April 2005

APRIL 2005
60TH ANNIVERSARY OF
LIBERATION
COMMEMORATIONS
AROUND THE WORLD
Vice President Dick Cheney was among delegations
led by leaders of 43 nations who came to Poland to
attended the recent 60th anniversary of the libera-
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2
Auschwitz appeared on stage and received medals from
Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kwasniewski
and Israeli President Moshe Katsav joined 1,000 survivors in Birkenau. Putin won long applause when he
acknowledged that antisemitism and xenophobia had
resurfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront directly. Putin said the
world should be ashamed of new manifestations of
antisemitism six decades after the defeat of fascism.
“Even in our
country, in Russia,
which did more
than any to combat fascism...we
sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this
problem and I,
too, am ashamed
of that,” Putin
said.
Moshe Katsav
gave his remarks
in Hebrew. “It
seems as if we can
still hear the dead
crying out.” He
praised the survivors “for returning to life, for daring again to feel
that you belong to the world, for finding the inner
strength to again raise families, for again believing in
man.”
Then a woman grabbed the microphone. She was
born in Poland, she said, and had been imprisoned
in Auschwitz.
Taking off her jacket despite the frigid weather,
she showed the number on her arm. The Nazis had
taken away her name and given her a number, she
said, and they had brought her to Auschwitz naked.
But now she has her name back, she has a country
and she has a president.
Her name, it turned out, was Miriam Yahav, and
what she did was unplanned. She was later applauded
when she boarded the plane back to Tel Aviv.
Other speakers were Wladyslaw Bartoszewski of
Poland, a Righteous Gentile; Simone Veil of France,
president of the Foundation for the Memory of the
Shoah; and the Jewish-born Cardinal Jean-Marie
Lustiger of France, who read an address from Pope
John Paul II. Romani Rose, chairman of the Central
Council of Germany Sinti and Roma, spoke on behalf
of the 220,000 to 500,000 gypsies killed in the
Holocaust.
The ceremony began with a recording of an
approaching train, a sound that created mental images
of crowded railroad cars bringing new prisoners to
the camps. It ended with long ribbons of fire set
ablaze on a stretch of railroad tracks that had carried
hundreds of thousands to their eventual graves, and
Cantor Joseph Malovany of New York singing the El
Malei Rachamim prayer.
tion of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and
Birkenau. Also in the delegation were Nobel Laureate
Elie Wiesel, Fred Zeidman of the United Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, Israeli President
Moshe Katzav, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin and others.
At a reception in Krakow for American Holocaust survivors, Cheney noted that the horrors of
World War II took place in the middle of the civilized world.
Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, 92, who commanded the
unit that captured the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, greeted
leaders and survivors—via satellite feed—at a Holocaust forum in Krakow ahead of the main ceremony
at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. Shapiro lives
in the United States and was too ill to travel. Three
other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate
American Gathering of
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TOGETHER 1
A PROCLAMATION BY U.S. PRESIDENT
“At the Auschwitz concentration
camp, evil found willing servants and
innocent victims. For almost five years,
Auschwitz was a factory for murder
where more than a million lives were
taken. It is a sobering reminder of the
power of evil and the need for people
to oppose evil wherever it exists. It is a
reminder that when we find
antisemitism, we must come together
to fight it.
“In places like Auschwitz, evidence
of the horror of the Holocaust has been
preserved to help the world remember
the past. We must never forget the cruelty of the guilty and the courage of
the victims at Auschwitz and other Nazi
concentration camps.
“During the Holocaust, evil was systematic in its implementation and deliberate in its destruction. The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is an
opportunity to pass on the stories and lessons of the Holocaust to future generations. The history of the Holocaust demonstrates that evil is real, but hope
endures. I call upon all Americans to observe this occasion with appropriate
ceremonies and programs to honor the victims of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
May God bless their memory and their families, and may we always remember.”
U.S. VP: EVIL DID NOT HAVE
THE LAST SAY
“I had the privilege of visiting Auschwitz
once before with President Ford in 1975. I
am honored to make the journey once again
and participate in the ceremonies. It’s been
a special honor as well to be in the company
of Americans who survived the Holocaust.
I remember reading General Eisenhower’s
account of seeing one of the Nazi death
camps at the end of World War II.
“He wrote, and I quote: ‘I visited every
nook and cranny of the camp because I felt
it my duty to be in a position from then on
to testify at first hand about these things in
case it ever grew up at home the belief or
the assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’
“Eisenhower was one of the many who were determined to let the world
know what happened, and to ensure that the evidence be kept so that the
terrible truth could never be forgotten or erased. We have the preservation of
memory at the camps themselves and for these last 60 years, we will have lived
amongst survivors of the camps, and America and the world are grateful for
your witness.
“As prisoners, you saw the face of systematic merciless cruelty that killed
innocent people of many nationalities and religious backgrounds, and murdered Jews only because they were Jews. But you also saw among your fellow
captives great courage and acts of kindness. For six decades, you shared horror
stories, recalling the horrors that you witnessed, keeping alive the memory of
good people, righteous people, who did no wrong and who no man had any
right to harm.
“Today many Holocaust survivors have children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. That, I believe, is the greatest victory of all. Evil did not
have the final say. You survived terror. You have let the world know the truth,
and you have preserved the memory of those who perished here.
“Our presence in Krakow today, together with our European and Israeli
friends, shows our determination to oppose antisemitism, religious intolerance, bigotry and genocide. We must face down hatred together. We are dedicated to the task at hand, and we will never forget. Let he who makes peace in
the heavens grant peace to all of us...”.
TOGETHER 2
SHARON MAKES MAJOR MEMORIAL
ADDRESS IN KNESSET
In a session marking the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon told the audience that the lesson learned
from the Holocaust is that Jews can rely only on
themselves.
“The State of Israel drew the lesson from the
Holocaust, and has known since its founding how
to protect itself and all its residents and supply a
safe haven for all Jews everywhere,” Sharon said.
“We know we can trust no one but ourselves.”
The special session opened with the “El Maleh
Rachamim.” Many Holocaust survivors in the visitors’ gallery were audibly crying.
“The sad and horrible conclusion is that no
one cared that Jews were being murdered...This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust
and this is the lesson which Auschwitz taught us,” he said.
“We must always remember that this is the only place in the world in which we,
the Jews, have the right and the power to defend ourselves with our own strength,” he
said. “This we will never surrender.”
Sharon said, “This phenomenon, of Jews protecting themselves and fighting
back, is deemed outrageous by the new antisemites. Legitimate steps of self-defense
which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror— actions which any sovereign
state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens—are presented by
those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.”
“Many expressions of antisemitism in recent years are no longer directed at the
Jew as an individual, but the embodiment of Jews in general. The State of Israel is the
state of the Jews,” Sharon said. “Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the evil
that begat the horror still exists, and still poses a threat. Israel stands alongside governments and Jewish and international organizations from around the world who
remember Auschwitz and are determined to fight this evil to the death. We will
continue to work ceaselessly so the memory of Auschwitz and the lessons of the
Holocaust are not forgotten, to ensure that Auschwitz does not return...It is my and
our historic responsibility.”
WORLD
COMMEMORATIONS
In Germany, a Holocaust survivor warned Germans
to be vigilant against antisemitism, particularly in the
Muslim world. Jewish community leader Arno Lustiger
told German leaders gathered in parliament for the national Holocaust Remembrance Day that everyone must
fight antisemitism.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder paid tribute by acknowledging the Nazis had wide support and promising that Germany will fulfill its “moral obligation” to
keep alive the memory of their crimes. “I express my
shame in the face of those who were murdered—and above all you, who survived the
hell of the concentration camps,’’ a somber Schroeder told a commemoration at a
theater that included survivors.
The memory of the Nazi genocide “is part of our national identity,’’ he said.
“Remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation—we
owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves. It
is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb
to it,” Schroeder promised.
In Brussels, members of the European Parliament stood in a minute of silence to
pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and to mark the anniversary. The EU
assembly then passed a resolution condemning antisemitism and racism and paying
homage to the victims of Nazi Germany. Germany’s President Horst Koehler was to
attend but was not scheduled to speak—an acknowledgment of Germany’s role as the
perpetrator of the Holocaust.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko addressed a youth gathering, and members of the audience stood and applauded as he entered the hall. Survivors who
returned for the commemoration stressed that each new generation needs to be educated about the Holocaust.
Increasing anti-Jewish incidents in Western Europe and a walkout by members of
a small German far-right party from an Auschwitz commemoration in the Saxony
state legislature were cited as examples of why it’s important to teach the Holocaust.
UN COMMEMORATES THE HOLOCAUST
FOR THE FIRST TIME AND MARKS THE
LIBERATION
TOGETHER
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2
APRIL 2005
c•o•n•te•n•t•s
(AP) UNITED NATIONS - With calls of “never again,” the U.N. General
Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi
death camps with a special session, a stark change for a body that has been
reluctant to address the extermination of the Jews during World War II.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, joined world
leaders in confronting a question that has long haunted the United Nations: whether its member states have the will to stop future genocide.
With mass atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, the question took on new
poignancy.
“The Jewish witness that I am speaks of my people’s suffering as a
warning,’” Wiesel told the General Assembly. “He sounds the alarm to
prevent these tragedies from being done to others. And yes, I am convinced if the world had listened to those of us who tried to speak we may
have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia, and naturally Rwanda.”
There were subtle reflections of a changed stance at the United Nations, where efforts to condemn antisemitism and commemorate the liberation of the camps had been blocked for years by the Soviet Union. In
2003, Ireland withdrew a General Assembly resolution condemning
antisemitism because of Muslim and Arab opposition.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a rare reference by a U.N. chief
to the Holocaust by name before the General Assembly. Later a photography exhibit sponsored by Yad Vashem opened at U.N. headquarters featuring images from the death camps—the first time an exhibit about the
Holocaust is being shown at the United Nations.
“We must be on the watch for any revival of antisemitism, and ready
to act against the new forms of it that are appearing today,” Annan said.
“That obligation binds us not only to the Jewish people, but to all others
that have been, or may be, threatened with a similar fate.”
Just one Middle East country—Jordan—delivered a speech commemorating the liberation of the camps. While 138 nations, including several
Arab ones, had said they supported the commemoration, few attended.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that though leaders
had agreed to set aside politics for the commemoration, they must do so
with “a unanimous resolve to give real meaning to those words ‘never
forget.’”
Speakers like Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Russia’s commissioner for human rights, Vladimir Lukin, warned against a rise in
antisemitism around the world. Shalom pointed to the strength of movements denying the Holocaust, asking if there was anything worse than the
destruction of an entire race.
“There is something worse: to do all this and then deny, to do all this
and then take from the victims and their children and grandchildren the
legitimacy of their grief,” he said.
“We have not learned one iota,’’ said Josephine Prinse, a Holocaust
survivor who bears the number tattooed on her arm by the Nazis. “We
talk. Do you see the results? They are still killing people in Darfur.’’
60th Anniversary of Liberation Commemorations..................................... 1
Proclamation by U.S. President............................................................... 2
Speech by U.S. Vice President.................................................................2
Address by PM Ariel Sharon................................................................... 2
Address by German Chancellor................................................................2
UN Commemoration of Holocaust......................................................... 3
We Remember Auschwitz by Roman Kent................................................4
Israeli Government to Distribute Holocaust Victims’ Assets....................... 4
France’s New Holocaust Memorial...........................................................4
New Museum at Yad Vashem...................................................................5
A Trip Back by Menachem Rosensaft....................................................... 5
ICHIEC National Service Project............................................................6
U.S. “Gold Train” Lawsuit Settled........................................................... 6
Holocaust-Era Bank Funds Can Be Claimed.............................................6
Arabs and the Holocaust by Robert Satloff............................................... 7
International News.................................................................................8
National News.....................................................................................10
Books................................................................................................ 12
In Memoriam......................................................................................14
Lest We Forget....................................................................................15
Katowice & Restitued Properties...........................................................17
U.S. Bank Fees Waived.........................................................................17
Truth Vindicated by Michael Berenbaum................................................18
Voices from Vilna by Helaine Shoag Greenberg....................................... 19
Just a Holocaust Escapee.......................................................................21
Denying Denial by Dr. Alex Grobman....................................................22
Searches..................................................................................... ........ 23
Letters to the Editor.............................. ..............................................24
Reunions............................................................................................ 25
Notices & Invitations.......................................................................... 26
Appeal for E-mail Addresses of Survivors and
Their Descendants
The American Gathering is collecting e-mail addresses of
survivors and their descendants in order to communicate
with them in a more cost-efficient and effective way.
Please send your e-mail address to
[email protected]
IMPORTANT CHANGE OF VENUE
The Annual Gathering of Remembrance
Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 2:30 p.m.
Hunter College Assembly Hall
69th St. bet. Lexington and Park
Tickets required.
For information, visit www.mjhnyc.org or call
646-437-4200, ext. 4490.
Sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage,
WAGRO and the American Gathering.
TOGETHER
AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 · New York, New York 10001 · 212 239 4230
President
BENJAMIN MEED
Senior Vice Presidents
SAM E. BLOCH
WILLIAM LOWENBERG
Chairman of the Board
ROMAN KENT
Chairman, Advisory Board
SIGMUND STROCHLITZ
Secretary
LEON STABINSKY
Treasurer
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Editor
JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
Editor Emeritus
ALFRED LIPSON
Publication Committee
SAM E. BLOCH, Chairman
Hirsh Altusky
Dr. Alex Grobman
Roman Kent
Max K. Liebmann
Alfred Lipson
Vladka Meed
Dr. Romana Strochlitz Primus
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Dr. Philip Sieradski
TOGETHER 3
WE REMEMBER AUSCHWITZ
REMARKS AT THE OPENING OF THE INTERNATIONAL
AUSCHWITZ COMMITTEE EXHIBIT AT U.N.
HEADQUARTERS
by Roman Kent
Secretary General Kofi Annan, esteemed dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, and
of course, survivors, particularly my fellow survivors from Auschwitz...
As a prisoner in Auschwitz, just attempting to stay alive in my hopeless day-today existence, I could never dream that 60 years later I would be standing here
before you at the United Nations opening an exhibit about Auschwitz.
What is Auschwitz? Surely, it is much more than a word. Now it is a symbol…
a symbol of evil. Let me put it another way. When speaking about World War II, we
soon realize that “Auschwitz” has acquired a
meaning of its own. It represents first and
foremost the most terrible form of evil—the
worst that mankind can offer.
No matter how much one studies, how
many books one reads, how many survivors
one talks to, or how many degrees one receives
in the study of the Holocaust, the non-survivor
can never even get a partial picture of the agony,
brutality and bestiality that occurred daily in
Nana & Kofi Annan with Roman Kent
the concentration camps. Auschwitz is the prime example. What happened there is
totally inconceivable, beyond man’s wildest imagination and, as such, it can only
become an abstract for the non-survivor.
How can one document the smell of burning flesh which filled the air? How can
one describe the living skeletons, alive but just skin and bones? How could one hear
their voices, touch them, console them, give them medical assistance and
nourishment? General Eisenhower, when entering Ohrdruf, one of the many
concentration camps, summed up his impression as follows:
“The things I saw defied description…The visual evidence and testimony of
starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering, I made the visit deliberately,
in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the
future there develops a tendency to change these allegations to propaganda.”
Many of us came to Auschwitz not knowing each other in life, but many of us
left together in the form of blue smoke emanating from the chimneys. The few of us
who were fortunate enough to have survived can neither forgive nor forget. Forgiveness
can be granted only by the ones who were murdered, and they are dead and their
voices can no longer be heard.
We living survivors dare not forget the millions who were murdered; for, if we
were to forget, then the conscience of mankind would be buried alongside the
victims. Thus, it is the destiny of survivors and the German nation to carry the
burden of this horrendous crime from now to eternity.
It is also our obligation to instill in our children what happens when prejudice
ISRAELI GOVERNMENT TO DISTRIBUTE
HOLOCAUST VICTIMS’ ASSETS
It has been determined that a government administrative unit will distribute unclaimed
assets solely among Holocaust survivors, rather than follow a proposal to distribute
such funds for Holocaust remembrance. The administrative unit will probably be
established in the office of the Custodian General at the Ministry of Justice.
The agreement makes clear that Holocaust survivors will be the sole beneficiaries
of assets without heirs, replacing the clause in a bill that stipulated that these funds
would be given to institutions commemorating the Holocaust.
They agreement reached inside the Knesset said that Colette Avital’s committee,
which examined the issue, will submit a bill to anchor the administrative unit in law.
The unit will replace the private company MK Yossi Lapid proposed for this
purpose. The Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee will formulate the
unit’s purpose, structure and functions when it prepares the bill for its second and
third Knesset readings.
The parties also adopted a clause in the bill to review the valuation of assets
decided upon by the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the Location and
Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims, which fully linked the current value
of these assets to the Consumer Price Index since 1948, plus 4% annual interest.
A joint Ministry of Finance-Bank of Israel expert committee will conduct this
review.
Minister of Finance Benjamin Netanyahu asked to review the subject, out of
concern that the state would be liable to pay large amounts to the heirs of
Holocaust survivors. Some reports estimate the amount at up to NIS 1 billion.
TOGETHER 4
and hatred are allowed to flourish. It is my conviction that only through education
can such a calamity be prevented from ever happening again. We must teach our
children tolerance and understanding at home and in school, for tolerance cannot be
assumed...it has to be taught, again and again. We must instill in our children that
hate is never right, and love is never wrong. That is the reason why we are working
with numerous young students to prepare this exhibit and teach them the meaning
of tolerance.
Lately, the world was greatly distressed and saddened by the unfortunate events
which took place in southeast Asia as a result of the horrific tsunami that unexpectedly
swept over numerous countries. The devastation and heartbreak caused by this
overwhelming tragedy became evident to us because of the in-depth reporting of the
press and the vivid images appearing on our television screens. The comprehensive
coverage kept us informed and was indeed more than praiseworthy.
I must also acknowledge the significant contribution of the United Nations, the
individual governments, and the public at large for their immediate response to help
those in need. It is truly heartwarming to see how mankind has come to the aid of
others when needed. People wanted to help alleviate the pain and suffering of the
hundreds of thousands who were left hungry and homeless because of a catastrophe
beyond anyone’s control.
As a survivor standing here today commemorating the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, I cannot help but think back to the time of the Holocaust
and question why the same response was not available to us in our time of need.
After all, in Auschwitz alone, 10,000 human beings were killed daily; no, not killed,
brutally murdered and burned to death. At that time, why in heaven’s name was
there no widespread recognition of the brutal acts being perpetrated against their
fellow men on a daily basis? The facts were known. With a proper immediate
response, surely much of what transpired could have been prevented. What occurred
during the Holocaust was not a result of mother nature, it was man’s inhumanity
to man at its highest level.
In a simplistic way, I can say in two
words why the tragedy of Auschwitz
happened…It happened because of the
evil of the perpetrators and of those who
were not; for, the world knew—the facts
were known—just as they were known
about the atrocities in Biafra, Kosovo,
etc. And yet the world did nothing.
Maybe now we are experiencing an
awakening, and maybe today the world
is finally changing for the better. It seems
Members, International Auschwitz Committee
that there is visible proof of compassion
and involvement instead of indifference.
This is progress! Thus, I want to hope against hope that there is a brighter future
for mankind. Perhaps we are finally realizing that we all live together on the same
planet, and we are all one people.
Roman Kent, Chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, is also vice
president of the International Auschwitz Committee.
FRANCE’S NEW HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
The Wall of Names engraved on stone walls mark a new monument in Paris’s
central Marais district, the Jewish quarter. The memorial pays tribute to the 76,000
Jews rounded up in France during the Holocaust and sent to Nazi death camps, and
is part of a renovated Holocaust memorial that was an archive center and expanded.
A simple plaque is the monument’s heart-wrenching centerpiece. It notes that only
2,500 survived.
President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the memorial by promising dozens of
Nazi death camp survivors that France would “never forget what it could not prevent. History haunts our consciences,” he declared. “It gives us a never-ending duty”
to be vigilant, he said. “Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It is a perversion, a perversion that kills.”
Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, one of ten experts who compiled the list from
Gestapo documents and French families, said the wall showed the Holocaust has
“become part of the public conscience at the level it should be.”
“This wall keeps our innermost secrets in its stone and delivers them to those
who pass,” said former EU President Simone Veil, herself a survivor of Auschwitz,
one of the 2,500 who returned.
“These names are those of your parents, grandparents, your children, brothers
and sisters ... all those we loved before they were assassinated in abominable conditions,” said Veil, who lost her parents, brother, sister, aunt and uncle in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Memorial will focus heavily on education by inviting school
classes and organizing trips to Auschwitz.
NEW HOLOCAUST HISTORY
MUSEUM OPENS AT YAD
VASHEM
Heads of State and government from at least 15 countries, as well as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan,
joined President Moshe Katzav, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Education Minister Limor
Livnat, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, and Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev at the inaugutral cermonies on March 15,
2005 of the new museum at Yad Vashem. An American contingent headed by New York’s
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
joined Eli Zborowski and Joseph
Wilf, who represented the American Society for Yad Vashem.
Following a brief early morning memorial service in the
Museum’s new Hall of Names, the
special assembly heard remarks
from the heads of more than 35 delegations, their Israeli
hosts and a number of leading Israeli intellectuals. They
raised their voices to the world in a call for safeguarding
the memory and the meaning of the Shoah for future
generations, and called for action against renewed
antisemitism and intolerance.
The New Museum is Yad Vashem’s main platform
for imparting the legacy of the Shoah to visitors. It tells
the story of the Shoah from the
point of view of the Jews; the
victims are the focus, instead of
being portrayed as anonymous
objects being acted upon by
their persecutors. Visitors will leave with a wider perspective
on the protection of humanity’s basic values and Jewish
continuity.
The new Holocaust History Museum is a revolution in
Holocaust memory. Making the individual victim the center
of its story, the Museum weaves more than 90 personal
stories into a thematic and historical narrative. Using
authentic artifacts, testimonies, documentary evidence,
archival sources, films, art and even music, the museum tells the story of the Holocaust
through the voice of the individual.
“It is impossible to understand the Holocaust and absorb its meaning without
learning about those who were most directly affected—the Jews,” explains Avner Shalev,
who is also Chief Curator of the New Museum. “Individual stories illustrate entire
historical themes and events, bringing out the human dimension more than ever
before. The Museum is designed to give the visitor an overall impression of the time,
places and atmosphere in which the Shoah occurred. Unique settings, spaces with
varying heights and differing degrees of lighting accentuate focal
points of the unfolding narrative.
Aside from artifacts, the exhibits also include some 100 video
screens showing original film clips from before and during the
Shoah, new survivor testimonies, and short documentaries
produced specifically for the new Museum. Designed by worldrenowned architect Moshe Safdie, a basic guideline for the
museum’s design was to create a visitor’s route dictated by the
evolving narrative—with a beginning, middle and end. As such,
Safdie devised a central walkway (prism) with underground
exhibition galleries on either side. The visitor is guided into the
adjacent galleries by a series of impassable gaps, created by museum designer Dorit
Harel, extending along the breadth of the prism floor. Displaying items from different
events, the gaps symbolize turning points in the Holocaust, and serve as chapter
headings for the evolving narrative of the exhibition.
The exhibition strikingly depicts Jewish resistance, rescue attempts and the
Righteous Among the Nations. Visitors are then exposed to the horrific concentration
camp universe and to the death marches. The last narrative chapter is dedicated exclusively
to the She’erit Hapleita (literally, the surviving remnant).
“The Holocaust is not a closed chapter in human history, but rather an integral
component in the development of our culture and the fashioning of our existence,”
says Shalev. “From the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is both a
YAD VASHEM MUSEUM: A TRIP
BACK IN TIME
by Menachem Z. Rosensaft
From The Jewish Week
Last week I set out on what I
thought was a trip to attend the
opening of the new museum at Yad
Vashem, Israel’s national authority
for the commemoration and study
of the Holocaust. In fact, I traveled
much farther, through both time and
space.
The museum is not a traditional
museum in the sense that going through it is not, first and
foremost, a cognitive, intellectual exercise. Of course, it has a
powerful educational dimension, but for me, the experience
was primarily an emotional, often surrealistic journey.
Surrounded by photographs and drawings created by Jews
rather than by the perpetrators, I found myself in a time
machine traveling through Nazi-occupied Europe.
The museum consists of a long, narrow corridor built through a hill, with
openings into exhibition spaces on both sides. The visitor must go through them
all, zigzagging across the main artery along a path which is barricaded on both sides
by suitcases, railroad tracks and other barriers. The tunnel, for that is what the
corridor truly is, slants downward and then up, becoming narrower and then gradually
widening again, with an opening at the far end through which one can see daylight.
As one becomes more and more immersed in tragedy, the light becomes nearer,
brighter, closer. But it can only be reached by going through the entire museum.
There are no shortcuts now any more than there were then.
The museum expressly tells the story of the Holocaust as a Jewish experience
seen through Jewish eyes, based largely on Jewish sources. Alongside the photographs
of the ghettos and camps, there are video monitors from which survivors give personal,
often anguished testimony. Upon entering the museum, one is confronted by haunting
film images of pre-war Jewish life. Ghost-like figures run up stairs and fade into
nothingness. Children wave, and there is nothing anyone can do to change their
fate.
After going through exhibits representing Berlin, Terezin, the Warsaw Ghetto
and elsewhere, I reach Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of the members of my
family, including my grandparents and my brother, were murdered together with
more than 1,100,000 Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Roma, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners
of war. This statistical data is a sobering reminder that the Holocaust is first and
foremost a Jewish tragedy. More than 90 percent of the victims of Auschwitz were
Jews.
I have seen scale models of the gas chambers and crematoria before, but somehow
this one seems more real. It is almost as if I can hear the tiny figures in their fear and
agony. I walk over a glass-covered display of shoes once worn by the dead. Later,
there are camp uniforms, a triple-decker bunk where inmates were crowded together
at night, the crude bowls from which the inmates ate what passed for food, and a
small chess set carved by an inmate at Auschwitz.
Suddenly, I am overwhelmed emotionally, intellectually, almost physically. It
becomes difficult to keep walking, to keep looking, to focus on the images. I find it
(Cont’d p. 6)
warning beacon against repetition of the extreme evil of the
past, and a light of hope for the future.”
Funding for the New Museum Complex comes from
the generous support of private donors through the American
Society of Yad Vashem and other Yad Vashem Societies in
Israel and around the world, the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims Against Germany, and the Government of Israel.
The New Holocaust History Museum is the pinnacle of
Yad Vashem’s multiyear development plan. This redevelopment
includes the establishment of an International School for
Holocaust Studies, an International Institute for Holocaust
Research, a new, modern archives and library building and the digitization of Yad
Vashem, laying the groundwork for the Internet launch of the Central Database of
Shoah Victims’ Names, as well as a new entrance and visitors’ complex—all of which
opened in the last decade—and now, the New Museum Complex.
More information about Yad Vashem and the New Holocaust History Museum is
available at www.yvadvashem.org.
TOGETHER 5
YAD VASHEM MUSEUM: A TRIP BACK IN TIME
(cont’d from Page 5)
hard to concentrate. The rest of the museum’s exhibits pass like a kaleidoscope
before my eyes. There is a section on the Jewish partisans of Belorus and Lithuania,
with their guns, boots and knap sacks on display. I visualize my father-in-law, Sam
Bloch, as a young man fighting the Germans with crude weapons and fierce
determination. Another space is devoted to the righteous among the nations, nonJews who risked their lives to save Jews, but why were there so few of them?
Images of the liberation reflect the survivors’ loneliness, their despair. Life begins
anew in the Displaced Persons camps. Pictures of weddings. Young mothers pushing
baby carriages. Protest demonstrations by the survivors against the British
Government’s anti-Zionist policies—cultural rebirth. And then there are images of
survivors attempting to enter Palestine illegally, only to be imprisoned by the British
in detention camps in Cyprus. The historical journey ends with the establishment of
the State of Israel, and I realize that this occurred two weeks after I was born in the
Bergen-Belsen DP camp.
I had just experienced my parents’ and my murdered family’s history from their
perspective, through their eyes. Most striking is the dignity with which the victims
of the Shoah, those who perished as well as those who survived, are portrayed
throughout. Equally impressive is the understated but powerful connection the
museum makes between the two formative events of modern Jewish times: the
Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. The absence of a sovereign haven
for the condemned Jews of Europe puts in historical context the survivors’ singular
contribution after the war to the struggle for Jewish national emancipation.
A small, dimly-lit alcove provides an opportunity for meditation and
contemplation, and then I step into the light on a terrace-like open-air extension
overlooking the Judean hills. Below is an expansion of green pine trees. Across a
valley there are white brick settlements with red roofs. Off on the right, a small
stretch of highway with fast moving cars and trucks is visible. The sky is clear,
cloudless, a bright triumphant blue. Perhaps from here, far in the distance, one can
see heaven.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer and president of Park Avenue Synagogue, is founding chairman
of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
HOLOCAUST STUDY
Under the leadership of Vladka Meed, the pioneering educational effort of teachers’
training in the history of the Holocaust has continued for some 20 years with a
program of activities. Hundreds of teachers from all over the country have participated
in this program that has included visists to the sites of the death camps and educational
seminars in Israel. The reunion of the participants takes place in Washington almost
every year. The sponsors and supporters of this program have been the Jewish Labor
Committee, the American Teachers Federation, the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors, with additional support from the Atran Foundation, the Gruss
Foundation, the Claims Conference, as well as from many individual survivors.
In line with such extensive educational programming, the new Israel Project is
releasing major new public opinion research on Americans’ knowledge and views of
the Holocaust. The poll of 800 likely voters (margin of error +/-3.46%,) conducted
Feb. 10-16, 2005 jointly by Stan and Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner
Research and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, show that 95% of
Americans say they know what the Holocaust is and 98% of American likely voters
are aware that the Holocaust took place.
In an era in which some have criticized Americans’ knowledge of history, the
study found that:
· 62% of Americans correctly answered that six million Jews were killed in the
Holocaust.
· 83% of Americans said they know either a “great deal” or “something” about
the Holocaust.
· When asked where they learned about the Holocaust, 53% of Americans
responded middle or high school; 52% history books; 48% television
documentaries; 43% television news and newspapers; 31% movies such as Schindler’s
List, The Pianist or Sophie’s Choice; 29% college or university; 15% church or
religious institutions; 12% the Internet; 11% the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., and 8% Jewish organizations such as the AntiDefamation League.
According to The Israel Project chairman, Michael C. Gelman, “It is important
to learn that Americans are aware of the history and horror of the Holocaust. This
new poll shows that the great efforts made to educate the public are working.
From public schools to movies, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington D.C. and beyond, the truth is getting through.”
TOGETHER 6
ICHEIC NATIONAL SERVICE PROJECT
LAUNCHES UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI PILOT
PROJECT
A national pilot project providing student support to aging Holocaust survivors was launched at the University of Miami’s Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies on January 31, 2005.
Coinciding with the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the unique program matches university students with
Holocaust survivors in the Miami area in order to ensure that the memory of
the Holocaust and the courage of the survivors are kept alive through this
encounter across generations.
The ICHEIC Service Corps program is a pilot project of the Miller
Center at the University of Miami and is sponsored by the International
Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), in partnership
with Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and the Conference on
Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. The project consists of three
components: academic courses on the Holocaust, weekly visits by a student
with a Holocaust survivor, and academic enrichment to help the student
understand the specific experiences of his or her new friend. Students also
receive training on how to help meet the needs of elderly survivors. Their
visits are coordinated by the Jewish Community Services of South Florida.
The University of Miami project is a pilot for a national program that is
being contemplated for other cities that have a willing university and a significant population of Holocaust survivors. It, together with a similar project
in New York City, was initiated by ICHEIC, chaired by former Secretary of
State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, with funds from settlements paid by insurance companies that held the insurance policies of some victims of the Holocaust. The settlements are designated to pay Holocaust-related insurance claims
and for Holocaust related humanitarian purposes.
ICHEIC was the first organization ever to offer Holocaust victims and
their heirs an avenue to pursue a claim against an insurance company at no
cost. The Commission was created as a means of addressing the gaps and
shortfalls of postwar compensation programs of the 1950s and 1960s and was
intended to provide an opportunity for thousands of Holocaust victims and
their heirs to submit claims for the first time. To date ICHEIC has awarded
approximately $110 million to claimants and is, through other philanthropic
programs, working to bring aid to Survivors around the world.
Dr. Miriam Klein-Kasenoff, responsible for the pilot’s academic enrichment, notes that students and survivors benefit “as the bonds between them
develop and the survivor feels free to ‘open up’ and tell the story of his or her
experiences in the Holocaust.”
For more information contact: [email protected].
U.S. SETTLES “GOLD TRAIN” LAWSUIT WITH
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
BY ANN W. O’NEILL, South Florida Sentinel
Settling a lawsuit with Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust, the U.S. government
recently agreed to pay $25.5 million and acknowledge U.S. Army officers’s plunder
of Jewish valuables during the waning days of World War II.
Terms of the settlement were spelled out in hundreds of documents filed in U.S.
District Court in Miami. According to the court papers, the government will issue
the public acknowledgment later this year, after U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz
finalizes the settlement.
“This is a moral and ethical victory,” said Israel Singer, chairman of the World
Jewish Congress in New York. “It sets the historical record straight.”
Singer also heads the Conference on Jewish Material Claims, which will
recommend which humanitarian organizations will share $21 million from the
settlement fund.
The so-called “Gold Train,” 29 boxcars laden with a 3 tons of artwork, china,
silver, antiques and other Jewish heirlooms seized by the Nazis, left Budapest, Hungary,
on Dec. 15, 1944, headed to Switzerland as Russian troops advanced. It got as far as
the Austrian village of Werfen, where the Nazis abandoned it. U.S. soldiers captured
the train on May 16, 1945.
A commission set up by former President Bill Clinton concluded in 1999 that
U.S. Army generals and other officers helped themselves to the loot, decorating their
homes and offices as they oversaw the rebuilding of Europe. The findings were based
on previously classified material from the National Archives.
ARABS AND THE HOLOCAUST
By Robert Satloff
Of the more than 100 countries that have formally endorsed the convening of the
special U.N. General Assembly on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,
not one is Arab. In the West, this is viewed as another manifestation of Holocaust
denial, an increasingly commonplace feature of Arab politics. For their part, Arabs
would retort that the Holocaust is not their history, so why the fuss?
The answer: They are wrong. The Holocaust, although overwhelmingly a European story, was an Arab story, too. Indeed, the Arab lands of Algeria and Morocco
were the site of the first slave labor camps—the term “concentration camps” was used
at the time—ever liberated by Allied troops.
From the outset of the war, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate
Jews extended throughout the area that Germany and its allies hoped to conquer.
That included a great Arab expanse, from Casablanca to Tripoli and on to Cairo,
home to more than a half-million Jews.
Though the Germans and their allies controlled this region only briefly, they
made substantial headway toward their goal. In the three years prior to the final
expulsion of German troops from Tunisia in May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy
French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the
precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only statutes depriving Jews of
property, education, livelihood, residence and free movement, but also torture, slave
labor, deportations and executions. There were no “extermination camps,” but thousands still suffered, especially those consigned to the region’s 40 or so labor camps,
many solely for Jews.
Luckily, a relative few—probably between 3,000 and 4,000—perished under
Axis control. If U.S. and British troops had not launched Operation Torch in November 1942 and then pushed Axis forces completely from the African continent six
months later, the Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and perhaps Egypt almost
certainly would have met the same fate of their co-religionists in Europe.
In all of this, Arabs played a central role. Indeed, Arabs were not too different
from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing;
many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; a brave few even
helped to save Jews.
Over the past three years, with the support of more than a dozen researchers and
interviewers in as many countries, I have been searching for these Arab heroes and
villains of the Holocaust. The stories I found are uplifting in their humanity and
THE AMERICAN GATHERING AND
U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
SEEK SURVIVORS NAMES
FOR REGISTRY
The Survivors Registry maintains the single most comprehensive listing of
Holocaust survivors in the world. The Registry has existed for over a decade, and
currently contains over 185,000 names of survivors and their spouses and descendants
(including children, their spouses, and grandchildren).
Visitors to the Registry’s public area at the Holocaust Museum can access basic
information about survivors and their family members via touch-screen computers.
This information is based on registration forms submitted by survivors and their
relatives, and includes birthplace and location before and during the war, as well as
maiden or prewar names. The Registry is an invaluable resource for survivors still
searching for family and friends, as well as for historians and genealogists.
Further information can be found at http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/
registry
We would be grateful—and it would be a great benefit American Gathering
members as they continue to search for missing relatives—if you could distribute
our registration forms to your members of your families, in case some of them are
not yet listed in the Registry. Registration forms are available in Hebrew and several
additional languages as well as in English.
Contact: Laura M. Green, Collections Manager, Survivors Registry
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
202-488-6164
Please send e-mail addresses to: [email protected]
heartbreaking in their depravity. Most of all, I found a forgotten chapter in the
memories of two peoples—Arabs and Jews.
Collaborators were everywhere. These included Arab overseers of Jewish work
gangs, Arab guards at Jewish labor camps and Arab translators who went house-tohouse with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived.
In Tunis, I tracked down the oldest living relative of the only Arab ever to be
convicted of a “war crime.” The man, Hassen Ferjani, had been hired by a Jewish
family to aid in their escape to Allied lines. Instead, he turned the hapless Jews over
to the Nazis, who subsequently beheaded them. Mr. Ferjani was eventually convicted
by a French military tribunal of conspiracy to murder. The Ferjani family, his nephew
Mustapha told me, forever viewed Hassen as the real “victim.”
Heroes, though fewer, provide inspiration beyond their numbers. Arab inmates
of labor camps shared the suffering of Jews and at times forged an antifascist bond
with them. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and,
at times, practical help to Jewish subjects.
In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding
believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. Not one Arab
broke ranks to take up the collaborationist French regime’s lucrative offer.
The most remarkable story I found was in the small Tunisian coastal town of
Mahdia. There, I tracked down the Chlaifa sisters, Muslim septuagenarians who
confirmed a tale told to me by an elderly Jewish woman about a local notable, Khalid
Abdulwahhab, who saved the lives of her family. He had whisked them away in the
middle of the night to his countryside farm to escape the predations of a German
officer bent on rape. He then guarded the Jews on his farm for several weeks, until
German forces were expelled from Mahdia. He was a true hero.
To many Arabs, discussing the Holocaust is radioactive because they fear it lends
justification to Israel and its policies. But even that deep political dispute cannot
obscure the fact that Arabs have a relationship with Jews that predates the establishment of Israel, a complex history that provides sources of pride as well as reasons for
shame. Accessing that history would bring Arabs into a universal discussion of the
Holocaust’s message.
One of the many reasons to convene the U.N. assembly on Auschwitz is that it
would be an excellent opportunity to launch this discussion. With some courage and
ingenuity, viewing the Holocaust through this prism could transform it into a bridge
between civilizations, not another excuse for a clash.
Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS NEEDING
ASSISTANCE
Financial assistance is available for needy Holocaust survivors. If
you have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or
other emergency, you may be eligible for a one-time grant. These
grants are funded by the Claims Conference.
If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in your area, please discuss
your situation with them. If you live outside the New York City
metropolitan area and if there is no such agency where you live, mail
a written inquiry describing your situation to:
Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance
P.O. Box 765
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156
TOGETHER 7
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TOGETHER 8
GERMANS TO BURY
HOLOCAUST VICTIMS' ASHES
BAPTIZED JEWISH CHILDREN
WERE TO BE KEPT
By Sven Kaestner
AP - German officials buried the ashes of thousands of people
killed in the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp after they
were discovered during building work at the site, the director of
the camp memorial recently announced.
Archeologists last year found a layer of ashes up to five feet
thick underneath a concrete memorial constructed near the camp's
former crematorium by East Germany’s former communist authorities. Director Guenter Morsch said it was impossible to establish the number or identities of the victims whose cremated
remains were found, but he estimated “there are tens of thousands.”
Some 200,000 people—including political prisoners, captives
from Poland, Soviet POWs and Jews—were interned at
Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945, and
tens of thousands died.
“At the end of the Nazi regime, the SS tried to cover up the
crimes committed at Sachsenhausen, and to do that they plowed
the ashes of the dead into the ground over a wide area,” burying
them under a layer of earth, Morsch told reporters.
On March 29, officials buried the ashes in 150 urns at the
Sachsenhausen site, he said. Each urn had the capacity to hold 66
pounds of ashes.
The burial comes ahead of commemorations marking the
camp's April 22, 1945, liberation by the Red Army. Advancing
Soviet forces found about 3,000 survivors, most of them old and
sick. Thousands of other prisoners died during the death marches
that preceded Sachsenhausen’s liberation as the SS evacuated most
of the camp.
Memorial officials expect survivors to come to the April 17
anniversary commemoration, which German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer also will attend.
Over recent years, a new visitor center has been opened at the
camp and the site entrance has been moved so that visitors pass
through the same gate used by the prisoners. The revamped memorial will be officially inaugurated at the anniversary ceremony.
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and JASON HOROWITZ
In October 1946, a year after the Nazi defeat, the Vatican refused to allow Jewish
children who had been sheltered by Catholics during the war to return to their own
families and communities.
There is now written confirmation of well-known church policy and practices at
the time, particularly toward Jewish children who had been baptized, often to save
them from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Its tone is cold and impersonal, and it
makes no mention of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Its disclosure has reopened debate of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII, a
candidate for sainthood who has been excoriated by his critics as a heartless antisemite
who maintained a public silence on the Nazi death camps and praised by his supporters as a savior of Jewish lives. The one-page, typewritten directive, dated Oct. 23,
1946, is a list of instructions for French authorities on how to deal with demands
from Jewish officials who want to reclaim Jewish children.
It also prevented Jewish children who had been baptized Catholic from going
home to their own parents
Written in French, discovered in a church outside Paris, and first disclosed by
Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper, the document, though unsigned, says,
“It should be noted that this decision taken by the Holy Congregation of the Holy
Office has been approved by the Holy Father.”
The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Rome-based Jesuit priest and a leading proponent for
the beatification of Pius XII, said. “There is something fishy her.,”
Itienne Fouilloux, a French historian compiling Pope John XXIII’s diaries said that
a serious researcher discovered the document and that it is genuine.
Pope John Paul II strongly supports the campaign to make Pius XII a saint, and in
February 2003, the Vatican announced the opening of some secret archives to help
clear Pius XII’s name, although the papers do not deal with his activities as pope.
A few weeks later, Avvenire, published by the Italian bishops conference, said
evdience has emerged that Hitler had a plan in 1944 to abduct Pope Pius XII. The
paper cited a written statement by Gen. Karl Wolff, the head of the SS in Germanoccupied Rome, saying that Hitler considered Pius a “friend of the Jews.” Pius XII
served as pontiff from 1939 until his death in 1958.
LAWS AGAINST GERMAN
NEO-NAZIS TIGHTENED
By Tony Czuczka
(AP) - Parliament recently tightened laws against neo-Nazi
demonstrations, seeking to block a planned far-right march
on the 60th anniversary of the Nazis’ surrender and permanently shield the nearby national Holocaust memorial in
Berlin.
The bill cited a “steady rise in far-right gatherings that ...
resemble ever more the character of the Nazi regime’s
marches.”
Germany already has extensive laws combating neo-Nazi
propaganda and banning the display of Nazi symbols. But
plans by the far-right National Democratic Party to march at
the Brandenburg Gate and one block from the Holocaust
memorial on May 8—60 years after the Nazi defeat in World
War II—have raised alarm among politicians and the Jewish
community.
Freedom of opinion “must not be abused to mock victims of the criminal Nazi regime,” Justice Minister Brigitte
Zypries said after the vote.
By making existing laws more explicit, the changes are
meant to make it easier for authorities to ban neo-Nazi gatherings near memorials to victims of the Nazis, such as former
concentration camps, if the demonstration seems likely to
“harm the dignity of the victims.”
Anyone who publicly “condones, glorifies or justifies”
the Nazis risks fines or up to three years in prison.
The National Democratic Party gained momentum last
Appeal for E-mail Addresses of Survivors and
Their Descendants
The American Gathering is collecting e-mail addresses of
survivors and their descendants in order to communicate
with them in a more cost-efficient and effective way.
Please send your e-mail address to
[email protected]
fall when it won 9% of the vote and entered parliament in the eastern state
of Saxony. Its campaign capitalized on high unemployment in the formerly
communist region and discontent with government cuts in social programs.
Its members walked out of a moment of silence to commemorate Nazi victims.
Last month, the party’s leaders marched through Dresden to denounce
the Allied firebombing of the city during World War II.
The German government failed in 2003 to have the party outlawed by
the country’s supreme court. Politicians are now debating whether to make
another try, but the tightening of laws on public assemblies was seen as the
quicker way to undercut the party’s base.
Backed by the governing coalition and the main opposition Christian
Democrats, the bill passed by a show of hands.
Critics raised civil rights concerns and argued that German law already
allowed authorities to ban gatherings.
The new rules are “partly unneeded, partly unsuitable,” said Max Stadler
of the opposition Free Democratic Party. “You don't fight right-wing extremism by limiting all citizens’ right to assembly.”
Paul Spiegel, the leader of Germany's main Jewish organization, welcomed the changes, but said laws alone won”t change young neo-Nazis”
minds. “We must make it plain, especially to young people, that there is no
alternative to the democratic parties,” he said on Bavarian Radio.
APPROACHING POLISH REPARATIONS VIA
EU COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS
A Polish-born Holocaust survivor is filing suit before the European Court of Human Rights to get his Polish property back. NYLAG is preparing the case on behalf
of Henryk Pikielny, who now lives in Paris.
The case, to be submitted to the Strasbourg, France-based court, requests that
the Pikielny family’s textile factory in Lodz be returned to Henryk Pikielny and that
the Polish government be directed to address the claims of other Holocaust survivors whose families lost property in the war.
The suit, the latest twist in the Jewish community’s long battle with Poland over
the return of personal and communal property, follows unsuccessful efforts in the
past 15 years to have the country adopt effective compensation legislation, to regain
property through the Polish courts and to lobby the Polish government through
diplomatic channels.
The Court of Human Rights does not accept class-action suits, but this “representative case” could set a precedent for the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Holocaust
survivors around the world who have outstanding property claims in Poland. The
total value of their property is estimated at $40 billion to $50 billion. There is
currently no legislation governing the restitution of private property in Poland.
WILD ABOUT HARRY
The European Union may consider banning Nazi symbols in its 25 member nations
after Britain’s Prince Harry wore a swastika armband to a costume party. Franco Frattini,
the EU’s justice and home affairs commissioner, said he was open to discussing the
issue at a meeting of EU justice ministers.
The call came after several German conservatives, socialists and liberal democrats in
the European Parliament urged a European ban following the scandal over photos of
Britain’s Prince Harry, third in line to the throne, wearing a Nazi outfit. Frattini’s
decision to look into an EU-wide ban could further embarrass Queen Elizabeth II, who
led British commemorations of the Holocaust in London.
Prince Harry was sent a copy of AREK, the story of Holocaust survivor Arek Hersch-a film being sent to every secondary school in the UK, accompanied by a workbook as
part of a campaign to fight the rise of the extreme right, racism and fascism in the UK.
The film explores the link between the rise of the far right in Britain today and other
human rights issues. AREK has been nominated for an award at the New York film
festival at the end of March.
Prince Harry’s caper had his photo splashed across the British tabloid The Sun wearing the tan uniform of the Nazi’s Afrika Korps, complete with red and black swastika
armband, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
He couldn’t have had worse timing. His grandmother was representing the nation at
the Holocaust Memorial Day National Event, and now Prince Charles wants Harry to
go on his own version of March of the Living—a trip to Poland to visit the death
camps.
CIA RELEASES DATA ON THEIR IMPORTED
NAZIS
(AP) The CIA has agreed to release more information about Nazi war criminals it
hired during the Cold War, ending a standoff between the intelligence agency and
the group seeking the documents. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), was lead Senator and
author of a 1998 law that required all U.S. government documents related to Nazi
war crimes to be declassified, but the Central Intelligence Agency had resisted giving
up details about the work performed by agents with Nazi ties.
The law has led to the release of more than 8 million pages of documents,
including 1.25 million from the CIA, which showed that the agency or its predecessor,
the Office of Strategic Services, had a relationship with some individuals later found
to be war criminals. Among them were five assistants to Adolph Eichmann, the man
known as the architect of the plan for exterminating the Jews during World War II.
The Nazis were sought by the CIA to provide expertise on the former Soviet Union
during the Cold War. DeWine said it’s important to “know what happens when our
government deals with criminals and uses criminals for its own purpose.”
The law already has led to the release of U.S. intelligence photographs taken in
1944 of Auschwitz and of dispatches from Gonzalo Montt, the Chilean consul in
Prague during the early 1940s. Both confirmed that the U.S. government knew
earlier during World War II than previously thought about the atrocities committed
against Jews.The law also led to new information about how the German government
and several U.S. and European banks worked together to funnel back to Germany
money that had been illegally taken from German Jews.
U.S. ENVOY TO UKRAINE SLAMS
JEWS FOR HOLOCAUST AND
COMMUNISM
The Chicago Tribune recently reported, “An official U.S. delegation sent to Ukraine’s recent presidential inauguration included
a Ukrainian-American who has accused Jews of manipulating
the Holocaust for their gain and playing an ‘inordinate role’ in
the rise of Soviet communism.”
Myron Kuropas was selected by the White House to fly to
Ukraine with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell as part of the
American delegation. Mr. Kuropas wrote in 2000, “Big money
drives the Holocaust industry. To survive, the Holocaust industry is always searching for its next mark. Ukraine’s turn is just
around the corner.” He has argued elsewhere that Jews played a
driving role behind Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s murderous policies in Ukraine. Mr. Kuropas has demonstrated his hostility
towards Jews for some time.
Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, explained to the Chicago Tribune, “This is not new stuff...If you go back over the decades,
he’s taken these kinds of positions highly antagonistic to the
Jewish people and Jewish interests and causes.”
The Knight Ridder news service confirmed that “three State
Department officials said the delegation was assembled by the
White House.”
“It is astounding that on the eve of commemorating the
60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration
camps, President Bush’s staff would not even bother to look
into Kuropas’ regular attacks on Jews and what he terms the
‘Holocaust industry’ before sending him to Ukraine with our
Secretary of State, to represent the United States of America,”
said National Jewish Democratic Council Executive Director
Ira N. Forman.
“This deeply embarrassing incident shows a lack of judgment on the part of the White House and, frankly, a lack of
basic competence,” Forman added.
HUNGARIAN MUSLIMS HONOR
HOLOCAUST
(JTA) - Hungarian Muslim leaders laid wreaths commemorating
the Holocaust at a memorial wall at Budapest’s main synagogue.
Calling the event “historic,” the head of the Hungarian Islamic
community, Zoltan Bolek, said it was the first time “that
Hungarian Muslims came in an organized fashion to
commemorate the victims who were so mercilessly slaughtered,”
the Hungarian Telegraphic Agency reported.
GENERATION-TO-GENERATION
BEARERS OF THE HOLOCAUST
FORMS IN ISRAEL
Generation-to-Generation, a new organization in Israel of Second and Third Generation, is dedicated to all aspects of the Holocaust.
The organization warmly welcomes people living in Israel, and
visitors, too, and hopes they will attend events they sponsor. All
look forward to meeting peers and colleagues. This is the first time
that there will be this kind of gathering of 2nd and 3rd generation
in Israel.
For more information, please contact Ari Birnbaum in Israel,
the co-founder of Generation to Generation at:
[email protected]
Telephone: 054-4316623
We welcome members from all over the world to our organization!
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Chava Biran and Ari Birnbaum co-founders.
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GERMAN STATE SEEKS BAN ON MENGELE MISERABLE ON THE LAM
(AP) - In previously unseen post-World War II letters, notorious Nazi doctor Josef
HITLER’S BOOK
(AP) - A German state that holds the rights to Adolf Hitler's
book Mein Kampf recently announced it was seeking legal action
to prevent the book from being published in Poland.
The book, which details the Nazi dictator's antisemitic views
and other beliefs, is due to go on sale in a few days. Polish publisher XXL said it wants to make a historical record available, but
it also cites “a 1,000-year-old worry” among Poles about “the
German dream of vast fertile lands and natural resources in the
east.”
Authorities in the state of Bavaria, which the victorious World
War II allies designated as the guardian of Hitler’s estate, issued a
statement noting that they hold the rights to Mein Kampf.
“Bavaria applies those rights very restrictively to prevent the
spread of Nazi ideology,” state Finance Minister Kurt Faltlhauser
said.
HOLOCAUST DENIER CHARGED
IN GERMANY
(AP) - A German judge in Frankfurt ordered white supremacist
Ernst Zundel held in jail after arraigning him on charges of denying the Holocaust and inciting hatred—a crime in Germany.
Canadian authorities had recently deported Zundel, 65, after a
federal judge ruled that his activities were a threat to national and
international security. Because his Website is viewed internationally, German authorities were able to charge him under German
laws.
Born in Germany in 1939, Zundel emigrated to Canada in
1958 and lived in Toronto and Montreal until 2001. Canadian
officials rejected his attempts to obtain citizenship in 1966 and
1994. He moved to Pigeon Forge, Tenn., until he was deported
to Canada in 2003 for alleged immigration violations.
Zundel has operated Samisdat Publishing, a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda, since the 1970s. Over the past decade,
he has been a key content provider for a Web site dedicated to
Holocaust denial.
RUSSIA WILL CONSIDER RETURN
OF WWII ART
(AP) - Russia will return so-called trophy art taken from Nazi
Germany during World War II only on a case-by-case basis, an
official recently announced, arguing that most of the cultural
treasures Moscow retains were seized as compensation for huge
Soviet wartime damage.
Anatoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the Russian government
agency that preserves the nation’s cultural legacy, said Russia held
some 249,000 art objects, more than 260,000 archive files and
1.25 million books and publications seized as compensation.
Germany and other countries have pressed for the return of
the collections, which they argue were taken illegally.
A Russian law that went into effect in 2000 distinguishes
between illegal trophies—taken without a military commander’s
sanction—and those Moscow sees as restitution for the 27 million
Soviet lives lost, 100 museums destroyed and utter ruin of entire
cities during the conflict it calls the Great Patriotic War.
Since 2000, Russia has satisfied six claims, for four archive
and two art collections, said Vilkov.
Just one of those claims came from Germany, to which Russia
returned a set of stained-glass windows from a church. The others
were from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ukraine
—none of them Nazi allies.
In addition to those countries, Hungary, Austria, Poland,
the United States, Great Britain and Greece have lodged claims
against Russia.
TOGETHER 10
Mengele describes a banal existence as a fugitive in South America, complaining
about his lazy Brazilian housekeeper and documenting his weekly trips to town.
Mengele also writes of his longing and love for Germany.
The letters show that Mengele, who eluded capture after the war ended and
lived secretly in South America, most of the time in Brazil, until his death in 1979,
died convinced of the superiority of what Nazis called the Aryan race. He also never
expressed regret in the letters and praised the apartheid regime that governed South
Africa until 1994. The letters show a man concerned with his banal life.
The Mengele letters came from the Brazilian Federal Police, who investigated
Mengele after his death in 1979. The letters show a bitter fugitive in constant fear of
apprehension, plagued by nightmares and sleeplessness, but defiant about Germany’s
murderous Nazi period.
DUMA NATIONALISTS AIM AT JEWISH
GROUPS
(AP) - A group of nationalist Russian lawmakers plan to outlaw all Jewish organizations and punish officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred
and saying they provoke antisemitism.
In a letter dated Jan. 13, about 20 members of the lower house of parliament, the
State Duma, asked Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate their claims and
to launch proceedings “on the prohibition in our country of all religious and ethnic Jewish
organizations as extremist.”
Alexander Krutov, one of the lawmakers, said, “The negative assessments by Russian
patriots of the qualities and actions against non-Jews that are typical of Jews correspond
to the truth...The statements and publications against Jews that have incriminated patriots are self-defense, which is not always stylistically correct but is justified in essence.”
The call to ban all Jewish groups raised concerns of persistent antisemitism in Russia.
The lawmakers accuse Jews of working against the interests of the countries where
they live and of monopolizing power worldwide. They say the United States “has become
an instrument for achieving the global aims of Judaism.”
U.S. DISTRICT COURT ANNOUNCES
HOLOCAUST-ERA SWISS BANK FUNDS CAN
BE CLAIMED AGAINST NEW PUBLISHED
LIST OF 3,100 NAMES
(PRNeswire) - Swiss banks have agreed to the publication of an additional 3,100
names of bank account holders who were probably Holocaust victims, giving survivors and heirs of Nazi victims another opportunity to apply for long-delayed compensation from accounts that were inaccessible for more than 50 years.
The publication of the list was announced on January 13 at the Brooklyn Federal
Courthouse, 225 Cadman Plaza East, Room 10. The names are being published
under the auspices of the $1.25 billion Swiss Banks Settlement, reached in 1998 in
U.S. District Court between Holocaust survivors and Swiss banks under Chief
Judge Edward Korman of the Eastern District of New York.
This new list is in addition to a list published in 2001 of 21,000 names of Swiss
account holders who were considered likely Nazi victims. To date, more than 2,800
awards totaling approximately $240 million have been made to claimants who plausibly have shown that they or their relatives had deposited assets in Swiss banks in
the period 1933 to 1945 that have not been previously repaid to them.
List available at www.crt-ii.org/2005_list.phtm
COMPENSATION OK’D BY GERMAN COURT
New York - The Claims Conference recently announced that a German judge ruled
that a Jewish woman should be compensated for the furnishings of a medical clinic
run by her parents in prewar Germany.
Gabriela Hammerstein Hammerstein, who is 81, grew up in Schwerin, Germany,
until her family fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Hammerstein already had
established her legal rights to her parents’ sanatorium.
In the latest case, Hammerstein, the only remaining direct heir, most likely will receive
a few thousand dollars in compensation for medical equipment and furnishings from her
parents’ outpatient clinic, the court said. The Claims Conference filed the claim.
BERGEN MUSEUM FEATURES YOM
HASHOAH EXHIBIT
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The Bergen Museum of Art and Science presents the Yom Hashoah
Remembrance Exhibit opening on April 9, 2005 and running
through May 31st, featuring the works of five artists, four of
whom are Holocaust survivors. Presented in the exhibit are
sculptures and collages by Agnes and David Adler of Westwood,
collages of award-winning artist Joyce Levine of Washington
Township, and mixed media by the Israeli artist Tamara Deuel,
whose works have been exhibited in many Holocaust Museums.
Holocaust survivor Herbert Kolb of Paramus is presenting
his powerful, personal collection of eye opening and stirring
documents, letters, paintings, photographs and artifacts which
chronicle the lives and deaths of his family and friends under the
Nazis. Tracing the steps taken by the Nazis to make Germany
Judenrein (free of Jews) one can feel the noose tighten around the
Jews. Once living as regular members of society, they were at first
subjected to social restrictions, then confiscation of property, then
loss of all freedoms, and ultimately torture and murder.
On May 5th there will be a special program with readings by
Diane Goldberg, who will talk about her life as a hidden child in
Belgium. Maestro Winston Dan Vogel will perform a special musical
program. Refreshments will be served. For the May 5th program,
general admission is $20; members $15.
The Bergen Museum of Art and Science located in the Bergen
Mall, Lower Promenade, Route 4 East & Forest Avenue, Paramus,
NJ. Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Admission: $5 – Adults;
$3 – Children; Seniors free on Wed. Call for group rates, special
tours, school groups: 201 291-8848
visit www.thebergenmuseum.com
SURVIVOR STATISTICS FROM
UJA/FED NY
Many survivors, especially those who came to the United States in
the years immediately following World War II, have done well
financially. But as age started to catch up, there were a lot of older
people who got sick and the little money they had was used up.
At last count, there were 122,000 Holocaust survivors living
in the United States, according to the United Jewish Communities’ National Population Survey 2000-01. They have discovered
that survivors’ median age is higher and they are frailer and in
greater need of financial or social assistance than other elderly Jews.
“Nazi Victims Residing in the United States,” a report released by the NJPS, finds that non-survivors are more than twice
as likely as survivors to be working; 23% of survivors are disabled
and unable to work compared with 5% of non-survivors; and
survivors are five times more likely to live in poverty than nonsurvivors, with 25% of them falling under the federal poverty
benchmark.
In 1999, 79 survivors were on a waiting list in the South
Florida area and 350 others received aid, out of a population of
about 3,000. A lot of them don’t want to ask for help.
UJA-Federation of New York, which is running a campaign to
raise money for needy survivors in their area released The Jewish
Community Study of New York: 2002, which estimates the community at about 55,000. This data assists groups that help survivors, including the Claims Conference, in allocating restitution
funds.
Over half of the post-65 group reported living below poverty,
compared to 1% of pre-1965 victims, according to the NJPS report. UJA also reported that one in four lives alone; the median
age of victims living alone is 76.
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MEMORIAL SCHEDULED
The annual Holocaust Days of Remembrance ceremony is likely to take place once
again in the Capitol Rotunda, after the House passed a resolution approving the
location on March 1.
The ceremony is part of a weeklong tribute to Holocaust survivors. The theme
this year will be “From Liberation to the Pursuit of Justice,” in memory of the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the subsequent
prosecution of war criminals under international law during the Nuremberg trials.
Martin Goldman, director of survivor affairs for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum, said the impact of the ceremony on the Holocaust survivors is tremendous.
“Survivors come from all over the country,” he said. “It is moving and touching
when they go to [the event] and tears are in [their] eyes.”
Goldman said that survivors are touched that the memorial is in the Rotunda of
the nation’s Capitol.
“The U.S. took in immigrants” who were Holocaust survivors, he said. “It
allowed them to build new lives and families.”
Over the past five years, speakers at the ceremony have included President
Bush, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then-Secretary of State Colin
Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. This year’s keynote
speaker has yet to be determined.
Each year, approximately 800 people, including survivors, members of Congress
and dignitaries, attend the ceremonies. In addition to a military processional and
remarks from members of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and other speakers,
there is always a candle-lighting ceremony and the singing of hymns.
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL SCULPTURE IN FLA.
By Fay Grajower
Southern Florida’s Holocaust Memorial Sculpture is surrounded by two walls
of polished Jerusalem stone, as is the floor of the alcove. The sidewalls of the
polished stone host bronze plaques of names of the deceased members of the
congregation. The Holocaust Memorial wall is made up of 44 pieces of imported,
hand chiseled Jerusalem cream stone, authentic distressed wooden doors and four
bronze figure-like forms in two pairs. Elements included are hand chiseled Jerusalem
stone, wood, bronze and slate on a 10.5' x 9' wall. In planning the piece
consideration was given to the issues expressed by the sponsors, the architectural
committee and the synagogue administration. Their specifications included
symbolism, use of figures and community participation. In addition, the piece
had to be compatible with the existing memorial alcove for the deceased members
of the congregation.
The materials, when combined, impel the viewer to silently contemplate the
texture and power of human memory. The figures suggest the everlasting souls of
those who perished in the Holocaust. While they stood together, they died alone.
The bronze material is invulnerable to all elements. The Jerusalem stone wall symbolizes
both of the history of the Jewish people as well as the place of yearning and future
redemption. The distressed wooden doors suggest barracks, doors of Eastern Europe,
both as enclosures and imprisonment as well as emergence into the future. The
seven-day candle in the hand carved stone niche is replaced weekly by a different
member of the congregation. The candle is an eternal memorial light. Two narrow
floodlights create shadows on the stone wall. Only the burning flame illuminates the
upper right section. Black slate surrounds the installation and serves as background.
How does one remember?
How dare one forget!
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THE RIGHTEOUS : THE
UNSUNG HEROES OF
THE HOLOCAUST by
Martin Gilbert (Toronto,
Canada: Key Porter Books,
2003)529p.,US$45.00
CAN$58.50.
In 1953, the Knesset passed
the Martyrs and Heroes’
Remembrance Law creating
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,
Israel’s national memorial to
the six million Jews. As part
of its mandate, Yad Vashem established a Commission for
the Designation of the Righteous to honor “the high minded
Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews.” The
commission is chaired by a member of the Supreme Court
of Israel. In this inspiring work, Sir Martin Gilbert, recounts
the efforts of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews
from being murdered during the Holocaust. As one survivor
observed, these were people who “ignored the law, opposed
popular opinion, and dared to do what was right.” Many
of those who risked their lives to save Jews had known
them before the war. Some were friends, business partners
or acquaintances, neighbors, teachers, fellow students, or
had worked in their homes or served as nannies. Other
rescuers had never met the individuals or
families before providing life-saving shelter. Among the
reasons that motivated Righteous Gentiles were: their
hatred of the occupier, dislike of Nazism and its racial
ideology, unwillingness to allow evil to triumph, a sense of
decency and religious beliefs. As of January
2004, 20,205 have been recognized for their heroic deeds.
Since Yad Vashem continues to investigate additional cases,
there will be others who will be added to this list. Yet there
were many who died alongside the Jews who they sought
to rescue, others passed away before they could be
acknowledged. Still others, have asked not to be
revealed, most probably out of concern and fear of what
their neighbors might say or do.
HOLOCAUST
HISTORIOGRAPHY: A
JEWISH PERSPECTIVE:
CONCEPTUALIZATIONS,
TERMINOLOGY,
APPROACHES, AND
FUNDAMENTAL
ISSUES by Dan Michman
(Portland Oregon: Vallentine
Mitchell, 2003) 435p.,
US$29.50. CAN$38.50.
Much of what is written
about the Holocaust is based
on non-Jewish sources, i.e. the
process of destruction, the perpetrators and the bystanders.
These are critical issues, but they tell only a part of what
transpired. In this volume, Dan Michman, professor of
Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University and
Chief Historian at Yad Vashem, provides a Jewish
perspective on the Holocaust by focusing on Jewish society,
its values, how it functioned and the context of the
Holocaust within Jewish and modern history. All too often,
Jews are portrayed simply as objects of persecution, but
this is incorrect, During the Holocaust Jews played an
active role in the events of the period. Michman believes
that to understand the Holocaust in depth, one must study
what happened in Western Europe. While not denying the
centrality of Eastern Europe in the Shoah, Western Europe
provides a different perspective on central questions—the
behavior of the Germans, the Jews and other populations—
that helps us with a more accurate anaylisis of events.
Among the topics he explores are: the Jewish Councils,
relief, rescue and the problem of predicting the Holocaust, resistance, religious Jews,
religious life, and the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel. Michan is an important
scholar who has done a great service to the Jewish people by focusing not only on
how Jews died, but how they lived.
SPANIARDS IN THE HOLOCAUST :
MAUTHAUSEN, HORROR ON THE DANUBE
by David Wingeate Pike (New York: Routledge, 2000)
442p., US$110.00. CAN$150.
Among the thousands of people who were sent to the
Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria there were
7000 Spanish Republicans who had fought in the Spanish
Civil War and then found what they had expected would
be a safe haven in France. In 1940, when the Germans
entered France, the Spaniards were arrested and
incarcerated. By succeeding in placing their members in
key clerical positions in the camp, the Spaniards
succeeded in saving important records of the SS
administration. The book recounts the horrors they
endured at the camp as well as those by the Jews, Allied prisoners of war and escape of
the Soviet officers in the Death Block. It also provides a vivid account of the assault
of the US Army’s ‘Thunderbolt’ Division, which liberated Mauthausen.
HOLOCAUST HERO: THE UNTOLD STORY OF
SOLOMON SCHONFELD, AN ORTHODOX
BRITISH RABBI by David Kranzler (Jersey City, New
Jersey: KTAV Publishing House, Inc. 2003) 289p.,
US$29.50 CAN$38.35.
At the end of the Second World War, Poland was still a
very dangerous place for Jews. They were attacked in the
streets and eyed with suspicion whenever they returned
to their former homes in search of their families and
friends. The pogrom in Kielce in July 1946 convinced
many that they should leave Poland for good. When
Solomon Schoenfeld, a young Orthodox rabbi from
Britain heard of these reports, he immediately left for
Warsaw to rescue 150 Jewish war orphans wearing an
army uniform he designed for the trip. In this impressive work, Professor David
Kranzler, a pioneer in the research of Orthodox rescue activities during and after the
Shoah, has written about the heroic work of Rabbi Schoenfeld who risked his health,
the welfare of his family and sometimes his life in an extraordinary mission to save
4,000 Jews from 1938 till the end of the war. He rescued children, teachers,
shochtim(ritual slaughterers) and Jewish scholars, and aided those in the internment
camps that the British established in 1940 out fear that the Jews might be a fifth
column. The rabbi established kosher homes, yeshivas and fought them jobs. To
care for their spiritual rehabilitation in the postwar period, he created mobile
synagogues that were especially appreciated by Jews who wanted desperately to connect
to their roots. The forty stories by those saved by Rabbi Schoenfeld make this an
inspiring volume and an invaluable teaching tool.
AN UNCOMMON FRIENDSHIP: FROM OPPOSITE
SIDES OF THE HOLOCAUST by Bernat Rosner and
Frederic C. Tubach. (Berkeley: CA The University of
California Press, 2001) 265p., US$24.95 CAN $33.25.
Bernat Rosner, a Hungarian Jew who survived the
Holocaust, and Frederic Tubach, a German who in his
youth had been in the Jungvolk( pre-Hitler Youth) met by
chance in the San Francisco Bay area and became friends.
Both had emigrated to the United States and were
American citizens.Rosner’ s father had been exterminated
in Auschwitz, while Tubach’s father had served as a
counterintelligence officer in the German army. It
took more than a decade after becoming friends before
they could discuss their pasts and decide to write their stories. In this poignant double
memoir, they endeavor to deal with each other’s pasts, their similarities and their
significant differences as a means of bridge-building. An unusual and heartbreaking
read.
WARNING AND HOPE: THE NAZI MURDER OF EUROPEAN JEWRY by
William Samelson (Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003) 558p., US$47.50
CAN$61.75.
William Samelson, a visiting professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the
University of Texas at San Antonio, was born in Piotrkow, Poland, and lived there
until the age of 11. When he was liberated
in Colditz, Germany on May 1, 1945, he
was 17 years old. During that time, he had
spent his childhood in the Piotrkow Ghetto
and working in various Nazi labor and
concentration camps in Germany
and Austria. For five months in the spring
and summer of 1942, he was part of a
partisan group in the area of Podole, Poland,
behind the Nazi front lines.This book differs
from most Holocaust survivor accounts in
that aside from his vivid descriptions of the
rich life in the shtetl, in the Buchenwald
concentration camp and elsewhere, he also discusses in detail the
roots and nature of antisemitism, Hitler and his ideology, the final
solution, the children, the war crime tribunals, the bystanders and
collaborators, resisters, and the role of God and the role of man.
Samelson concludes that since the Holocaust happened once, “it can
happen again! This is the essence of what we [the survivors] have to
say: it can happen, and it can happen everywhere and anywhere.”
WHY DIDN’T THE PRESS SHOUT:
AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL
JOURNALISM DURING THE
HOLOCAUST by Robert Moses Shapiro
Editor (Hoboken, New Jersey: Yeshiva
University in association with KTAV
Publishing House, 2003) 665p.,
US$49.50 CAN$65.85.
Robert Moses Shapiro, a professor at
Yeshiva University and Brooklyn College,
has edited a 30 chapter book on
what information was available in the
world media during the Shoah. The
authors examine
the American,
Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, French, Greek, Italian,
German, British and Hebrew press. This is not an exhaustive study,
but an overview of what appeared in more than a dozen countries.
By reviewing the Jewish and non-Jewish press we see events from
the perspective of the bystander and the perpetrator. The role of The
New York Times is discussed by former Times editor Max Frankel
who admits that the paper’s failure to report on the systematic
destruction of the Jews of Europe is “staggering and staining.” There
are a number of distinguished historians and others that make this
an important work. But some choices are questionable. Professor
Dina Porat of Tel Aviv University or some other Israeli scholar would
have been far more preferable than an iconoclastic Israeli journalist
to write on the Israeli press. And writing about the American press
was written by whose only claim to fame is that he is a reporter who
teaches a course on American journalism at a state university is
inexcusable.
HOLOCAUST AND RETURN TO
ZION: A STUDY IN JEWISH
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY by
Shubert Spero (Hoboken, New Jersey:
KTAV, 2000 ) 398., US$39.50
CAN$53.00.
Shubert Spero, a professor of Basic Jewish
Thought at Bar-Ilan University, has written
a truly remarkable work in which he brings
together his vast knowledge of Jewish
history, philosophy, the Talmud, the Torah
and general history to provide his
perspective on the destruction of the two Temples, the expulsion
from Spain and the Shoah. Among the questions he suggests that we
ask about these events are: What role does the Diaspora play in our
lives? Do we see the Diaspora as Galut, or exile? How important is
the territorial dimension in Judaism? Are we waiting for the Messiah,
and if so, how will we be able to recognize him? Do we see the
presence of God in history? To answer these questions, we need to
develop a Jewish philosophy of history that will enable us
to understand the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of
Israel and their broader significance. This book will guide
us through the process.
Your Sounding
A RACE AGAINST DEATH:
PETER BERGSON,
AMERICA, AND THE
HOLOCAUST by David
Wyman and Rafael
Medoff. (New York: The New
Press,2002) 269p. US$26.95
CAN $36.75.
Twenty-eight year old Hillel Kook,
alias Peter Bergson, nephew of
the Chief Rabbi of Palestine
and the political head of the Irgun,
came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II,
to lead a no-holds barred campaign to force the American
government to confront the destruction of the Jews of Europe.
Public rallies, aggressive lobbying of Congress and newspaper
advertisements designed to arouse response such as “How
Well Are You Sleeping,?” “Help Prevent 4,000,000 People
from Becoming Ghosts,” and “They Are Driven to Death
Daily, But They Can Be Saved,” became an integral part of
Bergson’s strategy. In the process, he and his group known
as the Bergson Boys, antagonized the American Jewish
establishment. American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen
Wise preferred not to pressure President Franklin
Roosevelt and worked assiduously to undermine and
obstruct Kook’s efforts.They even tried to have him
deported. The author’s extensive use of interviews with
Kook as well as interviews by others with Congressman Will
Rodgers, Jr., prominent liberal journalist and author Max
Lerner, Congressman Emanuel Celler and Samuel Merlin, a
member of the Irgun, Kook’s right-hand man and chief
propagandist make this a compelling book. Assertions by
Ben Gurion that in the summer of 1942, meetings could
not be arranged on Friday afternoons with Zionist leaders
because “everybody left for the country for the week-end,”
or that in the summer of 1943 one major Jewish leader left
for Maine on his vacation so that critical plans to rescue
refugees in Rumania and France had to handled by one of
his deputies make this a very disturbing book. By bringing
to light the work of the Bergson Boys professors Wyman
and Medoff have done a great service to the Jewish
people. Professor Wyman was a professor of history at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor Medoff is
Visiting Scholar in Jewish Studies at Purchase College, the
State University of New York.
we don’t allow it
UNDER HIS VERY
WINDOWS: THE VATICAN
AND THE HOLOCAUST IN
ITALY by Susan Zuccotti (New
Haven:Yale University Press,
2001) US $29.95.
Pope Pius XII has been the subject
of a number of books and articles,
in large part because of his alleged
silence during the Second World
War when the Jews of Europe were
being exterminated. His defenders
argue that he did help the Jews,
but that his activities could not be made public at the time.
The failure of the Vatican to open its archives to scholars
when this controversy first arose further exacerbated the
problem for it appeared that it had something to hide. In
this disturbing, balanced and significant work,
Professor Susan Zuccotti has sought to determine the nature
of the pope’s response and the extent to which he urged others
to do act. Along with other recent books on the same subject,
this book documents the failure of the pope and the Vatican
to exercise the moral leadership that one would expected
from the head of the Catholic Church.
You never leave us,
We see you,
we hear your voices
and remember your
stories
and touch your faces
between us
there are tears
and memories
Your sounding
proclaims you
remnant
of history
You
make us
realize
we are
all of us
works of art
some destroyed
perhaps
yet
none of us
forgotten
Submitted by
Leah Schweitzer
23565 Windrose Place
Valencia, CA 91354
[email protected]
[661] 263-6401
FYI
The poem you refer to as
“Ballad of the Seven” in
your January 2005 issue
(Vol.19, No.1, p.13) is
derived from a quite
famous poem by William
Wordsworth entitled “We
Are Seven” (1798).
Dr. Susan E. Lorsch
Associate Professor of
English
Hofstra University
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Salek “Sol” Allweiss, 78, the retired
owner of Sol’s Complete Car Care in Berkley,
recently succumbed to complications from
diabetes. He and brother Zyga “Zygie”
Allweiss were partners for 22 years in several
Sol & Zygie’s gas stations.
Sol was nearly 14 and Zygie 12 when Germany invaded
Poland in September 1939. The boys joined their mother and
sisters in a labor camp, Biesiatka, 50 miles away. Their father
and older brothers had already fled to Russia. When their
mother, Esther Heller Allweiss, died of typhus in the camp,
Sol helped bury her beside a large tree.
The Allweiss sisters were eventually shot and killed in 1943
with the camp’s 600 Jews (the oldest, Sarah, perished in
Auschwitz), but Zygie managed to escape. So did Sol, but
earlier. The brothers had an unexpected, joyous reunion in a
hayloft near the village of Krzemnica.
“Sol said he was meeting our father that evening in the
field,” Zygie said. Jacob Allweiss, a horse trader, had returned
to help his family. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the three were
ambushed in a field by 150 police, all Nazi sympathizers. With
guns in hand, the Allweisses scattered. Sol and Zygie learned
later that their father had been tortured and killed. The older
brothers are believed to have perished as well.
Toward the end of the war, the Dudziks, a Polish Catholic
family their father trusted, sheltered the brothers in the town
of Chajkowa. Decades later, an Internet search brought them
together with daughters from this family. Sol and Zygie
arranged for the Holocaust Memorial Museum to honor the
Dudziks as Righteous Gentiles in 1999. Sol was able to
communicate easily in Polish with one of the daughters, Anya
Olszewska of Hamtramck, who became the brothers’ long lost
“sister.”
Sol and Zygie and their older cousins, Zygmunt and Sallah
Muhlbauer, took the S.S. Marine Flasher to New York in 1947.
From there, the brothers journeyed to Detroit, where Sol
studied at Cass Technical High School. He was a mechanic at
Grand River Chevrolet and briefly designed “cars of the future”
for Chevrolet Experimental.
Sol was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1950. In 1951 he
married Frieda. Eight months later, just before the unit shipped
out to Korea, Frieda said the commanding officer learned Sol’s
history and issued him an honorable discharge, saying, “Allweiss,
you’ve done your fighting for a lifetime.”
—ESTHER ALLWEISS INGBER
PETER MALKIN
Peter Malkin, the Mossad agent who nabbed top Nazi official
Adolf Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street in 1960, died in
New York on March 2. He was 77.
The Mossad tracked Eichmann to Argentina, and Malkin
stopped him in the street. According to his memoirs, Eichmann
in My Hands, Malkin said to him simply, “Un momentito,
senor” (just a moment, sir), before kidnapping him. He
grabbed Eichmann’s arm and wrestled him to the ground as
another agent grabbed his legs, stuffing him into a car.
Eichmann was interrogated for 10 days in a safe house before
being spirited to Israel on a plane that carried an unwitting
diplomat, Abba Eban, later Israel’s foreign minister, for a
meeting with Argentine officials as a cover.
Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem and executed in
1962. Malkin was born Zvi Milchman and lived in Poland
until the age of 4. He served in the Mossad for 27 years and
was a master of martial arts and disguises.
IZZY MENDEL
Izzy Mendel was a man who always
had time for humor, even under the
most severe circumstances. When he
was 14 years old his father died. This
forced him to leave school and go to
work to support his mother, sister
and grandmother. It also molded his
character of always taking care of his
family. Working as a tinsmith, his talent made him a sought
after workman and enabled him to earn a living. In his early
TOGETHER 14
20s, the Nazis turned his world upside down. He eventually wound up in Auschwitz,
where he survived by the skill of his hands. The atrocities he witnessed haunted him
causing him, in his later life, to write many poems and essays expressing his grief.
After the war, he met Masha Miliekowski at a train station in Poland, where she
and her sisters were trying to make their way back to their village in Lithuania. He
convinced them not to go back because life under the Soviets was going to be just as
bad. They courted, wed and eventually moved to Germany, where they lived for four
years. Then they moved to Israel, settling in Netanya, where they bought a small
store. After a few years he became well established. Life in Israel was good, but
because of the constant threat of war they decided to try their luck in America. So,
for the fourth time in their lives, they uprooted themselves for a new beginning.
Once again his talent helped him in their new life. One of his sculptures even
became part of a permanent display at his sheetmetal union headquarters.
A man who never raised his voice in anger and deeply loved his family; a man
who did not know the meaning of the word “no” when it came to the needs of his
loved ones, he will be deeply missed, always loved, and never forgotten.
OTTO PLASCHKES
Otto Plaschkes, producer of films including Georgy Girl and Hopscotch, has died at
the age of 75. Plaschkes, an arts-loving socialist who belied the popular image of the
brash film producer, died of a heart attack, minutes after watching a film in London's
West End.
Plaschkes, born in Vienna in 1929, came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport
of Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany to Britain, and stayed
temporarily with a family in Liverpool. Later reunited with his parents and sister, he
grew up in Salisbury in southwest England, where his father, a butcher, ran a sausagecasing business. One of his teachers at school was writer William Golding, and
classmates swore that Plaschkes was the model for plump, sensitive schoolboy Piggy
in Golding’s The Lord of the Flies—a claim the author neither confirmed nor denied.
After study at Oxford and Cambridge universities, Plaschkes got a job at Ealing
Studios and eventually graduated to production roles, including Exodus in 1960 and
Lawrence of Arabia two years later. His first feature as producer was Georgy Girl,
the 1966 film starring Lynn Redgrave that helped popularize the image of “swinging
London” in the 1960s. He went on to produce a string of thoughtful movies for the
American Film Theater in the 1970s, including The Homecoming, Butley and In
Celebration. In 1980, he produced Hopscotch, a thriller starring Walter Matthau
and Glenda Jackson that was his most commercially successful film.
Plaschkes, who was at work on film projects until his death, is survived by his
wife, Louise, and a daughter.
JACOB TROBE
Jacob L. Trobe, who directed the care and resettlement of thousands of Holocaust
survivors left adrift after World War II, died Jan. 19 at his home in Haverford, PA.
He was 93.
As a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Trobe
was among the first relief workers to enter the concentration camps. At BergenBelsen, which had been freed weeks before any aid groups could arrive, he found
rampant typhus and starving, dazed survivors. Without asking his supervisors for
permission, he ordered $250,000 worth of butter, eggs and cheese from Scandinavia.
Trobe directed the committee’s relief programs in Germany and later in Italy,
which was a staging area for the underground movement of Jews to the Middle East.
He also helped deliver aid to displaced Jews in Luxembourg, Libya, the former
Palestine and Turkey. At one point, the committee helped support 250,000 Jews in
relief camps. He lobbied publicly for their welfare, asking Italy’s foreign minister for
assurances that they were welcome and pushing for their passage to Australia, New
Zealand and elsewhere.
Upon returning from Europe, Trobe led the Jewish Child Care Association of
Essex County, the Jewish Board of Guardians in Newark and the Jewish Child Care
Association in New York. Restless in retirement, he tracked the evolution of the
media business for two decades by conducting television interviews of industry
leaders. The interviews appeared on a show on public access channels with the support
of the Communications Media Center at New York Law School, and it remains in
production.
SOLOMON WIEDER
Solomon Wieder, outspoken survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen died on
January 19, 2005. Born in Dolha, Czechoslovakia, he was the sole survivor of his
immediate family. He was wounded moments before being liberated from BergenBelsen , where he was shot trying to steal a potato for his dying father. He spent
two years recuperating in Sweden. He then moved to Brooklyn, NY, on a yeshiva
scholarship. He was one of only four survivors featured on “Survivors: Testimonies
of the Holocaust,” a CD produced by Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation,
narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder. He also published A Time to
Bear Witness, a guide for Holocaust survivors. Sol often spoke at local schools
about his experiences in the camps. He moved people greatly by his ability to
speak about his experiences with both sorrow and humor. He was a hero to all
who knew him.
AMALIE PETRANKER SALSITZ
The Unknown Heroine of Kracow
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It was January 1945. The Russian army had advanced into
Poland and stood poised to enter Kracow. Anticipating their
need to withdraw, the German High Command had ordered
that this beautiful and historic capital of Poland be mined and
blown up, not only as an act of mindless vengeance, but also to
strike at the Polish underground which had moved there after
the battle of Warsaw as well as to disrupt the Russian advance.
Few of us realize that the demolitions charges were set and the
order to destroy Kracow was given, and were it not for the
courageous actions taken by a heroic 22-year-old Jewish woman
who defied that order, the historic city, along with thousands of
its residents, would have been destroyed.
Amalie Petranker was quite alone in this world. Her parents,
her sister and some 200 of her extended family had been killed
by the Germans. Only she survived, and through a combination
of luck and guts had managed to escape the ghetto in Stanislawow,
assumed a new Catholic identity as Felicia Milaszewska, procured
workpapers in that name, and gotten a series of jobs in Kracow,
eventually elevating herself to a position as a trusted executive
secretary to the manager of the Austrian engineering company,
Meyereder and Krauss (M&K).
The Kracow office of M&K had been opened to supervise
the building of German bridges and road facilities. It helped
that Amalie was beautiful, well educated and spoke seven
languages, including perfect Polish and German. It also helped
that she was perceptive enough to know that were she to associate
with real Polish Catholics, they would quickly pick up enough
Jewish mannerisms to turn her in. So she went into the lions’
den, the community of the German occupier where she was
embraced as one of the Volksdeutch, a Pole of German ancestry.
On January 17, 1945, the German Army evacuated Kracow
to evade the advancing Russian army. Fleeing with them went
the management personnel of Meyereder & Krauss. They
expected the secretary, Felicia Milaszeska to go with them, but
she said no, since she was born in Vilno and had family there,
she would better find her way in Poland than in Austria. They
left her in charge of the office along with a skeleton crew of five
housekeepers and a janitor. They also left her with a heavy burden.
They told her that at the instruction of the German high
command M&K had placed explosives in 287 major buildings
in Kracow. Additionally, at each major intersection in the city,
DR. FENG SHAN HO: Righteous
Among the Nations
By Manli Ho, his daughter
Dr. Feng Shan Ho was one of the first diplomats to help
Jews by issuing them visas to escape the Holocaust. He was the
Chinese Consul General in Vienna, following the annexation of
Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 (Anschluss). With the
Nazi takeover, Austrian antisemitism and persecution of Jews
erupted in full force. Using a policy of coerced expulsion, Nazi
authorities told Jews that if they obtained visas from other
countries as proof of emigration, they, as well as relatives deported
to Dachau or Buchenwald, would be allowed to leave.
Many Austrian Jews tried to emigrate, but found almost no
country willing to allow them entry. Their plight was further
exacerbated by the July 13 resolution of the Evian Conference,
which made it evident that none of the 32 participating nations
was willing to accept Jewish refugees.
Ho recalled: “Since the annexation of Austria by Germany,
the persecution of Jews by Hitler’s ‘devils’ became increasingly
fierce.” He said he “spared no effort in using any means possible”
to help Jewish refugees and “innumerable Jews were thus saved.”
Having been turned down by other consulates, the Jews
came to the Chinese Consulate, which issued them visas to
Shanghai, China. Ho authorized the issuing of visas to any and
they had erected 15-foot-high concrete columns filled with dynamite. Felicia was
shown the plans, given the combination of the safe and told to expect a phone call
from the German High Command and execute whatever order they gave. The next
day the call came.
Let us cite her recollection of that conversation as she told it 45 years later in
the book she and her husband wrote, Against All Odds.
“In a few days we did get a call from the headquarters of the commandant of the
German combat forces in the Kracow area. I heard this clipped military voice:
‘Oberfeldkommandaturspricht! Is das das Buro M&K Gessellschaft?
‘Jawohl,’ I answered. Then he said, ‘Springen Sie die Saulen (blow up the columns)’
and he hung up. As I lowered the receiver into the cradle, I realized what I had done.
I neglected to tell the Kommandant that all Company officials had left and that the
German Army would have to blow up the columns.”
Felicia had long been working in contact with the AK (the Polish underground).
She notified them of the phone call and told them she had the plans showing
where the dynamite was placed. They acknowledged the call but did nothing to
dismantle the explosives. It wasn’t until January 19 that fate intervened in a manner
that the most imaginative scriptwriter could not imagine.
Captain Tadeusz Zaieski of Polish intelligence arrived in Kracow attached to
the Russian Army. Polish intelligence knew the city was mined to be blown up but
they did not know where or how. Acting on what information they had, Zaieski
and his team proceeded to the house at 191/2 Juljusza Lea comer Urzedniczej that
had served as the offices of M&K. There they found what they took to be the
beautiful German woman reported to be in charge of M&K. The bitterness of the
war would be enough for any Polish officer to act harshly toward a German from
whom they wished to extract information. But the war had been particularly harsh
for Tadeusz Zaieski, for in reality he was a Jewish survivor, Naftali Saleschutz, who
also was posing as a Catholic under false papers. He, too, had lost virtually his
entire family and had only joined the army near the end of the war to exact some
revenge for their loss. A tense stand-off between what she perceived as a typical
antisemitic Polish army officer and he perceived as a haughty German enemy
somehow eventually resolved itself. They revealed themselves to one another as
each being that rarest of things in 1945 Poland: Jews.
Milaszewska delivered the plans to Zaieski who in turn turned them over to
the Russian army. The columns were dismantled; the bombs removed. The city of
Kracow was spared and today it flourishes as one of the major historic sites of
Europe.
But how different it might have been if Amalie Petranker, the Jewish girl from
Stanislawow had not survived. And what if she had panicked and given a different
answer when the phone call ordering Kracow’s destruction came in? What if another officer had gone to investigate M&K, and killed the “German” secretary?
Kracow might have been destroyed, thousands might have been killed in the process, and Amalie Petranker might never have met and married Naftali Saleschutz,
now known as Norman Salsitz and remained his wife for the next 57 years.
all who requested them, despite direct orders to desist from his superior, the
Chinese ambassador in Berlin, and a subsequent demerit from his own government.
Shanghai harbor was under Japanese occupation, and did not require a visa
for entry. But for Jews to be allowed to leave Austria, a visa served as proof of
destination. “I knew that the Chinese visas were to Shanghai ‘in name’ only. In
reality, it was a means for Austrian Jews to find a way to get to the US, England
or other destinations,” Ho recalled. Many Jews were released from Nazi
concentration camps on the strength of the Shanghai visas.
In 1940, Dr. Feng Shan Ho was transferred from Vienna. He spent the rest
of World War II involved in China’s war effort against Japan. In 1947 he began a
nine-year tenure as Chinese ambassador to Egypt and the Mideast. His subsequent
postings were to Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia. After 40 years in the diplomatic
service, Ho retired to San Francisco, California. On September 28, 1997, he
died at age 96. He was never reunited with any of those he had helped.
Why was Feng Shan Ho willing to help the Jews of Austria when others
would not? His reason was simple: “I thought it only natural to feel compassion
and to want to help. From the standpoint of humanity, that is the way it should
be.”
In the year 2000, the State of Israel bestowed the title of Righteous Among
the Nations, one of its highest honors, on Dr. Feng Shan Ho “for his humanitarian
courage” in the rescue of Austria’s Jews.
. . . that the generations of the children of Israel should know, (Judges IIIii)
TOGETHER 15
Bronislawa M. Warman, a
courier for the Jewish
underground in Warsaw
during World War II, recently
passed away in New York. She
was 85. Born Bronka
Feinmesser on January 22,
1919, in Warsaw, Poland, to secular assimilated Jewish parents,
she helped support her family after her father died when she
was 7. The outbreak of war prevented her from studying
medicine, but Bronka got a job at the Bersons’ and Baumans’
Children Hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, first as a
receptionist and then as a nurse’s assistant. She took some
medical courses in a secret school directed by a prominent
hematologist, Dr. Ludwik Hirszfeld. At the hospital, she
connected to the Jewish underground as it was forming, when
the Germans began to deport ghetto inhabitants to Treblinka.
One of the deportees in the summer of 1942 was her mother,
Mindla. An older sister, Halina, managed to escape the ghetto
but was later caught and killed by the Gestapo.
In October 1942 the Jewish Fighting Organization asked
her to cross to the Aryan side of Warsaw to establish hiding
places for Jews escaping the ghetto. With her non-Jewish “good
looks,” flawless Polish, innocent “forget-me-not”-blue eyes, and
luck she managed to find many Catholic Poles, mostly strangers,
who were willing to take in Jewish refugees from the ghetto or
put them in specially built hiding places. She went on her daily
rounds, distributing money, arranging for false documents, and
checking on security of people under her care. She also earned
the trust of several Jewish children who lived like strays and hid
in the ruins or abandoned cellars, and managed to care for them.
It is a measure of her instincts and ability that none of her
“charges” ever fell into German hands while under her protection.
Using two sets of false identity documents, “Marysia with the Blue Eyes,” her
wartime pseudonym, lived in two apartments where the surviving members of the
JFO’s high command met and occasionally stayed after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising in April-May 1943.
In his Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter (Yale UP, 1994), Simha Rotem
(“Kazik”), recalls one of those apartments: “It was good to come there, like an oasis
in the desert, where you could relax a bit. Marysia, who was optimistic and quiet by
nature, created a pleasant atmosphere. Her easy-going temperament even calmed me
and, I assume, the others who came there...She was always calm and didn’t tend to
get excited, qualities we all needed in those days. In her presence, the fear that
constantly oppressed us vanished.”
Mrs. Warman was in the Jewish partisan unit under the command of Yitzhak
Zuckerman (“Antek”), which joined the communist-directed People’s Army in the
general uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in August 1944. The uprising, led
by the non-communist Home Army, lasted 63 days. When it ended in a negotiated
surrender two months later, the Germans expelled the entire civilian population of
Warsaw, but the Jewish fighters could not obtain POW status. The small unit, which
included Zuckerman, his wife Zivia Lubetkin, Marek Edelman, the only surviving
deputy commander of the ghetto uprising, and Zygmunt Warman, Marysia’s future
husband, hid for six weeks in an underground cellar, foraging through abandoned
houses at night for food and water. Finally, in the middle of November, Marysia and
a friend walked through the deserted ruins of the city to a suburb where, in a transitcamp field hospital, several underground volunteers organized a Red Cross rescue
mission and successfully took the remaining fighters to safety.
She was married in 1946; her husband, a lawyer who later became a justice on
Poland’s Supreme Court, died in 1965. She had a successful career as a production
manager and then an editor of foreign language publications at the State Scientific
Publishing House in Warsaw. In 1968, during an antisemitic purge, she was fired
from her position, and in 1970 came to New York with her children, where her
friends from the underground, who left Poland after the liberation, provided significant
help. Unable to continue work in publishing, she learned a new profession as a
paralegal specializing in trademarks, and worked at several New York law firms until
her retirement in 1994.
Surviving are her daughter Anne of Los Angeles, son Jerzy of New York, and
brother Jacob Ferney of London, England.
SIGI GRUN
A VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ
It has been 60 years now that I have struggled to bring
attention to an act of bravery by a 19-year-old Jewish boy in
Ghetto Przemys in the year 1943.
Sigi Grun, originally from Bielskosila (Bielitz), had returned
home for summer vacation from Ramsgate in Southern England
where he attended private school. His father was a wealthy textile
merchant and had adequate means to send his son to private
school. The entire family—parents, Sigi and his sister—had in
1939 moved to the east to be under Soviet occupation, rather
than remain in Nazi-occupied Poland. I met Sigi in 1941 and
we became close friends. In 1942, having been taken to Belzec,
Sigi lost his parents and sister.
Sigi, together with the local butcher, Sonny Krebs, and I
decided to become resistance fighters. In late spring 1943 I was
sitting on the remnant of an old oak in Emal Square of the
Przemyal ghetto when, close to midnight, Krebs appeared and
excitedly told me we had to leave the ghetto right away. Because
I still had my parents with me in the ghetto, I told him I couldn’t
do so. I later found out that Krebs has been working in the
ghetto and ran into one of the most feared of Gestapo people,
Kaisner. Kaisner had pulled a gun, threatened Krebs, but Krebs
pulled a big butcher knife from his stiefel and stabbed the Gestapo
man a few times. He left him on the street and the Judenrat had
subsequently notified the Germans of the attack. After talking to
me, Krebs had run to Sigi and both left the ghetto.
Eight days later both were caught in the woods west of the
River Ean, brought to prison in Przemyal, and then beaten and
tortured. Soon the remaining 1500 Jews left in the ghetto were
ordered to the Ghetto Square. Large, long tables had been placed
under a balcony. A bunch of SS Gestapo and Ukrainian militia
sat in the immediate area around one of the tables. Then they
brought forth Grun, Krebs and a 15-year-old boy. They were
bloody and had shaved heads, but Grun and Krebs still were
walking proud. Forced to climb unto a table, Sigi spoke fluent
German as soon as a rope was placed around his neck. Sigi spit
in a Nazi’s face and screamed, Ihr habt den krieg verloren aloud,
so that all of us could hear.
Dr. Simon Gottfried, Fishkill, NY
We all remember the controversy created by the Catholic Church of Poland
when they were planning to erect a tall cross at the entrance to Auschwitz. I am
a survivor of Birkenau-Auschwitz, Jaworzno and following the death march to
Blechhamer, where I was liberated by the Red Army at the end of January 1945.
On a number of my trips to Poland, I never miss a visit to Birkenau-Auschwitz.
On one of those visits I witnessed something I will never forget. As I went
through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, I was met by two ultra-Orthodox young
men. They wore black kapotas, tzitzis hanging out and payes behind their ears.
Trying to talk to them was not easy. But between their broken Yiddish and
German we were able to
communicate. They said they
were students at the Budapest
Yeshiva. The purpose of their
stay in Auschwitz was to
prevent at any cost and risks
to their lives, the erection of
that cross. Being spat in their
faces and ridiculed by Polish
hooligans, I have never believed
that out of a yeshiva could
come such two courageous and
dedicated young men, who through sheer devotion to Judaism have prevented
the desecration of the place where millions of our brethren were murdered at the
hands of the Nazis. I asked them how they were surviving there. The Auschwitz
Police Authorities had permitted them to live in one of the camp barracks. To
survive financially, it was unbelievable to hear that they survived on donations
from tourists, mainly—can you believe it—German tourists. I saw a German
woman who came over to them with tears in her eyes, emptying her purse of all
money she had.
I have witnessed the hanging of 26 men in Jaworzno who were caught trying
to escape through a tunnel, I have witnessed their courage by cursing and spitting
on their executioners. Those two are no less courageous.
An episode I will never forget.
Joseph Kryszpel, Pikesville, MD
BRONISLAWA
M. WARMAN
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TOGETHER 16
KATOWICE & RESTITUTED
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by Ellen Friedland
KATOWICE-Wlodzimierz Kac, the 53-year-old president of the
Jewish community of Poland’s Katowice province, talks about
what he would do with the proceeds from sales of former Jewish
communal properties in his region—properties that were originally synagogues, schools, hospitals, mikvehs (ritual baths), libraries, old-age homes, orphanages, cultural facilities, and cemeteries. First, he says, he would build a medical facility for the
elderly, who constitute the majority of the community’s 350 or so
registered Jews. When they are gravely ill, he says, they go to
Polish hospitals and lie in rooms adorned with crucifixes—and
even the most kindhearted priests on duty solicit their last confessions. Faced with such an atmosphere, some Katowice Jews
forgo treatment and stay home.
Kac’s second priority would be to hire a rabbi. The last local
Jew who knew how to lead “the davening” passed away in March
2004. Today, the Jewish Religious Community of Katowice—which
meets in offices and a prayer room donated by a locally based Israeli
landlord—not only doesn’t have funds to pay for a part-time rabbi,
it cannot afford to purchase prayerbooks or office supplies.
Finally, says Kac, he would donate a percentage of the proceeds to help other needy Jewish communities in Poland and
throughout the world.
Kac’s dreams are far from coming true—argely because of
schisms and scandals dating back to the former communist system and exacerbated in 1998 by the passage of a law entitled “On
the Relationship Between the State and the Jewish Religious Communities.” Mirroring enactments affecting other religious groups,
the statute gave the Polish Jewish community the right to seek
the return of prewar communal properties that had not passed to
private hands after the communist regime’s collapse in 1989.
The question of jurisdiction over reverted properties pitted
the Union of Jewish Religious Communities of Poland (JRCP)—
which insisted that all proceeds go to the local communities—
against the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), an
umbrella coalition of ten international Jewish groups based in the
U.S. and Israel, which just as adamantly argued that the proceeds
serve a double purpose: to support Polish Jewry as well as Jewish
communities worldwide.
NATHAN KATZ
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Nathan Katz was born in
Riteveh, Lithuania, in 1919. He
attended cheder there and also
studied as a Talmudic student
in the yeshiva founded by the
great scholar Rabbi Shmuel
Fondelier. When the Nazis
invaded Lithuania in 1941, the
Katz family was arrested and
taken to Latvia, where they were
jailed and put into Nazi labor
camps near the town of Dvinsk.
The Katz family and a few
others escaped and walked
hundreds of miles before returning to Shavel, in Lithuania,
where they found temporary refuge in the Shavel Ghetto. During
his time there, Katz worked in the ghetto underground,
smuggling in food and medication and helping the Jews of the
ghetto survive. At the end of 1943, when the Jews of the ghetto
were sent to Auschwitz for extermination, Katz and his new
bride, Sima, escaped into the nearby forest. With five other
family members they were hidden by a Gentile family, escaping
capture and extermination until gaining liberation when the
Russians defeated the Germans. In 1946, after securing falsified
documents, the family escaped from Russia and traveled to
Poland, then to Germany, and finally arrived in New York City
in March, 1951.
The deadlock lasted four years. According to Herbert Block, assistant executive
vice president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (a WJRO
constituent), the dispute delayed progress on restitution to such a degree that four
years after the law had been enacted, only about 500 of an estimated 6,000 or so
possible claims had been filed. Finally, with only ten months left before the law’s
May 2002 deadline to file claims, the JRCP and the WJRO reached a settlement:
proceeds from reclaimed properties in the 22 Polish gubernatorial districts where
Jews have a presence today would be used to benefit those communities; in the
remaining 27 regions, the proceeds would be channeled by the JRCP to the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, a newly formed organization
administered by representatives of both the Polish Jewish community and the WJRO.
The Foundation would be able to direct any funds it received from the sale or rental
of properties to satisfy the needs of both Polish Jewry and Jews in other countries.
Complicating the claims process even further is the cost factor. Because each
claim necessitates a paper trail of proof, lawyers, appraisers, and researchers—both
inside Poland and beyond—must be hired to document a given property’s prewar
identity. To date, the Foundation’s bill for research exceeds $1 million. Moreover,
when historical Jewish heritage buildings in poor condition are restituted, the
Foundation is sometimes quickly served with orders to renovate them or pay
heavy fines for noncompliance; the reclamation then becomes a bust for the Jewish
community and a bonus for the municipality. Similarly, city councils often require
the Foundation to repair and maintain properties that had been neglected for
decades.
In addition, government officials and residents are often loathe to return
former Jewish properties that since the war’s end have served the needs of the
larger population, such as hospitals, schools, libraries, and recreational facilities.
Wary of alienating their neighbors, Jewish communal leaders generally prefer to
enter into arrangements, where possible, in which Jewish patrimony is traded for
other publicly held properties, including some that have never been owned by a
Jewish community.
Once properties are returned to the Jewish communities, their leaders, hard
pressed for funds, are often clueless as to how to redevelop or manage them. As a
result, they sometimes needlessly sell the properties for a quick-fix infusion of
cash. To stem such sales, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has
established an “economic empowerment” program, which, explains the program
founder Jerry Spitzer, provides interest-free loans to help communities “think
strategically and be proactive rather than reactive” as they develop, rent, enter into
contracts, and otherwise manage their restituted properties. While the program
has so far met with success in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Budapest, it is still in its initial
educational stages in Poland.
Ellen Friedland is a documentary producer and writer focusing on the Jewish community of
Poland. This article first appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Reform Judaism Magazine published by the Union for Reform Judaism.
Once in the United States, Katz, with his family by his side, started a real
estate company in 1960 in Jackson Heights, Queens. He began with three-family
homes, renting furnished rooms to stewardesses. The company grew over the years
and when he died, he left behind a substantial real estate operation including more
than two dozen apartment buildings and many units under his management umbrella.
He also left behind a legacy of philanthropy and an interest, as well, in never
forgetting the lessons taught by the Holocaust. He wrote about his life experiences
in a book titled Teach Us to Count Our Days, published in 1999 and later in
Lithuania as well.
From the day in 1941 when the Germans brutally murdered his beloved teacher,
the young Katz swore that he would come back and make sure the rabbi was given
a proper burial. In 1994, Katz’s promise came true when, through his efforts, the
rabbi’s remains were discovered and disinterred in Lithuania. Shipped to Israel,
amid great fanfare, celebration, and honor, Rabbi Fondelier was reburied in
Jerusalem. Also, remembering the kindness of the family that hid his family during
the war, he found them in Lithuania and even brought them to the United States
for a commemorative reunion when they were named as “righteous gentiles” by
Yad Vashem.
Nathan Katz’s philanthropies included Jewish agencies, Zionist organizations
and Holocaust memorial groups. He was a founding member of the Holocaust
Museum in Washington, D.C. He was also a founding member of the Museum of
Jewish Heritage in New York City and a board member of the American Friends of
Yad Vashem. He was on the executive committee of the American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
For the past 62 years, he was married to Sima (Blofarb) Katz and leaves his
wife and two daughters, Miriam Katz of Bethpage, and Rita Levy of Roslyn. He
also leaves grandchildren Lisa, Michelle, Rebecca, Matthew and great-granddaughter,
Fay.
Joshua Resnek, Jewish Week
TOGETHER 17
TRUTH VINDICATED: THE SELFDESTRUCTION OF DAVID IRVING
by Michael Berenbaum
Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on
Trial: My Day In Court with David
Irving (New York: Echo, 2005) pp.
346, $25.95.
For five excruciating years, from
the moment that David Irving sued
Deborah Lipstadt for libel in
England until the Appeals process
ran its course, Lipstadt had to remain
silent. Others defended her
scholarship and revealed the
deceitfulness and deliberately
misleading nature of Ir ving’s
writings. She did not take the stand
in her own defense. Lipstadt is a
contemporary women not known for
her reticence. Silence was hard on
someone who prides herself on
fighting her own fights—but it was
necessary. Now she speaks freely
without bitterness and rancor and
not in a torrent, either.
In 1993 Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book entitled Denying the Holocaust:
The Growing Assault Against Memory and Truth, which described Holocaust
denial in our age. A few paragraphs were devoted to David Irving, the most
informed, original and therefore, most dangerous of Holocaust deniers. Irving
could not bring action against Lipstadt in the United States because as a public
figure, the burden was on him to prove that Lipstadt engaged in reckless disregard
of truth—a near impossible task—since what she said was true. In England, the
burden of proof is reversed, and he sued in London, when an English edition
was published by Penguin—also sued by Irving.
Liptadt wrote that Irving was “a Hitler partisan wearing blinkers, who
distorted evidence, manipulated documents and skewed and misrepresented data,”
and that “Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying out Hitler’s legacy.” She
considered him a dangerous Holocaust denier. As the Court determined, Lipstadt
was not wrong, merely understated.
Perhaps Irving thought that Lipstadt would back down, issue a pro forma
apology and settle for a symbolic sum. As the trial neared, he asked for a pittance—
£500 to go to charity. Perhaps he thought the potential liability would force the
parties to back down.
Lipstadt could not back down. To concede would be to accept defeat, inflict
injury upon Holocaust survivors and desecrate the memory of the dead. She had
to take a stand to preserve her standing, her dignity and her values. But as she
writes, she did not stand alone. Lipstadt’s book is a tribute to those who stood
by her. She is the first to recognize their importance, their competence, generosity
and dedication.
Her brilliant and dedicated legal team included Anthony Julius, a fine lawyer
and literary scholar who wrote a Ph.D. on T. S. Eliott’s Antisemitism and was a
proud Jew known as Princess Di’s divorce lawyer. His partner, James Libson,
and his law firm Mishcon de Reya, were prepared to take the case pro bono.
They recruited Richard Rampton, a distinguished London barrister, to try the
case after they prepared it. He, too, was prepared to work pro bono.
In the end, adequate funds were raised for the defense from Leslie and Abigail
Wexner, Steven Spielberg, William Lowenberg and other Jewish philanthropists.
Rabbi Herbert Friedman, whose distinguished career began as a U.S. Army
Chaplain working with soldiers and survivors and working with Bricha, organized
the fundraising effort discretely. [For the record, I was honored to assist him.]
The American Jewish Committee stepped in without seeking credit or
publicity. Ken Stern, a lawyer and an authority on Holocaust denial, masterfully
ran their efforts. Emory University, where Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of
Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, stood by her and gave her paid
leave. Others taught her Holocaust course; friends visited, called, e-mailed and
supported her through the long ordeal.
Scholars were recruited: Richard Evans, of Cambridge, a superb historian
and an expert on historiography, read each of Irving’s works and then checked
and double-checked the original documents Irving cited and his translations—a
tedious and increasingly loathsome task, as the depth of Irving’s deceit became
clear.
TOGETHER 18
Christopher Browning, of the University of North Carolina, a worthy
successor of Raul Hilberg as the leading authority on German documents, worked
on German documentation of the “Final Solution.” Robert Jan Van Pelt, a
Canadian of Dutch origin, an architectural historian who wrote brilliantly of
the gas chambers of Auschwitz and who reads German documentation, testified
on gassing at Birkenau. Peter Longerich, a German living in England, analyzed
the work of the Einsatzgruppen in former Soviet territory in 1941-42. Hajo
Funke examined Irving’s association with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and racist
groups, the speeches he made and the manner in which he played to his crowd.
Evans examined Irving’s footnotes and documentation. Their findings were
devastating to Irving. The team’s scholarship became contributions to the
historiography of the Holocaust. Evans’ case became an extended discourse on
how historians should read documents and reach their learned conclusions, an
expression of historiography at its best—that demonstrated the most egregious
violations of the cannons of the profession. The books that emerged from this
team have added significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust in clarity and
in depth.
No survivors were called as witnesses. No Israelis. The trial was designed to
be a trial of documents—an added benefit since we are approaching the day
when the last survivor will leave this earth and living memory will become the
stuff of history. To those who feared that this natural development of time
would put the memory of the Holocaust at risk, the trial proves otherwise.
The lawyers decided that the case would not be tried in the court of public
opinion, in the press, but in a courtroom. The trial was held before Judge Charles
Gray—without a jury. The press fury Irving induced as he played to them for
months allowed his side of the story to be ubiquitous while Lipstadt was silent.
In the end it was up to the judge
to deliver a decisive, clear judgment.
What did Lipstadt do during
five years of public silence? As a
blind person may hear more clearly,
a deaf person see more intently, one
who is muted may listen more
carefully.
Lipstadt proves to have the
keen eye of journalist, observing the
setting, the demeanor and even the
fashion style of everyone from the
Court Clerk to the Judge and her
Barrister. She writes with a
novelist’s sense of plot so that while
the reader is led through the entire
trial, from first accusation to final
vindication, the major story is never
lost in the details. She doesn’t tell everything—but she does convey the drama,
the anguish and the wealth of emotions that were her day-in-day-out experiences.
She writes without self-pity, but the reader is likely to pity her restraint. For
those who did not follow the trial day-by-day, this book is fascinating reading
that gives one a sense of what it was really like to sit there, to see the nature of
the evidence, and see how strategic decisions that were made.
In the end, all drama aside, the Judge understands and renders the clearest of
judgments by unmasking the pretense and politics of Irving’s pseudo-scholarship
and the racism and antisemitism of his beliefs. And the plaintiff, David Irving,
plays his role to perfection, exceeding even our fondest wishes for him, by
destroying himself in public. In defeat his sting is diminished.
Lipstadt is entitled to gloat, but does not. She understands the importance
of her vindication—and its limitations. The British press was nasty, seeing it as
a battle of class, an English gentleman against an American Jewish woman upstart.
Some barely concealed their antisemitism and sometimes they confusingly
presented the trial as an issue of free speech. In our world where rumor and
innuendo parade as fact and insight, there is a tendency to believe that in every
squabble there is some truth on each side and a basic laziness about uncovering
it. At least in England, Lipstadt was spared cable’s Court TV spinning.
As friend and colleague, I am gratified by Lipstatdt’s vindication, but what
was all-important was the unmasking of David Irving. Irving may have made
the greatest contribution to that himself—by bringing the suit in the first place,
defending himself and then destroying himself.
Michael Berenbaum is the Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and
Religious Implications of the Holocaust and an [Adjunct] Professor of Theology at the University
of Judaism.
VOICES FROM VILNA
by Helaine Shoag Greenberg
My brother Leon, sister Cheryl and I grew up during the 40’s and 50’s in
Jeannette, PA a small town near Pittsburgh that had three glass factories and a rubber
factory that made great tennis balls. Jeannette had a tiny, close-knit Jewish community.
Our maternal grandparents, Frank and Mary Levin came from Vilnius, Lithuania
(Vilna in Yiddish). They and their four children and nine grandchildren made up a
good portion of the congregants of our little synagogue on Gaskill Ave. For me, life
in this small town felt happy and safe. I have fond memories of walking to school
and back with best friends, of sitting in the front seat of the mail truck as I rode to
the top of Margaret Street, and of jumping on the mattresses at Levin’s Furniture
Store when I was supposed to be sweeping
I remember holiday dinners spent around Grandmother’s dining table eating the
delicious chicken, surrounded by brothers and sisters, cousins,
aunts and uncles. Our Grandmother told stories about her
life in the old country. She said the villagers, Jews and Gentiles,
were all poor and helped each other out. She described the
wooden synagogue in Traube, Belarus, as if she had just been
there. She cried when she spoke about her mother Tova. I
always loved the part when Grandma talked about my father’s
mother Fagel and spoke about her with such high regard.
Cheryl felt very proud she was named after her. Grandma
had been the mother’s helper when Fagel, a distant cousin,
had moved to nearby Vilnius from Traube after her marriage.
Our Grandmother Mary told us that she herself had been a
beautiful young women with whom Frank, our Grandfather,
had fallen in love at first sight. They married and came to
America in 1902. My mother, Ida, graduated from high school
in 1929 and was about to go off to college. As a graduation
present, her parents traveled with her back to Vilna to visit
relatives. That is where our parents met. After four long years
of correspondence and after much travail, my father Wolf
Shoag obtained a visa to come to the United States to marry
Mom.
My grandmother’s stories made me feel privileged to know
so much about my mother’s side of the family. However, as
much as my grandmother spoke about her history, my siblings and I knew little
about my father and his family. When asked about his childhood, Dad would tell us
tales about the history of the Shoags, but would stop when we questioned him
about his brothers and sisters. Through the years we got fragments of information,
but nothing about his life was clear. There were three boys and three girls but that
was all we knew. He would only say, “They are gone now.”
Cheryl remembered Dad talking about some letters he had received from his
family and some old pictures from Vilna somewhere in the basement of our parents’
home. Cheryl hoped that these photos might give us some answers to the puzzle of
our father’s past.
By 1984 both our parents were deceased. We had to clean out our family home
to sell it. Cheryl searched the basement and came up with the old pictures from
Lithuania. The letters in English and Yiddish that Dad had spoken about, water
stained and crushed, were found under a pile of old files. With thrill and awe, we
looked at them together. I sent the Yiddish ones to a translator. None of us had time
to read them more than cursorily because jobs and kids were a priority.
In May of 2000, through the Jewish Genealogy Society, we three traveled to
Vilnius together. At last we had time to share our various funds of information. It
was a joy to be together on this mutual quest. A young, delightful, English-speaking
guide, Regina, sent by the Genealogy Society, met us.
We flew from Helsinki to a drab, square, cement Soviet-style airport near
Vilnius. During the drive from the airport we saw unadorned, cement-block, Sovietstyle apartment houses. When we reached the city proper, there were charming
Renaissance, Baroque and Classic buildings. I was surprised at the sophistication of
small European Vilnius founded in 1323. I had expected to be traveling back in time
to an early part of the 20th Century, the time of our grandparents and father. The
pictures we found were of wooden houses with tin roofs, likely from the poorer
section of town. The Stikliai Hotel, which the Genealogy Society had chosen for us
in the Old Town, was a French hotel chain with elegant French furniture and matching
bedcovers and wallpaper. The Old Town, which had once been the Jewish ghetto,
was now a UNESCO Historic Site, full of restored buildings from the 17th and 18th
century. This was the very city that had been the home of our ancestors for 200
years. I felt defiant. “We Shoag’s came back to our city!”
The first night, we were taken to Shabbat services and dinner held at the
one remaining Jewish synagogue. Its beige Moorish outside facade had three curved
and pointed arches. The inside of the synagogue appeared spare and worn. Under
strict Orthodox custom, women were sent to the balcony. I was glad because then I
could quietly ask questions of the guide. She said, “Among the thousands of Jews
living here in the 18th and 19th century, Vilna had been the home of illustrious Jewish
scholars.” At the time of our visit there were only 100 children in the synagogue
school. A young, American-born Lubavitch rabbi led the prayers. In the social hall
downstairs, we were given a Sabbath dinner of chicken soup and chicken. The meal,
cooked by the rabbi’s wife, was plentiful.
We couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel that night to play the tape Leon had
made of Dad talking about his family history and about his life. How meaningful it
was to hear his voice back in the city that he came from.
“The time was the late 1700s. Vilna was a blossoming Jewish center. Around the
time of the great and learned Vilna Gaon, a young man named Aryah (lion) ben (son
of ) Moses managed the lands in Lithuania for the Polish Earl Sudervianski. Jews
back then were not allowed to own their own land. The Polish Earl closed his
holdings and his Jewish employees and their families had to
move on. Aryah took a horse and buggy and moved to
Wilkomierska Ulca Street in Vilna. Tsar Alexander I decreed
that Jews must take last names for purposes of tax collection.
Aryah ben Moses was appointed as a tax collector for the
Tsar. As Aryah was a good singer of Hebrew prayers and
must announce the law of taking a last name for tax
purposes, he chose a synagogue as the place to pronounce
the tsar’s command. This ancestor had just finished reading
a chapter in Amos, ‘When the Lion roars, who is not afraid.’
In Hebrew the words are Aryah Shoag. He then announced
the Tsar’s decree and stated his name Shoag (roar).”
In the tape our father reminded us that names were
given to honor deceased relatives and the Shoag male names
were the same three: Moses, Wolf, Aryah. We continued to
listen to the tape.
My parents had a small “department store” in their home.
They sold shoes and shawls and bolts of cloth. During WWI,
to escape the war, the family planned to flee east to a cousin
in Orsha, Belarus, on the Dnieper River. My father packed
all of his merchandise and loaded two freight cars. My sister
Roza and I were the most worldly so we went ahead to
Belarus to meet the train with the goods. (Wolf was 10 and
Roza was 14 years old.) My parents were supposed to come after closing the house.
They bought a horse to go to Orsha, but when they left Vilna the horse ran away, so
they went home. The Germans army came through and we two children were left
alone from 1915 to 1918. We lived in the home of Fagel’s cousin. In 1918, at age
14, I went back to find my people. You can imagine the happy reunion! I had grown
and they didn’t even recognize me.
It is not ironic that he died calling for Roza.
The next day, to our utter joy, we obtained a family tree going back to 1780
from the archivist Galina at the Lithuanian National Archives. She had copied the
archival information onto a piece of paper, tracing the generations. The first person
named Shoag was Aryah. From then on all the first-born male names were the same
three (Aryah, Moses, Wolf), as our father told us in the tape, verifying his story.
We went next to the Paneriai Forest. Paner was a place of contrast, of peaceful
woods but where the Lithuanians and Nazis had committed terrible atrocities. There
was a large stone Genocide Memorial with an inscription commemorating the dead.
Five clearings had been dug for large oil pits to accommodate the trains that came
through during the earlier part of the century. In 1941, 70,000 Jews were lined
around an oil pit and shot. They fell inward and were buried. We suspect that Aunt
Roza Shoag Kaslovska was among this group. Having read Roza’s letters, I felt
disbelief, numbness and nausea.
We were driven to Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania. There is a lovely
walking promenade with stores on either side. Not far away, the Japanese consulate
building has a sign dedicating the building to Chiune Sugihara who bravely gave
visas to Jews, allowing them to escape in the early 40’s, even though his government
prohibited it. Those that could escape went through Japan to Shanghai, China.
Kaunas also has only one synagogue. How gorgeous this Blue Synagogue altar is!
Cobalt blue tiles line the front wall and altar proper.
A 19th century Russian Tsar built the Fort Nine Prison right outside of the city.
In 1941 it was used as a place to imprison and then shoot Jews, including those from
Germany and France. Thirty thousand were killed. We were taken to the small cells
where prisoners were kept. They were dark and dank. In the field next to the prison
stands a huge, powerful, misshapen monument of rock to commemorate these dead.
The powerful monument carved in stone looks like tortured people. Stone arms
were uplifted and stone faces cried out.
TOGETHER 19
The next day we moved on to Belarus, the country of origin of both our
grandmothers. We drove on good two-lane roads in Lithuania past flat, green farmland
with a few small forests scattered in between. After 1991 Lithuania and the other
Baltic states joined the Western economic market, freeing themselves from
communism, but Belarus remained communist. We were detained at the border for
a short time showing passports and buying $60 worth of Russian rubles each. At
least Belarus still looks just as I expected from our 1929 pictures. It remained poor
and the roads narrow and pot-holed. Drab wooden houses, very few of them painted,
with gray tin roofs dot the road. We stopped at several small shops to buy lunch.
Empty white shelves lined the walls. In Lithuania the stores had been filled with
goods.
Oshmena, Belarus, was the largest town in the district and had one hotel. After
registering with the police, I took pictures of Lenin’s statue outside the Communist
Party Headquarters. A suspicious policeman came over with the Communist Party
Chief. The party chief was in his early 50’s and spoke softly and kindly to me. I told
him we were looking for any Jews living in the city. The Chief graciously called the
only Jewish lady remaining in the town. He remarked that we could send money, a
few thousand dollars, to build a fence around the overrun Jewish cemetery. “People
are poor here and need work,” he explained.
Our room at the Hotel Oshmena had a large empty lobby except for a desk and
couch. The small bedrooms on the second floor ran along each side of the large,
dimly lit hallway. Our rooms were not dirty but just very worn looking. A square
box-like radio blasting a woman’s voice seemed to glare from the wall. The shared
bathroom had a sink and toilet, with its pipes painted light blue, but there was no
toilet paper or soap. We ate dinner in the hotel dining room. It was dark and
shabby, but clean like the hotel room. The people may be poor but they really like to
dance to loud, old-fashioned music. We certainly joined in, but no one seemed to
notice us.
We were lucky to meet the town’s only remaining Jew. “Babushka” Lipkowitz
was an 85-year-old woman, who reminded us of our dear Grandma, small, wizzen
and wrinkled. Her son-in-law had painted the home bright yellow and green on the
outside. Inside, it was overcrowded with dingy and worn-looking furniture. Her
two granddaughters, Marina and Olga, both in their early 20’s, joyfully received us
in their home. Their parents were at work. Babushka told us about Fort Nine Prison
in Lithuania where her 3-year-old son had been shot. She showed us his picture! She
and her husband survived the war because they jumped from a train bound for the
Estonian concentration camps and hid in the woods for the rest of the war. Her 20year-old granddaughter, Marina, wanted to go to Israel. This granddaughter told us
that lately she felt Jewish because some old drunks had called her “Jew.” I felt such
sympathy for the old lady that I left her all my rubles.
Accompanied by Marina, we found the Jewish cemetery where most of the
gravestones were choked by bushes. An old woman tended a goat there, while she
rested on a fallen gravestone. Fifteen junior- high-school-age boys were playing soccer
on an empty grassy field within the cemetery. The healthy-looking, dark haired boys
were all wearing jeans. They watched us as we sprayed shaving cream over the
gravestones and wiped the cream in the grooves to see the Hebrew letters more
clearly. Our guide read the names. The boys offered to help us cut the bushes away
from the stones. We gave them candy that we carried for just such occasions. We
were making a list of names to give to the Genealogy Society for their records.
In nearby Traube, home of both our grandmothers, three shabbily dressed old
men offered to show us where the old Jewish synagogue had been. They would not
take money. “Your story is our story. We all have lost much.” They led us to the spot
where the synagogue had been. I pictured my grandmothers and their parents, my
great-grandparents, entering a wooden building to attend services. To me, it was
hallowed ground.
Nearby was a Jewish cemetery overrun by a forest. The gravestones were torn
down. We turned them over looking for ancestral names and listing them for the
Society records. We did not find anyone from our family.
Close to this cemetery, a small monument stands in the Evia forest. From family
letters, I suspect that Dad’s sister, Aunt Sonia Shoag Cykiewitz, was taken there to
be shot. I was too sad to talk. During the trip back to Vilnius, the border guards
made us wait, but only for one hour.
The best was saved for last. We went “home” to Snipiskes, a suburb of Vilna
over the Green Bridge. We went to hunt for our father’s home, hoping it was still
standing. Dad called it Snipishook (Yiddish) and laughingly would tell us, “If we
were bad, he’d spank us all the way to Snipishook!” I had brought an old map of the
city. Our guide Regina had a new map. Leon had the address 51/52 Wilkomieska
Street. All the old street names had changed and modern buildings had been erected
but the numbers seemed to be the same. We walked around several blocks that
looked promising, hunting for Dad’s house.
Amazed, we saw two houses and a courtyard at 51/52 formerly Wilkomierska
Street just as my father had described. The houses were new with stucco on the
outside but positioned as they had been in the old pictures.
With our guide we walked to the nearby park and sat on a bench, pulling out
TOGETHER 20
the old letters that Cheryl had the foresight to bring along. Here is a sample two of
the astounding and despairing letters:
This letter is from Dad, who had learned English so he could write to Mother.
Vilnius 2, XII 1932
Dear Ida,
Yesterday anti-Semitic excesses had begun at the Vilnius University. Christian
students attacked their Jewish colleagues and events befell girl students. I am enclosing
a newspaper from the last week, which will make the situation clear to you.
The future for the Jews in Poland is a desperate one. Imagine these students are
to be our future leaders and we will have to depend on them. You won’t find everything
so detailed in the paper for they fear confiscation here. Our parents compel us to
remain at home in the evenings, but you can imagine with what a heart we do so
knowing that Jews are beaten in the streets and our duty is to defend the Jewish
honor. But I pity mother.
Now darling write oftener and don’t keep me waiting long. Best love and regards
to your folks from mine and especially from me. Wolf
The article said that Jewish girls were raped. Our Uncle Shia was pushed from a
second floor balcony at the university. He survived, married his sweetheart, and fled
to Palestine in 1933. Dad came to the U.S. in 1934 and married Ida, Jan. 6,1935.
As the decade came to a close, Wolf realized the gravity of his family’s situation.
Our father even contacted U.S. Congressman Robert Allen, who wrote to the
American Consul General T. Bevan in Warsaw asking to obtain permission for Rabbi
Cypkiewitz to come as rabbi for the Jeannette synagogue.The effort failed. The
rabbi was arrested and jailed in 1938.
As Germany began the invasion of Poland, letters came from Vilna. This letter
was written two days before the German invasion. This most poignant, despairing
letter is from grandfather, Moses Mattathias.
Monday the 12th day of Elul 8/28 1939
From Moses:
Dear children of ours (Frank, Mary with all with our dear children,Wolf, Ida,
our beloved sweet grandchildren.
We can already say goodbye. God knows if we will be able to know one from the
other. We have already had the taste of war for 4 1/2 years. The war could then have
made us crazy from the sorrow. We were left here crippled. All our blood running
through us could have turned to pus. This did not happen. We were then young
enough, strong.
Today the streets are full with bloody cries. The women run after the men, the
children after the fathers. One cries hysterically. No one can take any more. The
hunger chases. The horses were taken away even from the Gentiles. There is one
horse left in a whole village of Snipiskus.
Jews can not bring anything into the city. One is without teeth. Who has the
strength or means to bite (fight) the enemy. The angry enemies say that they will
take away everything that is found by Jews. Ah, Wolf! How can you listen to this?
The enemy wants to make nothing from Jewish possessions. How hard everything
was accumulated.
One can write nothing in these letters. One comforts oneself believing that
America will come to our defense. “It should not be, God forbid, how it was for the
Jews when it was the Destruction of Jerusalem.” Others promised to help but did
not. “Scream with all your might that one should really save a people from
destruction.” One pinches oneself the while and one tears chunks of flesh and blood
runs readily. And people still play politics.”
My heart is broken over my load of poverty. Where shall we put ourselves?
Everyone wants to eat. I must scream over the seas to all my friends. No one must
hold back help in such a time.
All our dear ones, are we not, God forbid, parting forever? Forgive me that I cry
with all my might. It is that it hurts so much from that other war. Who can feel our
pain, as well as you, my child? There was no bread. And some of us were ruined after
that war and became beggars until we were put in the grave. Today is a worse danger
than the other war. I was still so heroic then even though we had over us the
Cossacks, the Bolshevists. One overcame the time, and remained alive. For you and
Roza my eyes did not dry four years, but you came home. And now, cry again. Cry
not to know of where some of my children are. That is to me worse than everything.
Our life is so bad now, what do we have to save?
At last I understood why Dad was silent! It was too painful for him to speak, to
think of this genocide. Profoundly shaken from our reading, we made our way
slowly back to the hotel. The young rabbi from Boston was on the street. He said,
“Although things look good, the economy is going downhill after 10 years of
independence from the Communists. When the economy becomes bad, people look
for others to blame. They look for scapegoats.” He was worried about the safety of
his wife and four small sons.
As we neared the hotel, I was heartbroken to see Zuden Rout (Jews out) in
graffiti on a street wall. The shop above had three new posters in the window. They
contained a waist-up colored picture of Hitler with the words Hitler Isvaduotojas
(Hitler Savior in Lithuanian). Why do they still have pictures of Hitler?
JUST A HOLOCAUST ESCAPEE
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In February 2002, 12 year old Leonie Barrett and I,
Jennifer Bernardes, adopted 77 year old Harry Ettlinger, a
survivor of the Holocaust. We were the first to do so in New
Jersey. He had been recommended by the Holocaust Council
of MetroWest and our Newark’s Oliver Street School teachers
Bobbie Winokur and MaryLou Genovino. Born into the
Jewish faith, Harry’s parents, brothers and he left Germany
just before Kristallnacht in 1938. He had graduated from
nearby Newark’s East Side High School in 1944, and returned
to Europe as an American soldier during World War II.
From the day we met him, we have spent time in oneon-one interviews at Oliver Street School, filmed sessions at
the Jewish Community Campus of MetroWest, lunches in
our homes, and a tour to the places where Harry lived in
Newark and nearby Irvington. That was just a start. Harry,
my mother Fatimah, and I traveled to Yardley, Pennsylvania,
where we met one of his sons, Paul, and his three
grandchildren.
In April of that year, Leonie and I were invited with him
to a Passover Seder in a nearby college. We experienced this
Jewish custom firsthand and thus were able to attain an even
greater appreciation for the Jewish religion. During that
month, Mrs. Winokur, Leonie, Harry and I were speakers at
the city-sponsored Yom Hashoah service held at the Grace
Episcopal Church in Newark. Close to 500 people attended.
During that year and 2003, we were featured in the MetroWest
sponsored Jewish News, which has a circulation of 40,000.
Harry is Co-Chair of the Wallenberg Foundation of
New Jersey. It is an interfaith, all volunteer organization, which
recognizes a very select group of Middle School and High
School Students who emulate the legendary Raoul Wallenberg.
Unbeknownst to Harry, the selection Committee recognized
Leonie and I as Wallenberg Finalists in 2002.
In the spring of 2003, sponsored by Michael Rubell, son
of an Auschwitz death camp survivor, our Oliver Street School
visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Lincoln Memorial
in Washington. All of my classmates and I were given different
identification passes for a Holocaust survivor or victim. Mine
was for a Hanne Hirsch from Karlsruhe, Harry’s birthplace.
That opened up an international news event, since in 1937
she had moved into the 4th floor of the Ettlinger family
building, while Harry lived there on the 2nd floor. Hanne,
now Hanne Liebmann and Harry talked over the phone the
next day. They became VIPs at the Museum’s 10th anniversary
celebration. They, her husband Max, Leonie and I became
the center of an article by the well-known columnist, George
Wills.
Hanne and Harry gave a talk to our class, shown on New
Jersey’s Television News channel. Among the many happenings
from that reunion was the contact between Harry and the
daughters of the American couple, who had vouched for
Harry and his family back in 1938.
In 2003, Harry’s contact in city hall arranged for Newark
Mayor Sharpe James to issue a letter of recommendation for
our entry into the esteemed Newark Science High School.
Leonie and I are now enrolled there.
Later that year, Harry hosted a visit at his home for
Sister Rose Thering, Mrs. Winokur and Genovino,
MetroWest Holocaust Directors Barbara Wind and Rose
Valland, the Liebmann’s, us and our mothers. Sister Rose is
known internationally for her work of bringing Jews and
Christians together.
Around that same period, Harry arranged for our
Congressmen to enter us into the Congressional Record. I
shall never forget the presentation by my Congressman
Menendez in his Jersey City office.
Born into an affluent family, whose history dates back hundreds of years,
Harry and other German Jews were subject to ever increasing discrimination under
the Nazi government. By the boycott of the city’s population, the 85-year-old
Ettlinger family elegant woman’s fashion store came to end in 1935. With no hope
of any income and the darkening outlook, his parents and those of all their friends
looked to settle in another country. Few door were open. By the fickle finger of
fate, they had come unknowingly to the nearby American consulate on that day in
April 1938, after which this country would no longer accept applications for
emigration. The approval of that application led to their arrival in New York in
mid-October.
In 1940 the family moved to Newark. After graduating from high school, he
joined the U.S. Army in August 1944 and was sent to Europe during the later
stages of the Battle of the Bulge. On his 19th birthday, Harry was left behind,
while his eight buddies joined the 99th Infantry Division. All were either killed or
wounded in action. Harry always talks about what a lucky man he is.
From the end of the war until mid-1946, he, as a U.S Army sergeant, was
assigned to ferret out stolen works of art from a vast museum and library collection
stored in two German salt mines. He is very proud of that effort.
He earned several degrees in Engineering and Business Administration. In his
45-year career he started work on commercial products and then switched to
aerospace parts and systems. Before his retirement in 1992, his company promoted
him out of Engineering into a Program Manager position for the guidance system
on the Trident submarine-launched nuclear deterrent missile.
Since his retirement, Harry has been extremely active in many organizations
and has received many special honors. He is an Honorary State Commander for
the Jewish War Veterans, was a Senior Citizen of the Year for Parsippany for his
work on the Wallenberg sculpture dedicated in that town, and received a special
commendation from the commanding admiral of the Fleet Ballistic Program. His
is an avid player in the game of Bridge, where he has reached the Life Master level.
He belongs to other fraternal, senior citizen and veterans organizations. He has
been an active member of the MetroWest Holocaust Council. But his most
rewarding involvement is his co-chairmanship of the Wallenberg Foundation of
New Jersey. It is probably now one of the most active groups, which honors
Raoul Wallenberg, the legendary hero of the 20th Century.
Harry was married for nearly 53 years to Newark born Mimi Goldman. She
passed away last August after many years with diabetes. They have two sons, Dr.
Robert Ettlinger and the above mentioned Paul Ettlinger, and the recently married
daughter Amy. Robert recently became a father to a daughter.
Harry has become a part of my extended family. He is like another grandfather
to me, since I rarely see my mother’s father, who still lives on a small farm in
Brazil. In June 2003, Harry was the guest speaker at Leonie’s and my graduation.
We could not have been more honored to have someone so close and dear to speak
at our very own graduation. To this day, every time we see Harry, it seems like a
story right out of our childhood anthologies. The joy and blessings of what we
have done seems to spiral outward and touch people and entities, which we would
never dreamed possible.
(l-r) Harry Ettlinger, Hanne & Max Liebmann
TOGETHER 21
DENYING DENIAL
by Dr. Alex Grobman
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TOGETHER 22
For years, Israelis were reluctant to acknowledge the potent and
inexhaustible stream of antisemitism in
Arab media and in pronouncements by
Arab religious and political leaders.
According to Menahem Milson,
professor of Arab literature at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the
Israelis repress the virulent plague of
hatred that surrounds them because of
the Zionist ideal. Zionism, the dream,
was supposed to be the end of European
antisemitism. Jews came to the Promised Land to escape Jewhatred, and when they got there, they discovered it to be
ubiquitous! And then, after the Holocaust, by psychological
necessity, they slipped into denial.
Milson says if the Jewish intellectuals and politicians in
Israel concede that the strength of Arab antisemitism has
poisoned the psyches of their Palestinian partners in peace, it
justifies those who question Arab sincerity in peace talks and
support for those who refuse to surrender land.
Itamar Marcus, who monitors Arabic sermons, speeches
and media via the Palestinian Media Watch, reports on the
constant barrage of hatred and lies broadcast by the Palestinian
Authority, much of it imported from other Arab lands. Arie
Stav, director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, reports
that, in general, Israeli academic institutions, were minimally
interested in analyzing this phenomenon and its effects.
Shimon Peres as Foreign Minister in 1993, Stav notes,
ordered the Palestinian Covenant removed from all Israeli
government offices. The Covenant is anti-Israel and contains
the PLO’s ideology, its objectives and calls for the “elimination
of Zionism in Palestine (article 15). It also proclaims the “entire
illegality of the establishment of Israel” (Article 19) and the
need “to destroy the Zionist presence.”
After a number of wars, two intifadas and the failure of the
Oslo Accords to bring peace, some Israelis are now convinced
that the Arabs will never accept the existence of the Jewish State
and will use every subterfuge to destroy it. Not all Israelis share
this view. There are those who believe that there are Arabs who
want peace. That is understandable, at least from a psychological
perspective.
Sixty years after the Holocaust, the Jewish State is
negotiating with an Arab leader who denies that it ever happened.
He used his “knowledge” to spread lies and hatred for Jews
among Arabs in many lands, lies and hatred found in his 1982
doctoral dissertation for Moscow’s Oriental College. The
president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a.
Abu Mazen), claimed that the Nazis and the leadership of the
Zionist movement conspired together to create the Holocaust.
In 1984 he published a book based on his dissertation,
questioning if gas chambers were used to exterminate Jews,
and claiming that “even less than a million” might have been
NAZI LOSES CITIZENSHIP
A federal judge revoked the U.S. citizenship of a retired Massachusetts factory worker, Vladas Zajanckauskas, 89, ruling he
lied when he claimed he wasn’t involved in the Nazi destruction
of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1943. The defendant said his
involvement with the Nazis was limited to working the bar at
one of their camps in Poland.
Justice Department prosecutors said he was a guard in a unit
called the “Trawniki men” that helped the Nazis capture and kill
Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Prosecutors asked the judge to revoke the Lithuania native’s citizenship on the grounds that he
lied on his visa application about his activity during the war.
Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray said Gorton’s
decision was “another reminder of the government’s unswerving commitment to the pursuit of justice on behalf of the
victims of the Holocaust.”
murdered. The Zionists used a higher number of victims, he said, to extract “greater
gains” when they would “distribute the spoils.” He asserted, “Raising a discussion
regarding the number of Jews [murdered] does not in any way diminish the severity
of the crime committed against them, as murder—even of one man—is a crime that
the civilized world cannot accept and humanity cannot accept.”
Abu Mazen’s Holocaust denial challenges the legitimacy of the Jewish State.
Scholars at MEMRI say that he does that by showing how the Zionists worked with
the Nazis to destroy the Jewish people—because only “Palestine” was the right place
for Jews. He claims “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement
against the Jews living under Nazi rule in order to arouse the government’s hatred of
them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination.”
(“Palestine Leader: Number of Jewish Victims in the Holocaust Might be ‘Even Less
Than a Million…’ Zionist Movement Collaborated with Nazis to ‘Expand the Mass
Extermination.” (Washington, D.C.: The Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI), Number 95. May 30, 2002)
Denying the Holocaust is part of a strategy to deny the Jews any connection to
the Land of Israel, including the strategy of denying the Bible. Itamar Marcus
illustrates the problem:
• “Biblical Judaism is really Islam. Biblical Jews are really Arab, and the Land of
Israel is really the Arabian Peninsula [Judaism is not a religion on the full sense of the
word…] The religion of Moses is a religion, apparently it is the Islamic religion, and
some research that was published find[s] that, when translated correctly, the Torah
texts show that it is a continuation of Islam.”
• “It is known scientifically as well, that a homeland of all the [Israeli] tribes
exists today in Asir [in the Arabian Peninsula]. Their history is there.”
• “Modern Judaism, the Torah and Bible are forgeries. Jews are falsifiers and the
enemies of Allah and Islam. The Torah was brought down while it contained
guidance…They [the Jews] faked the words of Allah and changed their religion and
laws are wicked….
Professor Arthur Hertzberg, a Jewish leader and historian, says, “The attack by
Holocaust deniers is… the most hurtful that has ever been leveled against Jews. We
have long been prepared to defend our religion and our corporate character…but the
immediate reaction to the Holocaust deniers is outrage….”
In our book Denying History, Michael Shermer and I note that Holocaust
denial is a form of pseudohistory. It is an affront against history and how the science
of history is practiced. To deny the Holocaust is shocking because it attempts to
deny our search to understand extreme acts of humanity. Holocaust denial is so
dangerous and despicable—it is an attempt not just to deny a true past, but to deny
a meaningful one.
By denying the Holocaust and vilifying Zionist leaders, Abu Mazen declares
Jews have no legitimate right to any part of Israel.
Before anyone signs an agreement involving the security of the Jews in the State
of Israel and perhaps its viability, is it unreasonable for someone to go up to Abu
Mazen and just ask him if he really believes what he wrote? Don’t we need to know
if there is a reason to believe he is different from his predecessor? So far, the only
difference is better personal grooming. Since his election, things do not bode well.
For years the Jews in America and many of its leading academics argued against
meeting with deniers lest they be given legitimacy. Are we legitimizing Holocaust
denial and Jew-hatred while we delegitimize Israel?
We yearn for peace, but at what price?
An historian, Dr. Grobman most recent book is Battling for Souls: The Vaad Hatzala Rescue
Committee in Post War Europe [KTAV]. He is also co-author of Denying History: Who Says The
Holocaust Never Happened? (University of California Press, 2000).
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Together Searches
c/o The Wordsmithy
P.O. Box 224
New Milford, NJ 07646
We are looking for Auschwitz
survivors with numbers at or near
A12247, my mother’s number.
Thanks. Sam Grussgott
please email: [email protected]
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I have been searching for my sister
for almost 60 years. She might
have tried to search for me. I just
found out that I was registered as
a victim of the Shoah by a niece
at Yad Vashem. Maybe it’s
someone else with the same nee
and married name as mine, being
deported from the same place in
Hungary. Could it be that this
niece could be her daughter, who
thought I had perished? I hope so.
If she survived, please help me find
my sister or her family. My
younger sister is Ilona Ungar,
from Foldes, Hungary, whom I
last saw on October 20th, 1944 in
Auschwitz, Lager C30. I was
selected to go to hard labor at
Glogao and she remained. She was
15 years old; my father was also
there in Lager D8. Elizabeth
Lefkovits nee Ungar; born in
Foldes, Hajdu, Hungary Feb. 27,
1924. My parents were Ungar
Ignac from Hajdusovat and
Rothman Hermina from Debrecen.
her again.” He presumed she and her family died
somehow. But if this Bluma Ostrover who completed
these forms in 1957 in Israel was indeed my dad’s aunt,
apparently she survived and remarried (an Ostrover).
While it is unlikely she is still alive (she’d be in her
upper 90’s, at least), she likely had children and
grandchildren. My father and I would like so much to
try to find these relatives! They could still be in Israel,
or they could have emigrated to the US, Canada, or
wherever! Does anyone out there know of an Ostrover
in or from Israel? Please, please let me know. Finding
and meeting this little branchlet of our ravaged family
tree would be such a gift.
Janice Friebaum, Boca Raton, FL (father is Morris/
Moshe Friebaum...also Freibaum and Frajbaum)
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I came to America in 1952 and have since tried to get
closure on the death of my mother and brother. The
information I have found is as follows:
Ilse Liese Trzeciak, nee Salomon, my mother, DOB
4/19/09, was deported from Darmstadt to Terezin from
the transport XVII/2-47 on February 12, 1943 and
then October 1, 1944 with transport Em-1447 to
Auschwitz. My brother, Israel Trzeciak, known as Peter,
DOB 4/10/39, was deported on the same dates with
XVII/2-48 and Em-1448 respectively. Any information
on either would be very much appreciated. I do not
know the date or manner of their death, though one
can imagine. Please, if you know anything, no matter
how horrible, let me know.
Edith Rogers
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Do you have any current information about the German
Jewish teenage girls hidden in a religious retreat called
“La Sainte Baume” during the last year and a half of the
war? The retreat was operated by a French priest “le
Pere Piperot” and an order of nuns, and the girls were
disguised as workers. My mother, Lore Bermann, was
hidden there under the assumed name of “Jeanne Durst”
with her younger sister, “Marie.” I would be very
grateful to receive any information you might have
about the people and the place, and would welcome
any correspondence from anyone who was there or who
has knowledge about it.
Barbara Beitman-Breitman
Second generation in Huntingdon Valley, PA
I had the amazing discovery that
an aunt of my father (my dad is a
survivor from Warsaw) may have
actually survived the war.
Previously we had believed only
my father and one other aunt
survived in his immediate and
hugely extended family. He lost
all parents, grandparents, aunts
(except the aforementioned),
uncles, cousins...everyone. While
“playing” with Yad Vashem’s Pages
of Testimony website I found
forms that were completed for
some of my father’s deceased
family members. The woman who
completed the forms appears to
be my father’s aunt, Bluma
Ostrover. My father recalls his
Aunt Bluma (or Bleema) leaving
Warsaw around 1939 for the
Soviet Union with her husband
and young son. He believes her
married name, then, might have
been Goldberg. He said “She went
to Russia and nobody heard from
I work as a museum counselor and director of a small
art museum near Zagreb, Croatia. My wife’s mother
died suddenly of an illness two years ago. Some days
before her death, she asked my wife to learn about her
childhood days and to notify her sister and her son.
My wife promised that she would, but she did not
know it would be so difficult to keep this promise. My
wife’s mother was hidden during World War II in a
Christian convent in Zagreb. Her identity was changed
four or five times, and we do not know her real identity. She went in 1943 to a monastery in Italy and later
on to Bern, Switzerland, then later to New York. Does
a list exist of children who went to Switzerland and
later on to USA? The well-known historian from Berlin, Dr. K. Voigt, explained to me that many children
from Vienna were hidden in Zagreb. The Catholic
Church from Zagreb couldn’t organize a single transport of children. We have several identities for my wife’s
mother, but not one is real! The rabbi from the Jewish
community in Zagreb and some of my friends, historians from the history institute, explained that there is a
possibility that there is documentation. We have passport photo for of my wife’s mother from that time; she
was, we suppose, 10 years old. A short time ago we
visited the Holocaust information and support center
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in Vienna, Austria; they tried to help us and they will
try to publish her photo in a magazine for Vienna community. We published two photographs in the Jewish
magazine in Croatia with no results.
Do you know some hidden children who were also
hidden in a convent in Zagreb?
Prof.Mario Lenkovic ([email protected])
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Elaine Zaks in Royal Oak, MI is searching for her father’s
cousin and/or his children. They fled Poland (Osoveh?)
during WWII and perhaps are in Israel.
My father, Philip Zaks, died in 1961. We knew
most of his family had been wiped out, reportedly some
40 to 50 people. My mother Leah Guz Zaks, born in
Rachvalivke, died two years before Dad, so we never
got the chance to grow up with our parents or learn
more about their backgrounds. We learned that Dad’s
family name had originally been Zakuske or Zakusky.
Dad’s place of birth is open to question. Best info is
that he was born in Poland; the locale I’ve heard about
is something like ‘Osoveh’. Dad’s father’s name was
Yakov. My father was Pinchas and then Philip. We
think our folks left Poland,
on foot, in 1943 and
landed in Italy sometime
in 1945. My brother
Michael was born in Florence, Italy in the refuge
camp my parents lived in
until they were granted visas to the US in November 1948. They arrived in
NY on December 2, 1948
aboard the USS Vulcania.
From a photo, I think
he has a paternal cousin, William, whose last name would
have been Zakuske or Zakusky but whether he kept
this name, I don’t know. I saw this picture for the first
time last month and so never knew of this cousin or
the circumstances of his departure from Europe.
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I’m the only survivor from my family that I know of,
I’m looking for my family members that may have
survived that I don’t know about. Perhaps they are in
the registry. I’m looking for Arie Midler born in 1933
in Bialystok Poland. Matil or Matilda or Matil Midler
born in 1937 in Bialystok Poland. Sara Cimsztein
(Maiden Name) Shulamit Cimsztein (Maiden Name)
please reply to: [email protected]
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I have been searching (actually my sister started
searching when I was a child, I’m 62) for my mother’s
family, for the past many years. My mother came to
the US, New York… in approximately 1928. She left
behind, in Kazimiertz, Poland, the following family
members: Joel and Annabelle, her parents, her siblings
Froim, Mottel, Deborah, Brenda, Rochel Lea… they
were all named Levitman (Levittman, ??). For a while
after my mother came here she received some mail from
the family and then everything stopped. My sister
registered the family at Yad Vashem I’ve register the
family in the Holocaust Survivors registry. I am
determined to find someone before I am no longer
here…I just believe there is someone somewhere.and
if there isn’t I want to know what happened to them.
I work for JEVS, Jewish Employment and Vocational
Services in Philadelphia I am the director of a welfare
to work program. I am grateful for any help and direction
you may provide…
Esther Kirshenbaum
reply [email protected]
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TOGETHER 23
I would like to get in touch with survivors
that were in camp HIRSCHBERG which is
now in Poland as JELENIA GORA. Any help
would be appreciated. I had a younger sister,
Miriam and a younger brother Simon, I am
the only one that survived.
Jacob Kuperman
respond to [email protected]
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We saw the program We Want the Light on
BBC television. It occurred to me that the
featured pianist Alice Sommer Herz might
have known my grandmother, also a pianist
and also in Teresenstadt, where she was
murdered by the Nazis. I should like to contact
Alice to find out if she knew my grandmother,
and what happened to her. Can you help?
Andrew Hoellering
respond [email protected]
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Arny Vis of Langley, B.C., Canada is trying
to locate a man known as “Karel,” hidden by
his maternal grandparents at 33
Heelsumseweg, Wolfheze, province of
Gelderland, Holland, in September, 1944.
“Karel” was approximately 15 years old at the
time. Vis’ grandparents, Jan and Griatje
Aarsen, protected and hid several friends and
family from the Germans. One of the hiding
places was the Psychiatric Hospital (Stichting)
in Wolfheze. “Karel” survived the Holocaust
as he sent a postcard to the Aarsen family after WWII. If you have any information on
“Karel” (possibly an assumed name), please call
or write:
Arny Vis, #13-8892 208th St., Langley, B.C.,
Canada, V1M 2N8, phone # (604) 513-3367,
email:[email protected] (underscore after scuba) OR [email protected]
a
Information Wanted:
Stories about the pets the people owned during the Holocaust. What happened to the pets,
heroics they may have performed, what they
meant to their owners, survival stories, reunited stories, memories of pets, comfort they
gave, etc. Contact Susan Bulanda, at
[email protected] and include WWII in the
subject line, or write 104 Todd Court,
Yorktown, VA 23692. Include contact information. Thank you.
a
When I got a copy of my mother’s prisoner
card from Buchenwald, I was shocked to find
that she was listed as married to a Michal
[sic] Garbel, whereabouts unknown. I have
no idea if this information is accurate or not,
and of course spellings would depend on the
nationality of who was hearing the name and
writing it down. And then people during the
Shoah changed names for various reasons. My
mother’s name appears as Lidja Garbel on a
transport list from Stutthof to Buchenwald
with a Frieda Garbel, both of them listed as
being from Vilno. I’ve had no luck anywhere
trying to trace Frieda or Michal Garbel. If
these names ring a bell for you, please email
me directly at [email protected].
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Do any of you have any information about
people who may have been rescued or helped
during the war by Dr. Consul Muñoz Borrero,
TOGETHER 24
an Ecuadorean Consul in Sweden who issued
Ecuadorean passports to Jews?
Sonia Zylberberg
Directrice d’Éducation / Director of Education
Centre commemoratif de l’Holocauste à
Montréal/Montreal Holocaust Memorial
Centre
1 Carré Cummings Square
Tel: (514)345-2605, ext. 3025
Fax: (514)344-2651
E-mail: [email protected]
www.mhmc.ca
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I am a 2nd generation looking for the following
family:
Blajchman from Itza, & Radom Poland
(Radom Ghetto& Skarzysko-Kamienna
Concentration Camp)
Czarny from Czestochowa, Poland
(Czestochowa Ghetto & Treblinka)
Krakauer from Czestochowa, Poland
(Czestochowa Ghetto & Treblinka)
Szyff from Czestochowa, Poland (Czestochowa
Ghetto & Treblinka)
Majerowicz (Nowa Wies, Poland (Czestochowa
Ghetto & Treblinka)
Zylbergold (Leiow, Poland, Warsaw, Poland)
Lemel (Poland)
Zajdenberg (Radom, Poland^ Radom Ghetto)
Rekszowicz (Nowa Wies, Poland &
Czestochowa Ghetto & Treblinka)
Your assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Annette Renschowicz
Brooklyn, NY
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I’m looking for survivors of the shtetl
Chmielnik, Poland, or people with some
Chmielnick contacts. My father, Avram
Ferleger, was from Chmielnick (as were other
Ferleger family members). Ferlegers were also
in nearby Lodz. Also looking for survivors from
Warsaw who might know my mother, Miriam
Ferleger (same last name - they were cousins),
who lived at Mila 5, and survived the Warsaw
Ghetto, Maidanek, Auschwitz etc. I understand
there’s a periodic reunion of Chmielnikers. And
there are many/some? in Florida, Toronto and
Israel, etc. Some photos of interest perhaps to
many and which you may wish to refer people
to:
http://homepage.mac.com/davidferleger/
polandpictures/PhotoAlbum7.html
including both shtetl and Warsaw.
David Ferleger
10 Presidential Blvd, Suite 115
Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004
610-668-2221 610-668-3889 fax
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor,
The recently discovered document in which
the Vatican instructed its representatives in
France to prevent baptized Jewish children
from being returned to their families may
not have surprised those of us who were
victimized by this policy, but this finding
has reopened old wounds, which finally—
after nearly sixty years—need to be healed.
Every person has a right to know the truth
about his or her heritage. Please ask the
Vatican to open all Holocaust era baptismal
files by signing the petition at the website
below.
http://support.adl.org/site/
PageServer?pagename=Vatican_letter_alert
Thank you,
Rachelle Goldstein
Vice President The Hidden Child
Foundation/ADL823 United Nations
PlazaNew York, NY 10017 212-885-7900
a
To the Editor:
I am a daugther of two survivors and that
makes me so proud. But I also want to let
you know what is right: first take care of
the survivors and then address the issue of
education. Everyone everywhere should
know about the Holocaust and this should
be taught every day, every moment, but the
survivors are the needy ones now.
sara
a
To the Editor:
Esther Berkensztat Sandrowicz’s article
brought my husband and me to tears with
your article called ‘I was at the Gallows.”
Whenever my husband remembered this
hanging it bought tears to his eyes, even in
the interview with The Steven Spielberg
Foundation filming at home, many years
after he was freed. I really appreciate this
article that you wrote because it keeps the
horror that was done to humanity alive. I
am so glad that you survived and hope that
you have a good life.
Lisa Bernd wife of Addie (Adolf )
[email protected]
a
Finding the submitter of the information to
Yad Vashem is a possible key to finding
relatives. The problem is, finding the submitter.
The Israel Genealogical Society has offered to
locate submitters who may live in Israel.
Contact information for the Israel Society can
be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/iajgs/
yearbook-2004/israel.htm
Howard Margol
a
After losing my whole family in 1942 in Lask
Ghetto, I was sent to Lodz Ghetto, where by
sheer luck, I was chosen by Chaim Rumkowski
to be one of the ten girls and ten boys as his
foster children. We lived in a small house
on Marysin. The group was taken care by a
“Housemother” who decided that each girl
shall take care of one boy, wash and mend
his clothing. My responsibility was Macks
[Max] who was born in Germany. He
survived the war. I received in 1948 a letter
from him from Cyprus. No further contact.
I’m searching for anyone from Rumkowski’s
Foster children.
Lusia Osiakowska Eimer, Forest Hills NY
AFTER 63 YEARS, A MISSING BROTHER IS
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By Howard Margol
In the early part of 2004, I met Jerry and Roslyn Convoy
from Montreal, Canada. They were visiting their daughter and
her family in Atlanta, Georgia. Jerry was born in Kaunas,
Lithuania and was a survivor of the Kaunas ghetto and
concentration camps. During their visit, I showed them several
issues of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” newspaper published in
Vilnius, Lithuania.
Jerry and Moishe had two sisters and two brothers. After
liberation from Dachau on April 29, 1945, Jerry, and his brother
Moishe and one sister were in contact with each other. They
searched in vain for the other brothers and sister, could not find
them, and assumed they had been killed.
During our meeting Jerry informed me that his brother,
Moishe, had recently died. At Jerry’s request, I placed the
following notice in the April-June, 2004 issue of the “Jerusalem
of Lithuania” newspaper.
Died in Canada on Feb. 21 MOISHE KONVOJ. Born in
Kaunas on Oct. 13, 1929. Kaunas Ghetto prisoner from 19411943, taken from there to Dachau. Liberated in 1945.
A Josef Convoi in Vilnius saw the notice in the “Jerusalem
of Lithuania” newspaper and felt that Moshe Konvoj could
possibly be the brother he failed to find after liberation. Jerry
was contacted. The next step was to prove whether Josef Convoi
in Vilnius was really his missing brother. Correspondence was
initiated and questions were asked. Question: What was Josef ’s
father’s name? Josef responded “Alte.” Jerry decided that was
not correct because his father’s name was Dovid. But wait!!
Jerry remembered that when they were kids, his father
became very ill. To fool the Angel of Death, Dovid’s name was
changed to “Alte.” Josef was a small child at the time so it was
possible he remembered his father’s name as Alte rather than as
Dovid.
Question: What was Josef ’s mother’s name? Josef did not
know. When the family members were separated, Josef was 11.
At that age, he would not have necessarily known his mother’s
name. He most likely would have referred to her as “mother”
rather than by her first name. So, the question of any family
connection between Josef and Jerry remained very uncertain and
unknown.
Question: Describe the house where you were born and
grew up. Josef described the house perfectly. This was the first
real indication that Josef was, indeed, the missing brother.
To offer further proof, Josef went to Kaunas and obtained a
copy of his birth record. He did this after receiving what turned
out to be some incorrect advice. The birth records in Kaunas
are merely copies. The original birth records are stored in the
Lithuania State Historical Archive (Lietuvos Valstybes Istorijos
Archyvas) right there in Vilnius and Josef could have easily
obtained a copy there without having to go to Kaunas. Josef
sent a copy of his birth record to the surviving sister in Israel
and to Jerry in Montreal.
Jeshua [Jesua], son of the tailor Dovid[as] Konvojas and
Taiba-Base nee Zinger[yte], was born in Kaunas on the 31 of
December 1929. Circumcision was done on the 8 of January
1930. The family lived in Kaunas on Malunu Street #6. The
parents were the Jews and residents of Lithuania.
Dovidas Konvojas and Taiba-Base were the same parents as
Jerry’s and the address where they lived was also correct! After
63 years, the missing brother had been found!
It is amazing that they have found each other after 63 years
but sad that they did not reunite years earlier. The surviving
sister lives in Israel and a family reunion in Israel is planned for
the near future.
Let this serve as a message to others: never give up hope of
finding missing family members, relatives, or friends. You have
to keep trying.
A truly amazing story and I am proud to have played a small
part in it.
YAD VASHEM LIST REUNITES SISTERS
Two sisters who survived the Holocaust and moved separately to Israel were reunited
after 61 years with the help of a high-tech database, a spokeswoman from the Israel
Holocaust memorial said Sunday.
Estee Yaari of the Yad Vashem Heroes and Martyrs Memorial Authority said
Klara Blaier 81, and Hannah Katz, 78, moved to Israel in 1948, each unaware that
the other had survived the Nazi slaying of 6 million Jews during World War II. Yaari
said the two had last seen each other in Hungary in 1944, shortly after their parents
sent them from their home in the former Czechoslovakia to live with relatives. The
two women could not be reached for comment.
“On Thursday, Hannah Katz’s granddaughter was looking for information about
Katz’s mother on our Internet database,” Yaari said. “All of a sudden she discovered
that Katz’s sister, Klara Blaier, was living about 85 miles away in northern Israel.
They were reunited the next day.”
The Yad Vashem database contains information on about 3 million Holocaust
victims, Yaari said. It was added to the Yad Vashem Internet site last year.
REUNION IN FLORIDA: 60 YEARS LATER
Five Holocaust survivors reunited for the first time in sixty years, though they have
spoken on the phone. They are in Florida in anticipation of the inauguration of Cafe
Europa at the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, where 500 survivors
are expected. It is estimated that there are 4,000 survivors in Florida, and among
them are Clara Dann, 83, Kati Roth, now 75 Mike Lane, 78, Eva Weiss, 76, and
Margit Feldman, 75, all survivors of Auschwitz.
All knew each other before and during the war, and now they’ve found the time
and gotten together in Boynton Beach for the first time since liberation.
Feldman and Roth were girlhood friends. Weiss was a resident of a neighboring
town and met Feldman on the train to Auschwitz. Weiss, Feldman and Roth survived
the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Lane and Dann met the others
later.
All five went on to build good lives. Feldman, who wrote a book about her
experiences, is from Bridgewater, N.J. and a member of that state’s Commission on
Holocaust Education. Lane, a Florida resident, had a bakery in Hallandale; Dann, a
widow, lives in Hollywood, Fl., and Weiss lives in Farmington Hills, Mich.
Roth lives in Cleveland. They have nine children and sixteen grandchildren
between them.
“We have talked many times, but just being in the same room together is
special,” said Feldman. “We [had] all lost our immediate families, so we can relive
the past with others who understand. We have a lot of sorrow, but no bitterness.”
She wonders if her life’s work, teaching about the Holocaust, has had any effect
on today’s world. “Look in the news and all you see is hatred and discrimination,”
Feldman said. “I see very little change. So we talk about it. We will never stop
talking about what happened.”
BROTHERLY LOVE
(JTA) Four Jewish brothers who saved 1,200 Jews during World War II by helping
them get to the Philippines will be honored. The Frieder brothers will be recognized
at their hometown Cincinnati Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education. The
brothers established a Jewish Refugee Committee in the Philippines. Working with
Paul McNutt, a former governor of Indiana who was U.S. High Commissioner of
the Philippines, and the Philippines’ president, Manuel Quezon, they helped refugees
from Germany and Austria enter the country.
JEWISH PARTISAN EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION (JPEF) IS
LOOKING FOR JEWISH PARTISANS
Our organization, the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF), is looking
for Jewish partisans to complete our goal of 50 partisan interviews. We use these
interviews to create educational materials for teens to help them learn about the
Jewish partisans and connect them to their own Jewish identity. Please feel free to
visit our website, www.jewishpartisans.org, to see how we use the interviews or for
more information about JPEF.
Julia Ellis
Outreach Director
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GENERATION TO GENERATION: A ONCEIN-A-LIFETIME GATHER ING AT YAD
VASHEM
Yad Vashem calls on survivors and their descendants to
attend Generation to Generation, an international and
multi-generational gathering on May 4-9, 2005 at Yad
Vashem. Under the patronage of H.E. Mr. Moshe Katsav,
President of the State of Israel, this historic event will
include participation in the Holocaust Remembrance Day
ceremonies at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official ceremony
marking 60 years since the end of the war at the IDF
Armored Corps Memorial Complex at Latrun, interactive
programs on a variety of topics, tours of the new
Holocaust History Museum and Jerusalem, and more. For
further information, see www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/
jubilee/sur vivors/home_survivor.html or e-mail
[email protected]. For registration, hotel and
tour arrangements, contact Unitours Israel (e-mail:
[email protected], fax +972-3-5239099, tel. +9723-5209972).
HELP AVAILABLE
The Mount Sinai School of Medicine Specialized Treatment Program for Holocaust Survivors and Their Families offers Group & Individual Psychotherapy for Holocaust survivors & children of Holocaust survivors.
Many survivors and children of survivors struggle with
feelings of anxiety, depression, isolation, and loss. Our
groups help participants explore the connection between
these feelings and their traumatic experiences, with the
goal of facilitating personal growth. For more information please call Dr. Ellen Labinsky at 212-659-9121.
SUBJECTS WANTED for STUDY
Mount Sinai School of Medicine Research study for
Holocaust Survivors and their Offspring.
Purpose: To test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between biological and psychological symptoms
in Holocaust offspring and their parents.
Our studies have pointed to the possibility that offspring may be at greater risk for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder and or depression if one or both
of their parents also suffered from these conditions following their experiences in the Holocaust. In addition
to asking offspring (and if possible, their parents) about
their symptoms, we also perform biologic examinations
to characterize the release of stress hormones under resting conditions, and in response to neuroendocrine stimulation. Among the presenters are leading historians and
Holocaust survivors.
FROM GENERATIONS OF THE SHOAH
OSE to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the
Liberation of Buchenwald
Among the survivors liberated at Buchenwald were about
a thousand children. With the consent of the French
government, OSE offered hospitality to 427 of them. All
Buchenwald survivors and their families are invited to
attend, as are OSE alumni. For more information on the
schedule and the location of events in Germany and France,
contact [email protected].
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON THE HOLOCAUST IN UKRAINE
Tkuma – the Central Ukrainian Holocaust Foundation
in cooperation with the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute
of Holocaust Research, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, will
convene the Fourth International Conference on the
Holocaust in Ukraine , which will take place in
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Dnepropetrowsk. For more information: [email protected].
“THE LEGACY OF THE HOLOCAUST: WOMEN AND THE
HOLOCAUST.”
Krakow, Poland May 26 - 28, 2005
Keynote speaker: Professor Nechama Tec author of Resilience and Courage;
Women, Men, and the Holocaust. For more information: http://www.uni.edu/
klink
THE SIXTH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS
(IAGS) will be held at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida,
USA, June 4-7, 2005.
Call for papers at the next conference of the International Association of Genocide
Scholars, Ninety Years after the Armenian Genocide and Sixty Years after the
Holocaust: The Continuing Threat and Legacy of Genocide. For more
information, contact Dr. Stephen Feinstein, Director, Center for Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
MN 55455-0125, USA. Tel: 612-626-2235. E-mail: [email protected].
WORLD FEDERATION OF JEWISH CHILD SURVIVORS OF
THE HOLOCAUST
“Still Going Strong 1945-2005”
Amsterdam, Netherlands.
August 19-22, 2005. For more information: www.congres2005.nl
BEYOND CAMPS AND FORCED LABOUR - 60 YEARS ON
The Imperial War Museum, London. January 11-13, 2006.
Call for papers: Please send an abstract of 200-250 words together with
biographical background of about 50 words by 15 March 2005 to: Dr JohannesDieter Steinert, email: [email protected]. For more information:
www.secolo-verlag.de.
HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION AND EDUCATION
CENTER’S SUMMER TEACHER INSTITUTE OF
HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
June 6 –10, 2005
This college-accredited institute, which targets educators in Miami-Dade,
Palm Beach, and Broward Counties, will be held at the first South Florida
Holocaust Museum in Hollywood, Florida. Dr. Michael Berenbaum, the
keynote speaker, is currently a Professor of Theology at the University of
Judaism. Dr. Berenbaum is also serving as a consultant for the Holocaust
Documentation and Education Center’s museum, which will be opening at
2031 Harrison Street in Hollywood, Florida. A portion of the institute will
be devoted entirely to methodology, strategies, and resources for teaching
the Holocaust. Here teachers will have an opportunity to further discuss and
share and critique materials, lessons, and classroom activities and projects.
For more information: [email protected].
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
2005 SU M M ER FACU LT Y SEM I NAR FOR SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS TEACHING HOLOCAUST AND HOLOCAUSTRELATED COURSES
June 8 – 21, 2005
This seminar is for college/university faculty members in the social sciences
who are teaching or preparing to teach courses with a Holocaust-based
component. The objectives of the seminar are to strengthen participants’
background in Holocaust history; examine recent developments in Holocaustbased research in the social sciences; and review approaches for incorporating
Holocaust history into college/university-level teaching. For more information:
www.ushmm.org.
***
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is searching for individuals
who were interviewed in 1946 in a sound recording made by psychology
professor David Boder. If you have information about any of these persons,
please contact Elizabeth Hedlund, at the USHMM, (202) 314-7850, or at
[email protected]. There is a list of these individuals on the USHMM
website at www.ushmm.org
HOLOCAUST TEACHERS PROGRAM
A SUMMER STUDY PROGRAM IN POLAND, THE CZECH
REPUBLIC AND WASHINGTON, D.C.
July 6-27, 2005
The summer seminar program on Holocaust and Jewish resistance was initiated
by Vladka Meed in 1984. The seminar will include educational activities in
Poland, the Czech Republic and Washington, DC, with the participation of
scholars from Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Study Center of the
Ghetto Fighters’ House at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. See basic menu of
www.jewishlabor.org for an online application.
YAD VASHEM’S FIFTH JEWISH EDUCATORS SEMINAR:
‘TEACHING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST’
July 18 - August 4, 2005
Yad Vashem will host a seminar for Jewish educators working in Jewish education
around the globe at its International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem.
The deadline for applications is March 31. For more information, visit
www1.yadvashem.org/education/jes05.html
or email [email protected].
INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
RESCUE, RESCUER, RESCUED
The Righteous among the Nations and the Holocaust European and Comparative
Perspectives Paris, December 2006. Jointly organized by the Centre for
International Studies (CERI) and Research and the Centre for the European
History in the Twentieth Century (CHEVS) of the National Foundation of
Political Science with the support of the Foundation for Remembrance of the
Holocaust (Fondation pour la Mmoire de la Shoah). Jacques Semelin (Conference
Director) CERI. E-mail: [email protected]. Sarah Gensburger
(Conference Coordinator) EHESS/CEIFR: e-mail: [email protected].
CALL FOR THE SUBMISSION OF APPLICATIONS:
The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation Summer Student
Scholars Program
The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation of New York and Oswiecim, Poland is
pleased to announce that we will be awarding four scholarships (including housing
and travel subsidy and other benefits) for an eight-week program in Poland June
22 - August 18, 2005. This will be the fifth year of the AJCF Student Scholars
Program.
The Student Scholar Program is an exciting opportunity for students with
interest in such fields as Modern Jewish History, Holocaust Studies, JewishChristian relations, Jewish Communal Service, Jewish Education, and Genocide
Studies. To be considered, applicants must, at a minimum, have completed
their undergraduate degrees by June, 2005.
TRIBUTE EVENT
To mark the 60th Anniversary of the end of WWII and the Liberation, Milwaukee’s
Holocaust Education and Resource Center, HERC, is planning a major
community event that will take place on June 29 at the Milwaukee Art Museum
in the new Calatrava Wing. This event will be a tribute to the survivors, the
survivor community and to liberators from southeastern Wisconsin. The following
is a link to the latest HERC newsletter and will give more information on this
tribute; PORTRAITS in COURAGE Honor the Memor y. http://
www.cjlmilwaukee.org/Support/HERC Material/HERC Newsletter - Vol 3
No1.pdf
We are trying to locate as many survivors and children of survivors that live
/lived in southeastern Wisconsin. We also would like to locate WWII veterans
from Wisconsin that were involved in the liberation of a concentration camp
and/or their families. Please email contact information to [email protected]
and put Tribute Event in the subject line.
THE GENERATION AFTER AND GENERATIONS OF THE
SHOAH INTERNATIONAL (GSI) are pleased to announce a speakers’
development workshop to be held in the Washington, DC area on Sunday, May
22, 2005. This workshop will provide training and guidance for those who
have never spoken about the Holocaust and continuing education for those who
have speaking experience. Please note that this will be one of an ongoing series
of workshops to help us develop and expand our skills and ability to carry on
our legacy as children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The program
will be hosted by the DC group of children of Holocaust survivors, The
Generation After and is presented by The Generation After in conjunction with
GSI. For more information, please e-mail us at [email protected] or call 301-9334716 and we will get you specific details. We have limited space for this workshop
and so we ask that you register as soon as possible.
60TH ANNUAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL SERVICE TO BE
HELD IN SKOKIE ON APRIL 17
SKOKIE, Ill., March 3 /PRNewswire/ — Sheerit Hapleitah of Metropolitan
Chicago, the umbrella organization for Chicago-area Holocaust survivor groups,
today announced that the 60th annual collective memorial observance will be
held on Sunday, April 17. The service, which begins at 1:30 p.m. at the Skokie
Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue, 8825 East Prairie Avenue, in Skokie, is
traditionally the largest gathering of Holocaust survivors in the Midwest and
one of the largest in the United States.
Speakers at the 2004 service will include Moshe Ram, Israeli Consul General,
Mayor George Van Dusen of Skokie, Rabbi Gerald Teller, spiritual leader of the
synagogue, Charles Lipshitz and Larry Schwartz. Officials of the Jewish War
Veterans, Skokie Post 328, will also participate. As part of the ceremony, a
grandchild of survivors will pay tribute to the enormous contribution of the
Holocaust Survivors to the Chicago community in passing their legacy of courage
to future generations.
A high point of the service is the candle lighting ceremony honoring the six
million victims, including 1.2 million innocent children, who perished in the
Holocaust. The ceremony will be conducted by Sherry Rubinstein Warso of Dor
Ledor, the Young Leadership Division of Sheerit Hapleitah, and past vice president
Barbara Pryor, with the participation by children and grandchildren of local-area
Holocaust survivors. Proclamations by Governor Rod Blagojevich and Mayor
Richard M. Daley of Chicago will be read by committee members.
Sheerit Hapleitah includes the following groups: Association of Children of
Holocaust Survivors, Hofesh Chapter - NAAMAT, Holocaust Memorial
Foundation of Illinois, Jewish Lithuanian Club of Chicago, Laor Organization,
Maccabi Sports Organization, Midwest Chestochover Society, New Citizens
Club, Workman’s Circle, The United Chicago Jews of Hungarian Descent, Inc.,
Association of Child Survivors, Dr. Janush Korchak B’nai Brith Lodge and Dor
Ledor, a group is made up of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors
that will play an important role of carrying on our legacy.
SOURCE Sheerit Hapleitah of Metropolitan Chicago
LINKS FROM OUR AUSTRALIAN FRIENDS
The Anne Frank Organization does magnificent work battling Holocaust deniers and providing education on racism, discrimination and right-wing extremism much of which can be can be found on their website at: http://
www.annefrank.org/content.asp?pid=1&lid=2. The BBC also has a fantastic site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/genocide/
Here in Australia we have, per capita, more survivors of the Holocaust than in
any other region of the world - except Israel. Many of these people are now very
old. Some of them give freely of their time to speak about their experiences at
museums in Sydney and Melbourne. In Sydney visit the Jewish Museum:
www.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/ In Melbourne visit the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre: www.arts.monash.edu.au/affiliates/hlc/
And there is a marvellous traveling exhibition run by B’nai Brith called Courage to Care, bringing the message of racial tolerance and understanding to all of
Australia.
http://www.bnaibrith.org.au/index.asp?pRef=CourageToCare
FOR MORE DETAILS, CONTACT: Andrew Casey
Ph: +61 2 8204 7206
Fax: +61 2 9281 4480
[email protected]
LAUNCH EVENT OF PARTISANS OF VILNA
YIVO INSTITUTE 15 West 16th ST., NYC-7 PM, APRIL 18
Partisans of Vilna was finished twenty years ago and the film is being released on
DVD by Newvideo. At this screening Josh Waletzky and I will be speaking.
Come celebrate and you will be given a free DVD only on this night.
Partisans of Vilna, Dir. Josh Waletzky. Discussion with producer Aviva Kempner,
Waletzky and former partisan, Eta Wrobel. 130-minute documentary based on
interviews with former partisans in Hebrew, Yiddish and English. Explores moral
dilemmas faced by Jewish youth who organized underground resistance in the Vilna
ghetto and then fought as partisans vs. the Nazis. Tickets: Reg. $8; YIVO members
$6.50; Seniors/Students $4. Box Office (917) 606-8200.
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FPO
Special “Matzevah Marker”
Available for Survivors’ Graves
Survival has placed upon us the
responsibility of making sure that the
Holocaust is remembered forever. Each
of us has the sacred obligation to share
this task while we still can. However,
with the passage of each year, we realize
that time is against us, and we must
make sure to utilize all means for future
remembrance.
A permanent step toward achieving
this important goal can be realized by
placing a unique and visible maker on
the gravestone of every survivor. The
most meaningful symbol for this purpose
is our Survivor logo, inscribed with the
words HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR. This
simple, yet dramatic, maker will re-affirm
our uniqueness and our place in history for
future generations.
Our impressive MATZEVAH marker is
now available for purchase. It is cast in solid
bronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and can be
attached to new or existing tombstones. The
cost of each marker is $100.00. Additional
donations are gratefully appreciated.
Let us buy the marker now and leave
instructions in our wills for its use. This will
enable every one of us to leave on this earth
visible proof of our miraculous survival and
an everlasting legacy of the Holocaust.
Name ____________________________________________________
Address ___________________________________________________
City ____________________________State _______ Zip __________
Number of Markers ___________________
Total Amount Enclosed ________________
The cost of each marker is US $100
including shipping & handling.
Make checks payable to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
and mail to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 West 30th Street
New York, NY 10001
Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
FPO
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