January 2004

January 2004
VOLUME 18 NUMBER 1
TRIBUTE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS HELD IN WASHINGTON
FOR POSITION
ONLY
For the first time in 10 years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum closed its doors to
the public to pay tribute to the survivors. More than 7,000 people from all over the world
took part in an event that celebrated Holocaust survivors’
lives and the 10th anniversary of the opening of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Nearly a third of those present were survivors like Joe and
Ella Brandt, who said it was an important gathering because
time is running out. “We are all getting older. In order to
prevent the bigotry and hatred that still exists today, we have
to come out and talk about it,” said Joe.
For every attendee, the experience was different.
After 65 years of searching for someone who knew
about the deaths of her parents and sister, Leah Gutman found
closure. Gutman, a Glenview, Illinois resident, didn’t want
to come to the Tribute. But at the last minute, she cancelled
a trip to Israel and decided to see if she could find a lost link
to her family. She patiently sat at the Bialystock table in the
Survivor Village when a woman asked, “Did you know Chja
Grochowska?”
“That,” said Gutman “was my sister.” The woman met
Chja in a ghetto after Gutman had fled to Palestine.
“I cannot wait to call my brother,” Gutman said. “To hear
someone that knew her story, her name. There were
assumptions in the past, but this was news from her best
girlfriend. Finally, I know.”
“It was an unforgettable weekend,’’ said Agatha
Neumann, who emigrated from post-war Hungary to the
United States in 1956. It was her first visit to the museum.
“Every time I saw a corpse I couldn’t help but think that maybe
it was my father,’’ said Neumann, who has never verified how
her father died.
Neumann and her mother, Elizabeth Schwartz, avoided
a similar fate by being hidden. While at the museum,
Neumann was delighted to meet the niece of Swedish war
hero Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg most likely provided
the false Swedish passports that Neumann and her mother
had obtained at one point.
“I felt this time I had to go,” said Eddie Weinstein. “Because I am getting old.”
Weinstein wandered the tent, slowly, with a cardboard placard resting on his chest. It
read: “I am looking for people who escaped from Treblinka.” “I didn’t find one person,” said
Weinstein, whose story of escape from the Polish extermination camp has been documented
in a book, Quenched Steel.
“It was totally overwhelming,” said Rabbi Jay Miller of San Mateo, Calif. He happened
to be in Washington and was one of the few in attendance whose family had not been directly
affected by the Holocaust.
At one of the oral history sessions, Marlene Rubenstein and her children, all from
Illinois, learned the full story of her mother, Lola Nortman, a Holocaust survivor. “She’d
never told her story,” said Rubenstein. “It was incredible.”
Hannah Rath, 80, from University Heights, Ohio, was taken from Hannover, Germany
into forced labor. Her mother was picked for death. “It should never be forgotten,” she said,
“and I hope it won’t. But it’s never the same. That is why we speak to young people. They
should know what can happen in a generation, what can happen with a dictator like Hitler. It’s
in the history books, but I don’t know how much they will [care] when we are all gone.”
“History dies,” said Freda Pollack, a New Jersey native and daughter of a survivor. “History
becomes cold unless people, survivors, pass forward their stories.” Pollack had just lit candles
in the Hall of Remembrance with her mother, Eva Kostre, who survived Auschwitz.
For Herbert Kammer, the message has always been tolerance. As one of the “hidden
children,” he lost his parents when he was sent to France to escape the Nazis.
American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 Weast 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, New York 10001
TOGETHER 28
In the basement of the museum is a photo display of the recent genocide in Rwanda and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Other survivors, like Dr. George Schwab, a foreign policy expert in
Manhattan, emphasized the future. “It’s important not only as
a memorial,” Schwab said, “but also as an opportunity to learn,
and to prevent something like this from happening again.”
Julie Hantman, whose grandfather’s family was killed
in the Holocaust, said she was having a hard time being at the
museum and had to leave a tour that her mother, a museum
volunteer, gave earlier this year. Hantman revealed the tension
between hope and horror, which she feels when thinking about
the Holocaust. “It’s challenging to feel like I can own this
history,” she said.” I haven’t dealt with it…I have a lot to
learn.”
Hilda Stern, a passenger on the ill-fated St. Louis and an
80-year-old survivor from Chicago area, attended out of a
sense of duty to serve as eyewitnesses to the past. “We have
to pay tribute. It’s the least we can do for the families we lost
and for ourselves.”
As time marches on relentlessly, Holocaust survivors
are beginning to tell the stories they have repressed for most
of their post-war lives. Stern’s daughter, Debra Green, feels
a responsibility to learn all she can in order carry the memory
forward.
Miriam Kaufman says, “Having parents and many
relatives that are survivors made this an intense and incredible
experience. The wave of emotions went from one extreme
to another. My sister is from Los Angeles, I’m from San
Diego and we met our mother from Cleveland in
Washington. Many of our relatives and their children came
as well from Cleveland, Columbus, Florida and Los Angeles.
“I was impressed by the many survivors I met and heard
experiences from. All of them were awesome. Their
accomplishments, strides and strength gave me chills. The
museum, the dinner, the speakers, the survivors, the 2G’s
and 3G’s all made this unforgettable. I would not have missed
this experience for anything. I will treasure it forever.”
Leon Shear, 76, of South Euclid, Ohio, who was 12 when the Nazis plucked him from his
family in Poland, was there. He saw his mother and sister in Auschwitz several years later just
before they were gassed. His sister was just 13. He prays for people to be good to each other.
“That there will be no more wars, no more suffering.”
“Look what happened in Chechnya,” said Shear. “Look what’s happening in Yugoslavia. Look
what happens anywhere in the world, look around, in Asia, that people are still killing because they
have a certain belief, because what they don’t want others to learn. It’s not 1940. We’re talking
2004.”
“It’s an incredible lineage we all share,” said Helen Burstin of Washington, who came with
her parents, both survivors. “It’s a remarkable thing to walk into this tent and see 6,000 people
connected to survivors.”
At times the event resembled a wedding, with survivors and their families dancing the hora
to Israeli folk music in the Survivor´s Village. Later, there was a sing-along in Yiddish with
members of the Folksbiene Theater of New York.
According to the most recent census by the Israeli government, there were 140,000 to
160,000 Holocaust survivors alive in the US in 1997. That total has decreased as the generation
ages.
Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who helped bury a time capsule on the museum grounds, called
the reunion a “victory over forgetfulness,” saving the six million Jewish Holocaust victims from
“a second death.”
“Your presence—our presence—here today is our answer to this silent question,” he said.
“We have kept our promise. We have not forgotten you.”
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TOGETHER 1
Message from
President Benjamin Meed
The word “Amcho!” carries a very special meaning.
Our special family understands what it meant then. It meant
one of our own whom we could trust.That was a lot in
those trying times.
When darkness descended on the Jews of Europe, there
was, in each of our hearts, a torch, a beacon, however dim,
of determination and hope. We maintained the spirit to
hold onto life, a spirit of resistance and defiance.
In our struggle for life, there were not too many who helped us. But there
were a few rescuers, and eventually there were the American and other Allied
soldiers who liberated us. To the rescuers and liberators, I can only say, our
gratitude knows no words. It is because of you that we are here today, as free
Americans. In this country, we found a home – a refuge. And, with us, we
brought the torch. And that torch sustains our memories.
Today, it is a torch of memory – a knowledge no others possess. Our torch
is humanity’s hope. This is the spirit of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the institution
that we built in our adopted homeland and to which we entrust our memories.
We now pass our torch on to our children and to their children, and beyond.
The torch of memory is precious. It can illuminate the world. We who bore the
torch in the darkest days now entrust it to the generations whose very lives are
our greatest triumphs. We do so with hope, resolve and love.
Momentous gatherings such as this Tribute weave together the threads of the
past, present and future. We were together in the world of our youth, a world of
shtetls and cities teaming with Jewish life and pulsating with Jewish culture. We
were together throughout the years of destruction—in ghettos and camps, on
cattle trains and on death marches. We were abandoned by the world. The only
ones concerned with our fate were our killers. So we held on to each other.
We have journeyed together from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom,
and from death to rebirth. As we came to our new homelands, we needed to be
together. Even in silence we understood each other as no one else could, for we
understand an unspoken language filled with anguish and hope.
We drew strength from one another. And we gathered in this unforgettable
reunion of our special family.
In 1981 at our first international gathering in Jerusalem, we came together
with new family members. We greeted each other with renewed vitality and plans
for the future. We pledged our commitment to our new homelands and to Israel–
to its people as they strive for peace and security. The bond to our brothers and
sisters there is strong.
Holocaust survivors are a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and
the ability to rebuild shattered lives. We were alone, our families lost, and yet we
chose life over hatred.We have traveled a long and difficult road to our new lives.
In America, in Israel, and in nations all over the world we found freedom and
restarted our lives with dignity. We achieved a great deal through tears and hard
work, but we are especially proud of our children. They are not just lawyers,
doctors, scientists and teachers, many are leaders in their communities.
At the same time, we sustain our rich heritage, traditions of our old life. We
preserve the special culture of Yiddishkeit. The world must know us as the
people we were before the destruction the Nazis unleashed.
We must tell our story to be worthy of the memory of our six million martyrs
who cannot speak for themselves. Some may ask, “Why is Remembrance
necessary?” The answer is that only by committing ourselves to the sacred task
of remembrance can we fulfill the commandment given to us by our fallen brothers
and sisters. Our testimonies will stand against the deniers and falsifiers who deny
us our Kedoshim.
We share our trauma not to divide us, but to unite us. By keeping alive the
memory of the past we can build a better future. We offer our memories to the
world, not for ourselves. We offer our memories because the world still must
listen. Antisemitic acts in Europe and the Islamic world give us great pain and
sadly remind us that our work is far from over. The world still needs our voice.
It still needs our lessons.
Over the decades, we gathered to give voice to those lessons in Jerusalem,
Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Houston and many other places.
Almost 20 years ago, we received the keys to the future U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum, which was then just a dream.
We can now sense the achievements of our generation taking hold in this
museum and in other institutions around the country. Our collective presence
reminds these institutions of their commitment to remembrance. If they are to
speak in our names, they must respect our experience, respect both its Jewishness
and its universality.
We have come a long way from the ghettos and camps, from being ignored
and cast aside. We have become guardians of moral lessons of the utmost
importance. We know that evil has no limitations, neither time nor distance. If we
are not prepared, if we are indifferent to the plight of others, humanity will suffer
again.
Today, we stand before humanity to bear witness at this sacred place, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We stand with our children and their
children to mark its 10th Anniversary. This permanent, living memorial to the
Jewish uniqueness of the Holocaust will remain long after we have gone. It is our
voice. It will continue to tell and retell our story. Remembrance will endure.
TOGETHER 2
TOGETHER
VOLUME 18 NUMBER 1
JANUARY 2004
c•o•n•te•n•t•s
Tribute to Holocaust Survivors.................................................................................1
Message from Benjamin Meed.................................................................................2
Stuart Eizenstat’s Address..........................................................................................3
Remarks by Elie Wiesel, Fred Zeidman and Ruth B. Mandel.................................4
Remarks by Vladka Meed..........................................................................................5
From the Scrolls of Remembrance.................................................... ......................5
To Have Lived To See the Day by Arieh O. Sullivan................................................6
The Commemoration by Roman Kent......................................................................6
I Was There by Martin Herskovitz............................................................................7
A Gathering of Guardians by Menachem Z. Rosensaft...........................................7
Reflection on Restitution Funds by Sam Bloch......................................................8
Mormon Church by Ernest Michel..........................................................................8
Auschwitz Visit by Gil Sedan and Martin Herskovitz.............................................9
Holocaust Education by Vladka Meed...................................................................10
The Shoah and September 11th by Solomon Goldman.........................................11
Holocaust Commemoration...................................................................................12
Tribute Scrapbook....................................................................................................14
News from Around the Nation and the World.......................................................16
Films & Theater.......................................................................................................19
Talking About Books by Paula David..................................................................... 19
Holocaust Bookshelf...............................................................................................20
Noted in Passing......................................................................................................22
Holocaust History by Dr. Rafael Medoff.............. ................................................23
Second Generation .................................................................................................24
Commemorating Deeds of Heroism by Dr. Alex Grobman.................................26
Searches....................................................................................................................27
NATIONAL LEADERSHIP
CONFERENCE
OF THE AMERICAN GATHERING
AT THE MAYFLOWER HOTEL IN WASHINGTON, DC
FRIDAY, FEB. 13 - 16, 2004
HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE 11TH BIENNIAL
REUNION OF THE TEACHER ALUMNI OF THE
HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
SUMMER FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
CONFERENCE FEES:
$200 per person covers registration, Saturday and Sunday dinner
ast and Monda
ner,, Sunda
Sundayy breakf
breakfast
Mondayy brunch. Shabbat dinner on
Frida
ridayy night is an additional $50.
TION:
HO
TEL REGIS
TRA
HOTEL
REGISTRA
TRATION:
We will reserve your room. It is your responsibility to pay the hotel
directly
ed number of rrooms
ooms ffor
or $1
19 per da
directly.. There are a limit
limited
$11
dayy
plus tax ffor
or single and double occupancy
ovided on a ffir
ir
st
occupancy,, pr
pro
irst
come, first serve basis.
CONT
ACT THE AMERICAN G
ATHERING
CONTA
GA
OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
FOR YYOUR
OUR REGIS
TRA
TION FFORMS
ORMS TTOD
OD
AY!!!!!
REGISTRA
TRATION
ODA
212-239-4230
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 Z. FRIEDMAN
Editor Emeritus
ALFRED LIPSON
Publication Committee
SAM E. BLOCH, Chairman
Vladka Meed
Hirsh Altusky
Dr. Alex Grobman Dr. Romana Strochlitz Primus
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Roman Kent
Dr. Philip Sieradski
Max K. Liebmann
Alfred Lipson
S
EARCHES
Still Searching
Bulletin Board
Compiled by Serena Woolrich
(Allgenerations@aol.com)
It is almost sixty years after liberation
and we are still searching for our missing
relatives; I have been sending out e-mail
searches from people in Allgenerations
which include names of missing relatives,
family names, names of hometowns, camps,
ghettoes and any other pertinent
information which we might have.
If you would like for me to send out
your searches in Allgenerations, or if you
have any information as to the searches
included below, please contact me at
Allgenerations@aol.com. These requests
will also be published in Together
whenever possible.
I’m searching for Eva Markovits who lived
in Oradea (Nagyvarad) till deportation to
Auschwitz in 1944. I know she survived the
war, was sent to Sweden and in all
probability lives now in the USA. This is
her maiden name; I don’t know her married
name or her whereabouts. I’m also looking
for Dr. George Array, who graduated from
the Rabbinical Seminary in 1943, and was
teaching English at Miefhoe on Ship Utca
in Budapest. Was anyone in hiding in 1944
at the Vadasz Utczai Uveghaz, an annex of
the Swiss Embassy in Budapest?
Agi Grossinger
San Jose, CA.
Here are the primary family names – Birke
and Haber, from Uniejow and Lodz.
Dymantsztajn from Lodz. My father
Noosen Birke and his uncle
______Haber lived in Uniejow originally,
then owned an apartment building on 11
Listopada and other businesses in Lodz. His
mother was Ruchel Haber Birke. The
Dymantsztajn family were carpenters,
making wooden paddles for bakers.
Szifra Birke
Medford, MA
My father’s cousin was Max Abosch who
during the occupation escaped from Vienna
and went to England, but it is possible that
he was interred (because he was Austrian)
and could have been sent to Canada. During
the same time, Max’s father (could be
Josef) but last name in an official letter is
spelt Abush (perhaps in error) was living
in the Bronx, New York. I may also have a
living relative somewhere (I have no idea
where) named Kurt Weisz who is in his
70s, and he would have been born in Vienna
also.
Julie Jones
Burlington, Ontario, Canada
All the people mentioned below come
from Lodz. My paternal grandparents were
Morris (aka Moshe) and Helena (aka
Genia) Bornsztajn or Bornstein. Their
last known address was P.O.W. 15
Armiiludowej. The date they were sent on
a transport out of Lodz ghetto was Sept.
10, 1942. My paternal great-grandparents
were Usher and Rifka Bornsztajn, both of
whom died before the war. My father was
Roman Bornsztajn and my mother, Mina,
nee Flattau, Bornsztajn. My mother had
two sisters, Anna and Franna.The latter
was married and a dentist who died of
typhus in Auschwitz close to the end of the
war. Also lost was Edmund or Mundek
Flattau, a brother to my mother. My
maternal grandparents who also perished
during the war were Herschel and Bertha,
nee Schwartz, Flattau.
Vic Borden
Englewood, NJ
Here is the background of my father, the
survivor in my immediate family. Born
Shmuel Kohn in Plonsk, Poland in 1918,
one of eight children born to Leib and
Mindel Kohn. Of course there were
cousins in Plonsk and in a neighboring
town whose name that I need to look up. I
believe it is Mlawa or something similar.
Lynn Collins
Boston, MA
My mother is
from a small town
called Pzorzheim,
Germany. She was
in a concentration
camp in Germany
and one in France,
then was hidden
throughout
France. Her maiden
name is Zloczower.
My father was
born in Berlin,
Germany. He was
in a labor camp.
His name is
Neumann. Does
anyone know them?
Jeanette Neumann Berstein
Eagleville, PA
My mom’s side was from Lodz. Her
mother was a well known hat designer
named Ida Blanche. She had shows all over
Europe. The name of the family on my
mother’s maternal side, most of whom
were murdered, was Latowicz or
Ladowicz. The name is now transmuted to
Liatowitsch, and this name is used by the
surviving family in Switzerland. If anyone
has heard of my Grandmother please
contact Allgenerations@aol.com
Lisa Reitman-Dobi
New York, NY
My father was from Krakovitz in Poland,
and his last name was Fleischer. He was
in various concentration camps during the
war. The last few years of the war he was in
Auschwitz and then was transferred to
Nordhausen in the East of Germany where
he escaped during a bomb raid and lived in
a nearby forest with other escapees for
eight days until the liberation.
Lina Fiszman
Melbourne, Australia
My maternal grandmother’s family’s
surname was Rechter and they were from
a town called Nizni Verecky,
Czechoslovakia. My grandmother ’s
father’s name was Yozef Rechter from
Nizni Verecky, Czechoslovakia. He was
married to Roza Fischer from Poland.
Felicia P. Zieff
Chicago, IL
My parents’ families come from Galicia.
My mother from Tomasow-Lubelski and
my father from Tyczyn, a small town
outside of Rzeszow. (Poland).
Anna Salton Eisen
Dallas, TX
My uncle Miklos/Micklosh? Schvartz /
Schwartz, whatever the spelling, survived
Buchenwald with my father and his brother.
They lost my grandfather and grandmother.
This uncle, the rumor was, went to Israel
and tried to get in when the British caught
him trying to get in and he was shot. When
I checked the records there was a Schvartz
with the wrong first initial that was killed.
I don’t believe it was him, although it could
have been. I have a sense that he could very
well be alive somewhere in the world and
had a family. and we would never know. His
birth date was 10-25-1916 and was born in
Varno Aronzi, or something spelled similiarly,
in Hungary.
Larry Schwartz,
ADSI, Chicago, IL
My father was from
Lodz and had two
daughters from his prewar marriage. They were
twin girls who also
worked in the ghetto,
one died there, one was
deported to Auschwitz,
last name Rosenwasser;
first names, Rahel &
Raiszel (or something
close). I have no more
information about
them except that they
were born on Christmas.
I think they lived on Milinarska Street and
my father was a shoemaker. I don’t know
what school they went to. I know so little
of these lost sisters of mine, because it was
always difficult for my father to talk about.
They are a generation older than I am. I was
born in NY after myfather remarried in
Landsberg, post war.
Roslyn Rossenwasser Ross
New York, NY
My Weiss family was from the small town
of Jovra (pronounced “Yo-rah”) just
outside of Ungvar (now Uzhhorod). The
Kesslers (and Berkowitzes) were from
Pinkovich (sp?) a hamlet a few miles from
Jovra with, maybe, three Jewish families.
My maternal grandmother was a sixth (I
think) generation Davidovich in Bilke
(there were three separate Davidovich
families in that town.) Bilke is about 15
km from Chust (Huzst), and had a sizable
Jewish population before the war. Today
there is one (1) Jew left. The Mechlowitzes were from Berezova (or Berehova
- depending upon who’s telling the story).
There are a lot of towns with similar names,
but this town is also close to Chust. I have
managed to track down tons of Davidovich
“cousins”, but no Weisses, Kesslers
(Berkowitzes) or Mechlowitzes. I’m
especially interested in finding
Mechlowitzes - my paternal grandfather’s
family.
Rhonda Wenner
Broomall, PA
My father was from a small city called Gyor
in Hungary. He was the sixth of nine
children, born with the name Andras
Fleischner. His father, Bela Fleischner, was
killed in Gyor. His mother, nee Kammer
Piroska, was born in Bratislava, then a part
of Hungary. She was deported to Auschwitz,
along with two of her daughters, Zsuzsa
and Judit. Both daughters survived. Two
brothers, Laszlo and Gusztav, died in
concentration camps, I think BergenBelsen or Dachau. After the war, four of
the surviving children, Gyori, Andras,
Zsuzsa and Istvan (Pista) changed their
name to Takacs. Judit remained a
Fleischner until she married, when her
name changed, I think, to Denes. Imre, who
had immigrated to Italy before the war, went
to Shanghai for the war’s duration, then
settled in Israel. Katalin (Katus),
immigrated before the war to Vienna, then
Albania, fled to Turkey, married Loro
Saraci, and finally immigrated to the U.S.
Andras followed in 1957. My mother, Eva
Judi Klieg, was the second of four children
born in Budapest, Hungary. Her father,
Leader Klieg, was born somewhere in what
is now Romania. Her mother, Lion Banned,
was from the small town of Rackeve. Ilona’s
father was the head rabbi there, followed
by her brother. Ilona and her youngest child
died in 1936. Her entire family died in the
war, except for one brother who
immigrated to Chile beforehand. My
mother, her father, and two brothers, Gabor
and Istvan (Pista), survived. After the war,
they all changed their name to Kalnai. My
brother and I, Peter and Piroska
(Priscilla) Takacs, were born in Budapest,
immigrating to the U.S. in 1957, settling
in Los Angeles. I would love to hear from
anyone who knew a family member of
mine.
Priscilla Schneider
Los Angeles, CA:
I am interested in knowing how many
people from Kaunitz, near Dussledorf, are
still alive. We were sent there after
liberation and I have lost touch with others
who were there.
Klara Swimmer
Tucson, AZ
I’m searching for my first cousin
Avraham Czarny. Perhaps he is in your
community? Second, I’m looking for a
Rachela Rusin, also a Survivor.
pinettea29@aol.com
Does anyone have any information about
my mother Rosa Druck from Vilna who
survived Stutthoff Concentration Camp
in 1945?
Please reply to:
tortoise112002@yahoo.com
International Tracing Service
Grosse Allee 5-9
D34444 Arolsen, Germany
is the place to write to, if people are
trying to locate people
Unless otherwise indicated,
please send responses to
Allgenerations@aol.com
TOGETHER 27
H
OLOCAUST HISTORY
CO
M M EMORATI
NG
COM
TIN
F
DEEDS O
OF
H ERO
ROII S M
by Dr. Alex Grobman
Designating the
Righteous
In 1953, the Knesset passed the Martyrs and Heroes’
Remembrance Law creating Yad Vashem. 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.” A member
of the Supreme Court of Israel chairs the commission.
To be granted the title “Righteous Among the Nations,”
the rescuer must have:
a. On his own initiative been actively and directly
involved in saving a Jew from being killed or sent to
a concentration camp when the Jews were trapped in
a country under the control of the Germans or their
collaborators during the most dangerous periods of
the Holocaust and totally dependent on the goodwill
of non-Jews.
b. Risked everything including his own life, freedom,
and safety.
c. Not received any form of remuneration or reward
as a precondition for providing help.
d. Offered proof from the survivor or
incontrovertible archival evidence that the deeds had
“caused” a rescue that would not otherwise have
occurred and thus went beyond what might be
regarded as ordinary assistance.
Risk is the basic criterion—not altruism. Those who
aided Jews in countries not under Nazi rule or who
had diplomatic immunity where there was little or
no risk are not eligible for consideration. Jews also
cannot be proposed for this honor. The three basic
criteria are thus: risk, survival, and evidence.
Those who were saved nominate a candidate. Notarized
applications are sent to Yad Vashem through an Israeli
embassy or consulate. Data requested about the rescuer
includes the individual’s name, approximate age at the
time, present address, occupation, and marital status during
the war.
In addition the witness-survivor is asked:
a. To describe briefly his or her life before the start
of the rescue story.
b. How and when the rescuer was met.
c. Who initiated the rescue.
d. Dates and places of rescue.
e. The nature of aid given and if this involved hiding,
what were the conditions.
f. If there were any financial arrangements.
g. The rescuer’s motivations.
h. The risks involved.
i. How the cover-up story (presence of the witness)
was explained to others.
j. The relations between the witness and rescuer at
the time.
k. The name and age of others in the rescuer
household who helped and the nature of assistance
provided by each individual.
l. The nature of the departure from the rescuer.
m. The names and addresses of others who helped
the rescuer.
n. The type of incidents that occurred during the stay
at the rescuer’s home.
TOGETHER 26
The Ceremony
Rescuers are honored at a public ceremony at Yad
Vashem. Until it ran out of space, a carob tree was planted
by the rescuer along the Avenue of the Righteous with the
individual’s name and nationality inscribed on a plaque at
its base. The carob tree was chosen because it is a perennial,
is sturdy and strong, but not dominating like the cypress
tree, which is associated with pride.
The ceremony begins at the Hall of Remembrance
where a cantor recites the Kel Maleh Rachamim (God who
is merciful) and the mourner’s Kaddish. The rescuer then
re- kindles the eternal flame. The main prayer is said in
the rescuer’s native language. A wreath is placed on the
vault containing ashes of the Holocaust victims.
At the Wall of Honor the rescuer’s name is unveiled. If
the rescuer had not yet received a medal and a certificate
of honor from an Israeli embassy, a presentation is made.
They are inscribed with the Talmudic adage: “He who saves
one life is considered as having saved the whole universe.”
The rescuer is then invited to say a few words; those who
were saved then speak.
Not everyone awarded the title “Righteous Among the
Nations” accepts this honor. A number have refused. Some
disapprove of Israeli government policies. Those from
Eastern Europe in the past ran the risk of being ostracized
or worse. In the immediate post-war period, in Poland,
Ukraine, and Lithuania some rescuers were murdered.
What type of individuals risked their lives to save a
Jew? Nechama Tec, a professor of sociology who survived
the Holocaust by passing as a Christian with the help of
Christian Poles, has isolated several characteristics, which
shed light on this question.
Characteristics of rescuers included:
a. A high level of individuality, independence, and selfreliance that caused them “to pursue personal goals
regardless of how these goals” were perceived by
others.
b. A commitment and involvement in helping the
needy that had preceded the war.
c. A belief that their rescue activities were not heroic
or extraordinary but part of their duty.
d. An “unplanned and gradual beginning of rescue at
times involving a sudden, even impulsive move”.
e. A “universalistic perception of the needy” that
“overshadowed all other attributes except their
dependence on aid.”
Pierre Sauvage asserts that religious belief was a
significant characteristic that has not been adequately
addressed. His award-winning documentary, Weapons of
the Spirit, relates how the Protestant village of Le
Chambon in southern France hid 5,000 Jews, including
he and his family, during the Nazi occupation.
For all our valiant efforts to find the rescuers, their
names are “largely unrecorded and their good deeds remain
anonymous and unrewarded, except in the emotions of
those they saved” observed Sybil Milton, a Holocaust
historian. Some Jews and their rescuers were killed during
the war; others died later, leaving no one to tell their
stories. Still others, rescued and rescuers, were unable to
locate each other after so many years of separation.
Although we will never know the precise number of
rescuers who saved Jews, we can learn much from the
testimonies of those we have documented. As Sholem
Asch, the Jewish writer, acknowledged “It is of the highest
importance not only to record and recount, both for
ourselves and for the future, the evidences of human
degradation, but side by side with them to set forth the
evidences of human elevation and nobility. Let the epic
of heroic deeds of love, as opposed by those of hatred, of
rescue as opposed to destruction, bear equal witness to
unborn generations.”
Dr. Grobman is a contributing editor of Together is a Holocaust
historian, who co-authored Denying History: Who Says The
Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? His latest
book on the Vaad Hatzala in post-WWII Europe will be published
early next year.
COMPUTERS
REUNITE
HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS
from a story by peggy anderson for
associated press
SEATTLE (AP) - Holocaust survivors
who had once despaired of finding
long-lost loved ones are being reunited
with them with the help of computer
databases and the opening of Soviet
bloc archives.
In just the past four months, the
Red Cross Holocaust and World War
II Tracing Center in Baltimore has
reconnected at least 40 people with
loved ones missing since the war.
The tracing center was established
in 1990 to sort through 47 million
papers released after the Iron Curtain
fell, including records from the Soviet
Union and other East Bloc countries
and seized Nazi documents.
About 1,000 people have been
found by the tracing center since it
was established. But not everyone is
lucky enough to find a relative. More
often, said spokeswoman Elise
Babbitt, a search turns up “dates of
death, which camps family members
were in, which deportation trains they
were on.”
Even when the search turns up
only a slip of paper, “people are just
happy to know anything, anything at
all,” said Seattle Red Cross volunteer
Tammy Kaiser, who worked on
Gordon’s case. “It documents the fact
that they were alive, they’re being
remembered. Sometimes that IS a
happy ending.”
34,000 people hoping to find
others lost during the war have
contacted the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C., over the past year. The museum
shares information with the Red Cross
tracing center.
“We hear all the time, ‘Isn’t this
all over?”’ Babbitt said. “That’s why
we’re working so hard to get the word
out.”
Last week, Red Cross tracing
center reunited a Holocaust survivor
with the man who pulled him from a
crib 61 years ago to keep him from
being sent to Auschwitz.
“I’m really shook up,” Hartogs,
now 65, said as he hugged the 75-yearold Schipper on Tuesday at the Los
Angeles airport. Both men now live in
the United States.
TRIBUTE TO SURVIVORS
NOVEMBER 1-2, 2003
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
REMARKS OF STUART E. EIZENSTAT
Stuart E. Eizenstat, a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling, was President Jimmy
Carter’s Chief Domestic Policy Adviser. In the Clinton Administration he was U.S. Ambassador
to the European Union (1993-1996). He also served as Special Representative of President
Clinton on Holocaust-Era Issues. He is the author of Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave
Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II.
It is a privilege to speak tonight on the 10th Anniversary of the opening of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, and especially to the Holocaust survivors and your families
and the families of those who perished. This is your Museum, your history, and your
story. For me this is closing a circle of time. You have lived through Hell on Earth. But
for me, like so many Americans of my generation, the Holocaust was a faint, distant
memory.
My coming to terms with the Holocaust was due to a chance encounter in the 1968
presidential campaign, with a fellow campaign worker, Arthur Morse. He had just
published a path-breaking book, While Six Million Died, which for the first time
described the inaction of President Roosevelt and other American leaders in the certain
knowledge of the mass slaughter of Jews at Hitler’s hands. This was a profound shock
for me. Years later my shock was reinforced when I met Jan Karski, who told me the
chilling story of how he twice went into the Warsaw Ghetto to bear witness to western
leaders, only to be rebuffed in meetings with President Roosevelt and with Supreme
Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
On April 25, 1978, as his chief domestic policy adviser, I sent a memorandum to
President Carter recommending a presidential commission to propose a permanent
memorial in our nation’s capital to the victims of the Holocaust. President Carter
announced the Commission on May 1 at the White House, during a visit of Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin. A little more than a year later on
September 27, 1979, the President’s Commission, headed by
Elie Wiesel, recommended a U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. It took another 14 years of effort before the Museum
was dedicated on April 22, 1993.
Nothing can restore what has been lost in the Holocaust:
Rabbis no longer teaching the next generation a tractate of
Talmud; Cantors no longer chanting haunting melodies in
synagogues great and small; musicians and writers, poets and
actors, business entrepreneurs and scientists whose creative
genius was extinguished; mothers never creating the warm
candle-lit glow of a Shabbat evening; farmers and shopkeepers
no longer eking out a meager but proud living; one and a half
million children never able to create their own Jewish sparks
in the world; the Yiddish language, the transmission belt of European Jewish culture,
barely a whisper; the heart of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe torn asunder. We
remain today the only religious group in the world whose number is smaller than in
1939.
* * * *
ZACHOR — REMEMBER. We tell the world, and ourselves “Remember.” But
how do we remember? Let me suggest five ways, each catalyzed by the Museum, by
you and your fellow survivors, and by the memory of the Six Million.
First and foremost is to perpetuate the memory of the Six Million by telling the
brutal truth about the Holocaust: the truth about the evil designs of the Nazi
perpetrators and their collaborators; the truth about those who allowed their
neighbors to be taken to their deaths without protest; the truth about the role of
neutral countries who provided the financial and material support to help sustain the
German killing machine; the truth about how the allied leaders of the great western
democracies refused to ease their restrictive emigration quotas at the 1938 Evian
Conference, signaling unmistakably to Hitler their blind eyes for the fate of Jews,
that lasted throughout the War (soon after Evian darkness began with Kristallnacht).
And, yes, the truth about the heroic non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews,
and the many brave Jewish partisans and fighters in the ghettos and forests of Europe.
Each day this Museum opens it doors it reminds the world of these longsuppressed truths. Each year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reaches some
150,000 teachers around the country to help them teach youngsters about the
Holocaust in terms they will understand. More than 2800 teachers come to the
Museum for Belfer National Conferences, and more than 179 Mandel Fellows in
46 states design original Holocaust education projects for their schools and
communities.
A second way to remember is to insist that the lessons of the Holocaust be
applied to contemporary problems, to make the protection of human rights a key
part of our personal, community, national and international agendas.
Here again the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has played a special role,
because of its unique call on the moral conscience of the world. Elie Wiesel and
the President’s Commission on the Holocaust recommended a “living memorial”
(EXCERPTS)
with Holocaust remembrance contributing to the prevention of future horrors. As
they put it, “a memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of
the past.” The Museum has fulfilled that vision. Shortly after it opened, the Museum
created the Committee on Conscience, which has helped stir the conscience of the
world to genocides and threats of genocides, from Bosnia and Rwanda to Chechnya
and Sudan.
A third path to ZACHOR is to honor the survivors of the Holocaust, by helping
the living and their families. The Holocaust was not only history’s gravest, most
systematic genocide, it was history’s greatest theft—the confiscation of bank
accounts, art, property, personal effects, insurance policies, along with brutal,
uncompensated slave labor. With the initiative of leaders like Edgar Bronfman,
Israel Singer, and Senator Alphonse D’Amato, the lawsuits filed by class action
lawyers, and with the strong support of President Bill Clinton, and his dedicated
team, the issue of justice for long-forgotten Holocaust survivors was forced back
onto the world’s agenda. Yet the heart and soul of the efforts I helped lead for
Holocaust restitution, were inspired by Holocaust survivors like Roman Kent and
Benjamin Meed.
Thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish communal properties—churches,
synagogues, schools, community centers, even cemeteries—are being returned to
help the re-emerging religious groups after the Cold War rebuild their shattered
communities. Tens of thousands of Swiss bank accounts have been discovered. Some
$8 billion in class action settlements were obtained from private Swiss, German,
Austrian and French companies, and their governments, and for the first time private
enterprises were held accountable for aiding and abetting wartime activity. Art and
property are being returned and insurance policies are being paid.
But there is much more to be done here. Insurance
policies have been paid at a painfully slow rate.
Additional slave labor payments are long overdue, while
thousands of survivors are passing away before our very
eyes. Looted art remains hanging in public museums.
Property payments in Austria remain hung-up over legal
disputes. Regaining personal property, or even a small
percentage of its value, remains almost impossible in
many Eastern European countries, some now part of
NATO and soon the European Union, which should be
held to western norms.
The bottom line is that far too many elderly
survivors, from South Florida to Eastern Europe remain
destitute, without access to life-sustaining medical and
pharmaceutical aid. We must use the 10th Anniversary of this great museum as an
inspiration to put aside our differences, and work together to use the unclaimed
funds we have collected to assure that survivors are not neglected in their declining
years. You have suffered so grievously when you were young. You must not do so
again. We must dedicate ourselves to make elderly survivors our top priority, above
all else.
Another way to remember is for us to protect Jews wherever they are threatened,
and to help defend the Jewish homeland in Israel. Yom Ha’Atzmout, Israel Independence
Day, comes soon after Yom Ha Shoah, just as Israel was born out of the ashes of the
Holocaust. To neglect one is to forget the memory of the other.
It has become painfully evident that antisemitism did not end with the Holocaust,
and that a new, virulent antisemitism has arisen, aimed at Israel and its supporters. It
was visibly portrayed by the standing ovation Arab leaders recently gave at the 57 nation
Organization of the Islamic Conference to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad’s crude canard that after “the Europeans killed 10 million Jews out of 12
million, . . . today the Jews rule the world by proxy,” and “get others to fight and die for
them.” There has been an upsurge of antisemitic actions by Moslem youth in Europe
against Jews and Jewish religious property; European professors threaten to boycott
Israeli universities, and some European labor unions refuse to off-load Israeli products.
And once again there is a deafening silence by many world leaders in the face of these
outrages, a reminder that the work of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is not yet
done. At the same time, we should take heart in some measure that, with U.S. leadership,
the 54-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has now taken up
the issue of antisemitism and antisemitic violence for regular monitoring as a human
rights issue.
The memory of the Six Million who died simply because they were born Jewish, a
memory so brilliantly captured forever by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, must
inspire us to redouble our dedication to Jewish identity, education, observance, and
institutions, to Israel, and to Jews in need everywhere.
May the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, its leaders and staff, and may you, the
Holocaust survivors and your families go from “strength to strength,” and continue to
tell your story, L’Dor V’Dor, from generation to generation.
TOGETHER 3
Chairman, United States Holocaust Memorial Council
I come from Wharton, Texas. Like
many of your hometowns, it’s a small
place that most people have never heard
of. But for a fateful decision by my great
grandparents to send my grandparents to
America, I might have been born in a small
town in Poland or Russia, rather than one
in Texas.
Already there are young people
growing up—in small towns and large
cities alike—with only the most cursory
education about the Holocaust. My
generation has a duty to them—and to
you—and we have to fulfill that duty now.
My generation lives at a vital juxtaposition in time. On one side of us are
the inspiring examples of survivors and the enduring memory of those who
perished. On the other side are generations upon generations who must remember
the Holocaust or be at risk of repeating it.
The choice is that direct—and so is the challenge. With every successive
generation, memory dims. Only the torch you carry can light our way. This is
what remembrance is for, and a new generation now takes up that duty.
The urgency of the task is in our newspapers each day. Violent antisemitism
is on the rise throughout the world, and Israel—where so many survivors found
a home—is under attack.
As we take up the torch of remembrance, we can only hope to bear it as
honorably, as effectively, as you have. We can only hope to be worthy of our
people’s ancient tradition—“tikkun olam” — to repair the world.
Repairing the world is an ongoing obligation – a task that never ends. My
generation will continue the sacred task, but we must think about generations
hence. It is for that reason that today we are literally planting the seeds of
remembrance for those unborn generations.
I will now ask our distinguished guests to join me and some of the very
youngest members of our special family to bury a time capsule containing an
ageless message to the future from this gathering. Our proclamations of today,
our affirmations for tomorrow, will now be buried in front of the Museum’s
most sacred space, its Hall of Remembrance.
We undertake this ritual for our lost families, for our new families, and for
the generations to come. We pledge ourselves and our successors to uphold the
torch of remembrance, and accept with a sense of privilege the legacy we have
been bequeathed: To participate in whatever ways we can—individual by
individual—in the effort to repair our world.
RUTH B. MANDEL
Vice Chairman, United States Holocaust Memorial Council
More than six decades ago, a young Jewish couple from
Vienna boarded a ship with their infant daughter for what
they believed was an escape from Nazi-dominated Europe.
I was that infant. The ship was the St. Louis — and what
was supposed to be an escape became that most familiar of
Jewish journeys … a long wandering. We were shunned by
Cuba, and turned away by the United States. A few of us
were fortunate; we were taken in by the British. But the rest
— who weeks earlier stood on deck to glimpse the promised
land of America — were sent back to tragic fates.
I have no memory of the St. Louis. All I can do is recount the impressions of
others. How alone my parents must have felt — literally adrift on the vastness of the
ocean, trapped between a homeland that wanted to destroy us and a haven that refused to
accept us.
But here, in this place, for this occasion, we who escaped, you who survived, have
found a haven from the solitude of memories that cannot be fully communicated because
no words adequately capture them. Here we find in one another an implicit understanding
that requires no speech, a unique bond of history and memory. There is a special comfort
in community tonight.
These walls, this gathering, reverberate with memory — as do the walls of the
extraordinary institution that we helped build — the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. A picture of my parents and me aboard the St. Louis hangs in the Museum—
that place where memory lives and memory teaches.
The ship that was adrift long ago in an ocean of hate and rejection, in the darkest of
times, has sailed through the decades to serve memory in teaching powerful lessons for
generations to come. Thus, for tonight, for us, for this weekend, and for the future, the
ship is at port. Welcome home.
TOGETHER 4
NOBEL LAUREATE ELIE WIESEL
This is a great day and its greatness
is meaningful to you,
survivors, for it
symbolizes our
victory over
forgetfulness, thus
saving the victims
from a second death.
This Museum owes
you much. Look at it
and be proud.
Granted, your
role in its existence
is not unique. Others
have taken part in it.
From the very
beginning, when the
idea of the project
had hardly been formulated, we received
from both the White House and
Congress their enthusiastic support.
Men and women from all social spheres
and religious or secular affiliations,
rabbis and priests, businessmen and
scholars, rich and poor, young and old,
united by an extraordinary passion for
truth and compassion, joined their
talents and fortunes, inspiring America
to comprehend the weight of memory on
our collective aspirations. I salute my
predecessors on the Presidentiallyappointed Council. They worked hard.
Nothing could stop them. And nothing
did.
We salute the administration of the
Museum with its staff of professionals
and volunteers, whose devotion brought
nobility into a world often known for its
icy winds of complacency and
careerism. Rarely has a lofty dream
attracted so many just persons,
galvanizing so many groups, and attaining
such a popular success in a such short
time. Remember the rainy morning of
the inauguration ? Only ten years have
passed since then. When we see the
outcome, we are filled with gratitude.
No one is as open to
gratitude as we are. For us,
every gesture is an
offering, every dawn filled
with grace. We watch a
child, ours, and we see our
parents. And we would give
that child all that was taken
away from us.
However, in the spirit
of the stock-taking
solemnity of the occasion,
we recall, not without
melancholy, the early days of your
arrival in this blessed land. You were
received without fanfare and
ceremonies. No festive dinners were
offered in your honor. No speeches, no
presents. As if society
had told you: You are
alive, that ought to be
sufficient.
Not long ago, when
liberated prisoners or
hostages returned home,
they were celebrated by
the entire nation. And
that was and is the right
thing to do. But that was not done
when traumatized
survivors from
Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Belzec, Majdanek and
Ponar finally landed on
these shores. Of
course, you obtained
sympathy and
compassion from
various quarters; many
good people assisted
you in rebuilding your
lives and your hopes on
the ruins of a shattered
past. But most of the
time you evolved in a
closed circle inhabited
by your former comrades:
invisible walls separated survivors
from the rest of the nations.
In the beginning, you so
wanted to share your memories
with others. But they refused to
listen. “Do not look backwards,”
people told you. “It is unhealthy.
Turn the page; the future is waiting
for you.” Then, you stopped
trying, you would just whisper:
“What’s the use? Anyway, you
won’t understand.”
Do people understand now?
Now, at least, they realize that this
is the place—together with Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem—where one
can come close not to the Event
itself, that is impossible, but to its
dark and fiery gates.
Much before the Museum was
built, I was asked what my hopes
had been for its impact. Anyone
entering it, I said, should not leave
it unchanged. Here children and
adults learn that Good and Evil are
part of the human condition, and
they can be infinite. Here we learn
that the loneliness of victims, their
sense of abandonment,
their silent despair as
they walked, in
nocturnal procession
towards the flames, are
not to be forgotten;
they must leave a trace,
a burning scar on man’s
history, on its memory,
and God’s as well.
Surrounded by
your children and
grandchildren, fellow
survivors, do you feel joy in your
hearts? If so, it is not void of
sadness; it cannot be. And yet, and
yet. Close your eyes and see the
invisible faces of those we have
left behind, or have
left us behind as
witnesses.
Our presence
here today is our
answer to their
silent question: We
have kept our
promise. We have
not forgotten.
Elie Wiesel and Jordan Penn, 7, and
Adriana Geiderman, 8, bury a time capsule
on the Eisenhower Plaza.
S
ECOND GENERATION
SOUNDS
by Lisa Lipkin
The greatest sound you could hear as a teenager
in Clifton, New Jersey, was
the blast of the old air raid
siren on a snowy winter’s
morning. That meant,
Snow Day. School is
Cancelled. There were
nearly 1,000 kids in my
high school class—far too
many to telephone in person—
so whenever there was
questionable weather, the
school blew that earsplitting horn instead. All
winter we prayed for that siren to blow so that we
could sleep in and spend the day at the mall.
It’s funny how just one generation earlier, that
same sharp blast meant only bad things to high school
students. One blow of that old, rusty, yellow siren,
which sat at the corner of Dwasline Road and Allwood
Place, meant, “Hide under your desks! Duck and
Cover. It’s an air raid. A bomb. A nuclear war!”
Sounds are like that. They have no loyalties. One
minute they’re your source of comfort, the next, the
root of your pain.
photo by Gideon Lewin
FRED S. ZEIDMAN
OUR PARENTS, OURSELVES
by Jeanette Friedman
It hit me when Lily
Fogelman (born in a Polish
town fifteen minutes away
from the one my mom was
born in) told me that when the
World Gathering of Holocaust
survivors took place in 1981 in
Israel, she was 55 years old—
younger than I am now. Good
grief, I thought, we have
become our parents!
Lily Fogelman is a special lady. Straight as an arrow.
Nisht du ka chochmas. She keeps on keeping on,
marching along on her own two feet up three flights of
stairs to her guest room in a 2G’s house. She spends
part of one afternoon fitting me for a suit she decides I
must have, reminding me what it was like when I had
to stand still, elementary school age, as my mother made
my clothes for me. All the survivor women are our
mothers I realized. They are all different, and they are
all the same, and how wonderful can that be? They
even talk about food and eating the same way!
I came to know Lily through her daughter, Dr.
Eva Fogelman, whom I met in 1979 at the Zachor
Conference at Hebrew Union College in New York.
Dr. Eva Fogelman is one of the many catalysts in the
creation of something called Second Generation. Since
then, lots of water has passed under the bridge and
we have, amazingly, accomplished so much! When
we first started networking, Holocaust education was
first being born. Until then, Jewish leadership had tried
to ignore our parents and us—until the World
Gathering, that is.
That long ago weekend at the Zachor Conference
had galvanized us into social action, into becoming an
international movement to remember the past and
There was a time I arrived in Spain for my summer
vacation. When I first heard the gong of the cathedral
bells outside my rented apartment in Barcelona, I
thought, “Enchanting.” My Danish, Jewish traveling
companion thought, “Expulsion.” “When we sat next
to a group of elderly people and heard them speaking
loudly in German, I thought, “Tourists.” My friend
thought, “Perpetrators.” But when an ambulance
zoomed by, blasting its distinctly European-sounding
siren, my friend thought, “Hospital emergency.” I
thought, “My mother.”
It was 1973 when we decided as a family to travel
to Budapest on a vacation. I was 11, young enough to
still be fascinated by everything. We had been living in
Zurich, where my father was on a sabbatical doing
cancer research at the university. We had taken lots of
trips that year. One to Florence. Another to Vienna.
Still another to Paris. All by train. It was all very
romantic to me. I loved the clanking of the wheels
against the tracks and the hissing of the steam, and the
sound of the conductor screaming, “All Aboard!,” no
matter what language it was in.
But when we rolled across the border from Austria
into Hungary, armed Communist soldiers climbed
aboard. When my mother saw them, dressed in their
uniforms, their rifles abutting their waists, her whole
body tightened. They opened our compartment door
and asked for our tickets in a foreign language. To me,
it was melodious Hungarian. To my mother, it was
1942.
Apparently, the Hungarians, not the Germans, had
been the ones to round up the Jews in Uzghorod, her
village in the Carpathian Mountains. But she had never
spoken about it, not once, and we never realized the
connection. Until then.
With one final, huge release of steam, the train
rang its bell, a sound that signaled the start of another
delicious rail adventure for me. For my father, it signaled
the start of pure hell. He had to watch my mother
disintegrate, moment by moment, into a helpless girl
of 12, and endure, with each clang of the bell, another
squeeze of her fingernails into the palm of his hand.
There were moments of reprieve in Budapest.
When we bought a peasant blouse at a tourist shop.
When we ate chicken paprikash in a small, family
restaurant. When we sat in a park overlooking the River
Pesht. But at night, when we lay on our sagging
mattresses in our small rented room, and an ambulance
rode by, it didn’t sound like “Hospital Emergency” to
any of us. It sounded like thirty years of muffled pain.
We watched mom curl up into a fetal position and
scream the whole night. We left for Zurich the next
morning. We didn’t talk about what had happened.
Instead, my mom said nothing. To her, it must have
sounded like silence. To me, it was the noisiest train
ride of my life.
“Never Forget.” This Tribute, today, was a mellower
movement to remember.
The Tribute was a gathering unlike any of the
official gatherings that preceded it in 1981, 1983, 1985
and since. As unimaginable as it seemed, there on the
grounds of an almost sacred place in Washington, D.C.,
a place that tells the story of the attempted genocide
of our people, of our families, those who survived the
ordeal—and their liberators and rescuers—were
toasted for their accomplishments and their hardearned happiness. Life was celebrated and cheered.
Perhaps, some say, we have now succeeded too
well, considering the state of the world and the
duplication of institutions. On the other hand, it is very
hard for anyone to ignore the Holocaust anymore, and
not realize that genocide must not stand—that human
rights are paramount, that life is sacred. Perhaps
Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans would have been
even worse calamities if we hadn’t told our stories
and somehow forced someone to act somewhere to
stop the insanity. Who knows?
On Saturday evening, we walked through a
cavernous convention center the size of Central Park
to get to our dining room, but lo and behold, for those
who couldn’t make it on their own, there was a little
tram, World’s Fair style. The organizers, bless them,
thought of everything.
More than 4,500 people were served in one
room—an amazing sight. There was no crowding; the
seating was flexible. The speeches were short and
sweet. We noted our losses, old and new, then listened
to Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat talk about how we
had all come to be gathered in this one place at this
one time, and what that meant to him as the son of
American Jews and a member of the government that
had ignored the St. Louis and the tracks to Auschwitz,
as well as rescue of the Jews. His point was that people
had worked hard to bring the survivors some measure
of justice, no matter how imperfect.
Dinner was bittersweet. People were just beginning
to orient themselves to the event and didn’t really know
what to expect.. Besides, as everyone couldn’t stop
saying, the food was pretty good too! The 7-layer cake
was maybe a little dense, but, it was pretty good, and
so was the coffee!
Everywhere we went, museum staff and volunteers
were there to help the survivors and their families find
their way around with friendly faces and intelligent
responses! The next morning we arrived on Wallenberg
Place to attend programs about memoir writing—and
when they were done, drifted into the giant tents for
breakfast…and to listen to the music of the past. “Oh
mein Gott, frishe frucht!!!! And so much of it. Lunch
and dinner were terrific, too.
The requisite bulletin board was outside the tent,
where families, perhaps for the last time, mounted paper
searches for lost loved ones. And then there were the
tables where people sought out others from their old
neighborhoods one last time—and I discovered a cousin
I didn’t know I had. He looked at my name tag—
“Host a mol efsher gekent a Volvie Friedman?” he
asked, “Did you once know a Volvie Friedman?”
I looked at him and said, “Volvie Friedman, z”l. I
think so, I ought to, he was my dad.”
That happened two more times before the day
was over, once, on my mother’s side, with the only
Hasid I saw in the crowd. And then there was the 16year-old from Baltimore in a crocheted kippah. “I
wish more frum Jews were here,” he said when he
was asked for his reaction to the time capsule
ceremony. “From the cross-section here, you can see
the Shoah affected every kind of Jew that there is.
But they tried to teach me it was a punishment for
our sins. Do you tell people who have cancer that
God is punishing them? No you don’t. If all the
different kinds of Jews were all here, maybe we could
have unity.”
From the mouths of our babes. “Am Yisrael Chai.”
TOGETHER 25
S
VLADKA MEED
ECOND GENERATION
MEMORIAL CANDLE
by Lisa Reitman-Dobi
photo by Gideon Lewin
I am the child of a child
survivor. The biggest event
in my life happened 20 years
before I was born. It shaped
my mother and therefore
shaped me. I grew up the way
she did: rootless.
My European mother
was lost in suburban
America. She was plunked
down in the middle of a foreign culture without one
single person who understood her. Although she was surrounded by American Jews, they may as well have been
from another planet. Planet Jewish America. Land of competitive hospitality. She had few friends. Her life centered, and still does, around her family. Although she tried
to give us normalcy, there was nothing normal about the
way she got here.
There was something in me that needed to understand my mother, and that something drove me to write
about it, first in Second Generation Voices, a book that
recounts firsthand experiences of children of survivors
and children of perpetrators, then in the play Tell Me
About It. The play is based on my insight and understanding of how the Holocaust continues to affect us.
And the Holocaust, is not easy to understand.
I grew up feeling confused and deprived. Not deprived of material things–well, there was that much
wanted pony, you know, a really cute one that I could
keep in the back yard or in my room…It was a much
deeper deprivation than that, I felt deprived of belonging to something.
With the best of intentions, my parents settled in a
completely American neighborhood. There was no survivor community in my upbringing. Even if there had
been, my mother would not have embraced it. “I am not
a survivor,” she said for years. “We didn’t flee, we left.”
Leaving, I’ve told her, is going to Club Med. Fleeing is
when they’re going to kill you if you stay.
My mother, an only child, and her parents ran from
country to country under dreadful conditions. And then
the worst happened. As refugees in Morocco, both my
mother’s parents died and she was alone at the age of
14. Yet she insisted, “I am not a survivor.”
I grew up with my mother’s notion of a pecking order of suffering. It measured and categorized loss, displacement, fear and pain. This was why my mother gave
low rank to her own experience, and by extension, mine.
Not having been in a camp, she considered herself not
only not a survivor but a lucky person to boot. This is
an odd barometer by which one is taught to evaluate
pain, happiness and life in general.
As a friend of mine says, “It ain’t Auschwitz, keep
on truckin’.” But this notion was how she undercut her
own indisputable grief and bereavement and—by extension again—mine. Maybe some people didn’t have numbers tattooed onto their forearms, but they have nightmarish memories seared into their souls just as indelibly. While her emotions had to go someplace, in an
effort to spare her loved ones, and herself, my mother
kept things bottled up. The result was tension, anxiety
and fear. She’s like a champagne bottle, my mother,
bursting to let it out. My mother is truly a great lady; I
just wish she’d found a way to connect with other child
survivors and hidden children. She would be a happier
great lady.
People can be made of brick or glass. My mother
is brick with glass inside. She is strong but fragile. To
me, she is magical. She managed to dodge raindrops.
She managed to escape the nightmare of her childhood,
to grow up and to create new realities, which she then
TOGETHER 24
populated with children. And of course her children
provided her with a generous amounts of angst so essential to her existence! My mother is amazing. She
can find epiphanies in the mundane because she has such
a keen appreciation of life. But she also has vivre confused with survivre. Everything is a Big Deal (capitalized) either worth worrying over or worth celebrating.
But what she didn’t see—and this was the Big Deal of
my childhood—was that I didn’t belong. My mother was
a refugee, self-educated, resourceful, intelligent and
lonely. And I felt like the outsider.
I wanted my mother to be just as American as everyone else’s mother. I wanted her to play bridge. I
wanted her to join a club. She didn’t and she never would.
My God, she wouldn’t be caught dead playing those
beach club games or going to the Catskills. I can’t even
picture that. My mother had nothing in common with
American mothers and no connection with survivor
mothers, save for a couple of women she knew from
Morocco. But these women did not define themselves
as survivors, no matter how awful their uprooted childhoods had been. Like any child, I wanted her to fit in
somewhere so that I would fit in somewhere. She didn’t,
and therefore, I didn’t. She was different, and therefore,
I felt different. And if you feel different, you ARE different.
Other children my age went to Hebrew school. For
me, it was not permitted. After the war, my mother
would have no part of a synagogue, because 1) it meant
having your name on a list, and 2) it involved praying to
a God who had permitted the atrocities of the Holocaust. I felt like Lisa, the Un-Jew.
So I grew up with both feet firmly planted nowhere,
or more accurately, one planted here on American soil,
the other in a decimated Europe, a place that had once
been the thriving metropolis of my mother's Jewish family. I also grew up with the implicit understanding that
my life could turn on a dime. It had happened before,
why shouldn't it happen again? “Have fun-Be careful” was
one phrase in our house. It just didn’t feel safe or comfortable or right to be Jewish. Yet every year, we had
what I now call “the Secret Seder.” And God forbid you
didn’t show up.
In my play, Tell Me About It, I use humor to address
some difficult demons. People ask how a play about the
ripple effect of the Holocaust could be full of humor.
It’s a play about families, and the dialogue and cross-talk
that make for the most aggravating family moments can
be very entertaining to the observer. Jews have always
used humor as a coping mechanism, and we have the jokes
and comedians to prove it. But nothing beats the humor
of family discussions, where everyone is talking, no one
is listening, your original question is never answered and
there is a great big elephant in the livingroom around
which everyone tiptoes. What happened to Mom’s family? Why is Mom so tense? Why is everyone dead? Why
are we having chicken AGAIN? But under humor is sometimes sadness or anger and in this case, I felt both. Sad
that my mother had to go through what she went through,
to lose so many and so much, and angry that the world
stood by and allowed it to happen.
The play had the good luck to be read and to go into
production, but luck isn’t everything. Endurance is necessary, and a strong degree of perseverance helps. We
pass these traits on to our children whether or not they
tell us about it. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re
capable of until we’re put to the test. There’s a saying
that a woman is like a tea bag: you don’t know how strong
she is until you put her in hot water. That’s the way I see
the generations after the Shoah. Even my sisters, who
never expressed interest in our mother’s past, have a certain strength and perseverance that is not unlike our
mother’s.
When I was little, I used to sneak into my parents
bedroom when no one was around. In her closet, my
mother had a box of photos. Those photos were a mys-
tery to me, a treasure of immeasurable proportion. They
were old and faded, but the people in them were smiling.
These photos were of cousins, aunts and uncles who were
murdered.
I used to look at those photos and scan them for my
own features. I’d take them out, one at a time, and look
very carefully. Mirror in one hand, photo in the other. It
was my ritual. I needed a sense of lineage, of hereditary
qualities. I felt like an orphan in some odd ways: who was
I like? Why? Who is my mother talking about and am I
really a carbon copy of that person? Does that mean I
have her profile? Will I outgrow it?
Apparently, I was like a lot of dead people whom I
never knew. My mother was good at telling me why I was
like deceased relatives who died unnatural deaths. I was
compared to Max who was musical and adventurous. He
—in my mother’s words and I’m quoting now—“fortunately was killed in the Spanish Civil War.” I was compared to Malka, who was smart and stubborn and probably got shot since she wasn't the type to just go without
a protest. Being shot was a good thing. It showed, according to my mother, "strength of character" and an incidental avoidance of what probably would have been a far worse
fate.
I’m told I get my creativity from my mother's mother,
a well-known hat designer before the war. My grandmother—and I have a hard time calling her that—died at
the age of 39, 28 years before I was born. I look like her.
My mother stares at me sometimes. Maybe you can understand. Maybe you stare at your own children. It makes
you feel like another casualty, without the visible wounds
to prove your pain. But some wounds are not visible, and
those can be the deepest wounds of all.
There was—and is—a history of which I ought to be
proud, a history of musical, literary, creative, and highlyeducated family members. But all that remains now is a box
of photos and some stories. What would have happened if I
hadn’t said, “Tell me about it” to the point of aggravating my
poor Mom.
I’m the only one in our family who wanted to know more
about my mother. My sisters never needed to know about
that crack in time from which our mother came. It was a
terrible crack in time, and for many people, it was easier to
not look back but rather say, Kadima. As a child, I heard
Kadima a lot, closing the door on the past and moving forward. This was necessary in creating a life out of nothing.
But at a certain point, especially when the ripple effect of the
war impacts the family, it becomes helpful to look at the past.
My play deals with that ripple effect. Perhaps my sisters saw
the past as too scary, maybe they thought it might swallow
them up, or likely they were just following my mother’s lead
and heading forward—Kadima—without needing an explanation of our mother's tension level and her intense involvement with her children and now grandchildren.
They say that in survivor families there is often one
child—perhaps a firstborn, maybe a lastborn—who is a symbol of those who didn’t survive. This child becomes a living
testament to all that was lost. This child is called the Memorial Candle Child. It seems that is my role. It’s a privilege. It was my choice—and my destiny—to look deeply
into my mother's past and into the Holocaust itself. Writing
helps me to dissect and understand the multiplicity of emotions I saw in my mother, and the refractions of those qualities that I see in myself.
Now I’m the mother of two daughters. I see how the
Holocaust has affected me, and the way in which I raise my
daughters. Interspersed with the tension and anxiety comes
tremendous appreciation for the continuity of generations.
This is something I didn’t see in my mother until now and
something my daughters, no doubt, don’t yet see in me. I am
no longer lost, but part of something larger, of
continuity…and I’m glad I went looking for it. To me, my
daughters are gifts. They are miracles. And so, I'm honored
to be a Memorial Candle kid. As a writer, as a daughter, and
as a mother, I won't let the flame go out. I promise.
Lisa Dobi is a playwright.
Introduction of
Yiddish Culture Event
Tribute to the
Survivors
at the
United States Holocaust
Museum
in Washington, DC
at the Survivor Village
Once again we greet all of you wholeheartedly.
A cultural event has become a tradition at the
gatherings and conferences of survivors. It
symbolically expresses the link and the love that
we feel for our culture, for our traditions, for the
creativity of our people. During the darkest period
of Jewish history, our culture sustained and
nourished us.
We who survived Hell remember that before
the shadow of the Nazi nightmare fell upon Europe
and extinguished its light, Jewish life sparkled with
the glow of creativity. We took pride in our Jewish
scholars, writer, books, newspapers, schools,
synagogues, libraries, theatres, and sports clubs.
Many of them were organized and supported by
the very active political mass movements such as
the Socialists, Zionists and religious groups.
Even during the deportations, in the Vilna
Ghetto, and during the Final Solution, poets wrote
songs, artists staged performances. In the Kloga
Camp, composer Vladimir Dumarshkin wrote
music. In the concentration camp Theresienstadt,
children and their teachers painted scenes of their
homes, of butterflies, which could not longer be
seen. They did this on scraps of paper before they
were put on trains to Auschwitz.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the secret Oneg Shabbat
Club was organized – scholars and writers did
research, collected documentary material, the socalled Ringelblum archives and buried them in milk
cans for future generations. Some of them were
found and one of the milk cans is displayed in the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to tell our story.
Although abandoned by the world, our people
still held onto their belief in humanity, to our ethical
values, our Jewish traditions. We survivors carry
this heritage with us everywhere. It has helped us
to find a new place for ourselves in America, where
we have rebuilt our lives, our homes and our
families.
This great land, with its many nationalities and
cultures has enriched us all, but our Jewish heritage
has enriched America too. Survivors have made
their contributions and have won world recognition
through being awarded the Nobel prize in many
fields, among them our own, dear Elie Wiesel,
Peace Prize recipient, who is with us at this
gathering.
Yes, many times throughout our history, Jewish
culture has been forced to change. It was destroyed
in Poland and in other countries of Europe,
uprooted in Russia, but revived in Israel and still
continues here in America. The values of Jewish
life remain eternal.
Tonight, through words, songs, and music we
will share the dreams, the sorrow, the joy and the
love and hopes of our people. Together with our
artists, we will express what is in our hearts.
From the Scrolls of Remembrance
notations by museum visitors...
* This Tribute is an honor to attend because it passes on
from my parents’ generation, who are the survivors, the
concrete evidence for our children and their children to
see...May they never forget what happened to their
grandparents and the millions of others.
* We are here as three generations. I thank god my parents
have survived so that we have this wonderful family. Their
legacy of our three generations will continue to grow and
“Remember.” We are here to ensure that this will “Never”
happen to anyone again. I am proud to be a part of this
incredible event that honors my parents and in
remembrance of those I never had the privilege to know. Thank you everyone for this memorial you have
created.
* With pain and joy we visit this special place. Thank you for the opportunity to share it with other
survivors and their families.
May we have the courage to ensure it never happens again.
* To all the survivors: Thank You. Without you we wouldn’t be here.
We bear witness to the evil that men can do and vow to not let it happen again.
* In memory of beloved family, my mother, my sister, my brother, whom I miss every day of my life.
* In memory of an entire family I will never know.
* In memory of my beautiful beloved mother and father and for my beautiful children and grandchildren,
may this museum continue to educate and remember.
* In loving memory of my daddy … who lost his entire family … sweet little sisters, his dear
parents, and who was tormented with grief, unable to tell his story. May all our children keep this
history alive.
* I am a survivor of eight concentration camps. I survived and am glad to be able to come to this
gathering with my daughter and granddaughter. Please remember the Holocaust and never to forget.
* I am here today as a wife of a survivor, my loving husband who died in 1994 at 63 … He left a
legacy of two beautiful children who will bear his mark for future generations to live in peace and
equality of our human race. Educate, remember and persevere.
* For my mother and in memory of my grandparents: sharing the painful history so we never forget.
* As members of the second and third generation we are grateful for the Holocaust Museum and the
opportunity to remember the six million, my father’s parents and family and my father’s survival.
* I am very grateful, as a member of the Second Generation, to be here in our Nation’s Capital
walking through the Holocaust Museum. I am hopeful that the suffering of my family, our people,
was not in vain. May the experiences of the past serve as a lesson for all generations.
* I am very sad to be here in memory of all my relatives who have died in the camps, but extremely
proud to be here for my surviving relatives. May the memories, stories, will to live and suffering
always be preserved. This weekend has been a wonderful, moving, amazing experience for my
family who attended. I hope that my children never forget this experience.
* I sat on rain-soaked chairs in April 1993 to witness the opening of this amazing place. I witness this
day of amazing accomplishment. I hope I may live long enough to witness the progress, the interest
of future generations in what happened in those days of the twentieth century when darkness fell
upon the earth and eventually the Museum became a shining light for all humanity – Now and for the
FUTURE.
* This has been a fabulous tribute to all the survivors and their courage and hope for the future.
I’m proud to be here as a member of the second generation. We will carry on the torch!!
* In honor of all who came before us and all our parents endured, we are so grateful this Museum will
keep the legacy alive. I hope and pray that future generations will never forget their stories and the
horrors that hatred can create.
* Remember and educate!
* In loving memory and tribute to my beloved parents … For teaching me to trust and to love despite
the darkness they experienced. The horrors of the Holocaust become increasingly incomprehensible,
but the heroism and resilience are eternally inspiring.
* I have survived and am here with my children and grandchildren. We will never forget and will
pass on this memory so that this horror will never be forgotten.
* Thank you for remembering my family – my aunts and my uncles and my cousins – and my halfbrother, killed age 4, whose name my father never spoke.
* I’m from the second generation here with my parents, survivors – my father of the youngest of
survivors – to show our respect for those of our family members and all the others who were not
so fortunate to be here today. We are truly blessed.
* The time we spend on Earth, in this world, is so precious. We are here because those before us
sacrificed their entire world, and for what? It’s just that – as a third generation, I know the torch
has been passed on, so we will NEVER forget. So teach your children, your grandchildren,
otherwise the sacrifices made as to ensure our existence might go down the same path so many
of our brethren were forced to take.
* I am a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and I am most grateful to this Museum for
letting the world know of the darkness that befell the Jews of Europe during World War II.
Thank you.
TOGETHER 5
TO HAVE LIVED TO SEE THE DAY: THE AUSCHWITZ FLYOVER
Sep. 4, 2003
Jerusalem Post
by Arieh O. Sullivan
Three Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter jets recently
thundered over the Auschwitz death camp in a
display of modern Jewish might. As the jets zoomed
by at 300 knots an hour,
formation leader Brig.Gen. Amir Eshel read
out the following
statement, which was
broadcast on the
ground: “We pilots of
the Air Force, flying in
the skies above the
camp of horrors, arose
from the ashes of the
millions of victims and
shoulder their silent
cries, salute their
courage and promise to be the shield of the Jewish
people and its nation Israel.”
The Israeli F-15s, originally invited to Poland to
celebrate the Polish Air Force’s 85th birthday, were
escorted during the flight by two Polish air force
fighter jets. The ceremony ignored marginal protests
and heavily overcast Polish skies. In the cockpits,
the Israeli aircrews carried the names of all those
recorded murdered in Auschwitz on this date exactly
60 years ago. They had picked the names out of the
records at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem prior to flying to Poland last week. The
jets, flying low enough for all to see the blue Star of
David, flew toward the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp as slowly as possible, following
the railroad tracks leading into the camp and
crematoriums and then peeled away.
Among those on the ground was a contingent of
140 IDF officers who were selected to visit Europe’s
death camps. Following the fly past, the jets, the
most lethal aircraft in the IAF’s arsenal, landed back
at Radom air base, refueled and set out on the 1,600
nautical mile route back to Israel. “They are passing
over this most awful place on earth, a place where
the allies did nothing to even show they were even
trying to save us,” said Prof. Shevach Weiss, Israel’s
ambassador to Warsaw. “They asked me here in
Poland why we were disturbing the quiet (at
Auschwitz). This quiet is the silence that was forced
upon us,” Weiss told Israel radio. “This is a onetime event. I told them here that this quiet could be
disturbed once by a screech. This screech is the
shout of the grandchildren of those whose ashes
are at Auschwitz.”
The Nazis built the camp in occupied Poland in
1940. More than a million people, 90 percent of
them Jewish, perished in gas chambers or died of
starvation and disease at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
complex before it was liberated by advancing Soviet
troops on January 27, 1945.
Sol Weiss, born 12/1/29 in Csenger, Czecholosvakia.
Only survivor of family of five, survived Auschwitz.
Came to U.S. in 1949 where he married Alice Katz in
1952. They were married for 51 years. Worked as tiecutter in garment center, father to two sons, Glenn,
48, and Cary, 40. Grandfather of Sarah Weiss, 10. He
died from a neuro-muscular disease named
Myasthenia Gravis. He was an honest, hard-working,
family man, supporter of Israel, and lived his life
guided by principles of the Torah.
TUVIA WIESNER
by Roman Kent
TOGETHER 6
authored “Imperfect Justice” delivered the keynote
address.
Calling the Holocaust not only history’s gravest,
most systematic genocide, but also its greatest theft,
Eizenstat advocated restitution as an important path
to remembrance, Zachor, and to justice for longforgotten Holocaust survivors.
“There are some critics who questioned the
whole effort at Holocaust restitution,” he said. “But
I found that for survivors it was not the amount
they recovered, but the fact that someone was held
accountable during their lifetimes for the wrongs
committed against them.” He continued with the
statement that it w as survivors Roman Kent and
Benjamin Meed who were the moral force behind
the negotiations.
Survivors and their families spent Saturday and
Sunday, November 1 - 2, at the Museum, where
they toured the Permanent Exhibition and special
exhibitions on Anne Frank and hidden children, and
went behind the scenes to see the facilities used to
conserve the thousands of artifacts survivors have
donated over the years. There were writing
workshops for survivors interested in penning their
own memoirs and opportunities for grandchildren
to interview their grandparents about their
experiences during the war.
The staff helped visitors research the fates of
victims and survivors they had been unable to find
on their own. There were also numerous
presentations offered throughout the weekend,
covering everything from researching genealogy on
the Web to commercial publishing of memoirs to
understanding the Museum’s architecture. The
Tribute closed Sunday evening with a lively
performance of Yiddish songs led by Mike Burstyn
He came to the United States in 1946 from Stuttgart,
Germany after spending six years (1939-1945) in different camps. At the age of 13 he worked at an ammunition factory until he was taken on a death march to
Tomashow, where he was put on a train to Auschwitz.
After selection, he was subsequently shipped to
Vahingen, then to Underrixen, Niekagerach and
Niekarelz. He was liberated in a tunnel in Ostenburken.
SOL WEISS
THE HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION IN WASHINGTON, DC
On November 1 st
and 2nd, more than 7,000
Holocaust survivors
with family members
gathered at the United
States
Holocaust
Memorial Museum in
Washington, DC for the
Tribute to Holocaust
Survivors- Reunion of a
Special Family. Joined
by children, grandchildren, liberators and rescuers,
the survivors were honored for the extraordinary
accomplishments they’ve made in their adopted
homeland. They were reassured that their shared
history and commitment to remembrance of the
Holocaust would be preserved—within and
beyond the Museum’s walls—for generations to
come.
“This is a great day and its greatness is
meaningful to you, survivors, for it symbolizes our
victory over forgetfulness, thus saving the victims
from a second death,” said Nobel Laureate Elie
Wiesel to the crowd before him at the Museum.
“This Museum owes you much. Look at it and be
proud.”
Organized by the Museum with the help of the
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors, the Tribute was perhaps one of the last
opportunities for the eyewitness generation and
their descendants to come together. Saturday night
featured a dinner for more than 4.500 people at
the Washington, D.C. Convention Center where
Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, who led the U.S.
government’s negotiations for Holocaust
restitution during the Clinton administration and
N
OTED IN PASSING
and stars from the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater,
with inspiring remarks by Abraham Foxman and
Valdka Meed..
The reunion drew such tremendous interest—
with participants traveling to Washington from 38
states and 5 countries—that an enormous white
tent was erected on the field opposite the Museum
to accommodate the crowds. To help survivors
in finding “landsmen,” the tent housed a “Survivor
Village” with tables staffed by survivors from a
number of villages, cities, ghettos, concentration
camps and displaced persons camps. Visitors
could post questions on a large bulletin board to
seek information about those they lost during the
war. Media flocked from as far as Japan. China
and Europe to cover the event.
Part of the Museum’s l0th Anniversary
programming, the Tribute recognized all that the
survivors who have contributed to the success of
the institution, from helping plan the Permanent
Exhibition to raising money, to volunteering their
help in the day-to-day activities of the Museum.
“Without the support of the survivor community,
this museum could never have been created,” said
Museum Director Sara Bloomfield. “We wanted
to pay tribute to them.”
Addressing fellow survivors gathered before
him on the Museum’s Elsenhower Plaza on
Sunday, Benjamin Meed said, “We stand with our
children and their children to mark the 10th
anniversary of this Museum. This permanent living
memorial to the Jewish uniqueness of the
Holocaust will remain long after we have gone. It
is our voice. It will continue to tell and retell our
story.
“Remembrance will endure.” he said.
Tuvia Wiesner and his brother, both Holocaust
survivors, came to Israel after World War II. His
brother was killed in the 1948 War of Liberation.
Subsequently, Tuvia married his late brother’s fiance,
and they had six children. As was his usual custom,
Wiesner rose early every morning to attend prayer
services at the Nezarim synagogue. On Chol Hamoed
(the intermediate days) Pesach, Chanan was one of two
men who were the first to arrive before the starting
time for services. They were both stabbed and killed
by terrorists as they approached the synagogue. Later
security forces discovered that the early arrival of
Chanan and the other man had interrupted the terrorists
before they could complete the installation of a bomb
in the Aron Kodesh (holy ark) of the synagogue, which
they apparently intended to detonate in the middle of
morning prayer services, potentially killing many
more people.
EDDY WYNSCHENK
I met Eddy Wynschenk in September 1946 in
Amsterdam when both of us were residents of the
Home for Jewish Boys orphaned by the Holocaust.
While I had survived in hiding in the Netherlands, Eddy
had been incarcerated in concentration camp Vught in
the Netherlands then, after a short stay in transit camp
Westerbork, was deported to Auschwitz. There he was
put to work on the ramps in Birkenau emptying the
cattle cars of whatever arriving Jews had left behind,
followed by working in a mine in Furstengrubbe. He
was sent on the death march in January 1945 to DoraNordhausen where upon arrival he suffered from
severe frostbite and all his toes, black from gangrene,
were removed.
His wartime and postwar trauma forced him to
stop working. The American government awarded him
monthly SSI payments. The Dutch government finally
recognized how it had added insult to injury in the
immediate postwar years and awarded him a small
monthly stipend in an attempt to make up for its
negligence, and provided an automobile to ameliorate
his growing immobility. Eddy dedicated himself to
speaking in the local schools about his Holocaust
experiences. While he tried to teach about the dangers
of intolerance, his main message to his students was
never to miss an opportunity to tell their families “I
Love You” even in moments of anger, for it was the
one thing he missed the most since he lost his family.
Eddy Wynschenk passed away on December 16,
2003 after a short illness.
Louis de Groot
H
OLOCAUST HISTORY
“CHRISTMAS
WITHOUT JEWS”:
A HOLOCAUST
CONTROVERSY
by Dr. Rafael Medoff
During the 1940s, Academy Award-winning
screenwriter Ben Hecht authored a series of
controversial newspaper advertisements intended
to alert Americans about the Holocaust. But none
of the ads caused more of a stir than the one he
wrote in 1943, which declared that the world
was looking forward to a Christmas with no Jews
left alive in Europe.
Hecht’s ads were placed in major newspapers
around the country by a Jewish activist
organization known as the Bergson group. It was
headed by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), a Zionist
emissary from Jerusalem who organized protest
rallies, lobbied Congress, and sought to raise
public consciousness about the plight of Jews in
Hitler Europe.
The advertisements featured eye-catching
headlines such as “How Well Are You Sleeping?
Is There Something You Could Have Done to
Save Millions of Innocent People—Men,
Women, and Children—from Torture and
Death?” and “Time Races Death: What Are We
Waiting For?”
In early 1943, Hecht read a newspaper report
in which Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels
was quoted as vowing to finish the task of
murdering all European Jews in time for
Christmas. The Nazi threat inspired Hecht to pen
an advertisement headlined “Ballad of the
Doomed Jews of Europe.” Rumors about the
ad, and the ballad it contained, reached some
journalists even before it was published. The
Independent Jewish Press Service reported that
the ad “would have to be printed on asbestos, it
was so hot,” because the ballad “says that there’s
going to be a very happy Christmas this year
because by December there just wouldn’t be any
Jews left for the Christian world to spit at.”
That report was not far off the mark. Hecht’s
ballad began: “Four million Jews waiting for death
/ Oh hang and burn but—quiet, Jews! / Don’t be
bothersome; save your breath— / The world is
busy with other news.”
The second stanza challenged the Roosevelt
administration: “Four million murders are quite
a smear / Even our State Department views /
The slaughter with much disfavor here / But
then—it’s busy with other news.”
Such public Jewish criticism of the Roosevelt
administration was quite unusual, given the high
level of American Jewish support for FDR and
the New Deal. Even those Jews who were
privately troubled by Roosevelt’s refusal to aid
European Jewry were reluctant to speak out,
fearing that any public disagreement with the
president during wartime might provoke
antisemitism. But Bergson and Hecht believed
the desperate situation of Europe’s Jews required
them to speak out.The last stanza of Hecht’s
“Ballad of the Doomed Jews” was the most jarring:
“Oh World be patient—it will take / Some time
before the murder crews / Are done. By Christmas
you can make / Your Peace on Earth without the
Jews.”
The ad was scheduled to appear in the New
York Times in early 1943, but was delayed because
of the wartime paper shortage. In the meantime,
someone at the Times leaked the text to officials of
the American Jewish Committee, a mainstream
Jewish organization that strongly opposed Bergson’s
outspoken approach. Bergson was urgently
summoned to the office of AJCommittee president
Joseph Proskauer, who warned him that “such an
anti-Christian attitude [as implied in the ad] could
well bring on pogroms in the USA.”
Bergson agreed to withdraw the ad, but insisted
that Proskauer convene a meeting of Jewish leaders
to discuss taking concrete steps to press for U.S.
action to aid European Jewry. The meeting, held in
New York City some weeks later, was attended by
officials of more than a dozen prominent Jewish
organizations. Bergson, who spoke at the meeting,
urged them to sponsor an emergency conference
on the issue of rescuing Jews from Hitler. But “they
wanted just to get a repeated assurance that [the
ad] won’t be published,” he later recalled.
Bergson held back the ad for several more
months, hoping that Proskauer and his colleagues
might yet decide to take a more activist approach
on the rescue issue. When no such action was
forthcoming, he decided to publish the ad. It
appeared in the New York Times on September
14, 1943.
Needless to say, the ad did not cause any
pogroms. On the contrary: “Ballad of the Doomed
Jews” and the other Hecht ads played a crucial
role in the Bergson group’s campaign for U.S.
rescue action, by drawing attention to the plight of
Europe’s Jews and rousing public support for U.S.
intervention. The campaign culminated, in October
1943, in the introduction of a Congressional
resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government
agency to rescue Jewish refugees.
The public controversy caused by
Congressional hearings on the resolution, combined
with behind-the-scenes pressure from Treasury
Department officials, convinced President
Roosevelt, in January 1944 to establish the rescue
agency the resolution had sought—the War Refugee
Board. The Board’s activities, which included
financing the rescue work of Raoul Wallenberg,
saved the lives of over 200,000 people during the
final 15 months of the war.
Those American Jewish leaders who believed
nothing could be done to help European Jewry, or
who claimed there would be a severe antisemitic
backlash if American Jews protested, had been
proven wrong. The Bergson group had
demonstrated that Jewish activism was a realistic
and effective option in the United States during the
Holocaust years.
(Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies, which focuses on issues related to America’s response to the
Holocaust - www.WymanInstitute.org)
TOGETHER 23
“I WAS THERE”
N
by Martin Herskovitz, Petach Tikvah, Israel
Moderator, 2nd-gen@smartgroups.com
h-martin@netvision.net.il
OTED IN PASSING
DANIEL AARON
Daniel Aaron graduated from Temple University in 1950
with a degree in Economics. He subsequently went on to
become one of the founders of Comcast Corporation,
America’s third largest cable-television company. He was
a leader in the cable industry throughout its period of
greatest growth and served as chairman of the National
Cable Television Association while helping build Comcast
into a Fortune 500 company. After retiring, he was active
in leading efforts to battle Parkinson’s disease, along with
his wife, Geraldine, a Temple alumna. In 2001 Veritas
Press published his biography, Take the Measure of the
Man - An American Success Story. Aaron’s father was a
prosperous German Jew, whose law practice and political career ended after Hitler came to power. When he
was unable to find work in New York, the elder Aaron
committed suicide three weeks after his wife took her
own life. Aaron was orphaned at 13, along with a younger
brother. His biography not only encompasses his experiences as a foster child, soldier, family man in Levittown,
Pennsylvania, but as a prominent cable-TV executive. It
is a triumphant story of the human spirit-of courage, compassion and hope. In 1994, Aaron received the Diamond
Achievement Award from Temple University.
LOTTE BERK
Lotte Berk, who used her training as the basis for an
exercise program that became popular with the stars,
recently died at 90. Berk, whose family was Jewish, was
born Liselotte Heymansohn in Cologne. In the 1930s, she
fled the Nazis with her husband, Ernst Berk, a fellow dancer,
and their baby daughter, Esther. Berk started modeling at
Heatherley's School of Fine Art and later danced with the
Ballet Rambert at London's Covent Garden. During World
War II, she entertained British troops. She developed her
dancer's training regime into a set of exercises that
improved muscle tone and posture. At 46, she opened her
women-only studio in London's Manchester Street. Clients
included actresses Joan Collins and Sian Phillips, singer
Barbra Streisand and model Yasmin Le Bon.
YEHUDA ELBERG
Award-winning Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg recently
died in his sleep in Montreal. He was 91. A widely
acclaimed Yiddishist whose body of work documented
shtetl life, he gained popularity in the English-speaking
world after a 1997 English translation of two of his novels:
Ship of the Hunted and The Empire of Kalman the
Cripple. While he found new audiences with his English
translations, Elberg remained committed to the Yiddish
language. “I don’t accept what people say, that Yiddish is
dead or dying,” he told The Forward. “Something that is
dead doesn’t grow.”
Born in Zgierz, Poland, in 1912, he published his first
short story in 1932 and went on to write for several
Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers. During the Holocaust,
Elberg was actively involved with both the Lodz and
Warsaw resistance movements, setting up safe houses and
managing to avoid deportation to a concentration camp.
Toward the end of the war, he got military accreditation
to trail the American military as a correspondent. Most
of his stories written during the war were lost.
After the war, he lived in Paris and became close
friends with the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, who pushed
Elberg to continue working.
A committed Zionist, Elberg worked in New York
after World War II, helping Jewish refugees immigrate
to Palestine. He married Tahilla Feinerman, who died in
1955. He relocated the following year to Montreal, where
he remained for the rest of his life with his second wife,
Shaindle Stipelman Bloomstone, who died in 1987. In
his adopted city of Montreal, Elberg became a prolific
writer and published many of his stories in literary
journals. Elberg was often compared to famed Yiddish
TOGETHER 22
writer Isaac Bashevis Singer—his distant cousin.
Elberg was honored with numerous prizes during his
lifetime. In 1977, he won the Itsik Manger Prize, which is
often called the Nobel Prize of Yiddish Literature; he was
granted the award in Tel Aviv by Golda Meir, in her last
public appearance. In 1984, he won the Prime Minister’s
Award, an Israeli literature prize that had been given only
once before to a non-Israeli: Singer.
ISSER HAREL
Isser Harel started out in 1930 as a young Russian
immigrant to Israel. He later founded his own orange
company. By the 1940s Harel joined the Haganah and
the British auxiliary forces to fight the Nazis. He headed
the intelligence branch of the Haganah in 1942.
Harel quickly climbed the ranks of the Israeli elite,
ultimately becoming the first head of the Shin Bet,
Israel’s internal security service. He was the Mossad
director from 1952-1963.
During his tenure as the Mossad chief, he led two
famous operations. The first was the capture in 1960
of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi architects of the
Final Solution. The other involved Yosseleh
Schumacher, the grandson of an ultra-Orthodox
Brooklynite, who, in 1959, was prevented from
kidnaping his son and enrolling him in a religious
school. Harel resigned from the Mossad in 1963.
After his career in intelligence, Harel was primarily
a writer. His best known book, The House on Garibaldi
Street (1975), recounts the capture of Eichmann. He
died in Israel at 91.
RABBI EPHRAIM OSHRY
Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, leader for 50 years of the
landmarked synagogue Beth Hamedrash Hagadol on the
Lower East Side and venerated among Orthodox Jews as
a sage of the Torah and author of a five-volume religious
response to the Holocaust, died recently in Mt. Sinai
Hospital at the age of 89.
Born in Kupishok, Lithuania, in 1914, Oshry studied
with the great rabbis of the day. He was interned in a
concentration camp near Kovno, Lithuania, by the Nazis
during World War II. His first wife and their children died
in the camps before the end of the war. In 1949, he married
Frieda Greenzwieg, a survivor of Auschwitz.
The volumes on the religious response to the Holocaust
were begun while he was in the camp, written in Hebrew on
bits of paper, which were buried and retrieved after the war.
It was the rabbi’s life work. A one-volume version in English
won a National Jewish Book Award several years ago.
Rabbi Oshry and his wife left Lithuania and landed in
Rome where the rabbi organized a yeshiva for orphaned
refugee children. In 1950 he managed to bring all the yeshiva
students with him when he moved with his family to Montreal.
They came to New York in 1952 where he was invited to be
the rabbi of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, a congregation
founded in 1852. The funeral, attended by nearly 1,000
mourners, was at his synagogue. The body was taken to
Jerusalem for burial.
FRED KORT
Manfred Kort, 80, one of nine survivors of Treblinka, the
man who created the bubble machine for Lawrence Welk
and built a toy empire in California, died recently. Kort,
who donated $5 million to the United States Holocaust
Museum, was a major Jewish philanthropist who gave to
many causes, including Bar-Ilan University. Son of a
Polish Jew who lived in Germany, he was pushed with his
family into Poland and then, as the Germans overran that
country in September 1939, into a succession of mean
ghettos and work camps. Kort was sent to the Treblinka
labor camp and survived there for about a year, mainly
doing water-carrying duty that got him food from the
guards’ kitchen. On a Sunday morning, July 23, 1944,
guards burst into Kort’s barracks with a rough command:
“Lie down wherever you are.” Instead, Kort ran, climbing
out a barracks window and hiding in a storage shed.
Because of his photographic memory, Kort was a valuable
witness during war crimes trials against the Nazis. Kort
arrived in the U.S. in 1947 with a nickel in his pocket.
Under the wing of the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee, he lived in a modest Manhattan hotel, got a
job at Bendix Corp. and entered night school. In 1969,
Kort took the Teeny Bouncer, a tiny high-bouncing ball,
$50,000 and, with a partner, set up Imperial Toy Corp.,
which he grew into a multi-national, multi-million dollar
corporation.
RAFAEL FELIX SCHARF
Rafael Felix “Felek” Scharf, who died in London aged
89, was an educator, writer, historian and keeper of
memory, who devoted his life to the tragedies of the Shoah,
and to the grim complex of Polish-Jewish relations. Very
much a pre-war Polish Jew, and occupied for much of his
life with a business career, he became a crucial figure in
postwar historiography.
Scharf was born in Cracow, where he studied to
become a lawyer. He was a modern, exemplary Cracowian
of his times, inhabiting Polish, Jewish and European
cultures. Increasingly, though, his love for Poland was
unrequited. Scharf left Cracow in 1938, going, he would
later say, voluntarily but guiltily, as if he were deserting a
kind of battlefield. Life was being made increasingly
difficult for Jews, no matter how much they loved the great
Polish poets.
During the second world war, he served first in the
infantry and then in British military intelligence. He
worked for a while with Ignacy Schwarzbart, one of the
two Jewish representatives to the Polish government in
exile in London. Scharf was with him when the telegram
from the Polish underground arrived with the first news
of the death camps. Schwarzbart, that day, recorded in his
diary, “This is not possible.” Scharf spent the rest of his
life trying to explicate the impossible.
At the end of the war, he was interrogating Germans
in Norway, which was when he made his first of many trips
back “home.” He combined his mission with family life
and business careers as the owner of a silkscreen printing
business and then as a dealer in English watercolors.
Scharf became an important figure on committees and in
publishing houses—he was one of the founders of the
Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford; he sat on
the board of editors of the Library of Holocaust
Testimonies.
David Flusfeder
IRENE G. SHUR
Dr. Irene G. Shur, professor of history at West Chester
University and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania
was one of the pioneers of Holocaust Studies in the United
States. Since 1977, she taught thousands of students—
undergraduate and graduate, teachers at the Intermediate
Unit in Chester County, and took groups of students to
study the Holocaust in Israel. In 1990 she became the
recipient of an Emmy Award for her work on a
documentary, CANDLES, which featured the return to
Auschwitz of some of the Mengele twins. She also
introduced a Master of Arts degree and a Certificate of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as a Distance
Learning program which broadcast lessons to the Dixon
Learning Center in Harrisburg, PA.
STANLEY STEINBERG
Stanley Steinberg, a Holocaust survivor born in Radom,
Poland in 1927 passed away recently in Los Angeles.
Should you decide to ask whether my trip from Israel
to the US for the Tribute to the Survivors in Washington
was worth it, my answer is an unequivocal yes.
It was enthralling to see so many people pay tribute
to the Holocaust survivors. Yet many survivors have
already passed away and there was a general awareness that
many more will not be with us for long. You felt the urgency
in the air as family members bent their heads to the
whispered, half-choked words of the survivors as they told
their story, many for the first time. Many frail survivors,
on canes, in wheelchairs, in obviously failing health made
the effort to tell their story, to leave their legacy to next
generation. They made this effort because they knew that
this may be their last chance, or if not the last, at least
their best chance to tell their stories with Museum
exhibits serving as reminders and guides. I passed them in
the museum and marveled at their quiet strength, the same
strength that allowed them to survive the Nazi horrors.
I saw their children and grandchildren, with video
cameras and tape recorders, documenting every word,
every emotion. I saw their faces, too; eager for knowledge
yet appalled at what they have heard, a mixture of horror
and gratitude that is a special mixture found at such events
and seldom elsewhere. I saw them in the Meed Center,
clustered around the small screen, scribbling down names
and details, verifying that every sister and brother is
recorded, never to be forgotten.
And yet it was not only memories and sorrow, it was
the joys of music and the joys of reunions, friendships
renewed and friendships cemented. It was an amazing
experience!
“WE WERE THERE”
by Generations of the Shoah International
gsi@imeg.com.
Generations of the Shoah International (GSI), a
Second Generation group which networks and shares
information and resources about the Holocaust with
2Gs and 3Gs across the globe, had the unparalleled
opportunity to attend the Tribute to Holocaust Survivors
in Washington, D.C—surrounded by, talking with and
learning from 3,000 survivors, an almost uncountable
number of 2Gs, 3Gs and 4Gs, and many other guests.
Hundreds of wonderful connections, new and
rekindled, were lovingly braided. For many who were
there, it was more than that: The Tribute a bracing,
bittersweet mixture of laughter and joys, tears and pain,
a testament to the courage of those who survived and
those who didn’t survive the Shoah. Appropriately, the
Tribute challenged all of us—survivors, 2Gs and 3Gs
alike—to honor the memory of those who perished by
working even harder to make this world a better, safer
place for Jews and non-Jews alike.
History is littered with many murderously
ambitious efforts to obliterate the Jewish people, but
none came closer to realization than the Holocaust.
Yet history wryly waited to show one of its hands in
the form of the torch passed at the Tribute from
survivors to their descendents. Who could have
believed it if they had been told nearly 60 years ago
that the survivors—forgotten, abandoned and ignored
by the world—would one day, at a United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in the capital of the
United States, be the honored guests of a great nation.
Those who were there could—and did.
A GATHERING OF
GUARDIANS OF SHOAH
MEMORY
by Menachem Rosensaft
For the first time, the survivors were guests rather
than hosts. They did not have to worry about logistics or
programming. Most importantly, they did not have to
justify themselves to anyone. They were made to feel
that their existences, their memories, mattered.
The museum’s staff and volunteers made the
survivors feel not only welcome, but also special. And
the survivors, in turn, had a profound effect on the
museum’s staff. On Monday, the museum’s associate
director, Alice Greenwald, said that she had never seen
morale at the museum so high. The men and women
who work daily with the imagery and artifacts of
destruction had been reinvigorated by getting to know,
even if only for a few hours, those for whom the Holocaust
must forever be a reality.
“We can now sense the achievements of our
generation taking hold in this museum and in other
institutions across the country,” Meed said. “Our collective
presence reminds these institutions of their commitment
to remembrance. If they are to speak in our names, they
must respect our experience, respect both its Jewishness
and its universality.”
Far too often the Shoah is perceived as the domain
of the dead—as if they alone experienced its horrors.
The survivors suffered no less, and their anguish
continued far longer.
But the survivors are also the embodiment, the
shadows and reflections, of those who perished. They
are what, but for fate, those who were annihilated would
have become. Not ghosts or two-dimensional stereotypes,
but loving, interactive, outspoken men and women. The
sound reverberating through the two enormous tents set
up across the street from the museum was a blend of
laughter, tales and, yes, nostalgia. Sadness and mourning
are part of the survivors’ collective persona, but not the
defining element.
The most striking aspect of the weekend was its
tone. The mood was one of fulfillment. A sense of energy,
purpose and vitality permeated the multigenerational visits
to the museum’s permanent exhibition and special exhibits
on Anne Frank and the hidden children, workshops where
grandchildren interviewed their grandparents, panels at
which survivors such as Adam Boren and Joseph
Tenenbaum talked about writing their memoirs, tables
identified by the names of camps and ghettos at which
survivors ate together and reminisced, and the joyous
closing concert of Yiddish music.
Individually, each survivor may feel lonely, but
together they form a vibrant community. And their
families, their children and grandchildren are an integral
part of that community, which speaks to the future and
the continuity of their hopes and dreams.
For some sons and daughters of survivors, this
gathering was also bittersweet, even painful. My father
died 28 years ago, but I had gone to the previous
gatherings in Jerusalem, Washington, Philadelphia and
New York with my mother. Now both my parents are
dead, and I was there on their behalf as well as my own.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the AntiDefamation League, reminded us that because
antisemitism is alive and prospering, the survivors’ legacy
to future generations must become “one that inspires
leadership and action, that demands accountability from
all the denizens of this small planet to refuse to tolerate
intolerance.”
That, of course, must be the essence of our mission.
Neither the survivors, nor especially we, their children
and grandchildren, have the right to spend our time and
energies talking only to ourselves about ourselves.
By coming together, Elie Wiesel told the thousands
assembled at the museum on Sunday afternoon that they
had prevailed over forgetfulness: “Surrounded by your
children and grandchildren, fellow survivors, do you feel
joy in your hearts? If so, it is not void of sadness; it
cannot be. And yet, and yet. Close your eyes and see the
invisible faces of those we have left behind or who have
left us behind as witnesses. Our presence here today is
our answer to their silent question. We have kept our
promise. We have not forgotten.”
“Remember, fellow
survivors, when we
emerged from the ghettos
and the forests and the
death camps, hopelessly
determined to invoke hope
and tell the tales, few were
willing to listen. Survivors
were understood by
survivors alone. They
spoke in code. Those who
were not there will never know what it meant being
there. All outsiders could do was to come close to
the gates; those who were not in Auschwitz will
never enter Auschwitz.”
Elie Wiesel spoke these words beside the
Western Wall in Jerusalem more than 22 years ago,
on June 18, 1981, at the concluding ceremony of
the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
That was the first large-scale reunion of those who
had experienced the Shoah. Many of us, their sons
and daughters, came with them. We witnessed their
rejoicing in seeing one another, all the while
remembering.
Today, the survivors remain the guardians of
their memories, of their legacy, except that now
their voices are being listened to more and more.
This past weekend, they met again, more than 2,000
of them, accompanied by their children and
grandchildren, some 7,000 persons in all. The
venue was the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, the occasion, a tribute by
the museum to the survivors. At a pivotal moment
of transition, the survivors were reassured that their
history, their past and, yes, the remembrance of
their dead, would be preserved and protected within
the museum’s walls.
“My generation lives at a vital time,” Fred
Zeidman, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council, told them Sunday. “On one side
of us are the inspiring examples of survivors and
the enduring memory of those who perished. On
the other side are generations upon generations who
must remember the Holocaust or be at risk of
repeating it.... We pledge ourselves and our
successors to uphold the torch of remembrance
and accept with a sense of privilege the legacy we
have been bequeathed: To participate in whatever
ways we can—individual by individual—in the
effort to repair our world.”
Walking among survivors is always a unique,
uplifting experience. Each time we hear stories we
have not heard before: experiences from the ghettos,
nightmares from the death camps, reminiscences
of chance encounters, humor and bittersweet
melodies still echoing out of the postwar displaced
persons camps.
Not surprisingly perhaps, the sons and
daughters of the survivors share similar poignant
moments: “My father told me that he and your
father...” Sometimes the revelations come from
strangers. A man who had been a child in BergenBelsen said to me, “Did you know that your mother
saved my life?” And then we learn, a generation
removed, hitherto unrevealed insights into our
parents’ lives.
Last weekend, however, was different from
previous gatherings. In the past — Jerusalem in
1981, Washington in 1983, Philadelphia in 1985,
New York in 1986 — the survivors themselves,
led by Benjamin Meed, Sam Bloch and Roman
Kent, among others, had been the organizers. This
time, a federal institution opened its doors, in the Menachem Rosensaft is the founding chairman of the International
words of the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield, Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and a member
“to those whose lives we honor.”
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
TOGETHER 7
REFLECTIONS ON RESTITUTION FUNDS
by Sam E. Bloch
I am a survivor of the
Holocaust. My fellow
survivors and I are the
witnesses who emerged
from Nazi hell with a special
message, with a sacred
legacy of remembrance and
justified claims of restitution.
It is crucially important
that Holocaust restitution
funds and other resources
within the Jewish community are used to assist my fellow survivors who need
social services they cannot afford. These are brave
men and women who are elderly now and need
assistance. They may not be able to meet the costs of
their utilities. The scars left by the past affects their
health and their entire existence. Funds from Holocaust
restitution and Jewish organizations must be used lo
help them live out their days with a measure of dignity.
The situation of the needy survivors has only
recently begun to come to the attention of many in the
wider Jewish community, but the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany has played a pivotal
role for a decade in providing such assistance to
survivors. Its funds for such assistance derive primarily
from the Claims Conference’s recovery of unclaimed
Jewish property in the former East Germany.
The Claims Conference fought to recover this
property at the same time it ensured the right of heirs
to stolen Jewish property to file claims for it. If the
Claims Conference had not fought to recover this
property, the land would have reverted to the state
[Germany] or to postwar non-Jewish owners, a simply
unthinkable outcome.
The Claims Conference has used most of the
proceeds it has derived from the sale of or
compensation for that German Jewish property to
pioneer specialized care for Holocaust survivors around
You may have read in
your local paper that the
Mormon Church, also
known as the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, despite agreements
with the American Gathering, has continued the practice of posthumously
baptising Holocaust victims and other Jews.
The story was published in the New York Times
and other papers and mentioned the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors. Ernest Michel, who
has been spearheading this effort since 1995, was
Chairman of the World Gathering in Israel in 1981.
At a special meeting of the Executive Committee of
the American Gathering in early 1995, he was authorized to negotiate with the Church on behalf of the
American Gathering. At that time there was a total of
380,000 Holocausts victims baptized, including his
parents.
Subsequent negotiations lasted six months and
supposedly resulted in the withdrawal of all 380,000
names of Holocaust victims from the Church's
records, the first time they had agreed to do so. The
Church also agreed to discontinue the baptism of all
Jews. Ernie has discovered that despite the 1995
TOGETHER 8
the world. The needs are great and diverse, with
assistance in more than 30 countries including
homecare, medical care and equipment, food packages
and hot meals, winter clothing, rent payments, nursing
beds and emergency cash grants.
The Claims Conference has established Holocaust
Survivor Assistance programs in more than 50
communities in the United States and has helped
reinvent care for the elderly in Israel. And although
the funds derive from German Jewish property, they
are used to care for survivors regardless of their country
of origin or current residence.
The conditions and the needs of Holocaust
survivors, who have endured so much hardship in their
lives, should be a permanent concern to the entire
Jewish community and to all Jewish federations, not
only to the Claims Conference.
But the Claims Conference has also come under
criticism of late for its allocations that support Shoah
education, research and documentation. Some say all
funding should go to the survivors themselves. Faced
with the imperatives of both caring for elderly survivors
and ensuring that the lessons of the Shoah are
preserved for generations to come, the Claims
Conference has done both. It has used a small portion
of the funds from the recovery of German Jewish
property to fulfill an obligation to preserve the memory
of those who perished.
Survivors like myself want the world to know
what happened. We who walked away from the
ashes of Nazi Europe knew we had the
responsibility of bring the voice of those who did
not survive. In recent years, as we have become
fewer in number, many have acted on that
responsibility, trying to tell the world our story while
we still can.
It is not enough to repeatedly sound the slogan
“Remember.” And neither is it the survivors who
need to be told to remember. When we sound this
command so loudly, it should be directed primarily
to the world around us, to those who were not in
Treblinka. And this is where grants for education,
research and documentation are vitally im-portant.
Restitution funds must also be used for this purpose.
Claims Conference allocations in this area are
used for Shoah educational programs and teaching
materials, and efforts to document, archive and
preserve irreplaceable documents, pictures, artifacts
and firsthand survivor accounts of the Holocaust
The funds come from the assets of those who
perished. Using a small portion to preserve their
memory is fully justified. It is indeed gratifying.
The vast majority of all Claims Conference funds
go to direct compensation payments to survivors.
Thus, 1 to 2 percent of all restitution and
compensation funds distributed by the Claims
Conference are used to preserve the memory of those
who perished—to remember how they lived and how
they died, and the world that was destroyed.
These efforts must be continued in order that
the legacy of the Holocaust may remain with the
world long after the survivors—and the generation
that learned from the survivors—are gone.
It is my firm belief that any survivor who needs
social service assistance should receive it. Those who
emerged from the camps, ghettos, forests and hiding
places already have endured more than any human
being should. In their last years, Holocaust survivors
are entitled to care and comfort, and it is the
responsibility of the Jewish community to
supplement the efforts already being made in this
area with restitution funds.
But restitution funds have many worthy uses,
among them ensuring that the names of the Six Million
are recorded for all time. Those who perished wished
to be remembered. We must honor their last wish.
Sam E. Bloch is the senior vice president of The American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the president
of the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Survivors.
THE MORMON CHURCH SCANDAL
agreement, which was signed by him for the Ameri- ask President Hinckley and the leadership of the
can Gathering, the Mormons have continued to bap- Mormon Church to keep to the 1995 agreement and
tize Jews. Names such as Theodore Herzl, David be sure that it is properly carried out.
“It is entirely possible that some of your relaBen-Gurion, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and other
famous Jews are among those baptized. It is cer- tives, parents, uncles, etc. were posthumously baptainly possible that some of your own relatives are tized by the Mormon Church. You can find out about
this by going to the nearest Mormon Temple and ask
on this list.
With our support and that of the President's Con- to look at their IGI files. If you find names and if you
do agree to write to the Church, you
ference, the ADL, the Weisenthal
should use these among your arguCenter and Senator Hillary Rodham
send your letters to:
ments.”
Clinton, the small group of indiPresident
Gordon
B.
As you may know, the Mormon
viduals involved in this effort are
Hinckley
Church has a beautiful temple in Isnow asking the Mormon Church
to stop, once and for all, this ab- The Church of Jesus Christ rael and they are very friendly to Isof Latter-Day Saints
rael and the Jewish community in
horrent, insulting practice.
Salt Lake Temple
general. You should also know that
We are asking each of you to
50 N.W. Temple St.
a similar letter writing campaign is
write your own letter to to PresiSalt Lake City, UT 84150 now being organized in Israel. There
dent Gordon B. Hinckley at The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latteris no doubt that hundreds, and we
Day Saints, stating that you (either
hope, thousands of letters, will have
as a survivor or a descendant of survivors) deplore an impact on the Church and convince the Elders to
this practice by the Mormon Church and ask that it be stop this practice.
We are sure you realize the importance of this
stopped.
You can add that you learned about it through the issue.
media. The letter should not be an attack on the MorPresidium of the American Gathering of Jewish
mon Church. It must be polite but firm. It should
Holocaust Survivors.
A PROMISE TO REMEMBER: The
Holocaust in the Words and Voices of its
Survivors by Michael Berenbaum (Boston,
MA: AOL Time Warner Book Group, 2003) 48p.,
US$29.45. CAN$39.95.
A “portable” Holo-caust museum, A Promise to
Remember is an interactive history of the Holocaust
that includes removable documents—from cherished
recipes that were adapted to
life in a Jewish ghetto to
artwork created in a
concentration camp—and
an hour-long audio CD
capturing survivors’ voices
and stories. Each chapter
addresses a different topic,
moving from the rise of the
Nazis and creation of Jewish
ghettos
to
life
in
concentration camps and
liberation. The interactive format, rich with photos
and pull-outs, combined with the historical depth of
Berenbaum’s text, make this an invaluable tool for
both family discussion and individual understanding
of this darkest period in world history.
THE GERMAN ARMY AND GENOCIDE:
Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews,
and other Civilians in the East, 19391944. edited by the Hamburg Institute for
Social Research (New York: The New Press,
1999) 224p., US$25.00.
For a number of years after the Second World
War, it was generally assumed that only the SS and
the Gestapo were involved in the murder of Jews,
communists, civilians, war
prisoners and others in the
East. This myth has been
shattered for some time,
but with the publication of
this book we have
handwritten letters from
German soldiers to their
families, official German
Army documents and 500
photographs providing further
proof that the average
German soldier serving in
the Wehrmacht knew about these atrocities, and at
times even participated in the killings.
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, the Allies
unwittingly helped perpetuate this fiction that these
German soldiers were above the fray by portraying
them as basically honorable and decent men who were
just following orders and were merely victims
of Hitler, their mad leader. By exposing this distortion,
we have a more accurate picture of what actually
transpired which should help us better understand how
to deal with ongoing acts of genocide.
H
Warsaw in September
1939, during his years
in the Vilna Ghetto and in
the Klooga labor camp
where he was building
fortifications for the
German defense. On
September 17, 1944, one
day before the Red Army
liberated the camp, Kruk
buried his last diaries in the
Lagedi camp in front of six
witnesses. He and most of
the remaining Jews in
Klooga and Lagedi were shot and burned on a pyre
the next day. One of the six men survived the war
and retrieved the diaries.Other portions of the diaries
were uncovered elsewhere.
GHETTO DIARY by Janusz Korczak with
intoduction by Betty Jean Lifton(New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)
115 p., US$12.95. CAN$17.25.
Shortly after the German
invasion of Poland in
September 1939, and about a
year before the ghetto was
established in Warsaw, Janusz
Korczak, a distinguished
Polish Jewish writer of books
on parenting, plays and
children’s books, an innovative educator, pediatrician
and one of the first advocate
for children’s rights, began
writing a personal memoir. Years before, he gave up a
successful medical practice to set up progressive
orphanages in Warsaw for impoverished children.
In1912, he opened the orphanage on Krochmalna
Street with a hundred Jewish boys and girls that
focused on “moral education.”
When the Germans forced the Jews into the
ghetto, he took his charges with him. In the
introduction to the diary, Betty Jean Lipton correctly
observes that the diary reveals how a moral and
spiritual man struggled to keep alive the 200 orphans
who had come with him into the ghetto. When
Korczak’s Polish disciples on the Aryan side of the
ghetto heard rumors of Jews being gassed, they
offered to spirit him from the ghetto, but he refused
to abandon the children. When the time came for the
group to be deported, Korczak held two young
children by the hand as he led the rest of the 192
children and 10 staff members in an orderly
procession to the Umschlagplatz, from where they
were transported to Treblinka. An inspiring and
moving diary.
LIFE BETWEEN MEMORY AND HOPE:
The Survivors of the Holocaust in
Occupied Germany by Zeev W. Mankowitz
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
335p., US$35.00. CAN$46.55.
THE LAST DAYS OF JERUSALEM OF
LITHUANIA: Chronicles from the Vilna
Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944 by
Herman Kruk, Benjamin Harshav, Editor. (New
Most books about the Jews in post-war
Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press,
Germany
are written from the perspective
2002) 732p.,US$45.00. CAN$60.00.
When the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated in September,
1943, Herman Kruk along with several
thousand remaining Jews, were taken to camps in
Estonia, ”notably” to Klooga, near Tallinn. Kruk, a
member of the Jewish Labor Bund from Warsaw, kept
a journal of daily life from the Nazi invasion of
of outsiders and thus do not reflect the rich
and complex inner life of the survivors. Zeev
Mankowitz, a senior lecturer at the Melton Centre
for Jewish education at The Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, has written an important internal history of
the German Jewish survivor community, its people,
OLOCAUST LIBRARY
ideas, movements and institutions. H i s e x t e n s i v e u s e
of survivor newspapers,
journals, local camp papers
and interviews with key
participants enables us to
understand how they confronted
their unbearable past, t h e i r
intense present and their
views on Zionism that shaped
their future. In the process,
Mankowitz shatters the
myth of the survivors as broken and helpless
victims of history. Had he given more attention
to the spiritual and religious nature of the
She’arith Hapletah, and their attempt to
reconnect to their roots by establishing
yeshivas, kosher kitchens, mikvehs and
printing thousands of copies of the Talmud
and other sacred texts, this would have been
an outstanding book. Even with this glaring
omission, the book remains a major
contribution to the field.
MILITANT ZIONISM IN AMERICA: The
Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky
Movement in the United States, 19261948 by Rafael Medoff (Tuscaloosa and
London: The University
of Alabama Press,
2002) 290 p.,
US$39.95. CAN$53.25
From 1926 until the
establishment of the State of
Israel in May 1948, the U.S.
branch of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist
movement played a very
significant role in the
American Jewish community
and in helping shape American and British foreign
policy. The Revisionists did this by using extensive
advertising in the press, holding dramatic protest
rallies and making strategic alliances in Congress and
elsewhere. The leaders of this movement were
Benzion Netanyahu, Peter Bergson and Ben Hecht.
They were mavericks who used their enormous
talents to arouse the conscience of America to the
Holocaust, attempt to rescue European Jews and
promote the cause of Jewish statehood. By enlisting
a wide-range of Americans to the cause including
future political heavy weights Jacob Javits and Hubert
Humphrey; actors Marlon Brando and Jane
Wyatt, comedians Carl Reiner and Harpo Marx;
and Leonard Bernstein they were able publicize
t h e i r a c t i v i t i e s i n a d r a m a t i c w a y. T h e
Revisionists also established an underground
operation to smuggle weapons to Menachem
Begin’s Irgun to fight the British. Medoff
concludes that had Netanyahu, Bergson and
Hecht worked within a traditional Jewish setting
their talents would have been underutilized. “Free
from the shackles of diplomatic niceties and
watchful boards of directors, these maverick
Zionists were able to experiment with new, bold,
and effective varieties of Jewish political
activism.” Professor Medoff ’s well-written and
brilliant study should be required reading for every
Jewish professional and lay person.
TOGETHER 21
H
AN EXTRAORDINARY VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ
OLOCAUST LIBRARY
Jews and Arabs call for
healing
U. S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS PUBLISH
FIRST THREE BOOKS IN SURVIVORS’ MEMOIRS PROJECT
JOURNEY THROUGH
THE INFERNO
by Adam Boren with an in-
YESTERDAY: My
Story
by Hadassah Rosensaft
troduction by Menachem Z.
Rosensaft (Washington, DC:
with an introduction by Elie
Wiesel (Washington, DC:
United States Holocaust Museum, 2003) $15.95.
United States Holocaust
Museum, 2003) $15.95.
Adam Boren’s gripping
account of how he fled east
from Nazi-occupied Warsaw
as a teenager, only to fall into
German hands, along with
his father and brother. Miraculously, he was able to
escape as they were being hanged and made his way
back to Warsaw. Smuggled into the ghetto, where his
mother and sister perished, he became a member of
the Jewish underground resistance movement,
participated in the uprising, and was captured. He
survived Majdanek, Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen
concentration camps as well as a death march. He
immigrated to the United States in 1946 and now
lives in New Jersey.
Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft
(1912-1997) described ghetto
life in Sosnowiec, Poland, and
her deportation to AuschwitzBirkenau where her parents,
husband and child were
murdered on arrival. At Birkenau, she was able to
save inmates from selections to the gas chambers, and
later in Bergen-Belsen she succeeded in keeping 149
Jewish children alive from December 1944 until
liberation. One of the leaders of the Jewish Displaced
Persons in the British zone of Germany, she became
a member of President Carter’s Commission on the
Holocaust and a pivotal figure in the creation of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
LEGACY and
REDEMPTION:
A Life Renewed
by Joseph E. Tenenbaum
with an introduction by Elie
Wiesel (Washington, DC:
United States Holocaust
Museum, 2003) $19.95.
Joseph E. Tenenbaum
describes his experiences as a
teenager during the Holocaust
and his later life as a major
figure in Canada’s philanthropic and business communities. An ardent Zionist
and follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, He survived the
Zatorska, Plasow, Wielicza and Mielc forced labor
camps near Krakow as well as imprisonment in the
Mauthausen, Melk and Ebensee concentration camps.
At Ebensee, he was forced to work in quarries and
underground tunneling amid the deaths of thousands
of fellow prisoners. After liberation, he spent several
years in the Displaced Persons camps of Europe. He
now lives in Toronto.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the
World Jewish Congress, collects, preserves, and makes available to scholars and the wider public
the autobiographical written accounts of survivors of the Holocaust,
so that their memories can be transmitted to future generations.
“We have a solemn obligation to the survivors to ensure that their experiences and memories are preserved for generations to come. The Holocaust must never be studied exclusively from
the perspective of the perpetrators. Survivors’ recollections are integral to the historical record. Each story is unique, and crucial to future understanding of the Holocaust.”
...Elie Wiesel
Books can be ordered from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Shop, P.O. Box 92420, Washington, D.C. 20078-7327
800-259-9998 (Mon-Fri. 9-5:30 EST)
Please include a $4 shipping and handling charge per book.
ABIDING HOPE: Bearing Witness to the
Holocaust by Benjamin A. Samuelson (Ulyssian
Publications, 2003) $24.95.
There are only six of them
surviving in the world. They are
the “sonderkommandos,” onetime Jewish slave laborers who
were forced to operate the gas
chambers at concentration camps
in Nazi-dominated Europe.
Sonderkommandos were
killed routinely after three month’s
service so that the world would
never know of their existence.
Now, one of them has stepped forward, after 50
years of saying nothing, to reveal this little known and
worst side of the Holocaust (aka the “Shoah”) in a new
book, Abiding Hope: Bearing Witness to the
Holocaust.
Writing under the pseudonym of Benjamin A.
Samuelson, the Los Angeles based author tells his painful
story of being a sonderkommando, assigned to the
children’s camp within Auschwitz. He was forced, as
a teenager, to gas thousands of Jews, including his 11
year-old sister. Six decades later, he still says, “I don’t
understand how or why I made it through alive.”
Even now, Samuelson, at the age of 78, a successful
entrepreneur, insists on using a pseudonym. “I never
TOGETHER 20
admitted that I did it in large part so that I would not
have the time and energy to remember.”
Today, he says, “The most frightening thing is how
quickly the mind becomes numb and accepts things
that only a few weeks earlier would have been
inconceivable.”
After liberation from the camps, Samuelson left the
comfort and security of the humanitarian relief center
set up by the Swedish government, to go to Palestine to
fight for a Jewish homeland in Israel’s 1948 War of
Independence.
underground press such as Vrj Nederland (The Free
Netherlands) and Het Parool, and reconstructs a
different perspective of life in the Netherlands during
the Second World War than is generally portrayed. As
Bolle notes, whatever else can be said about the book,
Ben’s story touches us on the “deepest level.”
BEN’S STORY: Holocaust Letters With
Selections From The Dutch
Underground Press edited by Kees W. Bolle
(Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2001) 150 p., US $24.95.
CAN$33.25.
Gay, a writer of Jewish history,
wrote this book to bring attention
to the experiences of the Jewish
survivors of extermination and
concentration camps and forced
labor, who sought refuge in Germany
after the Second World War. World
Jewry has either been indifferent or
hostile to the notion of Jews settling
in postwar Germany, but this is a mistake she contends. Gay
tries to show that these Jews have courageously built a
new ”Jewish world” that is burgeoning and full of vitality.
Given that this immigrant generation has little or no
background of Jewish tradition, they will have the
opportunity “to create a fresh way of living as Jews in
modern times.”
In the 1930’s, Kees Bolle, a professor emeritus of
history from UCLA, and Ben Wessels were
boyhood friends in Oostvoorne, a village in the
Netherlands. Ben died at Bergen-Belsen a month
before the camp was liberated in April 1945. While
visiting a friend in Oostvoorne many years after the
war, Bolle found Ben’s letters describing his family’s
tragic experiences during the Holocaust. Bolle
translated Ben’s letters and the reports from the Dutch
SAFE AMONG THE GERMANS: Liberated
Jews After World War II
by Ruth Gay (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2002) 347p.,
US$29.95. CAN$39.85
by Gil Sedan
KRAKOW, Poland, May (JTA) — A Hollywood
director could not have staged a more dramatic scene:
In the middle of a forest, on the ruins of a former gas
chamber at the heart of the Birkenau death camp, an
Israeli rabbi from a West Bank settlement stood and
said Kaddish, surrounded by a group of Arabs and
Jews. Birds sang along with the mourning prayer but
the group listened in total silence, noting that Rabbi
Avi Gisser had changed the Kaddish’s traditional ending.
Instead of the usual “He will make peace upon us and
upon all of Israel,” Gisser said, “and upon all the peoples
of the world.” It was a gesture of gratitude to the 120
Israeli Arabs who initiated this unusual visit to the death
camps, an unprecedented act of Arab solidarity with
the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people. When Gisser
concluded the prayer, no one said a word. People stood
in silence for two or three minutes, Jews and Arabs,
some weeping, some lost in thought. One woman could
not fight her emotions and moved away from the group,
hugging the trunk of a tree for
support and bursting into tears.
Nearly 60 years after the
Holocaust, the prayer in memory
of the 1.5 million Jews murdered
in this camp, and the support of
this unusual group of Israeli Arabs,
was just too hard for the woman
to take. Gisser is the rabbi of Ofra,
a Jewish settlement in the eye of
the Palestinian intifada. When he
goes to Jerusalem, a 20-minute
drive away, he must reckon with
the possibility of a terrorist attack.
The Palestinians are his enemy, and
he is theirs. Yet he decided to go
on this visit to Auschwitz precisely
because Arabs—Israeli Palestinians,
as many now call themselves —
initiated it. “I am sensitive to
Palestinian pain regardless of the
political dispute with them,” Gisser says. “I came
because they showed sensitivity to Jewish pain.” More
than anything else, the visit of some 450 Arabs and
Jews to Auschwitz and Birkenau was an act of courage:
It takes courage for an Israeli Arab or a French Muslim
to identify with the Jews’ plight when it is so much
easier these days simply to hate. And yet they came —
120 Arabs and 130 Jews from Israel, as well as a
delegation of 200 Jews and Muslims from France.The
visit was the initiative of a group of Israeli Arabs headed
by Archimandrite Emile Shoufani, pastor of the Greek
Catholic community in Nazareth, one of the foremost
leaders of the Christian community in Israel.After the
October 2000 riots among Israeli Arabs, as relations
between Jews and Arabs in Israel deteriorated, and
after endless discussions with Jewish friends, Shoufani
declared: “I understand that we did not understand.”
In July 2002 Shoufani published a book in France in
which he noted that one “should learn the pain of the
other side to stop the death circles.” Seven months
later, Shoufani’s group called a press conference in
Jerusalem announcing its plan to visit the death camps
in order to better understand the Jews’ pain. A group
of some 150 Jewish public figures was organized to
endorse the project, including Dan Patir of the Abraham
Fund Initiative, Eliezer Ya’ari of the New Israel Fund
and Yeshayahu Tadmor of Jezreel Valley College. A
similar group was organized in France. Shoufani stood
on the podium at the Temple synagogue in Krakow,
an hour’s drive from Auschwitz, and pledged: “We
are here to be with the Jewish people and its suffering,
and tell them, we are with you.” Shoufani was aware
of the fire his initiative had drawn from the Arab
community in Israel. In recent weeks, key Arab figures
had charged that the initiative was serving Zionist
propaganda. “The Zionist enterprise uses” the
Holocaust “to justify Israel’s crimes today,” journalist
Amir Makhoul wrote. In his address, however, Shoufani
took precisely the opposite tack: He used the Holocaust
to point out that pain is pain is pain, whether suffered
by Palestinians, Jews or people of any nationality. “We
come out of the pain or our own people,” Shoufani
said, “but it is out of this pain that we unite with you in
your pain.” It was a courageous act, the first time since
the October 2000 riots that an organized group of Arab
public figures openly raised the flag of reconciliation
with the Jews. They all visited Birkenau and Auschwitz,
the twin death camps where much of European Jewry
was killed in the Holocaust. The first stop was the
Judenramp, the place where the trains came until May
1944, unloading thousands of Jews to face the fatal
selection: Some 15 percent
of them would gain
additional time working in
Auschwitz, but the majority
would take the long walk to
the nearby death camp of
Birkenau. Ida Grinspan
from Paris is one of the
survivors. She stood at the
very ramp where she
arrived 60 years ago as a
14-year-old girl on a
transport from France,
separated by force from her
parents. She stood, remembering quietly. Next to her
stood Majid Zerouali, 23, a
Muslim of Moroccan origin
now living in Toulouse.
Zerouali was one of a
number of Muslim boy
scouts who decided to join the visit. “It is not just a
Jewish tragedy, it is a human tragedy,” he said.
AUSCHWITZ DIARY
by Martin Herskovitz
Martin Herskovitz, child of an Auschwitz survivor
and resident of Petach Tikvah, was one of the Israelis
who went on that all-important trip to Auschwitz with a
group of Arab-Israelis. The following is an abbreviated
version of the diary he kept while on this historic
journey in May, 2003. The purpose of the delegation
was to bridge the gap between the two peoples via Arab
understanding and empathy with the Jewish trauma of
the Holocaust. The delegation included 130 Israeli Jews
and 124 Israeli Arabs. The Israeli delegation was joined
by a French interdenominational delegation of about
170.
The clacking of the train wheels in the distance
awakens me on the first day. I get up and look out the
window at the foothills on the outskirts of Krakow. Soon
another train passes, shrouded by the fog. The clatter of
the train seems like a Morse code message to my psyche,
beginning my journey back in history—my ticket was
validated at birth.
I suddenly realize that I may be looking at the tracks
along which my mother traveled 60 years ago. It is 5 a.m.
and I am completely awake; I get dressed to take a walk.
The early morning buses pass me as I wait for the light to
change; the destination names in Polish seem familiar,
reminiscent of destroyed communities. And I think about
what has happened so far.
We have shared our impressions of our first day
together, touring Jewish Krakow and hearing the story of
the Krakow Ghetto. One Arab participant, Youssef, speaks
about a feud between families in his village, Kfar Kana, in
the Galilee. He tells of risking his life to save a member
of the other clan whose house was torched. He says that
had he lived in Europe he would also have risked his life
to save my life. When we disembark near Auschwitz, we
walk along and talk.
Youseff says we are all human beings. Our talk turns to
politics and the reporters begin to swarm around, seeking a
story. Just as we were about to agree that finding a political
solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is more an
emotional than a diplomatic problem, Abuna, Father Emil
Shoufani, who organized this historic trip, approaches. He
raises a finger and says, “We have agreed – no politics.”
Chastened, we shrug our shoulders and continue silently.
The reporters wait a few moments for us to continue, then
despair and go search for their next story.
As we continued our walk to Birkenau, a reporter
comes up to me and asks me about my conversation with
Youssef. There will be those who will question how much
Youssef and his talk of brotherhood is representative of
the Israeli Arab population, I say, but I don’t want to deal
with the question now. I prefer to concentrate on their
feelings of empathy and brotherhood, to aid me in my pain.
By the time I finish talking, the main gate of Birkenau is
looming before me. Taken unawares, I stop suddenly and
exhale as if punched in the solar plexus, reflexively raising
my fist to my mouth. It is a moment or two before I can
continue walking and breathe steadily again. It is through
this gate that my mother, her parents and eight siblings
passed in the spring of 1944. Only my mother and her
sister managed to exit.
We enter silently, because silence is fitting. The tour
guide reads a letter sent from a wife and a daughter to
their husband/father. The girl, 9 years old, writes one
sentence about how terrified she is. As I hear these words
I realize that my aunts and uncles – little children – must
have spent their final hours in terror and suffering. They
have always been wraiths to me—not really alive and not
really dead. But here among their ashes, I also realize that
they were alive, and alive they suffered a terrible suffering
they had done nothing to deserve. I begin to cry, not tiny
tears that leak from the corners of my eyes, but a torrent
of tears like those the prophet Jeremiah wept for the
countless dead at the Temple’s destruction:
I seek comfort for my pain from Abuna, that he might
comfort me. He puts his arm around me as I cry
uncontrollably, “I can accept that they died, God had his
reasons for their dying, but why did they suffer?” Abuna
tries to answer when there is no answer, but the words are
not important. It is the warmth behind the words that
eventually calms me. Still, I am glad for my tears because
it means I am beginning to touch my pain. I, who had never
mourned, have begun to grieve and to heal.
On the way back to the bus, Aziz from Nazereth comes
up to me and says “I have no idea what to say,” and hugs
me. Other Arabs will come up to ask if I am alright, I answer
I am, because I truly am. Perhaps never better. I have been
bequeathed a wonderful gift from my mother, the ability
to touch even the most horrible trauma, and to climb out
from within its depths. If there is strength in touching one’s
pain and if there is power in pulling oneself out of its
depths, then today I have connected with an incredible
strength. I am proud to have finally grieved, fulfilling a
duty to the dead, to the unmourned. The Arabs look at my
tear-streaked face and see a person in distress. Yet I have
never been more serene than now.
The quote running through my mind is wrong. “They
jest at scars that never felt a wound.” Perhaps that is my
conditioning. What I see in their eyes is not jest, it is
concern and empathy and I am touched to the deepest
reaches of my soul.
TOGETHER 9
H
OLOCAUST EDUCATION: THE TEACHERS
by Vladka Meed
For years, readers of Together have learned about
the well known program, initiated by survivors, which
prepares U.S. middle and high school teachers to
implement Holocaust studies in their schools.
Hundreds of teachers traveled to Poland, saw
traces of former death camps and crematoria in
Auschwitz, Birkenau, Maidenek, Treblinka. They saw
the hair, shoes, eye glasses and valises of the victims.
They touched history.
Afterwards, they went to Israel and saw the
vibrant life despite the constant threat of terrorism.
These teachers in the vanguard of those bringing
the lessons of the Holocaust are important in guarding
our freedoms and our way of life here in America.
We would like to share with you the work,
dedication and accomplishments of a few of our
teachers.
Abbie R. Laskey (Seminar year 1996), East Hills,
NY writes, “Dear Vladka: On
November 14, 2003, in the magnificent
State Education Department building
in Albany, the New York Board of
Regents presented me with the 2003
Louis E. Yavner Teaching Award for
my work teaching about the Holocaust
and Resistance. It was a wonderful
moment.
“I have no doubt that I would not have merited
any recognition had you not taken me to the camps in
Poland, to the museums and universities in Israel and
to a much deeper understanding of the Holocaust and
of resistance. I also owe you an enormous debt of
gratitude for having introduced me, first to forty four,
and then at the reunions, to hundreds of Holocaust
educators from all over America who are also dedicated
to ensuring that their students learn the lessons of the
Holocaust. I have been inspired by these women and
men who, through your doing, have become my dear
friends.
“Indeed, I am so fortunate to have chosen a
profession in which the rewards have been countless.
Teaching the Holocaust and Resistance unit to students
who have incorporated the lessons into their everyday
lives and who will, I am confident, transform the
world for the better, has made all the difference for
me.
“Above all, I am grateful for the privilege of
meeting and befriending survivors like you. I am
inspired by your words, deeds and courage, and I will
always do my utmost to make sure that your story,
together with the stories of other survivors—and of
their relatives and friends who were murdered by the
Nazis—will be told and retold in the generations of
students to come.
“I received the reservation form for the Reunion
a few days ago and will be sending it in shortly. I am
looking forward to spending Presidents weekend with
all my friends.”
Ron Hollander (Seminar
year 1992) Montclair, NJ, who
became a professor since his
participation in our Summer
Seminar, writes “I contributed
the lead chapter on the American
press’s actual coverage of the
Holocaust while it was taking
TOGETHER 10
place from 1941-1945, ‘WE KNEW: America’s
Newspapers Report on the Holocaust,’ in the new book
jointly published in 2003, Why Didn’t The Press Shout?
American and International Journalism During the
Holocaust. The chapter is based on primary source
research conducted by me and my students in my
seminar on the Press and the Holocaust, the only college
course devoted exclusively to this subject.
“I presented a lecture on this topic at the Holocaust
Museum Houston and lectured at the Museum of Jewish
Heritage on American press coverage of anti-Jewish
actions in Germany from 1933-1935. Furthermore, I
chaired a panel, “Holocaust Museum Education in an
Age of Terrorism,” at the Association of Holocaust
Organizations’ annual conference.
Marcie Schoenfeld (Seminar
year 1989), Stamford, CT also
writes, “For the last five years
or so I have been representing
the Greenwich Public Schools
on the Educators Planning
Committee of the Westchester
Holocaust Commission (now
the Education Center.) I am
the only Connecticut member on the Planning
Committee. My membership has been invaluable to
both my school and professionally to me. (I think there
are three to four “Vladka graduates” on the committee.)
We have taken part in many programs and the
Commission has supplied us with many speakers.
“The real exciting news is that my school,
Greenwich High School, hosted the Anne Frank: A
History for Today exhibit for the entire month of
October. I was responsible for getting my school to
host the exhibit. I worked on this since early March.
We had almost 30 schools go through the exhibit, mostly
from Westchester and Fairfield counties. Every 8th,
9th and 10th grader in the Greenwich Public Schools
went through the exhibit—this is about 2,100 students
just from my system alone. Altogether about 5,000
students were signed up and there was a waiting list as
well. We had about 200 trained docents, including 55
students. The students had a two-hour experience
including a brief video on Anne, a virtual tour of the
Anne Frank House, a 45-minute tour of the 55 panels
and a 45-minute discussion with a survivor.
“My school has been very supportive and feels
very honored. I am very proud that we are the only
public high school to have hosted this international
exhibit.”
Rosemary Conroy (1996 Seminar year),
Lynnwood, WA grew up Roman Catholic in Guam
and Japan. Until college, Rosemary, the daughter of a
pilot for the Central Intelligence Agency, had only vague
notions of the Holocaust.
But for nearly a decade,
Rosemary, now the eighth
grade social studies teacher at
St. Luke’s School, has devoted
much of her career and a
substantial portion of her time
off, learning and teaching about
the Holocaust. “It started out
as a short unit, but the more I learned, the more I
wanted to teach,” she said.
Every spring, Conroy leads her students at the
Catholic school through a 10 week course on the riches
of prewar Jewish culture and community in Eastern
Europe, politics of the Weimar Republic, rise of the
Third Reich and implementation of Hitler’s plan for
killing the Jews of Europe.
“Teaching about the Holocaust is where I put most
strength and energy. Few subjects so clearly delineate
what happens when hatred and bigotry are allowed to
persist.”
As Holocaust survivors and the soldiers who
liberated the camps grow older and die, teachers with
Rosemary’s dedication to the subject will help make
up for the loss of first person memory, said Miriam
Greenbaum, co executive director of the Washington
State Holocaust Education and Resource Center.
This past summer, Conroy traveled with teachers
from around the United States to Poland and Germany.
Accompanied by Holocaust scholars, the group visited
the sites of six death and detention camps, attended
services at local synagogues and met with residents
who helped hide Jewish friends and neighbors during
World War II. The Jewish Foundation for the
Righteous, a New York based non profit organization
dedicated to honoring and helping support non Jews
who helped save Jews from persecution and death,
organized the trip.
“Eighth graders are ripe to absorb the Holocaust’s
historical and moral lessons” said Conroy. “They have
a real concrete idea of justice at this age. It’s important
to teach kids not be bystanders.”
ELEVENTH NATIONAL ALUMNI
CONFERENCE
PRESIDENTS WEEKEND
FEBRUARY 14 - 16, 2004
Our acclaimed teachers program on
Holocaust and Jewish Resistance sponsored
by the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors, the Educators Chapter
of the Jewish Labor Committee and the
American Federation of Teachers, is holding
its Eleventh Biennial National Alumni
Conference, co-sponsored by the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, over
Presidents Weekend, February 14 16, 2004
at the beautiful Mayflower Hotel in
Washington, D.C.
The teachers program, started in 1985, is
supported by the Atran Foundation, the
Caroline and Joseph S. Gruss Funds Inc., and
the Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany. The program prepares
secondary school teachers to implement
Holocaust studies in their schools.
This three-day conference brings together the
extended family of scholars, educators and
survivors to share knowledge and
experiences.
F
ILMS
GLOOMY SUNDAY
by Aviva Kempner
“BETTER DON’T TALK!”
WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY NAAVA
Gloomy Sunday is an
epic romantic story of PIATKA
four
intertwined
individuals who risk
death, fall in love and
endure a maze of
treacheries in 1930's
Budapest. Using the
Holocaust as a backdrop,
Gloomy Sunday compellingly illustrates the
romantic longings and moral choices that confront
lovers in any era.
Gloomy Sunday begins when the beautiful
Ilona (Erika Marozsan) captivates the hearts of
three different men: Laszlo Szabo (Joachim Krol),
a prosperous businessman who makes her the
manager of his Budapest restaurant; Andras Aradi
(Stefano Dionisi), a gifted musician who composes
the song "Gloomy Sunday" in her honor; and Hans
Wieck (Ben Becker), an awkward, amiable
German salesman. As the looming Holocaust
overwhelms Europe, Laszlo, Ilona and Andras
form a turbulent, passionate menage a trois, while
Hans, now a top ranking Nazi officer, protects
his Jewish friend Laszlo, while simultaneously
engaging in corrupt treachery that could threaten
each of the lovers' lives.
Adapting Nick Barlow's novel with co-writer
Ruth Toma, director Rolf Schubel creates a moving
tapestry in which the renowned title song—which
achieved iconic stature in the ’30s after it was
popularized in America by Billie Holliday, among
many others—becomes a haunting leitmotif that
illuminates the lives of these characters.
T
T
HEATER
Naava Piatka takes audiences on a spellbinding
theatrical journey of song, humor and powerful narrative as she shares a unique
and inspiring story of hope,
survival, reconnection and
reconciliation - a moving,
funny and uplifting tribute to
her comedienne/actress
mother's legacy of triumph
over tragedy through song
and humor. Better Don’t Talk
honors the essential Jewish
spirit of survival through
which voices once silenced
can be heard anew.
When Naava Piatka's
mother, Chayela Rosenthal,
died unexpectedly, the cancer that killed her was not the
only secret that the legendary actress, singer and comedienne kept from her
daughter. Naava was about to discover her mother's
incredible past as "Wunderkind of the Vilna Ghetto."
Amidst the ghastly overcrowded conditions, in
1942, her mom, a shy petite 16-year-old Jewish
girl, transformed herself into the vivacious singing star. In the tiny ghetto theater she told jokes
and performed in musical shows written by her lyricist brother Layb, bringing music and comedy into
the bleak lives of fellow detainees.
After Layb was murdered, Chayela secretly
wrote down his songs and plays in a little blue book
which, after her own death, was handed down to her
daughter. Sifting through family documents, listening to her father's anecdotes and contacting other
survivors who remembered her mother from her
days as a child star, Piatka pieced together the remarkable beginnings of Chayela's career and created her one-woman musical show Better Don't
Talk!
Blending personal narrative with humor and
song, Naava plays both herself and her larger-thanlife mother and is accompanied on piano this time
by her own daughter Jackie, who is the same age
now as Chayela was in the
ghetto. The title comes from
“ Yi s r o i l i k , ” o n e o f L a y b
Rosenthal's songs in which a
typical ghetto kid - a spunky
Jewish street orphan - says
"Why dwell on pain and sorrow? Better don't talk!" It is
precisely because her mother
didn't talk that Piatka is now
compelled to break the silence and sing the songs she
never heard her mother sing
and share the stories she was
never told.
Naava Piatka also began
her professional career as a
child, and appeared in musical shows with her mother. Now, after an incredible
journey of discovery, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, she
was been invited to Lithuania to perform this play
on the very same stage on which her mother appeared. She has already performed Better Don't Talk
to rave reviews in Australia, South Africa, Canada,
USA and Germany. In 2002 she appeared in the "Acts
of Courage" Performance Series at the US Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC, the Descendants of the
Shoah "Living Legacy" Conference in Chicago and
at Boston's Brandeis University's Creative Arts Festival 50th Anniversary.
ALKING ABOUT BOOKS
STORY IN A SUITCASE
by Paula David
All year I’ve been working with an 8th grade class of
public school kids on a unique project about child survivors.
It started with reading Hana’s Suitcase, a book by Karen Levine
that follows a Japanese group of young kids
who received a suitcase belonging to one
“Hana Brady, orphan” from the Auschwitz
museum. They began a long and difficult
search for Hana and her story, taking them
(the museum curator) across Europe and
eventually finding out that Hana died but her
brother George survived. George has been
alive and well in Toronto all these years,
and a few years ago, received a letter in the
mail from a young Japanese woman asking
if he knew Hana. The book is the story of
Hana and George before the war, in
Thereisenstadt, (who were ultimately
transported to Auschwitz), paralleled with
the story of a unique woman in Japan and her desire to teach
children how to strive for peace. This book captured the
imaginations of the kids, their special teacher and me!
All year we’ve been involved in learning about child
survivors, meeting them, studying Holocaust history and
visiting the older survivors where I work. Last night
they presented the results of these efforts... and they are
amazing. They created four suitcases as a traveling exhibit
to go to other schools and share the lessons learned. One
suitcase contains large wooden puzzle pieces, combining to
make six stars of David...each one talking about a piece of
child survivor history...the children’s stories, the righteous
Gentiles etc.
One suitcase contains 30 bundles—one for each student
of a class. Each bundle contains different artifacts so that
students can create stories about the child they might have
belonged to. One has a rosary and a bible,
one has a bunch of family photos, one has a
baby blanket and a kiddush cup and so on.
The third suitcase is resource material for
teachers that we have all collected...as well
as a video of the yearlong process, tapings
of the survivors’ classroom visits and the kids
working on the project.
It also contains a CD of the song that
a teacher wrote and the kids recorded about
children and war...it is remarkable. They
also wrote their reflections. The fourth
suitcase is empty...and comes with a request
that any group of children working with the
exhibit, put something about what they
learned in the empty suitcase. It will be an ongoing and
permanently growing piece of work. The process has been
incredible for all of us. Karen Levine, who wrote the book
came to meet the students and brought along Fumiko from
Japan (who found Hana’s story) and George Brady (Hana’s
brother). They were blown away by what the kids did. It
seems that anyone who heard about the project wanted to
get involved and it just kept growing.
The videographer came to tape one class and has put in
hundreds of hours. The school hired an artist as consultant
and she kept coming back on her own time to see this through.
The music teacher saw the artwork and wrote the song, and
another musician donated the studio to record it. Its potential
is limitless and the teacher and I who started it all are still
standing with our mouths open amazed at where it is going.
Finally the kids invited their parents and friends to Baycrest,
where I work, to launch their project so that the very elderly
survivors I work with could attend. It was a bittersweet
occasion for them because most of their children did not
survive.. But they got so excited to see kids of all races and
religions learn about the Holocaust and try to understand. It
is truly a testament to child survivors and their unique
experiences during war. I am hoping it will act as a living
reminder of what happens when the world turns its back on
children...and what will happen to the children in a world that
has ignored them since the Holocaust. It would warm your
hearts to see what these kids have done.
The parents (all colors and cultures) were captivated
and of course were so proud of their kids. They had no
idea of the extent of the project. The child survivors were
blown away by what the kids produced and perhaps one of
the most touching things was watching George Brady’s
face as they sang their original song “Hana’s Suitcase”
about George’s murdered little sister. His wife held his
arm, and when he got up to thank the kids, you would have
thought they were meeting a rock star...”it’s George...oh
my god, I can’t believe George is here.. he touched me...
he spoke to me...it’s really George!” A 70-something child
survivor regular guy has become a folk hero to millions
of kids around the world!
TOGETHER 19
W
Petition to Bring
Raoul Wallenberg Home
ORLD NEWS
BULGARIAN COMMEMORATION
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) - Bulgarians celebrated the country’s
unique and unheralded role fighting the Nazi extermination
of the Jews with speeches and special classes for
schoolchildren. Addressing a conference in Sofia, Peter
Schieder, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe, praised the resistance 60 years ago
that led to Bulgaria’s refusal to deport any of its 50,000
Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II.
“Sixty years ago, the Bulgarian people gave a
wonderful example to the rest of the world. By saving the
lives of Bulgarian Jews, it showed that even the darkest
evil such as the Holocaust can be stopped by tolerance,
peace and love,” he said.
to sift through the museum’s vast files on Holocaust
victims. The project, will give open access to the largest
compilation of Holocaust information anywhere, and will
be fully operational in June of 2004. This includes
testimony from relatives and friends about the victim,
photos, witness confirmation of the victim’s death, and
other relevant data. Internet users would be able to add
new names and new information to existing files and
correct any mistakes the files may contain.
UKRAINE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
A brother and sister who were split up as children in
Poland and survived the Nazi Holocaust apart have been
reunited in Israel after 65 years. Both Shoshana November,
73, and Benny Shilon, 78, had lived there since 1948
without knowing the other was alive.
November said the reunion only came about by chance
after a friend pushed her to visit Jerusalem's Holocaust
museum, Yad Vashem. She started looking through the
archive for her husband’s family because she herself “had
no one left,” but a member of staff came up with the news
that Benny was still alive.
Shilon had left his details just two weeks earlier in
the museum's “Pages of Testimony.”
“We jumped on one another and we hugged and kissed
and it was hard to talk—it was hard to think,” November
said of their meeting.
Shilon then found out that one of the photos in the
museum was actually of November and he had passed it
many times without recognizing the young girl staring
through the wire fence at Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi death
camp.
“I looked for her and my siblings during all the years
after the war. In the end it happened like a Hanukkah
miracle,” Shilon added.
Shilon and November were split up in 1936, when
their father left home because of economic crisis. Their
mother could not cope with four children and they went
to separate orphanages.
“You cannot describe this in words,” Shilon said about
their reunion. “I grew up alone and I was immune to crying,
I didn't know how to. But last night, I cried.”
Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine — On a frosty evening last week,
1,200 people gathered around an empty lot on Gogol
Street in this former military-industrial city for what some
observers said was a long-overdue dedication. Shivering
Holocaust scholars, local businessmen and boldface
names from Israeli politics and society — including Israeli
Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs Natan
Sharansky and Chief Rabbi of Israel Meir Lau — presided
over the laying of the cornerstone for Ukraine’s first
memorial to the Holocaust, the Tkuma Ukrainian
Memorial Holocaust Museum. The museum will be
attached to Dnepropetrovsk’s main synagogue, a gleaming
modern building and the focal point of the growing Jewish
community there. Since the fall of the Soviet Union,
Dnepropetrovsk — with a population of 1.3 million,
including 78,000 Jews in the metropolitan area — has
come to be known to some as the Jewish capital of
Ukraine.
ARCHITECT COMMUNICATES LESSONS
OF HOLOCAUST
Toronto, CAN—Architect Daniel Libeskind, designer of
the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin, spoke to a capacity
audience at Beth Tzedec Synagogue Nov. 8 as part of
Holocaust Education Week. In a talk called “Designing
Sacred Space: Memorializing the Holocaust,” he discussed
his efforts to communicate the lessons and stories of the
Holocaust through architecture. “There is a need to bring
the memory [of the Holocaust] to Germans,” said
Libeskind, who also designed the Felix Nussbaum Museum
in Osnabruck. “The Holocaust is about how the past is
communicated to the present and future generations.”
HOLOCAUST EDUCATION WEEK
Toronto—Commemorated in rich in emotion, history and
artistic expressionism. Events included film, music,
discussion and personal accounts Shannon Halliwell is not
Jewish, but she participated in the world’s largest
Holocaust education program. She was chosen among
hundreds who auditioned to be part of the Oratorio Terezin
children’s choir, which performed on Nov. 1 and 2 to nearly
sold out crowds. 120 events took place through Nov. 11
making up the 23rd annual Holocaust Education Week.
The program offers numerous ways to learn about the
Holocaust with books on the subject (displays at various
stores), music, art exhibits, films, cultural events,
memorial services and first-hand accounts from
Holocaust survivors and family members. Events also took
place in 35 churches as well as synagogues. And for the
first time ever, events branched out into surrounding cities.
YAD VASHEM’S SEARCHABLE DATABASE
Jerusalem—Yad Vashem has unveiled a giant search engine
for its data base, that cost millions of dollars to develop.
By entering data—including name, birth date, place of
birth and occupation—users all over the world will be able
TOGETHER 18
SURVIVOR SIBLINGS ARE REUNITED IN
ISRAEL AFTER 65 YEARS
By Reuters
KRISTALLNACHT COMMEMORATED IN
INDIA
New Delhi, India—”Only take heed to thyself, and keep
thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine
eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the
days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’
sons.” Deuteronomy 4:9 Sol Teichman, 75, carries this
message around the world, telling people about the trauma
he and his fellow Jews suffered at the hands of Nazi
forces.A social worker based in Los Angles, Teichman was
part of a US delegation in Delhi to organize a photo
exhibition on the holocaust.
SWISS PARDON SOUGHT
Bern, Switzerland—A woman who was punished by
the Swiss government for smuggling Jewish refugees into
the country during World War II became the first person
to seek a pardon under a new law that seeks to make
amends for the neutral country's refusal to help Jews
escape the Nazis.
Aimee Stitelmann helped 15 refugees cross the border
from France to Switzerland between 1942 and 1945, when
she was a teenager. She was caught in 1945, convicted of
violating Switzerland's border laws and sentenced to 15
days in prison. Stitelmann, 79, told reporters that she was
seeking the pardon to draw attention to “the injustice of
being punished for sheltering illegal immigrants.”
To: The President of the United States, the
Prime Minister of Sweden, the Prime Minister
of Israel, and the President of Russia
Dear Sirs:
We, the undersigned, feel that the governments
of the United States, Sweden, Israel and Russia
should cooperate to determine the fate and
whereabouts of Swedish diplomat and hero Raoul
Wallenberg. We recommend the creation of an
international commission to investigate these
matters. We also recommend that all sources of
information including archives and eyewitness
reports be freely exchanged to that end.
Fifty-nine years ago, as a young man, 31 year
old Raoul Wallenberg volunteered for an incredibly
dangerous mission on behalf of the United States
of America, the War Refugee Board, and on behalf
of humanity. He arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944,
with instructions to help save the remnants of
Hungarian Jewry. In seven months, he succeeded in
saving tens of thousands of lives and in restoring
hope to mankind, becoming an international symbol
of bravery and the pursuit of human rights.
After successfully helping to save these lives,
Wallenberg was unjustly abducted by the Soviet
Army in Budapest in January 1945. He was imprisoned
in the infamous Lubianca prison and many other
Soviet prison camps and gulags, and was kept
incommunicado from the outside world. At that time,
both his homeland, Sweden, and the United States of
America ignored his fate. No one sought his release.
Over the ensuing decades, he was sighted in Soviet
prison camps, and still the world did nothing.
In the ensuing years, Raoul’s mother and father
pursued justice for their son. They both died in 1979,
brokenhearted at never having been reunited with
their beloved son. His brother, Guy, and his sister,
Nina, then took up the mantle and have been pursuing
justice for more than 50 years.
We would like your help in convincing the abovenamed governments to release all their relevant
documents with the goal of finally determining what
happened to Raoul Wallenberg.
We ask their help specifically to resolve the
following questions:
• Why was Raoul Wallenberg taken by the Soviet
Union in January 1945?
• Where was he kept in the Soviet Union?
• Why was he not returned to his homeland of
Sweden?
The research for the last 59 years has never
satisfactorily resolved the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.
We know that you share in Raoul’s family’s
concern for justice. If we do not pursue this justice, it
sends a clear message to future heroes that they can
do the right thing, but still be left behind. It serves no
good for them to think that their country and the
world might abandon them.
We know that you will join us and the world in
pursuing justice for Raoul Wallenberg.
If Raoul Wallenberg is still alive, we urge that he
be returned home immediately. If he is no longer alive,
we urge that his remains be returned to his family in
Sweden for proper burial.
On the 60th anniversary of his mission to
Budapest, we ask you to sign this petition to urge a
unified effort by the nations of the world to bring
Raoul home.
THE WALLENBERG FAMILY ASKS THAT
YOU COPY THIS LETTER, COLLECT
SIGNATURES, AND SEND IT TO U.S.
GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES
THE SHOAH AND SEPTEMBER 11TH
by Solomon Goldman
The enormous growth of Holocaust literature,
its history, poetry, drama and theology is being
augmented by many feature films, documentaries
and stage plays. Serious attempts to treat it
humorously, objectionable to some, understandable
to others, only prove how deeply affected sensitive
people are by what happened in the twentieth
century in the heart of Europe — the center of
Western civilization. Indeed, the claim that the
world will never be the same is attested to by the
behavior of many people, institutions, and
governments. The most painful soul-searching and
examinations of tenets of faith — a process still in
its infancy — befell the two major religions, the
Jewish and the Christian, the first one groping with
the eternal question “why,” the other with the
unfathomable “silence.”
Conquering the sin of silence is not limited only to
the Vatican. At the 1943 Bermuda Conference, the Allies
still did not see fit to organize any rescue of the Jews
though cognizant of the Nazi implementation of a plan
for Jewish annihilation. Not until January 1944 did
Roosevelt agree to establish the War Refugee Board,
the rescue agency. Alas, too late. The tragic
consequences of untold human suffering, mass murder,
and genocide of an entire people are still visible as
manifested by the survivors, by the many memorial
museums that have sprung up all over the world and
by the vanished and devastated Jewish communities
of Europe.
For decades now Jewish scholars and
philosophers have struggled with the concept of
“uniqueness” of the Holocaust. Internally this
characterization of the Holocaust affected both
Jewish individual and group behavior and
religious practice as well. In fact, the Holocaust
became for many Jews the rationale for either
affirming or rejecting their faith. Its impact on Jews
the world over and on the State of Israel in particular
has translated itself almost into an article of faith.
The world has become impatient and irritable
with Jews’ using the Holocaust as a placard. The
ritual of taking every foreign dignitary visiting Israel
to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem resulted
sometimes in unpleasantness, as was the case with
the German Chancellor Kohl, who refused to don a
cap on his head during the memorial service in keeping
with Jewish tradition. The policies of the State of
Israel were often severely criticized even by its
friends as being primarily nurtured by the “never
again,” combative post-Holocaust psychology. This
hypercritical attitude towards Jews is best illustrated
by the recently discovered diary of the late 33rd
president of the United States, the folksy and
generally admired Harry S Truman. On July 21,
1947, after a ten minute telephone conversation with
Henry Morgenthau Jr., he penned the following
entry: “The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They
care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles,
Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as
DPs (displaced persons) as long as Jews get special
treatment.” It should be noted that this entry was
made only two years after WW II, when the ovens
ofAuschwitz, Buchenwald.,and Dachau hardly had
time to cool off. Sara BIoomenfeld, director of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, explained
Truman’s comments as “typical of a sort of cultural
antisemitism that was common at that time in all
parts of American society. This was an acceptable
way of talk.”
For the historical record, it must be recalled that it
was the same Truman who was the first among all
other world figures to recognize the newly-born State
of Israel, literally minutes after its birth. A further
discussion of this incident would detract from the main
purpose of this article.
Juxtaposing the Holocaust with the American
tragedy of September 11 is not intended to draw either
historical or moral parallels. Except for the irrational
wickedness and evil that generated these two events,
they were generically different. The Holocaust
perpetrated by a godless criminal tyranny was tragically
partially nurtured by traditional Christian doctrine that
condemned Jews to martyrdom for their sin of rejecting
Jesus as the savior and son of God. September 11 was
perpetrated by fanatical Muslim extremists in the name
of God.
What motivated me in undertaking this very
delicate analysis of the two events was only one striking
similarity. One remembers an utterance by the late
Golda Meir characterizing the Shoah to this effect: “The
tragedy of the Holocaust is that the unthinkable
happened.” The same applies to September 11: again
“the unthinkable happened.” As a result, America will
never be the same.
The trauma of our nation and the civilized world
has so deeply cut into our consciousness, that hereafter
we will forever speak of the pre-or post-September 11
era. Our domestic and foreign policies will hereafter
be dictated by our collective and individual memories.
The upsurge of patriotism, the outpouring of emotions,
the ecumenical spirit have rallied our ethnically
diversified nation into a new, renewed nation of
Americans. The moral lesson derived from these two
“
unique,” “unthinkable” events can be only one: Evil
wherever and whenever it appears must be confronted
forcefully and uncompromisingly. Alas, we are not yet
at this level. The world community and the UN have
so far failed to create an instrumentality capable of
halting atrocities. These atrocities continue daily
throughout our globe. Is this an absolutely unavoidable
fact of the human condition?
In the meantime, we ought to be more understanding
and charitable toward the victims of “God’s wrath,”
who resort to the “never again” slogan as the rationale
for their existence. It is not only the leitmotif of Jews
and Israelis. (All Americans and primarily the bereaved
families are determined to fathom the yet undisclosed
intelligence which would bring some solace to their
despair. Their aim is not so much the pointing of fingers
as the assurance that never again shall this happen to
our nation. Lt. Kevin Shaefer, one of the victims of the
attack on the Pentagon, was burned over half of his
body and had only a fifty percent chance of survival.
He underwent seventeen surgeries and suffered two
near-fatal heart attacks. He was discharged from the
Walter Reed Army Medical Center on December 14,
2001. He is now a staff member for the independent 9/
11 Commission. He signs his e-mails “‘Never Forget.”
Indeed, were commanded to “blot out the
remembrance of Amalek from under heaven, thou shalt
not forget” (Deuteronomy 25:19). The often quoted
American philosopher and poet George Santayana said
it more gently: ‘Those who do not remember the past
are condemned to relive it.”
Dr. Solomon Goldman is Director of Department of
Education, Emeritus of the Jewish National Fund of
America.
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
AWARDS HONORS
ELIE WIESEL AND
MENACHEM ROSENSAFT
On November 9, 2003, State of Israel Bonds honored
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel and Second
Generation activist Menachem Rosensaft at its 19th annual
Holocaust Remembrance Dinner at the Grand Hyatt Hotel
in New York. Speakers at the dinner included Israel Bonds
president and CEO Joshua Matza and Israel Singer,
chairman of the World Jewish Congress and president of
the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany.
Former dinner honorees Dr. Henry Kissinger and Steven
Spielberg saluted Elie Wiesel in videotaped tributes.
“Israel Bond wanted to express its thanks to Elie
Wiesel, the conscience of the Holocaust, who inspired
the dinner and was its first honoree in 1985,” said David
Halpern, a son of Holocaust survivors and dinner chairman.
“His identification with the event has enabled survivors,
their families, and other supporters of Holocaust
remembrance to unite in strengthening Israel’s economy
through the Bonds program.”
At the dinner, Professor Wiesel voiced concern at the
rise of antisemitism throughout the world. “I gaze at the
storm clouds gathering in Europe today and am deeply
troubled,” he said.
In accepting the 2003 Elie Wiesel Holocaust
Remembrance Award, Menachem Rosensaft, a New York
attorney who is president of Park Avenue Synagogue and
director and editor-in-chief of the Holocaust Survivors’
Memoirs Project of the World Jewish Congress, recalled
his parents, the late Josef and Hadassah Rosensaft, who
had both survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and who,
he said “taught me that for remembrance to have meaning,
it must be a source of strength, just as Elie Wiesel has
taught us that we must at all times remember our past for
the sake of the living as well as the dead.”
THURSDAY June 3, 2004
THE FOLKSBIENE PRESENTS
a Moishe Rosenfeld Production
famed recording star and composer
NEIL SEDAKA
SINGING IN YIDDISH at
CARNEGIE HALL
featuring The Klezmatics and
The Yiddish Chorale
Babyboomers and their families will thrill to
hear former teen idol and current Vegas
headliner, Niel Sedaka, sing in Yiddish for The
Folksbiene Theater Gala at Carnegie Hall. The
event will feature Sedaka, who will sing in
Yiddish as a tribute to his heritage growing up
in Brooklyn. The Folksbiene is the last
remaining professional Yiddish theater in
America. For ticket and journal information,
visit www.folksbiene.org or call 1-800YIDDISH or 212-213-2120. Make your
reservations now for an unforgettable and
unique evening.
TOGETHER 11
H
OLOCAUST COMMEMORATION
WISCONSIN COMMEMORATION
Wisconsin Rapids, WI—To commemorate Kristallnacht,
Holocaust survivor Henry Golde spoke to students in the
Wisconsin Rapids School District and at the First
Congregational Church. He told how he endured a lifetime
of horror and tragedy in a matter of five years, and it made
him bitter and angry. “I can interpret prejudice and bigotry in
one word: hate,” said Golde. He met with an attentive audience
of teenagers at River Cities High School. Students were
assigned to look up a Holocaust survivor on the Internet,
read the survivor’s story, and in their own words tell why
they think that person was able to survive. But this was the
first time they heard a survivor’s story firsthand. Golde said
he realized he did have hate inside and decided at that moment
to start to love. It is the message he has been spreading for
several years, ever since a radio station host asked him to
talk about his experiences.
DRAMA EMERGES FROM HOLOCAUST
Dover, DE —Jack Ratz, the author of Endless Miracles,
shared his story to commemorate Kristallnacht with Dover
middle and high school students at the invitation of Michelle
Simonetty, a middle school teacher. At the beginning of
World War II, Ratz was among the 35,000 Jews who lived in
Riga, Latvia. By its end, he was among the fewer than 1%
who survived. Principal Michael Tierney said students should
think of the several hundred children, who attend their school,
and how they would feel if a tragedy occurred and fewer than
a dozen survived. Addressing the students, Ratz held up a
black-and-white photograph and passed it around the
auditorium. He said he had found the image hanging on a
wall during a recent trip to Riga’s Holocaust Museum. The
photograph showed a teenager being processed by Nazis as a
slave laborer. The boy’s head was shaved, and he stared down
at the number he held in front of him. It was 281. “That was
my number,” said Ratz. “It’s a photograph of me.” Ratz said
he was at the Dover school to bear witness to his past.
Looking at the crowd of students, he told them they were the
future and that they must tell his story to the next generation.
“You must tell your children and your grandchildren, because
they will not have met a Holocaust survivor,” he said.
Graichen’s experiences so they will resist similar situations Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center at the El Paso
in the future.
Marriott. More than 500 people attended. She shared speaking
duties with Fred S. Zeidman, chairman of the United States
HEARING HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
Holocaust Memorial Council. “We don’t know how much
longer we’re going to have people like Nesse Godin around
PROMOTES UNDERSTANDING
Cincinnati, OH—Many of those who endured the horrors of to tell their story,” he said. “That’s why it’s up to us to learn
World War II were children at the time. Now their stories the message.”
are coming to life in Mapping Our Tears, an interactive
exhibit designed and produced by Jack Rouse Associates for PEORIA COMMEMORATION
The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Peoria, IL—Jane Ising, the wife of the late Dr. Ernest Ising, a
Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of long time Bradley professor, spoke during a presentation
Religion. Mapping Our Tears immerses visitors in an given by the Jewish Federation of Peoria. Because Dr. Ising
environment designed to resemble an attic from a European was Jewish and Jane was not, they hoped they would be able
home of the 1930s. Personal testimonies are combined with to maintain an almost normal life in Germany, but he was
special effects, sound and multi-media to illustrate the Jewish arrested and forced to leave the country.
experience. The exhibit will evolve as additional stories are
gathered.
CHURCHES JOIN COMMEMORATION
Marple, PA—When the Jewish citizens of Denmark were
SURVIVORS SHARE STORIES
ordered by the Nazis to wear armbands bearing the Star of
Pittsburgh, PA— Three Harrisburg-area Holocaust survivors, David, they did not don them alone. The example of King
Sam Sherron, Rabbi Menachem Bornstein and Kurt Moses, Christian X and the Danish population, who in solidarity
told 150 people that the history of the Holocaust must live wrapped their sleeves with the same marking, was one of the
on so it is not repeated. The three spoke at the Jewish stories told by Rabbi Peter Hyman and congregant David
Federation of Greater Harrisburg Kristallnacht observance Rosenberg of Temple Sholom during services at St. Mark’s
in the Jewish Community Center. “My parents, two brothers United Methodist Church. The exchange commemorated the
and four sisters all died in the Holocaust,” Bornstein said. 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht. They told the story of Alfred
“How I survived, I don’t know. After liberation, I went to Italy, Neugebauer, a firefighter in Dresden who was ordered to stand
then to Israel, where I joined the Israeli Army for 22 years.” idle as flames destroyed the city’s 100-year-old synagogue.
Eventually, he got married and had four children and 16 He saved one of the six-foot Stars of David atop the building,
grandchildren. “Whatever Jews go through, they always will hiding it in his in-laws’ home. The act, if uncovered, guaranteed
have hope,” he said. “God will help us.” Moses, who grew up imprisonment in a concentration camp or death. The same
in Holland and survived three concentration camps said he stories were recounted at Grace Lutheran, Marple Christian,
was liberated in 1945. Sherron grew up in Lithuania . He said Marple Presbyterian, Messiah Lutheran, St. Peter’s Episcopal,
he lost 72 family members in the Holocaust. Sherron came St. Pius X Roman Catholic and Trinity Christian Reformed.
The synagogue members also lit a Yahrzeit candle on each altar.
to the United States in 1948.
HOLOCAUST J.W. TALK IN ROCHESTER
Rochester, NY—Researcher, archivist and writer Jolene Chu
was the featured speaker at Monroe Community College’s
12th annual Kristallnacht program hosted by members of the
Holocaust Genocide Studies Project. Chu’s presentation,
titled “Witnesses of the Holocaust, Witnesses to the
Holocaust,” explored the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses
under the Nazi regime. Chu serves on the board of the
Jehovah’s Witness Holocaust-Era Survivor’s Fund, which
coordinates humanitarian and social programs for Jehovah’s
Witness survivors of Nazi persecution.
IOWA COMMEMORATION
Walcott, IA—Sixth- through eighth-graders at Walcott
School received a personal lesson when two Holocaust
survivors, Joseph Kempler, 75, and Rudolf Graichen, 78,
spoke to them about their lives in captivity. The visit by the
two men, both Jehovah’s Witnesses, was sponsored by Greg
and Sandra Milakovich of Davenport.
Kempler was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1928 to a devout
Jewish family. He spent time in six concentration camps
during his teen years. He was sent to Plaszow concentration
camp in July 1943 and then on to the Zakopane, Mauthausen
and Melk camps. Kempler’s entire family, except for a sister
who was hidden by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Poland,
perished during the Holocaust.
Graichen was born in Germany in 1925. In 1937, the
Gestapo arrested all the male members of the local Jehovah’s
Witness congregation, and Graichen’s father was sentenced
to five years in prison. That same year, as a student at the age
of 12, Graichen withstood intense pressure, refusing to join
Hitler Youth. A year later, Graichen and his sister were taken
by police from their school to a reform school in an attempt
to indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology. From there they
went to live with a Nazi foster family. When he was 17,
Graichen was reported to the Gestapo for having illegal
religious literature. The Gestapo arrested both Graichen and
his mother, who died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp
shortly before liberation. He was released at the end of the
war. In 1950, he was tortured by East German police and
sentenced to four years in prison. He now resides in Brady, TX.
Noting that other Holocausts have taken place in recent
years in places like Kosovo, Kempler said it’s important to
remind people, including youngsters, about his and
TOGETHER 12
SHARING EXPERIENCES
Corpus Christi, TX—In 1939, when Hilda Mantlemacher was
8 years old, Adolf Hitler announced he would kill all Jews,
she said. “The only way to avoid death was to avoid being a
Jew,” she said. Mantlemacher joined sixth-, seventh- and
eighth-grade students at Corpus Christi School in
Chambersburg recently to give a presentation about her
experiences during the war. Born in the former
Czechoslovakia, Mantlemacher was always surrounded by her
parents, grandparents, younger brother and friends—friends
that were later taught to despise her because she was Jewish.
As Mantlemacher looks back on her “difficult and degrading”
experiences, she said she doesn’t hate Germans. She only
tries to educate those who don’t know about the Holocaust.
“I feel as though I have a responsibility,” she said, “to speak
the voices that aren’t heard.”
GODIN SPEAKS IN EL PASO
El Paso, TX—Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin, who lives in
Washington, DC, was in El Paso to commemorate
Kristallnacht and educate the public about the horrors of the
Holocaust. “You cannot bring back the dead, but you can
change the future. We can teach people that we are all God’s
children and that we can respect each other.” Godin, 75, was
a guest speaker at the annual fund-raising dinner for the El
W
ORLD NEWS
CANADA OKS HOLOCAUST DAY
Winnipeg—The recent antisemitic remarks of Malaysian
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad were on many
people´s minds as Canada´s Parliament unanimously
passed a motion establishing a national Holocaust day. Leo
Adler, director of national affairs for the Friends of Simon
Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, said, “The fact
that all five parties unanimously supported this bill speaks
volumes about Canada´s response to racists like Mahathir
Mohama.” Then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien was
criticized for his failure to condemn Mahathir.
ISRAELI BANKS HOLD ONE BILLION IN
UNCLAIMED ASSETS
Jerusalem—The Yediot Ahronot Hebrew daily reported that
the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the Location
and Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims estimates
Holocaust victims’ assets held in Israeli banks at NIS $1
billion in 4,000 separate accounts. The figure includes
interest and linkage. The accounts were opened by
European Jews in Israeli banks before WWII, or were
opened with funds smuggled to Israel from Europe during
the war. The committee, headed by MK Colette Avital
(Labor), has finished its report and is now waiting to
complete its inquiry and obtain the banks’ response.
Accountants appointed by the Knesset have been tracing
the accounts of Holocaust victims in Israeli banks and
estimating their value for the past two years, according
to an agreement in principle signed between the Knesset
and the major banks: Bank Leumi, Bank Hapoalim , Israel
Discount Bank, United Mizrahi Bank, and Mercantile
Discount Bank.
YAD VASHEM RESPONDS TO ITALIAN
DENIAL POLL
Jerusalem—Yad Vashem called upon the Italian government
to step up educational efforts among its teachers and students,
and to send of teachers from Italy to seminars held at Yad
Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. The
International School has conducted seminars in seven
languages for teachers from many countries around the world.
Among the findings in the poll: 11% claim that the Jews are
lying when they say millions were murdered in gas chambers,
8% believe Italian Jews ought to leave the country, and 22%
say Jewish citizens of Italy “are not true Italians.”
HOLOCAUST LIBERATOR HONORED
Washington, DC—As a 20-year-old GI during World War II,
Vernon Tott saw someone waving to him and thought he and
his captain had stumbled upon American POWs. But what he
saw on that April day in 1945 was a place he can only describe
years later as “hell on Earth”—a German slave labor camp.
Tott, 78, was honored by Holocaust survivors he helped free
from the Ahlem labor camp near Hanover, Germany, nearly
six decades ago. The ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum was a surprise “We owe him a lot,” said Holocaust
survivor Abraham Stern of Sumter, S.C. Stern and three other
survivors who were on hand for the tribute—Moniek Milberger,
Ben Sieradzki and Sol Bekermus—watched with smiles and
tears as the museum unveiled Tott’s name etched in granite on
a wall in the building’s donor lounge.
FOUR SPEAK IN TENNESSEE
Nashville, TN—Four survivors of the Berga concentration
camp—now all in their late 70s—stood on a Vanderbilt
University stage and spoke to an audience of teenagers
not much younger than they were when captured. The event
was part of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission’s
continuing educational programs aimed at high school
teachers and their students. About 300 attended. The four
were among 350 Americans sent to the camp because they
“seemed” Jewish. Most, like Carden, were not. The story
IG FARBEN DECLARES BANKRUPTCY
Frankfurt—IG Farben, the former German company that
used thousands of slave laborers at Auschwitz, has filed
for bankruptcy. It means IG Farben will probably not pay
further compensation payments to victims. Once the
world's largest chemical firm, most of IG Farben's assets
were confiscated after World War II and transferred to
Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa and BASF. Jews in Western Europe
forced to work at IG Farben plants by the Nazis received
compensation in the 1950s. But the company refused to
contribute to a $5.9 billion national fund in 2001 to
compensate remaining former slave laborers, most from
East Europe. They claim all legal claims against the
company have been settled and they had hoped to put
money from the real estate sales toward cases involving
people who missed deadlines or lacked documents to
receive payment from the national fund.
LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE
Vilnius—Just over a year ago, the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, in cooperation with the Targum Shlishi Foundation
headed by Miami-based Jewish philanthropist Aryeh
Rubin, announced Operation Last Chance, offering
rewards of $10,000 for information leading to the
conviction of any Holocaust criminal in the Baltic states.
Websites were swamped with record numbers of antisemitic comments and angry attacks on Ephraim Zuroff,
the head of the SWC in Jerusalem. Most Lithuanians are
totally opposed to efforts to bring those countrymen who
took an active part in the murder of Jews to justice. And
independent Lithuania has not sentenced a single person
in the slaughter of all but 8,000 of the 220,000 Jewish
population under Nazi occupation. Lithuanians complain
they are held collectively responsible for the actions of a
few criminals, and there is almost total denial of any wider
Lithuanian role. The SWC has received leads to 241
possible suspects—184 from Lithuania, 38 from Latvia,
six from Estonia and 13 from Ukraine. Thirty-two names
have been given to prosecutors in Lithuania, 13 to the U.S.
and 10 to Latvia. Official murder investigations of 24
suspects have now been initiated in Lithuania. And this
has now prompted the SWC to expand the project to
Poland, Romania and Austria. Still, the Lithuanian
prosecutor in charge of Holocaust and war-crimes cases
says Lithuanian police and security agencies are having
trouble locating the people named. Operation Last Chance
is or will be operational in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Poland, Romania and Austria, with Belarus, Ukraine,
Hungary and Germany scheduled for launch later.
PETA HITS WALL IN BERLIN
Berlin—An ad campaign by People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) called “Holocaust on Your
Plate,” which juxtaposes images of Jews in Nazi death
camps with chickens in industrial farms, is meeting
outraged resistance in Germany. The PETA campaign,
earlier waged in North America, has already been
condemned by the ADL and others. The PETA posters are
to be part of a traveling display starting next March, and
the Central Council of Jews in Germany is considering
legal action to halt the campaign. The head of the Council
called the PETA initiative the most disgusting abuse of
the memory of the Holocaust in recent years. PETA claims
to have 20,000 members and supporters in Germany.
FRENCH RABBI WARNS OF ANTISEMITISM
Paris—France's chief rabbi has cautioned Jewish men
against wearing yarmulkes in public, suggesting they wear
baseball caps instead. Rabbi Joseph Sitruk urged young
men to be extra cautious, saying they could become targets
of violence if they wear the yarmulke, or skullcap. “It hurts
me” to make such a recommendation, he said, “but I say
that to protect our young people.''
MANUSCRIPT RETURNED
Vienna—A 14th-century Jewish manuscript seized by the
Nazis from a library in Vienna was returned to Austria
after it turned up in a New York auction house. Officials
presented the rare Kabalistic manuscript, valued at more
than $68,000, to the Jewish Community Organization of
Vienna. U.S. Customs, prohibited the auction house from
delivering the manuscript to the buyer and later seized
the manuscript.
FRANCE HAS NEW POLICY VS. ANTISEMITISM
Paris—President Jacques Chirac announced a tough new
policy to combat antisemitism, saying that an attack on a
Jew is an attack on the entire nation. The president spoke at
a news conference following arson attacks on a private
Jewish school. Chirac said a plan of action was laid out that
includes extra security at Jewish places of worship and
schools, “exemplary sanctions” against anyone found guilty
of antisemitic acts and reinforced civics courses in French
schools “to educate each child on the respect of others, on
dialogue and tolerance.” Local prefects are to meet with
Jewish leaders to decide what kind of security
reinforcements are needed in schools, and prosecutors are
to signal cases of antisemitism to the justice minister.
HOLOCAUST WREATHS VANDALIZED
Berlin—Vandals defaced wreaths laid at a Berlin
Holocaust memorial to commemorate the 65th
anniversary of Kristallnacht. The memorial, a stone set in
a bridge over a railway line, recalls local Jews who were
deported to Nazi death camps from a nearby freight
terminal in the 1940s. A police patrol discovered that four
wreaths had been thrown over the side of the bridge and
others defaced, with flowers torn out and ribbons cut.
Police said there were no suspects.
BELZEC PROJECT PROCEEDS
Warsaw—“The lawsuit is frivolous,” American Jewish
Committee Executive Director David A. Harris declared
responding to queries about an action brought against the
national organization in a New York court regarding a highly
acclaimed project to erect a memorial at the site of the
former Nazi death camp at Belzec in southeastern Poland.
An earlier lawsuit against the AJC, filed in
Washington, was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff
after he met with Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi
of Warsaw and Lodz, who is overseeing the construction
at Belzec.
The Belzec Memorial Project, a joint effort of the
AJC and Poland, with support from the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, is the first effort in 60 years to
preserve and protect the long ignored Belzec death camp
and establish a permanent memorial to the hundreds of
thousands of Jews who perished there during the
Holocaust.
“For decades the site has been totally and tragically
neglected,” said Harris. “This memorial will finally explain
the full story of Belzec, pay tribute to the victims, provide
a permanent protection for the mass graves, and serve as a
reminder that we should never forget.”
Rabbinical authorities in Europe and Israel have given
their full approval to the memorial design. Rabbinic
representatives are on site during the construction.
“The project should be advanced without any
postponement or delay,” Rabbi Elaykim Schlesinger, dean
of the Harameh Yeshiva in London and President of the
Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in
Europe. “This plan is a great improvement to protect this
sacred site from 60 years of terrible neglect,” said Rabbi
Schlesinger. He added that anyone who has the concern of
the martyrs in mind “would do nothing at all to delay this.”
The vast majority of funds raised by AJC for the
project have come from Holocaust survivors and families
of survivors. “There is a great deal of support for the
Belzec Memorial Project in the survivor community,” said
Harris, himself the son of Holocaust survivors.
HOLOCAUST BROUGHT HOME
London, UK—In a ground-breaking program run by the
Hampstead-based London Jewish Cultural Centre,
Holocaust survivor Trude Levi travelled to Austria to help
school pupils deal with their country’s troubled past She
gave a two-hour lecture on the evils of Nazismbasement
in Salzburg’s state business school, the Handelsadademie,
where hundreds of 18-year-old students listened intently.
Hungarian-born Ms Levi was just 20 when she was taken
to the death camp at Auschwitz.The Mill Hill resident was
one of eight Holocaust survivors from London
participating in a week-long trip to schools in Austria,
organized by a group of volunteers funded by the Jewish
Welcome Service in Vienna. Her talk was the first of its
kind at the 700-pupil college, which sits in the heart of a
socially deprived suburb of Salzburg. Alfred Frauscher,
deputy headteacher of the school, said he thought it was
great. . editorial@hamhigh.co.uk
TOGETHER 17
A
ROUND THE NATION
ANTISEMITISM ON SCREEN
New York, NY—A series presented at the JCC in Manhattan
used a select group of films—historic and contemporary,
foreign and American—to explore how movies promoted,
reflected or responded to antisemitism. At each screening,
the social and historical context of each production and
the film's means of expression was discussed by Jerome
Chanes, professor and author of A Dark Side of History:
Anti-Semitism through the Ages and Stuart Klawans, film
critic of The Nation since 1988, who writes frequently
about film for The New York Times and recipient of a John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2003-04.
The films included: Jüd Suss, Crossfire, Gentleman's
Agreement, Memories of a River and Homicide.
ANNE FRANK EXHIBIT IN GEORGIA
Atlanta, GA—The Anne Frank in The World exhibit
officially opened on Friday, November 16, 2003 in Atlanta.
The Governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, cut the ribbon,
and then led a group of Survivors and liberators thru the
exhibit. The project was successful beyond the planners
wildest expectations. The Georgia Commission on the
Holocaust, Kennesaw State University and it's foundation
are extremely proud of their accomplishments.
EXHIBIT HONORS LOCAL SURVIVORS
Santa Barbara, CA—The Santa Barbara Jewish Federation,
in collaboration with UCSB, will open a permanent
exhibition to honor Holocaust survivors and refugees in
Santa Barbara. The exhibit, titled “Portraits of Survival: Life
Journeys During the Holocaust and Beyond,” was unveiled
at the Federation’s headquarters in downtown Santa Barbara.
SURVIVOR SHARES STORY
Pawnee City, NE—Survivor Leo Fettman recently told his
story at The Pawnee City High School auditorium during a
school assembly to commemorate Kristallnacht. He tells
his story of survival in an effort to spread his message.”We
are all children of the same God,” he said.
Fettman was 19 years old when they came to his home
in Hungary and deported him to Auschwitz. His family was
forced to leave all of their belongings behind to be taken
on a journey that only Fettman would survive. Fettman has
written a book, Shoah, that took him approximately 15 years
to write. On the front cover of the book is a photo of his
father and brother as they stood in front of the boxcar that
carried them to their death. Fettman found the photo while
looking through a book about the Holocaust.
HOLOCAUST TOLD IN FILM
TOLERANCE EXHIBIT DEFACED
St. Petersburg, Fla. - An exhibit promoting peace and
understanding was slashed and defaced with racial slurs,
authorities said. A passer-by called police to report that
the “Coexistence” exhibit’s billboard-size panels had been
vandalized, The exhibit was in a downtown park. All but one
of the 39 artworks had been cut or spray-painted with antiblack slurs, and police have labeled it a hate crime. There
were no suspects. The exhibit, which began in Jerusalem in
2001, has toured cities in Europe and Africa. St. Petersburg
is the second of 14 stops in the United States.
RECONNECTING WITH THE PAST
Students from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University of
Pittsburgh, PA, recently took a Hillel-sponsored trip to
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., were able to view many exhibits and
artifacts from the Holocaust. “It was a truly sobering
experience,” said Jackie Braslawsce, the Jewish student life
coordinator for Hillel. “It made me proud to be Jewish. It
made me want to learn more about being Jewish. It made
me want to carry on the legacy of the Jewish people and
carry on the story of the Holocaust.”
TEENS RAISE $12,000 FOR MUSEUM
Highland Park, MD—An estimated $12,000 was raised to
commemorate Kristallnacht in Highland Park at the first
event ever organized and executed by teenagers to benefit
the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Three of
the nine high school students involved are grandchildren
of Holocaust survivors. Dena Rubenstein, a senior at New
Trier High School, spoke about the experiences of her
grandmother, Lola Nortman, for the fund-raiser at the North
Suburban Synagogue Beth El. Nortman, now 81, was a farm
laborer at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in
Germany. One day, on her way back from the fields, she
collapsed and was later found in a pile of corpses. “She was
the same age, 17, as I am now,” said Dena, whose twin
brother, Jared Rubenstein, also helped plan the event. Also
sharing a grandparent’s story was Aaron Dubnow. His
grandfather is Leo Melamed, chairman emeritus of the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a member of the U.S.
Holocaust Museum Council. The other participating teens
are Kali Bale and Ali Redfield, both at Highland Park High
School, and New Trier students Alex Berlin, Laura Miller,
Barry Ronner and Katie Scheyer.
TOGETHER 16
Atlantic City, NJ—Nearly a lifetime ago, Sonia Kaplan of
Cambria Heights became one of the victims of the great
crime of the 20th century. She survived, but the Holocaust
scarred her. And one night in early November, “Broken
Silence,” was shown in The Richard Stockton College of
New Jersey to commemorate Kristallnacht. Kaplan and
other family members were on hand for the hour-long
screening and took questions from students. Polish nonJews saved her life on four different occasions. At one point
she realized she had to leave one hiding place or the Polish
woman’s life would be in danger. She hid in the woods with
15 other Jews from the town and the remnants of the Soviet
occupiers.Finally, returning Soviet troops liberated the
town.
INDIANA COMMEMORATION
South Bend, IN—Temple Beth-El commemorated
Kristallnacht night with a prayer service in memory of
Holocaust victims and with a lecture by Renee Firestone. A
survivor of Auschwitz and a lecturer with the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s Education Outreach Program in Los
Angeles, Firestone told her story of spending 13 months in
the concentration camp. At the outset of her lecture,
Firestone said that although it is painful to do so, the past
must be remembered. In response to a question from the
audience, Firestone said that unlike some other survivors,
she couldn’t remove her identification tattoo from
Auschwitz. “That number is me,” she said. “It’s a part of me
like my eyes or my nose are a part of me. How could I
remove it? ... It’s part of who I am.”
the Wilf Family Foundation, established by Holocaust
survivors who settled in the state. All major expenses were
covered, including travel, hotel accommodations and books.
ARKANSAS COMMEMORATION
Springdale, AK—Helen Lebowitz Goldkind a survivor of
two of Nazi Germany’s deadliest concentration camps,
related her experiences at the Jones Center for Families as
part of an annual Holocaust presentation for area high
school students. Goldkind joined historians, political
scientists and lecturers in “The Economics of the
Holocaust: Moral Bankruptcy” program. Begun in 1994,
the Holocaust presentation is a way to bring history to
life for area students and to help assure that younger
generations don’t forget the dangers of totalitarian
authority. The prestige of the event has grown and
annually attracts well-known and respected national
experts to Springdale as presenters.
THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS STILL
LOOKING FOR HOLOCAUST
COLLABORATORS AND MURDERERS
Washington, D.C.— Christopher A. Wray, Assistant
Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division,
recently announced that the Justice Department has asked
a federal court to revoke the U.S. citizenship of a Chicago
resident for his role in a Ukrainian police unit that helped
administer and annihilate a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied
Poland during World War II.
In a complaint filed December 29, 2003, the Criminal
Division’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the
U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois
allege that Osyp Firishchak, 84, who was born in what is
now Ukraine, joined the Nazi-operated Ukrainian Auxiliary
Police (UAP) in October 1941 and was a member of its 1st
Commissariat in L’viv until at least October 1943. During
this time, the 1st Commissariat, along with other armed
L’viv UAP units, rounded up Jews, imprisoned them in a
ghetto, terrorized them, oversaw their forced labor, killed
those attempting to escape and delivered others to killing
sites for mass execution.
Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray noted,
“This case reaffirms the Justice Department’s dedication
to the principle that those who helped the Nazi regime
carry out its evil designs do not deserve the privilege of
American citizenship.”
This case is a result of OSI’s ongoing efforts to identify,
investigate, and take legal action against former participants
in Nazi persecution who reside in the United States. Since
it began operations in 1979, 73 individuals who assisted in
Nazi persecution have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and
59 such persons have been removed from the U.S.
Members of the public are reminded that the complaint
contains only allegations.
SENIORS JOIN 100 YOUTHS FROM
AROUND COUNTRY TO TOUR MUSEUM
Gloucester Twp. NJ—Two Black Horse Pike Regional
School District seniors recently embarked on a four-day
youth mission to Washington, D.C. to revisit what happened
during the Holocaust. The experience has made them look
at the world—and themselves—differently. The New Jersey
office of the ADL contacted five high schools or high school
districts participating in its anti-hate project called “A World
of Difference.” Each one picked a number of students to
apply for the mission, and the ADL whittled the number
down to two from each school or school district. During
the mission, students heard from Holocaust survivors,
including Nesse Godin, who survived four labor camps and
a death march. New Jersey participants were sponsored by
If you know a
Holocaust survivor
who recently passed away,
please notify the
American Gathering.
212-239-4230
H
OLOCAUST COMMEMORATION
of the U.S. soldiers in the Berga camp was a little-known
part of Holocaust history until filmmaker Charles
Guggenheim made the documentary Berga: Soldiers of
Another War, which recently aired on PBS.
A LESSON IN HATRED
Carthage, MO—The pictures that Hedy Epstein showed
the students at the local high school look like any in a
family album. But Epstein doesn’t show the pictures to
depict her happy years as a young school girl, because when
she was a teenager she was a Jewish girl growing up in a
small town in Nazi Germany. “Hatred is what led to
Auschwitz,” said Epstein. “It’s a very destructive emotion.
There’s nothing whatsoever to be gained from hatred.” She
asked students to make good choices. And she urged the
students to take steps toward peace. “Each and every one
of us can and must make a difference,” she said. Epstein,
who now lives in St. Louis, said she continued to harbor
hate toward the entire German population until the 1970s,
when she spoke out against the war in Vietnam. She realized
that although she was allowed to protest the U.S.
government’s military actions, citizens in Germany during
the 1930s and 1940s would have been jailed and killed for
voicing opposition to Hitler and his policies.
AT LONG LAST
Portland, OR—The Portland City Council has moved ahead
with a memorial that means a lot to Oregonians. In 2000,
the World Jewish Congress estimated that there were
500,000 Holocaust survivors remaining worldwide.
Although it is unknown how many live in Oregon, it is
known that dozens of survivors in the Portland area serve
in a speakers’ bureau organized by the Oregon Holocaust
Resource Center. A wall will also honor 750 people—
somehow connected to Oregonians—who died in the
Holocaust.
STUDENTS LEARN FROM SURVIVORS
Ellicott City, MD—Two Holocaust survivors told their
stories of courage to a group of about 40 sixth-graders
and their parents at Folly Quarter Middle School in Ellicott
City for Kristallnacht Commemorations. The two women
recounted their childhood memories—one of being hidden
in convents and homes, and one of being sent to America
to live with strangers—with a positive message of the
goodness of those who helped them. Trudy Turkel, now a
grandmother living in Ellicott City, told her story of escape
from Hitler's reach in 1938. “About 1,000 children were
saved by an American Kindertransport,” Turkel said. “I was
14 years old. My parents were willing to sign a release
that I could travel all the way to America alone.” A German
soldier, Carl Frishbaur, saved the life of Flora Singer, now
a grandmother living in Potomac, and the lives of her
mother and two sisters. Before the war, he used to come
for dinner, said Singer. “I only knew him as Uncle Carl,”
she said. In 1942 [in Belgium], Carl came to the door one
night and said, ‘Take the children and go. Don't ask
questions, just go!’ Singer and her sisters were hidden in
convents and homes until the liberation, she said.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR SHARES STORY
WITH O’NEAL STUDENTS
Pinehurst, NC—Seventh and eighth graders at The O’Neal
school had the opportunity to hear Ralph Jacobson share
his experiences relating to the alienation and evacuation
of Jews during the period before and during World War II.
Jacobson moved from Germany to New York at age 11
with his mother. The presentation was particularly moving
to students, teachers and parents since eighth graders
recently completed a review of World War II.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR INVITES HE WHO
SAVED HER
New City, NY—Lorraine Erlanger was a 16-year-old
concentration camp survivor. Teddy Duckworth was the
26-year-old British soldier, now 84, who saved her life.
Lorraine was 13 when she and her family from
Obernkirchen were taken to the camps. Lorraine would
be spared, but she'd be the only survivor. Her mother, her
father, her grandmother, her great grandmother—virtually
her entire family—were all gassed by the Nazis. She
returned to her home town and thought she was safe, until
two soldiers came to the door. “She went hysterical
because she thought we were the Gestapo coming to take
her back.” They were reunited recently when her eldest
son Lenny got married. “Without him,” said Lenny, he
said, I wouldn't be here.” Said Lorraine Erlanger: “He's
just an extraordinary man. He's not Jewish, it has nothing
to do with religion. He just did the right thing because it
was right to do.”
LUNCH N’ LEARN
Livingston, NJ—The Holocaust Council’s second Lunch
n’ Learn featured Marsha Kreuzman, who focused on her
experiences in Plaszow Labor camp, working under Amon
Goeth, the sadistic commander (played by Ralph Fiennes
in Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List.) The third Lunch n’
Learn featured Barry Berger, born in Czechoslovakia and
the survivor of several concentration camps. The Lunch
n’ Learn project is an ongoing series at the Metro-West
Federation.
6TH ANNUAL SETON HALL CONFERENCE
Greensburg, PA—The National Center for Holocaust
Education held its sixth annual conference at Seton Hall
University. Entitled “Remembering the Shoah, an
Educational and Theological Challenge for the third
millenium,” Dr. Phillip Cunningham of Boston College
gave the keynote address. Father John T. Poliakowski,
well-known as a pioneer in the field, was also a main
speaker.
ALL SAINTS' ACADEMY PROGRAM
Winter Haven, FL—Dr. Pierre E. Chanover spoke for the
first time about his experiences during the Holocaust to
a packed audience of teachers and students at All Saints'
Academy's Hampton Campus. Years ago, his mother, who
also survived the Holocaust, tried to make Chanover come
to terms with his past and brought him to Auschwitz where
his father was exterminated. As a child, the speaker had
been hidden by French Catholics and converted. Chanover
is a French professor at Florida Atlantic University, editor
and publisher of Poesie-USA, an American magazine of
French poetry and is the president of Child SurvivorsHidden Children of Palm Beach County. Chanover
dedicated his speech to the 1.5 million children who died.
PAYING RESPECTS
Boca Raton, FL—Holocaust survivors who pass their
stories on to students were honored in a ceremony by
the League for Educational Awareness of the Holocaust
(LEAH) in the Boca Country Club. The event was held
in remembrance of Kristallnacht. “The survivors rose
up and they chose life. They rose up and started families
and told their stories,” said LEAH President Connie
Packman. “People will come to understand that this
evil we have witnessed can’t be ignored.”
Ernest Kan lived in a Berlin apartment with his family.
Thanks to his Latvian origin, his family was spared and he
was able to protect several other Jewish families.
However, Kan was soon expelled from high school—as
educating Jews became illegal—and moved back to
Latvia, where his family was forced into a ghetto after
the German’s invaded. His mother was one of many killed
by German troops on a death march into the forest during
a mass liquidation of the ghetto in 1941. Kan survived
stays in three concentration camps until being liberated
in April 1945.
ABOUT THE OFFICE OF
SURVIVOR AFFAIRS
The United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum created the Office of Survivor Affairs in
1997 to serve survivors and their families, the
museum’s most important and unique
constituency. The office represents and works
with the museum’s more than 60 Survivor
Volunteers. Our volunteers serve the museum in
many ways, including providing precious
translation services to our Collections department,
by helping museum visitors and by providing
administrative help in all different parts of the
museum. We have a Survivor Volunteer group
that meets once a month to review general business
related to survivors’ interests and for special
presentations.
Throughout the museum, the Office of
Survivor Affairs supports private and public
programs, such as First Person, and advises on
matters relating to working with survivors and their
children. Every month there is The Memory
Project, a writing workshop for Survivor
Volunteers.
In reaching out, the office organizes
conferences, programs and events of interest to
the survivor and Second Generation communities.
We represent the museum and our office at
conferences and programs across the United
States and around the world by presenting papers
and giving talks about the role of the museum and
our office and what services we can provide to
survivors and their families.
The United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum defines a Holocaust survivor as a person
who was displaced, persecuted, and/or
discriminated against by the racial, religious,
ethnic, and political policies of the Nazis and their
allies. In addition to former inmates of
concentration camps and ghettos this includes,
among others, refugees and people in hiding.
If you are a survivor in the Washington, DCarea and are interested in volunteering at the
museum and being a part of our Survivor Volunteer
group, please contact Jill Greenstein (202-4799737 or jgreenstein@ushmm.org) or Cyndy Clovis
(202-479-9738 or cclovis@ushmm.org) in our
Volunteer and Intern Services department.
To receive our monthly email newsletter to
survivor and Second Generation groups and
individuals and other friends of the office,
describing items of interest to survivors and their
families email us at survivoraffairs@ushmm.org
and we will add you to the list. If you do not
have email, please call us at the numbers listed
below so we can add you to a “regular mail”
mailing list.
Martin Goldman, Director
Office of Survivor Affairs
Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2126
Email: mgoldman@ushmm.org
Tel: (202) 488-0414
Fax: (202) 488-2693
Betsy Anthony, Senior Associate
Email: eanthony@ushmm.org
Tel: (202) 314-0399
TOGETHER 13
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF MUSEUM IN WASHINGTON
TON
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF MUSEUM IN WASHINGTON
Image of time capsule that was buried on the
Eisenhower Plaza. The capsule contains
memorial candles, photographs, copies of the
cermony remarks, a copy of the November 2,
2004 Washington Post, and the most recent
edition of the Museum’s membership
publications. It will be unearthed in 2043, the
Museum’s 50th anniversary.
The American Gathering
and the participants in the
Reunion wish to thank
Sara Bloomfield and the
Museum staff
for their excellent
organization of this event.
TOGETHER 14
TOGETHER 15