5 May/June - American Society for Yad Vashem

Vol. 36-No.5 ISSN 0892-1571 May/June 2010-Iyyar/Sivan 577010 TH ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEONOF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMMore than 200 people attended the Annual Spring Luncheon, which took place May 27th, 2010, at the Grand Hyatt in New York City. This year’s Luncheon theme was“Continuity.” Lili Stawski, Spring Luncheon Chairwoman, opened the event.Honoree and survivor Doris Gross was introduced by her daughter Lili Gross Barasch, and Honoree and Young Leadership Associate Yonina Gomberg was introducedby her grandmother and Yad Vashem Benefactor Gladys Halpern.Marilyn Rubenstein, a Yad Vashem Benefactor and longtime supporter of the American Society, introduced this year’s guest speaker, Professor JosephKertes, recipient of the Canadian National Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction for his latest novel, Gratitude.The luncheon’s theme of Continuity was evident throughout the entire event as we saw many third-generation participants take their place among the guests. As a member of theYoung Leadership Associates, Yonina pledged on behalf of the third generation to assume a leadership role in the American Society for Yad Vashem and continue the mission of Remembranceso that the world may never forget.Doris Gross, 2010 Spring Luncheon Honoree, Eli Zborowski , Chairman, American Society for YadVashem; Yonina Gomberg, 2010 Spring Luncheon Honoree.Sam and Gladys Halpern; Fred Halpern; Yonina Gomberg, Honoree; Eric Gomberg; CherylHalpern; and Estelle and Rabbi Avrum Feldman.Members of the Young Leadership Associates.Lionel Barasch, Andrea Moneton, Fela Moncznik, Carol Moneton, Doris Gross, Lili Barasch, KimberlyBarasch, Nicholas Barasch and Gene Moneton.IN THIS ISSUEAnnual Spring Luncheon of The American Society for Yad Vashem.................1, 8-9Yom Hashoah observed around the world..................................................................2Heirs sought for Holocaust fortunes............................................................................5Great escape...................................................................................................................6The Arab position on the Holocaust..............................................................................7Yad Vashem ramping up effort to combat Holocaust denial.....................................10Death on the Baltic.........................................................................................................11Memories of the Holocaust...........................................................................................13Athens unveils its first Holocaust memorial..............................................................14My sister Kathy..............................................................................................................15Revealing the young bureaucrats behind the Nazi terror..........................................16Robin Klatt, Alice Klein, Ilana Kahn and Adina Burian.

Page 2 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770YOM HASHOAH OBSERVED AROUND THE WORLDIsrael – Yad Vashem picked “Voices ofthe Survivors” as the theme of this year’sHolocaust Remembrance Day. A specialexhibition of the works of Holocaust survivorsopened at Yad Vashem.“The voice of the survivors is the link thatbinds the painful and tormented history ofthe Jewish people during the Holocaust to(R to L) President of Israel Shimon Peres; Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu; Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the AmericanSociety for Yad Vashem; and Elizabeth Zborowski, Cultural Director,American Society of Yad Vashem, in Yad Vashem, Jerusalemon Holocaust Remembrance Day.the future, to hope and to rebirth,” YadVashem said on its Web site.Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin openedthe Every Person Has a Name ceremonyby reading aloud the names of childrenwho had taken shelter in France only to befound and sent to Auschwitz.President Shimon Peres, Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, opposition leader TzipiLivni, Knesset members and Holocaust survivorsalso participated in the ceremony.Peres read the names of his own familymembers and recounted their story, includingthat of his grandfather Rabbi ZviMeltzer, who was rounded up with otherJews in the Vishniev synagogue that wasthen torched by Nazis.Peres commemorated“my family members, whowere slaughtered with 2,060of their fellow communitymembers in Vishniev in August1942 at the hands ofthe Nazis and their localconspirators, who gatheredthe city’s residents in thewooden synagogue andbrutally murdered by shootingand fire.”The B’nai B’rith WorldCenter and the Jewish NationalFund held a uniqueceremony in Israel dedicatedto the commemorationof the heroism of Jews who rescuedfellow Jews during the Holocaust.The ceremony took place in the Scroll ofFire Square, located in the Martyrs’ Forestwhere six million trees have been plantedin memory of the victims of the Holocaust.Some 600 people participated in the ceremony,including 250 junior high school studentsand some 250 Border Patrol recruits.During the ceremony, Ambassador ofRomania to Israel Losiper noted that theissue of Jewish rescuers has been neglectedover the years. The ambassadorpaid tribute to the Holocaust-era leaders ofthe Jewish community, including the presidentof the community and the chief rabbi,who conducted an uncompromising struggleuntil the end of the war to save theJewish community from annihilation.According to B’nai B’rith, thanks to thatstruggle half of Romania’s Jewry survived.Many of these Jews immigrated to Israeland contributed greatly to its development.Aleksander Czoban-Sarel, president ofthe “Moshe Shor” B’nai B’rith lodge in TelAviv, escaped the Nazis atthe age of 14 after both ofhis parents were murdered.Along with his younger sister,he survived by hidingamong Poles and adoptinga false identity. He vowed tocontinue to convey his personalstory to future generations.“We remained alive, eventhough we could havefound ourselves among thedead at any moment and atany time. Destiny wantedus to survive. I am proudthat I chose to live in EretzIsrael,” he said.Elana Rozenfeld, the cantor at Park Avenue Synagogue, with a boyabout to read on Holocaust Remembrance Day.***USA – Toby Edelstein, 9years old, stood on YomHashoah evening before asynagogue audience of about350 to talk about his grandmother.The details were few,but they were enough.Grandma, Aviva Rohloff Zylberberg, wasa child herself during the Holocaust, thatcataclysm of cataclysms in the bloodsoaked20th century. A Jew in Germany,she survived by passing as a Christian.Other young people — some in their 30sbut most in their teens — also rose at thePark Avenue Synagogue, on East 87thStreet, to recount in a few unadorned sentenceshow a grandmother or a grandfathereluded the Nazis’ industrializedslaughter of Europe’s Jews.Cara Levine told of Anne and Saul Celnik,who hid in Warsaw after escaping fromthat city’s ghetto. Jennifer and Matt Balabanspoke of Irene AnshelewitzSchwadron, who endured through concentrationcamps and a death march. “Our twogreat-aunts were killed,” Matt Balabansaid, “but the bullets somehow missed ourgrandmother.” Michael Silverstone talkedabout Henry Vogelstein, who fled NaziGermany in 1939, emigrated to the UnitedStates and returned to Germany as anAmerican combat soldier.If an event may be said to possess acommodity, then, by definition, memory isthe principal one for Holocaust RemembranceDay. But it is a perishable commodity.Preserving it requires work.The day was observed in various waysaround the city. As usual, the largest eventwas a ceremony at Temple Emanu-El. Atthe Jewish Community Center in Manhattan,on the Upper West Side, there was adaylong recitation of names of the dead.In Lower Manhattan, some survivorswent to the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, torelate their experiences to visiting schoolchildren.More and more, though, survivors arenot the principal bearers of their own stories.That responsibility is falling withgreater urgency to their children and, asthe Park Avenue Synagogue ceremonyunderscored, to their grandchildren. Thewar, after all, ended 65 years ago. Holocaustsurvivors are not getting anyyounger. Worse, one by one they are notgetting any older.The emphasis on a new generation isinexorable. That “transfer of memory”was behind the Park Avenue Synagogue’sreliance on grandchildren, saidMenachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer, whoorganized the programwith a cantor at the synagogue,Elana Rozenfeld.Interlaced with the storiesof ordeal and endurancewere songs inYiddish, written for themost part during theHolocaust.One song written afterthe war was a sad, sweetnumber called “MaynShvester Chaye” (“My SisterChaye”). This was atribute by a Yiddish poet,Binem Heller, to his sister,who raised him in theirhouse “with tumbledownsteps.” Chaye, with thegreen eyes. Chaye, with the black braids.Chaye, who died in the Treblinka exterminationcamp, not quite 10 years old.***Poland – Thousands of young Jews,along with Holocaust survivors, marchedat Auschwitz to remember those who perishedin the Nazi death camp, and tohonor Poland’s late president.The 10,000 or so people from aroundthe world attending the annual March ofthe Living walked the stretch of about 3kilometers (2 miles) between the redbrickAuschwitz compound and the deathcamp’s wooden barracks section ofBirkenau.At least 1.1 million people — mostlyJews, Poles and Roma — died in the gaschambers at Auschwitz or from starvation,disease and forced labor at thecamp that German Nazis built in occupiedPoland during World War II.Many in the annual march also woreblack arm bands or carried black ribbonsin memory of Poland’s President LechKaczynski and his wife, Maria, who werekilled in a plane crash along with 94 othersen route to WWII-era observances inwestern Russia.Israeli Ambassador Zvi Rav-Ner readout a message in Hebrew, English andPolish saying this year’s marchers werealso “paying homage” to Kaczynski andthe other plane crash victims.“Lech Kaczynski and his wife werefriends of the state of Israel and of theJewish nation. Today we will march in solidaritywith the entire Polish nation,” Rav-Ner said while standing by the infamousgate with a sign reading “Arbeit MachtFrei,” or “Work Makes You Free.”The inscription was meant to misleadinmates into thinking they were arriving atAuschwitz to work, not to die. The metalsign now in place is a replica of the original,which is undergoing renovation afterit was stolen in December and recoveredtwo days later.By tradition, the march started with theblowing of the shofar, at the gate.The Auschwitz camp was liberated inJanuary 1945 by Soviet troops.***Canada – Holocaust RemembranceDay was marked by solemn ceremoniesin Canada and abroad just as a reportwas released showing that violent attacksagainst Jews worldwide more than doubledlast year.Survivors of the Buchenwald concentrationcamp gathered with U.S. veteransand German dignitaries at a ceremonymarking the 65th anniversary of thecamp’s liberation.Participants in the March of the Living at Auschwitz.Holocaust survivors laid flowers at thesite of the concentration camp nearWeimar, Germany, to mark the date.About 56,000 people, including Jews,Communists, and Gypsies from acrossEurope, were killed at the Nazi camp.The U.S. Army freed Buchenwald on April11, 1945.In Toronto, the city’s Jewish communitygathered for a service at Earl Bales Park.Toronto’s remembrance service is thesecond largest commemoration outsideof Israel, drawing in about 2,000 peoplefrom across the Greater Toronto Area.This year’s ceremony focused on Holocaustsurvivors living in Toronto and highlightedtheir contributions to Canada,organizers said.But on a day meant for rememberingpast violence against Jews, a new studypoints to continuing prejudice.The study from Tel Aviv University reportsthat there were 1,129 anti-Semiticincidents worldwide last year that rangedfrom vandalism and arson against Jewishtargets to beatings of Jews. The figure isthe highest since the survey began morethan two decades ago, and is up from559 incidents the year before.In his Holocaust Remembrance Daystatement, Prime Minister StephenHarper acknowledged the continuingpresence of the kind of hatred and bigotrythat led to the Holocaust.“Anti-Semitic crimes in Canada, includingrecent vandalism at Jewish schools inCalgary, Montreal and Toronto, demonstratethe continuing need for both actionand education,” he said.“They remind us of the necessity ofstanding firm and taking decisive actionagainst the evils of anti-Semitism. Ourgovernment is doing both while takingsteps to ensure that the lessons of theHolocaust are remembered.”

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 3FORMER SS SOLDIER SENTENCED TO LIFEFormer SS member Heinrich Boerewas convicted and sentenced to lifein prison for killing three civilians in NazioccupiedHolland.Boere, 88, had admitted to the districtcourt in Aachen, Germany, that he shot thethree in 1944, but insisted he was followingmilitary orders and could have faced imprisonmentin a concentration camp or thedeath penalty if he refused.The shootings were ordered in reprisal forattacks carried out by the Dutch resistance.Lead judge Gerd Nohl said that the murderswere of “practically incomparable maliciousnessand cowardice — beyond thedecency of any soldier,” according to Germannews reports. The defendant, who is halfGerman and half Dutch, was an enthusiasticNational Socialist and handed over fellow citizensto be executed, the judge said.Efraim Zuroff, Israel director and chiefNazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center,praised the efforts of prosecutor UlrichMaas and said the trial proved that Holocaustperpetrators could still be held accountablefor their crimes.“The conviction of Boere, who volunteeredto join the SS and openly admittedthe crimes he committed, is an importantreminder that the overwhelming majority ofthe murderers of the Holocaust did so willinglyand without any coercion whatsoever,”Zuroff said in a statement.The Simon Wiesenthal Center gaveGermany and the United Statestop marks for pursuing and prosecutingNazi war criminals but slammed Australia,Canada and several former eastbloccountries for “complete failure” tobring suspects to justice.In an annual report released on theeve of Holocaust Remembrance Day,the Los Angeles-based Jewish organizationsaid that contrary to widely held beliefit is still not too late to apprehendand try Nazis.“It is clear that at least several suchcriminals will be brought to trial duringthe coming years,” wrote the report’s author,the center’s Israel director, EfraimZuroff.“While it is generally assumed that it isthe age of the suspects that is thebiggest obstacle to prosecution, in many“Despite the passage of decades, thistrial clearly shows that Nazi war criminalscan still be brought to justice if there is politicalwill to do so, which unfortunately isnot the case in most European countries,”he said.Heinrich Boere.Zuroff has been among many observersof the ongoing trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk,89, for involvement in more than29,000 murders in the Sobibor death camp.Boere had told Focus magazine last yearthat he was following orders.“It was not difficult: you just had to benda finger,” he said.After the war, Boere was found guilty ofmurder in Holland and fled to Germany,where he took on German citizenship.Meanwhile, the Dutch death sentence wascommuted to a life sentence.JEWISH GROUP PRAISES GERMANY, USFOR CHASING NAZISANew York memorabilia dealer is sellingwhat he claims is the last privately-ownedcopy of a World War IImanuscript of Jewish names known as“Schindler’s list” and made famous in a1993 movie of the same name.The list was kept by German industrialistOskar Schindler, who saved morethan 1000 Jews from the Holocaust byemploying them in his factory duringWorld War II.cases it is the lack of political will, morethan anything else,” he said.The report said the most disappointingcase was that of Sandor Kepiro, convictedby Hungary of helping to organizethe 1942 murder of at least 1,200 civiliansin Serbia but never punished, althoughthe center has located him inBudapest.The report listed Estonia, Lithuania andUkraine along with Australia, Canada andHungary as countries “in which there areno legal obstacles to the investigation andprosecution of suspected Nazi war criminals,but whose efforts (or lack thereof)have resulted in complete failure duringthe period under review.”Germany and the United States werethe only countries the report gave an “A”grade for their “highly successful investigationand prosecution program.”NY DEALER OFFERS "SCHINDLER'S LIST" FOR SALEA suitcase belonging to Oskar Schindler withthe original copy of a list of over 1,200 PolishJews known as “Schindler’s list” is shown inStuttgart, October 15, 1999.New York memorabilia dealer Gary Zimet,who is seeking $2.2 million for his list, saidthree others are owned by museums, includingthe United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum in Washington and the Holocaustmemorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.Zimet, who is representing the manuscript’sseller, told Reuters it had been heldfor over 55 years by the family ofSchindler’s accountant, Itzhak Stern. TheStern family recently sold it to the current,unidentified owner, Zimet said.David Crowe, a professor at Elon Collegein North Carolina and a Schindler expert,had seen a picture of the list and reckonedit could be one of many Schindler producedover the course of the war.“The Nazis were fanatical about keepingrecords, new lists were constantly beingmade,” said Crowe.Dated April 18, 1945, typed on onionskinpaper, the slightly frayed list beingsold by Zimet contains 801 all-malenames, and is 14 pages long. It detailsthe names of the workers along with theirbirthdates and jobs.SECRET GERMAN FILES TO REVEAL POSTWAR MYSTERYOF THE “HOLOCAUST ARCHITECT”The story of the man known as “thearchitect of the Holocaust” is wellknown, but nobody knows who helpedAdolf Eichmann flee Germany in thepostwar era.After fleeing Germany, Eichmann wascaptured in Argentina by Israel’s Mossadand hanged after a trial in Jerusalem.There were speculations that the Vaticanhelped war criminals hide or escapeafter the Second World War – allegationsChurch officials have always denied.But a secret 4,500-page document bythe German intelligence service, the BND,could shed light on the postwar life of thecoordinator of the Nazi genocide policy.While BND claims that the files must remainsecret, freelance reporter GabrieleWeber has sued the agency to declassifythe documents that may answer thequestion: who helped Eichmann escape?Marguerite Simmons has never forgottenthe day she met Adolf Hitler.Today she is 104, lives quietly in Guiseley,Leeds and is very probably the only livingJewish woman to have talked to thearchitect of the Holocaust while he wasruler of Germany.And it is even moreimprobable that anyonecan have met theman and then beenhunted by his henchmenafter being photographedwith him.Marguerite had toabandon her life inGermany before theoutbreak of the SecondWorld War when shewas recognized as aJew in a photograph with her young son,John Muller, and Hitler.Marguerite said: “When the Nazis cameI had to get out of Germany. It was veryscary growing up in Germany as a Jew.“Hitler addressed my little boy when hewas only a few years old.“He was a famous man and I knew hewas hated. I was very scared.”Marguerite and six-year-old John werestaying in a hotel in Cologne in 1934 andwere told that Hitler and propaganda chiefJoseph Goebbels were also guests.They were told to line the stairs to greethim, but Hitler noticed blond-haired, blueeyedJohn, who was wearing a Bavarianoutfit, and approached him.Documents associated with the livesof several guards from theAuschwitz-Birkenau concentration campwere recently discovered in the nearbytown of Oswiecim.Auschwitz Museum spokesman PawelSawick said that the documents includedfood coupons, death certificates, and amap. The rest of the documents are stillbeing evaluated.The documents were discovered in anattic of a home in the southern Polish townof Oswiecim that was undergoing renovation,Sawick said.“The sensational value of this discoveryis in the fact that these original documents,bearing the names of main murderers fromAuschwitz, were found so many years afterthe war,” said Adam Cyra, a historian forthe Auschwitz Memorial in an interviewwith the Associated Press.A JEWESS WHO MET HITLERHow much did Germany know aboutwhere he was?Weber is hoping to obtain at least partialaccess to the files being reviewed bythree judges at the federal administrativecourt in Leipzig.“I think it’s impossible that in Germanywe are hiding documents about a convictedNazi mass murderer,” she said.The American Gathering of HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendants grouphas also called for the release of the files.“The withholding of files on Eichmannmore than a half century after the war isunconscionable and indecent,” said vicepresidentElan Steinberg.The BND argues that much of the informationcame from a “foreign intelligenceservice,” and opening it up to publicscrutiny would harm future co-operationwith that unidentified country.Marguerite’s granddaughter Katy Muller,from Yeadon, said: “Hitler loved children sohe came up to my father, patted him on thehead and asked him where he was from.My father told him he was from Cologneand he walked off.“My grandmother wasvery nervous about meetinghim and she knewthat he wasn’t well likedbut she was still quite excited.She must be theonly living person thathas met Hitler.”A photograph was takenof the pair with the Nazidictator and when it waspublished someone recognizedMarguerite as beingJewish and it caused widespreadoutcry.The negatives and copies of the photographwere confiscated and destroyed.She was hunted down by the SS, whodemanded that she report to their passportcontrol. Fearing for her life, Marguerite fledto England in 1936, leaving her son andthen husband behind in Germany.On her arrival in England she was internedon the Isle of Man and she wassoon remarried to Erwin Simmons, whowas a German Jewish refugee serving asan officer in the British Army.When John Muller turned 17 he came toBritain to trace his mother and spent mostof his life working as a senior lecturer atLeeds University.AUSCHWITZ DOCUMENTS FOUND,REFERENCES TO ANGEL OF DEATH, JOSEPH MENGELE“The documents contain the names ofpeople who played a decisive role in murderingJews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, whowere in charge of selecting Jews, or of theuse of Zyklon B,” said Cyra. Zyklon B wasthe poisonous gas used to kill the Jews.A food coupon for sugar bears a signaturethat is suspected to be from JosephMengele, the infamous Schutzstaffel(SS) doctor known for his inhumane experiments.Mengele, one of the few high-level SS officialswho were never captured, is reportedto have drowned in 1979 in Brazil.Another document includes mention of Dr.Victor Capesius, who conducted othermedical experiments and was known asone of the camp pharmacists.None of the files are said to documentthe crimes against humanity conducted atthe concentration camp.

Page 4 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770BOOK REVIEWSThey Were Just People: Stories of Rescuein Poland During the Holocaust.By Bill Tammeus and Rabbi JacquesCukierkorn. University of Missouri Press:Columbia, Missouri, 2009. 236 pp. $24.95paperback.REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKINThis reviewer would like to begin bystating that the book, They Were JustPeople: Stories of Rescue in Poland Duringthe Holocaust, by Bill Tammeus andRabbi Jacque Cukierkorn, is a fascinatingand absorbing work. The conscientious research,the reader-friendly writing —they’re all well done. However, thisreviewer does have a “bone to pick” withthe authors.In the “Introduction” to their work the authorswrite that both the Jews that wererescued and those that rescued them were“just people.” Yes . . . and no . . . Yes,surely the Jews, those that saved them,and everyone else in the world has twohands, two feet, a face, etc. (except ifthey’ve been injured somehow). But to sayBlooms of Darkness: A NovelBy Aharon Appelfeld. Schocken Books,2010. 288 pp. $25.95 hardcover.REVIEWED BY RABBI ISRAEL ZOBERMANIsraeli survivor Aharon Appelfeld proveshis uncanny talent to connect us timeand again to his deep springs of early Holocaustexposure and those embedded memorieswhich continue to flow unabated.He was but seven years old when Germantroops entered his multi-culturedhometown of Czrnowitz,Romania, and his youngworld as well as that of somany others would beturned upside down, foreveraltered. Blooms ofDarkness is Appelfeld’slatest novel translatedfrom the Hebrew. With autobiographicalfeatures, itcenters on eleven-yearoldHugo, the only child ofprosperous yet assimilatedJewish pharmacistswho graciously lend supportto all in financial need.The father is taken awayand disappears, while the mother and sonsucceed in escaping through the undergroundsewers from the ghetto that is in theprocess of being liquidated. The devotedand desperate mother, who fails to securefor her son as proper a hiding place as possiblegiven the constricting circumstances,turns as last resort to Mariana, whom shehad befriended and supported since elementaryschool. Mariana, whose hard andabusive life leads her to prostitution, is commendablyand even heroically willing to acceptHugo, whose mom surprisingly andwisely bestows on her a substantial gift.Hugo, assuming a Christian identity,learns to adjust to hiding in a brothel, hisnew and quite unusual and unsuitablehome for a child who is protected nonethelessby his innocence, his smarts, and hismother’s pre-parting warning not to be tooinquisitive. The brothel visits of Germansoldiers will at war’s end doom Marianaand the girls at her side, harshly regardedTHEY WERE JUST PEOPLEthat those non-Jews who put their ownlives and, oftentimes, the lives of their ownfamilies on the line in order to save a Jewor Jews are “just people” . . .I don’t know about that!Indeed, Felix Zandman,relating in this volume ofhow Anna Puchalska, anon-Jew, saved him, himselfcalls Anna “Extraordinary,”asking “How a mother couldhave the courage, the guts,the inspiration to risk the lifeof her five children. Herself,maybe. But five children?”He still can’t get over it!Moreover, in later years,when Felix was asked if hewould have done whatAnna did, he answered, notlikely. And, surely, not if he had children tothink of!So, what did Anna do? Put simply, Felix,a frightened, young Jewish boy fromGrodno, running from the Nazis, askedAnna to take him in for just one night.BLOOMS OF DARKNESSas traitors and executed. The vulnerableand precocious Hugo grows attached toMariana, and she too finds him to be a reassuringthough worrisome presence inher own unstable and dangerous world.Thus the mutually supportive bondingleads to tender intimacy as well as a physicalone for this unlikely couple. The uniquebond, born of such an extraordinary scenario,comes to an abrupt end with theRussian victory over the Nazis. Onceagain Hugo is tried, undergoing a forcedand traumatic separationfrom a most significant figurein his life, this time amother-substitute.As in Appelfeld’s otherworks, the Christianfaith while not necessarilychurch-practiced, remains asource of inspiring lovingkindnessfor simple folkssuch as Mariana. In contrast,the pre-war well-off and university-educatedJews, likeHugo’s parents, have losttheir traditional roots, thoughnot the caring Jewish valuesand optimistic thrust.The author’s characteristic terse style,concealing more than revealing, is suitedfor the dreadful subject at hand in creatinga suspenseful aura in which the unavoidabledrama can unfold. The book’s titleconnotes that even in the midst of theShoah’s darkness and denseness of evil,there are to be found consoling and promisingflowers of rare beauty and humanity.Such a flower is unassuming, child-likeMariana, whose embrace of a pursuedJewish child and his people, at a grave riskto herself, reassures us that both humanevil and fear are not without the grace ofthe penetrating light of love and decency.She and other righteous gentiles remind usof an essential lesson, that the Jewish peopleare not alone in a universe that hasoften treated us as aliens.Rabbi Israel Zoberman is the spiritualleader of Congregation Beth Chaverim inVirginia Beach, Virginia.Anna did that and more. She hid him formany months . . . Felix and four other Jews. . . all the while risking her life and the livesof her family members!In another story related inthis volume by Tammeusand Rabbi Cukierkorn, weread about how AndreNowacki and his mother weresaved by the Kwiecinskis, anotherexceptional, non-Jewishfamily living in Warsaw. Fortwo years Andre and hismother were with Mrs.Kwiecinski, an actress, andher three caring and compassionatedaughters. And theygrew so close that, to this day,Andre refers to the threeKwiecinski daughters as his “sisters.” Norwere Andre and his mother the only Jewsthis family helped. From time to time othersjoined them.Interestingly, both Ms. Puchalska and theKwiecinskis experienced “close calls.” ButThe Years of Extermination: Nazi Germanyand the Jews 1939-1945.By Saul Friedlander. HarperCollins, 2008.896 pp. $39.95, hardcover.REVIEWED BY STEVEN WELCHSince the publication in 1966 of hisbook Pius XII and the Third Reich,Saul Friedlander has been one of the internationallyacknowledged experts on theHolocaust. In The Years of Exterminationhe has provided us with an up-to-date, authoritativeaccount of the murderous Naziassault against European Jewry duringWorld War II.As was the case withhis previous widely acclaimedvolume, TheYears of Persecution1933-1939, publishedin 1997, this is a conventional,non-theoreticalwork of synthesisaimed at a broad audience.The narrative islinear and the organizationstrictly chronological.Each of the 10chapters is given a titlethat simply indicatesthe time period covered,such as “December1941-July 1942”.These 10 chapters arein turn grouped into three major parts: Terror(autumn 1939 to summer 1941); MassMurder (summer 1941 to summer 1942);and Shoah (summer 1942 to spring 1945).Any historian dealing with the Holocaustfaces the daunting task of organizing avast amount of information about a complexset of interrelated episodes that unfoldedacross an entire continent.Friedlander has chosen to use the familiartriad of perpetrators, bystanders and victimsto structure his narrative.While acknowledging the importance ofanalyzing Nazi policy-making, Friedlanderis particularly concerned to move beyonda German-centered approach in order toprovide what he terms a “more globally orientedinquiry” that allocates a central placethat never swayed them from determinedlydoing what they felt was right. In fact, suchis the case with all those non-Jews thatrescued Jews presented in this book.So, were these “just people”?Then again, perhaps the authors refer tothose who saved Jews as “just people” foranother reason. Perhaps it’s their way ofshowing us that we all have the capacity todo what they did. That we don’t have to benine feet tall. That we don’t have to haveany unique physical characteristics to takeon what they took on . . . to save the life ofa fellow human being. Yes, I can see thatthat’s it . . . That’s their reasoning . . . Still,not everyone would have done what theydid, nor, to be brutally honest, would everyonedo it today. Thus, those who savedJews during World War II are very specialpeople, rightly recognized for their “specialness”by Yad Vashem. They are surelythe angels among us.Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor of Media,Communication, and Visual Arts at PaceUniversity.HOLOCAUST BYSTANDERSin the story to the experiences of the Jewishcommunities targeted by Hitler.The juxtaposition of the high politics ofthe perpetrators with the individual historiesof their Jewish victims represents themost innovative and distinctive aspect ofFriedlander’s approach.In his examination of Nazi policy-making,Friedlander keeps the focus on Hitler andrepeatedly stresses the centrality of theFuhrer’s fanatical anti-Semitic ideology inseeking to understand why and how theHolocaust occurred. For Friedlander, ideasare both important and primary. He rejectsexplanations that stress theforce of circumstances orthat see the murder of EuropeanJewry as a byproductof a larger process ofcapitalist rationalization ormodernizing social engineering.In Friedlander’s view,Nazism is best understoodas a form of political religionof which the major article offaith was anti-Semitism.“Hitler,” he observes, “perceivedhis mission as a kindof crusade to redeem theworld by eliminating theJews.”In every chapter he providesextensive quotationsfrom speeches and private declarations thatleave no doubt about Hitler’s obsessive andpathological hatred for Jews.Hitler convinced himself – and a verysubstantial number of his followers – that“the Jew” was the driving force behind bothBolshevism and capitalism. Stalin andRoosevelt, he insisted, were nothing butthe latest frontmen for an ancient and ongoingglobal Jewish conspiracy aimed atdestroying the Aryan race. This irrationaland absurd world view provided the justificationfor the genocidal program thatbegan to take concrete shape over thecourse of 1941.While Friedlander stresses the importanceof Hitler’s ideology as a crucial factor(Continued on page 14)

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 5NAZI DEATH CAMP STORIES UNFOLD ON NEW USF SITEBY LINDSAY PETERSON,THE TAMPA TRIBUNELeonard Lubin got used to seeing bodiesin the final days of World War II.The images that stuck in his mind were ofthe living – half out of their minds, running,some crawling like animals, from a concentrationcamp in Austria.Lubin, a military veteran from St. Petersburg,told his story to Michael Hirsh, whointerviewed nearly 150 military men andwomen for a new book, The Liberators:America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust.Hirsh has donated his interview recordingsto the University of South Florida.Lubin was 19 when he and the othermembers of the 71st Infantry Division cameupon the labor camp in a town called Wels.As they arrived, prisoners were pouring outof an open gate. Unsure about who thesesoldiers were, “they were running from uslike crazy in a panic,” Lubin told Hirsh.One man caught Lubin’s eye. Starving likethe rest, he had found an empty tomato can,its top still partly attached and jagged allaround from the way it had been opened.“He had it with both of his hands jammedup against his face, trying to get his tongueinto it to lick the contents, and lick the toplid and sides of the top lid. Blood was pouringdown his face, and he was acting totallyinsane,” Lubin said.“So in my nightmares, that’s what I see.And to me that’s what the Holocaust was.It wasn’t death; it was torment of the kindthat can reduce a human being to sub-animalstatus, to be willing to lacerate himselfand cut himself to get that slight bit of nourishment.’’Lubin, 83, died in April. His 49-page interview,in print and audio form, is nowpart of the USF Libraries Holocaust andGenocide Studies Center. It’s one of thedozens that Hirshcompleted as researchfor his book.The book tells thestories of the GIswho happened uponthe concentrationcamps scatteredacross Germanyand Austria, wheremillions of men,women, and childrenwere held asslave laborers untilthey were killed ordied from disease orstarvation.The soldiers werein their late teens and early 20s and whatthey experienced never left them. ForrestRobinson was so traumatized by themasses of dead bodies at Nordhausen helost his memory for two weeks.Albert Adams described finding theovens at Mauthausen still hot. One of theprisoners gave him a tour of the camp. “Heshowed me where they tortured them,where they would hang them, hang themup and beat them.”Adams also watched prisoners beat todeath a “kapo,” another prisoner who hadcooperated with the guards. After the liberations,the soldiers shot SS officers with nosecond thoughts.Now in their 80s and 90s, the menwere sometimes fuzzy on exactU.S. troops execute Dachau guards on liberation day.dates and the sequence of events, Hirshsaid. But their memories of specificevents, the sights and especially thesmells, were as clear as if they’d happenedthe day before.“One thing that surprised me was thenumber of guys who still suffer from what wenow know as PTSD. They still can’t getthese visions out of their heads,” Hirsh said.Many had never told their closest relativeswhat they’d seen.Hirsh was surprised no one had ever collectedthese stories for a nonfiction book.The story of the Holocaust has been told,Hirsh said, but never through the eyes ofthe GIs who found the survivors after theprison guards abandoned their posts.“Who would have thought there were anyuntold Holocaust stories?”Hirsh is a Vietnam veteran, screenwriterand documentary producerwho donated several of his scripts to USFa few years ago. Last year, as he wasstarting to write Liberators, he was talkingto his USF library contact, Mark Greenberg,and mentioned he had the transcriptsof his interviews.“I could feel the phone start to vibrate,”he said.USF had just opened its Holocaust andGenocide Studies Center, and Greenbergwas the director.The university will launch a new Webpage: the Concentration Camp LiberatorsOral History Project. Of nearly 150 interviewsby Hirsh, 31 are available there nowand the rest soon will be.“I’m trying to fill a hole in history thateveryone thought had been completelywritten,” says Hirsh.“The problem is that the hole needed tohave been filled in 20 years ago. And if I’dwaited any longer, there would have beenno way to fill it.”HEIRS SOUGHT FORHOLOCAUST FORTUNESBY ANNE BARKER, ABC NEWSIn recent years European banks havebegun paying millions of dollars to thefamilies of Holocaust victims whoseassets were dormant in bank coffers afterthe war.But one country where banks are stillfighting claims for restitution is Israel.Thousands of European Jews openedaccounts in the Holy Land before or duringthe war. They have gone but theirwealth lives on, in the banks.Now, a group in Israel is embarking on aworldwide search for the rightful heirs.David Hillinger’s grandparents weregassed in Auschwitz in World War II.But in 1940 before they died, his grandfatherdeposited 1,400 English pounds in theAnglo Palestine Bank in what is now Israel.Like so many European Jews, theyhoped the money would assist theirescape from persecution after the war.“He was afraid of the Germans, so hewas thinking like other people also, ‘If Isend money in Palestine, perhaps theysend me a visa and I can live in Palestine,yes?’” Mr. Hillinger said.After the war the Anglo Palestine andother banks still held the deposits of thousandsof Jews who had died in theHolocaust.David Hillinger’s family had the documentsfor his grandfather’s account, which he saysis now worth about half a million shekels.But Leumi Bank, which took over fromAnglo Palestine, said the account did notexist and refused to pay.“I was angry because it is Israeli banksstole Israeli money from people who diedin the Shoah,” he said.David Hillinger is one of maybe hundredsof thousands of heirs of Holocaustvictims who deposited money in what arenow Israeli banks.Many European Jews even boughtproperty in Palestine before the war, in thehope they would eventually live in theHoly Land.But six decades on, much of the moneyis still locked away and land and housesare still vacant.Elinor Kroitoru works for the Companyfor Location and Restitution of HolocaustVictims’ Assets, which has taken up thefight with the Israeli banks.“We have a few hundred plots of landand they sum up to quite a nice amount ofmillions of Israeli shekels,” she said.Two of the banks recently settled out ofcourt but of the other three, she claimsLeumi still owes about 300 million shekels($90 million).“We know about 10,000 accounts thatwe’re speaking of, but some of theaccounts were given back to the heirsafter the war,” she said.“So I think it’s about around 7,000accounts that we’re talking about today.”Now the company is about to begin aworldwide search for the relatives of Holocaustvictims who invested in Palestinebefore they died.And Ms. Kroitoru suspects most have noidea they are the heirs to a small fortuneor even property.“Many people didn’t even know thateven their father bought a plot of land inPalestine,” she said.Leumi Bank says it handed most of themoney in the accounts to British authoritiesafter the war, and at most would onlybe liable for the interest accrued.And recently it paid 20 million shekels –as a goodwill gesture – to the companyrepresenting the heirs.In the meantime, it has agreed to enteran arbitration process to resolve theclaims.WEST GERMAN SPY AGENCYEMPLOYED ABOUT 200 FORMER NAZISThe German spy service has admittedthat it employed about 200 formerNazi criminals for at least 15 years afterthe end of the Second World War.Some had been involved in massacresin Poland and Russia, others wereGestapo torturers; all found a berth in theWest German intelligence service. Thecases have been brought to light becausethe Federal German Intelligence Service(BND) is compiling a history of its espionageactivities since 1956 – and so polishingup its image, in the manner of MI6.There was never any attempt to hide thefact that the BND employed Nazis – it wasset up in a hurry, with US help, to createspying networks against the SovietUnion – but it has always been vagueabout its war records.Now the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungnewspaper has been given access to filesfrom the 1960s that detail how the BNDtried, belatedly, to weed out suspected warcriminals. Potted biographies of theagents, with lightly disguised names, havebeen published at www.faz.net/bnd.According to the newspaper the BNDwas thrown into confusion by the discoveryof two Soviet moles, Heinz Felfe and JohannesClemens, in 1961. Felfe had previouslybeen a member of the SS whileClemens had been nicknamed “The Tigerof Como” for his savage treatment of Italiandissidents during the war.The head of the BND, Reinhard Gehlen- himself a former intelligence officer in theWehrmacht - decided that a criminal warrecord could make his agents a securityrisk, giving Moscow blackmail material.The old Nazis had served their purpose,providing agent networks and insideknowledge of the Soviet Union and EasternEurope. Now they had to be screened.Gehlen, one of the legendary Cold Warspymasters, assigned a 32-year-old molehunter,Hans-Henning Crome, to the task.In 1963 Mr Crome, now a pensioner, setup a team called Unit 85, which establisheditself in the attic of Gehlen’s villa onthe BND compound. Co-operating withNazi-hunters in Ludwigsburg, they startedto work through the records of theagency’s 2,450 employees.Many had made only rudimentary attemptsto cover their tracks. A certainKurt W, formerly of the Gestapo in Koblenz,for example, had claimed to be a passportcontrol officer in Sajmiste, near Belgrade. Infact, Sajmiste was the site of a concentrationcamp in which thousands of Jews were detainedand murdered. Kurt W. – a promisingofficer in the BND – was thought to havebeen involved in the killings.Georg W had been a young officer in theGestapo, and joined an Einsatzkommando- in essence a killing squad - that murderedthe Polish intelligentsia after the German invasion.His unit killed 1,700 Poles, includingwomen and children, in a single day in awood outside Palmiry. By the end of the war,he was hunting down Jews and communistsin hiding in Kassel. Then he joined the BNDand rose through the ranks. He had plentyof opportunities to bump into old comradesin the canteen – Helmut S, for example,whose SS unit was deemed responsible forthe slaughter of 24,000 people, most ofthem Jews, in the Soviet Union.Gehlen recorded his contacts and reportsfrom the war and stored the microfilmsin water-tight barrels in various sitesin the Austrian Alps; he later traded themfor his freedom. One of his nuggets of informationwas that several members of theAmerican Office of Strategic Services –the precursor to the CIA – had been secretmembers of the US Communist Party.But the BND was a spy service without areal tradition, and even after the sacking ofthe Nazis and Gehlen’s retirement in 1968,it was plagued by moles.

Page 6 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770SURVIVORS’ CORNERBY JOSEPH BERGER,THE NEW YORK TIMESWe have seen these images before,wizened men and women recallingunspeakable events that occurred whenthey were teenagers, sometimes tartlymocking their own cluelessness.In a series of four documentaries aboutthe little-known ordeals of Czech Jews duringWorld War II, for example, Anna KrausBauer looks back at her train journey to anEstonian labor camp. “I remember I keptlooking at the moon, telling myself it isshining here, and it is shining at home too— the very same one,” she says. “Somaybe things won’t be so bad.”But what makes Forgotten Transportsstand out from the multitude of Holocaustdocumentaries is that its director, LukasPribyl, did more than track down survivorsor burrow through film archives and deportationrecords.Over 10 years and visits to 30 countries,he hunted down photographs of SS campcommanders and snapshots taken by localresidents and workers who might have encounteredinmates, sometimes trading bottlesof vodka for the artifacts. Theimpression conveyed is that a photographerwas along for the nightmare ride ofthe Czech Jews.When Mrs. Bauer and friends who managedto stay together through the warspeak of Aleksander Laak, their SS commander,there he is in his fearsome ramrodauthority, and, at the film’s end, there he is15 years later in Canada, looking plumpand content, surrounded by the kinds ofrelatives he never let his victims keep.(When his crimes were revealed in 1960,he hanged himself.)And when Jews at Salaspils, a Latviancamp, recall an Ernst Ballon who escapedand the retributive hanging that followed,there are photographs of Ballon; the SScommander, Otto Teckemeier, who orderedthe hanging; the Jewish block elder,BY GILA LYONS, TABLETImet Sonya Oshman at the world premiereof A Partisan Returns: The Legacyof Two Sisters, a documentary about the1943 escape of 250 Jews, including Sonya,from a work camp in Poland through a 700-foot tunnel dug by hand.Sonya’s speech at the podium impressedon me her sheer will to survive,gratitude for surviving, and mission toshare her story.Several weeks after the film screening, I satin Sonya Oshman’s sunny living room at herassisted-living facility in New Jersey. At 86,she was small but sturdy, with feathery brownhair, round deep-set eyes, and thin eyebrowsthat arched upwards when she smiled.In 1931, Sonya Gorodinsky was 9 yearsold, the eldest of four children, with a sisteryet to be born. The family lived on PilsudskiStreet, in a home next to Sonya’s maternalgrandparents, who employed twoSURVIVAL TALES TOLD IN SNAPSHOTS:CZECH JEWS ENDURING THE HOLOCAUSTSiegfried Kaufmann, who chose thescapegoat; and Salaspils inmates watchinga hanging.“Behind every picture there is severalhundred phone calls,” Mr. Pribyl, a 36-year-old Czech Jewish historian who studiedat Brandeis and Columbia, said in atelephone interview from Prague. “I decidedeverything people say will be docu-Deported women as conscripted laborers.mented with authentic pictures and footagefrom that time and place.”Together the films trace the experiencesof 76 of the 270 survivorsamong the thousands of Czech Jews deported,not to the familiar Theresienstadtghetto or to Auschwitz, but to less-wellknowncamps like Jagala and Kaiserwald.Mr. Pribyl chose that approach because hisgrandfather was sent to an obscure camp.The films weave several strands in anapproach echoing the chapter structure ofJoyce’s Ulysses. Each film portrays differentgroups in different locations — singlewomen in Estonia, men in Belarus, familiesin the Riga ghetto of Latvia, escapees fromthe Lublin region of Poland.Each film also depicts a different modeof survival. The men from Belarus quicklygrasped their fate and hatched ways to joinpartisan units. The Estonian women survivedby naïve denial. Children in the Rigaghetto played soccer, walked to schoolpast bodies strung from gallows, and later,in Kaiserwald, heard their parents make futileplans to hide them under barracksfloorboards.In each film well-dressed survivors sit incomfortable living rooms calmly recollectingwithout a narrator’s intrusion. Mr. Pribylalso avoided standard historical footage ofevents like Nazi parades.“You won’t see Hitler in my films,” hesaid. “What I’m interested in is when youtake a person from a relatively normal lifeand suddenly throw them into completelyapocalyptic conditions — how does thatperson react?”Working with a cameraman and the financialbacking of relatives and others, hepestered subjects for years to talk or handover photographs. In one visit to an SS officer’skin, he pressed the doorbell insistently.“Go to the garage,” he recalled an exasperatedrelative’s snapping. “Grandpa’ssuitcase is there. Take it and leave usalone.”The film about Estonia shows howwomen who grew close on the transportto Jagala made sure to buck eachGREAT ESCAPEyoung Polish women who did houseworkand looked after the children. “I had a goodyouth,” Sonya told me. “I was one of theprivileged ones.”Sonya’s parents, Abraham and Tamara,owned an appliance store. Abraham calledhis daughter Sonyaleh. Many of his customers,non-Jewish state officials, befriendedhim and called him Abramaleh, orMeme. When there was tension betweenthe Jews and Poles of the town, theywould often turn to Meme to mediate.The children attended Jewish schoolswhere they studied Hebrew, Torah, andJewish history, as well as math, science,and literature. She went on to study tobe a doctor and was accepted to medicalschool in Bialystok, to begin in thefall of 1939.By September of that year Novogrudekwas in danger of German invasion. The Polishauthorities fled, knowing they would beoverpowered. The Jews there believed theRussians would be more sympathetic rulersthan the Germans, and so when Soviet soldiersmarched into town on September 17,they were greeted with flowers and hugs.The afternoon of June 24, 1941,Sonya was the only one at home onPilsudski Street. As she passed the tallbrick chimney in the center of the house,she heard a bomb fall. Then another. Shestood frozen while the entire house collapsedin a heavy sigh of dust and boards.After the smoke settled, Sonya stoodstunned next to the brick chimney.The Germans had invaded Novogrudekand turned the Jewish neighborhoods torubble. The shops in the marketplace,mostly Jewish-owned, were burnt andsmashed, as were the Jewish libraries andschools. Of all the synagogues, only a fewwalls remained. There were 300 casualties,mostly Jewish.It was bitterly cold six months later, onSaturday, December 6, when 6,500 Jews,half the town’s population, were instructedto assemble at the courthouse yard. TheGorodinskys trudged toward the town centerclutching pillows, boxes of photo-other up, sometimes dividing a cadgedpiece of bread.“We tried to keep each other’s headabove water,” one of them, Hana Fuchs-Klenk, said. “We were willing to giveeverything up if we could help somebodyelse or that she needed it more.”The films show heaps of fly-coveredcorpses and naked, frightened womenwaiting to be shot in a trench. But it alsocaptures eruptions of human quirkiness —sometimes generous, sometimes cruel —that bring the Holocaust down to anearthly level.Gisela Danziger Herzl recalls how shespotted the suit of her husband, Karel, onanother man and “finally knew what Ithought was going on.” In the Kivioli camp,Mrs. Herzl was about to be shot when theGerman commandant interceded.“Gisela, make this chicken for me — ittastes like my mother used to make it,”Mrs. Herzl recalled his saying. “So thechicken saved my life.”One SS officer, Heinz Droshin, pulled offhis insignia and fled the camp with a beautifulJewish girl, Inge Sylten. Photographsof both are shown.“It was like they forgot where they arecompletely,” Mrs. Danziger said.In Riga an SS officer catches a youngwoman hiding red wool among clothesshe was sorting for shipment to Germanyand shoots not only her but also everyfourth woman in her group. But at Kaiserwaldin Latvia, another SS officer, after atrifling bribe, looks the other way whilemen dig a tunnel so women from the adjoiningcamp can sneak under the fenceand spend the night.The survivors sometimes chuckle asthey look back in disbelief. Mr. Pribyl saidhe felt that survivors had a sense of humorand an optimistic outlook in common. Butultimately, Mr. Pribyl said, his researchproved that “the only recipe for survival isto have a lot of good luck.”graphs, and sacks of clothing. Soldierslocked the gates of the courthouse yardbehind them.For two days, the Jews neither slept norate. On December 8, Sonya’s grandparentsand little brother were sent to theirdeaths, while Sonya, her parents, and herremaining siblings were locked into thecourthouse compound along with Novogrudek’sremaining 1,500 Jews. It was amakeshift ghetto surrounded by barbedwire and armed guards. The people insidewere craftsmen saved for their skills. Eachmorning the ghetto gates would open andtailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, carpenters,saddlers, and mechanics, alongwith their families, were ushered undergunpoint to their workshops to sew fur liningsinto boots, manufacture guns, ormend German army uniforms.On May 7, 1943, there was anotherroundup in the courthouse square. SSguards swarmed around the exhausted(Continued on page 12)

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 7THE ARAB POSITION ON THE HOLOCAUSTBY SHLOMO AVINERI, HAARETZOne sometimes encounters thePalestinian argument that there isa basic injustice in the fact that they appearto have to pay the price for Europe’scrimes during the Holocaust. It’s true, ofcourse, that Nazi Germany and its allies,and not the Palestinians, are those guiltyof perpetrating the Holocaust.Nonetheless, any argument that linksthe establishment of the State of Israelexclusively to the Holocaust ignores thefact that modern Zionism preceded theannihilation of the Jews in World War II,even if the Holocaust clearly strengthenedthe claim for Jewish sovereignty.Yet the Arab argument that places allresponsibility on Europe is not completelycorrect. When the Arab revoltagainst British rule in Palestine brokeout in 1936, its aim was to change theBritish position, which had supportedJewish immigration to Palestine sincethe Balfour Declaration. The revolt wasalso meant to hurt the Jewish communityand discourage Jews who were planningto immigrate. The British, in time-honoredcolonial tradition, cruelly suppressedthe revolt, assisted by theBY RAY FURLONG, BBCHedi Fried was never supposed to returnhome. Packed into a cattle truckin 1944, she was deported to Auschwitzwith the other 17,000 Jews in Sighet, nowSighetu Marmatiei in Romania.But like her town’s most famous son, theNobel laureate Elie Wiesel, she survivedand has often returned to the town to bearwitness to what happened with talks andlectures.Now, aged 85, she’s made an emotionalfinal journey there.The rain streams down as we draw upoutside Sighet’s Jewish cemetery.“This is my pilgrimage, the last one,”says Hedi, stepping over a large brownpuddle.“When I come to Sighet I remember mychildhood stories, and I see the ghosts.When I walk the streets I see peoplecoming and going. But they’re not hereany more, none of them.”There are rows of gravestones at oddangles in the grass, many engraved withthe word Auschwitz and several names.Hedi’s family gravestone contains, amongothers, her mother and father.“They went up in smoke,” she says, “butI had their names put here.”A prayer for the dead is recited, andHedi shows me her grandmother’s gravestonenearby. She died long before theHolocaust, when Hedi was a child.“I remember how she always used togive me sweets,” she says, recalling a bygoneage when Sighet was a bustling Jewishcity.As we drive through potholed streets toour next stop, she points at the low-risehouses with crumbling 1920s facades.“All of these were Jewish houses,” shesays, the only person in the town who canremember what it was like.Her family moved into a new house in1937. “I was delighted with it. I thought wehad invented functionalist architecture!”she says, as we stand outside an elegantbut decayed building.“That was my window. I can see myselftalking to my boyfriend,” she says. But theJewish community and helped by theBritish Mandatory government.But in the winter of 1938-39, the Britishchanged their policy after the government ofPrime Minister Neville Chamberlain realizedthat its appeasement of Hitler had failed.Britain began to prepare for a war against theNazis, and as part of this it changed its MiddleEast policy. Britain reintroduced the draft,started massive production of tanks and aircraft,and developed the radar. In light of theneed to insure the Empire’s critical link toIndia via the Suez Canal, Britain feared thatcontinued violent suppression of the Arab revoltin Palestine would push all Arabs in theregion closer to Nazi Germany and FascistItaly. It consequently decided to move closerto the Arabs and away from the Jews and Zionism.As Colonial Secretary Malcolm Mac-Donald explained to the Zionist leadership,the change was prompted not by a Britishconviction that Arab claims were justified, butrather by realpolitik: There were more Arabsthan Jews; the Jews would support Britainagainst the Nazis in any case, but the Arabshave the option of joining Nazi Germany.The cruel paradox lies in the fact that appeasementof the Arabs started just asBritain relinquished its appeasement policyvis-á-vis Hitler and was preparing for waragainst Germany. This was the reason formood instantly darkens. “I can also rememberleaving for the last time.”“This was the most modern house intown, the first with a water-closet. So thelast thing I did here was to flush the toilet.“I thought we’d come back soon. Wedidn’t. My parents didn’t come back. Mysister and I survived just by chance.”surviving Auschwitz, Hedi andAfter her sister were moved to Bergen-Belsen, later liberated by the British. Afterthe war they moved to Sweden, whereHedi worked as a psychologist.She has also been a tirelesscampaigner to keep retellingthe story of the Holocaust, travellingthe world to give talksand lectures, first returning toSighet in 1968.“So many survivors found itimpossible to talk about whathappened. But for me it’s actuallytherapy. Even now, cominghere, I’m working through it.“At first I thought I couldnever return to Auschwitz, butI did and since then my nightmaresare not as strong. I still have thembut I no longer wake up in a damp sweat.”But Hedi is also concerned that newgenerations are not learning the truth aboutthe Holocaust.“My aim to come to Sighet was that thechildren understand what their great-grandparentshave done, because when I livedhere as a child I was a ‘damned Jewess,’’’she says.“They don’t know what their grandparentshave done: some have been perpetrators,a few rescuers, the majority bystanders.And that’s what they have to learn: never,ever be a bystander.”At the Elie Wiesel museum in Sighet,schoolchildren perform a folk dance forHedi. She gives a talk – but the event isdisorganised.While she sits behind a table, teenagersstand huddled in front of her looking embarrassed.Others are outside in the corridor. Theycouldn’t hear a word even if they weretrying to – which they’re not.the 1939 White Paper, which drasticallylimited the right of Jews to buy land inMandatory Palestine and placed a ceilingof 75,000 on Jewish immigration. Themessage to the Arabs was clear: The Jewswould remain a minority in Palestine.This policy did not completely achieveits goal; the Mufti of Jerusalem, HajAmin al-Husseini, found his way to Berlinanyway. An anti-British and pro-Nazi rebellionerupted in Iraq, led by Rashid Ali. Butas far as the Jews were concerned, theBritish continued to consistently apply theprinciples of the White Paper during thewar. The gates were shut to legal Jewishimmigration, the British navy fought illegalimmigration, and ships seeking to saveJews from the Nazi occupation (such asthe Struma) were returned to their port oforigin; some of their passengers died atsea, others in the gas chambers.Guilt for the Holocaust lies with Nazi Germanyand its allies. But an untold numberof Jews, perhaps as many as hundreds ofthousands – including my grandparentsfrom the Polish town of Makow Podhalanski– were not saved and did not reachMandatory Palestine because of the positiontaken by the Arabs: they succeeded inshutting the country’s gates during thedarkest hour of the Jewish people.HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR FIGHTS APATHYHedi Fried.I ask one 17-year-old boy why he ishere.“I don’t know why, we’ve been told tocome,” he says, laughing.“What do you know about the Holocaust?”I ask.“Nothing, we haven’t done it at school yet.”A 15-year-old girl who was inside is alittle more forthcoming. She says Hedispoke about her childhood in Sighet andwhat happened to her family.“Were you surprised?” I ask.“Yes,” she replies.“Have you ever heard what happenedhere in your town before?”“No.”Monosyllabic answers are common toteenagers. But the local schools clearlydid not see Hedi’s visit as an opportunityto teach their pupils about this town’shorrific recent history.Of the 17,000 Jews who lived here beforethe war, there’s hardly a trace – just a fewfamilies and a single surviving synagogue.After the talk, Hedi joins in the folk dance,drawing on enviable reserves of energyfor an 85-year-old.But back at the hotel afterwards, she’sclearly tired when asked about the lukewarmresponse that her testimony drew from thelocal youth.“People don’t want to talk about it, especiallywhat happened in their own community.The bystanders are ashamed of it,”she says.“But tomorrow I am going to anotherschool.”POLISH WOMAN’SJEWISH “SHOCK”More than 27,000 Jews were killed atthe Sobibor death camp, built by theNazis in Poland. The BBC’s Steve Rosenbergtravelled to Poland to meet a womanwho only recently discovered that she, herself,was Jewish and that her family hadbeen killed in one such camp.Bogomila always suspected that hermother had a secret.“She always looked frightened,” Bogomilatells me. “My husband used to say,‘Your mother is afraid of her own shadow.’”Last summer, her 67-year-old motherBarbara finally revealed her secret. She isa Jewish child of the Holocaust. Suddenly,at the age of 37, Bogomila realized shewas Jewish, too.“I was in shock,” Bogomila admits. “I didn’tsleep at all that night. I couldn’t eat forthe next two weeks.”I’m sitting with Barbara and Bogomila inthe Jewish community center in Lublin. BeforeWorld War II, more than 40,000 Jewslived in this city. The Holocaust changedeverything.“My whole family was killed by theNazis,” Barbara says.“I survived because a Polish familyagreed to hide me. When I was growing upI realized the Polish ‘mother’ couldn’t bemy real mother, she was too old. When Iwas 12 she told me the truth.”I ask Barbara why she had waited somany years before telling Bogomila andher other two daughters of their Jewishheritage.“My husband is Catholic,” Barbara says,“He didn’t want the girls to know. His ownfamily didn’t like Jews. He didn’t want thegirls to have problems. I’d had problemswhen I was small. In school the other childrenused to make fun of me. They usedto pull my curly hair to try to make itstraight. I was made to feel different.”Today Jews in Poland continue to sufferabuse.“I wouldn’t call it anti-Semitism,” says thePresident of the Union of Jewish Communitiesof Poland, Piotr Kadlcik. “It’s more abroad dislike of Jews. What’s worrying is acertain level of leniency of the prosecutor’soffice in relation to hate crimes, Nazisalutes and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries.”Barbara admits that she never plannedto reveal her secret. It was Bogomila’s persistentquestioning about the past thatforced her to change her mind.Her daughter had been bombarding herwith questions about her ancestors, desperateto discover more about her family.After the initial shock of discovering shewas Jewish, Bogomila says she is “veryhappy” with her new identity. She has evensigned up for a course of Jewish studies inLublin.She attends the small Sabbath mealhere in the community center. And she recentlyvisited the Nazi death camp Sobibor,where a quarter of a million Jews weremurdered in the gas chambers.I ask Bogomila if she has told her ownchildren the news.“I would like to tell them,” she says, “butthey are so small. Agatha is 10, Christopheris six and Julia is five.”“Are they really too young to be told?” Iask.“If I tell them, then my oldest child,Agatha, will probably go and tell her othergrandmother – my mother-in-law,” Bogomilaexplains.“And my mother-in-law doesn’t like Jews.As for my husband’s grandmother, shehates Jews.”

Page 8 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 577010 TH ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON OF THECONTINUITY IN ACTIONEli Zborowski, Chairman of The American Societyfor Yad VashemDear Guests of Honor, Doris Gross and YoninaGomberg; Luncheon Chairperson, Lili Stawski; ourGuest Speaker, Prof. Joseph Kertes; dear friends:On behalf of the American and International Societiesfor Yad Vashem, our Officers and Board, as well as YadVashem Jerusalem, it is my pleasure to welcome you allto our 10th Annual Spring Luncheon.This afternoon’s program is a celebration of continuity…The continuity of our work from generation to generation,and our ongoing efforts towards our future in preservingmemory and commitment to education. Indeed, this year’sLuncheon theme is “Continuity,” and it is only befitting thatour Guests of Honor should be Doris Gross, a Survivor, and Yonina Gomberg, the daughterof Cheryl and Fred Halpern and granddaughter of Gladys and Sam Halpern, Survivors.Doris is a Holocaust Survivor and is deeply committed to the cause of Remembrance.She, together with her late husband Sam, was part of our organization since its inceptionand worked tirelessly on its behalf. Yonina, a very active member of our Young Leadership,is part of our Third Generation, and with her peers is committed to continue our importantmission. Yonina and her peers are determined to carry the torch held by her grandparents,by Doris, and by the other members of our generation.It gives us great Nachat to witness real CONTINUITY IN ACTION, the two Guests ofHonor, Doris the Survivor and Yonina the grandchild of Survivors. Look around: the majorityof guests are 2nd-and 3rd-generation, starting with the Luncheon Chairperson, LiliStawski, a daughter of Survivors, as well as the presence of both Chairpersons of theYoung Leadership Associates – Caroline Massel and Jeremy Halpern – both grandchildrenof Survivors – the leaders of our torch-carriers. We consider one of the Societies’ greatestachievements in assuring continuity by having you, our children and grandchildren, withus in our work on behalf of Remembrance, which is the mandate of Yad Vashem.The important work of our two outstanding women Honorees, together with all of you,dear friends, enables us each day to commemorate and educate.This year, we are honored to have with us Professor Joseph Kertes as our guest speaker.Last but not least, I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of Rachelle Grossman, ourEvent Coordinator, who together with the staff is responsible for the Luncheon arrangements.REMEMBER AND HONOR THE PASTLili Stawski, Luncheon ChairwomanOn behalf of the entire Yad Vashem Committee, I amso happy to welcome you here today and thank youfor your support. I am honored to serve as Chairperson ofthis year’s Spring Luncheon.Eli and Elizabeth Zborowski never cease to inspire me;their total devotion and dedication to Yad Vashem are utterlyamazing and if not for their hard work, Yad Vashemwould not be where it is today – so thank you!Also, we are very grateful and fortunate to have RachelleGrossman, who helped make today’s event so special.I very much appreciate and want to share my enthusiasmfor the American Society for Yad Vashem. This year’stheme is “Continuity” – and the best way to begin is at thebeginning: going back to 1980, when one of the very firstmeetings of Yad Vashem was held at the home of my parents Elli and Izzy Krakowski. Itwas my brother Harry Krakowski who offered to be the first supporter of Eli’s vision – YadVashem.Coming from a family of Survivors, both my immediate as well as my extended family,one grew up knowing how important it is that one does not forget – that we remember andhonor the past. As one of my daughters, Ariella, quotes Elie Wiesel: “One person of integritycan make a difference.”In order for continuity to go on, we must all recognize how instrumental Yad Vashem isto all of us. As Elli and Izzy Krakowski, Survivors who passed on their stories and theirvalues to my brother Harry, sister-in-law Andrea and onto the next generation, my deardaughters Ariella and Ilana Stawski, and Rachel, Sarah, Sophie, and Leah Krakowski,L’Dor Va Dor.Thus it is with great pride and joy that I acknowledge this year’s Yad Vashem’s Honorees:Doris Gross, a Survivor, and Yonina Gomberg, a grandchild of Survivors Gladys and SamHalpern, who is an outstanding lawyer and works so hard for her community.Jean Gluck; Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem; and Fanya GottesfeldHeller.Attendees of the 2010 Spring Luncheon.Stella Skura and Cheryl Lifshitz, benefactors.Prof. Joseph Kertes, Guest Speaker, and Marilyn Rubenstein, benefactor.

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 9AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMTEACHING THE LESSONS OF HISTORYDoris Gross, Spring Luncheon HonoreeThank you, Lili, for your introduction, and thanks to yourfamily and my daughter Carol and her family and mysister-in-law Fela Moncznik and all my guests who camehere in support of the Society – a partner to Yad Vashem inits sacred work on behalf of Remembrance.Seventy years ago I was a happy child nurtured by lovingparents. Suddenly, however, my life turned upsidedown and the next five years pushed me through unspeakablehorrors. I experienced life in the ghetto, wassent to forced labor and to concentration camp. My entirefamily perished except for my late brother Bernard andmyself. And I will always remember the last words my fathersaid to me: Don’t always be the first, but don’t also be the last.My late husband, Sam, was equally dedicated to Remembrance and we were deeplyinvolved with this organization from its inception.I am honored to be this year’s Spring Luncheon Honoree together with an active memberof the young leadership, Yonina Gomberg. This is a real tribute to the success of our workwhere we all work together with our next generation, the younger people who dedicatetheir efforts to remembering the history of the Holocaust. I am grateful to G-d for havingsurvived, for having married my beloved late husband, for having a beautiful family, formy children and grandchildren. After all the hardship I went through I consider workingwithin the American Society towards helping Yad Vashem preserve the memory of the SixMillion, a privilege and an obligation. Teaching the lessons of history to our children andtheir children for future generations to come is what we are about.In closing I again wish to thank all of you for bestowing this honor on me.Ilana Stawski; Lili Stawski, 2010 Spring Luncheon Chair; Regina Petersiel; Elli and IsraelKrakowski.COMMITMENT TO REMEMBRANCEYonina Gomberg, Spring Luncheon HonoreeThank you, Grandma, for that beautiful introduction.Congratulations to Mrs. Doris Gross, my fellow Honoree.Your story of survival and triumph is an inspirationto us all. It is truly a privilege to share this day with you.And thank you, Eli and Elizabeth Zborowski, for all thatyou did for the American Society for Yad Vashem; LiliStawski, our Luncheon Chairwoman, and RachelleGrossman, for your efforts to make a beautiful and successfulluncheon; and dear friends.I am so honored to be here today representing the thirdgeneration.My parents, Fred and Cheryl Halpern, and my grandparents,Rabbi Avrum and Estelle Feldman and Sam and Gladys Halpern, always demonstratedthe importance of family, yiddishkeit, tzedakah and Israel. I am blessed to havesuch exemplary role models.It was my grandparents, Sam and Gladys, who taught me the importance of keepingalive the memory of the Holocaust. Many of you know of their experiences during theShoah. Grandpa Sam and his brother, z’l, Arie were in the Kamionka labor camp. Afterescaping from the camp the night before the camp was liquidated, they went into hidingin the home of the Gorniak family. Grandma Gladys, her mother, and two aunts spent 18months hiding in the home of Marian Halicki. My family owes its existence to these righteousgentiles.What we can’t possibly know, however, are the stories of so many others who were murdered.In anticipation of today’s luncheon I searched through Yad Vashem’s central databaseof Shoah victims names. I came across many women named Janina, or Jonina witha “J,” and a few whose names were spelled exactly like mine, with a “Y.” Yoninas whowere victims of the Shoah. Reading the testimony dedicated to their memory affected meprofoundly.Therefore, I gratefully accept this honor in the name of these Yoninas:Yonina Figer was born in Podzelva, Lithuania to Yekhezkel and Rivka. She remained inPodzelva, where she perished in the Holocaust.Yonina Gilersonaite was born in Kowno in 1936 to Solomon and Frida Kaplan. She wasa child, only 5 years old when she perished in 1941.Yonina Grynbaum was born in Poland. Married to Avraham, she spent her days beforethe war as a housewife in Warsaw. During the war she was in the Warsaw Ghetto, whereshe perished.Yonina Kretinger was born in Vilkaviskis in 1905 to Bentzion and Feiga. She never hadan opportunity to marry and start her own family…she perished in 1942 in the Shoah.Reading testimonies such as these affirmed for me why Yad Vashem is a unique institutionwhose mission is indispensable when it comes to remembrance, documentation,research, and education.Many who are not as close to Yad Vashem or the Shoah as we, speak of the Holocaustand think of the collective six million – an incomprehensible number. But Yad Vashem focusesus on six million individuals. The Pages of Testimony project, which is the effort tocollect the names as well as any anecdotal information about these six million Jews whowere lost to us, is just one of many ways that Yad Vashem commemorates the murderedand documents the atrocities of the Holocaust.I salute Mrs. Gross and all of you here today for your incredible work on behalf of theAmerican Society for Yad Vashem and Yad Vashem Jerusalem. As a member of the YoungLeadership Associates, I pledge to my fellow honoree, Doris Gross, to Eli Zborowski, tomy dear grandparents and parents, and to all of you here today, that the third-generationis devoted to continuing your work. Indeed today’s theme, “Continuity,” epitomizes thiscommitment to remembrance.I want to thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here today andfor so generously supporting Yad Vashem. Personally, I feel humbled and truly blessed,that, baruch Hashem, I can stand here today, a grandchild of survivors.I, also, thank my husband Eric, and our sons Liam and Tobias, for being so supportive,inspiring and loving. Once again, thank you for this honor.Fred Halpern, Sam Halpern and Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem.Nicole Pines Lieberman, Robyn Gelberg and Danielle Schwartz.

Page 10 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMTHE AUSCHWITZ ALBUM: THE STORY OF A TRANSPORT –ILONA BERK’S STORYJim Berk, a sports journalist and guidein-trainingat the Holocaust MemorialCenter Zekelman Family Campus in FarmingtonHills, Michigan, was attending aviewing of the exhibit “The AuschwitzAlbum: Story of a Transport,” when hecame upon a startling discovery thatcaused his breath to catch in his throat andhis heart to skip a beat. He recognized hismother — Ilona Dorenter Berk — in one ofthe photos with a group of women, uponarrival from the train to the notorious deathcamp, Auschwitz.The American Society for Yad Vashembrought this exhibit from Yad Vashem inJerusalem four years ago, when it had itspremiere at the United Nations in New YorkCity. Since then, the exhibit has travelledthroughout the United States to severalcities, colleges and museums in Los Angeles,Miami, Chicago, and now Detroit.The Auschwitz Album is the only survivingvisual evidence of the process of mass murderat Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a uniquedocument and was donated to Yad Vashemby Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier in 1994.The photos were taken at the end of Mayor beginning of June 1944, either by ErnstHofmann or by Bernhard Walter, two SSmen whose task was to take ID photos andfingerprints of the inmates (not of the Jewswho were sent directly to the gas chambers).The photos show the arrival of HungarianJews from Carpatho-Ruthenia.Many of them came from the Berehovoghetto, which itself was a collecting pointfor Jews from several other small towns.The purpose of the album is unclear. Itwas not intended for propaganda purposes,nor does it have any obvious per-Ilona and Sam Berk, wedding day, 1953.sonal use. One assumes that it wasprepared as an official reference for ahigher authority, as were photo albumsfrom other concentration camps. The photosin the Auschwitz Album show the entireprocess except for the killing itself.Ilona Berk (nee Dorenter) was one ofthe fortunate who survived. In 1944she was a young Jewish woman of 25, livingin the Berehovo ghetto in Hungary duringthe darkest days of Nazi-occupied Europe.She was born in 1918 in the town ofUzhhorod, (Ungvar in Hungarian), whichwas in Czechoslovakia prior to Hungary’sannexation. In May 1944, she wasdeported from the ghetto to theAuschwitz-Birkenau concentrationcamp in this infamous transport,whose ultimate purpose was thetotal extermination of HungarianJewry by the Nazis. Ilona, the secondof eight children, with theirmother, was deported and put ontothis transport. She was one of thelucky ones — upon arrival at thecamp, during the horrific selectionprocess by the SS, she was selectedfor forced labor, and she survived.Thousands of others werenot as lucky.Today Ilona is 91 years old, andlives in Lincoln, Nebraska. Whiletelling her story, at many momentsshe became very emotional. Understandably,these are very difficultand painful memories to recall. Ilonaremembers the trip on the transport tookthree or four days, and many people diedon the way, before reaching Auschwitz.She believes that her skills as a seamstress,and her ability to speak German,helped her to survive that terrible time. Shelost a sister and two brothers at Auschwitz.After the war ended, Ilona lived inSweden for a few years, and eventuallymade her way to the United States. In1952, at age 33, she visited MiamiBeach for a holiday, where she met herhusband, who was from Grand Rapids,Michigan. They married in 1953 and settledin Lincoln, Nebraska; their son Jimwas born in 1954. Jim lives in WestBloomfield, Michigan, and is active in thecause for Holocaust remembrance.Today, the numbers of Shoah survivorslike Ilona Berk are quicklyshrinking. Amid a world in which Holocaustdenial is resurgent — their spiritcries to each of us who remains: “Remember.”We need your help to make sure thatthe names and stories of the victims arenot forgotten.The American Society for Yad Vashemsupports the work of Yad Vashem inJerusalem, the world’s pre-eminentHolocaust memorial, museum, and researchcenter.Your support will help us to continueour work in the field of Holocaust research,remembrance, and commemoration.Please be generous with a gifttoday and please remember Yad Vashemin your will.To support the work of Yad Vashemwith a gift today, please contactMadelyn Cohen at 212-220-4304 ormcohen@yadvashemusa.org.VIRTUES OF MEMORY:SIX DECADES OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS’ CREATIVITYBY YEHUDIT SHENDARThe yoke of memory is borne by Holocaustsurvivors day in and day out.Over the years, they have unburdenedthemselves piece by piece:some by writing, some by thespoken word and some bymeans of the visual image, inart and in film. Each one hasfound a personal path to sharehis or her experience with immediatefamily, fellow Jews andothers, wherever they may be.The unique commandmentthey were given – not on thepeak of Mount Sinai, but in thedepths of the abyss – is that oftelling their story, as stated inExodus 13:8: “On that day youshall tell your child” – the sonsand daughters of the humanrace.The testimonies of the survivorsfirst entered the publicdiscourse during the 1961Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.That is when we learned to listen to theirpersonal accounts. The annals of eachsurvivor became interwoven with eachother in a dense fabric of warp and weft– and the texture of the Holocaust’s collectivememory slowly took shape. Sincethen, a supreme effort has been made togather testimonies in every place wheresurvivors live, turning each into a witnessin the trial of history.Adolf Frankl (b. 1903, Austria-Hungary, d. 1983, Austria), Distribution of Foodin the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.However, the word in whatever form – inwriting, in speech – is not the only instrumentto guarantee memory. What happensto those for whom the word is not the appropriatevehicle for expression, who committedtheir memories to canvas, or bychiseling or carving in wood – a languagewhose syntax is visual?Since its inception, hundreds of artworks,the fruits of paintbrush and chisel, havebeen collected at Yad Vashem in nothingless than a wondrous fashion. This is atremendous body of visual testimony, thattogether with the printed and uttered wordsgive a voice to the survivors. However, thiscorpus has yet to be comprehensivelystudied in a manner that examines noteach individual work, but rather how theartist remembers by means of expression,and thus bequeaths the legacy of remembranceto others.The new Yad Vashem exhibition“Virtues of Memory:Six Decades of HolocaustSurvivors’ Creativity” opensup this body of artistic expression,enabling us,those who were not there,to touch a reality through visualaspects. It presents alanguage of powerful signsand symbols, stemmingfrom the directness of theexpression, and the urgentneed of the one who remembersto delve into thedepths of memory, bleakand unadorned. It is not anattempt to recreate reality,but rather reality itself, bothexternal and internal, tintedwith the hues of personalexperience.The exhibition is arranged by thematic orvisual categories of the works. Survivortestimonies, echoing the impetus of theircreative expression, complement the exhibition’spresentation.These “virtues of memory” thus take theirshape and form in a multi-faceted visualpuzzle. Each work is the voice of an individual;combined they form a multi-voicedchoir, powerfully reverberating throughoutthe exhibition space.IDENTIFYING NOTESFROM THE WARSAWGHETTOBY DR. LEA PRAISThe end of the war saw the gatheringof an astounding yield of personaldocumentation written by Jews under Nazioccupation.Entire archives, alongside chronicles ofevents, personal diaries, notes, and witnessreports, all created under the mostunusual circumstances, were revealedand, as time passed, became an essentialbasis for Holocaust study. In addition totheir historic importance and literary value,the discovery of these writings was itselfintriguing: the fascinating, emotional talesof their endurance when often the authorsthemselves did not survive.Astonished by the impact of these manuscripts,historians and archivists joined togetherto publish them. Their sense ofobligation was fueled in part by their understandingthat they were fulfilling the morallegacy and wishes of the writers. The lastline in the diary kept by Chaim Aharon Kaplanin the Warsaw ghetto, written on theevening of 4 August 1942 at the height of thehunt to deport him to Treblinka, reads: “If myend is nigh – what will become of my diary?”Some of the writings were published asearly as the late 1940s. The Jewish HistoricalInstitute of Warsaw, where some PolishJewish historians who had survivedgathered, had one of the most valuabledocumentary treasures – the undergroundarchive known as Oyneg Shabbes (OnegShabbat) – and, in its periodicals, pub-(Continued on page 15)

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 11BY JEREMY ELIAS ,THE JERUSALEM POSTOn May 3, 1945, thousands of prisonerswere loaded onto ships inLübeck Bay, off the northern coast of Germany.They had endured years of Nazibrutality and were within hours of Allied liberationand the end of a seemingly endlesshell. Before that hour could arrive, morethan 7,000 would be dead in one of thegreatest maritime disasters of World WarII. My grandfather was there.I’ve always known my grandfather’sstory. I can’t remember a particular timewhen he first sat me down from beginningto end. So it’s as if I was born with a vagueunderstanding of what happened, and therest of my life was for filling in the details.In 1941, at 15, Henry Bawnik wasrounded up on the streets of the Lodzghetto. He would be leaving his family, andthe one place he knew. Scared and anxious,he looked around the group of unfortunateJews. Through the panicked men,and their barking tormentors, he sawDavid, an older neighborhood friend he’dalways looked up to. David was the one familiarface in the newly assembledgroup.Thank God for David, a protector,my grandfather thought.David was beaten to death within hours.This was an unfamiliar world, and itwouldn’t be a kind one.From his year in the Lodz ghetto, andsome four years in the camps, there arecountless stories. They are painted withsenseless violence and inconceivable brutality.They are the kind that come from anyvictim who bears witness to the madnessof men and lives with the burden andcourage to speak about it.But the most prominent theme in all mygrandfather’s accounts isn’t murder anddestruction – it is luck. And never was luckmore imminent than that afternoon on theBaltic 65 years ago.In January 1945, as the Allies drewcloser, my grandfather left Fürstengrube, asubcamp of Auschwitz, for Gleiwitz. It wasthe first leg of a death march north, continuouslymissing liberation by days andsometimes hours. In Gleiwitz, theyboarded cattle cars. With the lack of food,space and sanitation, the cars becameboxes for rotting corpses, starved and diseased.My grandfather and other prisonersbegan using these corpses as furniture –a couch, a mattress. Death had been adaily occurrence. It wasn’t a tragedy but anaccepted inevitability. One day he toowould be a couch or a mattress, and thatwas justification enough.After 10 days in the cattle cars, they arrivedat Dora-Mittelbau. Each living prisonerdragged a dead body to a growingpile of skeletons. The indistinguishablemen and women, with sunken cheeks andhollowed eyes, were thrown upon eachother, a tangled mountain of death. Thebodies were burned that night.In April, the Allies again drew closer, andonce again my grandfather was forced toflee an approaching liberation. The Germanswere running out of land. Soon therewould be repercussions, and a light wouldshine on years of horror. For that they werenot prepared, so they continued to march.Max Schmidt, a young SS officer andcamp commander, loaded my grandfatherand the 540 other prisoners onto bargesup the Elbe River. With no camps left, hewould take them to his family’s estate inAhrensbök, Germany.The area of northern Germany was becominglivelier. British bombers filled theDEATH ON THE BALTICsky as the prisoners lined up to becounted. Schmidt leaned back with hishands on his hips, slowly dipping his headto the sky. “Ich sehe schwarz,” he quietlysaid. “I see black.”But even Schmidt could not foresee thedarkness to come.The night of May 2, the prisoners wereawakened from their sleep to onceagain march. It wouldn’t be a long march,just to the coast. They’d finally run out ofland. My grandfather and the 500 otherswere marching to the sea.Then they reached Neustadt. The CapArcona sat idle, three kilometers off thesandy beaches of the harbor. The waterwas filled with U-boats, barges and ships.The prisoners boarded a group of smallerboats waiting to take them to the Cap Arcona.They filed on in reverse alphabeticalorder, starting with “Z.”In its prime, the Cap Arcona was abeautiful ship, making voyages fromSouth America to Germany for the richand famous. Coincidentally enough, itwas used in a Joseph Goebbels propagandafilm based on the Titanic, wherethe German protagonist propheticallywarns of imminent danger ahead – provinghis superior intellect.Now, the motor was completely shot. Theship served as a floating cell for the tortured.There was no more land for theirlabors, no more camps for their deaths.They resorted to the sea, and a ship just fitto stay afloat.The small rafts, loaded with prisoners,inched toward the 213-meter cruise liner.My grandfather wondered where they’d begoing. Another camp, he supposed. It hadalways been that way. Wake up, move andwork to live one more day. But of courseeven that was not certain. The only thinghe did know was that the Nazis weren’tgoing to tell him much, and if they did, itmeant nothing.When the rafts got to the base of the CapArcona, the captain yelled down that nomore prisoners would fit. They’d beenloading the ship for more than a week. Inthe hull, thousands were packed like sardines– no window, no air, just the swayingmotion against the swell of the Baltic.The SS officer told the captain that loadingthe prisoners was an order, not an option.My grandfather was in one of the lastgroups to climb on board. He stood in theback of the boat, with hundreds of otherstriped prisoners roaming the deck. Belowthem were levels of cramped men andwomen, leaning on each other, fighting forair, fighting for everything. Their decrepitbodies filled the once extravagant banquethalls and living quarters.Henry wasn’t there more than two hoursbefore the bombing started. British Typhoonswere roaring through the sky,blasting everything in their path. It was ashow, an extravagant display of power andforce, fire and destruction. They’d hit theU-boats. My grandfather had a front-rowseat, the air shaking from the blasts andthe cold water of the Baltic exploding witheach hit. The prisoners on deck werecheering. The pilots were ordered to bombeverything in their path, and they’d beendoing so with precision and effectiveness.At 2:30 p.m., however, their pathscrossed with the Cap Arcona. The first Typhoonflew overhead, only about 1,000feet up. As it dove for the great ship, thebomb ripped the far end of the deck open.Men and women fell to the floor as theflames erupted. Prisoners screamed asthe scene turned to utter chaos. They triedto put the flames out, but the fire hoseswere cut. Soon more Typhoons, and moredirect hits.My grandfather looked down at thesmoking floor. Screams of death and painpermeated the air. The stairwell frombelow, where thousands were being asphyxiated,reached the deck through asmall door. They were fighting for fresh air,clawing to escape the coffin of smoke.Most were quickly consumed by theflames. He looked at the SS guard still onboard. He was lost, the tormentor becomingthe tortured. Two Russian POWsquickly tossed the guard overboard.Prisoners began taking their clothing off.They’d risk the 3-km swim to shore. Mostwho tried were paralyzed by the 7ºC water.But those strong enough to bear the temperaturewould be gunned down by SS,Hitler Youth, naval personnel and townspeople,all of whom were firing their gunsfrom the sandy beaches of Neustadt. Mygrandfather couldn’t swim, but he took hisclothes off anyway.Suddenly, the ship began to tilt on itsside. Hundreds of naked men andwomen fell overboard. My grandfatherran to the high side of the ship andgrabbed a rope. He looked down at theapproaching water. He watched as thenaked men and women sank into the sea– 200, 100, 50 left treading.The approaching water was clear. Henrycould see the prisoners descending todarkness, their bodies slowly fading out ofsight.It wouldn’t be long until he reached thewater and the same fate. He wasn’tscared. This was it. After fighting for eachday for the last five years, it would all endin a minute or two. The exhaustion wouldbe over, the struggle would finally end.The ship was almost completely capsized,the hull sticking up to the sky. My grandfatherhit the cold water, the rope no longerserving its purpose. As he prepared for theinevitable, a voice rang through the air,“Henry, Henry!” Like an angel fromheaven, it was Peter Abramowitz, one ofhis closest friends from the camps. He waswalking along the bottom of the ship, hisclothing still on. He leaned over the side.“I’ll bring you up,” he said.Peter carried my grandfather on hisback, the base of the ship too hot for bareskin. They walked to the partially submergedsection, able to sit down. Theylooked around and counted – 300 people,naked. In a matter of hours, their friends,who had been in the camps with them forat least three years, were at the bottom ofthe Baltic.On shore, the British had already seizedcontrol. They sent out Germans from theU-boat school to pick up the 350 survivorsof the 4,500 on board. Three small tugboats pulled up to the Cap Arcona. “Whatcamp are we going to now?” my grandfatherinstinctively asked.“No camp,” the German replied. “Thewar is over.”The frequent question is why theBritish would bomb the Cap Arconaand the two other civilian ships. The Allieswere concerned that high-ranking Germanswere making an escape for Norway.The pilots were not aware of the ship’s truepassengers, and in fact thought it was filledwith SS officers. Ordered to bomb everythingin their path, the British Typhoonswould make an escape impossible.However, it has been documented thatthe British were informed of the ship’scargo the previous day, but RAF personnelnever passed the message on. It was anoversight that led to the sinking of theThielbek, the Deutschland and the Cap Arcona.And with those three ships, morethan 7,000 prisoners would lose their lives,never knowing just how close they cameto liberation.Benjamin Jacobs, a prisoner whosestory is almost identical to my grandfather’s,wrote the most comprehensive accountof the Cap Arcona, The 100-YearSecret. Within that book, he writes,“Those who perished were not just prisoners.They were tough, tenacious, unrelentingfighters, with hearts stubbornenough to survive all the Nazis had castupon them. And yet, they died on the verydoorstep of freedom.”Sixty-five years later, the British governmenthas never made any public referenceto the event, denying the dead the recognitionthey deserve. With the files sealeduntil 100 years after the disaster, informationthat would bring the tragedy to thepublic eye is locked until 2045.By then, all survivors and many of theirchildren will be gone. And with their passing,a chest of personal memories, of whentheir friends died on the last page of thelong and tragic epic, will be gone too.The onus will then lie on us to tell their stories.We’ll tell about the “tough, tenacious,unrelenting fighters” who lost their lives ata time when the world went mad. And toprove we’ve learned since then, we’ll showthat a human life should never go unrecognizedand their deaths should never beforgotten. This is my grandfather’s story,and it is theirs as well. We should strive tomake it ours.

Page 12 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770(Continued from page 6)crowd. Among the guards was Zbisheck,Sonya’s former neighbor, who looked herin the eye.Zbisheck’s family had lived across fromthe Gorodinkys on Pilsudski Street.Zbisheck and Sonya were playmates foryears. Perhaps when Zbisheck saw Sonyain the crowd he was reminded of her bicycle,her summer dresses, the scallions inher garden. Zbisheck motioned for Sonyato follow him. They entered a room in thecourthouse where the skilled workerswaited, including her father. Sonyagrabbed Zbisheck’s arm and whispered,“You saved my life and I thank you. Butplease, can you help my sister and mymother too?” Zbisheck answered under hisbreath that he had already risked his life tosave her.That day the ghetto population was reducedby half. Sonya heard later that hermother linked arms with relatives and her11-year-old daughter and said “Come, let’sgo together to the grave.” Now only an essential250 workers, along with some children,remained. They began to plot theirescape that night.The original breakout plan had beento storm the ghetto gates on a Sundaynight, when the guards notoriouslydrank and grew lazy. In preparation, somepeople bribed hand grenades from guards,others smuggled in guns from peasantsoutside the ghetto, still others stole ironrods and knives from their workshops. TheJews would throw everything they had andrun. The casualty rate would be high, but itwould be better than certain death at thehands of their oppressors.Everyone was ready in their places onthe appointed evening. A man near thefront gate was poised to throw the firstgrenade. Sonya, waiting in the bunk, fingereda small gold ring in the pocket of hertattered skirt. A few weeks before herdeath, her mother had pulled her daughteraside and tugged at her finger. Pressingsomething small and warm into Sonya’spalm, she said, “Listen, my daughter. Havethis ring. Maybe you will need it. Maybeyou will survive.”Before the first grenade was thrown, areinforcement of guards arrived at themain gate, braced for action. The actionwas called off. Each subsequent night, areinforcement of guards arrived at dusk,and the Jews eventually abandoned theirescape plan. The wife of an injured doctorhad leaked word of the plan, not wantingher husband to be left behind and killed.But the younger Jews didn’t want to waitfor death. “We saw that everything was finished,”Sonya told me. “What was left wasonly one person from each family. Theyoung people started to scream, ‘We don’twant to die like our parents died. We’ll runaway.’ ” But the older people didn’t wantthem to run, because the Germans wouldkill whoever remained in retribution.Berl Yoselevitch, a carpenter, thought ofa tunnel as a compromise. The weak andinjured wouldn’t have to run fast or fight.They would hide themselves when everyoneelse left. The Jews would dig a passagefrom under a bed located along thenorthern barracks wall, closest to theouter walls of the ghetto and the woods.The tunnel would drop four and a halffeet, then run north under the ghetto to afield next to the forest. They would escapeon a moonless July night, when thewheat and grass were uncut and highenough to provide cover as they ran.Once out, they hoped to join the Bielskipartisans and seek revenge.GREAT ESCAPE“We wanted to show the world that Jews kind. Four feet underground, muddy withare not sheep that go to the slaughter,” damp soil, Sonya and Aaron fell in love.Sonya remembered. “We decided whoeverwill make it will make it and whoever the diggers filled sacks of it that they thenTo remove dirt displaced by the tunnel,would not would not. It was better to die passed back until it reached the hole underthis way than the other way. And maybe the bed in the ghetto. Half a million poundssomeone will survive to tell the world what of earth were packed into false doublehappened.”walls built in the courthouse barracks. SoilDigging began right away, and details was hidden in corners where the attic ceilingslanted to meet the floor, and buriedwere kept to a select few in order to preventinformation leaks. Not everyone was under floorboards that were ripped up andfor it. Some Jews feared the tunnel would then replaced. Ghetto residents smuggledbe impossible to complete before the Germansfound out about it. There was one ground — outhouses at the end of thesacks of soil to toilets — holes in theman whom nobody trusted; to ensure that camp. One of the group’s carpenters laidhe wouldn’t talk to the Germans, the Jews a wooden track along the tunnel floor sokilled him.they could use a cart to haul the dirt out.the summer of 1943,July 1943, the tunnel was aboutThroughout Sonya clawed at the soil underneaththe courthouse to escape a place she had,until recently, loved her whole life. Much ofthe tunnel was dug by children and smallmen, who could maneuver within its narrowwalls. An electrician named Rakovskidiverted a current from the ghetto andstrung electric bulbs along the tunnel ceiling.He also figured out how to disconnectthe searchlights that surveyed the ghettogrounds, and he did so occasionally, so theGermans would get used to these “shortages”and not suspect anything when onetook place on the night of the escape.The children dug lying down, belliespressed against the earth. I asked Sonyaif she remembered the smell of the earth,how it felt on her cheeks and under her fingernails.“I did not smell or feel a thing,”she replied. “We were anxious to get outas fast as we can because we had deathwaiting for us. I don’t even know whether Iwas breathing or not. I didn’t care at all,Mamika. We were full of worries that weforgot about anything else. We just wantedto get out. We wanted our lives.”In order not to soil their only clothing andarouse suspicion, the children dug nakedor wore robes of burlap sacks or old clothsewn especially for the task. Sonya dugwith her brother, Shaul, sometimes with acousin, and with her new friend, AaronOshman, who at 30 was 10 years olderthan she and had been moved with hisbrother to the Novogrudek ghetto about ayear earlier, when his ghetto in Ivinitz, asmall town in White Russia, was liquidated.Theirs had been a wealthy familybefore the war; their father owned a hardwarebusiness. When Aaron arrived inNovogrudek, he sat in an empty workshopcrying for his parents. In a Shoah Testimonyvideo interview, given before hisdeath in 2004, Aaron recalled the first timehe saw Sonya. “In walked a beautifulwoman. She was 19 years old. She said,‘Don’t cry, young man, you still have yourlife.’” Aaron discussed philosophy and Zionismwith Sonya. He was articulate andBy 240 feet long and near completion.But July was rainy that year, and the soppyearth leaked, muddying the tunnel. Thegroup feared the tunnel would collapse.Determined not to let his plan fail, BerlYoselevitch stole wood slats from his workshopto reinforce the walls and ceiling. Healso organized the digging of small drainsand channels in the floor to divert water.In the meantime, the wheat fields wereharvested, leaving a vast area of openground between the camp and the forest.Rumors floated that the ghetto was to beliquidated further, leaving just 20 peoplealive. Many of the Jews wanted to leaveimmediately, but more decided to delay departureand dig 100 feet farther, whichwould put the tunnel’s exit closer to the forest.They’d leave the digging of the actualexit until the night of the escape. The firstpeople to go through would be the young,carrying shovels to dig the final distanceand guns and hand grenades should theyface guards when they surfaced. The olderpeople would wait and take up the rear sothat if they moved too slowly or fainted theywouldn’t hold everyone else back.In August, the tunnel was complete. Itwas 750 feet, and the Jews watched thelate summer sky for signs of a storm thatwould provide cover during an escape. Butthe nights were clear, and the moonlessdays passed. While they waited, 11 skilledcraftsmen, including Sonya’s father, weretransferred to Koldichevo, a camp that rana weapons factory. Of Sonya’s family ofseven, only she and her brother Shaul remainedin Novogrudek.Over the next several weeks the Jewsrehearsed their escape to see how long itwould take. Two to three hours seemedenough time for 240 people to passthrough the tunnel. They submitted namesof those they wanted to leave with, andwere instructed when to appear at themouth of the tunnel.Sunday, September 26, 1943, was amoonless stormy night. Around 8 p.m.,Rakovski, the electrician, cut power to theghetto searchlights and turned on the tunnellights. Nails in the barracks’ tin roofwere loosened, amplifying the sounds ofthe falling rain in order to mask sounds ofescape. The Jews quietly assembled, waitingin the darkness for their turn to lowerthemselves into the lighted earth. Sonyastood with Aaron and her brothers. Somefamilies tied themselves to one another;others held hands.One couple had secretly given birth inthe ghetto. Before the escape, the motherstrangled her child to death — the groupcould not take the chance that the babywould cry during its escape and alertguards above ground.Like the Jews fleeing Egypt, the Jews ofNovogrudek crawled as quickly as theycould through the dirt. Sonya was in themiddle. At her hands were people’s feet, ather feet, others’ hands. She felt like amouse in a line of them, crawling silently.She hypnotized herself with a chant:Sonya, you got to make it, you got to makeit. She then changed it to, God, please letme go through. Don’t bury me. Don’t buryme. Don’t bury me. Every movement shemade, she was sure that the world wouldbury her alive.At the end of the tunnel, it was pouringrain, and the escapees couldn’t see in thenew darkness above ground. Seventy ofthem accidentally ran toward the ghettoand were shot by guards who thought partisanswere ambushing them. Among themwere two of Sonya’s cousins and BerlYoselevitch, the tunnel’s mastermind.When Sonya emerged, she immediatelylost Aaron and her brother in the confusion.She heard shots and shouting from theright, and to her left she could just makeout a road. “I got into a little ditch and outfrom the ditch I went through a cornfieldwhere the leaves and the stalks were quitehigh. During the night I crawled around.During the day I sat in the bushes andwaited.” She had no shoes. Her dress wastorn. She ate nothing.Early the morning after the escape, Germansstormed into the barracks to see whyno Jews had lined up for the daily roll. Byone account, they found an ironically formalletter explaining that Jews wereneeded elsewhere. In another version, theletter informed the Germans that they wereliberating themselves and that they wouldtake revenge. Afraid to enter the tunnel incase bombs or traps had been set up inside,the Germans forced a member of theJudenrat to crawl through. When he arrivedsafely on the other end, he washanged. Peasants crowded into the courthouseto gaze at the gaping hole the Jewshad left behind.For two weeks Sonya ran through theforests during the night and tried torest and hide during the day. She grew sohungry that when she finally saw a littlehouse with a light on at the bottom of a hill,she couldn’t resist trying for help, despitethe frightening prospect that her fate dependedon the kindness of the person inside.Through the window she saw an oldman at a table, patching clothes. Helooked like pictures she’d seen of St.Nicholas, with white hair and beard. Sonyaknocked on the window and when hecame to the door he simply said, “I knowwho you are. I want to help you.”The Novogrudek escape had been onthe radio, and the Nazis announced thatanyone who turned in a Jew would receiveseveral pounds of sugar. But the man offeredSonya his cellar, about 10 feet fromthe house, where he stored potatoes.(Continued on page 13)

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 13MEMORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST: KITTY HART-MOXON(Continued from page 12)Sonya buried herself there, thinking abouta future without her family and friends.During the day, she didn’t move. Late eachnight the old man would bring her bread, alittle milk, a cooked potato, whatever hehad. After six weeks, he came with only asmall bit of bread. He had nothing left foreither of them to eat. Sonya looked at thering her mother had given her and said,“Please take this. Sell it for food.” The manrefused. The whole town knew he waspoor. If he came to them with a gold ring,they would know he was hiding a Jew.Nearby, at the edge of the forest, therewas a house where people often came andwent by horse in the middle of the night.He had heard that these were the Bielskis,and he offered to cover Sonya with strawin the back of his wagon and take her tothat house. Sonya agreed. There shefound her brother Shaul, some survivingrelatives, and friends from neighboringghettos. She also found Aaron, whom sheasked to marry her.In the Bielski group, everyone had a jobto perform. While Sonya’s relativesmade fur hats and boots, Sonya stoodBY STUART JEFFRIES, THE GUARDIANIn Birmingham, after the war, peoplewould ask Auschwitz survivor KittyHart-Moxon about the tattoo on her forearm:“Is that your boyfriend’s telephonenumber?” “People simply knew nothing,”says Kitty. “If I did say what happened tome and my mother, people would say:‘That sounds farfetched.’ I would explainthat I saw thousands walk into a gas chamberand never come out. But they could notget their heads round it. They found it impossibleto comprehend that there wasmassacre on a huge scale, that thousandswere murdered deliberately.”What was worse was that no one wantedto know. She and her mother had arrivedat Dover in late 1946 to be met by heruncle, the husband of her mother’s sister.“He said: ‘I don’t want you to talk aboutanything that happened to you. I don’t wantto know.’ My mother and I became veryangry at being silenced.”Did you ever receive counseling? Kittyfavors me with a justifiable sardonic lookas we sit in her living room in Harpenden,Hertfordshire. “Counseling? No. Mymother and I sorted ourselves out bycountless discussions about what hadhappened to us.” Kitty wrote two booksabout her experiences: I Am Alive (1961)and Return to Auschwitz (1981). She alsohas made award-winning films about herreturn to the death camp and about hertime after Auschwitz. Kitty, a retired radiographer,has been speaking for decades inschools, colleges, universities to all whoare prepared to listen. In 2003 she receivedthe OBE for her work on HolocausteducationShe was born Kitty Felix in 1926 inBielsko, a Polish town where Jews,Czechs, Poles and Germans mixed. Sherecalls a blissful sporty childhood with herbrother Robert – hiking in the mountains insummer and skiing in winter. She was educatedby nuns and was oblivious to anti-Semitism until she and her Jewishswimming team were stoned during a competition.A few days prior to Hitler’s invasionon 1 September 1939, Kitty’s familyfled eastward to elude the Wehrmacht butwere overtaken by the Nazis and becametrapped in the Lublin ghetto. After many attempts,the family escaped and obtainednon-Jewish documents.They had to split up to maximize theirchances of survival. Kitty and her motherposed as Polish forced laborers and weretransported to Bitterfeld within Germany towork in a munitions plant. But in March1943, Kitty, her mother and 12 otherwomen suspected of being Jewish werebetrayed and later sentenced to death byfiring squad.e were prepared to die there, but“Wit turned out to be a mock execution.”It was a piece of Nazi cruelty: theguards fired shots into the air. “Instead, wewere sentenced to life imprisonment inAuschwitz. First we were transferred to aprison in Dresden. Our cell had writing onthe walls: ‘We are on our way toAuschwitz, see you in hell. No oneever gets out.’ My mother was baffled.She knew Auschwitz as aplace where one went fishing in thenumerous ponds.”Auschwitz, Kitty says, was theCrewe of Eastern Europe – an importantrail junction. “In Auschwitz,the obedient prisoner who stuck tothe rules lived for three to sixweeks. Camp food could not sustainlife for long. The camp soupwas laced with a poison, a form ofbromide.” Kitty and her mother survivednearly two years there. “There were occasionswhen I was lucky with jobs. If youcouldn’t escape from working out in theopen, outside the camp, you could notsurvive long-term.”Over a period of eight months Kitty wasfortunate to work with a group of inmatessorting belongings of those deported toAuschwitz. It was in that place, she sayswith bitter irony, that she regained herstrength and her health. “My life was savedthere – because of access to food andwater.” Kitty tells me that at one point inAuschwitz she worked in the dysenteryblock: when she came on duty one day allthe patients had been killed on the ordersof SS doctor Josef Mengele.She tells me about sorting men’s jackets.“You had to search each one for valuables– gold, jewelry, currency. But to befound with a single valuable item waspunishable by death. Any currency foundGREAT ESCAPElook-out on a hill. One morning about twoweeks after she arrived, Sonya saw agroup of men walking toward her. Fromtheir skeletal frames, she could tell thatthey were escapees hoping for refuge.They told her they had recently fledKoldichevo, the camp where her father hadbeen held. Sonya asked about him. “Hehad escaped with us,” they told her. “He’sprobably on his way to see you now.”Sonya stood guard for two days andnights, forgoing sleep, watching for a familiarfigure. Finally, on the third day, a manapproached. He was smaller than her father,but, she thought, perhaps he’d shrunkunder hardship. She sobbed waiting forhim to reach her, to see the crinkle in hiseyes, to hear him call her Sonyaleh.When the man was near enough, Sonyasaw that it was not her father.“Why are you crying, child?”“I am waiting for my father, AbrahamGorodinsky, from Koldichevo.”“Stop crying, my child,” he said. “Your fatheris never coming.”The man had been a doctor atKoldichevo, while her father had workedfixing watches and appliances. Eachwas of no value to us and we used it astoilet paper. We ate from rotting piles offood that littered the place – though thiswas forbidden.”She recognizes that she never gave up.“You could see it in people’s vacant expressionswhen they gave up – by the waythey shuffled and stooped. You distancedyourself from these people, believing itwas contagious. It was a ruthless place,the most unequal society in the world.”Her proximity to the four crematoria andgas chambers meant that she witnessedrelentless killing from April to November1944, when the greatest number of victimswere murdered. “It’s been said that 1.5 milliondied. We, who were there, say it wasin excess of 2.5 million. Our brains couldKitty Hart Moxon, Holocaust survivor.simply not accept what we werewitnessing, but it was happening.” Amongthose who died were 30 members of herown family.How did she survive? “A few fortunateevents.” One was when her mother, whohad been working in the so-called hospital,managed to speak to a kommandantcalled Hossler. “This was incredibly difficult.Two things baffled him. She was inher 50s, which was rare since there wereno women of that age, and she spoke perfectGerman, which seemed to impresshim.” That conversation, in which shepleaded for her daughter not to be killed,probably saved Kitty’s life. She tells me itwas generally believed that those whowere direct witnesses to mass murderwould not be transferred to other campsbut summarily executed.On 11 November 1944, mother anddaughter were transferred to a camp nearWroclaw (the Polish name for what wasnight, the Germans appointed a differentinmate to guard their jewels. When itcame Abraham’s turn, he knew he wastoo tired to stay awake and hired a friendto take his turn rather than risk fallingasleep on the job and being killed for it.But his friend was exhausted too and fellasleep in the barracks before even takingup the post. When a guard came to checkthat a watchman was there, he discoveredan empty chair. The next day, theGermans made all the inmates gatheraround as they beat Abraham so badlythat his body lost its shape. “However,”said the doctor, “your father yelled to thesoldiers when the beating began, saying,‘You will kill me today, but I have a sonand a daughter and they will survive andtell what happened here.’ ”When they heard that the war hadended, the remaining Jews of Novogrudekmarched back to their hometown. Theyfound nothing but painful memories. Withother refugees, Aaron and Sonya walkedacross Europe to a displaced personscamp in Italy. They hoped it would be astopping point on the way to Israel, butSonya got sick and needed penicillin,then Breslau in eastern Germany), to workin the Philips electronics factory. On 18February 1945, they were forced on a twoweekdeath march over the Sudetenmountains without food or shelter, beforebeing put on to open coal trucks and taken1,000 km across Europe to work in an undergroundfactory in north-west Germany.Only about 200 survived the journey fromthe original 10,000 who had set out. Hermother was by then 55 years old.It was sometime in March that Kittyand her mother were taken toBergen-Belsen concentration camp,from where they were put inside sealedcattle trucks. The train was abandonedand they were expected to die. Manywomen in her truck suffocated. “We tookturns to breathe through a crack in thefloor. We heard a noise and banged onthe walls when suddenly the door waspulled open by three German soldiers.We said, ‘Shoot us, we are not goingback in.’” They were taken to a nearbycamp outside Salzwedel and were liberatedon 14 April by American troops.After liberation, Kitty and her mother becameinterpreters for the British army andlater worked with the Quaker Relief Teamin a displaced persons’ camp. They discoveredthat they were the only survivors oftheir family. Kitty’s father had been murderedby the Gestapo. Her brother Robertdied fighting at Stalingrad. Her grandmotherwas murdered in the gas chambersof Bełzec death camp.Their work for the British army earnedKitty and her mother special permits to livein the UK She started a new life in Birmingham.She married and had two sonsand qualified in radiography. “I hid nothingfrom my sons. They grew up in an environmentwhere everything was discussed becauseI believed they had to know. If theydidn’t eat their meals, they were told howgrateful I would have been for any food inthe war and that no food must ever bewasted or thrown away.”Kitty’s mother lived with her until herdeath in 1974. Now widowed and retired,Kitty has two sons and eight grandchildren.“Auschwitz shaped my life,” she says. “Itwas all my teenage years, it was my completeeducation, my university.”which was available then only in the UnitedStates. The couple married and departedfor Brooklyn shortly after the birth of theirfirst son.Aaron died six years ago, after 56years of marriage. Sonya has twosons, both lawyers, and four grandchildren.She travels to schools, synagogues,community centers to share her story. “Myname is Sonya Oshman,” she says, “and Iwish to speak of my father. From 30,000Jews [in the region], perhaps only 150 survived,and from the Gorodinsky family, Iam now the only living member. My brotherwho escaped with me died five years ago.He was a major in the Israeli army. But Iwant to keep my father’s promise, so I amstanding here tonight and filling out the lastwish of my dad. I am telling you a little fragmentof my story. In this way, I hope my father’slife will be one of the livesremembered.”Meanwhile Novogrudek’s Jewish graveyardis overgrown, its headstones mostlymissing; peasants have scavenged thegranite slabs to line their basements andthe walls of cisterns. Once home to 6,500Jews, Novogrudek now has one.

Page 14 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770ATHENS UNVEILS ITS FIRST HOLOCAUST MEMORIALBY HELENA SMITH, THE GUARDIANIt has taken nearly 70 years, but a monumentto honor Greece‘s Holocaustvictims was finally unveiled in Athens.Athens is the last EU capital to commemoratethose who perished at the hands ofNazi forces.“To get here has been difficult but now itis done the message is simple. We havenot forgotten and we will not forget,” saidBenjamin Albalas, president of the Jewishcommunity in Athens.Greece lost more of its Jewish populationin the Final Solution, proportionately, thanalmost any other country in Europe duringthe second world war. Around 65,000 men,The Holocaust memorial in Athens in the shape of a broken Star of David.(Continued from page 4)leading to the Holocaust, he insists thatthere was no extermination plan concoctedin advance by Hitler and consciously pursuedby the Nazi regime.In line with several recent studies, he arguesinstead that the Nazis up to 1941 extendedthe same model of terroristicpersecution developed within Germany inthe late 1930s to the Jewish populations thatcame under their control. This approach focusedon identification, segregation, expropriation,concentration, and emigration, butnot on physical extermination.The invasion of the Soviet Union inJune 1941 opened a second, muchmore lethal phase of mass murder, withGerman mobile killing squads carrying outmass executions of Soviet Jews. In retrospect,the introduction of mass killing behindthe Eastern Front can be seen as thebeginning of what became the “final solution,”but Friedlander insists that thesemurder operations –- which initially targetedonly Jewish males – were designedprimarily to hasten the collapse of the RedArmy and the Soviet system and were notpart of a calculated plan of mass exterminationof the entire Jewish population.The crucial turning point came with theentry of the United States into the war inearly December 1941. From Hitler’s perspective,this transformed a European conflictinto a true world war, and he wascertain, of course, that the Jews were toblame for this decisive escalation. He respondedby ordering the extermination ofall Jews, thus fulfilling his January 1939“prophecy” that if the Jews brought aboutwomen and children were dispatched totheir deaths in Auschwitz between 1941and 1944.An estimated 1,000 Athenian Jewswere packed off to the concentrationcamp in April 1944 after thousands fledor went underground. Arriving there aftera two-week train journey, they were metby Dr Josef Mengele. “He selected 320men and 328 women for his own ‘research,’”writes the historian, Mark Mazower,in his book Inside Hitler’s Greece.“The others were immediately gassedand burned in crematoria.”What remains of the country’s Jewishcommunity today had campaigned longand hard for the memorial to be erected.The quest began in earnest last year whenthe municipality of Athens donated a primepiece of real estate, overlooking the ornatecemetery where Pericles delivered his famousfuneral oration in honour of the Athenianskilled during the Peloponnesian Warin 431 BC. Few areas resonate as muchwith the ideals of freedom, equality anddemocracy.More symbolically, the site is also closeto the synagogue in Melidoni Street where,under a ruse of food handouts, the Jews ofAthens were trappedand captured by theGermans.The acclaimedGreek-American artistDeAnna Maganiasconveyed what theHolocaust survivorElie Wiesel describesas “man’s inhumanityto man” in a plaqueon the site. Carved inthe form of the Star ofDavid – the ancientsymbol of Judaism –acting like as compass, the sculpturepoints to the cities and villages acrossGreece from where tens of thousands ofJews were gathered and deported. Thecommunity chose it on the basis of its “simplicity”and “ingenious design.”“In keeping with the Jewish tradition itsymbolized death and the memory ofdeath in a quiet and calm way,” said acommittee member who oversaw an internationalcompetition for the memorial. Butthe marble monument, which is set in aHOLOCAUST BYSTANDERSa world war the result would be “the annihilationof the Jewish race in Europe.”Beginning in summer 1942, the bureaucraticallyorganized, industrialized exterminationof the Jews of Europe incustom-built death camps hit full stride.Such a massive undertaking was unthinkablewithout the co-operation of mid-leveltechnocrats and organizers aided by theleaders and populations throughout NazicontrolledEurope.Friedlander paints a damning portrait ofthe conduct of the bystanders. Passivityand indifference predominated, but inmany cases the Nazis could count on theactive support of non-German authoritiesand their security forces in facilitating theannihilation process.As he points out, “not one social group,not one religious community, not onescholarly institution or professional associationin Germany and throughout Europedeclared its solidarity with the Jews.”Friedlander is especially critical ofthe failure of the Christianchurches, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox,to respond to the onslaught againstthe Jews. He identifies the virulent anti-Judaism cultivated by Christianity overcenturies as a major contributor to theanti-Semitic culture that, he argues, tookhold in Germany under Nazism but alsoflourished in the rest of Europe as well.The fact that Christian churches sharedwith Nazism anti-communist, anti-liberaland anti-materialist views rendered thechurches incapable of coming to the defenseof the Jewish population.herb garden, is also about healing. Whilesix of the work’s pieces are triangular, conjuringbroken-off pieces of the star, thecentral piece, a massive hexagon block,remains intact and is reminiscent of rejuvenationand survival.“The herbal garden is a symbol of healingand place,” said Maganias. “The ideais that people walk around the monument.The orientation of the star, engravedwith the names of cities andtowns from which victims were deported,and the smell from the herbs aim to actas a catalyst of memory.”The unveiling of the monument comesagainst a backdrop of growing attacksagainst Jewish targets in Greece. InJanuary Crete’s historic synagogue wasfirebombed twice following the vandalismof cemeteries nationwide. ConstantinePlevris, a prominent neo-Nazi accused ofinciting racial violence with a book glorifyingHitler, was also acquitted by thesupreme court.“Incidents of anti-Semitism are definitelyon the rise and our fear is they will increasewith the economic crisis afflicting Greece,”said David Saltiel, who heads the CentralJewish Council representing the country’s7000-strong community.“We feel especially depressed by the decisionof the supreme court. This monument,which as a community we dedicateto this city, is a reminder of what can happenwhen a society loses its tolerance forpeople who are different.”Mary Michalidou, an expert on monumentsin Greece, agrees that Athens’Holocaust memorial is long overdue.“But,” she says, “while it should havehappened earlier, its location aestheticallyand symbolically couldn’t be better.It will now rank among Europe’s bestHolocaust monuments.”Pope Pius XII comes in for heavy criticismfor his “selective appeasement” of the Nazis.While the Pope sought in some cases toraise objections to Nazi measures, his concerndid not extend to the mass murder perpetratedagainst the Jews. The Pope’ssilence stands as a disturbing example ofthe broader moral failure of the Europeanand American spiritual and intellectual elitesin the face of the Holocaust.More than is the case in most Holocausthistories, Friedlander’s book strives tobring the voices of the victims into thestory. He quotes extensively from a wideand diverse range of Jewish diarists, fromthe well-known, such as Viktor Klempererand Emanuel Ringelblum, to more obscurefigures such as the 12-year-old Dawid Rubinowiczand the teenage Moshe Flinker.Their observations are by turns poignant,painful, revelatory, and depressing. Theyinfuse an essential individual, human dimensioninto the overarching narrative ofmass destruction. In the later chapters,one is repeatedly confronted by jolting“final entries” that signal that yet anotherindividual has fallen victim to the vast Nazikilling program.Friedlander’s book represents a majorcontribution to the study of the Holocaust.No small part of his achievement lies in hisability to highlight the crucial role of humanagency in history. His account reminds usthat the Holocaust was not a “natural” catastrophe,not something inexorable and unstoppable,but was instead the terribleconsequence of conscious human decisions,aided and abetted by the widespreadfailure of the bystanders to act in opposition.ANTI-SEMITISM INSTITUTETO BE ESTABLISHEDAT UNIVERSITY OF LONDONJONNY PAUL, THE JERUSALEM POSTThe University of London is set toopen a new institute for the studyof anti-Semitism, which will work inpartnership with the world’s oldestHolocaust library, after London-basedPears Foundation donated £1.5 millionto the project.The new institute will become part ofthe college’s School of Social Sciences,History and Philosophy and will haveclose links with the College’s School ofArts and its School of Law.The Institute will work in partnershipwith the Wiener Library, the world’s oldestHolocaust memorial institution,which is set to move to the university in2011 from its current central London location.The library will allow Birkbeck academicstaff and students, as well as others,to use its vast resource forresearch, teaching and outreach activitiesin the area of anti-Semitism, religiousand racial intolerance.“We are delighted that the Pears Foundationdonation enables us to establishthe institute and also that we will be ableto provide a home for the Wiener Library,”Prof. David Latchman, the masterof Birkbeck, said.“Birkbeck commands an unparalleledcombination of expertise in the field ofanti-Semitism and intolerance in a widerange of disciplines, from political sciencesto psychosocial studies and fromhistory to law,” he continued.“Birkbeck will also offer relatedcourses to attract a wide range of studentsfrom a host of backgrounds – fromcommunity, religious and educationalleaders, school teachers; local governmentemployees and civil servants.“The Pears Foundation commissioneda research/mapping report which establishedthat there appears to be no academicfaculty or institution at any UKuniversity undertaking the role we foreseefor this new institute,” said TrevorPears, executive chair of the PearsFoundation.“We believe that the study of anti-Semitism is vital to the understanding ofall racism and xenophobia. Our concernis that anti-Semitism is misunderstoodand viewed solely as a Jewish issue. Webelieve anti-Semitism is a ‘societal illness’– a rise in anti-Semitism signalssomething is wrong or worsening in society.”The institute is the result of severalyears of work, reflecting the Pears Foundation’sphilosophy of promoting understandingof “the other” through bettereducation. This is exemplified in thefoundation’s work in Holocaust Education;the School Linking Network, whichsupports local authorities across the UKto bring together high school studentsfrom diverse backgrounds; and SharedFutures, an interactive educational resourcefor students and teachers thatexplores Judaism in Britain today.The Wiener Library is the world’s oldestinstitution for the study of anti-Semitismand the crimes of Nazi Germany,the history of German and Central EuropeanJewry, the Holocaust and its aftermath.It is a major archive comprisingnot only 60,000 books and 2,000 periodicaltitles but also 1.5 million pages ofarchival material.

May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 15BY DR. EDGAR EICHBAUMIn December 1931, the village of Petershagensparkled under a clean blanketof snow. My mother was in her last weekof pregnancy, but her slim body and looseshift hid her grown abdomen.On the tenth of the month feverish activitystarted in the house. I did not understandwhy, but became infected with theprevalent mood of expectation.A strange, heavy-set woman in a whitedress took charge. She heated water intwo large pots. My mother was locked inher bedroom.The women smiled at me. “Soon the storkis coming to bring you a new baby. Go up tothe roof and watch for him.” She said.I hurried upstairs and waited on thesnow-covered roof. The cold wind cut intomy face and my hands. Nothing happened.The only sight was the black smoke belchingfrom the chimney. No stork.From the bedroom window the lady in whitecalled up to me: ”Edward, where are you hiding?The stork just left. He brought you a littlebaby sister and some chocolate cookies.”I zoomed down from the freezing roofand saw my mom in bed, smiling and holdinga little screaming bundle. My fatherwas away on business. The midwifepinched my frozen cheek, handed mesome cookies. “Were you sleeping whenthe stork came down through the chimney?”That is how my sister was born.Little Kathy became the center of mymother’s attention, and I found myself suddenlyfree to roam around without anyMY SISTER KATHYadult supervision. In the past I had neversought much of my mother’s attention, butnow when I saw the deep affection andcare she gave to the baby, I became jealousof my little sister. Still I liked to hold herwhen she was smiling and not smelling,and I never tried to harm her.Summer 1936, almost five years hadpassed. We had moved to Berlin. The Naziregime in Germany had already severelyrestricted the civil rights of its Jewish residents.Their children were not allowed toattend public schools. I was lucky to havebeen accepted to the only, crowded,school of the Jewish community. I was tenyears old, and considered myself almost agrown up. Kathy became a beautiful littlegirl, but to me she remained my baby sisterwho hung on to me like chewing gum tofingers. I always had a hard time to get ridof her company.***ommy, I am going to visit a friend,”“MI announced on my way out.”Mommy, I want to go with Edward.” Iheard my four-year-old sister in the background.Oh my, this nag does not leave me alone, Ithought when mom begged me: “Take Kathywith you. She has no one to play with here.”“Mom, you know that we do not play withgirls and certainly not with babies,” I respondedangrily and stormed out of thehouse. I could still hear my sister crying.“I wish she had never been born,” passedthe evil thought through my mind, but once Iwas in the street, running while kicking an occasionalstone in my path, and dreamingabout Gulliver’s journey or Robinson Crusoe’sadventures, I forgot that I had a sister.So time passed. It was now December1937. My parents were taking me to thetrain station on my way to Palestine, whereI was to live in a youth village. My father onmy right was very quiet. My mother on myleft sobbed continuously. My six-year-oldsister happily hopped along.Suddenly my father gripped my handand said:“Edward, you know that we love you verymuch. You are going far away and we donot know when we will meet again. Wepaid for your trip, but if you wish to stay, wewill just go home.”Mom looked down to me, trying to smile,No. My mind was made up. I was going toPalestine to be a pioneer.“You Jewish swine – go to Palestine”sounded the cry of Hitler-Youth in my ears.“You see, she is happy that I am leaving,”I said, pointing at my sister.Mother started to cry again.”Kathy is too young to understand thatshe is losing her big brother for a longtime,” father said.I looked at her with much dislike, thinkingthat now, at last, I was getting rid of her fora long time.Two years passed. The Second WorldWar started. After many months of lonelyand difficult acclimatization to the new environmentand language, my fellow childrenaccepted me. On the Sabbath,parents and siblings visited most of mypeers. I would look at those reunions withheaviness in my chest. Now I missed myparents and my sister Kathy so much. Shewould be eight years old in a few months.If she were here, I would be a proud bigbrother watching over her and defendingher against any of the boys who would bemean to her.In March 1941, I got the last letter frommy parents. There was a picture of Kathy,smiling, standing in line with her classmates.On the back of the photo she wrote“Edi I miss you much, Love, Kathy.”She was so pretty, my little sister. I kissedthe picture and cried.Summer of 1945, the war ended. Thehorrors of the Holocaust becameknown all over the globe. An aunt, who survivedthe carnage, informed me that my parentsand Kathy were cremated in one of theinfamous “Lagers.” I lost all my family.Today was December tenth 1945,Kathy’s birthday. She would have beenfourteen years old now, a lady. We wouldhave been best friends, and together planningour future.How would I ever be forgiven for the crueltyand dislike I had shown her when shewas little? Now I would have asked her tocome with me to all my social events. Butshe was no more, just dust that the wind carriedaround the globe. There was no gravewhere I could show her my love and pay hermy respect, and ask her to forgive me.Her only tombstone is her birthday. Sosince, for the last sixty years, on December10, I remember you, Kathy. I see you, thefour-year-old girl with one tiny hand holdingmommy’s skirt, looking up to her and begging:“Mommy, can I go with Edward?”And I say “Yes, come with me, my bestfriend.”Leave me never again.IDENTIFYING NOTESFROM THE WARSAW GHETTOl(Continued from page 10)ished selected documents from the repository.However, the tremendous scope ofthe documentary material, the precariousstate of some of the documents, the difficultiesin deciphering the handwriting andin identifying the writers, in addition to var-Rabbi Shimon Huberband.ious political and other constraints, madepublication of these documents a complex,drawn-out and i n c o m p l e t e affair.At the end of the 1950s and especially inthe 1960s, a greater number of writingsfrom the Holocaust started to appear.In 1961, Notes from the Warsaw Ghettoby Emanuel Ringelblum, founder anddirector of Oyneg Shabbes, was publishedin Warsaw. The same year, YIVO in NewYork published an edited Yiddish versionof a Vilna ghetto diary kept by HermanKruk, and in 1966, Yad Vashem publishedThe Scroll of Agony by Chaim Aharon Kaplanfrom the Warsaw ghetto. Around thesame time, the Zachor Publishing Houseput out Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religiousand Cultural Life in Poland During theHolocaust (1969), a collection of the Holocaust-erawritings of Rabbi Shimon Huberband,one of the notable contributors to theOyneg Shabbes archive. These and manyother books were a supremely importantelement in the formation of the Jewish narrativeof the Holocaust. However, it laterbecame clear that they did not include allthat had been written by their authors duringthe war; upon new study of the collections,additional chronicles or notes aresometimes discovered. Recently, previouslyunknown pages were found in theHersch Wasser Collection at YIVO, lateridentified as Rabbi Huberband’s writings.These chronicles, as well as sections leftout of Kiddush Hashem (in both its Hebrewand English editions), will soon be publishedin an article by the author of this articlein the upcoming volume of YadVashem Studies (38:1).The importance of the texts so far unearthedlies in their contents and the timeand place in which they were written –May-June 1942, the period of terror in theWarsaw ghetto – and in the writer himself,Shimon Huberband, an unusual figureamong the Oyneg Shabbes archivists, inpart because of his association with OrthodoxJudaism. In his writings, Huberbandlooked at the world of the religious Jew inthe ghetto, though he did not ignore otherissues. After Huberband’s murder on 18August 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum emphasizedhis noble character, his meticulousnessand his extensive knowledge,calling him one of the pillars of the archive.“Only some of the material he collectedwas preserved. Most of it disappeared withhim,” Ringelblum wrote in Huberband’smemory. Any document from Huberband’spen, any additional piece of informationfrom his own hand, is a real historic find.LAUNCH OF NEW YAD VASHEMENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GHETTOSAfter 6 years of research, the groundbreakingnew Yad Vashem Encyclopediaof the Ghettos During the Holocaustwas launched in New York on May 13,2010, by the American Society for YadVashem and New York University Press,its distributor. Over 100 people attendedthis landmark event.The 2-volume Yad Vashem Encyclopediaof the Ghettos covers allthe ghettos established by theNazis in Europe during the Holocaustand includes 250 photographs,62 maps, essays and aDVD of wartime footage of ghettosfilmed in real time during the Holocaust.Eli Zborowski, Chairman ofthe American Society for YadVashem, describes it as “a groundbreakingundertaking.”“The Encyclopedia is the outcomeof pioneering research on theunique phenomenon of ghettos,”said Avner Shalev, Chairman ofYad Vashem. “With information onconditions, administration, leadershipand coping methodologies thathave never before been gatheredtogether into one encyclopedia, it is a valuableresource for anyone interested in thehistory of the Holocaust.”Professor Dan Michman, Chief Historianof Yad Vashem and a contributor to the Encyclopedia,spoke at the event and noted:“More than a technical inventory coveringover 1,100 ghettos that existed under theNazis and their allies, the encyclopedia reflectsan historiographic understanding thatghettos were implemented only for Jews,and, as such, the phenomenon is conceptuallyseparate from the concentration camps.”A series of introductions explain the historicalorigins and the emergence of theghettos, their characteristics and regionaldifferences, as well as the sources and natureof the photographic material left behind.Each entry, written by experts in thefield, includes the city’s [ghetto’s] presentlocation, wartime name and geographicalcoordinates and, where applicable, sectionson life prior to World War II, the Sovietoccupation, German-Nazi occupation, theEli Zborowski, Chairman, American Society for YadVashem; Jennifer Hammer, Editor, New York UniversityPress; Prof. Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund DistinguishedProfessor of European History, Brown University; Prof.Dan Michman, Chief Historian, International Institute forHolocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.ghetto setup, ghetto institutions and communallife; murder, terror and killing operations;underground and resistance; andnumber of survivors at liberation.Professor Omer Bartov, John P.Birkelund Distinguished Professor of EuropeanHistory at Brown University, one ofthe most renowned experts in the field alsospoke at the event and noted: “This encyclopediapresents scholars and laymen forthe first time with a comprehensive view ofthe ghetto phenomenon which was so centralto Jewish life during the Holocaust.”The Encyclopedia is available for purchasefrom New York University Press. Call1-800-996-6987/ 212-998-2546 to order.

Page 16 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2010 - Iyyar/Sivan 5770REVEALING THE YOUNG BUREAUCRATSBEHIND THE NAZI TERRORBY JAN FRIEDMANN, SPIEGEL ONLINEWho exactly were the men whoplanned and administered theNazi crimes? The new "Topography ofTerror" documentation center opened inBerlin at the site of the former Gestapoand SS headquarters. It reveals the facesof the almost unknown perpetrators of theHolocaust.The index cards cover an entire wall,several hundred of them in pink, beige orgreen, containing names, dates of birthand handwritten notes. They are the detailsof some of the 7,000 former employeesof the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, theThe Topography of Terror site in the center of Berlin. It was fromthis site that the Nazi death machine was administered.amalgamation of the feared SS paramilitarygroup and Gestapo secret policeforce – the men who worked at the veryepicenter of the Nazi terror regime.Sixteen of these thousands of cardsthat were collected by investigators inBerlin in 1963 jut out from the wall, representingthe only former employees ofthis terror headquarters who ever facedprosecution. And three of these cards areraised further – showing the trio whowere eventually convicted. That is justthree out of a total of 7,000.The exhibition can be seen at the new"Topography of Terror" documentation centeropened by German President HorstKöhler, just two days before the 65th anniversaryof the end of World War II. Unlikethe nearby Holocaust Memorial, which isdedicated to the Nazis' victims, this modestmetallic gray building is designed to highlightthe role of the perpetrators, thosemanagers and bureaucrats who from theirBerlin offices administered mass murderacross Europe.The center also reveals the worst historicallegacy of the German Federal Republic:the fact that thousands of murderersand their accomplices were able to leadquiet lives in postwar Germany, undisturbedby the criminal justice system. Thesite of the exhibition is probably the mosthistorically contaminated place in Berlin.The complex on what was once Prinz AlbrechtStrasse, just a stone's throw fromtoday's government buildings, was theheadquarters for the Third Reich's brutalrepression.In 1933 the Gestapo made the former artschool at Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 its headquarters.The adjacent Hotel Prinz Albrechtbecame the SS headquarters in 1934 andthat same year the SS intelligence service,the SD, took over the Prinz Albrecht palaceon nearby Wilhelm Strasse. It was fromthis complex of buildings that Hitler's officialsadministered the concentration andextermination camps, directed the deadlycampaigns by the SS death squads andkept an eye on the regime's opponents.The "Final Solution" that was discussedat the famed Wannsee Conference on Jan.20, 1942, was also prepared here. A groupof ministerial officials and SS functionariesbased here chose the venue for the conferenceof high-ranking Nazis, where theplan for the murder of Europe's Jews washatched.Hitler was rarely at the complex. He preferredto stay away from Berlin, sometimesruling from his Wolf's Lair military headquartersand sometimes from his Bavarianmountain retreat. But this was where thebrains behind the Nazi crimes, such as SSleader Heinrich Himmlerand SD chief ReinhardHeydrich, had their offices.And they surroundedthemselves by men whodidn't necessarily fit intotoday's stereotype of aNazi war criminal, neitherboorish sadists nor bloodlessbureaucrats. Theywere ambitious universityeducatedmen, agedaround 30 and more likelyto be ideologues thantechnocrats. They alternatedbetween serving atthe Berlin headquartersand in foreign posts, likeyoung managers at a bigcompany making their wayup the career ladder. And after the ruptureof 1945 most of them simply faded awayinto the background.Erich Ehrlinger, for example, a lawyerfrom Giengen in southern Germany,who at the age of 25 was already a staffleader at the SD main office, before becominga commander in the German securitypolice in Ukraine andleading the 1b Einsatzkommando,or mobile deathsquad. A case against himin 1969 was dropped becausehe was deemed incapableof standing trial. YetEhrlinger lived for another35 years.Then there was the Munichbusinessman, JosefSpacil, who joined the SS atthe age of 27. He was stationedin an occupied areaof the Soviet Union as anSS economist, then cameback to Prinz AlbrechtStrasse to serve as a department head. Heappeared as a witness in the NurembergTrials but was never prosecuted himself.Photographs of a group of younglawyers, Werner Best, Ernst Kaltenbrunnerand Hans Nockemann, stare down fromthe walls — all were born in 1903. "Oneeasily forgets that National Socialism wasa young movement," say AndreasNachama, the director of the new documentationcenter.Nachama proudly walks through thebuilding, showing its concrete walls anddark stone floor. "The site is our most importantexhibit," he says. "We don't needimpressive architecture, it is all there." Hepoints to the views. Across the way is theformer Air Ministry of Hermann Göring,now the German Finance Ministry. A fewmeters away is the Berlin state parliament,once the seat of the Prussian parliament.Adjacent to the site is a 170-meter sectionof the Berlin Wall. No other place containsquite so much German history.It is hard to understand today why thiscrucial historical site was neglected for solong. Between 1949 and 1956 the authoritiesdemolished the war-damaged buildings.It might have been possible then toreconstruct the site, but people preferredto forget this place of horror.It was a left-wing citizens group in the1980s that rediscovered the site, not onlyas a place where the perpetrators plannedthe Holocaust but also as a site of the Germanresistance. Around 15,000 peoplewere arrested by the Gestapo and kept inthe ground-floor cells of Prinz AlbrechtStrasse 8.Excavation work uncovered the floors ofthe cells, as well as parts of the walls andfoundations. A provisional exhibition was puton in 1987 as part of Berlin's 750th anniversarycelebrations. That original Topographyof Terror, a row of information boards displayingtext in the open air, stayed put forover 20 years and eventually would attracthalf a million visitors annually.And it took almost that long until the documentationcould be housed properly. Anarchitecture competition from 1993 endedin chaos. Then architect Ursula Wilms andlandscape architect Heinz Hallmanstepped in with their project, which was finishedin two and half years.Agood end to a long-drawn-outprocess. However, valuable yearswere wasted, during which the area's governmentquarters and other memorials rapidlychanged. The Topography now appearsas a latecomer. And the opportunity waswasted to bring together the various Nazimemorials in the city under the umbrella ofa single foundation. That would have beenin a better position to cooperate with bigdocumentation centers abroad, as well asA woman inspects the remains of the original buildings along theformer Prinz Albrecht Strasse.the Holocaust museums in Washington andLondon and the Mémorial de la Shoah inParis. Nachama, however, says that the Topographyof Terror was never supposed tosupply comprehensive answers. "We arepleased if visitors leave us with more questionsthen they started with."These visitors can stare in amazementat the photograph of Karl Wolff, head ofHimmler's personal staff, as he standshappily in front of his house on StarnbergLake and waters his plants.Or at a color photo from 2002 that showsFriedrich Engel, the former head of the SSin Genoa, in a Hamburg court. Engel,known as the "Butcher of Genoa," wasconvicted in absentia by an Italian militarycourt for the 1944 murder of hundreds ofItalian captives. Germany's highest court,the Bundesgerichthof, then overturned hisHamburg conviction. Engel died in 2006 –a free man.Web site: www.yadvashemusa.orgInternational Society for Yad VashemMARTYRDOM AND RESISTANCE500 FIFTH AVENUE, 42nd FLOORNEW YORK, N.Y. 10110-4299NON-PROFIT ORG.U.S. POSTPAIDNEW YORK, N.Y.PERMIT NO. 9313Martyrdom & ResistanceEli Zborowski,Editor-in-ChiefYefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,Editor*Published Bimonthlyby the International Societyfor Yad Vashem, Inc.500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd FloorNew York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304EDITORIAL BOARDEli ZborowskiMarvin ZborowskiMark PalmerSam Skura**Israel KrakowskiWilliam MandellSam HalpernIsidore Karten**Norman BelferJoseph Bukiet***1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates,and Nazi Victims**deceased