AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEMHouse in New York City. Thanks to our wonderful...

IN THIS ISSUEThe ASYV Annual Spring Luncheon.......................................................1, 8-9

The Warsaw ghetto: The epitome of rightful resistance...............................2

Two friends who escaped from Auschwitz and warned the world..............3

The rabbi saved by Hitler’s soldiers...............................................................4

Saving Bulgarian Jewry: 75 years later..........................................................6

Warsaw ghetto orphanage head’s letters made public..............................................10

We fell in love in a concentration camp.......................................................12

Jewish documents of Holocaust reveal secrets.........................................13

Holocaust letters contained “a lot of hope,” exhibit shows......................14

The checkered record of the Swiss Red Cross during the Holocaust.....15

Vol. 44-No. 5 ISSN 0892-1571 May/June 2018-Iyyar/Sivan 5778

AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM

The American Society for YadVashem Annual Spring

Luncheon took place on Wednesday,May 23rd, at the JW Marriott EssexHouse in New York City. Thanks toour wonderful co-chairs (GoldieHertz, Danielle Karten, Abby Kaufthal,Jaci Paradis, Rachel Shnay andMichelle Taragin) and esteemed hon-orees (Millie Zuckerman, Ruth Katz,Ann Sklar and DeborahZuckerman). The luncheonwas attended by over 300supporters, including sur-vivors, their children, grand-children, great-grandchildrenand friends.

Luncheon co-chair GoldieHertz welcomed our guestsand introduced Leonard Wilf,chairman of the Americanand International Societiesfor Yad Vashem. Referring toour honorees, Mr. Wilf statedthat “the outpouring of atten-dance and support for Millieand the Zuckerman familythis afternoon is a true testa-ment to the esteem in whichthey are held by family,friends, and those whoselives they have touched.”Millie, her husband,Abraham, z”l, and their familyare Guardians of YadVashem. Mr. Wilf then invitedall survivors present at theluncheon to please rise andbe recognized. “[Their] stories of per-severance and resilience are inspira-tional and remind us why we are heretoday.”

Rella Feldman, ASYV board memberand longtime friend of the Zuckermanfamily, introduced our beloved hon-oree, Millie Zuckerman. Millie wasborn in 1925 in Huminska, Poland. Ms.

Feldman was born in the BindermichelDisplaced Persons Camp in Austria,the same DP camp where Millie metand married her late husband, Abe, z”l.Ms. Feldman highlighted Millie’s opti-mism and fortitude, “the same qualitiesthat allowed [her] to persevere throughthe horrors of World War II and build afamily with Abe after the Krieg.”

Millie Zuckerman, a Holocaustsurvivor and the matriarch of

her family, spoke with grace andstrength. She said, “It is hard to imag-ine it has been 73 years since the warended,” and that it is “such an honor tobe honored.” Four generations of theZuckerman family were present thatafternoon. Ruth Katz, Millie’s daughter,

proudly stood next to her mother at thepodium and spoke of the inspiring loveshe witnessed between her parents allher life. Ms. Katz conveyed the contin-ued strength of her parents and theirlegacy. “From the ashes of theHolocaust, the Zuckerman family hasgrown to 32, so far.”

Luncheon co-chair Rachel Shnayintroduced our esteemed guest

speakers, Michael Bornstein andDebbie Bornstein Holinstat. In herremarks, Shnay, who is also YoungLeadership Associates co-chair, aptlydescribed the importance of YadVashem when she declared, “The sig-nificance of one life, one name — thatis Yad Vashem.” As the granddaugh-ter of Holocaust survivors, Shnaygrew up hearing her grandparents’stories. It was with great pride thatshe introduced our guest speakers,as she knows “the time will comewhen there are no survivors remain-ing to tell their stories first hand.”

Mr. Bornstein, a Holocaust sur-vivor, is one of the youngest sur-vivors of the Auschwitz concentrationcamp. He and his daughter, broad-cast news journalist Debbie Holinstat,are the co-authors of Survivors Club:The True Story of a Very YoungPrisoner of Auschwitz. The book

chronicles the experience of Michaeland his extended family during theHolocaust, its aftermath, and into thepostwar years. Ms. Holinstatacknowledged that her father, unfor-tunately, never used to speak abouthis past and the horrors he faced inPoland during the war. As LeonardWilf stated earlier in the afternoon, “Ittook Michael seventy years to tell his

story — and what a storyit is.” Today, Michael andDebbie travel to schoolsand conferences to speakabout their book andshare Mr. Bornstein’sstory of survival. Copiesof Survivors Club wereprovided for all of ourguests, thanks to the gen-erosity of Patti Kenner,and many guests stayedto have their copiessigned by the authors.

Luncheon attendeesexplored the Yad

Vashem exhibit “Spots ofLight: Women in theHolocaust” before gather-ing in the ballroom for ameaningful program.

The “Spots of Light”exhibit features nineaspects of the Jewishwoman’s daily life duringthe Holocaust: Love,Motherhood, Caring forOthers , Womanhood,

Resistance and Rescue, Friendship,Faith, Food, and the Arts. Eachaspect is accompanied by a person-al story, related in the first person.According to Yad Vashem, “by givingexpression to these individualwomen, the exhibition reveals thepoignant stories behind the histori-cal events, and provides faces andvoices within the darkness andsilence.”

To close the program, Jaci Paradiscalled upon everyone in attendanceto renew their involvement and com-mitted support for Yad Vashem andHolocaust remembrance. MichelleTaragin echoed this and the mes-sage of the entire afternoon — neverforget. We must continue to tell thestories of those who were murderedand those who survived theHolocaust because “now it’s our turnto keep their stories alive.”

IT’S OUR TURN TO KEEP THEIR STORIES ALIVE

Millie Zuckerman, Ruth Katz, Ann Sklar and Deborah Zuckerman, 2018 Spring Luncheon honorees, are being presented withthe American Society for Yad Vashem Leadership Award by Leonard Wilf, chairman of ASYV. They are joined by some of MillieZuckerman’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2018 - Iyyar/Sivan 5778

BY MATTHEW KALMAN, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

When Jerusalem-based pho-tographer and filmmaker

David Blumenfeld decided to followefforts to restore the Jewish cemeteryin Ivansk, the Polish town where hisgrandfather was born, he didn’t real-ize he would become entangled in aproject that would awaken dark mem-ories of collaboration with the Nazisand spark a national furor in Poland.

Blumenfeld’s journey into Poland’sguilty past is captured in his new doc-umentary Scandal in Ivansk.

Descendants of Ivansk’s Jews, whoin 1939 made up most of the town’spopulation before they were almost alldeported and murdered by the Nazis,discovered that the ancient Jewishcemetery had almost been erased. Thetombstones had disappeared. Thememorial in the town square doesn’tmention Jews at all, and all the landand property once owned by the Jewswas taken by their Polish neighbors.

“It was strange to think that beforethe war most of Ivansk was Jewish,yet today there was no trace of theJewish shtetl that once existed here,”says Blumenfeld.

As the film unfolds and the ancientcemetery emerges from its neglectedoverlay of trees and scrub, a questionhaunts the town: Were the Jews for-gotten, or was their presence here

consciously suppressed?The Jewish group begins restoring

the cemetery and collecting the tomb-stones, stirring memories of the once-forgotten neighbors whose stores oncelined the main square. Some residentswant to forget. Others want to remem-ber — and even apologize. There arewhispers of theft, ghosts of betrayal,and dark mutterings of the ultimate sin:collaboration with the Nazis.

When the town mayor unveils a newmemorial, the decades-old scandal ofmass murder is supplanted by a newuproar. The inscription refers to “col-laborators,” triggering a nationaldebate about the role of Poles in thecrimes of the Nazis.

Blumenfeld is on hand to witnessand document these develop-

ments, accompanying the descen-dants of the town’s Jews as they seekto preserve the memory of their fami-lies, some of whom had lived inIvansk for centuries.

“At first, I was cynical about goingback to Poland. When I came acrossa dramatic testimony by the sole sur-vivor from the town describing the daybefore the Nazis arrived, I knew I hadto make this film,” says Blumenfeld.

“Aware of their impending fate, therabbi gathered the Jews to bury theirholy Torah scrolls in the Jewish ceme-tery. He made those assembledswear to one day ‘tell the world whatthe Nazis and their collaborators did

to us here,’” Blumenfeld says.“Little did I know that these words

etched onto a stone monument 70years later would cause a front-page,nationwide scandal across Poland,and set me onto an odyssey exploring

the subject of memory through thelens of the often contentious relation-ship of Poles and Jews,” he says.

Blumenfeld’s timely film provides anintimate portrait of a community strug-gling with the politics of memory andhistory that helped forge Poland’snew legislation that banned any men-tion of “Polish” collaboration with theNazis or “Polish” death camps.

An academic recalls a poll by thePolish Academy of Sciences that

found 61% of Poles believed thatPoles suffered as much as or morethan the Jews under the Nazis.

“Between Poles and Jews here is astruggle about victimhood and who isthe ultimate victim,” says ProfessorHavi Dreifuss of Tel Aviv University.

“During World War II the Poles wereunder a cruel Nazi occupation. Thisfeeling of victimhood increased underthe Soviet occupation. They were theultimate victims. They couldn’t evenimagine that there was someone in aworse situation,” says Dreifuss.

As Blumenfeld gets the elderly resi-dents to open up about their memo-ries of their Jewish neighbors, the hid-den secrets of the town’s guilty pasttumble out. They recall how the Nazischased the Jews through the streets,shooting the elderly and sick whocouldn’t keep up. One day, the Jewswere marched into the town squareand forced to dump all their belong-ings before being marched off to thetrain station.

A resident reveals what happenedto those items — and to the homesand land the Jews left behind. “Manyof the Poles became rich from this,”he says.

And what happened to the preciousTorah scrolls?

The rabbi thought they would besafe buried in the cemetery, but did hereally understand the neighbors whohad shared their little town?

WAS THIS POLISH SHTETL’S PRE-HOLOCAUST JEWISH HISTORY

FORGOTTEN, OR ERASED?

BY BEN COHEN, JNS

It’s hard to say for sure whether thefollowing fable was really told in

the Warsaw ghetto, but it’s grimlyfunny enough to warrant repeating.

The story goes that at the height ofWorld War II, Winston Churchill con-sulted with the Chassidic Rabbi ofGur about the best way of bringingdown Nazi Germany. The rabbi toldthe British wartime leader that therewere two ways he could think of: onenatural, the other supernatural.

“The natural way would be if onemillion angels with flaming swordsdescended on Germany anddestroyed it,” explained the rabbi.“The supernatural way would be ifone million British paratroopersdescended on Germany and did thesame thing.”

“Supernatural” may be too weak aword to describe how the very idea ofoutside military assistance must haveseemed to the approximately 70,000Jews who remained in the Warsawghetto on April 19, 1943 — the firstnight of Passover — as Nazi troopslaunched their final liquidation. But bythe time they finished that operationon May 16 — with the symbolic burn-ing of the Warsaw Great Synagogue

and the deportation to death camps ofthe surviving inhabitants — hundredsof the invaders lay dead or woundedafter nearly a month of savage fight-

ing with the poorly armed, impossiblybrave Jewish fighters in the ghetto.

We think, for good reason, of theWarsaw ghetto ultimately as atragedy to be mourned, the culmina-tion of the process of eliminating theJewish population of the Polish capi-tal that began in 1939, and one moreexample of the same brutal fate metby Jews in other Polish towns andcities — like those in the Vilna ghetto

who rose in armed revolt against theNazis the previous year, in January1942.

Yet I want to suggest that the pas-sage of time should encourage us tothink a little less mournfully. A story ofgreat hope revolves around theevents of the Warsaw ghetto uprisingthat needs to be heard, particularly ata time when — as a survey carriedout by the Jewish Claims Conferencerevealed recently — the public’s gen-eral knowledge of what the Holocaustinvolved is diminishing.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising isnot just a key aspect of the

Holocaust, but one of the most inspir-ing stories that history has everrecorded in the general struggle forliberty. The American revolutionariesunderstood that human beings havean inherent right to resist tyrannyregardless of who the tyrant is, andthat same understanding was whatdrove the Jewish fighters.

Moreover, the Jews of Vilna andWarsaw were not the only communi-ties to fight back against the tyrannyof Nazism. A circular in November1943 from the surviving Jewishunderground fighters in Polandreported on Jewish armed resistancein the city of Bialystok, and in theTreblinka and Sobibor death camps,

as well as in smaller towns —Tarnow, Bedzin, Czenstochow,Borislaw — whose names ring fewbells with us almost a century later.All of these uprisings broke out in theweeks and months after news of theresistance in Warsaw had spread; inthe words of the report, they were “acontinuation of the chain of heroicdeeds which the Warsaw ghetto initi-ated.”

That same report also proudlyobserved how Jewish Communistsand the socialist, non-Zionist Bundhad “joined hands with all Zionistunderground organizations” in theWarsaw ghetto. “Our comrades livedand worked with the others just asmembers of a close family. A com-mon aim united us,” it said. “Duringthis entire period of over half a year,there were no quarrels or struggles,which are common among adherentsof different ideologies.”

There is, in those words, an unmis-takable sense of victory, even as therest of the report records defeats,setbacks and other difficulties.Those fighters knew, as the endengulfed them, what they hadachieved. Enough time has nowpassed for us to judge that even ifthey did not live, they won. For that,they deserve our eternal gratitude.

THE WARSAW GHETTO: THE EPITOME OF RIGHTFUL RESISTANCE

The Mordechai Anielewicz statue at the YadMordechai kibbutz in southern Israel.

David Blumenfeld, director of the documen-tary Scandal in Ivansk.

May/June 2018 - Iyyar/Sivan 5778 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

BY JACKSON RICHMAN, TABLET

Thirty years ago, Alfred Wetzlerdied in his native Slovakia. He

and his friend, Rudolf Vrba, riskedtheir lives and escaped Auschwitz sothey could warn other Jews and theworld in precise detail what was hap-pening behind the fences and gatesof the Nazi concentration and exter-mination camp. Although they werenot successful in their attempt to saveHungary’s Jews from marching totheir deaths at Auschwitz, Vrba andWetzler did succeed in saving someJews as well as compiling and publi-cizing the first record of the Nazis’systematic atrocities at the camp.

Rudolf Vrba, formerly WalterRosenberg, was born on September11, 1924, in the Slovakian town ofTrnava. The son of a sawmill owner,he was expelled from high school inBratislava due to Slovakia’s version ofthe Nuremberg Laws. He worked as alaborer in Trnava until March 1942,when he was arrested, and on June14, 1942, he was deported to theMaidanek concentration camp andlater to Auschwitz.

Alfred Wetzler was born on May 10,1918, in the same town as Vrba. Hewas sent to Birkenau on April 13,1942. Later, he too was sent toAuschwitz.

Both Vrba and Wetzler held admin-istrative jobs in Auschwitz, whichallowed them access to many differ-ent areas of the camp and finally toplan their escape. “There had been anumber of escapes from Auschwitz;and in every case, the escapee hadbeen caught, sometimes within hours,sometimes within a few days,” the lateBritish historian and Oxford professorMartin Gilbert said in a 2011 episodeabout Vrba and Wetzler’s escape inthe PBS series Secrets of the Dead.As the English historian DavidCesarani added, “The consequencesof failure were torture and public exe-cution. Anyone connected with theescape would also be tortured andmurdered.”

In his book I Escaped fromAuschwitz, Vrba wrote, “It was a sim-ple plan and I literally stumbledacross it by accident.” When anescape occurred, the two mennoticed, the Nazis would look for theescapee for three days, after whichthey would give up on the search. Ifthey could survive the initial searchperiod, they reasoned, their chancesof survival would increase.

On April 7, 1944, almost two yearsafter Wetzler arrived at Auschwitz, heand Vrba hid in a cavity created with-in a woodpile in an expansion area ofnew construction in the camp for theHungarian Jews. They covered them-selves with gasoline-soaked Russiantobacco, hoping it would mask theirscent from the SS dogs. After remain-ing immobile in the hiding spot for

three days, they sprinted for thewoods. But even though they wereoutside the hellish place, they werestill not safe, as the Germans hadexpelled the Poles from all the townsand villages in the Auschwitz regionand replaced them with ethnicGerman Volksdeutsch.

“Once you were outside you were amarked person. Your head wasshaven, you were filthy, you stank.Anyone seeing one of these escapingfigures knew exactly who they were

and where they had come from,”Cesarani said. “The Nazis weresearching with dogs, there were SSteams scouring the countryside. Itwas an area that was alreadydescending into guerrilla warfare, par-tisan warfare. It was covered withpolice, German troops; there weremilitary installations, military convoyson the move. Very few friends.”

Vrba and Wetzler were careful, butthey made mistakes along the way asthey rushed to the Slovakian border.On the third day on the run, they acci-dentally wandered into a town. Withthe risk of being discovered, they triedto find their way out by stumblingdown alleyways and back streets.Exhausted, starving and lost, theyasked for help and were welcomed bya peasant woman who agreed toassist them.

Another close mishap occurredwhen they were less than halfway tothe Slovakian border, running into awoman tending to her crops. Althoughsuspicious, the woman introducedthem to a sympathetic Polish farmer,who offered to drive them to the bor-der and direct them where they couldcross to avoid the Germans.

***

On April 25, 1944, 15 days afterfleeing Auschwitz and after

walking more than 85 miles throughoccupied Poland, Vrba and Wetzlerfinally arrived at the headquarters ofthe Jewish Council in Zilina, Slovakia.There, Vrba described to the Councilthe atrocities taking place atAuschwitz. The Council was horrified.At the time, there were rumors theconditions in these camps wereappalling. But few could imagine the

Jews being exterminated en masse.The two men revealed detail after

detail about the systematic murder ofhundreds of thousands of Jews. But itbegan to dawn on them that theCouncil didn’t believe a word theywere saying. According to Gilbert, thepeople at the Jewish Council were“astonished by the story, they couldn’tbelieve it because what they [were]talking about is the death of some oftheir closest friends, relatives, fellowSlovaks.”

Gilbert added that the councilmencouldn’t imagine something systemat-ic where, out of 1,000 people, half ofthem would be taken off a train andgassed within a few hours.

“The Jewish community in Slovakiadidn’t believe them at first because itwas so unbelievable,” George Klein, ajunior secretary of the Jewish Councilat the time, said. “Killing is one thing,but to organize the killing, to make itinto a huge bureaucratic apparatus toorganize the transport, to have every-thing streamlined: that was so incred-ibly German efficiency, that peoplesimply didn’t believe that it was possi-ble.”

Vrba, who had a phenomenal mem-ory, told the councilmen the names ofthe people with whom he had beenimprisoned. “[Vrba] memorized everytransport, every train that came in,how many people were on it and howmany of those people who were on itwere immediately sent to the gaschamber,” Gilbert explained.Convinced the truth was being told,the Council asked them to recall allthey could about what was transpiringat Auschwitz. Vrba warned them thatHungary’s Jews would be next andthat the camp was ready for theirarrival.

In their book, Anatomy of theAuschwitz Death Camp, historiansYisrael Gutman and MichaelBerenbaum wrote that Vrba andWetzler were able to compile thereport through the “many dozens ofAuschwitz prisoners who at great riskcollected top-secret information onthe camp crematoria.”

According to Cesarani, the processof writing and translating the reportsand sending them to places such as

the Vatican, the Jewish communityand American representatives inSwitzerland, and the Red Cross tooktime. By the time the report had beencompiled and translated, Germanyhad occupied Hungary and hadbegun preparing for mass deporta-tions of its Jews.

Rudolf Kastner, who was the leaderof the Jewish Council in Budapest,received the Vrba-Wetzler report andwas stunned, but did not release thereport to the Jews of Hungary. Hekept it a secret because he thoughtthat if the information was revealed, itwould derail a deal he and theCouncil were trying to make with theNazis.

Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jewishcouncil member, met personally withAdolf Eichmann, who made Brand anextraordinary offer. Eichmann wouldallow a million Jews to go free inexchange for 10,000 trucks loadedwith supplies. Brand, feeling that thedeal was too good to be true, pursuedthe deal. He brought the deal to theBritish, who saw this deal as, accord-ing to Cesarani, a “grotesque trick toallow the Germans to claim they arenegotiating with the British over thefate of Jews, that they’re going to takedelivery of trucks to use against theRussians.”

On May 15, 1944, over a monthafter the escape, Vrba learned thatdespite his risking his life to tell theworld what was happening atAuschwitz, despite his pages andpages of detailed accounts, theHungarian deportations were underway. He believed he had failed.

Two days later, approximately 4,000Hungarian Jews arrived at Auschwitz.The Nazis bypassed the selectionprocess, and almost all of them wereled to the gas chambers immediately.“The extermination of 600,000Hungarian Jews was the fastest cam-paign during the entire Holocaust,”the Jewish Council’s George Kleinsaid. “It went on with incredible speedso there wasn’t much time for reflec-tion.”

***

Vrba and Wetzler were devastat-ed. Fearful they would be recap-

tured, they fled to the Slovakianmountains. Now in hiding, Vrba andWetzler felt there was nothing morethey could do to help the Jews ofHungary. In Budapest, RudolphKastner still hoped the Eichmann dealcould succeed even though the Allieswanted no part of it. Eichmann knewthat as Kastner dragged out the nego-tiations, more Jews were being sentto the gas chambers.

In the end, Eichmann allowed over1,600 Jews to go to safety. However,the normal deportations to Auschwitzcontinued. Cesarani remarked thatthe reason why information was notbroadcast to the Jews of Hungary is

(Continued on page 7)

TWO FRIENDS WHO ESCAPED FROM AUSCHWITZ

AND WARNED THE WORLD

Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba.


The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’sSoldiers: Rebbe Joseph IsaacSchneersohn and His AstonishingRescue.

By Bryan Mark Rigg. UniversityPress of Kansas: Lawrence, Kansas,2016. 490 pp. $49.95 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

“To the Lubavitchers, it made sensethat angels in human form had savedthe Rebbe because, in Chabad’sopinion, only God could have choreo-graphed the disparate cast of charac-ters who worked together to extractthe Rebbe and his party from a massof killers.”

The story told by the conscien-tious researcher, Bryan Mark

Rigg, in his well-written, riveting workentitled The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’sSoldiers: Rebbe Joseph IsaacSchneersohn and His AstonishingRescue, is nothing short of miracu-lous. And yet, it’s all true! Nor wereangels involved. Who took an interestin the Rebbe’s desperate situation?Who did everything in their power tomake sure the outcome was success-ful?

First off, in September 1939, withthe invasion of Poland by the Nazis,the leadership of the numerically sub-stantial Lubavitcher community inAmerica, who viewed RebbeSchneersohn as the “unquestionedleader of world Jewry and the poten-tial Moshiach (Messiah) of their gen-

eration,” took a major interest in hiswelfare. Soon, because of that, heart-felt pleas for emergency action wentout to government officials. Amongthose whose attention was drawn tothe plight of the Rebbewere Supreme CourtJustice Louis Brandeis,Senator Robert F.Wagner, Secretary ofState Cordell Hull, attor-ney and FDR advisorBenjamin V. Cohen,Postmaster GeneralJames A. Farley, assis-tant chief of the StateDepartment’s EuropeanAffairs Division RobertT. Pell, and more.(Interestingly, in lateryears many of theseindividuals would not beknown for their particu-lar concern with the plight of all Jewsin Europe during the war years.)

Moreover, among those notedabove, it was, most especially,

Secretary of State Hull (surprisingly)and Pell who actually acted on whatthey learned. Indeed, the proverbial“ball started rolling,” as regards theRebbe’s rescue, when the secretaryof state “authorized” Pell to write toRaymond Geist, the American consulgeneral in Berlin, and Geist, in turn,contacted Helmuth Wohlthat, “thechief administrator of Göring’s officeof the Four-Year Plan” and “an expert

in international industry and econom-ics.” Aside from being “fond of Pell,”Wohlthat, by this time, had become arather “ambivalent Nazi, despite hishigh office and party membership.” In

short, Wohlthat tookon the rescue mis-sion. He contacted agood friend and like-minded individualwhen it came to“political misgivings”vis-à-vis Nazism,Admiral WilhelmCanaris, head of theAbwehr, the Germanmilitary secret serv-ice. At that point,Canaris, realizing the“operation would bea delicate one,”“entrusted the job ofescorting the Rebbe

out of Poland to Major Dr. ErnstBloch, a distinguished Wehrmachtofficer who happened to be halfJewish.”

At the same time, and of no lessimport, Max Rhoade, a “distin-guished” Washington, D.C., lawyerknown for his important contacts, wascontacted by Sam Kramer, legalcounsel for the Lubavitcher inAmerica. Rhoade would tirelessly anddeterminedly wade through countlessimmigration obstacles in order to getthe Rebbe and the close associatestraveling with him (many of them fam-

ily members) into America. Thus, forexample, in attempting to secure non-quota status for them, Rhoade, in pre-senting the Rebbe’s case to Americanofficials, compared him to the Popeand his “hierarchical” ministerial staffseeking safety in America. In casethat argument didn’t work, he alsoworked on securing quota visas forthem. This meant he had to prove thatthey were really rabbis and that theycould all support themselves.Meanwhile, Rhoade had no rabbinicaldegrees, bank statements or evenbirth certificates to show officialdom.

Indeed, there was quite a “cast ofcharacters” that worked to save theRebbe and his entourage. But ultimate-ly “all the wheels in so many placesturned,” leading to eventual success.

This reviewer wouldn’t attempt totell the “how” of the story. That would-n’t be fair, especially since Rigg’sabsorbing page-turner of a work tellsit so well.

Finally, concerning the author’s com-ments regarding the Rebbe’s actionsor, rather, relative inaction regardingthe actual physical rescue of otherJews still in Europe once he was safein America . . . unfortunately, in thatarea, sadly, there’s plenty of blame togo around, plenty . . . One could onlywish it had been otherwise .

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia, Communication, and VisualArts at Pace University.

THE RABBI SAVED BY HITLER’S SOLDIERS

In Broad Daylight: The SecretProcedures behind the Holocaust byBullets.

By Father Patrick Desbois. ArcadePublishing: New York, N.Y., 2018. 312pp. $19.83 hardcover.

In a new, second book about the“Holocaust by bullets,” Father PatrickDesbois depicts in grim detail localbystanders’ culpability while Nazisimplemented the Final Solution.

REVIEWED BY MATT LEBOVIC, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

For all intents and purposes, thefirst phase of the Holocaust was

a communal undertaking, one thatwas jointly perpetrated by NaziGermany and thousands of EasternEuropean collaborators.

When the Nazis invaded Sovietlands in 1941, the notorious deathcamps had not yet been constructedin occupied Poland. To enactGermany’s “war of annihilation”against the Jews, mobile killingsquads — called Einsatzgruppen —were deployed to conduct large-scaleshooting massacres. In some towns,thousands of non-Jews turned out towatch the slaughter of Jews in festiveatmospheres, belying the myth of agenocide carried out in secret.

Typically, Einsatzgruppen “actions”were conducted in Jewish cemeteries

or on the outskirts of town. Comparedto the death camps more closelyassociated with the Holocaust, themass shootings were well document-ed with photographs and contempo-rary reports. Nearly two million Jewswere murdered in these open-airmassacres, comprising one-third ofthe genocide’s sixmillion victims.

“Today, it is stillsaid in the formerSoviet territories thatthe killings weredone in secret,”wrote Father PatrickDesbois in his newbook, In BroadDaylight: The SecretProcedures behindthe Holocaust byBullets.

Published inJanuary, In BroadDaylight is the fol-low-up to Desbois’s2008 book, TheHolocaust by Bullets, based on theRoman Catholic priest’s investiga-tions into the Einsatzgruppen mas-sacres in Ukraine. For his new book,Desbois drew from research in sevencountries where the Einsatzgruppenoperated, with an emphasis on thenon-German men and women who

helped facilitate the shootings.Earlier this year, the author helped

conduct a seminar for tour guides atthe former death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, where the Nazismurdered one million Jews in gaschambers. During the week-longtraining in January, 130 guides

learned about the“Holocaust by bul-lets” killings that —in a matter ofmonths — “evolved”into the constructionof six purpose-builtdeath camps.

Although Desboishas identified hun-dreds of Holocaustmass shooting sitesin Poland, the bulk ofhis work has beeneast of that country.Since 2004, hisresearch team hasinterviewed nearly4,000 eyewitnesses

to Einsatzgruppen killings, includingelderly men and women who admit tohaving collaborated with the Nazis.

“Memory survived among thesepeople,” Desbois has said of witness-es to the genocide, including thosewho were very young at the time.

“In little Soviet villages, the children

didn’t watch the genocide of the Jewson television. They went to the neigh-boring fields in order to see for them-selves,” wrote Desbois, adding thatboys were sometimes assigned therole of bringing bullets to the killersduring mass shootings.

“The capacity to see the mass mur-der of others without taking anyresponsibility predates mass media,”wrote the celebrated priest.

In 2004, Desbois founded theorganization Yahad–In Unum

(Together in One), based on his mis-sion to locate and mark theHolocaust’s Einsatzgruppen killingfields. Since then, the priest and hisresearchers have also applied theirmethods in war-torn Iraq, interviewingYazidi survivors of the Islamic State’sgenocidal campaign.

The book In Broad Daylight wasorganized according to a “typical”Einsatzgruppen operation, beginningwith “The Night Before” and endingwith “The Day After.” Within that time-line, some collaborators performseemingly mundane tasks — thecooks and clerks — whereas othersunleash horrors upon their Jewishneighbors, as depicted in a chaptercalled “The Rapes.”

To identify potential eyewitnesses,Yahad–In Unum investigators usually


IN EASTERN EUROPE, WHEN NAZIS KILLED JEWS,

A “CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE” PREVAILED


Polish Prime Minister MateuszMorawiecki says there were, alongwith Polish, Russian, Ukrainianand German. Israeli historians sayit’s part of an ongoing campaign toblur the line between the murder-ers and the victims.BY DAVID B. GREEN, HAARETZ

Who was Polish Prime MinisterMateusz Morawiecki referring

to when he spoke about “Jewish per-petrators” in the Holocaust?

Morawiecki was responding to aquestion from Israeli journalist RonenBergman during a session at theMunich Security Conference.Bergman, the son of Polish Holocaustsurvivors, told the premier that whenhe was growing up, his mother hadsaid she and her family were savedonly because their Gentile neighborsdid not know they were there. Theneighbors, he said, “snitched to theGestapo” when there were Jews hid-ing in the vicinity. Bergman wonderedaloud if his revelation would make himsubject to criminal charges in present-day Poland.

Morawiecki denied that anyoneneeded to fear being punished inPoland for claiming there had been“Polish perpetrators” — just as therewere “Jewish perpetrators, as therewere Russian perpetrators, as therewere Ukrainian — not only Germanperpetrators.”

There is no denying that theGermans, in occupying Poland, forcedthe country’s Jews to assist in govern-ing and policing themselves, by way ofthe Judenrat (the Jewish councils) andthe Jewish police, who were responsi-ble for running the day-to-day affairs inthe Jewish ghettos and keeping order.When the Nazis began the process of“liquidating” a ghetto, they would obli-gate the Judenrat to provide lists of theJewish residents, and sometimes toselect the victims.

In some cases, such as that ofWarsaw ghetto Judenrat head AdamCzerniaków, suicide was preferable toassisting in the deportation of his fel-low Jews: Czerniaków ingested acyanide pill on July 23, 1942 — theday the transports began.

Far more controversial was ChaimRumkowski, who headed the Lodzghetto and implored the Jews there toassist him in turning over the ghetto’schildren, as well as its elderly, to theGermans so that the remainder wouldbe saved. Of course, all of Lodz’s Jewswere eventually deported, includingRumkowski, who was murdered inAuschwitz, apparently by members ofthe Jewish Sonderkommando, onA u g u s t 2 8 , 1 9 4 4 . ( T h eSonderkommando were anotherexample of Jews being pressed intodoing the Nazis’ dirty work for them —in this case, removing dead bodiesfrom the gas chambers.)

But the stories of Rumkowski, andthe Jewish police, and many other

disturbing episodes of Jews who col-laborated with the Germans — somebecause they thought it would savesome lives, others because of whatcan only be called moral depravity —are well known.

As Havi Dreifuss, a professor of his-tory at Tel Aviv University and aresearcher at Yad Vashem, toldHaaretz in an interview, “This was oneof the first subjects to be tackled byJewish and Israeli scholars” of theHolocaust, and it continues to bestudied today. In Israel, “some Jewswere even put on trial for their actsduring the Holocaust. Naturally, it is avery sensitive topic, but there’s notaboo on studying it. Even if it was amarginal phenomenon, no one eventhinks to suggest that it shouldn’t beresearched.”

Dreifuss says she suspectsMorawiecki’s Munich comments werepart of a larger effort underway inPoland that is intended “to blur the dif-ferences between the murderers andthe victims.” And the differences, shesays, are enormous.

“First, the scope of the phenomenonwas marginal in the Jewish case —important but marginal — whereasthe hostile reaction of many Poles tothe persecuted Jews was a norm inmost parts of Poland. Poles hatedand feared Nazi Germany, but manyof them saw the murder of the Jewsas a ‘positive’ outcome of the war.Second, there is the question ofmotives. While most Jews collaborat-ed hoping to save themselves, theirfamily or part of their community —Poles helped Nazi Germany huntJews due to various reasons, amongthem hatred and financial benefits.”

Dr. David Silberklang, a seniorhistorian at Yad Vashem and

editor of its Yad Vashem Studies jour-nal, concurred with Dreifuss, sayingthat it was “outrageous” to make thecomparison between Jewish collabo-rators and Polish ones.

Like Dreifuss, he emphasizes thatthe phenomenon was “marginal,” andalso that Jews who did help theGermans “were looking for a way tosave their skins.” Among Gentile

Poles, “we’re talking about peoplewho went out of their way to huntdown Jews,” he says.

Morawiecki was at great pains tonote that it’s wrong to speak of “‘Polish’death camps,” since “there was noPolish independent state” during WorldWar II, and the concentration anddeath camps were organized andoperated by the Nazi German occu-piers. But even he had to correct him-self a short time later when he began asentence with the words, “In Poland,”and then corrected himself by saying,“On the Polish soil, I should have said,because there was no Poland duringthe Second World War.”

That, too, is somewhat misleading,as there was a Polish government-in-exile — which was based in Londonduring the war — and there was also

the Delegatura, which was commonlyreferred to as the “undergroundstate.” Its job, in the words of YadVashem’s Silberklang, “was to try tohold together Polish society againstthe attacks on it by the Nazis, whowere trying to dissolve Polish society.”

Also, there was a Polish police forcethat numbered some 15,000 in 1942,serving in both the cities and the coun-tryside in the General Government(the Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, Lublinand Eastern Galicia districts). SaysSilberklang: “They’re often the oneswho are hunting down the Jews whoran away. And they could have decid-ed that they weren’t going to find theJews.” They could have put on a showof searching for them, before saying,“‘You know, these Jews are just sogood at hiding, we’re not able to findthem.’ But they didn’t do that, at leastnot as an institution.”

Furthermore, adds Silberklang, nei-ther the government in exile, nor theDelegatura in occupied Poland, norany of the various underground mili-tary organizations “ever defined fight-ing the Germans as including trying tohelp Jews.” There were other nations— Silberklang mentions the Dutchand the Danish — whose resistanceorganizations did make that part oftheir mission, but not the Poles. Somewould not even accept Jews into their

ranks, and some even “actively hunt-ed down Jews and killed them.”

Recently, notes Silberklang,Morawiecki “laid a wreath at the burialsite of some of them,” referring to thepremier’s visit to a Munich cemeteryto pay homage to the memory ofmembers of the Holy CrossMountains Brigade — a far-right, anti-Communist underground group —who are buried in Munich.

Argues Silberklang: “It’s not just amatter of ‘Your hero is my criminal;my hero is your criminal.’ Someonewho’s actually murdering people can’tbe anyone’s hero.”

There was a Polish organization,Zegota, founded by both Jews

and non-Jews, that was dedicated torescuing Jews. “But now,” saysSilberklang, “it’s used as an exampleof the spirit of the Polish people.When the fact of the matter is thatPolish rescuers — those who tried tohelp Jews — had to fear their neigh-bors more than they had to fear theGermans. Because so many of theirneighbors wanted to turn them in.”

As an example, he points to IrenaSendler, the Gentile woman who res-cued Jewish children from theWarsaw ghetto. “She saved dozens,maybe a couple of hundred. And shepaid for it. She was punished andbeaten by the Germans. But one ofher comments [after the war] wasthat, in Poland, it was easier to hide atank under a rug than a Jewish childin a Christian home.”

Morawiecki tried to limit the damagecaused by his remarks a day earlier. Aspokesperson issued a statementclaiming that his words “should beinterpreted as a sincere call for opendiscussion of crimes committed againstJews during the Holocaust, regardlessof the nationality of those involved.”

However, the new Polish law thatrecently reignited the debate aboutPoland and the Holocaust forbidsopen discussion of that topic, makingillegal any statement accusing the“Polish nation, people or state” of par-ticipating in any way in the Holocaust.

Dreifuss stresses that the argumenthere is not between “Jews” and“Poles.” She notes that “there are won-derful Polish scholars who have con-tributed tremendously to our knowl-edge about the Holocaust, including —yet not only — on some darker aspectsof Polish and Jewish relations.

“The argument is between peoplewho want to write history, and talkabout history, based on existing docu-mentation and updated knowledge —and those who don’t want to allow thisopen discussion,” she adds. “For me,the saddest thing will be if this attemptto blur differences and frighten thepromising younger generation ofPolish scholars ends up succeeding.Simplification will take over the field,and the complex reality of those dread-ful days will be fundamentally harmed.”

WERE THERE ACTUALLY “JEWISH PERPETRATORS”

OF THE HOLOCAUST?

Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat in Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. Rumkowski waseventually murdered in Auschwitz, apparently by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, inAugust 1944.


BY DANIEL S. MARIASCHIN

In March 1943, Nazi Germanydemanded of its Bulgarian allies

that they deport the country’s 48,000Jews. For months, the Nazis and theirBulgarian collaborators had dis-cussed the means for the transfer ofBulgarian Jews to the death campsthat already had taken the lives of mil-lions of other European Jews. Twoyears before, the Sofia governmentadopted the anti-Semitic Law for theDefense of the Nation, which fore-shadowed the ultimate decision todeport Bulgaria’s Jews.

Indeed, there was even a BulgarianCommissar for Jewish Affairs,Alexander Belev, who had been inplace for precisely this kind of opera-tion. The plans included the deporta-tion of more than 11,000 Jews fromNorthern Greece and Yugoslavia,areas under Bulgarian military admin-istration. Jews in both places wereforced to wear the yellow star, andmany young men in the Bulgariancommunity served in forced labordetails.

For those Jews inside Bulgaria’sborders, the plans for their roundupand demise were thwarted by anunlikely coalition of leaders of theBulgarian Orthodox Church, mem-bers of parliament, intellectuals andeveryday citizens, whose sense ofjustice and revulsion made the notionof sending their neighbors to theirdeaths unacceptable.

The reaction of the Church leader-ship set it apart from religious figureselsewhere in Europe, who througheither indifference, self-interest oroutright anti-Semitism turned away, orwere complicit as Jewish community

after community was destroyed.Led by the metropolitans (prelates)

of Sofia and Plovdiv, Stefan and Kyril,the church leadership — not all inagreement at the outset — came to theconclusion that it must deplore thedeportation orders. First, the churchagreed on protecting the few hundredJews in the country who had convert-ed to Bulgarian Orthodoxy (manythinking it would save their lives), butthat grew into a campaign to speak outfor the entire endangered community.

In a letter to the government on May4, 1943, the Holy Synod noted that“Our people, by its soul and con-science, by its mentality and convic-tion, cannot bear lawlessness,repression and atrocity against any-one. Our human, as well as ourChristian conscience is embarrassed.Hence, the Holy Synod is asked spirit-edly from many sides — by good andloyal Bulgarian public figures, by well-known people of culture and patriots,by Bulgarian mothers — to insist onjustice and humane attitude for theJewish minority in the country.” TheSynod met both with King Boris IIIand with the prime minister to conveyits opposition to the deportationorders.

Metropolitan Stefan of Sofiadenounced Hitler from the pulpit, call-ing him “the miserable and insaneFührer.” Metropolitan Klement ofStara Zagora insisted “we cannot stayindifferent to the fate of the persecut-ed Jewish minority because we wouldbe condemned by God…”

In the secular realm, the protestsagainst the deportation orders

were led by Dimitar Peshev, thedeputy speaker of Bulgaria’s NationalAssembly. Peshev, who came from

the small provincial city of Kyustendil,was moved by the deportation ofJews from Bulgarian-administeredareas outside the country and byreports of Jews in his home townbeing told to gather their belongingsin anticipation of roundups by theauthorities. His tenacity and persist-ence in pressing government leaders— the prime minister refused to meetwith him — was a key element inarousing public opinion about theplanned deportations.

On the people-to-people level,many Bulgarians had close

relations with their Jewish neighbors.Fifteen years ago, I was in Kyustendilfor the 60th anniversary commemora-tion of the rescue of Bulgarian Jewry.Following the program, which washeld in the town square, an elderlywoman ran up to the then Bulgarianforeign minister, and quickly engagedhim in animated conversation. Shethen did the same with an Israeli gov-ernment representative, who had alsoparticipated in the program. Curious, Iasked both what the conversationwas all about. The woman, I was told,had Jewish classmates who had leftfor Israel after the war, and now, shewanted to know if anyone could helpher track them down. For nearly 60years she had no one to ask, and thiscommemoration, with its attendeesfrom Israel, gave her the opportunityto find her friends.

The deportation orders were nevercarried out. The exasperated GermanAmbassador Adolf Beckerle, in acable to Berlin, wrote: “The Bulgariangovernment, despite its efforts in rela-tion to the final solution of the Jews, isattached to the mentality of theBulgarian population…. This one

does not find any drawbacks in theJews, that would justify actionsagainst them.”

The role of Bulgaria’s King Boris IIIin the deportation story has been sub-ject to much speculation, but it is clearthat the pressure to resist thedemands from Berlin came from out-side his circle.

Ironically, Belev, who was ultimatelydismissed from his job near the end ofthe war, fled to Kyustendil, where hewas captured and ultimately shot onthe way to Sofia to be tried.

Peshev, whose friendship for theJewish community eventually earnedhim the honor of being among theRighteous Among the Nations at YadVashem, was tried by the postwarCommunist government, chargedwith collaboration with the Germans.He was sentenced to 15 years inprison and released after serving abrief time.

Tragically, for the Jews of NorthernGreece and Yugoslavia, there was nosimilar rescue effort. Many actuallyhad relatives in Bulgaria, who werepowerless to save them. Most weredeported across Bulgarian territory, toAuschwitz and Treblinka.

At a time when defiance in any formran tremendous risks, those whohelped the Jewish community — theOrthodox Church, Peshev and thosewho joined him and friends and neigh-bors who found it unconscionable thatfellow Bulgarians would be sent totheir deaths — stood their ground. Ina demonstration of both conscienceand justice, these courageous humanbeings stood apart in a continentbereft of moral principles.

In that, 75 years later, there is anobject lesson for us today.

SAVING BULGARIAN JEWRY: 75 YEARS LATER

BY MENUCHA CHANA LEVIN,JEWISH PRESS

Frank Foley lived a quiet life in asmall English town after World

War II. His neighbors had no idea thatthis short, unassuming man was ahero who had led a dangerous doublelife in Nazi Germany. He had beenhead of Britain’s intelligence serviceand saved thousands of Jewish lives.

Based in Berlin in the 1930s, his offi-cial job was passport control officerfor the British. In actuality, he was thehead of the Berlin office of MI6,Britain’s secret intelligence service.

As a spy, Major Foley had a dramat-ic career. He organized the operationthat saved Norway’s gold reservesfrom the Nazis and persuaded lead-ing German scientists not to pass onessential data about atomic researchto the Nazi leadership. He also con-vinced scores of German spies tobecome double agents.

A lifelong devout Catholic, Foleywas greatly moved by the Nazi perse-cution of Jews, and assisted thou-sands to escape from Germany.

Following Kristallnacht in 1938, hewrote in a confidential report toLondon: “The Nazi party has notdeparted from its original intentionsand its ultimate aim remains the dis-appearance of the Jews fromGermany.”

Though immigration rules stillremained strict at that time of eco-nomic depression, many Jews real-ized the danger and tried to flee fromthe Nazi threat.

Defying the unrelenting policy of hisown Foreign Office, Foley issued10,000 visas for British MandatePalestine. Without diplomatic immuni-ty in Berlin, he ran a serious risk ofbeing discovered by the Nazis.

Despite the great personal danger tohimself and his family, he continued toforge visas and passport documentsfor Jews attempting to flee Germanyand Austria. He entered concentrationcamps to secure the release ofJewish prisoners. It is believed that hesaved about 10,000 lives.

Frank Foley’s wife, Kay, reported:“Jews trying to find a way out ofGermany queued in the hundredsoutside the British consulate, clingingto the hope that they would get apassport or a visa. Day after day wesaw them standing along the corri-dors, down the steps and across thelarge courtyard, waiting their turn to fillin the forms that might lead to free-dom. In the end, that queue grew tobe a mile long. Some were hysterical.Many wept. All were desperate. Withthem came a flood of cables and let-ters from other parts of the country, allpleading for visas and begging forhelp. For them, Frank’s yes or no real-ly meant the difference between anew life and the concentration camps.But there were many difficulties. Howcould so many people be interviewed

before their turn came for that dread-ed knock on the door…

“Frank worked from 7 am to 10 pmwithout a break. He would handle asmany applications himself as he couldmanage and would walk among hisstaff of examiners to see where hecould assist them, or give advice andwords of comfort to those who wait-ed.”

Wim Van Leer, also involved in help-ing Jews to escape from NaziGermany, noted that “the winter of1938 was a harsh one, and elderlymen and women waited from six inthe morning, queuing up in the snowand biting wind. Captain Foley saw toit that a uniformed commissionairetrundled a tea-urn on a trolley alongthe line of frozen misery….”

Miriam Posner, a Jewish girl ofsixteen, traveled from East

Prussia to beg for a visa to Palestine,although she did not meet Britain’sstiff conditions for entry. She main-tained: “Foley saved my life. Weheard that there was this man Foleywho was kind to the Jews. My mother


THE SPY WHO SAVED THOUSANDS OF JEWS

Foley at the start of World War II.


(Continued from page 3)that it would have been “pointless.”“The speed and ferocity of theGerman occupation, the speed ofthe roundup and ghettoization, andthen the ferocity with which thedeportations were implemented,made any kind of response almostimpossible to effect,” he said.

In June of 1944, the Nazi secretwas finally exposed as a copy of theVrba-Wetzler report was received byBritish Intelligence. The documentwas forwarded to top British andAmerican officials. According to thePBS documentary, “On June 15, theBBC broadcast the horrific details of

the report. Five days later, extractswere published in the New YorkTimes.”

The Vrba-Wetzler report reachedSwitzerland on June 18. HistorianYisrael Gutman wrote, “Now, not justthe name of the place was revealed;it was also shown to be the placethat had so often figured as ‘theunknown destination’ or as ‘some-where in Poland.’ ”

On July 2, the U.S. Air Forceattacked Budapest, raining bombson the Hungarian capital. Inresponse, Admiral Miklos Horthy ofHungary, who supported Hitler, hadthe trains stop the deportations. It

was only a coincidence. At the time,more than 300,000 Hungarian Jewshad been sent to the gas chambers,but 120,000 Jews had been saved,75 times more than the number ofJews saved in the Kastner deal.

As the war was nearing its end,Vrba and Wetzler joined theCzechoslovak partisan resistanceand fought the Nazis until the end ofthe war. By the time the Americans,British and Russians advanced intoGermany, the Nazis’ reign of terrorhad began to collapse. On January27, 1945, the Russians liberatedAuschwitz. By then, the Nazis hadkilled an estimated 1.5 million peo-

ple there in a span of under fiveyears.

After the war, Wetzler stayed inSlovakia and married a fellow sur-vivor from Auschwitz. He became ajournalist and newspaper editor. Hepassed away in 1988. Vrba marriedhis childhood sweetheart, GertaSidonova, and moved to Canada,where he became an associate pro-fessor of pharmacology at theUniversity of British Columbia. Hedied in 2006. Both men were heroeswho used their ingenuity under terri-ble circumstances to expose aghastly story to a world that waslargely indifferent to their plight.

TWO FRIENDS WHO ESCAPED FROM AUSCHWITZ AND WARNED THE WORLD

(Continued from page 4)began in German or Soviet archives.In hundreds of cases, testimony hasled the team not only to determinewhere mass executions took place,but to uncover the remains of bulletsin the ground.

In contrast to the relatively secre-tive death camps, the

Einsatzgruppen massacres were “anattraction” for many communities,according to Desbois. In some locali-ties, the Holocaust unfolded with “car-nival” or quasi-religious undertones,such as the organizing of bloody,Passion-like marches through town,or forcing Jews to perform on theedge of mass graves.

“The Germans in the Eastern territo-ries could not be unaware that the

gawkers who rushed to see the Jewsmurdered, sometimes up to thegraves’ edge, crossed themselvesover and over,” wrote Desbois.“Consciously or not, they organized atableau vivant, a living picture, of aninverted representation of theStations of the Cross.”

No role played by collaborators wastoo small to escape the author’s inter-est. In the chapter, “The Layer ofPlanks,” Desbois pondered the use of

wooden planks placed over the ditch-es during executions. After conduct-ing hundreds of interviews, he at lastcame upon a witness who mentionedthese planks.

“A board had been placed on theditch on which the Jew had to gonaked,” the witness told Desbois,referring to the 1941 massacre of2,000 Jews in Bolekhov, Ukraine,which took place at the town’s Jewishcemetery.

“I still remember that the Jewishfamilies held hands on the plank,”said the witness. “Then they wereshot in the head from behind and thenthey fell into the ditch. There were afew Jews down in the ditch who hadto lay the dead bodies in rows.”

In a chapter called The Sanitizer,

Desbois explained how the SS mur-der squads engaged local communi-ties in “cleaning up” after each mas-sacre. Before Jewish homes andbelongings could be pillaged, effortswere made to erase evidence thatthousands of people had been mur-dered.

“The personal bathtubs ripped out ofJewish houses became anonymoustubs for transporting the lime to themass graves where the Jews had

been murdered,” wrote Desbois. “Fora few days, the entire village seemsto have been transformed into ahuman slaughterhouse. A slaughter-house needing to be sanitized after acrime.”

According to Desbois, his investi-gations yielded many “grave

fillers,” but few people who admit totransporting Jews to execution sitesin trucks or wagons. For those in townwho did not witness the massacresfor themselves, evidence of what took

place was visible on the streets fordays.

“It took a village-wide effort to get theJewish furniture out of the houses andinto the schoolyard where it was sold,”wrote Desbois. “Not only was the saleof Jewish goods not hidden or dis-creet, camouflaged, but it took place in

broad daylight at the center of Sovietlife. …In the place where everyonewent to make daily purchases, thepossessions of murdered Jews weresold shamelessly at auction.”

IN EASTERN EUROPE, WHEN NAZIS KILLED JEWS,

A “CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE” PREVAILED

Aftermath of the Babi Yar ravine massacre in Kiev, Ukraine, during which 33,000 Jews were mur-dered between September 29 and 30, 1941.

Jews being forced to dig their own graves in Storow, Ukraine, July 1941.

The Skede Beach massacre in Latvia, where 2,700 Jews were shot in three days, December 1941.


PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE AMERICAN SOCIET

Back row (l. to r.): Michael Bornstein and Debbie Holinstat, guest speaker; Ron Meier, executive direc-tor of the ASYV; Leonard Wilf, chairman of the ASYV. Front row (l. to r.): Dr. Ruth Westheimer, PattiKenner.

Mark Moskowitz, member of the executive committee of ASYV, and Rose Moskowitz.

2018 Annual Spring Luncheon at the JW Marriot Essex House, New York City. Gladys Halpern; Sharon Halpern; Abbi Halpern, board member; and Millie Zuckerman, honoree.

Mark Moskowitz, member of the ASYV executive committee; Adina Burian, member of the ASYV exec-utive committee; and Leonard Wilf, chairman of the ASYV.

Rella Feldman (l.), board member and longtime friend of the Zuckerman family introduced MillieZuckerman (r.), 2018 Spring Luncheon honoree.


TY FOR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON

Michael Bornstein and Debbie Holinstat signing books following the Luncheon.

Millie Zuckerman and her children Ruth Katz, Wayne Zuckerman and Ann Sklar.

Ilana Shmoel; Stuart and Margaret Sinclair; and Goldie Hertz, 2018 Spring Luncheon co-chair.

Jaci Paradis and Michelle Taragin, 2018 Spring Luncheon co-chairs.

Rebecca Altman, Marilyn Rubenstein and Dara Rubenstein. Auschwitz survivors Michael Bornstein, guest speaker, and Andrew Burian.


BY OFER ADERET, HAARETZ

On August 27, 1940, MariaRotblat, the director of a Jewish

orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto,wrote a letter to Regina Bergman, oneof the students who had been in hercare and who had fled the city a yearearlier, after the German invasion ofPoland. “My dear, I’m happy at yourhappiness. I bless you, Reginka, justas your mother would, and I am sodelighted with your joy, just as shewould be,” she wrote.

Behind these warm words lay a grimreality. Rotblat and the one hundredorphaned girls she was caring for atthe Youth Home for Girls — a board-ing school affiliated with the CentralAgency for the Care of Orphans —were trapped inside the ghetto.Bergman’s parents had died whenshe was a child, and she then movedto Rotblat’s orphanage. When the warbroke out, she fled the bombardmentof Warsaw and moved east to areasunder Soviet rule.

Rotblat tried to see the bright side ofthings and encouraged Bergman tobe happy with her lot, with the factthat she was free, and newly and hap-pily married. “You are in the hands ofa man guided by values, who lovesyou with the love you are worthy of,someone who respects you,” shewrote to her former student. “Whenyou have a man beside you wholoves you and whom you love, life andits circumstances are not frightening

or difficult. Do you remember,Reginka, the words describing how‘life is worth living if there is some-thing to live for’?” she asked.

Rotblat smuggled her letters out ofthe ghetto to the Aryan side ofWarsaw. From there, they were senteast to Bergman, who kept them untilthe day she died in 2013 at the age of95.

“Those letters were very dear to herheart, but now we’ve decided toentrust them to an archive, sincethey’ve begun to crumble,”Bergman’s daughter Miriamexplained this week. Last summer,the letters, written in Polish, weretransferred to the archive at theGhetto Fighters’ House Museum atKibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot north ofHaifa. The letters were carefully han-dled there and translated into

Hebrew. They are now being madepublic for the first time.

The letters reveal a close bondbetween the two women, the directorand her former ward, who, despite thedifficult circumstances, managed tomaintain contact during the war. “Mydear Reginka, Any news from you iscause for celebration for me. ... Thelonging and yearning to see peoplewhom I am close to is so great that itis overwhelming,” Rotblat wrote inNovember 1940. In a request toBergman’s husband, she added:“Could you write and tell me whatyour wife, my Reginka, looks likenow? Is she healthy? Is she happy?Have you already gotten to know herand to appreciate her pure character?Is she a bit more serious now thatshe’s a married woman? I really begyou to answer all these questions.”

Later in that letter, Rotblat writes:“My dear and beloved ones, If youonly knew how much I worry aboutyou since I don’t know how you reallyare. There is nothing new here. Iwork, and since there is no shortageof work, I don’t have time to think toomuch.... I haven’t been paid for fourmonths, but that’s insignificant com-pared to the really serious problems. Iembrace you, my children, and kissyou from my heart. Can you feel,Reginka, how strong [it is]?”

The correspondence betweenthe two continued as Bergman

wandered across the Soviet Union.She stopped first in Bialystok, which

in 1939, by virtue of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Germanyand the Soviet Union, was transferredto Soviet rule. Later she was deportedto Soviet labor camps in Siberia.From there she and her husband con-tinued to Dagestan and Turkmenistanin Soviet Central Asia.

As a result of the war, there wereinterruptions in their correspondence.Some of the letters apparently did notarrive at their destination in a timelyfashion — or at all. On January 21,1941, Rotblat noted that she hadstopped receiving letters fromBergman. “For several months, I’vehad no news from you. I’ve writtencountless letters, and I have theimpression that my words to you endup in a vacuum. I’m scared to death,”the orphanage director wrote. “My

love, There hasn’t been a momentthat my thoughts have not been withyou. Always, but always, they involveyou. There isn’t a moment in which Idon’t think about you, my good

Reginka, my dear and beloved one.The worst thing is the sense of help-lessness: Right, my dear?”

At the end of her letter, Rotblatexpressed concern for her otherwards, who were in hiding in variousplaces as a result of the war. “If Icould divide myself into pieces andsend each one of you part of myheart, you could bear anything, know-ing that I am on the job, waiting for themoment when I can gather all of you[back] to me,” she wrote.

In March 1941, Rotblat wrote thather work at the ghetto orphanage washelping her deal with the harsh reality.“If I didn’t have the concern over onehundred girls, I probably would gocrazy, but these concerns don’t permitme to, and I hold on because ofthem,” she wrote.

The archive at the Ghetto Fighters’House has a photo of Rotblat withsome of the girls who were cared forat her orphanage during the war.There are no photos of Bergman dur-ing the war years. Her daughterexplained that, when her parentswandered across the Soviet Unionfleeing the Nazis, they did not takephoto albums with them.

“There was a strong bond betweenmy mother and Rotblat, and therewas great mutual love there,” saidBergman’s daughter Miriam. The let-ters attest to that.

In one letter, Rotblat wrote: “MyReginka, I place my entire heart andsoul in these few words that I write.You mustn’t doubt. I am trying with allmy might to make you understandthat I think about you all the time. I’mbothered by the fact that I can’t helpyou with anything. Despite all myefforts, at work I’m always with you inmy thoughts. I always see you in frontof my eyes. Listen, my dear daughter.

I need to see you at my table before Idie. I’m sure of that.” A final postcardwas sent by Rotblat on May 27, 1941,after a long break in contact. “Mydearest Reginka, For a few months,

there has been no word from you. Iknow this doesn’t mean you’ve forgot-ten me, just as I haven’t forgottenyou. My dear, hang on. Be brave. Iconstantly live with the hope that I willsee you. I am always thinking of you,talking and remembering nonstop.We must see each other again. Doyou understand, Reginka? We must.”

Rotblat’s wish did not come true.In August of 1942, in the

course of the Nazis’ mass roundupoperation known as the Grossaktion,she and the orphans under her carewere led to the ghetto square fromwhich the deportations were carriedout. Through the intervention of oneof her colleagues, all of them werereleased. The children were sent toother institutions affiliated with theCentral Agency for the Care ofOrphans.

Maria and her son, Leib, who wasactive in the Akiva movement, part ofthe Jewish Fighting Organization,found a hiding place. With the out-break of the Warsaw ghetto uprisingin April 1943, Maria Rotblat wassmuggled into the famed bunker at18 Mila Street, where JewishFighting Organization members,under the leadership of MordechaiAnielewicz, were hiding.

When the bunker was attacked bythe Germans, Maria Rotblat’s sonshot and killed her at her request. Hethen committed suicide along withdozens of other fighters who refusedto surrender to the Nazis. Rotblatand her son were buried in a massgrave along with the other fighters.

Bergman, Rotblat’s former ward,survived the war with her husband,Zvi. They emigrated to Israel in 1950along with their two daughters,Miriam and Sarah. Bergman workedin Israel as a psychiatric nurse.

WARSAW GHETTO ORPHANAGE HEAD’S LETTERS MADE PUBLIC

The kitchen of the Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto.

The Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto.


(Continued from page 6)begged him. He just paced up anddown a little and then asked for mypassport and put the visa stamp on it.He did not ask any questions.” Sheadded, “He was small and quiet. Youwould never suspect he was a spy.”

Ze’ev Padan’s father was internedin Sachsenhausen concentrationcamp when Foley rescued him. Ze’evtoo was saved by Foley’s defiance ofauthority.

By the time of the infamousKristallnacht pogrom in

November 1938, Foley and his wifehad undertaken something evenmore dangerous: sheltering Jewsovernight in their apartment. Amongtheir “guests” was Leo Baeck, chair-man of the Association of GermanRabbis.

In September 1939, when the warbegan, Foley returned to England.However, he left behind a thick stackof preapproved visas with instructionsthat they should be distributed tothose fleeing the Nazis.

After the war, Frank Foley and hiswife Kay retired to the small town ofStourbridge. He lived quietly, enjoyinghis garden and chatting with the local

children. Since he rarely mentionedhis wartime experiences, the neigh-bors had no idea that a hero lived intheir midst.

He died in 1958 at the age of 74.Three years after his death, Mrs.Foley finally revealed his braveexploits.

British journalist Michael Smithbrought Foley’s unknown story to light

in his book Foley, the Spy Who Saved10,000 Jews, published in 1999:

“Foley clearly ranked alongside thelikes of Oskar Schindler and RaoulWallenberg, and yet his name wasvirtually unknown. I set out to find outthe truth about Foley. One of my first

stops was Yad Vashem, the IsraeliHolocaust memorial center, where Iasked if Foley had ever been consid-ered for the honor of RighteousAmong Nations, the accolade accord-ed to any gentile who helped saveeven one Jew from the Holocaust.”

Although officials at Yad Vashemhad heard of Foley, there was no evi-dence to support his case. However,a document in its archives written byHubert Pollack, a Jewish aid worker,who had worked alongside Foley inBerlin, described how Foley hadsaved tens of thousands of Jews fromthe Nazis.

This was the first of many testi-monies by prominent Jews who

had known Foley. The most dramaticcame during the 1961 trial in Israel ofAdolf Eichmann. One of the chiefprosecution witnesses, Benno Cohn,former chairman of the ZionistOrganization of Germany, paid tributeto Foley.

“There was one man who stood outabove all others like a beacon,” saidCohn. “Captain Foley, passport officerin the British consulate in theTiergarten in Berlin, a man who in myopinion was one of the greatest

among the nations of the world. It waspossible to bring a great number ofpeople to Israel through the help ofthis most wonderful person. He res-cued thousands of Jews from thejaws of death.”

Hubert Pollack, a Zionist agent,pointed out that Foley was alsoaware of the secret Zionist organiza-tion Mossad LeAliyah Bet, whichsmuggled Jews into British-con-trolled Palestine. However, Foleyhad not reported it, as required, tohis superiors.

Thanks to the HolocaustEducational Trust, the evidenceMichael Smith collected was given toYad Vashem. After officials inter-viewed the living witnesses he foundin researching the book, they award-ed Foley the title of RighteousAmong the Nations in 1999, and atree was planted for him inJerusalem.

There is also a plaque in Foley’shonor in the British Embassy inBerlin and another in the town ofStourbridge. An 8-foot-high stonestatue in his birthplace of Highbridgealso provides a permanent tribute tothis quiet hero.

Benno Cohn, Chairman of the ZionistOrganization of Germany.

THE SPY WHO SAVED THOUSANDS OF JEWS

Tucked away in the picturesqueGerman city of Ludwigsburg, a

tiny team of investigators tracks thelast surviving Nazi war criminalsacross the globe and through the bet-ter part of a century, in an urgent raceagainst time.

“We put together the smallestpieces of information, like the piecesof a puzzle, to work out who wasemployed in what role, from whenuntil when” in Adolf Hitler’s totalitariankilling machine, says prosecutor JensRommel.

He has since 2015 led the eight-strong Central Office for theInvestigation of National SocialistCrimes, at a time when the last perpe-trators, accomplices, witnesses andsurvivors are finally vanishing.

Once all the perpetrators are gone,Germany will close the judicial side ofits coming-to-terms with the Nazi gov-ernment’s extermination of six millionJews and hundreds of thousands ofothers in the Holocaust.

In the meantime, the spectacle offrail defendants aged in their 90sappearing in courtrooms to answer forcrimes dating back to 1945 or earlierhas renewed vigorous debate aboutthe country’s dark history.

For decades after the war, theGerman government and justice sys-tem showed little haste to track downmany of those involved in the organ-ized mass murder.

A landmark change came with the2011 sentencing of John Demjanjuk,who served as a guard at the Sobiborextermination camp in occupiedPoland in 1943, to five years in

prison.The ruling opened the way to prose-

cuting anyone who worked at a con-centration camp — from soldiers toaccountants — as an accomplice inmass murder.

Before that judgment “we never castan eye over the smallest cogs in themachine,” said lawyer AndrejUmansky, author of a book on theHolocaust in Eastern Europe.

The changed legal landscape sincethen, he said, offers a chance “to givevictims a voice, their families, and tobring the facts back into the publicconsciousness.”

FROM MOSCOW

TO BUENOS AIRES

The team’s probes into the dust-shrouded past have taken

Rommel’s team of five prosecutors,two judges and one police officeracross the world in search of theirquarries.

Many German Nazis fled to SouthAmerica immediately after the war,among them one of the main architectsof the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, wholanded in Buenos Aires.

He was captured by the Israelisecret services in 1960 thanks toinformation passed on by Germanprosecutor Fritz Bauer, who was out-raged by the inching progress of hisown country’s justice system.

As for less notorious Nazis, “all theboats that arrived there were regis-tered. We have combed the passen-ger and crew manifests” and followedup on any German-sounding names,Rommel said.

Officials scoured immigration regis-ters, applications to be naturalized inArgentina, and the records of theGerman embassy.

“We owe it to history” and to the mil-lions of victims to “battle against for-getting,” said Peter Haeberle, of thejustice ministry in Baden-

Wuerttemberg state, whereLudwigsburg sits just outside its capi-tal, Stuttgart.

The team’s travels halfway aroundthe globe — at a time when thereremains no chance of tracking down aliving high-ranking Nazi official —have not escaped criticism in thepress, such as from Die Welt daily,over their sometimes exorbitant cost.

1.7 MILLION FILES

Many have criticized the compar-atively small number of Nazi

war criminals ever brought to justice.By 2012, some 6,498 people had

been convicted for their part in theHolocaust.

The monumental weight of history isclear from the smell of aged paper lin-gering behind the security doors ofthe former women’s prison where theinvestigation team is based.

One million seven hundred thou-sand cardboard files are stored in rig-orous alphabetical order in rows of

imposing metal cupboards —a unique full-size database ofNazi criminals and details oftheir acts.

From Hitler to the lowliestsoldier or helper, every Naziwrongdoer identified up untilthe present day is recordedhere, along with the places oftheir crimes.

Rommel carefully with-draws file 3 AR-Z 95/59 forDr. Mengele, Josef.

Known as the “Angel ofDeath,” the Auschwitz doctorcarried out horrific experi-

ments on those held at the camp.The record, prepared in the late

1950s, reads that his location is“presently unknown, likely inArgentina.”

Mengele died in 1979 in Brazil, hav-ing evaded capture — and justice —for the remainder of his life.

However many more Nazis enterthe dock or end up behind bars beforeall trails finally run cold, Rommel andhis team know the overwhelmingmajority of perpetrators’ stories willhave ended similarly.

Nevertheless, he insisted, “we haveto put every day to use if we want thechance to bring someone else to jus-tice.”

GERMANY’S NAZI HUNTERS IN FINAL LAP OF RACE

AGAINST TIME TO TRACK HOLOCAUST CRIMINALS

German prosecutor Jens Rommel leads a small team racingto track down the last surviving Nazi war criminals beforetime runs out.


BY ANTHEA GERRIE, NEW YORK POST

They had everything goingagainst their romance.

But Max and Hanne Liebmannescaped incredible obstacles — sep-aration, serious illness and the hor-rors of the Nazis — to fall in love in amost unlikely place: a concentration

camp. As the Queens couple cele-brated their 73rd wedding anniversaryon April 14, they honored thestrangers who saved their lives.

“The people of Le Chambon wereoutstanding, risking their lives forstrangers,” said Hanne, 93. “Theyrestored our faith in mankind.”

She and Max were teens when theirfamilies were deported from Germanyto a camp in Gurs, France, in October1940. Originally a place of internmentfor political refugees from the SpanishCivil War, it became a concentrationcamp in which more than 18,000 Jewswere imprisoned during World War II— and from which 6,000 prisonerswere shipped on to death camps.

Hanne Hirsch (her maiden name)was 15 when she arrived in Gurs withher mother, Ella. The girl wasassigned to work in the office of thewomen’s block, alongside JeanneLiebmann — whose son Max wasallowed to visit.

Hanne was immediately drawn tothe skinny teenager — “we all lookedlike skeletons in the camp but therewas a certain attraction” — anddelighted when he offered to walkwith her to gather rations at an adja-cent Swiss Red Cross barracks.

“There was no privacy for dating,but we saw each other every day,”she recalled. “Max was allowedunlimited tickets to visit other peoplebecause of the fact he was a musi-cian.”

Within weeks they had fallen in love.“The conditions were horrible, but we[had] a cultural life, and I was attract-ed by Max’s interpretation of music,”she said. Thanks to a group ofQuakers who donated instruments,the camp had an orchestra, in whichMax played cello, as well as an operaensemble.

But the teens were separated whenthe Children’s Aid Society gotapproval to move children out ofGurs. “In September 1941, I wastransferred to Le Chambon, aHuguenot village where refugees likeme were warmly welcomed and pro-tected,” Hanne said.

She was no longer imprisoned, butHanne’s survival still depended on

keeping a low profile. Periodically,French police, acting for the Vichygovernment collaborating with theirNazi occupiers, would swoop throughLe Chambon in search of Jews, butvillagers would deny they were shel-tering any “undesirables.”

“Max was not so lucky; he was sentto a Boy Scout camp where organiz-ers denied him the false [identity]papers arranged for other boysbecause he was not Orthodox.”(Some Jews were able to escapeFrance with the help of false IDs thatlabeled them as non-Jews.)

Their separation might have beenthe end of the relationship — and ofMax — had Hanne not made aheartrending 1,000-mile round-tripjourney across France in August1942. “A relative wrote to tell me mymother was ill, so I traveled back toGurs, which was under lockdown.”Although she was free to venture fromLe Chambon, she was also in hugedanger, as she had no false papers ata time when Jews were being deport-ed to the death camps.

“[My mother and I] had a shoutedexchange over rows of barbed wire.She gave me motherly advice, but Ican’t remember the exact wordsbecause it was so upsetting.

“Two days later I saw her in thefreight yard, where she was on a trainwaiting to be transported. She didn’tknow where she was going, but sheknew she was not coming back. Itwas the last time I saw her.” (EllaHirsch perished at Auschwitz.)

Aware of the intensifying roundupsby the Nazis, Hanne made a detouron her way back to Le Chambon, toMax’s scout camp near Lyon, France.“I told him if he wanted to survive heneeded to get to Le Chambon,”Hanne recalled.

Within weeks, Max arrived. “He did-n’t ask permission — he just left,” saidHanne. But they were only able to seeeach other twice, as the need to stayin the shadows had grown with newsof the increased Nazi roundups.

“We were hidden by farmers; I wasin a house and Max was in a hayloft,”Hanne said. “He managed to find me[three weeks later, when] he decidedto make his escape from France.” InLe Chambon, where one forger alonecreated hundreds of false IDs, Maxreceived papers identifying him as aFrenchman, Charles Lang.

Max, now 96, recalled how his per-ilous escape involved scrambling upand down mountains — only to bedenied entry by Swiss guards at theborder. “I got away by disobeying theirorders,” he said. “Instead of walkingback into France, I walked deeper intoSwitzerland, where a priest gave memoney for the train. He told me totake a local because the expresseswere being searched.

“I managed to reach Lausanne,where there was a Jewish communitycenter two minutes from the station.As I walked in, they said: ‘Welcome toSwitzerland. We will have to turn youover to the Swiss police, but nothingbad will happen to you now.’”

Five months later, it was Hanne’sturn. “I had false papers stating I wasAnne-Marie Husser, a Parisienne,”she recalled. Challenged overwhether she was Jewish, she man-aged to spit out to the customsagent: “I have nothing to do with thatdirty race.”

A few weeks later, the couple wasreunited in Berne, Switzerland,where Hanne was staying with rela-tives. She recalled the euphoria andrelief of being with her true love onceagain.

“I can’t remember whether we didany more than walk and talk — [justthat] we were so overwhelmed withthe wonderfulness of being alive and

realizing we had both made it,” shesaid.

They married in Geneva weeksbefore the war ended in May 1945,and lived in a series of refugeehomes in Switzerland, where Hannegave birth to their only child,Evelyne, the following year.

The family emigrated to New York,where both had relatives, in 1948, butwere separated yet again two yearslater. “[Max and I] had tuberculosisand were sent to a sanatorium for twoyears,” Hanne said. “We couldn’tshare a room, but the worst thing waswe couldn’t see our daughter for ayear because doctors were afraid shewould pick up the infection.”

Evelyne was fostered “by a verykind woman who took good care ofher,” during that time, Hanne said.She and Max would call their daugh-ter “every Sunday and we sent herlittle presents . . . so she would knowwe were always thinking about her.”

After the war, the couple discov-ered that all the relatives with whomthey were deported had perished. Ina tragic twist, Hanne’s brother Alexhad reached safe haven in New Yorkin 1937, but she was never to seehim again: “He volunteered for theUS Army and never came back from

the war,” she said.With the help of a US government

program, Max studied to be anaccountant. Hanne worked in a med-ical office for many years. The twodote on their grandson and twogreat-granddaughters.

Despite the forces that worked tokeep them apart, Hanne said theirromance was meant to be: “We[always] held on to the belief that wewould see each other again.

“We were the luckiest of people toget out of the concentration camp,and even more so that we weretaken to a place like Le Chambon.Otherwise you wouldn’t be talking tous today.”

WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP

Hanne Liebmann and Max Liebmann.

The concentration camp in Gurs, France.


For decades, a confessional in achurch in Lithuania’s capital

Vilnius kept a precious secret: a troveof documents offering an unprece-dented glimpse into Jewish life inEastern Europe before and during theHolocaust.

The cache, with documents datingback to the mid-18th century, includesreligious texts, Yiddish literature andpoetry, and testimonies aboutpogroms as well as autobiographiesand photographs.

“The diversity of material is breath-taking,” David Fishman, professor ofJewish history at New York’s JewishTheological Seminary, told AFP viatelephone, describing the discoveryas a “total surprise.”

“It’s almost like you could recon-struct Jewish life before the Holocaustbased on these materials, becausethere is no aspect and no region andno period that is missing,” he added.

The trove was discovered earlierthis year during a clean-out of thechurch, which was used as a bookrepository during Soviet times.

The documents, together with alarger cache found in Vilnius nearlythree decades ago, are “the most sig-nificant discovery for Jewish historysince the discovery of the Dead SeaScrolls in the 1950s,” Fishman said.

An 1857 agreement between theJewish water carriers in Vilnius andthe city’s famous Ramailes rabbinicTalmudic academy, or yeshiva, offersa telling insight into everyday life 160years ago.

In exchange for copies of the Bibleand Talmud, the yeshiva agreed to letthe water carriers use a room forprayers on the Sabbath and holidaysfree of charge.

A ledger of the patients of ZemachShabad, a famous Jewish doctor and

social and political activist whosemonument stands in central Vilnius,was also among the documents seenby AFP.

Known as the “Jerusalem of theNorth” before World War II, Vilnius —Vilna in Hebrew and Vilne in Yiddish— was a hub of Jewish cultural andreligious life and home to hundreds ofJewish social, religious, cultural andscientific organizations.

Established in 1925, the YIVOYiddish Scientific Institute was

among the most important. Co-found-ed by Shabad, it documented andstudied Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Its New York branch was founded in

1926, and became the institute’sheadquarters in 1940 as NaziGermany invaded Eastern Europe.

After occupying Vilnius in 1941, theNazis destroyed the Jewish commu-nity and plundered its cultural wealth.

Jewish poets and intellectuals werecoerced by the Nazis in the Vilniusghetto into selecting Yiddish andHebrew books and documents for aplanned institute in Germany aboutthe people they had slated for annihi-

lation.Their story has been chronicled in a

book written by Professor Fishmanentitled The Book Smugglers.

The Germans sent a portion of theplundered texts to Frankfurt, but theJewish archivists risked their lives tohide a vast array of precious docu-ments from their tormentors.

But that was not the end of thethreat.

A fter the war, a Lithuanian librar-ian, Antanas Ulpis, intervened

to save those documents that hadsurvived the Nazis from the country’snew Soviet occupiers, who were benton destroying them as part of dictator

Joseph Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges.

Ulpis deftly hid someof the manuscripts“under a pile of Sovietjournals — that’s why noone bothered to look,that’s why they weren’tdiscovered sooner,”Renaldas Gudauskas,director of Lithuania’sNational Library, toldAFP.

There they remaineduntouched for decadesin the confessional in St.George’s Church, whichthe Soviets used as a

book repository after the war.It was only earlier last year, when

any remaining papers were beingcleared out in order to hand the build-ing back to the Catholic Church, thatthe pile of Jewish documents wasstumbled upon.

They were transferred to Lithuania’snewly renovated national library inVilnius, which already holds a largerarchive of Jewish documents discov-ered in the capital after the collapse of

the Soviet Union nearly threedecades ago.

The entire collection includesroughly 170,000 pages, LaraLempertiene, head of the nationallibrary’s Judaica Research Center,told AFP.

Library archivists, who read Yiddishand Hebrew, pore over the newlyfound documents that Fishman esti-mates will take five years to cata-logue.

They are also preparing them to beaccessible on the internet.The New York-based YIVO Institutehas spearheaded a bid to put the col-lection online, along with Jewish doc-uments from Vilnius that the US Armyfound in defeated Germany in 1946and sent to New York.

Launched two years ago, the cyber-space history project aims to put theoverall total of more than one milliondocuments online in a digital archivehighlighting Jewish life in EasternEurope before and during theHolocaust.

Archives that were once scatteredon both sides of the Atlantic “are nowconceptually, intellectually and physi-cally being reunited,” saysLempertiene.

For Simonas Gurevicius, one of thecity’s few Jews who still speaksYiddish, the newly discoveredarchive proves that Hitler and Stalinultimately failed to wipe out his lan-guage and the civilization builtaround it.

“The star of the Northern Jerusalemnearly burnt out, but its light is stillshining,” Gurevicius told AFP.Some 195,000 Lithuanian Jews per-ished under the 1941–44 NaziGerman occupation. Today, there arearound 3,000 Jews living in the NATOand EU country of 2.8 million people.

JEWISH DOCUMENTS OF HOLOCAUST HIDDEN FROM NAZIS,

SOVIETS FOR YEARS REVEAL SECRETS

According to new research donein Poland, two-thirds of the

local Jews who hid there from theNazis did not survive the war, mostlybecause of the actions of their non-Jewish neighbors.

The figure comes from a two-vol-ume work of 1,600 pages that histori-ans from the Warsaw-based Centerfor Research on the Holocaust ofJews have compiled over the past fiveyears. It covers nine out of Poland’s13 regions, the TOK FM radio stationreported.

Arriving amid a polarizing debate inPoland over a law that limits rhetoricon Polish complicity in the Holocaust,the study suggests Poles are respon-sible for hundreds of thousands ofdeaths by Jews in the Holocaust — afigure that is significantly higher thanprevious estimates.

The findings of the research werepublished earlier this year in a Polish-language book titled The Fate of theJews in Selected Regions of

Occupied Poland. They pertain to thefate of more than one million Jewswho went underground to avoid beingkilled in Operation Reinhard — NaziGermany’s campaign of annihilationof 3.3 million Jews in occupiedPoland.

According to Polish Chief RabbiMichael Schudrich, no more than2,500 Jews died at the hands of Polesduring the Holocaust or immediatelyafter it. Efraim Zuroff, Eastern Europedirector for the Simon WiesenthalCenter has disputed Schudrich’s esti-mate: he believes the correct figure is“many thousands” of people, includ-ing in at least 15 towns and cities ineastern Poland, where non-Jewsbutchered their Jewish neighbors.

But if the new study in Poland is cor-rect, then those estimates are just afraction of a tally of well over half amillion Jewish Holocaust victims whodied as a result of the actions of non-Jewish Poles.

The issue of Polish complicity inthe Holocaust is highly contro-

versial in Poland, where the Naziskilled three million non-Jews in addi-tion to about four million Jews. InJanuary, the right-wing governmentpassed a law criminalizing blamingPoland for Nazi crimes. Protests byIsrael, the United States and Jewishgroups over this law prompted whatobservers say is a wave of anti-Semitichatred with unprecedented intensitysince the fall of Communism in Poland.

The government is also leading acampaign that celebrates the actionsof Poles who risked their lives to saveJews. The Yad Vashem Holocaustmuseum has recognized more than6,000 Poles for such actions — thehighest number of any nation.

Especially dangerous for Jews inhiding were small Polish towns,according to historians BarbaraEngelking and Jan Grabowski, two ofthe nine researchers who conductedthe study. They called them “death

traps,” TOK FM reported.Grabowski is professor of history at

the University of Ottawa in Canadaand a dean among Holocaust histori-ans, especially on the actions ofbystanders. His 2014 book, Hunt forthe Jews: Betrayal and Murder inGerman-Occupied Poland, was theYad Vashem International Book Prizewinner for the same year. He alsoserved as a fellow at the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The latest research entailed identi-fying, interviewing or reviewing inter-views with as many survivors as pos-sible to ascertain the fate of otherJews in hiding who did not survive,the report said. It also features newlydiscovered archives from remoteareas of Poland from the Nazi occu-pation days and thereafter.

In one region, Miechów, more than10 percent of the Jews in hiding weremurdered directly by partisans whowere members of the Polish under-ground, according to the study.

POLISH NEIGHBORS BETRAYED MORE JEWS THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

The cache includes testimonies about pogroms, autobiographiesand photographs.


Israel recently honored PastorVaclav Čermák as Righteous

Among the Nations for saving Jewsduring the Holocaust.

Israeli Ambassador to the CzechRepublic Daniel Meron, together withthe mayor of Prague, JanaČernochová, took part in a ceremonymarking the event at the New TownHall of Prague.

Meron presented a commemorativemedal and certificate to MarieČermákova, Čermák’s daughter, onbehalf of the state of Israel and YadVashem, Israel’s national Holocaustremembrance center.

Čermák is the 117th citizen from theCzech Republic, or formerCzechoslovakia, to be granted thishonor by Yad Vashem.

The award ceremony was accom-panied by an exhibition, “BeyondDuty: Diplomats Who BecameRighteous Among the Nations.”

Čermák hid two Jewish families in acottage in the mountains in 1944.

After the outbreak of the SlovakNational Uprising in August of thatyear, the Germans launched a huntfor Jews and members of the localresistance.

With the worsening situation, theWeisenberger and Schönfeld families

decided to leave their homes inPrešov. Ľudovít Repáš, an employeeof the Prešov city hall, secured fakedocuments and sent them to VaclavČermák, a Baptist preacher inKlenovec.

Čermák took care of the two fami-lies. The Weisenbergers, who nowused the name Vasenko, hid in Grlica,and Schönfeld, now Váňa, hid nearhis own home.

With the increasing intensity anddanger of searches organized by the

Germans and Slovak collaborators,many Klenovec residents fled to themountains.

Ján Balciar, one of the remaininginhabitants of Klenovec, decided

to leave, and insisted that Čermák

and his family flee to the mountainsas well. However, Čermák refused toabandon the Jews in hiding andinsisted that he go with them.

The entire group, Ján Balciar withhis pregnant wife and two children,Vaclav Čermák with his family, and

Ignác and Margo Weisenberger andtheir nine-year-old daughter Viera,made the dangerous way to hiding inthe mountains together. The next day,Imanuel and Johann Schönfeld joinedthem.

However, the mountain shelter didnot mean the end of their worries.

At one point, an SS patrol discov-ered the cottage. They found the pas-tor and several other women, whilethe men were hiding during the day inthe forest. It was strange to theGerman soldiers that there were somany people in the house. Čermáktold them that one of the women hada baby, and the rest were relativeswho had come to the baptism cere-mony, and that ongoing battles in thearea prevented them from returninghome. The SS patrol was suspicious,but eventually they left, harming noone.

The group was later extended byanother Jewish woman, who wasbanished by those who had hid herbecause the local German command-er said that anyone caught helpingJews would be shot dead with theirwhole family.

All six Jews, hidden together withtheir rescuers in the cottage, survivedto see the end of the war.

ISRAEL POSTHUMOUSLY HONORS CZECH PASTOR

WHO SAVED JEWS IN THE HOLOCAUST

Pastor Vaclav Čermák and his wife.

Yad Vashem launched third digitalexhibition of letters from theHolocaust.

“She always wrote with a lot ofhope and never depressive,”

says survivor Betty KazinRosenbaum of her mother, murderedat the Sobibor concentration campwith her baby.

“Hope to see you in good health, athousand kisses, mommy,” were thelast words Betty’s mother wrote to her

before being sent with her eight-week-old baby to their deaths at theSobibor Nazi concentration camp ineastern Poland in 1943.

Sitting at her home with a pastoralview from a hilltop town overlookingthe Mediterranean Sea, 76-year-old

Betty Kazin Rosenbaum read thehandwritten letter in Dutch from themother she never really got to know.

Betty keeps her mother’s originalletter in her home, but she provided ascanned copy for a new digital exhibi-tion unveiled at Yad Vashem, Israel’sHolocaust research center and muse-um in Jerusalem.

A fter spending several years in aghetto in Amsterdam, the family

separated. In 1943, two-year-old

Betty was sent to a Christian fosterhome in the town of Eibergen in theNetherlands until the end of the war.

Her mother and eight-week-oldbaby brother were hidden by aChristian family in Neede, but werebetrayed by locals in the town and

were subsequently sent on a train totheir deaths. The father, too, accord-ing to records, was eventually sent toSobibor.

Betty did not know who sent her theletter her mother had written, nor thepostcard she wrote from the train. Butthe handwriting was the same as inthe well-kept baby record book thatshe carried, along with several otherarticles, in a big square blue box thatshe brought with her fromHolland when she emigrat-ed to Israel in 1964.

“She always wrote with alot of hope and neverdepressive,” said Betty witha smile. “Here she writesmommy. It is her and then Ifeel very close with her.”

Yad Vashem recentlylaunched its third digitalexhibition of letters obtainedfrom the Holocaust, entitled“Last Letters from theHolocaust: 1943.” Theexhibit “I Left Everyone at Home”includes 10 handwritten letters in dif-ferent languages.

The letters are mostly hopeful andoptimistic.

“All those who wrote the letters andare presented online ... became vic-tims of the Holocaust. They didn’tknow that when they wrote it,” saidYona Kobo, the digital curator andresearcher at Yad Vashem. Theirfates, she said, were all “more or lessthe same.”

Kobo tracked down each family ofthe people who wrote the letters.“Each story is different and each fam-ily is different and that also allows usto give them back their names, theirhuman dignity, and to commemoratethem,” she said.

Betty said sometimes she feelsanger, but now she is focused onresearching her family’s history, put-ting together the pieces of the puzzle

and sharing her story with youngergenerations.

“The war years vanished, and theynever told me anything. Now …there’s nobody to ask anymore andthat is very painful,” she said as shelooked at the fading photographs,prayer books and old, yellowing papernotes she has carried with her aroundthe world.

According to Yad Vashem, fewerthan 80,000 Holocaust survivors arestill alive in Israel.

HOLOCAUST LETTERS CONTAINED “A LOT OF HOPE,” EXHIBIT SHOWS

Ephraim Rosenbaum and his wife Johanna (née Zion) with their infant daughter Betty.

The last postcard thrown by Ephraim Rosenbaum from adeportation train from Westerbork to Sobibor.


BY SHELDON KIRSHNER, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

The Geneva-based InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross

(ICRC), one of the oldest humanitari-an organizations, emerged fromWorld War II with its reputationstained and damaged. Having comeunder fire for its failure to condemnthe Holocaust or extend substantial

assistance to Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe, it attempted toimprove its tarnished image bylaunching new aid initiatives in theaftermath of the war.

Gerald Steinacher’s first-rate book,Humanitarians at War: The RedCross in the Shadow of the Holocaustexamines these issues in minutedetail.

Steinacher, an associate professorof history and the Hymen RosenbergProfessor of Judaic Studies at theUniversity of Nebraska, frames hiswork around the three men whoshaped ICRC policy from 1928 to1955.

Max Huber was ICRC’s presidentfrom 1928 to 1944. Owing to his illhealth, his chief assistant and succes-sor, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, tookcharge of the ICRC in the autumn of1942. Paul Ruegger, who succeededBurckhardt in 1948, had beenSwitzerland’s ambassador to FascistItaly.

For all intents and purposes,Burckhardt probably exerted thegreatest influence on its policy towardJews during the period under discus-sion. Although he considered AdolfHitler a parvenu, he regardedGermany as an important bulwarkagainst Communism. “Burckhardtwas no great admirer of Hitler, but noparticular friend of the Jews either,”writes Steinacher. In a private letter toa friend in 1933, Burckhardt wrotethat “there is a certain aspect ofJudaism that a healthy Volk has to

fight.” And in an early draft of hismemoirs, he held Jews responsiblefor the outbreak of the war.

Steinacher suggests that the Swissgovernment’s cautious approach toJewish refugees from Germany influ-enced the ICRC.

Switzerland, fearful of a Germaninvasion, admitted about 30,000

Jewish refugees during the course ofthe war, but rejected at least as many.Jews were granted only temporary

asylum and had to leave as soonas possible. The cost of main-taining them was borne by the18,000-strong Swiss Jewishcommunity.

Until 1938, German citizensentering the country required novisa. But worried that it might beswamped by “foreign elements,”Switzerland asked Germany tomark the passports of non-Aryans with a red J stamp. Onthe eve of the war, the GermanRed Cross repeatedly told theICRC not to interfere on behalf ofGerman Jews because suchrequests would be ignored.

Although Switzerland was neu-tral during the war, groups ofdoctors and nurses from theSwiss army were sent to theEastern front in 1941 and 1942in support of Germany, and 755Swiss nationals enrolled volun-

tarily in the Waffen SS. Switzerland,too, traded with Germany and was akey market for art looted from Jewishcollectors by the Nazis.

In 1942, in the wake of the Wannseeconference in Berlin, Burckhardtlearned of Nazi plans to systematical-ly murder the Jews of Europe. Hisinformant was Gerhart Rieger, theWorld Jewish Congress representa-tive in Switzerland. Burckhardt, inturn, passed the information on to theU.S. consul in Geneva. Shortly after-ward, the United States and nine of itsallies publicly denounced Germany’splan and warned the perpetratorsthey would be held responsible.

Knowledge about Nazi atrocities didnot translate into action on behalf ofimperiled European Jews. Leery ofantagonizing Germany, the Swissgovernment persuaded the ICRC toremain silent with respect toGermany’s maltreatment of Jews. Inany event, Burckhardt preferred quietdiplomacy to public protests. It wasonly in the 1990s that the ICRCadmitted that its silence constituted a“moral defeat.”

With the tide turning againstGermany after 1942, the ICRC yield-ed to Jewish pressure inside and out-side Switzerland and embarked on atwo-pronged strategy to help Jewsand non-Jews threatened byGermany. The ICRC began interven-ing on behalf of civilian concentrationcamp prisoners. It also started send-ing food parcels to camps such as

D a c h a u , S a c h s e n h a u s e n ,Ravensbruck and Buchenwald. A littlelater, it sent food parcels to ghettos inPoland and to the Theresienstadtcamp in Czechoslovakia. In June1943, the ICRC proposed that parcelsshould be sent to Auschwitz, but itsproposal was rejected by the GermanRed Cross.

Steinacher contends that the estab-lishment of the War Refugee Boardby the United States in 1944 was aturning point for the ICRC’s rescueefforts. The ICRC distributed food inRomania and Romanian-occupiedterritories and tried to protect Jews.

The ICRC, however, did not distin-guish itself in an inspection tour ofTheresienstadt. In preparation for thevisit, the Nazis sanitized the camp,deported the sick and planted flowers.Once there, the Swiss delegates wereshown a school, attended a soc-cer game and were treated to aperformance of a children’s the-ater play. The deception was asuccess, judging by the ICRC’sfavorable report. The report,Steinacher says, “discredited the[ICRC] as being either naïve orcomplicit in a cruel fiction.”

Emboldened by its propa-ganda coup, the Nazis pro-

duced The Führer Gives a Cityto the Jews, an archly cynicaldocumentary that portrayed thecamp as a “spa town” where eld-erly German and Austrian Jewscould live out their lives in peace.In fact, most of the inmates whoappeared in the film weredeported and murdered inAuschwitz.

The ICRC soon dispatched adelegation to Budapest, where ithanded out letters of protection toJews and placed Jewish hospitals,clinics, hotels and soup kitchensunder its protection. Bowing to thewishes of the majority on the ICRC,Huber wrote a letter to Hungarianleader Miklos Horthy in June 1944asking him to stop the deportation ofHungarian Jews to Auschwitz.Huber’s intervention came too late.By that point, 400,000 Jews hadalready been killed.

Steinacher suggests that ICRC’sactions were, in part, impelled by itscompetition with the Swedish RedCross, which had played a role in therescue of Danish Jews in October1943. This rivalry turned into a per-sonal competition betweenBurckhardt and the vice-president ofthe Swedish Red Cross, Count FolkeBernadotte, a nephew of Sweden’sking who had expressed criticism ofthe ICRC. Burckhardt was thusinvolved in the ransom negotiations,initiated by SS chieftain HenrichHimmler, that enabled 1,684Hungarian Jews to find a safe havenin Switzerland.

“For Burckhardt, helping the Jews

ultimately became a way to pleasethe Allies, especially Washington, asthey moved forward toward victory,”writes Steinacher. “It had becomeclear to him that only a strikinghumanitarian ‘success,’ even one car-ried out in the waning days of the war,would quiet some of the criticism thathad been increasingly directedagainst the ICRC and Switzerland.”

In the wake of the war, the ICRCtried to make amends by extend-

ing assistance to distressed civilians.In one of its first initiatives, it issuedtravel papers to displaced ethnicGermans. But much to ICRC’sembarrassment, thousands of Nazicollaborators and SS men, includingperpetrators like Adolf Eichmann andJosef Mengele, availed themselvesof these documents. Nine thousandUkrainians who had been members

of a Waffen SS division also usedthese documents to emigrate toCanada.

Torn by a sense of guilt over itstepid response to the Holocaust, theICRC assigned three doctors to SSExodus 1947, which was carryingHolocaust survivors to Palestine.During the first Arab-Israeli war, theICRC provided humanitarian assis-tance to Jews and Arabs, andRuegger personally managed rescueefforts in war-torn Jerusalem.

In conclusion, Steinacher says theICRC only became more active inaiding Jews once it was clear thatGermany was going to lose the war.“But the practical aid the [ICRC]offered was very limited and markedby hesitation,” he notes. “The ICRCcould have intervened earlier andwith more determination, as theexample of neutral Sweden shows.”

He adds that, with the drafting andsigning of the new GenevaConvention in 1949, the ICRC over-came its checkered past andremained “a relevant, innovative andactive force in shaping internationallaw and humanitarianism.”

THE CHECKERED RECORD OF THE SWISS RED CROSS

DURING THE HOLOCAUST

Max Huber.

Carl Jacob Burckhardt.

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Martyrdom & Resistance

Ron B. Meier, Ph.D.,

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the American Society

for Yad Vashem, Inc.500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd Floor

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli Zborowski**

Marvin Zborowski

Mark Palmer

Sam Skura**

Israel Krakowski**

William Mandell

Sam Halpern**

Isidore Karten**

Norman Belfer**

Joseph Bukiet**

*1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, CampInmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased

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The American Society for Yad

Vashem was founded in 1981 by a

group of Holocaust survivors and led

by Eli Zborowski, z”l, for more than

thirty years. Recently approved by the

Board of Directors of the American

Society for Yad Vashem, our Legacy

Circle is being named in memory of Eli

Zborowski, z”l, who was greatly

respected for his work and accom-

plishments on behalf of Yad Vashem

and is missed by all who knew him.

The Eli Zborowski Legacy Circle is

open to and will recognize anyone who includes Yad Vashem

in their estate plans. This can include a bequest by will, fund-

ing a Charitable Remainder Trust or Charitable Gift Annuity,

donating a paid-up life insurance policy or contributing an

interest in an IRA or retirement plan, or making ASYV the ben-

eficiary of a Charitable Lead Trust. Individuals can make gifts

of any size, through a broad range of programs and invest-

ment vehicles that can accommodate those of modest means,

as well as those with substantial wealth.

By including Yad Vashem in your estate plans, you assure a

future in which Holocaust remembrance and education will

serve as a powerful antidote to denial, hate and indifference.

“I did not find the world desolate when I entered it. As myfathers planted for me before I was born, so do I plant for thosewho will come after me.”The Talmud

For further information about the Eli Zborowski Legacy Circle,

please contact

Robert Christopher Morton,

Director of Planned Giving at ASYV, who can be reached at:

212-220-4304; [email protected]

ELI ZBOROWSKI LEGACY CIRCLE


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