ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR … · 2017-03-01 · Sadly, Lucy’s father...

IN THIS ISSUEAnnual Spring Luncheon of the American Society for Yad Vashem..................1, 8-9Yom Hashoah: Remembering victims of the Holocaust................................................2Nazi propaganda for the Arab world................................................................................4Germany still keeping secrets on Nazi Eichmann.......................................................5Holocaust refugees remember “Golden Gate to Freedom”................................................6Shameful secrets in the fields of the Holocaust..........................................................7Gathering the fragments................................................................................................10Trove of historic records of Holocaust goes online...................................................11Lessons from the Shoah...............................................................................................12Stepping stones of the Nazi era...................................................................................15Forgotten strings recall Holocaust horror..................................................................16

Vol. 37-No.5 ISSN 0892-1571 May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771

ELI ZBOROWSKI, Chairman of the AmericanSociety for Yad Vashem

It is difficult to believe that 30 years havepassed since a few of us came together to

begin what is now the American Society for YadVashem. From the modest parlor meetings heldin the homes of survivors in New York and NewJersey, we have grown to almost 150,000 sup-porters all across the country.

I would like for a moment to reflect on thoseearly days. There is a Yiddish expression thatsays yeder onhoib is shver – every beginning isdifficult. While that is true, beginnings are alsofull of hope and expectation for the prospect ofgrowth and fulfillment. At the same time, boththe burden and excitement of any new ventureare enhanced by the people with whom you un-dertake the endeavor.

One of the people who joined us early on wasIsak Levenstein z”l, Rella Feldman’s father and

the elder statesman of the Pantirer family. Over the years, we would frequently see theLevensteins at simchas and at Grossinger’s, where survivors often gathered to mark theJewish holidays. There was a commonality of spirit between myself and Isak. We not onlyliked each other, but shared similar views in terms of our communal interests and respon-sibilities. It was through Isak Levenstein’s efforts that the Pantirer family became involvedin the American Society for Yad Vashem.

Murray Pantirer z”l was an enthusiastic member of our Board. He regularly attendedmeetings and made a significant contribution to the Society. Together with his wife, Louise,he was a Trustee of the Valley of Communities — a project which is unique among Holo-caust memorials. Two decades later, the Valley stands today, as the only comprehensivecommemoration to the more than 5,000 destroyed Jewish communities.

This afternoon, in honoring the Pantirer family, we are paying tribute to three generationsof committed and successful leadership in perpetuating the legacy of the Holocaust andthe noble cause of remembrance. Louise and Murray Pantirer were ever present at ourearly parlor meetings and could always be counted on for support of our annual tributedinners and, in more recent years, our spring luncheons. It is not surprising that theirdaughter, Elisa Pantirer Pines, has followed in her parents’ footsteps and has made Holo-caust remembrance a priority in her life.

Honoring family history and the lessons of the past are as essential to Nicole PinesLieberman, Elisa’s daughter and Louise’s granddaughter, as they are to the two previousgenerations. For Nicole, Holocaust education and transmitting the message of “NeverAgain” are historical imperatives. Her dedicated and effective work with the American So-ciety’s Young Leadership Associates is truly exemplary.

I am pleased to extend a heartfelt “Mazel tov” to these three outstanding women.As future generations continue to endeavor to understand their parents’ and grandpar-

ents’ world, their heritage, the Holocaust, and their rebirth to life, I have every confidencethat the light that is slowly fading in our tent will be brightly rekindled anew by their heirs.To the incoming leadership, I say, “May you go m’chail l’chayil — from strength to strength.”

NICOLE PINES LIEBERMAN, recipient of theAmerican Society for Yad Vashem Achieve-ment Award

T hank you Sharon, and Mr. Zborowski, forpresenting us with this very special and

meaningful award. Mr. Zborowski, your guid-ance and leadership throughout the yearshave been an invaluable example for the nextgeneration. Your hard work continues to in-spire us daily.

Lucy Pantirer was born in Rozwadow, Poland,on February 6, 1928, to Ethel and Leon Lorber.Rozwadow was a small shtetl with a populationof about 2,000 Jews in 1939. She remembersthe shtetl as mostly Jewish and recalls attendingthe Orthodox synagogue with her family.

In September of 1939, the Nazis capturedRozwadow and kicked her family out of theirtown. She was eleven years old when WorldWar II began. Her family was sent to the Russ-

ian side of Poland, to a city named Kolonia where her paternal grandparents lived. Even-tually Kolonia was invaded, and the Russians shipped her family via train towards Siberiain June 1940. Thankfully, most of her extended family was shipped off together to Siberia,where they lived in rooms next to each other. Sadly, Lucy’s father died during their time inSiberia while at a labor camp.

Lucy spent the war years moving from one city to the next, working in various laborcamps, attending numerous “schools” and learning many languages. By the end of thewar, Baba Lucy spoke five languages – Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Uzbek.Even after the war, the three women continued to be wanderers. First, they went toMoscow; from there they planned to go back to Rozwadow, to return home, but it wasn’tsafe due to pogroms. They instead traveled to Krakow, Poland. From there, the Brichasent them to Linz, Austria, to the Bindermichel displaced persons camp in the AmericanZone. In August 1946, she met a young man in the DP camp who gave her some choco-late, a luxury then and still Baba’s favorite treat. The young man, Murray Pantirer, z”l, aHolocaust survivor on Schindler’s List who had lost his parents and all of his siblings,would become her beloved husband of 61 years. They were married in January 1947 andstayed in the DP camp until January 1949, at which time they emigrated to the UnitedStates. Her mother and sister followed seven months later.

In a Jewish household, the wife and mother is called in Hebrew akeret habayit. This lit-erally means the “mainstay” of the home. It is she who largely determines the characterand atmosphere of the entire home. Baba Lucy is not only an akeret habayit, but also atrue eshet chayil, a woman of valor. She dedicated her life to building a home for her family.By choosing to host family events at her home, she set an example early on for her chil-dren and other members of the community. Lucy recognized her obligation to instill intoher children Jewish traditions, her love of family, and the joy of performing mitzvoth, byway of her actions. Along with Murray, she raised three children, who were married, andeach had three children of their own, and the family, thank God, continues to grow.

Like so many of you here today, my grandmother survived and overcame the painful atroc-ities of the Holocaust, and then dedicated her life to transplanting and rebuilding her familyand her home. Her story, and your story, is in many ways the story of the Jewish people.

It is stories like Baba’s that bring home the importance of Yad Vashem. Among many things,Yad Vashem stands as a testament to our past and where we came from, the life and valuesour loved ones and lost ones carried through the Shoah, our nomadic experience as a people,and our struggle to build a home in Israel infused with these values and traditions.

On a personal level, Baba Lucy has also taught me and my mother, Elisa, about the re-lationships among grandmothers and mothers and daughters. Her example inspires mymother to host family gatherings to celebrate the High Holidays and the Pesach Seders.I have learned from Baba and from my mother that instilling values that are passed on tofuture generations begins in the home. I understand the importance of one day, God will-ing, instilling these values in my home.

As we join together today to honor three generations of women, and as we continue tostress the importance of Yad Vashem to our children and to our children’s children, let us al-ways remember that a true and lasting commitment to Holocaust remembrance and educa-tion, as well as the State of Israel, begins in our homes. Thank you and Am Yisrael Chai.

ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMOF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEM

“MAY YOU GO FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH”

“COMMITMENT TO HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE BEGINS IN OUR HOMES”

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771

Israel – The world has not learned thelessons of the Holocaust but Israel has,Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu said atthe beginning of Holocaust Martyrs’ andHeroes’ Remembrance Day.

Speaking at the official state ceremonyheld at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem honoringthe six million Jews murdered by Nazisand their allies, the prime minister said theJewish state was capable of defending it-self against any potential threat.

“We must not bury our heads in the sandand dismiss the threat with cheap words,”he said. “Has the world learned the lessonof all this? I doubt it. Have we learned it? Ibelieve so. May the whole world know thatwhen Israel and the Israel Defense Forcessay ‘Never again,’ we mean every word.”At the same time, Netanyahu, who referredto Iran time and again throughout hisspeech, called on the world not to be indif-ferent to the perils posed by Tehran andhostile Islamist factions in the Middle East.

“It seems the world finds it easier to talkabout the lessons of the past than identifythem in the present and future,” he said.“But we, the Jewish people, cannot ignorethe lessons of the Holocaust during thesedays. Because there are new tyrants whoare upon us, and as they deny the Holo-caust and call for the destruction of ourpeople, Iran and its satellites – Hezbollahand Hamas – call and openly act to de-stroy the Jewish state.”

Addressing the international community,the prime minister said, “Civilized peoplearound the world – all those who say theylearned the lessons of the Holocaust –they must unequivocally denounce thosewho call for the destruction of the Jewishstate. Iran is even arming itself with nu-clear weapons to obtain that goal, and asof this moment the world has not stoppedit. The threat to our existence, our future,is not theoretical, cannot be brushed aside,cannot be minimalized.

“It stands right in front of us and hu-mankind, and we must stop it.”

Iran also featured prominently during thespeech delivered at the event by PresidentShimon Peres. He called the Islamic Re-public’s leadership a “danger to the entireworld.”

“Even after the Holocaust, a regime stillexists whose leaders publicly deny theHolocaust,” Peres said. “This should makeevery person sick and shake their con-science. The fanatical leadership of Iran isa danger to the entire world, not just Israel,but to every household; a real danger tothe future of humankind. The nations of theworld will not accept Iran havingnuclear arms. They are nowbeing tested.”

Holocaust survivor MichaelGoldman spoke at the ceremonyat Yad Vashem on behalf of themore than 200,000 others wholived through the Nazi genocideand now reside in Israel.

Goldman described how yearn-ing to live in a Jewish statehelped him survive his ordeal.

“We never stopped believing inreturning to Zion,” he said.

“In the hells of Auschwitz atnight I quietly sang the song ofAvigdor Hameiri: ‘On the top ofMount Scopus, shalom to thee Jerusalem.’I never stopped believing our enemies willsuccumb.”

USA – President Obama marked Holo-caust Remembrance Day with a statement“honoring the memory of all those who suf-fered, died and lost loved ones in one ofthe most barbaric acts in human history”during the period around World War II.

“More than six decades after the Holo-caust, and at a time when Holocaust denial and genocidal ideologies persist,our grief and our outrage over the

Nazis’ murder of six million Jews and somany others have not diminished,” Obama said.

“From this tragedy we see the cost of al-lowing hatred go unanswered in the world, but from this justice we also see thepower of holding the perpetrators of genocide accountable. Rememberingthese events only reinforces our solemncommitment to confront those who tell liesabout our history and to stop the spread ofhate in our own time.”

The US president added that “We mustheed the urgency to listen to and care for the last living survivors, camp liberatorsand the witnesses to the Shoah.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Ne-tanyahu cautioned that “the lessons of theHolocaust have not been learned,” andwarned that hatred of Jews “still sweepsacross the world... (and) is now directedagainst their state and its right to exist.”

***Synagogues throughout Queens ob-

served Yom HaShoah. At Young Israel of Forest Hills, where

Yom HaShoah first started in 1964 andthen spread throughout the world, Rep.Anthony Weiner, State Sen. TobyStavisky, and City Councilwoman KarenKoslowitz gathered with survivors andmore than 200 people to remember the

six million Jewish people killed by theNazi regime during World War II. Weinersaid, “There is a tendency to ask, as weget further and further from the Holocaust,why do we need these commemorations?Do a simple search on the Internet. ‘Didthe Holocaust ever happen?’ You will get

tens of thousands of articles, books, blogswritten denying the Holocaust.”

Abe Zeker, a survivor of Auschwitz,Mauthausen and Dachau, who attendedthe memorial, was 17 and weighed 70pounds when Gen. George Patton’s armyliberated Dachau on January 18, 1945.“They came too late,” said Zeker, whowas accompanied by daughters Susieand Libu.

Eugen Gluck was also 17 while workingin pajama uniforms on underground oiltunnels in Austria in conditions as cold as35 degrees below zero. Of the 2,500 peo-ple from his town of Satmar, Romania,only 38 survived.

Louis Katz was working with a Christianwoman in Pressburg, Slovakia, deliveringfood to Jews in bunkers when he wascaught by the Nazis in January 1945. Hewas beaten so badly he was in a coma fortwo months. He was rescued while an in-mate at the Theresienstadt concentrationcamp on the Czech side of the disman-tled country.

An exhibit, “The Auschwitz Album,” spon-sored by Mr. and Mrs. Eli Zborowski on be-half of the American Society for YadVashem and co-sponsored by Eugen andJean Gluck, Alter and Marianne Goldstein,and Allen and Judy Hymowitz, was avail-able to attendees.

“Germans, as a rule, did not take photo-graphs and worked very hard to keep the‘Final Solution’ a secret,” said Dina Spierer,chairwoman of the evening’s event.

She asked those in attendance to “edu-cate the next generation to love your neigh-bor as yourself,” saying it would make itharder for acts of genocide to occur. “Let’steach love and responsibility and make surethis will never happen again.”

***Several survivors of the Holocaust, who

were children at the time of Nazi power,opened a week of Yom HaShoah com-memoration by lighting six white candles atthe Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

The crowd of some 200 was told thatwhile each candle represented one millionJews who were murdered by the Nazisand their collaborators, the program fo-cused especially on the 1.5 million Jewishchildren who did not survive. The Music ofthe Children of the Holocaust was pre-sented by the Reform Cantors ofChicago, the North Shore Havura of Rab-bis, and the Chicago Milwaukee Associ-ation of Synagogue Musicians.

Cantor Michael Davis, from the Lake-side Congregation for Reform Judaism,

directed this year’s program. He said thechildhood theme was chosen becausemost of the survivors today were childrenduring the devastation. Among the liturgy,several of the songs were lullabies.“Lullabies in many cultures can have adark meaning too. The mother sings asweet song to the baby but unburdensherself at the same time,” Davis said.“The song I sang, ‘Dona, Dona,’ is a goodexample of that. In the context of theHolocaust it is a statement of horrorframed as a lullaby.”

Lillian Polus Gerstner, Director of SpecialProjects at the museum, said the commem-oration is meant to honor the memories ofthose who were lost as a reminder for thefuture.

Poland – About 7,000 Jews marched tothe former German Nazi death camp ofAuschwitz on May 2 in memory of the 6million Holocaust victims.

Participants in the 20th annual March ofthe Living were carrying Israeli flags. Theystarted from the former camp’s gate withthe infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“WorkSets You Free”) sign.

The crowd walked about 3 kilometers (2miles) from the red brick buildings ofAuschwitz I to the wooden barracks andgas chambers of Birkenau, or Auschwitz II,where a memorial ceremony was held at amonument to the camp’s victims.

The march, which is traditionally held onHolocaust Memorial Day, also includedsome Holocaust survivors.

Between 1942 and 1945, Jews fromacross Europe were brought to Birkenauby rail and killed in its gas chambers. Atleast 1.1 million people — mostly Jews,Poles, and Gypsies — died that way orfrom starvation, disease and forced laborat the camp that German Nazis built in oc-cupied Poland during World War II.

The Auschwitz camp was liberated Jan-uary 27, 1945 by Soviet troops.

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, dozens of peo-ple paid tribute to the nearly 200,000 Jewswho died 70 years ago when the Nazis in-vaded the country.

Waving Israeli and Lithuanian flags,about 100 demonstrators paid tribute tothe dead by marching to the Holocaust sur-vivor memorial outside the capital, Vilnius.

Visiting Israeli Deputy Foreign MinisterDanny Ayalon said it was important to re-member the 6 million Jews murdered inEurope by the Nazis because “anti-Semi-tism, xenophobia, and racism ... are stillthreatening all of us.”

Some 90 percent of the country’s pre-war Jewish population of 220,000 weremurdered by the Nazis and local collabo-rators — the country’s largest loss of life insuch a short time. Most of the 70,000 Jewsin the capital were killed within a fewmonths in 1941.

Yom HaShoah commemoration alsotook place in many Jewish communi-ties around the globe.

In the US commemorating eventsamong other places were held in BetShalom Congregation in Minnesota, atEast End Temple in Lower Manhattan,at Temple Emanu-El of Newton, MA.

Survivors and witnesses to Shoah andtheir families were invited to light a can-dle of remembrance in St. Louis, MO.

A community-wide remembrance ofthe victims, survivors, and heroes ofthe Holocaust including memorial can-dle lighting, Kaddish, music, and poetrytook place in Maryland.

YOM HASHOAH: REMEMBERING VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST

Holocaust survivor Simha Applebaum lights

one of the six torches at the ceremony at Yad

Vashem in Jerusalem.

Relatives of Holocaust victims lay flowers next

to the names of concentration camps, during a

ceremony marking the annual Holocaust Re-

membrance day in the Hall of Remembrance at

the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in

Jerusalem, May 2, 2011.

President Obama delivers his address on Holo-

caust Remembrance Day, May 2, 2011.

From left to right: Michael Gluck, Eli Chomsky, Felice

Sendik, Jill Solomon, Dina Spierer, Eugene Gluck, Jean

Gluck, Rose Mermelstein.

May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

AMunich court has found John Dem-janjuk guilty of war crimes, and sen-

tenced the 91-year-old former autoworkerto five years in prison.

Verdict came after 93 court days, includ-ing deeply affecting testimony from Dutchsurvivors and their kin, and monologues byDemjanjuk’s chief attorney, Ulrich Busch,who claimed his client was just as much avictim of Germany as any Jew.

Reacting to the early news, Jewish lead-ers expressed gratitude to the court.

“The most important thing is that he wastried and judged and for the last days of hislife is confirmed as a perpetrator,” StefanKramer, general secretary of the CentralCouncil of Jews in Germany, told JTA in atelephone interview. “How long he is goingto serve is secondary.”

“Even if there is going to be another ap-peal, as his attorney has warned, this courtruling now is a very important step in thedirection of justice after more than 65years of injustice,” he added.

Demjanjuk, born in Ukraine, wascharged with being an accessory to themurder of 27,900 Jews in Sobibor. He waspresent at nearly every court date, alwaysin a wheelchair or hospital bed. He woresunglasses, and said virtually nothing forthe duration of the trial. In April2010, Busch read aloud a statement inwhich Demjanjuk called the trial “torture,”relieved only by his care attendants.

Survivor Thomas Blatt, one of the rareescapees from Sobibor, told JTA duringthe trial that “All the guards [at Sobibor]were murderers… it is enough to prove hewas there.”

Demjanjuk immigrated to the UnitedStates after World War II. He lived in sub-urban Cleveland from 1952. His lateryears were spent fighting accusations ofinvolvement in wartime crimes against hu-manity: he was accused in the early 1980s

of being a guard at the Treblinka deathcamp, but was released from jail in Israelafter seven years when another Ukrainianwas identified as the guard in question.

The U.S. Justice Department later re-ported that Demjanjuk was suspected of

having been a guard at Sobibor and wasliable for deportation because his U.S. cit-izenship had been granted based on falseinformation. His citizenship was revoked in2002 and deportation was approved in2005. He was deported in March 2009.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Jerusalemoffice of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, toldJTA he was pleased with the verdictagainst Demjanjuk, but disappointed thata German court in Ingolstadt decided notto extradite another accused war criminalto Holland.

A spokesperson for the court said that88-year-old Klaas Carel Faber, convictedmore than 60 years ago by a Dutch courtof complicity in 22 wartime murders, wouldnot be extradited because Faber’s consentas a German citizen was required, and herefused, according to AP.

“This decision is absolutely outrageous,”Zuroff said in an interview from Jerusalem.“It makes my blood boil.”

Kramer noted that, of 150,000 warcrimes investigations in post-war WestGermany, only 6,500 resulted in trials.

JOHN DEMJANJUK FOUND GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES

John Demjanjuk in the courtroom.

The remains of about 40 Jews killedduring the Holocaust and found in a

mass grave were laid to rest on April 4 inan emotion-filled ceremony in northeasternRomania.

Five rabbis from Britain and the UnitedStates performed the funeral service undera grey and cloudy sky.

Dressed in black, they carried the re-mains, unidentified and contained in paperbags and cardboard boxes, and put theminto a single grave in the Jewish cemeteryof Iasi, overlooking the city.

“We have come here to help these peo-ple rest in peace. We believe it is God’swill,” British rabbi Meir Twersky, whosegrandparents are buried in Iasi cemetery,told AFP.

“We are gathered here today to remem-ber these men, women, and children whowere brutally murdered in a forest in 1941(...) only because they were Jews,” Israel’sambassador to Romania, Dan Ben-Eliezer,said during the official ceremony.

According to the Elie Wiesel National In-stitute, the victims were killed in the sum-mer of 1941 at Popricani, close to Iasi, bythe Romanian army, an ally of the Nazisduring World War II.

They were among more than 15,000Jews killed in Iasi during pogroms in1941.

A Romanian historian, Adrian Cioflanca,found the site thanks to the testimonies ofRomanians who had witnessed thekillings.

“We will continue the historical researchin order to try to determine where the vic-tims came from, whether it was from Iasior the surrounding villages,” the director of

the Elie Wiesel Institute, Alexandru Flo-rian, told AFP.

The exact number of victims, includingwomen and children, has not been deter-mined, but Cioflanca told AFP, “We foundthe skulls of at least 35 people, but therewere other body parts, so we can talkabout at least 40 people.”

The victims were buried just a few yardsaway from thousands more Jews killedduring the pogroms.

“I ask the forgiveness of the deceasedfor the suffering that has been brought totheir holy bones,” rabbi Meir Schlesingersaid, referring to the belief that the re-mains should have been left where theywere originally found.

But Abraham Ghiltman, the president ofthe Iasi Jewish community, said it was a“relief” to see “those whose memory wasforgotten” to be lying next to their fellowcitizens in the Jewish cemetery.

“We hope that the events we witnessedduring the Holocaust will never happenagain, neither in Romania nor in the restof the world,” he added.

According to an international commis-sion of historians led by Nobel Peace lau-reate Elie Wiesel, himself aRomanian-born Jew, between 280,000and 380,000 Romanian and UkrainianJews were killed in territories run by thepro-Nazi Romanian regime during1940–1944.

The Popricani mass grave is the first tobe discovered since 1945, when 311corpses were exhumed from three loca-tions in Stanca Roznovanu, close to Iasi,according to the Wiesel Institute.

BY GIL SHEFLER, THE JERUSALEM POST

Smuggled out of a Nazi labor camp asa baby, Dina Buchler-Chen ended upwith a gentile family but was found, re-turned to the Jewish people.

Seventy-one is almost too young for aperson to be a Holocaust survivor,

which is why Dina Buchler-Chen’s unlikelystory stands out among those of the sixpeople chosen to light a torch at the officialmemorial ceremony at Jerusalem’s YadVashem on the eve of Holocaust Remem-brance Day.

“I don’t remember the hardest part ofbeing with my mother and grandmother in aconcentration camp,” she said over thephone, as she made her way to the re-hearsal for the ceremony at the Holocaustmemorial museum. “But I have an emotionalrecollection: I can’t stand the dark and hateloud noises, and that’s from there.”

In 1941, aged one, Buchler-Chen wasdeported with her mother and grandmotherto Loborgrad labor camp outside herhometown of Zagreb, Croatia, which wasthen part of Yugoslavia. Knowing herchild’s chances of surviving what lay aheadwere nil, Blanka Buchler smuggled herdaughter out of the camp in a cotton-padded box with nothing but a note statingher name, her date of birth and the nameof a cousin who she hoped would takecare of her.

“Somehow my mom managed to smug-gle me out – don’t ask me how,” she said.

The box containing Dina was taken tothe Jewish community center in Zagreb,where it was left just outside the entrance.“The staff initially feared it was a bomb,”she said. “Through the note they knewwho my cousin was. The note is still keptat Yad Vashem.”

Blanka Ziczer-First, her mother’s cousin,whose name was on the fate-determiningnote, was a nonmarried opera singer withno experience rearing children.

Fearing her own life might be in dangerif she kept the baby, she sought out thehelp of a neighbor with ties to the resist-ance. Through her, Dina was placed in thecare of a woman in the countryside whowas paid for her services.

“But that didn’t work well,” Buchler-Chensaid. “After a while they checked up on meand saw how neglected I was. She keptme locked up in the attic and hungry. Peo-ple ask me what my first memory is and it’sof the ceiling of that house. I have no bettermemories.”

Luckily, she was relocated, otherwiseshe might not have survived. This timeBuchler-Chen was placed with Djina-Gertruda Beritic, a Catholic woman, whoraised her alongside her two sons as herown.

“They were so beautiful, they looked likeHollywood movie stars,” said Dina, whowas christened Maia, or Maria, at the localchurch. “They took me in and baptized me.On my birth certificate I have a Star ofDavid and the signature of a priest and

bishop of my baptism. These good gentilescared for me.”

She lived a low-key and happy life untilthe war ended, she recalls, staying awayfrom danger and adopting her surrogatefamily’s traditions.

“I was a Catholic, I admit it,” she said.“Later I would sometimes cross myself insecret, but that ended pretty fast.”

Tragically, Blanka Buchler’s fears werejustified. She didn’t survive the war nor didher husband or anyone from Dina’s imme-diate family. But cousin Blanka Ziczer-First, the opera singer, did, and came backto claim Dina after the war ended.

“My cousin came and snatched meaway,” she said. “I wasn’t Maia or Maria. Iwas Dina and a Jew. It was very hard toget used to.”

In 1948 Dina was taken to Israel, andshe went on to build her life in the youngcountry. She studied biochemistry and mi-crobiology, got married and raised a fam-ily of her own. Now retired, Buchler-Chendevotes a large part of her time to Hadas-sah, the women’s Zionist group, andhelped open a shelter for women inJerusalem. She has two children and sixgrandchildren.

“I love being a grandmother,” she said.She has never forgotten the kindness of

the Beritics, who took her in all those yearsago. Before they passed away she visitedthem several times in Zagreb, taking hergrandchild with her on one occasion. In1994 the Beritics were recognized as Right-eous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, ata grand ceremony held in Croatia.

Buchler-Chen said she doesn’t think muchof the what-ifs, the endless number of alter-nate scenarios which just as easily mighthave played out and led to a reality very dif-ferent from the one she is familiar with.

In response to a question, she said thatif her mother’s cousin had not picked herup after the war she probably would havestayed with the Beritics, like an unknownnumber of orphaned Jews who wereplaced with gentiles by desperate parents,and been brought up as part of the family.

“I’d have stayed there and become aCatholic,” she said. “Perhaps later in life theywould have told me who I was. When I wentback they reminded me that they put up aphoto of my mother by my bed so that I re-member her. But these were honest, goodpeople, and such a thing truly exists.”concentration camp,” she said over thephone, as she made her way to the re-hearsal for the ceremony at the Holocaustmemorial museum. “But I have an emotionalrecollection: I can’t stand the dark and hateloud noises and that’s from there.”

YAD VASHEM TORCH LIGHTER TELLS AMAZING TALE OF SURVIVAL

Dina Buchler-Chen.

The new deal reached between Ger-

many and the Claims Conference

means that the German government's con-

tribution to homecare funding for Holo-

caust survivors around the world will rise

from $156 million in 2011 to about $180

million in 2012. The allocations will rise to

nearly $200 million by 2014.

The Claims Conference will allocate theGerman government money to agenciesaround the world that provide in-homenursing and vital help with basic activitiesof daily living such as eating, dressing and,bathing, and other services that greatlyease the lives of elderly Holocaust victimsand enable them to remain living in theirown homes.

HOLOCAUST VICTIMS LAID TO REST IN ROMANIA

GERMANY INCREASES ALLOCATIONS TO SURVIVORS

B O O K R E V I E W SB O O K R E V I E W S MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. By Jeffrey Herf. Yale University Press:

New Haven, 2009. 335 pp. $30.00 hard-cover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

The VFA (Voice of Free Arabism)broadcast July 7, 1942:

“You must kill the Jews before theyopen fire on you . . . The Jews areplanning to violate your women, to killyour children and destroy you . . .This is your best opportunity to get ridof the dirty race, which has usurpedyour rights and brought misfortuneand destruction on your countries . . .Your sole hope of salvation lies in an-nihilating the Jews before they annihi-late you.”

Originally presented in Arabic, this isbut a small sampling of the radio ma-

terial broadcast into the heart of the MuslimMiddle East and North Africa by the Nazisduring World War II. It is all quite horrifying.It makes one think of what might have hap-pened to the Jews living in those countries— of the 700,000 of them — of the blood-bath that might have been . . . And it makesJeffrey Herf’s book Nazi Propaganda for theArab World very important. Why? Sadly,few know about this side of the war . . . northe conquest and subsequent HolocaustHitler planned there.

Thus, Herf’s research in “underutilizedand unused archival sources” brings to

light just how many Germans were in-volved in this push to Nazify the Arabworld. We are made aware of the substan-tial support the Muslims themselves gavethis campaign — most especially Haj Aminel-Husseini, the “lifetime” Grand Mufti ofJerusalem. And we seeclearly that the failure of theNazis in this direction wassurely not due to lack of try-ing. From the “Fall of 1939 toMarch 1945, the Nazi regimebroadcast shortwave Arabicprograms” to the area “sevendays and nights a week.”Moreover, this materialspread over the airwaveswas supplemented by printedpropaganda in the form of“Arabic-language leaflets andbrochures.”

Nor, in fact, was it particu-larly difficult for the Nazis to attract theMuslims to them and make them their al-lies. For, cleverly, Hitler’s men made it apoint of first emphasizing all that the twogroups had in common, their “affinities.”Once that was done, the Nazis could injecttheir own brand of poison in this “point ofentry” — poison advantageous to them.For example, both the Muslims and theNazis hated the Jews. The Koran encour-aged Muslim hatred by stating that “‘Youwill meet no greater enemy of the believersthan the Jews.’” The Nazis here added

that it was the Jews that had actuallycaused the war because of their Zionistgoals — Muslim land in the Middle East,and the more land the better! Further-more, the Nazis spread the idea that Jewswere creating an “army of 50,000” for

“eventual use against theArabs.” Hence, they wouldfinally “destroy Islam just astheir ancestors had been at-tempting to do for thirteencenturies.” Obviously thetruth mattered not at allhere.

And speaking of sup-posed Jewish power, theNazis continuously told theMuslims, by way of radioand print media, that Amer-ica was run by the Jews.For that matter they referredto the President as “The

Grand Rabbi Roosevelt.” In short, Amer-ica, according to the Nazis, was an enemyto the Muslim world and should be treatedas such.

When it came to the British, hated bythe Muslims because they were

their overlords, the Nazis, who also hatedthem, told the Muslims that the British were“firm supporter[s]” of future “Jewish ex-ploitation” in their region. Needless to say,this proclamation is particularly thought-provoking when one recalls everything theBritish did to prevent Jews from getting to

Palestine — all to please the Muslimsand keep oil flowing to Britain. Addition-ally, as the war wore on, Hitler wouldpromise the Muslims their long-awaitedfreedom from the British. In sum, an Axisvictory would bring them their independ-ence. What the Nazis forgot to mentionwas that they would be the new rulers . . .

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, theNazis couldn’t stop admiring, or at leastappeared to be unable to stop admiring,the Muslim dedication to their religion.The piety. The purity. All this, so unlikethe Godless Communists, the Russians,who Hitler’s men erroneously claimedhad “killed four million Muslims.”

In sum, Hitler and his supporters did allthey could in the region to spread theirkind of hate. And it all might have workedif not for the Axis defeat, first in Stalin-grad, and then, more immediately, in1943 in Tunisia.

Interestingly, Herf claims that “theideas” spread by “Nazism and fascismceased to play a major role in Europeanpolitics after 1945, but traces” of themcan still be found among the Muslimcountries of the Middle East and NorthAfrica. Listening to some of what comesout of that part of the world today surelyvalidates the author’s claim.

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia, Communication, and Visual Artsat Pace University.

NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD

The Sonderberg Case.By Elie Wiesel. Translated from the

French by Catherine Temerson. Alfred A.Knopf:New York, 2010. 178 pp. $25.00.

REVIEWED BY RABBI ISRAEL ZOBERMAN

With over 50 books to his illustriouscredit, Elie Wiesel, who prefers to

write in French and have his work trans-lated, continues to bless us at age 82 withhis multiple pursuits, including recently asa musician of his childhood songs andmelodies. Indeed, if any-one deserves to be knownas “Our Teacher andRabbi” in these unsettlingtimes of post-Holocaustperplexities for Jew andGentile, it is this humbleyet honored survivor. Heemerged from the “king-dom of the night” resolvedto help save humanity,struggling with his shakenfaith in his early classicNight, and contending withhis brethren’s fate in So-viet captivity in Jews of Si-lence, ever faithful to hisJewish moorings and their universality.

Wiesel, a 1986 Nobel Peace Laureate –he should receive one for literature too – ison the very short list of those who serve ashumanity’s conscience. He courageouslyspeaks for human rights in addition to hisElie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, andhis academic work as the Andrew W. Mel-lon Professor in the Humanities at BostonUniversity. Wiesel is a recipient of theUnited States Congressional Gold Medalalong with the Presidential Medal of Free-dom, and is the founding chairman of theU.S. Holocaust Museum Council, among

other prestigious honors. He is a humani-tarian ambassador par excellence.

Wiesel’s latest literary “home-run,” TheSonderberg Case, is a suspenseful Holo-caust-related novel, testimony to his beinguniquely at home both in the vineyard ofJewish knowledge and in more generalphilosophy and literature and possessingthe traditional Jewish penchant for re-sponding to questions with questions,while spreading nuggets of humanizingwisdom. He converses with Talmud and

Kabbalah sages and isequallly at ease with thelikes of Voltaire, Camus andGogol, masterfully utilizingthe literary construction oftales within tales.

The book’s protagonist,New Yorker Yedidyah (“God’sfriend”), gives up at his profes-sor’s urging a career on stagefor one as a theater critic,teaching us that words countmore than theatrical acts in aJewish context, for “man is abook” (p. 16). Wiesel himselfwas a journalist in Paris fol-lowing World War II.

Assigned by his editor to cover the trialof 24-year-old Werner Sonderberg, a Ger-man student at New York University who ischarged with murdering his uncle HansDunkelman, Yedidyah ponders Werner’sseemingly contradictory response of“Guilty…and not guilty” (p. 74).

Hans, who is really Werner’s grandpa, isan unrepentant ex-Nazi officer of the noto-rious Einsatzgruppen, boasting to Wernerof his murderous record and only regret-ting that Hitler lost the war with hope of yeta future victory. My own mom’s sister with

(Continued on page 14)

THE SONDERBERG CASE

Brave and Desperate: The WarsawGhetto Uprising.

By Danny Dor, Ilan Kfir and Chava Biran.Ghetto Fighters’ House, 2003. 208 pp.$195.

REVIEWED BY SHELDON KIRSHNER

When Germany conquered Warsawin September 1939, the city’s

360,000 Jewish residents were effectivelydoomed.

With the Polish capital in their hands, theGermans set up bread and soup distributioncenters for its starving population. In a por-tent of the horrors that awaitedJews, who comprised one-third of Warsaw’s population,they were not permitted to jointhe food lines.

“Nicht fur Juden” – Not forJews – the Germans pro-claimed.

In October of that fatefulyear, the German administra-tors issued the first of whatwould be numerous anti-Se-mitic decrees, all intended todemoralize, weaken, and iso-late Jews.

The Germans also humili-ated Jews – cutting off the beards of theobservant and beating and forcingpassersby to dance and sing at gunpoint.

On November 15, 1940, the ghetto wassealed. Shortly afterward, 100,000 Jewsfrom neighboring towns were pushed intowhat would be the biggest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many died of diseaseand starvation.

In the next three years, the German oc-cupiers methodically deported tens of

thousands of Jews. Further deportationswere shelved when the ghetto uprisingbroke out on April 19, 1943.

On May 16, Jurgen Stroop, the SS gen-eral in charge of crushing the revolt and liq-uidating the ghetto, informed his superiorshe had successfully carried out his orders.

These tragic events are recalled in Braveand Desperate, published in Israel by BeitLohamei Haghetaot, the Ghetto Fighters’House Museum.

The original edition, released in Hebrew,came out in 2003 to coincide with the 60thanniversary of the rebellion.

Skillfully edited by DannyDor and expertly designedby Tzipi Birak-Bizanski, thebook is a useful addition toHolocaust historiography.

The text, supplementedby personal accounts, issharp and precise. Thephotographs, some appar-ently never seen before inprint, are stark andgraphic.

Brave and Desperate,whose title pretty wellsums up the emotions thataccompanied the uprising,

charts major developments in the ghetto. On October 3, 1939, four days after the

fall of Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow – an in-dustrial engineer who had studied in Ger-many and who had represented the Jewishcommunity in Poland’s Senate – was sum-moned to Gestapo headquarters to headup the new Council of Elders.

The Judenrat, in conjunction with a Jew-ish police force, administered the ghetto for


WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING COMMEMORATED IN EVOCATIVE BOOK


BY STEWART AIN, THE JEWISH WEEK

After Holocaust survivor JosephWeinberger entered a nursing

home, his nephew began cleaning out hisBorough Park apartment and discoveredan old suitcase containing his naturaliza-tion papers, German currency, and a bookabout the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele — allrelatively standard-issue belongings.

Then Yitzchok Mermelstein reached intoa bag and pulled out a mundane artifact,but one with the power to drive home thereality of the Holocaust with the force of asledgehammer. It was a bar of soap bear-ing the initials “RIF.”

“When I opened the bag and saw ‘RIF,’ Iremembered hearing that the Nazis madeJews into soap, and I thought that maybethis was one of the bars,” recalled Mermel-stein, 52, of Flatbush.

“I believe I heard about it at the Holo-caust Museum in Washington and that YadVashem has a couple of bars,” he added.“I wrapped it in a towel. Seeing the Men-gele pictures and realizing that my uncleused the suitcase when he came to Amer-ica, I put two and two together.”

Mermelstein said he went home andlooked on the Internet for informationabout such soap and saw a picture of a barpurported to have been produced by theNazis from the bodies of concentrationcamp inmates. A picture of one of thosebars of soap “looked the same as I had,only it had a different number” below theinitials RIF. (The initials are believed to bethose of a German soap manufacturer.)

Mermelstein said he then visited hisuncle in the nursing home but that hisuncle, who has dementia, was unable toremember where he got the soap or any-thing about it.

Mermelstein said that “since I know thathuman remains have to be buried,” hecontacted people he knew at Misaskim, anOrthodox Brooklyn-based group that pro-

vides support to families in mourning andother services.

“They asked if it was real,” Mermelsteinsaid. “I said I wish it wasn’t, but it is. … Mymother was in a concentration camp, per-haps he got the soap from her. … It’s a onein a billion chance you find something likethis.”

At first there was talk of burying thesoap in a dignified ceremony. But as

more and more people heard of it, ques-tions were raised about whether the Nazisever really did use human fat to makesoap. The soap, which isbrownish in color and meas-ures about two inches by oneinch, was then locked up inMisaskim’s offices for safe-keeping.

A staff member at Misaskimresearched the matter andposted a story about it on thegroup’s website. In it, she re-counted how Joseph Wein-berger had spent the warhiding from the Nazis in cel-lars and bunkers; the Naziskilled his parents and nine ofhis 13 siblings.

The staff member, Suri Roth, found thatjudges in the Nuremberg Trials acceptedthe testimony from someone who said hehad worked at a laboratory that was in-volved in the production of soap that con-tained human fat. A bar of such soap wasactually introduced as evidence in the tri-als. Five years ago, that soap was testedby Poland’s National Remembrance Insti-tute, which announced that it did indeedcontain human fat.

But Roth said Holocaust experts todaybelieve that only a small amount of soapcontaining human fat was ever produced.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadttold The Jewish Week that “there is noproof that the Nazis made Jews into soapin a mass fashion. … There were attempts,but it was never practical.”

She noted, however, that one museum,the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mt. Zionin Israel, actually displays a bar of soappurportedly made by the Nazis fromhuman fat. The museum, maintained bythe Diaspora Yeshiva, is located in a cellarand built in 1949. Lipstadt said she knowsof no other museum with such a display.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum inRichmond shows footage of a Russ-

ian film that was played at the NurembergTrials. It shows Russian soldiers comingupon a skeleton in a vat at the Gdansk

Anatomical Institute, from which it was de-duced that the Nazis used human fat tomake soap.

Jay Ipson, the museum’s founder, saidhe knows questions have been raisedabout the veracity of the soap story andthat all he is doing is showing visitors whatwas presented at the Nuremberg trial.

A survivor, Ipson said that after the warmany survivors had bars of this soap thatthey believed contained human remains.He said one survivor who spoke at his syn-agogue a few years ago recalled seeingsurvivors burying a number of bars of soapin a cemetery in Munich.

But Peter Black, senior historian at theUnited States Holocaust Memorial andMuseum in Washington, D.C., said ques-tions about the soap are frequently asked

by visitors and that his answer is, “It didn’thappen.”

“There is nothing we can hold our hatson that would indicate the Nazis tried thiseven experimentally,” he said.

Asked about the Nuremberg Trials, Blacksaid the evidence presented there “gavethe rumor some legs.” In addition to theRussian film, two British prisoners of wartestified that they worked at the anatomicalinstitute, but Black said their testimony was“inconsistent.” One of them gave the courtthe “recipe” that was in the institute formaking the soap — and there was no men-tion of using human remains.

Black said he read the report of the testsconducted five years ago in Warsaw, buthe noted, “The forensic work was never re-leased.”

Regarding the initials “RIF” on the soapbars, Black said it is widely believed thisstood for, “Jews rest in peace.” In fact, hesaid, it was the initials of the soap manu-facturer, Reich Center for Industrial FatProvisioning.

“The Nazis did a lot of things that werevery ghoulish, but for some reason theshock value of the soap, of leather goodsand lampshades made of human productscapture the imagination,” Black said.

(Mark Jacobsen’s recent book TheLampshade is an account of the author’sattempt to authenticate whether a lamp-shade made from human skin could betraced back to the Nazis.)

Black said there is no proof that such ob-jects contain human product “and if it does,we don’t know it is from Jews. … And thedifficulty is tying it back to the Nazis. Thereis nobody who was close enough to haveseen the process. There were stories in Ro-mania, Auschwitz and Danzig. But if you fol-low them to their source, there is nothing.”

Mermelstein said he would like to havethe bar of soap from his uncle’s suitcasetested to see if it contains human fat. If itdoes, he said, it would be buried withproper respect.

HOLOCAUST-ERA SOAP FIND RAISES NEW QUESTIONS

Some of the belongings found in a suitcase of Holocaust survivor

Joseph Weinberger.

BY SIMON STURDEE, EJP

Fifty years after Adolf Eichmann wenton trial in Israel, Germany is still

keeping mum on how much it knew beforeMossad agents kidnapped the Nazi warcriminal in Argentina in 1960.

Organizers of a Berlin exhibition, “FacingJustice – Adolf Eichmann on Trial,” sayGermany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst(BND) foreign intelligence agency refusedaccess to the relevant files.

“We made a request to the BND arounda year ago to be able to look at these files.The response was negative,” Lisa Hauff,curator at the exhibition at the Topographyof Terror museum, told AFP.

This is “absurd” and “outrageous,” saidNorbert Kampe, head of the WannseeConference memorial, which helped on theexhibition at the museum on the site of theGestapo and SS’s former Berlin headquar-ters.

Eichmann was a key organizer in the de-portation and murder of millions of Jewsand others during World War II. He es-caped from captivity and ended up, likemany other war criminals, in Argentina in1950.

After his capture by Israeli agents, hestood trial in Jerusalem and was executedin 1962.

Freelance journalist Gaby Weber lastyear won a legal victory forcing the BND to

make available some of its files, which it isnow doing, but only step by step.

According to Spiegel magazine, theyshow that the BND, or rather its fore-

runner Organisation Gehlen, was aware asearly as 1952 that Eichmann was in Ar-gentina — eight years before his capture.

This is not that spectacular, observerssay, but the BND’s reluctance to releasethese files, and the fact that it is still block-ing access to others, has raised suspicionsthat it may be hiding more explosive se-crets.

“I have seen some of the (released) files,and a great deal is blacked out. They arebasically just trial documents with very few

interesting things,” Weber told Deutsch-landfunk radio this week.

The suspicion is that the government ofchancellor Konrad Adenauer wanted toprevent Eichmann being captured in casehe revealed highly embarrassing detailsabout the pasts of high-ranking figures inthe West German elite.

Eichmann’s kidnap came at afrosty time in relations with com-munist East Germany (GDR),which had long accused WestGermany of rehabilitating oldNazis in high positions, and at aparticularly tense period in theCold War.

In 1961 the GDR erected theBerlin Wall and the CIA spon-

sored the doomed Bay of Pigs in-vasion of Cuba. The following yearwas the Cuban missile crisis.

“Bonn is on trial with Eichmann,”ran the headline of GDR newspa-per Neues Deutschland, reportingon what it said was “panic” in Ade-nauer’s government.

The most prominent example was Ade-nauer’s chief of staff, Hans Globke, whohad been involved drawing up anti-Jewishlegislation under the Nazis. Spiegel quotedCIA files as saying Bonn was “on the brinkof hysteria.”

“Eichmann was like a walking bomb be-

cause he knew so much ... and if he had

spilled the beans he would have sent quite

a few people into a spin,” Weber be-

lieves.

The fact that Eichmann in the event kept

quiet on this aspect, and on other Nazis in

Argentina, raises the suspicion that there

was a “deal behind the scenes” between

West Germany and Israel, Weber said.

Adding fuel to the fire are accusations

that the West German embassy in Buenos

Aires appeared to be well aware that Eich-

mann was in Argentina, despite its claims

to the contrary after his capture.

“Nazi diplomats got top jobs in South

America (after 1945), particularly in coun-

tries run by dictators,” said Kampe.

“Every Nazi criminal on the run got their

identity papers issued at the embassies,

from (Josef) Mengele, the concentration

camp doctor, to Eichmann. It cannot pos-

sibly be that ... Bonn didn’t know about it.”

Eichmann’s sons applied for passports at

the Buenos Aires embassy in 1954, using

their real surnames and even putting as

their father SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer(“SS Lieutenant Colonel”) Eichmann, re-

ports said.

“There should be another ruling in the

coming weeks that we hope will release

most of the remaining files, if not all of

them,” Weber’s lawyer Reiner Geulen told

AFP.

A spokesman for the BND, Dieter Arndt,

declined to comment while Weber’s legal

action was ongoing.

GERMANY STILL KEEPING SECRETS ON NAZI EICHMANN

A video screen shows Adolf Eichmann during his trial in the

exhibition “Facing Justice – Adolf Eichmann on Trial” (Der

Prozess – Adolf Eichmann vor Gericht) at the Topography

of Terror documentation center in Berlin.

S U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RS U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E R MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771

His father roused Harry Gluckmanawake from a deep sleep, urging the

11-year-old to get out of his cabin bed andclimb to the deck of the steamship Heiyo Maru.

The boy rushed outside to see theGolden Gate Bridge soaring above him. Inthe pre-dawn darkness of Oct. 21, 1940,he gaped at its beams and towers as the Japanese liner sailed beneath the famousgateway that had opened just three years earlier.

“My father always referred to it after thatas ‘My Golden Gate of Freedom’ whenever we crossed the bridge or camenear it,” Gluckman said.

The family was among up to 600 Jewishrefugees who sailed into San Francisco Bay between 1939 and 1941, fleeing Nazipersecution in Germany, Austria, Lithua-nia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

They were part of a largely forgotten Pa-cific exodus that was much smaller than the stream of thousands of refugees whoreached the East Coast.

Gluckman, 82, is one of a handful of sur-viving refugees in the Bay Area who vividly remembers the transoceanic voy-age to San Francisco. The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation has spentmonths trying to track down others, hoping to share the little-known storieswhile there are still people who can tell them.

After the outbreak of war in Europe madeescape across the Atlantic Ocean difficult, hundreds of European Jews tookadvantage of a small window of time when the Pacific Ocean was open to pas-senger travel.

“In 1940 and 1941, right up to Pearl Har-bor, the Pacific was still open,” said Eddie Wong, director of the Angel Islandfoundation.

The Gluckmans crossed most of theworld to get to California, fleeing Nazi Germany by way of the Trans-Siberian rail-road, then boarding ships in Korea and Japan.

Speaking at his Alameda home on the70th anniversary of his arrival, Gluckman called the day his “re-birthday.”

He clutched a newspaper clipping that showed him wearing knee-high socks,smiling as he stood in a crowd that posed after walking onto a San Franciscopier.

The immigration station opened in 1910.It was a processing point for most of the Jewish refugees who arrived to SanFrancisco before it burned down and was closed forever in early October 1940, justweeks before the Gluckmans arrived.Many of the Jewish families did not have

the American sponsors they needed in order to get a U.S. visa, but found them bycalling or sending letters to American Jewswho shared their surname. The Gluck-mans’ sponsor was a man in New Yorkthey had never met, but who shared theirlast name and agreed to vouch for them if they promised never to contact himfor financial help, or even to express grat-itude, once they reached America.

“In those early days of the concentrationcamps, the Germans would let them go if they had a place to go, on the conditionthey leave all their assets behind,” Wongsaid. “Everything they owned was handedover to the regime.”

One family, before leaving Europe, spenttheir savings on two expensive fur coats, Wong said. The mother and daugh-ter wore the coats on the trip to the United States so they could sell them uponarrival.

The Gluckmans arrived with just $3.36and a few suitcases with clothes and

paperwork. The boy arrived as HeinzGlucksmann, but immigration officials recommended the family change the nameto something easier for Americans to pronounce.

Growing up in the southern German cityof Stuttgart, Gluckman was expelled from German public schools by the anti-SemiticNuremberg laws of 1935.

His family enrolled him in a Jewishschool attached to the Stuttgart syna-gogue, but on November 9, 1938, the boywatched townspeople pull books andchairs from the school, beat up a rabbi,and burn the buildings down. It wasKristallnacht, or the Night of ShatteredGlass, when Nazis ransacked Jewishhomes, shops, and places of worshipacross Germany and Austria.

It was also the night when the Gluck-mans became determined to flee, or atleast to get their two children out of Ger-many.

A British rescue organization called theKindertransport adopted Gluckman’s 3-year-old sister in 1939, taking her toEngland where she would be kept safe. His parents signed their son up for thesame program, but Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launchingWorld War II just before he was set to leave.

The Gluckmans applied for exit visasand kept looking for other ways to get out, eventually finding the Pacific route.“(My grandfather) read that if you couldpay for the entire trip in German marks in Berlin, they were willing to takeyou,” Gluckman said.

They stopped first in Breslau, now knownas the Polish city of Wroclaw, where they paid a final visit to the boy’s paternalgrandparents. The grandparents had been unable to get an exit visa, but ex-pressed confidence to family members that they would survive, Gluckman said.

The grandfather was a German veteranof World War I.

“He said, ‘I’ve served my country. Noth-ing will happen to us.’ He even had his old sword over the fireplace, and the IronCross,” Gluckman said.

The boy and his parents left Germanyfor Poland, then crossed through Lithua-nia to Moscow, where they boarded theTrans-Siberian Express for a long journey across the continent. They sailed fromKorea to Japan, and left Japan on Octo-ber 4, Gluckman’s 11th birthday, arrivingin San Francisco nearly three weeks later.

The family of three settled on SutterStreet. Gluckman’s father found work atthe I. Magnin department store. Hismother became a housemaid for awealthy family in Pacific Heights.

Their last contact with Gluckman’sgrandparents came years later in a post-card believed to haver been sent from theAuschwitz concentration camp. Thevague message expressed that theywere doing fine.

“My father spent every waking momentsearching for ways to bring his parents out,” Gluckman said.

The grandparents were murdered atAuschwitz in late 1943 or early 1944, Gluckman said. He lost 58 family mem-bers in the Holocaust.

Wiping tears as he talked, Gluckmansaid his name in German means “luckyman.”

He went to his office closet, pulling outa piece of cardboard where his father had drawn a family tree that stretchesback to the 19th century. Gluckmankeeps it updated, he said, as he used afinger to trace a line to his grandchildren.

“Hitler did not wipe out all of the Jews,”Gluckman said. “There were enough of us here to restart the family.”

First published in the San Jose MercuryNews

BY NIR HASSON, HAARETZ

Old black-and-white footage onYouTube shows children celebrat-

ing at a Purim party in post-World War IIAmsterdam. In the silent, four-minute clipposted by Yad Vashem, the kids aredressed up as kings, queens, princesses,and Arab sheikhs, marching in pairs andlaughing. Nothing about them indicatesthey are orphans who survived the Holo-caust, which had ended only a year ear-lier.

The video was recorded in 1946 at theChildren’s Home of Yehoshua and Hen-nie Birenbaum, whose children receivedthe Citation of Jewish Rescue, the firstaward of its kind, on Holocaust MemorialDay. The ceremony was held in the For-est of the Martyrs outside Jerusalem.

The newly created citation, recognizingthe heroism of Jews who rescued Jews,is being awarded by the B’nai B’rith or-ganization and the Jewish National Fund.

The ceremony marks the culmination ofa decade-long effort to raise awarenessabout Jews who saved other Jews.

“In terms of research, [study of] Jewishheroism pales in comparison to the Jews’suffering and the Nazis’ murderousness,”says Alan Schneider, director of the B’naiB’rith World Center inJerusalem.

Jews cannot be namedRighteous Gentiles, he adds.

“Gentiles risked their livesand the Jews were all in dan-ger. But some of them tookrisks beyond the call of dutyand we thought it was neces-sary to honor them,” Schnei-der says.

The Birenbaums saved notonly themselves and their sixchildren, but dozens of or-phans.

Before the war, Yehoshua and HennieBirenbaum, who married in 1927,

lived in Berlin. After Kristallnacht in 1938,they fled to the Netherlands. When theNazis occupied Holland, they were sent tothe Westerbork concentration camp.

The couple set up an orphanage therethat was recognized by the camp authori-ties and by Jewish aid organizations.

Some 300 children lived in the orphanage,where the Birenbaums did everything theycould to keep them from being transportedto the death camps.

“My parents used to sneak up to thecamp headquarters, see which childrenwere listed on the next transport and try tostop them from being taken,” says SonjaBirenbaum, the couple’s daughter.

In a report submitted to the Dutch gov-ernment after the war, Yehoshua Biren-baum wrote: “We’d already succeeded,more than once, to put off children’s trans-

ports, even when it seemed like a lostcause. We knew how to find ... people whocould help us. Once it was a notary whodesigned a rescue plan, once it was a doc-tor who forbade sending the children dueto a contagious disease in our hut....”

In one case, Hennie Birenbaum per-

suaded the camp commander that 50 of

the children were actually Christians, born

to German soldiers and Jewish women.

Equipped with forged documents, she

managed to save all of them but one.

The orphanage operated until February

1944, when the Birenbaums and the re-

maining children were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The Birenbaums set up an orphanage

there for 40 children, almost all of whom

survived. They reestablished their Chil-

dren’s Home in Amsterdam after the war

and in 1950 immigrated to Israel with 15

orphans.

“It was a heartwarming sight, after I re-

turned to Amsterdam, when a child

strolling with his mother recognized me

and hugged me, beaming with happiness,”

Birenbaum wrote.

Heiyo Maru ship that brought Gluckman fam-

ily to San Francisco.

HOLOCAUST REFUGEES REMEMBER “GOLDEN GATE TO FREEDOM”

FAMILY GETS FIRST AWARD FOR SAVING OTHER JEWS IN SHOAH

Yehoshua and Hennie Birenbaum with five of their own children.


A new book has outraged hard-linePolish nationalists by exposing thewidespread plundering of Jewishgraves by their countrymen.

BY JEROME TAYLOR, THE INDEPENDENT

At first glance it looks like an ordinaryrural scene from the middle of the

last century. Squinting in the bright sun-light, a group of Polish farmhands pose fora portrait after a successful day of toiling inthe fields.

Only on closer inspection is it possible tomake out what the scene truly depicts – amass grave-robbing exercise that shinesan uncomfortable spotlight on a little-known chapter of Polish history during theSecond World War.

Resting on the ground in front of the firstrow of farmers is a gruesome stack ofskulls, the last vestiges of thousands ofJews who were killed at a Nazi-run deathcamp outside the village of Treblinka. Farfrom harvesting their own crops, these Pol-ish farmers were treasure hunting in thekilling fields of the Holocaust, looking forgold teeth and trinkets that their Nazi mur-derers may have missed.

The photograph is the starting point ofGolden Harvest, a controversial new book

by the Princeton historian Jan Gross andhis former wife which details how somePoles profited from Jewish suffering duringthe Holocaust. The revelations havetouched a raw nerve in a country still

deeply scarred by the Second World Warand proud of its record of opposing theNazi occupation against horrendous odds.

The Polish version, produced by the pio-neering publishing house Znak, is alreadycausing a stir thanks to a small number ofcopies that were obtained and then con-demned by hard-line Polish nationalists.

They have been incensed by Gross’ssuggestion, not only that the plundering ofJewish property and corpses occurred dur-ing the Nazi occupation and beyond, butthat it was far more widespread than pre-

viously admitted. Znak’s offices in Krakow have

received hate mail and beenscrawled with graffiti since ex-cerpts of the book were publishedin the Polish media, forcing HenrykWozniakowski, the CEO of thepublishing house, to publicly de-fend the novel before its release.

“It’s a sensitive and controver-sial subject but it is a chapter ofhistory that needs to be told,” hesaid. “This book concentrates onthe black moments betweenPoles and Jews. While a majorityof Poles were passive observersof the Holocaust, and a minority

were active helpers, a significant minoritywere engaged in criminal activities againstthe Jews.”

Gross’s books have often caused astorm in Poland, a country he left in the1960s for the United States. Ten years agohe examined the 1941 massacre of 1,600Jewish villagers by their Polish neighbors,

causing outrage followed by soul-search-ing and a government investigation whichfound that Poles, and not the Nazis, wereindeed responsible for that atrocity.

Poland was home to approximately 2.5million Jews before the Second World

War, but the vast majority perished at Nazihands after 1939. Holocaust researchershave estimated that about 250,000 PolishJews managed to avoid the death campswhile remaining in Poland, but that only40,000 of them survived the war.

Gross’s book says that Poles killed tensof thousands of the remaining 210,000 ordenounced them to the Nazi occupiers.Speaking from New York, Professor Grosssaid he believed debate in Poland over at-titudes towards the country’s Jews duringthe Second World War had matured to alevel where most could accept that someatrocities were carried out against Jews,largely for material gain.

“There will be a reaction, but I think it willbe calmer and more restrained than [after]some of my previous works,” he said. “Thereis a group of Polish historians who for thepast eight years or so have engaged in thestudy of Polish-Jewish relations. They haveshown that bravery and cruelty coexisted. Itis part of human nature.”

SHAMEFUL SECRETS IN THE FIELDS OF THE HOLOCAUST

Polish villagers hunt for trinkets in a Jewish grave near Tre-blinka.

BY EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Before the $45 million Illinois Holo-caust Museum & Education Center

opened in Skokie, two years ago, therewas some urgency in completing its65,000-square-foot building, which nowstands so incongruously monumental inthe midst of Chicago’s suburban land-scape. At one time, 7,000 Jews bearing thescars of the Holocaust had lived in Skokiewith their families, and they were aging.Many had contributed artifacts to the mu-seum; some participated when it was justa storefront on Main Street; some had theiroral histories recorded for its exhibition andtheir lives chronicled in the institution’s im-posing companion book, Memory andLegacy.

And though they had survived one of his-tory’s greatest scourges, many, as we arereminded by the closing years of their bi-ographies, did not live to see this projectcompleted.

That is a shame, because although themuseum has its flaws — some of whichare shared by others of the 16 major Holo-caust museums in the United States — itis an impressive achievement, its perma-nent historical exhibition surveying Ger-many’s descent from high civilization toNazi inferno, as it obsessively dragged Eu-rope’s Jews to their deaths in ditches andcrematoriums.

Like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holo-caust, which opened last fall, it will also mostlikely be among the last such institutions cre-ated by survivors of the cataclysm, bearingwitness and offering lessons. That participa-tion is one of the sources of strength of suchmuseums, but strangely, too, it is also asource of weakness.

In its history, in fact, this museum encap-sulates one aspect of the evolution of suchinstitutions. Refugees from horrors havealways tended to congregate in particularcommunities, not to keep their memoriesalive, but, paradoxically, to allow them tobe forgotten; the past would become anaspect of shared experiences that did notneed mentioning and would not spur cu-riosity. And judging from some of the video-

taped recollections at the museum inSkokie, where in the mid-1970s almost halfthe population was Jewish, and a goodportion of that was made up of survivors,that is what happened — at least until1976, when the National Socialist Party ofAmerica first sought permission to paradethrough the town’s streets.

Ultimately, after court challenges anddemonstrations, the plans of this Nazi-in-spired group were changed, and scarcelytwo dozen acolytes gathered to demon-strate in Chicago. But as a concludinggallery in this museum shows, the contro-versy galvanized the community of sur-vivors and reawakened old vulnerabilities.Artifacts and memories were contributedfor the creation of a small museum, whichopened in 1984. A speakers’ bureau of sur-vivors was established to share experi-ences. And lobbying began, to include theHolocaust in Illinois public school curricu-lums (a requirement eventually establishedby the state legislature in 1990). This mu-seum (which contains a permanent exhibi-tion, along with art shows, an auditorium,and a children’s display) is the climax ofthat community’s efforts, where 150,000visitors a year are welcomed.

And all through the main exhibition —designed by David Layman, with two his-

torical consultants, Michael Berenbaumand Yitzchak Mais — the survivors’ arti-facts, biographies and interviews amplifythe historical archive. There are sketch-books and scrapbooks, uniforms andrelics. Two Yiddish diaries here were writ-ten by Aron Derman while he fought as apartisan in the Polish forests. There is a

bra scavenged from stolen thread andcloth by Hannah Messinger in a Germanlabor camp, and a leather belt that SamuelHarris — the museum’s president, whowas imprisoned in Nazi camps from ages4 through 12 — had kept with him as hissole comfort.

The museum is also displaying a Ger-man rail car, refurbished in 1943, the typeused to transport Jews east to the camps.The exhibition’s historical films were cre-ated by Northern Light Productions.

The building, designed by the archi-tect Stanley Tigerman, leaves its in-

dustrial skeleton exposed, so that nothingis made artificially pretty. And as the visitorweaves through the jagged, twisting gal-leries, the particularity of the personal ob-jects becomes powerful. It would be helpfulto get a better sense of how specific sur-vivors’ lives unfolded — their storiesemerge only in fragments along the way —but the companion book incorporates ad-

ditional details. Some atmospheric gal-leries are surprisingly effective, and it ulti-mately seems appropriate that Nazimemorabilia is shown through transparentfloor panels over which we walk as wereach the postwar period.

But the survivors’ perspectives can alsobe a weakness. The concluding gallerygives too much emphasis to the effects ofthe planned National Socialist Party marchin Skokie — effects that will be of little im-portance in future decades.

And because the survivors’ experiencesare necessarily personal, the message ofthese museums also takes on a particularshape. Survivors knew their neighbors inthe pre-Holocaust world. Often they werepart of a wider community, leading ordinaryand sometimes prosperous lives. As theirworld was dismantled, they had to ask,again and again, how friends and neighborsallowed this to happen. They imagined whatit might have been like, had there been re-bellion or resistance. And in drawing les-sons from their experiences, some beganto see the Holocaust as an extreme mani-festation of a refusal to care about injusticeor the fate of one’s neighbor.

Their approach was amplified by otherswho wished to avoid making the Holocaustseem too particular, emphasizing insteadmore general humanitarian issues. Thelesson, most broadly, and most blandly, isthat those who learn from the Holocaustmust learn the importance of empathy andtake a stand against injustice.

Become an “upstander,” the museumurges, not a “bystander.” A conclud-

ing 10-minute film, narrated by BarbraStreisand, is a call for social action. “Nowit’s up to you” is its repeated moral. We arereminded of the prevalence of genocides,which, despite the cry of “Never Again!,”show how much still needs to be done.

The museum also presents a special ex-hibition for children, which, its literature ex-plains, “provides a safe space where theycan brainstorm strategies on how to speakup for those experiencing hatred, preju-dice, and discrimination through bullyingand acts of intolerance within their localand global communities.”


THE MEMORY OF HOLOCAUST, FORTIFIED


ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON OF THE AANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON OF THE AThe American and International Societies for Yad Vashem held their

New York City.It was the largest attended Luncheon and celebrated the Societies’ 30th A

her daughter Elisa Pantirer Pines and her granddaughter Nicole Pines LieHolocaust remembrance.

The late Mr. Murray Pantirer and Mrs. Louise Pantirer were among the Societies were founded in 1981 by Mr. Eli Zborowski together with a hand

Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem; Sharon Halpern; Nicole Pines Lieber-

man, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award; Louise Pantirer, recip-

ient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award; Elisa Pantirer Pines, recipient of

the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award; Rella Feldman, Chairwoman of the 2011

Annual Spring Luncheo;, and Alan Pines.

Marilyn Rubenstein; Dr. Joanna Michlich, 2011 Annual Spring Luncheon Guest Speaker; and Eli

Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem.

Stella Skura, Cheryl Skura Lifshitz, and Iris Lifshitz Lindenbaum.

Elisa Pantirer Pines, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award; Nicole

Pines Lieberman, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award; and Louise

Pantirer, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award.

Seated: Lili Goldberg, Jeanne Jemal, Gabriela Shnay, Jill Finestone; standing: Nancy Chetrit, Rose Gold-

berg, Elyse Goldberg, Debbie Cooper, Dale Goldberg, Elisa Pines, Nancy Waldenberg, and Deborah Berg.

Guests at the American Society for Yad Vashem 2011 Annual Spring Luncheon.


AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMAnnual Spring Luncheon on Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at the Pierre Hotel in

Anniversary. In marking this occasion it honored Mrs. Louise Pantirer,eberman, three generations of leadership and dedication to the cause of

first to hold a parlor meeting during the Societies’ formative years. Thedful of dedicated Holocaust survivors.

Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem, accompanied by Jean Gluck, Reb-

betzin Lau, and her daughter.

Alan Pines; Elisa Pantirer Pines, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement

Award; Nicole Pines Lieberman, recipient of the 2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement

Award; and Avi Lieberman.

Sheila Erlich Pruzansky; Anna Erlich; Eli Zborowski, Chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem;

and Susan Erlich.

Joseph and Elizabeth Wilf.

Caroline Massel, Chair of the Young Leadership Associates; and Nicole Pines Lieberman, recipient of the

2011 American Society for Yad Vashem Achievement Award.

Nicole Pines Lieberman, Sharona Loeffler, Tamara Loeffler, Elana Loeffler, Daniella Schwebel, and Ilisa

Klapper.

Miriam Field, Selma Gruder Horowitz, and Pearl Field.

REPORT FROM REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMYAD VASHEM MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2011 - Iyyar/Sivan 5771

BY MADELYN COHEN

On April 27, 2011, the American So-ciety for Yad Vashem and the Con-

sulate General of Israel in New Yorkpresented the prestigious RighteousAmong the Nations award to Mrs. Maria

Rabb in honor of her late mother, Mrs.Jozsef Lukacsi (Lukacsi Jozsefne), neeIlona Klimes, and late aunt, Mrs. LaszloLukacsi (Lukacsi Laszlone), nee JolanKlimes, for saving Jewish lives during theHolocaust.

Mrs. Ilona Lukacsi lived in Rakoscsaba(now part of Budapest), Hungary, whereshe, her husband Jozsef, a shoemaker, andher sister Jolan took responsibility for savingthe family of Ede Hajos, a Jewish worker inJozsef’s shoe-making workshop. Jozsefmade the brave decision to help the Hajosfamily, and brought the family to his home inRakoscsaba. He was required toserve in the Hungarian military as aconscript and was gone for longstretches of time, leaving the day-to-day care and protection of the Hajosfamily to his wife and sister-in-law.

While Ede Hajos was taken bythe Nazis to the forced laborcamps in 1942 or 1943, his familywas saved thanks to the heroic ac-tions of Jozsef, Ilona and Jolan,which included hiding and caringfor Hajos’ wife Mrs. Ede Hajos(Hajos Edene), nee Margit Grunwald, andhis daughters Eva and Erika and her sis-ters Klara and Erzsebet Grunwald duringthe war. Their care and concern for theHajos family enabled them to survive un-harmed. Ede wasn’t as fortunate. He diedin the concentration camp.

This honor is bestowed posthumously tothe Lukacsi sisters, as Ilona passed awayin 1976 and Jolan in 1995.

The honor of Righteous Among the Na-tions recognizes those people who upheld

morality and human values in the midst ofa moral vacuum. This tribute attempts toconvey the gratitude of the State of Israeland the Jewish people to those who stoodby their side during a time of persecutionand great tragedy. Those recognized re-ceive a medal and a certificate of honor,and their names are inscribed on the Wall

of Honor in the Garden of the RighteousAmong the Nations at Yad Vashem, theHolocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remem-brance Authority in Jerusalem. To date,more than 22,000 people have been hon-ored as the Righteous Among the Na-tions. They come from more than 40countries and include Muslims and Chris-tians from all denominations; the only traitcommon to all is their courage to stand upfor their moral principles.

YAD VASHEM RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS AWARD PRESENTED IN NEW YORK

Maria Rabb with the Righteous Among the Na-

tions award.

Esther Fox, friend of Maria Rabb, and Maria's daughter,

Maria, at the ceremony in New York.

BY ROBERT ROZETT, THE JERUSALEM POST

As the generation of survivors dwin-dles, it’s of paramount importance

that we dedicate ourselves to continuingthe process of gathering fragments.

During the Shoah, an entire world wasshattered. The remaining scattered frag-ments vary infinitely in size, shape and tex-ture – from documents to diaries,testimonies to artifacts, photographs to

works of art. Despite their wide disper-sion, they can still be found in manyplaces – government and privatearchives, libraries, and even in the homesof people who went through the vortex ofthe Shoah, and members of their familiesleft behind. Each fragment tells its owntale and, like a thread, has a beginningand an end. These threads of information,intersecting and combining, are thenwoven together into a broad and deeptapestry that depicts a multifaceted storystretching over time and space. In thisway we can reconstruct as much of theshattered Jewish world as possible, theevents that led to its destruction, and thelives that continued to be lived while thedevastation unfolded.

Since its inception, Yad Vashem hasstrived to collect every relevant

source of information, each of which en-lightens us in its own unique way about thesix million Jews murdered and the millionsmore persecuted and victimized during theHolocaust. Yet some shards remain lockedin the memories of those who were there,still waiting to be expressed in word or art.Others languish in desk or dresser draw-ers, in old suitcases, or in shoeboxes. Andsome are precious, kept close to the heartand seldom shown to others. The frag-

ments we collect have universalmeaning for us as human beings,national meaning for us as Jews,and often very personal meaningas well.

As a child I always knew that mygrandmother Irma, my father’smother, had been in Auschwitz. Mygrandmother died in 1970, when Iwas still quite young, and all I knewof what she had endured were thedisjointed bits and pieces she had

told me. Among other diffuse facts, I re-member her telling me she had engagedin some sort of factory work, and that shewas together the entire time from her de-portation to her liberation with her daugh-ter-in-law. At the end of the 1970s, when Ifirst read Raul Hilberg’s monumental bookThe Destruction of the European Jews, inwhich he discusses labor in Auschwitz, itseemed to me I had learned that she hadprobably worked for the giant IG Farbenconcern.

Quite a few years later, when I was al-ready director of the Yad Vashem Library,I saw a fragment that told me a bit moreabout her travails. It was a deposition mygrandmother had written for a lawyer to ob-tain compensation from the German gov-

ernment. When the lawyer passed away,his family sent his entire archive to YadVashem. From that document I learnedthat my grandmother at some point hadbeen transported from Auschwitz to Traut-enau. It would be a long time before otherfragments would come to light.

Among the millions of documents re-cently made available to Yad Vashem bythe International Tracing Service (ITS) inBad Arolsen, Germany, I found several ref-erences to my grandmother, with the helpof my colleagues. She appears on a list ofwomen prisoners in Parschnitz, which isalso known as Parschnitz-Trautenau,dated October 1944. Directly following heron the list is her daughter-in-law. So theywere definitely together in the camp in au-tumn 1944. At the head of that list, it saysthe women were working for AEG. So nowit is much more plausible that the factorywork my grandmother engaged in was inParschnitz, not Auschwitz, and for AEGand not IG Farben. Lastly, on her daugh-ter-in-law’s ITS registration card, the dateshe (and most probably my grandmother)reached Parschnitz is listed as August 1,

1944. According to the card, the two werein the camp until it was liberated on May 9,1945 – the last day of the war in Europe.So uncovering one thread, following oth-ers, and weaving them together hasyielded at least a tiny part of the greatertapestry. Yet even from such a small illus-

tration there are things we canlearn. This story illustrates thatHungarian Jewish women sentto Auschwitz, later reachedother camps, where theyworked and suffered. It showsthat companies besides the in-famous IG Farben concern,some still thriving today, werecomplicit in their suffering.

So, especially now, as thegeneration of survivors dwin-dles, it is of paramount impor-tance that we dedicateourselves to continuing theprocess of gathering fragments

and putting them into context. The tools ofthe 21st century – the Internet, social net-works, digitization, and international coop-eration – offer much hope that we willenrich and expand our portrait of events.Seventy years after the advent of the sys-tematic mass murder of the Jews and thecoalescence of the Final Solution, it is vitalthat the enriched tapestry – and the in-sights we draw from it – remain in constantview. The more we further our knowledgeof the Holocaust and keep it in our con-sciousness, the better chance we have ofmolding a world free from prejudice, ha-tred, and crimes against humanity.

The writer is director of the Yad VashemLibraries, author of Approaching the Holo-caust: Texts and Contexts, and a soon-to-be published study on Hungarian Jewishforced laborers on the Eastern Front.

BY ARON HELLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ever since she became an orphaned12-year-old in Russia, Liora Tamir

thought she was alone in the world – hav-ing lost every single member of her familyeither in the Nazi Holocaust or Sovietprison camps.

That changed because of a recentsearch of a database of names of Holo-caust victims. She discovered that hermurdered grandparents were commemo-rated there by an uncle she never knew,who had moved to Israel.

This April, she was united with his son –her cousin – at an emotional ceremony atIsrael’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorialin Jerusalem.

“My mother didn’t tell me anything aboutthe family, I thought they were all gone,”said Tamir, 65, shortly after embracing 73-year-old Aryeh Shikler. “Now I have acousin. I still can’t believe it. It’s surreal.”

Tamir’s daughter, Ilana, made the re-union possible. For years she scouredarchives for any information about her ma-ternal grandmother, Yona Shapira.

Initially, she learned that her grand-mother traveled from Poland to pre-stateIsrael in the 1920s and spent six yearsthere before she was arrested and de-ported by the British because of her Com -


GATHERING THE FRAGMENTS

ISRAELI COUSINS UNITEDBY HOLOCAUST DATABASE


BY CRISTIAN SALAZAR andRANDY HERSCHAFT, AP

Atrove of papers and photographsdocumenting the lives of Holocaust

victims and survivors includes notablenames like Nobel Peace Prize winner ElieWiesel and former Israeli Prime MinisterMenachem Begin. But Benzion Baumrind’sname might have stayed forgotten to hisdescendants without the records kept by ahumanitarian aid agency.

A genealogist discovered Baumrind, oneof 6 million Jews killed during the Holo-caust, was in her family with one stray doc-ument buried in a database of historicpapers and photos kept by the AmericanJewish Joint Distribution Committee.

With over 500,000 names and more than1,000 photographs, the searchable collec-tion documents the relief organization’svast efforts during World War II and thepostwar era in 24 countries, from China

and Japan to the Dominican Republic andBolivia. The records, being made availableonline for the first time, open a singularview into the lives of survivors that the JDCaided during that cataclysmic period.

“We can get broader pictures of the ac-tual everyday social life inthe aftermath of war,” Ken-neth Waltzer, director ofthe Jewish Studies Depart-ment at Michigan StateUniversity, said of the col-lection.

Until now, the organiza-tion’s archive has beenlargely inaccessible to thepublic, kept at a privatestorage warehouse lo-cated a short subway rideout of Manhattan.

Volunteers enterednames in a database forover a year; rare, fragiledocuments were scannedinto the computer system.Users of the site can sub-mit names to identify peo-ple they recognize in thephotographs, which maybe later added to captions.

“A website like this iswhere history meets tech-nology,” said Gideon Taylor, an executivewith the New York-based committee. “It’staking history out of the dusty files... andbringing it out into the community.”

The committee plans to put even moredocuments from its archive online later thissummer.

The project is one of a growing numberaround the world aimed at making avail-able on the Internet primary records aboutthe Holocaust.

“It is a world phenomenon that’slaunched by the technology,” said David M.Kleiman, president of Heritage Muse Inc.,a New York-based genealogy technologyfirm.

The collection offers glimpses of the livesof children who survived the Holocaust to

become moral and spiritual leaders, politi-cians, and artists.

There was the 16-year-old teenager whowould become an author and one of theworld’s most esteemed humanitarians —Wiesel — listed on a document naming

426 orphaned boys fromthe Buchenwald concen-tration camp who weretaken to Paris by thecommittee in 1945. Alsoon the list: a future ChiefRabbi of Israel and oneof the youngest survivingprisoners of Buchen-wald, Israel Meir Lau,who was 7 years oldwhen he was liberated.

Begin, the future Israeliprime minister, is namedon a list of 9,000 PolishJewish refugees receiv-ing the agency’s aid inVilna, Lithuania, in 1940.

Another person namedin the files is Peter Max,the famed New Yorkartist whose cosmic-col-ored works became asignature style of thehippie 1960s.

“Looking back, it’s amazing thatpeople had the will to organize, to

create organizations to help people whofled other countries and were in direneed,” said Max, who was 6 months oldwhen his family, the Finkelsteins, fledBerlin and found safe haven in Shanghai,where the JDC also had a relief opera-tion.

For Linda Cantor, the past president ofthe Jewish Genealogical Society of NewYork and a volunteer who helped put thenames online, the collection helped herfind a relative she never knew about.

A researcher with 30 years of experi-ence in genealogy, even she was sur-prised when she came across adocument that connected her to Baum-

rind, who lived in the Polish town whereher family was from.

That document, a list of Polish Jews ex-pelled by the Nazi German governmentand living in the border town of Zbaszyn,Poland, between 1938 and 1939, showedthat her great-aunt was named as Baum-rind’s contact in the United States. It wasa tantalizing clue that would help her doc-ument him as a cousin.

“My discovery allowed him to have aplace in somebody’s memory,” she said.

The committee, commonly known asthe Joint, was founded in 1914 to helpJews in need in war-ravaged Europe and

Palestine. During World War II, it pro-vided assistance to refugees from Lithua-nia to Japan and helped Jews escapeEurope, including by booking them onships headed for the Americas.

Claus Hirsch, 76, of New York, fledBerlin with his parents and brother andfound asylum in Shanghai and had to relyon the Joint for hot meals. As a volunteer,going over lists of names and keyingthem into the database, it has been anemotional experience.

“It’s nice to see a name on a list,” hesaid, before he began to weep. “I sawnames of people I had known years ago.And I hadn’t thought about them in 30 or40 years.”

TROVE OF HISTORIC RECORDS OF HOLOCAUST GOES ONLINE

BY KEVIN FLOWER, CNN

Micha and Dan Glass are not your or-dinary Monopoly players.

In 1938 the two young brothers werehappy school children. They lived with their parents in the Czech city of Brno.

Their mother was a photographer wholiked to document the family’s life in pho-tos, and their father an electrical engineerwho enjoyed taking his boys skiing.The idyllic life of the Glass family was to beshattered a year later with the Nazi inva-sion of Czechoslovakia.

“Before (the) war it was normal living.And then the war came and a completelydifferent world. You can’t understand it.Everything changed,” Dan recalls.

Both of the boys’ parents were arrested.Their father was sent to a forced laborcamp, and their mother detained and tor-tured for six months.

In 1942, the boys and their mother weresent to the city of Theresienstadt, an areaof northwestern Czechoslovakia where theNazis established a ghetto for the Jews ofBohemia and Moravia.

At ages eight and 10, Micha and Danbecame intimately familiar with death.Over 35,000 people perished in There-sienstadt while another 84,000 were senton to be murdered in the Nazi deathcamps further east.

Disease, famine, and sub-human condi-tions aside, the camp’s prisoners did every-thing they could to maintain a semblance ofnormality. For one prisoner, an artist namedOswal Poeck, this meant designing anddrawing a makeshift version of a famedboard game. An unofficial version of thepopular board game Monopoly was born.

Fashioned from cardboard and drawn by

hand, “Ghetto” Monopoly was created as

a distraction for Theresienstadt’s thou-

sands of children and used as a tool to

teach them about life (and death) in the

ghetto.

Properties in the game were not popular

city streets and landmarks, but rather

buildings and locations from the ghetto it-

self — all named after German cities and

a grim reflection of the reality faced by the

camp’s prisoners.

“It’s strange to understand how can peo-ple make games for children in this specialplace — in the ghetto,” says SimaShacher, a researcher at Beit Theresien-stadt, a center dedicated to documentinglife in Theresienstadt.

One of the reasons the games were cre-ated, Shacher says, is because the chil-

dren were separated from theirparents and the adult prisoners look-ing after them did what they could tomake life more tolerable. It was an im-portant way for them to maintain asense of humanity and purpose in ahellish environment, says Shacher.

His memories of playing the game arefoggy, but Micha Glass recalls hidingthe board and its pieces under his mat-tress so they would not be discovered.

In 1945, Soviet troops liberatedTheresienstadt, and miraculously

the Glass boys and their mother survived.It was not until their release that theylearned that their father had been killed inAuschwitz, and that most of their extendedfamily was also dead.

The family eventually made their way toIsrael to begin a new life, and with themthey brought their ghetto Monopoly set.Over the course of years the boys wouldoccasionally play the game and continuedto hold on to it in adulthood to serve as areminder of what they lived through.

Fifteen years ago, the brothers decided

to donate the game to Israel’s Holo-

caust remembrance museum, Yad Vashem,

where it now sits on permanent display. The

reasons were simple, according to Micha.

“Because there are many, many people

who think that there was not a Holocaust

— we had a very happy family before the

war and after the war there was nothing,”

he says.

Micha’s younger brother Dan says the

passage of time has made him reflect

more about the past and the importance of

memory. The game, he said, is an impor-

tant symbol.

“It is something very, very unique. We

wanted it to be shown to the public — to

show there exists such a thing — there

was a Theresienstadt, there were kids,

there were children, there were survivors.”

For both brothers the game brings up dif-

ficult and painful memories, but through it

all they are able to see the silver lining.

Combined, the brothers Glass have six

children and 15 grandchildren. This, they

say, is what has made surviving the hor-

rors of the Holocaust bearable.

“What is good,” says Dan, pointing to his

older brother, “is that I am standing here

with my brother and that I have a big loving

family. This is the main good thing. This is

what I have.”

HAND-DRAWN MONOPOLY RECALLS LIFE IN GHETTO

Hand-drawn Monopoly from Theresienstadt.

This photo provided by the American Jewish

Joint Distribution Committee shows a group of

French Jewish refugee children who arrived

from Marseilles via Spain at the Rossio train

station in Lisbon in 1943.

This photo provided by American

Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

shows Claus Hirsch standing on a

street corner in Shanghai, where his

family lived after fleeing Nazi perse-

cution during World War II.

In this April 21, 2011, photo, Claus Hirsch re-

acts as he is interviewed at the American Jewish

Joint Distribution Committee offices in New

York. Hirsch is one of the volunteers entering

data for JDC.


BY AL BIENENFELD

My parents are Holocaust survivors.For most of us living in America

today, the Holocaust is something seen intelevision documentaries or something weread about. To many younger people today,it probably means Schindler’s List, a well -made movie, but off point in terms of trulyexpressing the horror of history’s definingmoment in human depravity. The Holocaustis the ultimate expression of evil.

From this moment in history came myparents, Henry and Helen Bienenfeld, twoPolish Jews. They met in America a fewyears after the end of the war. Their pathsand experiences were different in comingto America. My knowledge of my father islimited because he spoke little of the warand, frankly, I failed to ask enough ques-tions. I did not know until I was almost fiftythat he had a sister who perished alongwith his father and brother. Only he and hismother survived, partially because of luck,but mostly I believe because of strength ofwill. From what I now understand, his fa-ther and sister separated from his motherand the two sons. He spent time in aforced labor camp before escaping to anunderground bunker with his mother,brother, and others for between one andtwo years. His brother went out one nightto look for food (they all took turns), but hedid not come back. They subsequentlyfound his body and buried it in the woods,just weeks before the liberation. After the

liberation they removed the body (whatwas left of it) to a Jewish cemetery.

My mother’s father never seemed spe-cial to me. Max Pechter was, as I remem-ber, a mid-sized man. His wife Sarah wasa petite woman whom I recall as very gen-tle. My mother told me how this “not sospecial” man once stood at the center ofhis village arguing with the “elders” and“leaders” about the impending dangers. He

warned that the Germans would kill all theJews. They said he was crazy, and that hecould leave, but to keep quiet lest he starta panic. He and his wife gathered their fourchildren and headed eastward. At onepoint they were on a train headed towardSiberia. The Russian soldiers were goingthrough the train removing the “unhealthy.”Two of my mother’s siblings were ill andsome woman sitting nearby had threat-ened to turn them in. Then the “small andgentle” Sarah drew a knife and threatenedto cut this woman’s throat.

In Siberia conditions were harsh, living ina wood structure with a dirt floor, drawingwater from a well. Nonetheless the familysurvived and ultimately made it to Americawhole and intact.

My parents met in Baltimore and mar-ried. Previously, my father had worked inthe garment industry in New York, while mymother worked in a factory during the dayand afterward in a bakery her parents hadstarted with her sister and brother-in-law.They subsequently moved to South Jer-sey, to a rural area called Vineland, aboutan hour from Atlantic City. They opened asmall grocery store that did not do well.They then migrated to Philadelphia, wheremy father obtained a loan from relativeswho had come over much earlier and werevery prosperous. He opened anotherlarger grocery store and this time did verywell, but he was not happy. He wantedmore out of life, and he began a new ca-reer in what would become his life’s calling,real estate development, in particularbuilding and owning rental apartments.

My father and mother worked hours thatwere not to be believed, first just to survive,and then to prosper. They understood in-tuitively without being told that successwas an endurance contest, a marathon,not some “sissy” 5K run. My mother wasmy father’s unwavering supporter, throughthick and thin. Over the years he made mil-lions of dollars in fine investments. I tendto believe his best one paid dividends forover fifty years and was acquired at a very

young age. The investment had a name,and the name was Helen.

Over the years, my father became veryskilled at trading bonds. How he learnedthis I do not know. I suspect, that given ahigh school education, he might have be-come a billionaire.

Ioften thought that my father’s motherwas a cold woman. Recently I discov-

ered from my mother that this “coldwoman” somehow managed to bring asmall suit of clothes with her from Polandto America that belonged to the son whodied in the woods. As I understand it, sheheld on to it until the day she died.

Today I believe that the “real Jews” arethe survivors and those in Israel. Theyknow what it means to be a Jew, to livewith the constant threat of death, just forbeing a Jew. Those Jews like myself, whowere born here in America and have neverfeared for their lives due to a Nazi or Arabterrorist threat, are only partial Jews.

Because of my parents, my two brothersand I never had to do without. We wereprovided with life’s necessities and more.We had the luxury of being able to spendtime reading books and going to the the-ater, as well as going to work. Grandchil-dren have gone to Duke and Harvard. Asa result of their lives I know what it meansto be a Jew. It just took me a long time tofigure it out.

I believe I come from the best of people.Many may think this, but the difference isthat I am right.

Helen and Henry Bienenfeld.

THE BEST OF PEOPLE

BY LIAT COLLINS, THE JERUSALEM POST

Three statements come to mindwhenever I write about the Holo-

caust. The first I can attribute to ElieWiesel: “The Shoah wasn’t a crime againsthumanity, but a crime against the Jews.”The second was told to me by writer HaimGuri: “Israel was created not because ofthe Shoah but in spite of it.” I don’t remem-ber who told me the third, but it is no lessvaluable: Had there been a Jewish state inthe 1930s, the Holocaust might not havehappened at all, or would have been on amuch-reduced scale.

Do I get tired of emphasizing these threepoints? Of course. But I can’t bring myselfto stop.

As history becomes replaced by narra-tives and universalism sets the tone, theselessons seem set to disappear. They arebeing transplanted by more fashionable in-clusive versions: The Holocaust does notbelong to the Jews, but to anyone who hasbeen the victim of violence; and Israelgrew out of the Nazi atrocities and not be-cause of any intrinsic right of the Jewishpeople to their own land. Sadly, it is oftenJews in the Diaspora who fail to internalizethe last message: Israel isn’t the cause ofanti-Semitism around the globe, it is theanswer.

Twice a year the world marks HolocaustRemembrance Day. To be more precise,the world marks it once – on January 27,the day Auschwitz was liberated. For thepast few years it has become a set featureon the United Nations calendar. Unfortu-nately, for the rest of the year the worldbody raises motion after motion turning Is-rael into the source of all evil. Its protectionof global peace and well-being is so ad-vanced that having finally suspendedLibya from the UN’s Human Rights Coun-

cil, it seems set to replace it with BasharAssad’s Syria.

Israel commemorates Holocaust Mar-tyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day – orYom Hashoah as we call it – in the spring,fittingly between Passover and Independ-ence Day.

Here it is marked with an eerie two-minute siren for which the traffic draws toa halt and people stand frozen. Fewer andfewer have their own dreadful memories,but this is not about the survivors. Theydon’t need a special day to remember howthey’ve been through hell. This is about thepeople who didn’t survive but nonethelesslive on in every generation.

Children in Israel learn about the Holo-caust from an early age. Even toddlers inday-care centers are taught to stand forthe siren, and schoolchildren hold cere-monies. But it’s hard to explain the horroror take in the meaning of the number ofthose killed. That’s why it’s so important tolearn the personal stories.

It’s easier to relate to the individual expe-rience than to try to comprehend how sixmillion lives ended, whole family trees cutdown at the roots.

This year, under the title “Gathering theFragments,” Yad Vashem launched a na-tional campaign to rescue personal itemsfrom the Holocaust period, calling for ordi-nary citizens to provide documents, di-aries, photos, artifacts, and works of artfrom those terrible years.

Future generations will find it ever harderto relate to the Holocaust, not just becausethe firsthand witnesses are dying out, butbecause they are being brought up in a dif-ferent world.

It is an ever-changing world dominatedby the “now” and the “me.”

When President Barack Obama hosted aSeder at the White House he coolly com-pared the uprising in the Arab world to thestory of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s a perfect

message for the Twitter generation. With theperspective of barely three months – duringwhich he changed his mind more than once– Obama takes the most epic event in morethan four millennia of Jewish history and re-duces it to its lowest possible common de-nominator, and then distorts it some more.

The world is marking 50 years since thetrial of Adolf Eichmann, a trial which

gave us terms like “the banality of evil.”Have we learned its lessons? It doesn’t

seem so when, under the same principleof universal justice, Israeli leaders cannottravel to places like Britain for fear of beingarrested for “war crimes.”

As the Shoah becomes more universal-ized it is being dumbed down – the greaterthe attempts to apply it to all, the less rele-vant it becomes. The Holocaust, as Wieselnoted, was about the systematic attempt toeradicate the Jews, their religion, and theirculture.

That was it. We can and should learnfrom it but we can’t change it.

The Shoah was not about the Palestinians,but you wouldn’t know it from the imagerythat floats around on “human rights flotillas”and among their land-based supporters.

As the Palestinians draw closer to thelikely unilateral declaration of independ-ence, they seem to grow further from ac-knowledging Israel’s right to exist. TheJewish state, as Guri noted, would havegrown faster and stronger had there beenno Holocaust; the Holocaust would havebeen smaller and shorter had there beena Jewish state to offer sanctuary.Recently, the topic of teaching the Holo-caust in Arab schools has been the focusof heated debates.

According to Palestinian Media Watch,the union of UNRWA workers in Palestin-ian schools said, “We emphasize ouradamant opposition to confusing the think-ing of our students by means of Holocauststudies in the human rights study curricu-

lum, and emphasize study of the history ofPalestine and the acts of massacre whichhave been carried out against Palestini-ans, the most recent of which was the waragainst Gaza.”

Confusing indeed.By the “war against Gaza” I assume they

mean Operation Cast Lead, a war againstHamas missile attacks from Gaza on Israel.Missile attacks that are still taking place, forthat matter. The Palestinians are not thenew Jews, and Gaza is not a ghetto.

If their version of human rights permitstargeting an Israeli school bus and indis-criminately launching rockets on any civil-ian population within reach, then you canunderstand their reluctance to add theShoah to study programs.

Several people have e-mailed me re-cently telling me they feel like this is a re-peat of the 1930s. Those who live abroadcite attacks on Jews, but above all a per-vasive feeling that permits and even fos-ters such incidents.

The tiny Jewish community of Corfumight have been surprised by the burningof Torah scrolls in the local synagoguethis month, but Jews elsewhere inGreece are no strangers to anti-Semiticsentiment. Ditto the Jews of Spain,France, Denmark, and Holland. A Cana-dian student told me she no longer wearsa Star of David on campus, and someBritish Jews have removed the mezuzotfrom outside their doors, placing them in-side where they cannot be seen.

My answer is that this is different fromthose terrible years partly because thereis an Israel, albeit threatened by Iran withnuclear genocide and constantly as-saulted by terror attacks and missiles, buta success story nonetheless. Indeed, aGallup poll released recently declared Is-rael to be the world’s seventh most “thriv-ing” country. There can be no better wayto avenge the Shoah.

LESSONS FROM THE SHOAH


(Continued from page 10)munist activities. These activities ultimatelylanded her in the Gulag town of Vorkuta,where Liora was born.

Then, KGB documents she obtained re-vealed the names of Shapira’s parents. Fi-nally, she searched Yad Vashem’s CentralDatabase of Shoah Victims Names andfound a Page of Testimony under theirnames submitted in 1956 by a SimchaShikler – Aryeh’s father.

“It definitely feels like I cracked a mysteryand now we have a better picture of ourfamily,” said Ilana Tamir, 33. “I feel like Igave my mother a gift, I gave her a family.We had a hole in our hearts, andwe didn’t have a family or blood re-lationships with anyone – and sud-denly a family was born.”

Cynthia Wroclawski, themanager of Yad Vashem’s

name recovery project, called thedatabase “the repository for theJewish people” that allowed peo-ple like Tamir to peel away crucialinformation about their own familyhistories.

“I think everyone at some point intheir life becomes interested inwhere they came from to seewhere they’re going, and the storyof Liora Tamir is one such story,”she said.

Yad Vashem’s goal is to collect all 6 mil-lion names of the Holocaust’s Jewish vic-tims, encouraging survivors to come forthand fill out Pages of Testimony for thosekilled, before their names and stories arelost forever.

The project began in 1955 and hadreached 3 million confirmed names by thetime the online database was launched in2004. More than a million more nameshave been added since. The informationcan be accessed online in English, Hebrewand Russian.

Efforts continue, primarily in Eastern Eu-rope, where name collection is particularly

difficult because Jews there were oftenrounded up, shot, and dumped in massgraves without any documentation. Thenames of Jews killed at German deathcamps, on the other hand, often remainbecause of meticulous Nazi records.

Hugging his cousin for the first time, thegray-haired Shikler said the joy of the mo-ment was mixed with sadness over thosewho couldn’t witness it. He, too, knew lit-tle about his family history.

Of their grandparents’ five children, twoperished in the Holocaust, Shikler’s fa-ther came to Israel, Tamir’s mother diedin Russia, and another sibling emigrated

to the United States, never to be heard ofagain.

The two cousins live an hour away fromeach other – Tamir in Tel Aviv, Shikler inHaifa. They say they have much to shareand much to learn.

“We are connected by blood,” Shiklersaid, in a scratchy voice. “All you need todo is listen and it all starts flowing out.”

Tamir’s daughter said the situationwould take some getting used to.

“All of a sudden we have a family tree.Until now it was just one branch,” shesaid. “I don’t know what you do with fam-ily because it is really strange and newfor us.”

Liora Tamir, right, holds the hand of her cousin Aryeh

Shikler, as they meet for the first time at the Yad Vashem

Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

ISRAELI COUSINS UNITED BY HOLOCAUST DATABASE

BY YAIR ETTINGER, HAARETZ

Afew months ago, bulldozers demol-ished a private home in the middle of

Bnei Brak. The now-vacant lot, situated be-tween two homes and closed off by a fence,bears a colorful sign: “A holy archive is to bebuilt here, with God’s help.” The six-floorbuilding to be constructed at the site, whichis only at the planning stage today, is slatedto become a first-of-its-kind facility, and whatsome say will be the symbol of a transfor-mation in the ultra-Orthodox community’s at-titude toward the Holocaust.

In fact, the Kiddush Hashem Archive is along-standing Haredi enterprise dedicatedto commemorating the Holocaust. It wasestablished by the late Rabbi MoshePrager and is run today by Rabbi DavidSkulsky. However, it is actually located ina series of places scattered around BneiBrak. The planned facility is thus a break-through, to be located in one place in thecenter of the Haredi city.

With an investment of NIS 7 million toNIS 8 million, the building is slated to serveas a museum for the public at large and afacility for the study of the Holocaust, re-plete with a new archive, a library, and amemorial wing. Since 1964, the KiddushHashem has mainly collected thousands ofdocuments and objects related to the Holo-

caust, particularly from Orthodox commu-nities. These items will be stored in thenew facility.

Esther Farbstein, a Holocaust educatorwho serves as the academic adviser to theplanned center, explains: “This representsthe next stage in the transformation of theHaredi community’s attitude toward theShoah – and it is a necessary step.” Sheadds that even though the project can beconceptualized as an alternative to estab-lished Holocaust memorial and educa-tional endeavors, including Yad Vashem inJerusalem, “I know that Yad Vashem willnot oppose this place; it will support it.”

Dr. Mali Eizenberg of the Massuah Insti-tute for the Study of the Holocaust, whoformulates curricula for female Haredi ed-ucators and has been involved in the newproject, says the facility’s establishmentwill underscore what she calls “the Haredinarrative”: the spiritual life of Orthodoxcommunities at the time of the Holocaust.

Eizenberg explains that the concept ofthe Kiddush Hashem facility originated dur-ing the Eichmann trial. Some of the peopleinvolved in the trial, including MoshePrager, who was an adviser to the prose-cutors, felt “they [Haredim] had no place inIsraeli discourse, that the Haredi narrativewas not included in Holocaust memorials,”according to Eizenberg, who devoted herdissertation at Bar-Ilan University toPrager. She recalls that he had reserva-tions about the emphasis at Yad Vashemand other institutions on ghetto rebellionsled by Zionist-affiliated organizations. Hefelt such a tendency distorted the role andactivities of religious communities, andtheir connection to the Holocaust.

Farbstein believes that for the ultra-Or-thodox community “a visit to the new facil-ity will reduce ignorance. It will presenthistorical information and offer resources.The museum there will inspire confidenceand encourage visitors to deal with thesubject of the Holocaust. They will askquestions and get answers.”

NEW BNEI BRAK CENTER TO FOCUS ONHAREDI-STYLE SHOAH COMMEMORATION

Shmuel Garnestein among the records that will

be housed in the future Holocaust center.

BY ARLENE NISSON LASSIN

Imagine growing up in a vacuum of yourparents and siblings as the only living

blood-related family members.Michael Klaiman, Alan Golombek, Bella

Solender Forman and many others know intimately of that experience because theygrew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s as children ofHolocaust survivors.

For Klaiman and Golombek, their par-ents were the sole survivors of their imme-diate and extended families. That meantthey didn’t have an uncle, an aunt, agrandparent, or a cousin — not a single liv-ing relative other than their parents andsiblings. In Klaiman’s case, his parentsbuilt a tight-knit circle of other survivorswho were treated as extended family.

“We called the adults ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle,’and we called their friends’ childrenour ‘cousins’ even though we weren’t reallyrelated,” Klaiman said.

“I knew why we didn’t have any otherfamily from an early age, and it didn’t seemstrange to me because our entire socialgroup was in the same boat.”

Forman recalls her parents invitingfriends to holiday dinners because if they didn’t, “there would be no one there.”This strange but common bond hasbrought Jewish baby boomers — calledthe second generation — together.

Pepi Nichols is a longtime leader of aHouston group — called Second Gen-eraion, when it formed more than 30 yearsago, and now called Generations After —for all descendants of Holocaust survivors.

There are more than 300 members on its mailing list.

“In Houston, survivors clung to eachother because they didn’t have family, but they were pushed to assimilate, forget thepast and move forward,” Nichols said.

“It was the same for the second genera-tion. We didn’t discuss what our parentswent through and how it affected us. Whenour group first gathered, it was importantfor us to get together to talk about it … forthe first time — it was always the elephantin the room.”

The group, which began with 30 to 40people, met with therapists to facilitate discussion.

There is a wide body of research on theeffects of growing up as the children of Holocaust survivors, said SimoneGorko, a Philadelphia psychologist who is the daughter of survivors and who special-izes in trauma therapy. She leads groupand individual therapy for children of sur-vivors and published a paper in 2000 enti-tled Myths and Realities About Offspring ofHolocaust Survivors: An Overview of Re-search Findings.

In her work she sees common behaviors

among the second generation, illustrating

some of the impact. Most survivors did not

seek out psychological help because

of the stigma attached, and trauma from

those events had a way of leaking into

the next generation.

Some commonalities Gorko sees in

children of survivors are feelings of

being separate or “different” from the rest

of the world; having an “escape plan” and

security issues; having food or hoarding is-

sues; and struggling with guilt and pain for

the suffering of their parents. Both Forman

and Golombek grew up feeling “different.”

Though her father didn’t speak about his

trauma, Forman felt it on a daily basis.

“What I remember most about my father

was his over-protectiveness , which I, of

course, resented at the time,” Forman

said. “He was always worried about me

coming home from being out with friends.I

found out later that he briefly tried to es-

cape Poland. When that didn’t work out, he

returned home to find his entire family was

gone. So, he always worried that I wouldn’t

come back.”

Part of that protectiveness was not shar-

ing bad news of any kind with her. When

he received a diagnosis of cancer, Forman

didn’t find out until two years later. Forman

had friends who were constantly told of the

horrors their parents experienced — the

opposite of her experience. Either extreme

scenario is common, Gorko said.

Golombek grew up being awakened inthe middle of the night by his parents’screams from their nightmares and even-tually sought treatment for his own trauma.

“It was very difficult and created a verydysfunctional family,” Golombek said.

Gorko said many of these children grewup to be overly responsible and were overachievers. That was the case withGolombek, a “good Jewish son out of atremendous sense of guilt.”

“There wasn’t enough I could do forthem, and I put them above my own family after I married,” he said.

Klaiman, too, felt it was his responsibilityto make his parents happy, though he says he didn’t feel that as a burden.

“My parents pushed for education, andgood Jewish spouses, it was so important to them and I didn’t want to disappoint them,”Klaiman said. “Their greatest happiness wasseeing their family expand with grandchil-dren and then great-grandchildren .”

Though many said their parents did notlose faith in God, some, like Golombek, experienced their parents’ feelings of “anangry and vengeful God.”

As Holocaust survivors are now elderly,descendants are focused on education.

“My own concern is seeing that some-how, authentically, our parents’ stories arenot lost once they die,” said Sandy Lessig,a co-leader of Generations After. “We alsotry to help our (Houston) survivors any waywe are able.”

HEALING BONDS OF THE SECOND GENERATION


(Continued from page 4)husband and three children were amongthe Einsatzgruppen’s victims in Sarnay,the Ukraine, along with countless relativesbetween Minsk and Pinsk.

Werner confronts his grandpa prior toHans’ apparent suicide, for depriving himand all German youth of normalcy by con-demning them to eternal guilt. “Because ofyou, all of you, though we were born afterthe atrocities, we feel guilty. Because ofyou, my joy will never be unmitigated. Be-cause of you, the child I see in his mother’sarms makes me think of the children yousent to their deaths” (p. 167). Werner’ssoulful anguish resonates in the sharingwith Professor Wiesel of his German stu-dents at Boston University.

Yedidyah’s intersecting drama concernshis liberating discovery that he was born inPoland to parents who gave him away fortemporary safekeeping to their house-keeper Maria. His birth parents perished inthe Holocaust and Maria, a loving andrighteous gentile, returned him to the Jew-ish people. Not all Poles returned Jewishbabies, gratefully recalling Pope John PaulII, who instructed a Catholic couple in post-war Poland to depart from “their” Jewishbaby. Yedidyah’s lingering pain of an in-complete past now resolved meetsWerner’s pain for which, however, there

may be no remedy, though both were vic-timized by the same evil forces of, inWiesel’s language, “the great turmoil” (p.30) or “the great Tragedy” (p. 43).

The author applies the Holocaust’s les-sons of guilt and responsibility, healing andhope, to the tragic conflict between Pales-tinians and Israelis, trying to acknowledgeall sides while seeking to protect the“other,” that both have suffered from. Heprobingly reflects on the opposite polesand messages of Auschwitz andJerusalem, alerting and sensitizing us to-ward mutually respectful personal and pro-fessional relations, reminding us that allthat we do bears moral consequences af-fecting human lives deserving of tendertreatment. Tackling heavy-duty themesalong with light ones in an enchantingframework of skillful interplay, Wieseleases the burden of memory without dilut-ing its sacred essence. Encompassingmuch, which is our gain but a literary risk,the author succeeds nonetheless in con-necting three pivotal countries in three con-tinents in a delicate balance. TheSonderberg Case will long echo in a re-warded reader.

Rabbi Israel Zoberman is spiritual leaderof Congregation Beth Chaverim in VirginiaBeach.

THE SONDERBERG CASE

(Continued from page 4)the Germans. In 1942, Czerniakow com-mitted suicide, no longer being able to fulfillGerman demands.

By then, the ghetto’s population con-sisted of a small class of Judenrat employ-ees, police, and smugglers, a much largergroup of Jews struggling to survive on abowl of soup and a slice of bread per day,and a slightly smaller mass of people justgetting by.

The Jewish Fighting Force, which organ-ized the uprising, was formed on July 28,1942, just as the greatest deportation inthe ghetto’s history got under way. Its topleaders were Mordechai Anielewicz,Mordechai Tenenbaum, Joseph Kaplan,Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, and Zivia Lu-betkin. Only Zuckerman survived.

The odds against them were overwhelm-ing, given the paucity of weapons and am-munition at their disposal. The Polishunderground donated a small cache of 49pistols and 50 grenades. Polish arms deal-ers filled in the gaps.

Much to SS chieftain Heinrich Himmler’sdisappointment, the fighters rolled back thefirst German assault on the ghetto. In an-ticipation of Hitler’s birthday on April 20,Himmler had planned to convey the joyful

news that the ghetto had been cleared ofJews and rendered Judenrein.

Commanding far greater resources, theNazis eventually prevailed. In what is prob-ably an exaggeration, Stroop claimed that13,929 Jews had been killed and 7,000shot while trying to escape from burningbuildings.

The official German casualty rate waslow: 16 killed and 86 injured. But historiansbelieve the toll was considerably higher.Stroop, who was hanged after the war,wanted to minimize the heroism of theJewish fighters.

When the fighting ended, he was or-dered to plow the entire area of the ghettoand replace it with a huge amusementpark. The Germans leveled the remains ofthe ghetto, but it was left to Poland’s post-war government to build a park.

Today, the only physical reminder of theghetto is a 20-meter stretch of wall theNazis forgot to destroy. The wall is hiddenbetween drab housing blocks that con-verge on it from all sides.

More than sixty years after the Nazistried to eradicate the Jews of Europe, thedefiant spirit of the uprising lives on, withBrave and Desperate skillfully distilling itsessence.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING COMMEMORATED IN EVOCATIVE BOOK

(Continued from page 7)Participatory videos urge children to

“take a stand against intolerance and in-

equality.” One such video, which drama-

tizes schoolyard bullying, challenges the

child to select a course of action: “Say

something now to the bully,” “Show my

support to the person,” “Go tell the adult

nearby,” or “Something else.”

This approach is also used to justify the

inclusion of the Holocaust in school cur-

riculums. And it is strange. We wouldn’t

expect a museum about World War II to

end with lessons about the evils of all

wars. We wouldn’t expect an examination

of American slavery to end with platitudes

about the many despicable ways people

treat others as objects. Why then here?

Why the reluctance to study history in its

context instead of diluting it with general-

ities and vague analogies? This path also

ends up encouraging those always ready

to invoke wild comparisons to Nazism

and the Holocaust.

None of this undermines the sheer

force of the chronicle to which we have

been exposed, but by making the overall

perspectives so personal — and this in-

stitution is not alone — the museum may

also prevent us from fully understanding

other aspects of the history. If we want to

find a lesson in the events, for example,

is it that individuals should not be by-

standers or that nations should not be ap-

peasers? Is the lesson that everybody

should have a social conscience, or that

a different kind of political action is

needed when such forces emerge? Was

the Holocaust a product of intolerance or

an expression of more specific archetypal

hatreds?

One of the challenges faced by Holo-

caust museums as survivors die is to un-

derstand their experience by seeing it

through more than their eyes, to examine

the past without homogenizing it with

platitudes, to offer history without homily.

THE MEMORY OF HOLOCAUST,

FORTIFIED BY ISABEL KERSHNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

A s millions of Israelis paused in re-flection on May 2 at the sound of

the siren marking Holocaust Remem-brance Day, the Internet here wasbuzzing. The first online database ofmore than half a million pieces of prop-erty lost by Holocaust victims, many inEastern Europe, had just been uploadedas a first step toward restitution.

After years of quiet diplomacy that ac-complished little, organizers of the newproject, financed by the Israeli govern-ment, said the idea was to harnesstechnology in the struggle for resti-tution and to make as much noiseas possible.

“This is an activist approach,”said Bobby Brown, executive di-rector of the Holocaust Era AssetRestitution Taskforce, known by itsacronym, Project Heart. “We be-lieve there are no secrets anymoreabout the Holocaust.”

Pointing to the success of publicdrives in the past, like the cam-paign for Soviet Jewry and the set-tlement of claims of Holocaustvictims by Swiss banks, Mr. Brownsaid the issue of property restitu-tion had to be out there on Twitterand Facebook, although negotia-tions with countries where proper-ties were located “do not have tobe made public right away.”

The project, a nonprofit global campaignof the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental body, has set up offices inMilwaukee and Brussels.

This is the first worldwide list of propertyconfiscated, looted or forcibly sold duringthe Holocaust era to be made available tosurvivors and their heirs. Compiled fromhundreds of European archives, includingtax records and voter registries, it includesreal estate and land, movable property likeart and jewelry, and intangible personalproperty like stocks, bonds, and savingsaccounts.

The project has already invited poten-tial claimants to submit their details

to the Web site, which is in 13 languages.Many of the properties in the database arelisted with the names of the original own-ers, and sometimes their professions, in-formation culled from the public records tohelp potential claimants find a match.Some 650,000 pieces of property were up-loaded in a week, and Mr. Brown hopesthat the list will grow to a million by the endof the year. About 3.3 million Jews lived inPoland alone, he noted.

Other Jewish organizations have dealtwith restitution for decades. The Confer-

ence on Jewish Material Claims AgainstGermany has focused on Germany andAustria. The World Jewish Restitution Or-ganization was established in 1993 tofocus on Eastern Europe after the collapseof the Communist governments. There hasbeen some progress in the issue of com-munity-owned property, but none on per-sonal property, according to Mr. Brown.

The subject of restitution has long been

a delicate one between governments, and

this is the first time that the Israeli govern-

ment has become involved, providing Proj-

ect Heart with an annual budget of more

than $2.5 million for three years.

About a third of the 750,000 Israelis who

are above retirement age are Holocaust

survivors, and many live in poverty.

Once the information-gathering phase is

completed, the project plans to move on

to a more aggressive stage of legal and

public action to try to get the cooperation

of governments that have not cooperated

so far. This will involve lobbying politicians

and possibly helping with class-action

lawsuits.

Lea Nass, the deputy minister for senior

citizens, said the official stamp of the gov-

ernment on the project should help ad-

vance the cause.

Even if agreements are reached

with countries, myriad questions will

remain. Each country will have to

establish criteria for verifying claims,

evaluating the property and working

out timelines for any payout.

At the news conference in

Jerusalem, Natan Sharansky, the

chairman of the Jewish Agency for

Israel, said the Holocaust “was not

only genocide, but it was also the

greatest theft in history.”

Yet there were also moments of

kindness and heroism, one of which

has recently come to light. The

granddaughter of a Polish woman

who lived just outside the Auschwitz

concentration camp during World

War II presented Mr. Brown with his

first piece of recovered property.

She said her grandmother used to leave

food for the forced laborers outside the

camp in pots hidden in the bushes. One

night, when she came to collect the empty

pots, she found a jeweled necklace that

had been placed in one of them.

The granddaughter, Magdalena Woj-

ciechowska, 40, of Lodz, Poland, returned

the necklace to Mr. Brown, saying it was

“Jewish property.” After taking the neck-

lace to New York for the news conference,

Mr. Brown said he would hand it over for

safekeeping to Yad Vashem, the Holo-

caust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remem-

brance Authority in Jerusalem.

PROPERTY LOST IN HOLOCAUST IS CATALOGED ONLINE

A Holocaust survivor at a ceremony of remembrance at the Yad

Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.


BY AMNON RUBINSTEIN, THE JERUSALEM POST

Évian, Auschwitz, the Pinelli brothersall explain why, for Jews, the Nazi era ismore significant than any other.

The painter Max Liebermann was alucky man. He died in the third year

of the Nazi era – in February 1935. TheNazi era began in January 1933, whenAdolf Hitler became chancellor of Ger-many. Liebermann was a world-famousGerman Jewish painter, the father of Ger-man impressionism and of the Berliner se-cession school. He was a committedBerliner, born and bred in the capital. Helived with his wife Martha in the PariserPlatz, in an apartment overlooking theBrandenburg Gate (when asked for his ad-dress, he would say: “I live in Berlin,” firstturning to the right). He was born in thesame house his father and grandfatherwere born in. The Liebermanns also had asummer house in fashionable Wannseedistrict – not far from another Jewish-owned villa where the infamous Final So-lution conference took place some yearslater. When he saw from his window theNazi march of victory, he commented: “Icannot eat as much as I would like tovomit.”

In the first year of the Nazi era, he re-signed from the presidency of the PrussianArts Academy to protest the academy’s de-cision not to exhibit works by Jewishartists. None of the members of the Acad-emy showed any interest or sympathy. Helived to see the first measures takenagainst Jews by the new regime, butpassed away before it enacted the Nurem-

berg laws, and while many Germans stillbelieved the Nazis were a passing phase.

Liebermann was indeed a lucky man.Before he died, he wrote the then-mayorof Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengof: “With much sor-row, I realize that I woke up from the dreamof assimilation to a nightmare.”

His surviving wife was not that lucky. Inthe seventh year of the Nazi era, she wasforced to sell the Wannsee villa to a Ger-man Aryan. In the twelfth year, at age 85and incapacitated by a stroke, she was told

that the police would come and deport herto the Terezinstat concentration camp.They came in the afternoon with astretcher to carry her out. Despite herweakness, she managed to commit sui-cide by swallowing barbiturates beforethey dumped her on the stretcher. Her lastwords were: “If I cannot live in Germany, atleast I can die here.”

The Nazi era is certainly more relevantto mankind than any other. This was the

era in which the word “not” was struck offthe commandment “thou shall not kill.”And, therefore, it divides human historyinto “before” and “after” more significantlythan any other time. To Jews, this divisionis especially relevant: the Holocaust wasnot like a road accident, but a culminationof stages of hatred, persecution and bru-tality. To be a Jew after the Holocaust isdifferent from the days preceding the Naziera. True, Jews were not the only victimsof the murderous Nazi offensive: millions

of non-Jews – includingGermans – were also killed.But all Jews were by defini-tion sentenced to die be-cause of their birth. And inthis they were alone.

And there is another im-portant distinction: forJews, the stepping stonesof the Nazi era were notconfined to the horrificevents of World War II, butextended to events whichtook place before and afterthe war.

From a Jewish point ofview, Évian is a name

as relevant as Auschwitz. In July 1938,President Roosevelt convened an interna-tional conference in Évian-les-Bains todeal with the plight of “refugees” – theword Jewish was not mentioned in the in-vitation. The conference ended with a flatrefusal to give shelter to these refugeesfrom Germany and Austria. These peoplebelonged to the elite of Europe and wouldhave enriched the arts, industry, and sci-ence of any host country. They were re-

fused shelter only because of their Jew-ishness.

Europe at the time was full of homelessrefugees, but only the Jewish displacedpersons had no home to go to. Whenthey went back to their former homecountries, they found them Jew-less andinfested by the same old hatred, culmi-nating in pogroms in a few cases. GreatBritain closed the gates of Palestine tothese refugees, thus preventing themfrom joining the Jewish Yishuv – the onlycommunity ready to give them shelter.And one cannot forget the circles in thepre-reconciliation Vatican, which encour-aged Catholic monasteries not to returnJewish children – who were shelteredthere during the war – to their families.There were many such cases, and weshall never know how many childrenwere not claimed back because all theirrelatives had perished. The most notori-ous case was the refusal of a Frenchmonastery to hand over the two Pinellibrothers to their Jewish relatives. It tooka long time for the relatives to get custodyof the two orphans. Only in July 1953 –the 20th year of the Nazi era – were thebrothers allowed to join their cousins inIsrael.

These stepping stones – Évian,

Auschwitz, the Pinelli brothers – explain

why, for Jews, the Nazi era is more sig-

nificant than any other.

The writer is a Professor of Law at theInterdisciplinary Center, Herzliya and, aformer minister of education and Knessetmember, as well as the recipient of the2006 Israel Prize in Law.

STEPPING STONES OF THE NAZI ERA

A portrait of Martha Liebermann by Anders Zorn. Through her

suicide before she was taken, she escaped the Nazi era.

BY EDWARD SEROTTA, THE JERUSALEM POST

Seventy years ago in May, Hana Mon-tijo had not quite reached her first

birthday. Her parents, Menahem and Flora,lived in a mostly Muslim neighborhood ona steep hill overlooking Sarajevo. Theywere a poor family; Menahem worked asa tailor. Matilda and Breda Kalef were 10-and nine-year-old sisters, and lived in alarge house in Belgrade’s Jewish quarter,Dorcol. Their family owned a textile store,and everyone – uncles, grandparents, par-ents – worked there.

And in the southern Yugoslav Macedon-ian town of Bitola, Roza Kamhi and BenoRuso were a pair of 21-year-olds, deeplyin love, and planning for their future. All ofthem were Jewish.

Then came Nazi Germany’s invasion ofYugoslavia in April 1941, and immediatelyafter, its invasion of Greece. The Wehrma-cht was accompanied, or followed by, theSS and foreign ministry diplomats. Afterthe Royal Yugoslav Army collapsed in twoweeks, regular soldiers, committed Nazis,and professional diplomats all began plan-ning how to murder every living Jew in Yu-goslavia, and then in Greece.

Who were these Jews? Albahari, Arditi,Farhi, Kanhi, Alvo, Amouli, Kalef, Saltiel,Molho, Behar, Montijo, Kabilo, Finci –these were Sephardic family names, de-scendants of those who had been expelledfrom Spain in 1492. Unwanted by most ofEurope, they had sailed east and found ahome in Balkan lands, then ruled by theOttomans.

For the 450 years they had lived in theBalkans, the Sephardim kept their tradi-tions, their recipes, their customs, eventheir Spanish dialect, Ladino, or Judeo-

Español, all while becoming part and par-cel of Balkan city life.

In the north, their great city was Sara-jevo, with a Jewish population of 10,000.But the greatest of all Sephardic commu-nities was Salonika, or Thessaloniki as itwas known after it became part of Greecein 1912. More than 53,000 Jews lived inthis bustling port city on the Aegean.

Through the centuries ofthe Ottoman empire’s ex-pansion, Balkan Jewishcommunities flourished.During the empire’s longdecline, as industrializednorthern Europe sped pastthe Ottoman economies inthe south, most Jews in theregion became impover-ished. But in these lands,there had never been apogrom against them. Theyhad never been forced tolive in a ghetto.

What makes the story ofHana in Sarajevo, Bredaand Matilda in Belgrade,and Roza and Beno inBitola so different is thatthey survived the Holo-caust, whereas more than 96 percent oftheir fellow Balkan Sephardic Jews did not.

The four women – all alive today and stillliving in the Balkans – owe their survival toMuslim and Christian neighbors whorisked their own lives to protect them. Eachof these women has a story to tell.

Breda and Matilda, for instance, willnever forget that day in March, 1942. Theirmother had gotten them false papers sothey could pass as Catholics, and thatmorning was taking them to the Jewishhospital, where the girls’ crippled father

and his mother were imprisoned. Bredaand Matilda had hoped to visit them, butsomething was happening. German sol-diers had blocked off the street, and thegirls and their mother hid behind a curtainin a nearby house. They watched as sol-diers loaded the patients and doctors intoa windowless van, and the girls saw it driveoff. This was the first use of the carbon

monoxide gas vans in Serbia, and thiswould be the preferred method for murder-ing around 6,200 Serbian Jewish women,their children, and the handicapped.Beno Ruso, Roza’s boyfriend, didn’t thankanyone for hiding him during the war.That’s because he picked up a rifle, joinedTito’s communist partisans and foughtback.

By the time the war ended in May 1945,Beno, all of 24 years old, had reached therank of general. Then he raced home toMacedonia to look for Roza.

Where approximately 150,000 Jewslived between Sarajevo and Thes-

saloniki in 1940, today there are less than7,000. Yet these remnant communities area remarkable lot. One reason is they werere-established by former partisans. Thatmeant they were – and still are – a feistybunch. When war came to Sarajevo in the1990s, for instance, a handful of Holocaust

survivors sent most of theirfamily members to safety, thenopened a nonsectarian hu-manitarian aid agency to helpeveryone – Muslims, Serbs,and Croats. In fact, all ethnicgroups staffed their aid agency,La Benevolencija, and theydoled out food, medicine, andjokes in equal measure.

No sooner had the formerYugoslav republic of Macedo-nia become an independentcountry in 1991 than a smallband of Jews – some of themaging partisans – made theirway to the new governmentand asked for support to builda Holocaust museum so theycould honor all those who hadperished. It took a few years to

write all the legislation to return heirlessproperty to the Jewish community, but theanswer was yes.

Although General Beno Ruso did not liveto see the new museum open its doors inApril, his girlfriend, who had become hiswife, Roza, did attend. Although she is 89years old and blind, her grandchildren andchildren escorted her through the mu-seum, and read to her the panels that toldtales of Sephardic Balkan life, which hadblossomed for 450 years.

Until 70 years ago.

KILLING JEWS IN THE BALKANS, SAVING JEWS IN THE BALKANS

Left: Dona Bat Kalef with her daughters Matilda and Breda in Belgrade. Right:

Roza Kamhi in her Skopje apartment with granddaughter Jasmina Tajkovski.

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Martyrdom & Resistance

Eli Zborowski, Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the International Society

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

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli ZborowskiMarvin ZborowskiMark Palmer Sam Skura**Israel KrakowskiWilliam MandellSam HalpernIsidore Karten**Norman BelferJoseph Bukiet**

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


BY DAN MORGAN, CNN

Hidden in a basement in central TelAviv, amidst the smell of sawdust

and varnish, is a musical workshopwhose owner and his son have spent thepast 15 years tracking down violinsplayed by Jewish Holocaust victims andbringing the instruments back to life.

“The Germans confiscated from theJewish people every violin, viola, cellothey could and we are talking about thou-sands, gone with the wind,” said AmnonWeinstein, working amongst the dozensof violins and bows hanging from thewalls and ceilings of his unique work-space.

Weinstein is a luthier, an artisan andcraftsman of string instruments. He is arelic of a bygone era, whose moustacheand spectacles do little to hide his eccen-tric streak. He says almost all of the sur-vivors who played in the concentrationcamps owed their lives to their instru-ments.

“The Germans needed them, to cheatthe Jewish people. In the camps, if some-body was playing the violin nobody wouldthink the next door was a gas chamber.That was the plan of these horrible peo-ple,” said Weinstein, who lost close to200 members of his family during theHolocaust.

Weinstein’s own journey began afterhiring a German apprentice who con-vinced him to lecture the German associ-ation of luthiers in Dresden on the subjectof how German and Austrian instrumentsfound their way to Israel.

Bronislaw Huberman, a violin prodigywho was born in Poland in 1882, and Ar-turo Toscanini, the acclaimed Italian con-ductor, decided to form a philharmonicorchestra in Palestine in 1936, Weinsteinexplains.

“Of course they could never have fath-omed what the Nazis had planned for the

Jewish people during the Holocaust, butthey knew the situation was deteriorat-ing,” he said.

When the first rehearsals were heldin 1936, most musicians coming

to Palestine from Europe were still veryfond of the German violin makers andbow makers, Weinstein said.

Weinstein’s father, Moshe, emigrated in1938 from Vilnius, then a part of Poland.

Also a luthier, Moshe began servicing theinstruments of Huberman and Toscanini’sorchestra.

As news of the Nazis’ savage campaignagainst the Jews of Europe reachedPalestine, these musicians refused tocontinue playing German instruments,said Weinstein.

“People who playedon German instru-ments either brokethem or burned them,and some came to myfather telling him theywould throw themaway if he did not buythem,” said Weinstein.

After Weinstein’s ini-tial lecture, helaunched a radio ap-peal for people tocome forward withmore stories about“Holocaust violins.”

Only then did hestart receiving instru-ments that wereplayed in camps, andthe true search for survivors began.

Scouring warehouses, antiques mar-kets, and violin shops, he found violinsbelonging to Jewish artisans in Polandand to Klezmer families in central Eu-rope, from the ghettos in Warsaw andconcentration camps such as Auschwitz.

Each of their violins, some of whichbear the Star of David, tells another ex-traordinary story. The luthier claims he

can identify a violin’s history from thescuffs and scars on it.

“Today I am like a policeman. I canidentify which one suffered, which didn’t.Those which were in the Holocaust camein horrible condition, so the workshopmade the decision to make a concert in-strument out of each one,” said Wein-stein, who now safeguards more than 26of these instruments.

By his own estimation, he has volun-teered the equivalent of almost $200,000in labor on this project, but the more timepasses, the harder finding these instru-ments becomes.

Following the end of World War II in1945, very few survivors came to

Palestine. They could not fathom anotherwar, and so a large percentage of themwent to the United States, Weinsteinsaid.

Upon arrival, the majority of them “putthe violin in the attic and forgot about it,”he said.

Violins, like memories, faded in thedecades following the war as yearspassed and generations that followedknew little about the instruments left be-hind. Many of them were thrown away,but some found their way to antique deal-ers and violin makers, where Weinsteintracked them down.

“It is a very complicated period that isimpossible to understand, impossible toexplain, but the sound of the violin is tak-ing us back to this time. Today it is difficultto convince people something like thishappened. This is our mission, thateverybody will understand a little bit the

friction. The violin is a friction, but you canhear a sound and it is making life a littlebit more understandable,” he said.

The “Violins of Hope” have been playedin orchestras throughout the world, in-cluding Turkey, Switzerland, Israel, andthe United States.

Weinstein says his search will continueso that their music and memories cancontinue to be shared.

FORGOTTEN STRINGS RECALL HOLOCAUST HORROR

Amnon spends much of his time on the phone with clients around the world, trying to track down

the increasingly rare Holocaust violins.

Amnon’s private collection contains dozens of violins – some of which,

like the Holocaust violins he repairs and restores, bear the Star of David

symbol on them.

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