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TOGETHER 1visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
APRIL 2009 VOLUME 23 NUMBER 1
American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, New York 10001
NON-PROFIT
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
NEW YORK, N.Y.
PERMIT NO. 4246
cont’d on p. 4 cont’d on p. 9
Pope tells Jews Holocaust denial is“intolerable”By PHILIP PULLELLA
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, trying to defuse a controversy over
a bishop who denies the Holocaust, said recently that “any denial or minimization
of this terrible crime is intolerable,” especially
if it comes from a clergyman.
The pope also confirmed for the first time
that he was planning to visit Israel. Vatican
sources say the trip is expected for May. It
would be the first by a pope since John Paul
visited in 2000.
Benedict made the comments in his first
meeting with Jews since the controversy over
traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson began
in late January. Williamson denies the full extent
of the Holocaust and says there were no gas
chambers.
The pope told members of the Conference
of Presidents: “The hatred and contempt for
men, women and children that was manifested
in the Shoah (Holocaust) was a crime against
humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the
tradition of the Holy Scriptures...” cont’d on p. 7
ISRAELI GOVERNMENT LAUNCHESPUBLIC CAMPAIGN ON HOLOCAUSTSURVIVORS’ RIGHTSIn the wake of the Government’s November 2007 decision to maximize the rights
due to Holocaust survivors in order to see to their welfare and improve their
quality of life, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Social Welfare and Social Services
Ministry, the Pensioners Affairs Ministry and the Finance Ministry initiated on 15
February 2009 a wide-ranging public campaign.
The campaign will make use of Hebrew and Russian television, radio and
Internet channels and is designed not only for survivors themselves, but their
family members as well. The campaign was prepared by the Israel Government
Advertising Agency and will be conducted by the PMO National Information
Directorate.
The Government has made dealing with Holocaust survivors one of its most
important goals. Initially, Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Ra’anan Dinur
chaired a committee on the matter, and Social Welfare and Social Services Ministry
Director-General Itzkovitz prepared a report. Their combined efforts, along with
the adoption of the Dorner Commission Report, led to an increased basket of
services and assistance for Holocaust survivors.
Approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel today. However,
inquiries indicate that, despite the significant enlargement of the aid basket, many
survivors have yet to take full advantage of their rights. To this end, a national
telephone center was recently established.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “Establishing the telephone center is the
BY CHARLES BREMNER, TIMES ONLINE
The French State was responsible for deporting Jews during the Second
World War, the top judicial authority ruled for the first time recently, but it dismayed
families of victims by declaring that they had already been compensated.
The decision by the Council of State, the final arbiter on civil law matters,
made formal a doctrine that has been accepted by successive governments since
1995.
It was advising on a case brought by Madeleine Hoffman-Glemane, 75, one
of hundreds of victims who have sued recently for damages over their arrests
and deportation during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944.
The council called for a “solemn recognition of the responsibility of the State”.
France was “responsible for damages caused by actions which did not result
from the occupiers’ direct orders but facilitated deportation from France of people
who were victims of anti-Semitic persecution,” it said.
The ruling endorses a view that was proclaimed by the former President
Jacques Chirac when he took office in 1995. Before that the crimes of the
collaborationist Vichy Government had been acknowledged but they had been
ascribed widely to an outlaw regime and not to the French State.
The late President Mitterrand who left office in 1995 and who served as an
official of the Vichy regime, refused to accept the responsibility of the nation for
more than 75,000 people who were taken to Nazi death camps. Most were arrested
by French police on the orders of state officials and few survived.
Since taking office in 2007 President Sarkozy, whose mother is Jewish, has
ordered acts of remembrance of the French role in the Holocaust but during his
election campaign he said that France should stop apologising for itself because it
had never been involved in a policy of genocide.
To the anger of campaigners the council advised the court dealing with Ms
Hoffman-Glemane’s case that deportees had already received enough
“Jewish war victims have had enoughcompensation,” French court says
LITHUANIA TO PAY $41 MILLION FORSEIZED PROPERTYMOSCOW (JTA)—Lithuania agreed to pay $41 million over 10 years to theJewish community to compensate for seized property.
The Ministry of Justice recently agreed to make payments to the Jewishcommunity from January 2011 to March 2021 for property taken over decades ofoppression. Draft legislation on property restitution has languished for years.
The Lithuanian government had returned synagogues and other places ofworship to the Jewish community. Many other properties were nationalized afterWorld War II and under decades of Soviet rule.
Minister of Justice Remigijus Shimashius told Jewish leaders in late Januarythat the administration of President Valdas Adamkus wanted to move forwardwith restitution despite the current crippling financial crisis in the country.
“This matter has dragged on for 10 years, but I believe that the currentgovernment in power wants to break the ice,” the minister said, according to theRegnum News Agency.
The proposed payment accounts for one-third of the average market value of136 properties once owned by the Jewish community, including facilities forreligious, cultural and educational purposes. The compensation excludes restitutionfor parcels of land.
TOGETHER 2 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
TOGETHERApril 2009 Volume 23 Number 1
c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s
TOGETHER
AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 · New York, New York 10001 · 212 239 4230
Founding President
BEN MEED, l“z
Honorary President
VLADKA MEED
President
SAM E. BLOCH
Honorary Chairman
ERNEST MICHEL
Chairman
ROMAN KENT
Honorary Senior
Vice President
WILLIAM LOWENBERG
Senior Vice President
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Regional Vice-Presidents
MEL MERMELSTEIN
JEAN BLOCH ROSENSAFT
MARK SARNA
CHARLES SILOW
Counsel
ABRAHAM KRIEGER
Director of Communications
JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
Editor Emeritus
ALFRED LIPSON, l“z
Publication Committee
SAM E. BLOCH, ChairmanHirsh Altusky, l“z
Jeanette Friedman
Dr. Alex Grobman
Roman Kent
Max K. Liebmann
Vladka Meed
Dr. Romana Strochlitz Primus
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Dr. Philip Sieradski
Vice Presidents
EVA FOGELMAN
ROSITTA E. KENIGSBERG
ROMANA STROCHLITZ PRIMUS
MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
STEFANIE SELTZER
ELAN STEINBERG
JEFFREY WIESENFELD
Secretary
JOYCE CELNIK LEVINE
Treasurer
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Pope and Holocaust Denial by Philip Pullella...............................................1
Israeli Government Launches Campaign........................................................1
Lithuania to Pay $41 Million..........................................................................1
Jewish War Victims in Farnce Paid Enough by Charles Bremner...................1
Uphold the Legacy of Remembrance by Sam Bloch......................................3
Claims Conference News.............................................................................4
From a Place of Fire and Weeping by Marc E. Agronin.................................4
Resitution of Holocaust-Era Jewish Communal Property by Herbert Block.....5
Withold Pilecki by Tamil Tchorek..................................................................6
Menachem Rosensaft Named Counsel of the WJC........................................7
The Holocaust Revisionism of Hollywood by Rod Lurie.................................8
Foundations acquires letter exhibit by Sohpia Toreen.....................................8
Hillel Kook and Stephen Wise by Yehuda Bauer............................................9
The Ambassador by Zeyno Baran & Onur Sazak.......................................10
The Wedding Gown That Made History by Helen Schwimmer.......................11
Rosian Zernert by Susie Davidson.............................................................12
Nazi fficer Who Saved Jews Honored.........................................................12
The Midwife from Lodz by Dr. Salomea Kape-Jay......................................13
Moussa dn Odette Abadi: A Remembrance...................................................14
Vilna - Jerushalaim de Lite by Lily M. Margules..........................................15
Letters.......................................................................................................15
In Memoriam...................................................................... ........................16
Announcements..........................................................................................19
The End of Days by Felicia Figlarz Anchor...............................................20
Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich).............................................21
Dear Friends:
If you are moving or have already moved and wish to continue
receiving Together, please contact us with your new address. The
post office does not forward Together.
If someone has passed away, please contact us with the
information. This is important for the Registry so as to preclude
unnecessary mailings.
Thank you.
NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
NEEDING ASSISTANCE
Financial assistance is available for needy Holocaust survivors. If you
have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or other
emergency, you may be eligible for a one-time grant. These grants are funded
by the Claims Conference.
If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in your area, please
discuss your situation with them. If there is no such agency nearby,
mail a written inquiry describing your situation to:
Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance
P.O. Box 765
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156
ELLIS ISLAND PROJECTS FOR SURVIVORSAND THEIR DESCENDANTS
The Museum at Ellis Island is seeking Holocaust survivors who came throughEllis Island when they arrived in the United States. They are also seekingvolunteers to transcribe and translate Yiddish recordings made by immigrantsfor immigrants. If you are interested in participating in either of these projectsCONTACT: ERIC BYRON, MUSEUM DIVISION212-363-3206 EXT. 153 or email: eric_byron@nps.gov
The Survivors Registry maintains the single most comprehensivelisting of Holocaust survivors in the world. The Registry has existedfor over two decades and currently contains over 185,000 names of survivorsand their spouses and descendants (including children, their spouses, andgrandchildren).
Visitors to the Registry’s public area at the Holocaust Museum canaccess basic information about survivors and their family membersvia touch-screen computers. This information is based on registration formssubmitted by survivors and their relatives. The Registry is an invaluableresource for survivors still searching for family and friends, as well as forhistorians and genealogists.
Further information can be found at http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/registry
We would be grateful—and it would be a great benefit to AmericanGathering members as they continue to search for missing relatives—if you would distribute our registration forms to those who are not yet listedin the Registry. Registration forms are available in Hebrew and severaladditional languages as well as in English.
Contact: Laura M. Green, Collections Manager, Survivors RegistryUNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
202-488-6164or the American Gathering at 212-239-4230
Please send e-mail addresses to: mail@americangathering.org
REGISTRY
Annual Gathering
in Observance of Yom HaShoah
Holocaust Remembrance Day
Sunday, April 26, 20093:00 p.m.
at Congregation Emanu-El
Fifth Avenue and 65th Street
New York, NY
Sponsored by the
Museum of Jewish Heritage-
A Living Memorial to the
Holocaust
American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors and
Their Descendants
and
Warsaw Ghetto Resistance
Organization
For more information or
to reserve tickets
please call 646.437.4227between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. (Monday -Friday) or e-mail
AGR@MJHNYC.org
Tickets @ $36 must be reserved by April 20. Let no one say that the past is dead. The past is all about us
and what is within us. Haunted by memories, I know this
now, that the present is not the all of me... — Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Australian poet, political activist, artist and educator
TOGETHER 3visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
Preserve RemembranceConserve Authentic Places
Assume ResponsibilityPresented at the International Conference of
Holocaust Remembrance
The German Bundestag, Berlin
January 27, 2009We, the undersigned, survivors of German
concentration camps, women and men, represent
international prisoner committees of the concentration
camps and their sub-camps. We remember our
murdered families and the millions of victims who
were killed in these places of ashes. Their persecution
and murder, for racial political, religious, social,
biological and economic reasons, and a criminal war
took the world to the brink of disaster and left behind
an appalling toll.
Following our liberation, we pledged to build a
new world of peace and freedom: we became
Involved in order to prevent any repetition of these
incomparable crimes. Throughout our lives we have
born witness; throughout our lives we have made
every effort to Inform young people about our
experiences, about what we encountered, and about
the causes.
Precisely for this reason, we are exceedingly
pained and angered to recognize today the world has
learned too little from our history. Precisely for this
reason remembrance and commemoration must
remain the equal task of both citizens and states.
Today the former camps are story witnesses: they
are scenes of the crimes, international cemeteries,
museums and places of learning, they are evidence
against denial and the playing down of facts, and they
must be presented throughout time. They are places
of scientific research and educational commitment.
Looking after the educational interests of the visitors
must be sufficiently ensured.
The incomparable crimes against humanity
inflicted by the National Socialists — and above all in
this context, the Holocaust — were carried out under
German responsibility. Germany has done much to
come to terms with its history. We expect that the
Federal Republic and its citizens will continue honoring
their responsibility with special commitment in the
future as well.
But Europe also has its task. Instead of asserting
our ideals for democracy, peace, tolerance, self-
determination and human rights, history is too often
used to sow discord between human beings, groups
and peoples. We object to the comparative assignment
of blame, to the creation of hierarchies in the
experiences of suffering, of competition between
victims and to the confusion of historical phases. Forthis reason we endorse the words of the former
President of the European Parliament, Simone Weil,when she addressed the German Parliament in 2004and appealed for the transmission of memory:
“Europe should recognize and stand by its mutualpast as a whole, with all the bright and dark sides;every member state should know about its mistakes
and failures, and acknowledge they are at peace withtheir past, so that they can be at peace with theirneighbors.”
Our ranks are thinning. In all areas of ourassociations, at national and international levels, peopleare coming to our side to preserve remembrance:
they are giving us faith in the future; they are carryingon our work. The dialogue that was begun with usmust be continued with them. They need the support
of state and society for this work.
BY SAM E. BLOCH
President, World Federation of Bergen Belsen
Associations, President, American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
Meeting here today, in the heart of the free
German democracy, to commemorate alt those who
perished during the Holocaust, our thoughts go back
to the fires of the crematoria at Auschwitz and
Treblinka, to the mass graves of Belsen
and Babi Yar, and to all the places of death
and destruction. Our thoughts go back
to the more than 4000 destroyed Jewish
communities. For us, our martyrs will
always be with us.
We choose to remember and make
others remember all those who died,
lonely and abandoned by a cruel world
that stood by in silence and indifference.
When the Nazi murderers and their
accomplices destroyed our homes and
our communities, and annihilated, with so much cruelty
and barbarism, six million of our martyrs—innocent
men, women, children—they obliterated their hopes
and dreams, and the infinite creativity, beauty, and
knowledge that they could have contributed to the
betterment of the world.
The Nazis tried to destroy our human dignity, to
efface every vestige of humanity—all this before
taking our lives with such bestiality.
“Even if I die in Auschwitz,” exclaimed one of
our martyrs before execution, “it would be as a human
being who still believes in decency and humankind. I
will hold on to my dignity to the last minute of my
earthly life.”
These simple worlds of courage convey the full
spirit of defiance and resistance against the
Nazi tyranny.
There is a danger that, with the passage of time,
their and our suffering and struggle will be forgotten.
But as long as we live, and as long as there will be in
this world free people who care, we the survivors,
our children, and grandchildren will not stop reminding
the world of the Holocaust, and of man’s capacity
for inhumanity.
What about us, the Survivors? We emerged from
the ashes of the Holocaust, scarred with anguish for
our lost parents, brothers, sisters, and children. And
yet, we approached the return to life with courage,
tenacity, and spiritual strength. We carried a deep
pride in our Jewish identity, values, and tradition,
which inspired us to choose life, to believe in the
future, as we rebuilt our lives, brought children into
the world, created new families, and established new
homes and communities around the world. We, the
survivors of the Holocaust, demonstrated a unique
vitality, as we became productive members of society,
making notable contributions in alt walks of life. If
we are here today at such a gathering - as a living
bridge between the past and the future -
it is not only because of who we are, but
also because of what we are.
The story of our return to life is told
in the extraordinary Bergen-Belsen
Memorial Museum. The Museum is
unique for telling two stories: the grim
story of death at the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp and the inspiring story
of the rebirth of the survivors after the
liberation in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced
Persons Camp. Having emerged from
death and destruction, the survivors of Belsen stood
for life, rebirth and remembrance—an enduring
message that we hope will inspire the generations to
come. On behalf of the World Federation of Bergen-
Belsen Survivors Associations, and the American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, we express
our most profound gratitude to the authorities of
Niedersachsen for establishing the outstanding
Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum. Our sincere
appreciation goes to all those who labored with so
much dedication for many years to see it finally
inaugurated last year.
In recalling the past. we must reflect on certain
present day realities. Is racism less prevalent than in
the past? It is hatred that culminated in the Holocaust.
It started with speeches, the burning of books, the
burning of synagogues—and ended with the burning
of people.
The conclusion we may draw from the Holocaust,
its aftermath, and those who dare to defame our
tragedy, is the need for continual vigilance and
effective activism. Together, we must transform our
individual memories into collective action. Today, let
us affirm our solidarity and partnership in the sacred
task of remembrance, with a shared commitment to
building a world of tolerance. Justice, and
understanding. Let us uphold our legacy—from
Holocaust to rebirth—with renewed strength and
dedication, and together, let us build a better future
for all humankind.
UPHOLD THE LEGACY OF REMEMBRANCE
Noach Flug (Jerusalem)
International Auschwitz Committee
Sam Bloch (New York)
World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations
Bertrand Herz (Paris)
International Buchenwatd Corrmittee
Max Mannhelmer (Munich)
International Dachau Committee
Uri Chanoch (Jerusalem)
International Dachau Sub-Camps Committee
Jack Terry (New York)
International Flossenburg Committee
Albert van Hoey (Brussels)
International Committee Mittelbau-Dora
Robert Pincon (Tours)
International Neuengamme Committee
Annette Chalut (Paris)
Intemational Ravensbruck Committee
Pierre Gouffault (Paris)
International Sachsenhausen Committee
The last eye witnesses appeal to Germany, to all European states and to the international community, to
continue preserving and honoring the human gift of remembrance and commemoration into the future. We
ask young people to carry on our struggle, against Nazi ideology and for a just, peaceful and tolerant world, a
world that has no place for anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and right-wing extremism. This is our bequest.
TOGETHER 4 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Conference on Jewish Material ClaimsAgainst Germany
PLEASE SEND YOURE-MAIL ADDRESS AND THOSE OF YOUR
FAMILY MEMBERS TO
AMGATHTOGETHER@AOL.COMYOU CAN ALSO SEND MATERIAL
FOR CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION
The Claims Conference is allocating more than
$428,000 to assist Nazi victims, living in areas under
missile attack from Gaza, who may be especially
traumatized by the current conflict. These new grants
build on the Claims Conference’s support over the
past years to help Nazi victims in southern Israel cope
with the additional distress evoked by their present
situation.
Claims Conference assistance includes:
* $268,000 to pay for full memberships in 2009 for
Nazi victims in “supportive communities.” Supportive
communities provide emergency life buttons, enabling
elderly residents to easily contact (without use of a
telephone) emergency medical assistance directly.
Additional services also include home modifications,
counseling, security, and socialization programs. The
Claims Conference allocated $250,000 for this
program in 2008.
* The Claims Conference has enhanced its ongoing
support of AMCHA, the National Israeli Center for
Psychological Support of Nazi Victims, with a $50,000
grant for 2009, specifically to provide psychosocial
support to Nazi victims living near Gaza. In 2008, the
Claims Conference funded a new AMCHA branch
in Sderot.
* Special emergency allocations in 2009 of $36,000
to provide shatter-proof glass windows in three
nursing homes: Beit Avot Ashdod, Association for the
Welfare of the Aged in Beersheva, and Neve Oranim
in Gedera in southern Israel. A total of 290 Nazi
victims live in these nursing homes.
* Hunger relief programs in Ashkelon and Ashdod.
For 2009, the Claims Conference allocated $74,088
to Eshel Ashdod and $32,256 to Eshel Ashkelon for
food programs that include hot meals for Nazi victims,
a program that can be of great comfort in a traumatic
time. For 2007 and 2008, these agencies received a
combined $268,000 for hunger relief for Nazi victims.
Previous and ongoing Claims Conference
assistance for Nazi victims in southern Israel include
the following projects:
* In 2008, the Claims Conference allocated $211,000
to expand and reinforce the day center of the
Association for the Elderly in Sha’ar Hanegev, where
the majority of attendees are Nazi victims. In addition,
the day center of the Association for the Elderly in
Sderot received a $38,000 grant toward reinforcing
the building against attacks. These centers were
established with Claims Conference allocations in
1998 of $140,000 and $100,000 respectively. Last year,
the Claims Conference also initiated a program to
cover the out-of-pocket costs for low-income victims
of Nazi persecution who attend these day centers.
* The Claims Conference is working toward funding
reinforcement of the emergency room at Barzilai
Medical Center in Ashkelon to withstand rocket and
missile attacks. This is part of a larger effort toward
reinforcing and securing four hospitals in Israel in
conflict areas, undertaken in partnership with the
Prime Minister’s office. Barzilai serves hundreds of
Nazi victims every year. In 2005, the Claims
Conference allocated $810,000 to upgrade the internal
medicine department, where the majority of patients
are Nazi victims, and another $10,000 to renovate
the physiotherapy department. The Claims
Conference had previously allocated funds to Barzilai
to upgrade the geriatric and physiotherapy
departments in order to better treat Nazi victims in
the area. In 2008, the Claims Conference approved
a grant of $140,000 toward equipment for Barzilai’s
Intensive Respiratory Care Unit and Occupational
Therapy Department. To date, in sum, Claims
Conference allocations to Barzilai exceed $1.6 million.
* The Foundation for the Benefit of Nazi Victims in
Israel uses approximately NIS 1.2 million yearly from
its Claims Conference allocations to provide nursing
care to Nazi victims in the Gaza region.
* In 2006, allocations of $499,800 were made to three
Amigour sheltered housing complexes in Ashkelon
to provide protected areas on every floor of the
complex in order to shelter residents during attacks.
In 2008, the Claims Conference allocated an additional
$144,025 toward this project. This is part of a larger
Claims Conference allocation of over $1.8 million to
construct protected areas in 13 complexes in
vulnerable regions of Israel.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany (Claims Conference) represents
world Jewry in negotiating for compensation and
restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their
heirs. The Claims Conference administers
compensation funds, recovers unclaimed Jewish
property, and allocates funds to institutions that provide
social welfare services to Holocaust survivors and
preserve the memory and lessons of the Shoah.
culmination of a long process, during which this
Government, for the first time, acted to recognize
Holocaust survivors. For over a year, the Social
Welfare and Social Affairs, Pensioners and Finance
ministries, together with the PMO, have worked to
find the appropriate formula for properly assisting
Holocaust survivors living in Israel. We all wanted to
allocate many resources, and it is important to note
that Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On showed special
sensitivity on the issue and helped find the budget
that will allow the Government to provide many rights
and support services to Holocaust survivors. I am
proud to have headed the Government that has
corrected an historic injustice and is providing proper
assistance to the survivors.”
The national telephone center may be contacted
at *9444 or via http://www.zchut.gov.il/.
ISRAELI GOVERNMENT LAUNCHESPUBLIC CAMPAIGN ON HOLOCAUSTSURVIVORS’ RIGHTScont’d from p. 1
cont’d on p. 15
BY MARC E. AGRONIN, M.D.
Place of fire,
place of weeping,
place of madness
— Zelda, “Place of Fire”
The forest still stands, but the people are gone.
Only a stone memorial guards their place, surrounded
by tall grasses that hide bits of ash and bone deep
beneath their roots.
On this spot on Feb. 4, 1942, more than 920
Jewish men, women and children from the town of
Rakov in what is now Belarus were rounded up by
the Nazis and herded into the synagogue. Several
shrieking children were stabbed with bayonets and
thrown over the heads of the weeping Jews just before
the doors and windows were sealed and the building
was doused with kerosene.
An unspeakable scene of wailing ensued as the
once vibrant Jewish community was annihilated in
the fire. My patient, now 98, still weeps when he
describes witnessing this horror from a hidden perch
in a tree. He gasps audibly when he recalls watching
his father being pummeled by a Nazi soldier before
he was thrust into the doomed crowd.
When this survivor first told me his story, I was
speechless. He held tight to my arm, and I imagined
myself as the branches of the tree that supported
him during this trauma. I was now a witness.
As his psychiatrist I am obliged to ease his
suffering, but no medicine of mine can touch such a
memory. I have tried hard to understand how he and
others managed to mentally survive such traumatic
experiences. These aging Holocaust survivors, in
particular, have taught me what I have come to call
“lessons from fire.”
Lesson 1 is the most difficult for a doctor.
Sometimes the perpetual sadness of many older
survivors is not to be healed but shared. Over time,
as memories fade and the voices of lost loved ones
grow quieter, all that remains is a closely guarded
sadness, persisting as a substitute for the losses. Any
attempt to ease this emotion may be a threat to painful
but beloved remnants of memory. What some
survivors seek is not medicine or therapy: it is the
attentive presence of a doctor and others to serve as
the next generation of witnesses.
Lesson 2 brings a paradox. Surviving a grueling
trauma does not inoculate one against the stresses of
aging. A patient once told me that the small daily
indignities she faced in the nursing home felt worse
than her experiences in a Siberian labor camp. I
realized that she could not bear feeling like a victim
again, even in small measure.
From a Place of Fire and Weeping, Lessons on Memory,
Aging and Hope
The Claims Conference is not involved in theadministration, implementation or processingof Social Insurance pensions for the Germangovernment or its Social Security institutionsor payments from this fund. The informationpresented herein is intended for informationpurposes only and solely as a general guide. Itis a summary of specific issues and does notrepresent a definitive or complete statementof the programs and policies of the agenciesmentioned. To the best of our knowledge theinformation is correct as of the date of this
document but this information may change.
TOGETHER 5visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
BY HERBERT BLOCK
More than sixty years after the end of the
Holocaust, and nearly two decades after the fall of
the Iron Curtain, Jewish communities in East Central
Europe and the Former Soviet Union are still struggling
with the question of how to reclaim the properties
which were taken from them during the Nazi and
Communist regimes.
Before the Shoah, in nearly every city or town,
large and small, in this region, there were properties
that were owned by Jewish communal or religious
entities. Virtually all of these buildings or sites were
looted, confiscated or destroyed by the Germans or
their allied regimes during World War II. For the most
part, they were subsequently nationalized by
Communist regimes, which ruled for some 40 years
after the war.
Since the fall of Communism,
there has been an effort by the
remaining local Jewish
communities in each country,
together with international Jewish
groups, to obtain restitution of these
assets or compensation. In the mid-
1990s, the World Jewish Restitution
Organization (WJRO) was formed
in Israel to help address this and
other related Holocaust-era assets
issues.
Why is this being done? For the
once-great Jewish communities in
East Central Europe and the Soviet
successor states, the confiscated
Jewish communal property
symbolizes a rich heritage lost during the Holocaust
and the Communist era. There is a strong moral desire
to achieve at least a small measure of justice by having
governments return this property to Jewish communal
ownership, and for those governments to renounce
their claims to assets stolen from the Jewish people.
Property reclamation also represents a remarkable
opportunity in the ongoing renewal of Jewish life in
the region. Either as a venue for communal activities
and institutions, or as a source of income, restituted
Jewish communal property has the potential to put
communities on the road toward fiscal autonomy and
self-sustainability.
What kinds of properties were taken from these
thousands of Jewish communities? This rubric
includes anything that was owned by a Jewish
communal or religious entity, including synagogues,
batei midrash [prayer and study halls], yeshivot
[Talmudic academies], schools, mikvaot [ritual baths],
old age homes, orphanages, hospitals, rabbinical
residences, community offices, cemeteries, chevra
kadisha [funeral and pre-burial] facilities, as well as
apartments, houses and land that had been donated
to, or were otherwise owned by, the communities.
As there were no central prewar records of all
Jewish communal property, and many were in small
towns to which no Jews returned after the war, or
from which Jews were chased away by acts of
violence or threats, it is difficult to know exactly what
was looted. However, according to data from WJRO
and the existing local Jewish communities, we can
estimate that approximately 21,000 confiscated
properties fall under the categories mentioned above.
The majority were synagogues and prayer/study halls
(around 6,000–7,000), cemeteries (about 5,000) and
schools/yeshivot (nearly 3,000).
Under most property restitution laws, only
buildings or lands which were formally owned by
communal or religious entities before the Shoah can
be claimed. There were numerous other Jewish sites
which were privately owned but used by the
community which can not now be claimed. An
example would be the many shtiebelach [small
prayer halls] located in buildings owned privately by
individuals.
Claims for property must be made individually
by the officially recognized Jewish community in each
country, under the specific laws of each country. The
post-Communist governments in each country have
generally granted an official status to a “Jewish
religious community” under the state laws granting
recognition and benefits to
“churches.”
The Communist regimes also
nationalized the property of all
citizens and of all churches and
religious faiths. Therefore, if and
when a restitution law is enacted, it
typically establishes a process for all
churches to follow. However, the
situation for Jewish property differs
in several important ways. First, most
of the church properties have
generally been in continual use for
the past six decades, while Jewish
property was never used again after
the Shoah, due to the destruction of
the communities. In most towns there
has not even been a Jewish
presence, and the Jewish building was used by the
municipality (i.e., the prewar synagogue became a
town library or offices or storage). Secondly, the
Jewish properties are in worse condition than those
of churches due to their neglect by local authorities.
Thirdly, the restitution law may be drafted so that
it covers all property which had been nationalized
from a church, as the central church (or diocese) in
the country owned all the properties used by that faith.
However, the Jewish communities in prewar Europe
owned many buildings that were “communal” but not
owned by a religious body or used for religious
purposes (such as a Jewish hospital, orphanage or
old age home). Lastly, the law may cover properties
which were nationalized by the Communists under
laws enacted in the late 1940s; however, most of the
Jewish communal property had essentially already
been taken by governments, local authorities or even
individuals during the Holocaust when the Jewish
residents were murdered or deported.
One issue that arose in the 1990s between WJRO
and local Jewish communities is the question of who
should be the heir to all the prewar Jewish communal
and religious assets. Should it become the property
of the small Jewish community that exists in the
country today, which is just a fraction of the original
size of the prewar community (and may be in a country
with different borders now)? Should the property
devolve to international Jewry, or the State of Israel,
on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, as
well as those who perished? Although often difficult
to achieve in practice, a balance was struck by WJRO
and local communities. Through the creation of
“foundation” partnerships between local and world
Jewry, income from restituted property would first
cover Jewish needs in that country while any surplus
would go toward assisting survivors from that country
now living in Israel or elsewhere.
The local communities, together with WJRO and
the partnership foundations, face a difficult and
prolonged process of restitution in each country. It
generally begins with researching and creating an
inventory of prewar communal and religious assets.
Then there may be lengthy negotiations to get a
satisfactory restitution law enacted. Once a law is
passed, formal claims with substantial documentation
must be submitted to some type of governmental
administrative body. Then claims have to be argued
and defended, either at a hearing before a
“commission” or a “tribunal.” Often the outcome of
such a hearing will be a negotiated settlement with
the municipality or state entity which now owns the
property. This might result in the actual return “in
kind” of the original property, or the transfer of a
substitute building or plot of land, or payment of
compensation.
The restitution process is generally a protracted
one, fraught with complications. The process, from
research to filing and pursuing claims, is costly,
especially for Jewish communities that are in a
precarious financial state (until they start to get some
restitution). Government officials are never eager to
return property to Jewish claimants, often due to
concerns about negative reactions from local residents.
The restitution process can lead to manifestations of
antisemitism in the local media and the Internet.
Opposition to restitution is often trumpeted by
politicians seeking to use the issue to gain political
capital. Those who oppose restitution often pointedly
ask, “Why is the government doing something special
for the Jews?” or “Why do the Jews need so much
property?” or “How much of these restituted assets
will end up in Israel?” or “What will the Jews do to
the tenants of the property once it is returned?”—or
even, as Romania’s former president, Ion Iliescu,
declared, “[Restitution of Jewish property] is liable
to generate sentiments not of a positive nature toward
the Jewish population... is it worth continuing to skin
those who are living in distress today... And just in
order to compensate others? I don’t find that
appropriate.”
When properties are actually restituted, they are
often in a dilapidated state and can actually be a
financial burden on the Jewish community. For the
most part, governments are also quick to give back
cemeteries and ruined synagogues (especially in the
provinces), which have little or no financial value, to
communities that do not have the capacity or financial
means to maintain or repair them.
As of the end of 2008, only about 16 percent (or
roughly 3,500) of Jewish communal and religious
properties throughout the region had either been
returned or covered under a compensation agreement
(out of the estimated 21,000 cited above). There
remain an additional 8,000 cases in which claims have
been filed but not yet reviewed or adjudicated. There
are approximately 5,500 properties which have not
yet been claimed (mainly in countries which still have
no restitution law), and an additional 4,000 cemeteries
which are still under governmental ownership.
Some countries, which had relatively small Jewish
communities, and hence few claims, have completed
the restitution process for the small number of prewar
communal properties (Estonia and Macedonia).
The Restitution of Holocaust-Era Jewish Communal Property:An Unfinished Item on the Jewish Diplomatic Agenda
cont’d on p. 6
TOGETHER 6 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Others have returned a significant amount of (though
by no means all) communal property, but the Jewish
community is no longer actively pursuing claims
(Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic).
However, in many other countries significant work
remains to be done: In Poland only about 1,400 of
5,544 claims have been adjudicated in seven years;
in Romania only about 300 of 1,982 claims have been
decided in six years; and in Serbia, under a new law,
the community filed 513 claims by September 2008.
In Bulgaria and Croatia some properties have been
returned, but the government has resisted restitution
of the largest and most valuable urban real estate.
There are still no laws providing for the restitution
of Jewish communal property in Lithuania, Latvia,
Bosnia, Slovenia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and
Moldova. The Latvian prime minister established a
“working group” in September 2008 to consider this
issue. Lithuania remains the most recalcitrant country
in dealing with Jewish communal property. Despite
numerous public promises by several prime ministers
since 2002, and much international pressure, no
legislation has even been sent to its parliament for
consideration.
The State of Israel has been involved as an
observer body of the WJRO and by monitoring
restitution activities, mainly through the work of Israeli
embassies. It has not, however, actively participated
in restitution negotiations. Nevertheless, Israeli
government ministers often raise the subject when
traveling to European nations or when hosting foreign
diplomats in Jerusalem.
Since the mid-1990s the United States
government has played an integral role in encouraging
countries to enact restitution laws for both private
and communal property, and to expedite the review
of claims and the actual return of property or payment
of compensation. This has been done through the
Office of Holocaust Issues in the State Department
in Washington, as well as through the resources of
local American embassies.
In September 2008, the U.S. Congress again
spoke out on this issue when the House of
Representatives passed Concurrent Resolution 371,
drawing attention to the record of countries that have
prevaricated. The resolution called on the government
of Poland to enact legislation to address the issue of
private property and “ensure that such restitution and
compensation legislation establishes an
unbureaucratic, simple, transparent, and timely
process, so that it results in a real benefit to those
many persons who suffered from the unjust such
confiscation of their property, many of whom are well
into their 80s or older.”
Efforts by local Jewish communities and WJRO
to press for the enactment of restitution laws and for
the expediting of claims have often been supplemented
by international diplomatic efforts. For the most part,
these have been led by the US government and
Congress. In the early part of this decade, as part of
their campaign to join NATO and/or the European
Union, many countries promised to tackle the issue
of restitution. Sadly, most of these promises remain
unfulfilled, and now that the nations are firmly
embedded in the EU and NATO, there are fewer
avenues for diplomatic pressure. Moreover, after
most of the post-Communist nations joined the
international coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,
US leverage on these issues was perceived to have
diminished. While the European Union has not been
active on restitution issues, the European Parliament
and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE) have adopted resolutions on the
subject. The most recent was a July 2001 OSCE
resolution, which urged...OSCE participating States to ensure that they
have implemented appropriate legislation to
secure the restitution and/or compensation for
property loss by victims of Nazi persecution and
property loss by communal organizations and
institutions during the National Socialist era to
Nazi victims or their heirs(s), irrespective of the
current citizenship or place or residence of victims
or their heir(s) or the relevant successor of
communal property.
However, in June 2009, during its term in the
rotating presidency of the European Union, the
government of the Czech Republic will host an
intergovernmental conference on “Holocaust-Era
Asssets” in Prague, to which 47 nations have been
invited. The conference will review progress in the
decade since the 1998 Washington Conference on
Holocaust-Era Assets and will address a number of
open issues related to the recovery of assets of victims
of the Holocaust. The subjects to be covered include
the restitution of Jewish communal, religious and
private property; looted art; and the recovery of
Judaica and cultural property. The conference also
will review progress in Holocaust education,
remembrance and research. This will be an important
venue for encouraging further action by governments
on all restitution issues.
Despite all the difficulties and complexities
involved, the reclamation of Jewish communal and
religious property remains an important piece of
unfinished work in the quest for restitution of looted
Holocaust-era assets. This needs to remain a priority
for both world Jewry and for European Jewish
communities. By continuing to pursue this goal, we
can at least achieve some “rough justice” as well as
facilitate the reha-bilitation of Jewish life in countries
ravaged by the
Shoah and years of
C o m m u n i s t
totalitarianism. As
Shoah survivors age
and pass away, and
as we move further
away from the fall of
Communism, there
is only a small
window of oppor-
tunity in which to
really address this
issue. However,
with the combined
and reinvigorated
efforts of world and
local Jewry, together
with the new admini-
stration in Washing-
ton, and with a
supportive stance on
the part of the EU,
significant results
are within reach.
Herbert Block is anassistant executivevice president of theJoint and a boardmember of the WJO.Reprinted from IsraelJournal of Foreign
Affairs III:1 (2009)
Name ________________________________________________
Address_______________________________________________
City ________________________________State __ Zip ________
Phone_________________________________________________
Number of Markers _____________
Total Amount Enclosed $__________
Special “Matzevah Marker”Available for Survivors’ Graves
Survival has placed upon us the
responsibility of making sure that the
Holocaust is remembered forever. Each of
us has the sacred obligation to share this
task while we still can. However, with the
passage of each year, we realize that time is
against us, and we must make sure to utilize
all means for future remembrance.
A permanent step toward achieving this
important goal can be realized by placing a
unique and visible maker on the gravestone
of every survivor. The most meaningful
symbol for this purpose is our Survivor
logo, inscribed with the words
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR. This simple, yet
dramatic, maker will re-affirm our
uniqueness and our place in history for
future generations.
Our impressive MATZEVAH marker is
now available for purchase. It is cast in solid
bronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and can be
attached to new or existing tombstones.
The cost of each marker is $125.00.
Additional donations are gratefully
appreciated.
Let us buy the marker now and leave
structions in our wills for its use. This will
enable every one of us to leave on this earth
visible proof of our miraculous survival and
an everlasting legacy of the Holocaust.
The cost of each marker is US $125 including shipping & handling.
Make checks payable to: American Gathering
and mail to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, NY 10001
Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
WITOLD PILECKI, THEAUSCHWITZ VOLUNTEERWHO UNCOVEREDHOLOCAUST SECRETSby KAMIL TCHOREK
It was perhaps the bravest act of espionage of
the Second World War. After voluntarily being
imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp for
2½ years, and smuggling out its darkest secrets to
the Allies, Witold Pilecki overcame a guard and, with
two comrades, escaped almost certain death.
Now new details have emerged of the
extraordinary tale of the Polish officer who hatched
a plot with the country’s resistance to be rounded up
by the occupying Germans in September 1940 and
sent to the most notorious Nazi extermination center.
At the time Auschwitz was predominantly a camp
for captured resistance fighters, although Jews and
anyone considered a threat to the Nazi regime were
also being sent there.
Newly released documents from the Polish
archives reveal how Mr Pilecki, going under the false
name Tomasz Serafinski, went about setting up an
underground resistance group in the camp, recruiting
its members and organising it into a coherent
movement.
“In order to assure greater security I have taken
the view that each cell of five will not be aware of
another cell,” he wrote in one of his reports smuggled
out to the Resistance and which has now come to
light. “This is also why I have avoided people who
are registered here under their real names. Some are
involved in the most incompetent conspiracies and
have their own plans for rebellion in the camp.”
Later he wrote: “The gigantic machinery of the
camp spewing out dead bodies has claimed many of
cont’d from p. 5
cont’d on p. 11
TOGETHER 7visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
The German pope recalled his own visit to thedeath camp at Auschwitz in 2006 and, in some of thestrongest words he has ever spoken about the
Holocaust and relations with Jews, said:“It is my fervent prayer that the memory of this
appalling crime will strengthen our determination toheal the wounds that for too long have sullied relations
between Christians and Jews.”He repeated the prayer that the late Pope John
Paul used when he visited Jerusalem’s Western Wall
in 2000 and asked forgiveness from Jews forChristians who had persecuted them in past centuries.
Benedict then added in his own words: “I now
make his prayer my own.”Catholic-Jewish relations have been extremely
tense since January 24, when Benedict lifted
excommunications of four renegade traditionalistbishops in an attempt to heal a schism that began in1988 when they were ordained without Vatican
permission. Williamson, a member of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), told Swedishtelevision in an interview broadcast on January 21: “I
believe there were no gas chambers.” He said nomore than 300,000 Jews perished in Naziconcentration camps, rather than the 6 million
accepted by most historians.The Vatican has ordered him to recant but he so
far has not done so, saying he needs more time to
review the evidence.“This terrible chapter in our history (the
Holocaust) must never be forgotten,” the Pope told
the Jewish delegation from the Conference ofPresidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
In his address to the pope, Rabbi Arther Schneier,
who hosted the pontiff at his synagogue in New Yorklast year, emotionally told the pontiff: “As aHolocaust survivor, these have been painful and
difficult days, when confronted with Holocaust-denialby no less than a bishop of the Society of St Pius X
“Victims of the Holocaust have not given us the
right to forgive the perpetrators nor the Holocaustdeniers. Thank you for understanding our pain andanguish ...”
Both the pope and Schneier expressed the hopethat dialogue between Catholics and Jews couldemerge from the crisis even stronger.
While the excommunications of the traditionalistbishops have been lifted, they and members of theSSPX will not be fully readmitted to the Church until
they formally accept the teachings of the 1962-1965Second Vatican Council.
One of that historic gathering’s key documents
was a declaration called “Nostra Aetate” (In OurTimes). It repudiated the concept of collective Jewishguilt for Christ’s death and urged dialogue with other
religions.
cont’d from p. 1
PopeMenachem Rosensaft Named General Counsel of the World
Jewish CongressNew York lawyer and Jewish community activist Menachem Z. Rosensaft has been appointed General
Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, WJC President Ronald S. Lauder announced today. Rosensaft, who
drafted the WJC’s new constitution which was adopted this January at the organization’s 13th Plenary
Assembly, will serve as an officer of the WJC and a member of its Executive.
The son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and
Bergen-Belsen, Rosensaft has long been a leader in Holocaust remembrance
activities. He is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School where he teaches
a course on World War II war crimes trials. He is Vice President of the American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants and is also Founding
Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors,
a former National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and Honorary President
of the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. As general counsel of a major New
York Stock Exchange financial services firm, he was instrumental in guiding the
firm through a period of intense regulatory and governmental scrutiny, and
implementing good governance practices.
“I have known Menachem for many years and have come to rely on his judgment
and counsel,” said President Lauder. “The combination of his more than 20 years experience as an international
and securities litigator, his dedication to the Jewish people and to Jewish causes, and his absolute integrity will
be a tremendous asset in the WJC’s ongoing commitment to ensure good governance, compliance and
transparency as we move forward to accomplish our mission.”
The World Jewish Congress is the international organization representing Jewish communities in 92
countries. Founded in Geneva in 1936, the WJC serves as the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people to governments
and international organizations.
SCHLIEBEN: A forgotten concentration camp?
Forum on Saturday, 18 April 2009, in Schlieben (State of Brandenburg/Germany )
With remebrances of former prisoners, of contemporary witnesses and based on research conducted
during recent years.
Initiated by the city of Schlieben and Mr. Uwe Dannhauer, Jean-Louis Rey and Uwe Schwarz
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of publicity about Herman and Rosa Rosenblat and their Holocaust
hoax entitled Apples over the Fence. This story was supposed to have taken place in a German town called
Schlieben. Although the story has now been exposed as fiction, the Schlieben concentration camp and the
horrors perpetrated there were only too real. Just a few month ago a traveller to Schlieben in search of signs
of the Schlieben concentration camp would have been disappointed. Several initiatives have since contributed
to making sure this satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp will not be forgotten including the
stories of those imprisoned there between July 1944 and April 1945.
Witness accounts and photographs have all helped to examine the camp’s history and operation. The
camp served basically as a source of slave labor for the huge German weapons factory Hasag-Hugo Schneider
AG Leipzig.
As a part of the tragic history of concentration camps , the Schlieben camp was unique in several respects,
for its size, its organization and the diverse groups of people who worked there. More than 4,000 prisoners,
various other forced laborers, several hundred German civilians, soldiers of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe,
Reichsarbeitsdienst-RAD and SS troops were gathered there to work on designing, testing and ultimately
building several hundred thousand so-called Panzerfaust weapons.
The forum explores the question of how it was possible that Schlieben, a small town of about 2,000
inhabitants during the years 1938-1945 was practically adsorbed by the Hasag-Hugo Schneider AG and the
concentration camp.
Many years later, the town reflects without prejudice on its prior and its current history.
Further information is available from:
Uwe Sannhauer, Straße der Arbeit 8, 04936
Schlieben (Germany)
Phone 0049 (0) 536180426
e-mail uwedannhauer@hotmail.de
Jean-Louis Rey, 14 Place Denfert-Rochereau ,
75014 Paris (France)
Phone 0033 (0) 143227451
e-mail forum-schlieben@orange.fr
Uwe Schwarz , Theodor-Storm-Straße 1 , 03050
Cottbus (Germany)
Phone 0049 (0) 355525224
e-mail UweSchwarz21@hotmail.com
PLEASE SEND US YOURSTORIES, ARTICLES, POEMS,AND LETTERS FOR INCLUSIONIN TOGETHER AND OUR WEBSITE. WHILE WE CANNOT PRINTEVERYTHING THAT ISSUBMITTED, WE SHALLENDEAVOR TO PUBLISH THEMOST INTERESTING ITEMS.SEND TO:
AMGATHTOGETHER@AOL.COMSchlieben Memorial.
TOGETHER 8 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Foundation acquires Holocaust letter exhibitBY SOPHIA TOREEN, AP
CHICAGO—The faded papers hint at stark details in the lives of Nazi
concentration camp inmates.
Letters secretly carried by children through the sewers of Warsaw, Poland,
during the 1944 uprising. A 1933 card from a Dachau camp commander outlining
strict rules for prisoner mail. A 1943 letter from a young man, who spent time in
Auschwitz, to his parents.
The more than 250 World War II postal documents—cards, letters and
stamps—have been acquired by an Illinois foundation from a private collector
and will soon be on permanent display in a museum in suburban Chicago.
“These artifacts underscore the very personal dimension to this catastrophe,”
said Richard Hirschhaut, the executive director of the Skokie-based Illinois
Holocaust Museum and Education Center, where the exhibit will be housed next
year when the museum opens.
“It now will reach an exponentially larger audience and serve as a genuine
tool for education and learning,” Hirschhaut said.
The Holocaust memorial exhibit belonged to longtime postal memorabilia
collector and activist Ken Lawrence of Pennsylvania. It was called “The Nazi
Scourge: Postal Evidence of the Holocaust and the Devastation of Europe.”
The Florence and Laurence Spungen Family Foundation, based in Northbrook,
Ill., recently bought the collection and has added to it.
“The insured value of the collection is $1 million, but the educational value to
future generations is incalculable,” said Daniel Spungen, a board member of the
foundation, in a statement.
The exhibit also includes a handwritten Bible scroll in Hebrew that was used
by a German soldier to mail a package. There are also documents sent to a Nazi
doctor on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.
Lawrence, the former vice president of the American Philatelic Society,
meticulously collected the documents for more than three decades. His project
was sparked by claims that the Holocaust never occurred.
He has since showcased the collection around the country, garnering awards.
The exhibit can also be viewed online.
by ROD LURIE, Huffington Post
It never crossed my mind that I would ever speak
or write negatively about the work of a fellow
filmmaker. But when it comes to the topic of the
Shoah, I feel like I have to speak my mind — as both
a Jew and a Sabra.
The other day I was watching Stephen Daldry’s
film The Reader with my best friend and producing
partner, Marc Frydman. His grandmother was a
survivor of the camps. When it was over Marc
seemed both saddened and shocked. The movie, he
felt, served to diminish the suffering of the Jews and
went toward not a nullification of Nazi behavior, but
certainly a mitigation of it.
The Reader traces the relationship through the
years between a female Schutzstaffel
(SS) guard and a man whom she
seduced when she was in her mid-
thirties and he was but fifteen. It’s an
exceptionally well-made film. The
performances, especially Kate
Winslet’s as Hanna, are unique and
nuanced. It may even take home an
Oscar or two next weekend. [It did.]
Which is the problem.
The audience, many of them
young people uneducated about the
Holocaust, will take as fact what they
see on screen. And that would be a
damn shame. For this film gives
ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the
Archbishop Williamsons of the world, to the people
who would tell us that the Shoah is a mass
exaggeration.
Ron Rosenbaum has already written a brilliant
piece in Slate, taking the film to task for more or less
exonerating the German population for their part in
the Final Solution. Several others have written about
the inappropriateness of trying to solicit a kind of
sympathy for an SS guard. Others have attacked it
for using sexuality to soften and evoke pity for the
lead character.
What I would like to explore are the film’s
versions of certain “facts” presented in the film that
serve to diminish the culpability of the SS... if you
can imagine such a thing.
First up is the notion that Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz
would ever have been allowed into the SS. In the
trial portion of the film (especially well done) we learn
the SS was “recruiting” guards and Hanna volunteered
her services. (She was working in Siemens—the giant
electronics company that used Jewish slave labor).
Hanna is an illiterate. Furthermore, her work ethic was
driven by efficiency—doing her job and duty—and not
antisemitism.
The problem here is every person, man or woman,
who was in the SS was intimately indoctrinated into the
teachings of several rabid Jew haters including Julius
Streicher in Der Stürmer. In fact, that newspaper was
required reading for the SS on Hitler’s orders. One was
not entering a job when they came to the SS. They
were turning themselves over to an ideology with cult-
like obedience. This was especially true of those who
were entering the Totenkopf, the “deaths head,”
tasked with being guards at the camps.
Now, as with anything, you can find exceptions
to the rule. Of course there were
some members of the SS who were
not educated (though Germany was
easily the most literate European
country at the time). There may have
been a Hanna or two. But is that not
the primary tool of the Holocaust
denier? To turn the exception into the
rule? I am sure the makers of this
film are not deniers. But they are
helping those who are.
Because Hanna is not presented
as an anomaly, those uneducated on
the Holocaust will assume her
character is an accurate portrayal of
a member of the SS. Indeed, this depiction leads to the
kind of ignorant statement made in this excerpt from a
letter to the Los Angeles Times defending the film:
“Is it all that wrong to realize, that maybe the
murdered were not the only victims of that situation?
To anyone watching the movie with an open mind,
Hannah Schmitd [sic] is a sad victim, an illiterate
working as a guard, merely following orders, either
her rationality suspended and/or her judgment
coloured by the atmosphere of the Third Reich.”
No. Hanna is not a victim. But The Reader helps
to foster the notion that she and her contemporaries
may have been.
Indeed, Kate Winslet herself said this on The
Charlie Rose Show of the people who entered the
SS: “These were young men and women who didn’t
know what they were getting into.”
Furthermore, Winslet quotes Daldry as saying
that the “Holocaust was started by normal people.”
It is a shocking lack of understanding of one of
the most important and horrible moments in human
history.
Also in question is the SS “report” written about
the church-burning incident that is central to the film.
One of Hitler’s first orders was that the SS (and
Gestapo) could only be investigated by the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — created by
Heinrich Himmler. Although the Wermacht were
record keepers, the RHSA were not...and they were
most certainly not in the business of investigating the
murder of Jews (or in this case willfully allowing Jews
to be cremated alive).
The Reader gives the appearance that the SS
—in the midst of fighting the war—were policing
themselves for their own atrocities like we Americans
did with, say, My Lai. In France there were three
cases of churches filled with civilians being burned
to the ground. The RHSA never once filed a report
on any of these incidents.
The hollowest scene is the one I am sure was
intended to be the film’s most redemptive. A grown
up Michael goes to see a survivor of the very church
burning Hanna was involved with. She lectures him
about the camps and refuses the money Hanna has
willed to her (though she accepts the tin the money
came in). The beautiful Lena Olin plays the survivor.
She is well dressed. Her New York apartment is large
and gorgeously furnished, her art collection on display.
In the scenes preceding it we see Hanna. She
has nothing. She is in bad health. She commits suicide.
So, the SS representative in the film ends up
pathetic and sad and, by the way, not guilty of the
crime for which she was sentenced.
The lone representative of the survivors is haughty
and glamorous—a near perfect (and negative)
stereotype of the wealthy European Jew in New York.
Guess whom the audience can relate to more?
By the way, we never see the tattoo on Olin’s
wrist that every concentration camp prisoner was
branded with (Olin is costumed in sleeves). It’s almost
as if the filmmakers want to make us intellectually
aware of Jewish suffering but not emotionally aware
of it. The opposite is true of the SS guard’s “suffering.”
After Marc took some time to think about The
Reader he reminded me that the great Jewish writer
Primo Levi once said that the victims of the Nazis,
exterminated in the SS camps did not vanish forever
in the smoke of the ovens. They have a grave and a
fragile one: our memory.
As the years pass and those memories are buried
with the survivors it then is up to the artists to tell the
story of the six million and to tell it right.
And, by the way, there was something that neither
Marc nor his late grandmother ever forgot. The
number tattooed on her wrist: A5499.
THE HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM OF HOLLYWOOD
TOGETHER 9visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
Hillel Kook and Stephen WisePROFESSOR YEHUDA BAUER
On July 8, 2008 the Jerusalem Post
published an article by Isi Leibler, a Jewish
leader of importance, and a friend. Leibler
attacked Yad Vashem’s refusal to
incorporate into its Holocaust History
Museum an exhibit relating to efforts by
Hillel Kook to persuade the US
government to rescue the Jews of Europe.
Originally an emissary of the Irgun Tzvai
Leumi in the US, Kook and his team later
became independent actors. Leibler also
attacked the then leading personality of
US Jewry, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, not
only for hampering Kook’s efforts to bring
the tragedy of European Jewry to the
attention of the American people, but also
for not making public the famous cable
of August 8, 1942, of Dr. Gerhardt
Riegner, the secretary of the Geneva
office of the World Jewish Congress, who
tried to alert the WJC in London and New
York to the danger of a mass annihilation
of 3 1/2 to 4 million Jews in the coming
fall. Leibler says that Wise finally asked Roosevelt to intervene, and that Roosevelt
said “Tell your Jewish associates to keep quiet.” But Roosevelt did not speak
with Wise between August and December, 1942, so this is an error. Leibler says
that Wise’s non-action was “the most shameful failure of Jewish leadership in the
20th century.”
Unfair, and inaccurate.
In the summer of 1942, the Germans were racing towards Stalingrad. They
were at El-Alamein, and the danger to Palestine was obvious; the U.S. had just
barely managed to repulse the Japanese Navy at Midway. The Germans were
sinking more Allied ships in the Atlantic than the shipyards delivered replacements.
Public opinion in the US, as Gallup polls showed, was increasingly antisemitic.
This was the scene when the cable was received. Riegner’s cable ended with the
words “we transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot
be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connection with highest German
authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable.” Riegner’s cable thus cast
doubt on the accuracy of its own information.
Sumner Welles, the State Department undersecretary, asked Wise not to
make the cable public because the information had to be verified, as the cable
itself had implied. In any event, in the summer of 1942 there was no Allied army
anywhere near the Jews, and the Allied Air Forces in 1942 were incapable of
reaching the Polish extermination sites. No one could have prevented the mass
murder at that point; the situation changed in November 1943–after that the
Western Allies could have bombed the extermination sites, but refused to do so.
In 1942 the Americans could not have rescued the Jews even if they had wanted
to; in addition, they feared the “accusation” that they were fighting the war for
the Jews.
Was Wise right in yielding to Welles when the cable itself had cast doubt on
its own contents? As historians David S. Wyman and Raphael Medoff write (A
Race Against Death, 2002, p. 8): “Wise believed he had no realistic choice but
comply, for he could not risk alienating the one government department whose
cooperation was most needed in the effort to help the European Jews.” He did
inform Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Judge Felix
Frankfurter, in the hope that they would reach the President. He informed his
colleagues, and then he waited for confirmation, which arrived in November,
from the American representative in Switzerland. He then arranged for a press
conference to make the information public, and it was reported in the New York
Times, on a back page. Wise’s fault? Should all this contradictory and controversial
story, without any background and context, be shrunk into a panel in the Yad
Vashem Museum?
Hillel Kook was a young activist, and he did great work in trying to mobilize
American opinion to influence the US Administration to do something to save the
Jews. He was hampered and attacked by the Jewish establishment of the day,
with Wise at its head. Did he influence public opinion? Leibler mentions the big
demonstration of supposedly 400 Orthodox Rabbis in front of the White House in
on October 6, 1943, as proof of his effectiveness. It was indeed impressive,
although Orthodoxy was then a small minority among American Jews; and their
influence was minimal. They did not see Roosevelt, of course, but were received
on Capitol Hill by the Vice President and some senators. Their demonstration
was reported in the New York Times (October 7, page 4; 441 words), and that
was it. The media did not mention it afterwards, and the effect on American
public opinion is very doubtful. American antisemitism was to reach a peak in
1944, with 48% of the population expressing anti-Jewish views. Among members
of Congress, the mood began to change later, in 1943, and part of that was no
doubt due to the efforts of the Kook group; partly, it was also the influence of
Wise and his official Zionist group, who made contact with Treasury Secretary
Morgenthau. Yet it was some intrepid non-Jewish members of the Treasury who
persuaded Morgenthau to press the President, who then established the War
Refugee Board (WRB).
Leibler claims, wrongly, that the WRB was initiated exclusively by Kook, and
rescued 200,000 Hungarian Jews (Wyman and Medoff say that 120,000 were
rescued in Budapest). This is demonstrably wrong: The rescue of the remnant of
Hungarian Jews was the result of an
interplay of many factors, only one of which
was the WRB, which financed, for instance,
Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, but with
money from the JDC (the “Joint”)–
opponents of Kook, and the heart of the non-
Zionist Jewish establishment.
Leibler is right. Kook should be given
an honorary mention, along with other Jews
outside of Europe. But for that we need a
different museum, as this one is devoted,
by design, to what happened to the Jews of
Europe, in Europe. The visitor will not find
anything about efforts by World Jewry, or
the lack of them, except for a comment by
Jan Karski about his mission to the West.
There is nothing there about the Yishuv,
except for the parachutists; there is nothing
there about the organization of Soviet Jews
to support the Soviet war effort, almost
nothing about Jews serving in Allied armies.
Nor about Kook. Or Wise. Or Ben-Gurion (except for the post-Holocaust period).
Or Begin.
Yad Vashem’s Museum presents the story of the Holocaust, in detail. That is
what people come to learn. Much even about what happened to the Jews in
Europe had to be left out. If it introduced the story of world Jewish action and
inaction during the Holocaust, and expanded on the attitude of the Allies and the
neutrals, what does Mr. Leibler suggest should be kept out? Treblinka? Resistance?
Judenraete?
Isi Leibler’s heart is in the right place. It is his analysis that is wrong.
compensation. “The different measures taken since the end of the Second World
War have made reparation as much as possible,” it said.
The Paris court had sought the opinion of the council on the request of Ms
Hoffman-Glemane, whose mother died at Auschwitz, for material and moral
damages for the suffering of her and her father. She is suing the state and the
SNCF, the national railways, for 200,000 euros (£180,000) for Joseph Kaplon,
her father, and 80,000 euros for herself. Anne-Laure Archambault, the lawyer
for Ms Hoffman-Glemane, said that she would appeal to the European Court of
Human Rights.
Avi Bitton, another lawyer who represents 600 deportees and plaintiffs, said:
“We are simply asking to be treated like any other citizen who is a victim of
asbestos poisoning or a road accident. When you suffer damage, you should be
able to seek recourse.”
For more than a decade Holocaust survivors and their families have been
waging legal battles in French and US courts. In 2007, however, an appeal court
reversed a Bordeaux court conviction against the railways for holding and robbing
two Jews. The court ruled that the SNCF was not an arm of the State.
A New York Federal Court judge also ruled in December that France was
shielded as a sovereign state from action in US courts over its wartime conduct.
Since then Senator Charles Schumer of New York has tabled a Bill in Congress
to exempt the SNCF from the sovereign immunity.
‘Jewish war victims have had enough compensation’ French court sayscont’d from p. 1
Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson)
TOGETHER 10 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Turkey’s reaction to the recent Israel-Hamas war
in Gaza has scared many of us who believed that
antisemitism could never take root in our country.
The mass protests outside the Israeli consulate in
Istanbul, the defacing of
a synagogue in Izmir, the
antisemitic graffiti andnewspaper articles haveraised a frightening pros-pect. It is tragic that acountry that had been thesavior of so many Jews—first during the SpanishInquisition and later dur-ing World War II—hasbeen transformed into onewhose Jewish minoritylives in fear.
This eruption hasbeen building. For several years this decade, for in-stance, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Tur-key. Such facts make all the more important the ap-pearance in 2007 of The Ambassador, Emir Kivircik’sbiography of his grandfather, Behic Erkin, the coura-geous Turkish diplomat who saved 20,000 Jews inFrance from the Holocaust. Too few have heard ofhis gallantry or his righteous actions during one ofhumanity’s darkest times.
Behic Erkin fought in both World War I and theTurkish war of independence. He was the Ottomanarmy’s expert on railroads, and his logistical gifts provedcritical during World War I, earning him five medalsfrom the German government. The Iron Cross FirstClass was awarded to him personally by the Germancommander Liman von Sanders, and it would proveinstrumental in Erkin’s later effort to save Jewish lives.
Erkin was a close friend of Mustafa KemalAtatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who entrustedhim with the transportation of troops and ammuni-tion to the front lines during the war of independence.
After the formation of the republic, Erkin servedin parliament, representing Istanbul, and later as min-ister of transportation and development. He was ap-pointed Turkey’s ambassador to France on August 1,1939—a month before Nazi Germany declared waron Poland.From this perch, Erkin witnessed the com-plete collapse of the Allies on the continent. Parisfell on June 15, 1940. In July, Marshall Philippe Pétaindeclared himself president of what became knownas the Vichy republic and pledged his government’scollaboration with the Germans on all issues, includ-ing the fate of his fellow Jewish citizens. (The Turk-ish embassy moved to Vichy, though Erkin kept aconsulate open in Paris.)
Early on, Erkin sensed that something was notquite right. A census conducted solely among the Jewsliving in France in July 1941 troubled him deeply. Herecognized it as part of a broad campaign by the Vichygovernment to confiscate Jewish-owned propertiesand businesses. He determined to oppose the subju-gation of the Turkish Jews living in France. On July31, 1941, the Turkish embassy asked the Vichy gov-ernment to exempt those Jews who were Turkishcitizens from antisemitic legislation: The Republic ofTurkey does not discriminate among its citizens onthe basis of race, ethnicity, religion, or other elements.Moreover, the Republic of Turkey is concerned aboutthe laws by which the French government is forcingour citizens to abide. Therefore, we hereby inform[the French authorities] that we reserve all of ourrights with regard to our Jewish citizens.The Vichyauthorities ignored the Turks’ letter until Erkin took itup with German officials in Paris, who ordered the
The Ambassador : How a Turkish diplomat saved 20,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
by ZEYNO BARAN & ONUR SAZAK , The Weekly Standard, 02/16/2009, Volume 014, Issue 21
French to comply with every request from the Turk-ish consulate concerning the businesses owned bythe Jews with Turkish citizenship.
As Vichy France increased its collaboration withthe Nazis on the “Final Solution,” Erkin doubled hisefforts. He ordered the consul-general in Paris toissue birth certificates to Turkish expatriates living inFrance who had given up their citizenship before 1940.(Turkey had enacted new citizenship laws in 1935, and,if you did not register as a Turkish citizen, you werestripped of your citizenship.) Many of them lackedproper documentation to prove their ties to Turkey. Inone of his orders to Paris, he said, “I do not care ifthey do not have the necessary papers. Teach them torecite ‘I am Turkish. My relatives live on Turkish soil’and issue a birth certificate to anyone who can repeatthese ten words in Turkish.”The ambassador also or-dered his staff to produce a list of non-Jewish Turkishcitizens living in France, looking for individuals withclean records and employment histories.
On a cold winter night in February 1942, he sum-moned a group of people from this list and askedthem to volunteer to take custody of the businessesand properties that their fellow Turkish citizens werebeing forced to give up and to pledge to return every-thing when this ordeal finally came to an end. Hecalled them the “Turkish Custodians of the Proper-ties of our Jewish Citizens” and presented the list ofvolunteers to the leadership of the Turkish Jewishcommunity in Paris for its approval. When Erkin couldnot get the Vichy authorities to agree to transfer thecustody of the Jewish properties to non-Christians,he went to the German-controlled Jewish AffairsCommission and got it from them. This victory was atestament to Erkin’s tenacity.
While French leaders simply fell in line behindthe wishes of their German occupiers, Erkin foughton...Erkin recognized the danger he faced in stand-ing up to the Germans and defending the Jews.Kivircik quotes Erkin saying, “You need to deal with[the Nazis] as if you are playing chess, calculatingthe possible outcome of every single move you make.You have to continue on your path by calculating thenext 2 to 3 moves in advance. So long as you do nottake up arms, your most powerful weapon is diplo-macy. Diplomacy is a craft of patience and intelli-gence. I must have practiced it quite well that theseGermans kept complaining about me all this time, yetthey always awarded me with medals.”
Erkin’s campaign to grant a Turkish birth certifi-cate to every Jewish applicant who had ever been acitizen of Turkey received increased scrutiny afterNovember 1942, when Vichy authorities discoveredthat many Turks living in France had likely lost theircitizenship when Turkey’s new citizenship law wasenacted. The Vichy government’s investigation re-vealed that nearly 10,000 Turkish Jews were indeedFrench citizens in 1940. Vichy officials passed thisinformation to their German counterparts.
Erkin realized that it was time for the TurkishJews to leave France if they wanted to survive. Heknew that convincing the Germans to grant safe pas-sage for Jews en route to neutral countries would bea difficult task. In April 1942, he traveled to Paris tomeet with the German consul-general Krug vonNidda. He claimed that since the war seemed to belasting longer than expected, many Turks were in-creasingly concerned about their safety in France andwanted to return home. He told von Nidda and theother German officers in the room that he had madearrangements to transport back to Turkey those whowanted to leave. He needed the Nazi government togrant these refugees safe passage through occupied
territories. When von Nidda sarcastically wonderedwhy Germany should comply with such a request,Erkin replied, “for two reasons.” “First of all, Turkeywas the most important ally of the German Empire inWorld War I. If you recall those days, we rescuedtwo of your battleships. We harbored them in ourstraits. In return, they bombed Russian ports—andwe found ourselves in a war in which we did notwish to take part. While Germany lost its war onland, we won ours. Yet, we were forced to share thesame destiny with the defeated because of our alli-ance with you. This is the first reason. As for thesecond reason”—at this moment Mr. Erkin reacheddeep into the left pocket of his jacket, pulled out anobject and placed it on the table. From that momenton he continued his speech standing: “I am request-ing this from you not only as an ambassador from afriendly country, but as someone who has beenawarded with the Iron Cross of the First Degree—the highest military honor conferred by the GermanEmpire. For these two important reasons, you shouldgrant my wish.”
The Germans gave in, but granted Erkin only untilthe end of 1942 to arrange the evacuation. Erkin knewthat this was simply impossible, and, protesting unre-lentingly, successfully got the deadline extendedthrough 1943.His posting in France was approachingits end, and Erkin instructed all embassy and consu-late personnel to continue his work and to save asmany Jewish lives as they could. Erkin’s associatesproved more than capable. When the deputy consul-general in Marseille, Necdet Kent, heard from SadiIscan, a young Jewish translator at the consulate, thatTurkish Jews were being loaded onto a train for de-portation, he immediately went to the station to askthat they be released. When the German soldiers re-fused, both Kent and Iscan boarded the train them-selves. Upon hearing what had happened, Erkin de-manded to see von Nidda. When the German sar-castically asked, “What could be so urgent? Is Tur-key entering the war?” Erkin responded, “Thanks toyou we are about to enter the war.” He poured out atorrent of threats: A diplomatic scandal is about tobreak out and this is the mildest way I can put it. I fyou do not correct this mistake, a crisis between thetwo countries will be inevitable. When I tell my presi-dent what happened here tonight, I am sure Berlin isgoing to reevaluate the career of every official whodid not take the initiative to avoid a crisis betweenTurkey and Germany.”
To avoid a diplomatic incident with Turkey, vonNidda agreed to the release of all the Turkish citizensin the train. When the train was stopped and Kentwas told to leave with all the Turks on board, he in-formed the Germans that everyone aboard was Turk-ish. Erkin met von Nidda for the last time shortlyafter this incident. The German consul-general re-marked: “Now I understand why the German com-manders who served in the Ottoman Empire duringthe war both hated and respected you. I see that theIron Cross was given to the right person.”
When World War II erupted, 330,000 Jews livedin France: 10,000 of them were Turkish citizens, andanother 10,000 had previously been Turkish citizens.Erkin managed to get Turkish citizenship for the lat-ter 10,000 Jews and then convinced both French andNazi governments to allow them all to return to Tur-key. Behic Erkin saved the lives of 20,000 innocentsouls during Europe’s darkest moment.
Zeyno Baran is a senior fellow and the director of
the Center for Eurasian Policy at the Hudson Institute.
Onur Sazak is a research associate at the center.
Behic Erkin
TOGETHER 11visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
by HELEN ZEGERMAN SCHWIMMER
Lilly Friedman doesn’t
remember the last name of the
woman who designed and sewed
the wedding gown she wore when
she walked down the aisle over 60
years ago. But the grandmother of
seven does recall that when she
first told her fiance, Ludwig, that
she had always dreamed of being
married in a white gown he
realized he had his work cut out
for him.
For the tall, lanky 21-year-old
who had survived hunger, disease
and torture this was a different kind
of challenge. How was he ever
going to find such a dress in the
Bergen Belsen Displaced Person’s
camp where they felt grateful for the clothes on their
backs?
Fate would intervene in the guise of a former
German pilot who walked into the food distribution
center where Ludwig worked, eager to make a trade
for his worthless parachute. In exchange for two
pounds of coffee beans and a couple of packs of
cigarettes Lilly would have her wedding gown.
For two weeks Miriam the seamstress worked
under the curious eyes of her fellow DPs, carefully
fashioning the six parachute panels into a simple, long
sleeved gown with a rolled collar and a fitted waist
that tied in the back with a bow. When the dress was
completed she sewed the leftover material into a
matching shirt for the groom.
A white wedding gown may have seemed like a
frivolous request in the surreal
environment of the camps, but for
Lilly the dress symbolized the
innocent, normal life she and her
family had once led before the world
descended into madness. Lilly and
her siblings were raised in a Torah-
observant home in the small town
of Zarica, Czechoslovakia where
her father was a melamed,
respected and well liked by the
young yeshiva students he taught in
nearby Irsheva.
He and his two sons were
marked for extermination
immediately upon arriving at
Auschwitz. For Lilly and her sisters
it was only their first stop on their
long journey of persecution, which
included Plashof, Neustadt, Gross Rosen and finally
Bergen-Belsen.
Four hundred people marched 15 miles in the
snow to the town of Celle on January 27, 1946 to
attend Lilly and Ludwig’s wedding. The town
synagogue, damaged and desecrated, had been
lovingly renovated by the DPs with the meager
materials available to them. When a Sefer Torah
arrived from England they converted an old kitchen
cabinet into a makeshift Aron Kodesh.
“My sisters and I lost everything—our parents,
our two brothers, our homes. The most important
thing was to build a new home.”
Six months later, Lilly’s sister Ilona wore the dress
when she married Max Traeger. After that came
Cousin Rosie. How many brides wore Lilly’s dress?
“I stopped counting after 17.” With the camps
experiencing the highest marriage
rate in the world, Lilly’s gown was in
great demand.
In 1948 when President Harry
Truman finally permitted the 100,000
Jews who had been languishing in
DP camps since the end of the war
to emigrate, the gown accompanied
Lilly across the ocean to America.
Unable to part with her dress, it lay
at the bottom of her bedroom closet
for the next 50 years, “not even good
enough for a garage sale. I was
happy when it found such a good
home.”
Home was the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C. When Lily’s niece, a volunteer,
told museum officials about her
aunt’s dress, they immediately recognized its historical
significance and displayed the gown in a specially
designed showcase, guaranteed to preserve it for 500
years.
But Lilly Friedman’s dress had one more journey
to make. Bergen Belsen, the museum, opened its
doors on October 28, 2007. The German government
invited Lilly and her sisters to be their guests for the
grand opening. They initially declined, but finally
traveled to Hanover the following year with their
children, their grandchildren and extended families to
view the extra-ordinary exhibit created for the
wedding dress made from a parachute.
Lilly’s family, who were all familiar with the
stories about the wedding in Celle, were eager to
visit the synagogue. They found the building had been
completely renovated and
modernized. But when they pulled
aside the handsome curtain they were
astounded to find that the Aron
Kodesh, made from a kitchen
cabinet, had remained untouched as
a testament to the profound faith of
the survivors. As Lilly stood on the
bimah once again she beckoned to her
granddaughter, Jackie, to stand beside
her where she was once a kallah.
“It was an emotional trip. We cried a
lot.”
Two weeks later, the woman who
had once stood trembling before the
selective eyes of the infamous Dr.
Josef Mengele returned home and
witnessed the marriage of her
granddaughter.
The three Lax sisters—Lilly, Ilona and Eva, who
together survived Auschwitz, a forced labor camp, a
death march and Bergen Belsen—have remained
close and today live within walking distance of each
other in Brooklyn. As mere teenagers, they managed
to outwit and outlive a monstrous killing machine, then
went on to marry, have children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren and were ultimately honored by
the country that had earmarked them for extinction.
As young brides, they had stood underneath the
chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors
had been saying for thousands of years. In doing so,
they chose to honor the legacy of those who had
perished by choosing life.Helen Zegerman Schwimmer is the author of Like The
Stars of The Heavens.
The Wedding Gown That Made History
Lily and Ludwig Friedman
Lily Friedman and her wedding
dress on exhibit.
my friends...We have sent messages to the outside
world which were then transmitted back by foreign
radio stations. Consequently the camp guards are very
angry right now.”
Pilecki’s reports from the camp were channelled
to the Allies via a courier system that the Polish
Resistance operated throughout occupied Europe. By
1942 Pilecki’s organization realized the existence of
the gas chambers and he worked on several plans to
liberate Auschwitz, including one in which the RAF
would bomb the walls, or Free Polish paratroopers
would fly in from Britain.
However, in 1943, realizing that the Allies had no
plans to liberate the camp, he and two others escaped.
The new documents include a Gestapo manhunt alert
after his escape.
Pilecki ensured that a full report on the camp
reached London, and the resistance group he started
in Auschwitz continued to feed information to Britain
and the United States, confirming that the Nazis were
bent on the extermination of the Jews.
The archive material will again raise questions as
to why the Allies, and in particular Winston Churchill,
never did anything to stop the atrocities there. “We
can only assume the British thought we were
exaggerating,” said the Polish historian Jacek
Pawlowicz. “I’m certain Poles shared their intelligence
with MI6 and the highest levels of British Government,
which, for some reason, remained silent.”
After his escape Pilecki was captured fighting in
the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and spent the rest of
the conflict in a prisoner-of-war camp. In July 1945
he joined Free Polish troops in Italy, from where he
agreed to return to Poland and gather intelligence on
the Soviet takeover of the country. He was, however,
caught by the Polish Communist regime. In a twist of
fate, a Polish Jew administered the torture during his
interrogation. Pilecki’s wife was invited to visit and he
told her that his time in Auschwitz was child’s play by
comparison. After a show trial he was given three death
sentences and shot.
The new material includes his charge sheet, which
has 132 subsections, each listing a separate alleged
crime. “From July 1945 to May 1947 the accused
worked against the Polish state as a paid resident of
an overseas intelligence agency,” one accusation
reads. “The worst crime committed against the state
was that he was acting in the interests of foreign
imperialism, to which he has completely sold out
through a prolonged period of work as a spy.” The
implication is clear: Mr Pilecki was providing
information on the Soviet-backed regime that was
finding its way to MI6.
After his death Pilecki was demonized by the
Communists and his heroics re-emerged only after
1989.
His son, Andrzej Pilecki, who was 16 when he
learned that his father had been executed, said:
“There’d be no better memorial to my father than for
the young to learn of his example. I was at school at
the time, it was a terrible shock, but now after 60
years of waiting I am thrilled to see justice.”
The new archive releases also reveal touching
details. In a smuggled letter dated October 18, 1943,
to his ten-year-old daughter he wrote: “I am very
happy to hear you are such a devoted housemaid and
that you like to take care of the animals and our plants
in the garden. I, too, like every kind of bug and beetle
as well as the beans and the peas. I like everything
that lives. I’m very glad to hear that inside my children
there are the same thoughts that I have.”
WITOLD PILECKIcont’d from p. 6
TOGETHER 12 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Rosian ZernerBY SUSIE DAVIDSON, JEWISH ADVOCATE
“I stand before you as proof that miracles
happen,” Rosian Zerner said last year at the annual
Yom HaShoah ceremony at Faneuil Hall.
Zerner’s place at the podium was inspirational,
and apropos. Her advocacy on behalf of Holocaust
survivors and work in German-Jewish relations is well-
known. She is the former vice
president, and current governing
board member of the World
Federation of Jewish Child Survivors
of the Holocaust. The contact person
for Greater Boston Child Survivors,
she is the JCRC representative from,
and executive committee member of
the American Association of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors of Greater
Boston. She is also on the Holocaust
Survivor Advisory Board at the
Jewish Family and Children’s Service,
the Yom HaShoah planning committee, has
represented Boston survivors at restitution issue
meetings, and helped bring about a U.S. stamp
honoring rescuer/diplomat Hiram Bingham.
Although her native Lithuania holds the dread
distinction of being the country that lost the highest
percentage of its Jews, Zerner survived World War
II in the Kovno Ghetto, and in hiding. Her parents
dug a hole under the ghetto’s barbed wire fence and
pushed her to safety. “I was 6,” she said. “They timed
and avoided the changing of the guards, the
searchlights, the dogs.
Zerner, who had grown up in a privileged
environment, remembers every detail of her escape.
“I was hidden in homes, attics, barns and woods, an
orphanage. I was baptized,” she said. “Sometimes I
was ready to stop running, but my will to live was
greater.” Miraculously reunited with her parents after
the war, they remained in Italy for six years, en route
to Palestine and before moving to the U.S. in 1951.
Immersed into Newton High School at age 16,
she sang the St. Louis Blues without knowing English
with the acapella sextet the Newtonettes. She found
it refreshing to be with people not touched by the
Holocaust.
“It certainly did not fit into my senior prom as the
date of the class president or into the values that I
was absorbing within the ‘melting pot’ of the 50s,”
she said.
Zerner later matriculated at Barnard College. “In
Italy I had listened to Radio Free Europe and thought
I would come to the land of
spirituals and jazz,” she
rememberd. Instead, it was all rock
and roll. Her mother had been the
Konzertmeister of the Lithuanian
Opera, and Zerner had been a
student at Milan’s La Scala Ballet
School. She had read all the works
of Shakespeare, Zane Gray, and
Jack London in Italian. Despite
class structures and educational
strictures, she said that “the world,
the time, was my very own oyster.”
Zerner was a runner-up for Miss Barnard,
president of the fine arts club (her major was art
history and her thesis, the female nude), and a class
officer. Her future husband, John Zerner, was in her
music class. In 1961, she began graduate school at
Columbia, but embarked for India, arriving before
even the Beatles’ George Harrison. She spent four
months in Japan, Thailand and Persia.
“I bicycled in Nepal among Tibetan refugees,
lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, bathed in the Ganges
and went to its source.” She has since traveled to 64
countries. In Israel, Zerner visited her mother’s
surviving relatives on a kibbutz and in Tel Aviv. She
married Zerner in 1962; they had two sons but
divorced in 1970 following his medical school
graduation. “I was unprepared for either motherhood
or independence, and yet, in those feminist days, I
declined to take alimony,” she says.
In the freewheeling ’60s, Zerner’s car had a
flower instead of an antenna, she was teargassed in
Washington antiwar marches, and started to sculpt
again, painting, writing and publishing Beat poetry,
making candles, pottery, enameling. Her father later
convinced her to buy a home in Chestnut Hill.
“Newton schools were the best at that time,” she
said. A salon she had begun in Brookline became the
Sunday Brunch Club at the Newton Highlands
Women’s Club. She organized trips, tennis parties,
support groups, and media, joined boards of arts
organizations and chaired art-related events.
“In 1987, she joined her pro-baseball player son
Jay, who is now a physician, in Australia. Although
caring for her father curtailed graduate school hopes,
she studied Spanish and pre-Columbian civilizations
at San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca in Mexico,
climbed pyramids and became a Mayan Solar Initiate.
“I spent a month in New Mexico and Arizona with
the Zuni and Hopi, explored Eastern philosophies and
religions that took me to Brazil, Japan and Thailand,
and followed the Celtic and other paths that led from
Stonehenge throughout Portugal and Spain,” she said.
In 1996, her father died at age 90, and she learned
that her father’s sister, Lyda, committed suicide weeks
after the Nazis murdered her composer husband
Edwin. In 2000, Zerner joined a child survivors’ and
a German-Jewish Dialogue group. She accepted an
award bestowed posthumously by then President
Adamkus of Lithuania upon one of her rescuers. “I
re-connected with my childhood friend who hid with
me, and retraced my steps from the house of my
grandfather to the Kovno Ghetto, to the homes where
I was hidden,” she recalled.
At Faneuil last year, where son Lang lit a candle,
Zerner quoted presidential candidate Dennis
Kuchinich: “If we can change ourselves, we can
change the world. We are not the victims of the world
we see, we are the victims of the way we see the
world.”
Rosian was recently cited by the governor and
senate of Massachusetts.
Susie Davidson is the author of I Refused to Die, a bookdocumenting the lives of 20 survivors and 10concentration camp liberators in Boston, and Jewish Lifein Postwar Germany: Our Ten-Day Seminar.
(International Herald Tribune) Jerusalem (AP) The
Nazi officer made famous in Roman Polanski’s movie
The Pianist has been posthumously honored by
Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari says the
museum awarded the honor of “righteous among the
nations” to Capt. Wilm
Hosenfeld based on
testimonies of Holocaust
survivors. She says he
rescued at least two Jews in
Poland from the Nazi
genocide.
Hosenfeld joined the
Nazi Party before World War
II, but later wrote about his
“disgust and horror” at the
systematic murder of
European Jews. After the
war, Hosenfeld was arrested and jailed by the Soviets.
He died in a Soviet prison in 1952.
The museum says it will award a medal and
certificate to Hosenfeld’s descendants on his behalf.
No date has been set for the ceremony.
Nazi officer who saved Jewshonored
The UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey. The
program will take place on Sunday, April 19 at 4pm
at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center in Fair Lawn, NJ.
The keynote address will be given by Paul Shapiro,
Director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
The program honors six survivors by having their
story read in the first person by a young person, while
the survivor lights a candle on our menorah in memory
of the Six Million. There is a children’s candle
procession, one child for each anniversary of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The program includes a
Yiddish reading and a Second Generation speaker,
who will be Leah Kaufman, Director of Jewish Family
Service of North Jersey.
YIZKOR – Remembrance ServiceSunday, April 19, 2009
Fair Lawn Jewish Center/Congregation Bnai Israel
10-10 Norma Avenue, Fair Lawn, NJ
Keynote Speaker: Paul ShapiroDirector of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum -
Washington, D.C.
“Opening the Archives of the InternationalTracing Service:
How did it happen? What does it mean?”Program at 4 pm. Photo Exhibit at 3:30 pm
For additional information callDr. Wallace Greene (201) 820-3911
Sponsored by the
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
of the UJA FEDERATION OF NORTHERN NEW
JERSEY
TOGETHER 13visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
BY SALOMEA KAPE-JAY M.D.In the summer of 1944 the Russian Army halted
the offensive and sat passive on the other side of the
Vistula River watching the slaughter by the Nazis of
the Polish insurgents in Warsaw. Ninety miles from
Warsaw the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto started in
July and reached its final stage at the end of August.
The number of “volunteers” for deportation decreased
each day and the Gestapo started their “actions”—
roundups—by removing Jews from their apartments
by force. The “actions” always came suddenly and
were performed with the precision of a Swiss watch,
reinforced by the experience the Nazis acquired with
each passing day. The familiar picture of a swarm of
armed Gestapo men in green uniforms standing with
their legs wide apart, in battle readiness at the corner
of the streets, of the Jewish police dispersed to the
buildings in search of ghetto dwellers, and of the
trucks waiting for the victims was a part of the
landscape in July and August 1944, the last months
of Lodz- Ghetto existence. And the noise! The cries
and screams of the Jews removed from their homes
together with the barking commands “Raus! Raus!”
formed a terrifying cacophony.
It was a warm August in 1944. The pleasant
weather facilitated the hunting expeditions and the
Gestapo found Jews almost without a miss. On one
of those beautiful summer days my mother needed
to reconnect with relatives. There wasn’t food in the
house, not a slice of bread or even the brown ersatz
coffee that gave a sense of being sated when eaten
dry with brown sugar. Mother avoided the open streets
and moved like a cat through the courtyards, cellars
and attics. She knew the ghetto like the palm of her
hand for her patients once lived there. An old pass
from the Department of Health allowing her to move
freely during the curfew—of little help if stopped by
the Nazis—gave her some kind of false security.
I was alone. The lonely man who had lived in the
kitchen had been deported the month before. Not a
trace was left of him, only the narrow, bare bed he
had used.
Soon our room would look like his, I thought, and
nobody would know of us, of our life, of our struggle,
of our death. We’ll have no names; we’ll become
statistics. Will future occupants of this building lead
normal lives within these silent walls? Will they make
love in this room? Will children play in the streets
where the Nazis are now dragging people to their
deaths? Will laughter be heard here again?” Such
thoughts frequently occupied me. The empty bed
made me aware how little I knew about the man
who shared our apartment with us for two years.
The ghetto was a place where friendship was in short
supply and hunger admitted no human bond.
I looked at our room with its big closet and the
old clock which had stopped telling time. Time was
now measured from one roundup to another. Above
the unmade bed a huge painting of “Solomon and his
Wives” covered the wall. The well-rounded figures
of the biblical wives with opulent breasts looked
obscene in the cluttered and cold room. It was almost
too painful to look at them on an empty stomach. I
stared at myself in the big mirror standing between
the two windows; my dress hung on me like one on a
hanger. Once again I surveyed the room. A heavy
couch in the corner showed its wiry interior which
made deep marks on my back after a night’s sleep
and the old, black stove stood useless and cold. On
the table All Quiet on the Western Front waited for
a reader.
These things will outlast us, I thought. With envy
I looked at the table and the closet. When my eyes
rested on the painting of Solomon and his wives, I
said aloud “No, not you. You’re too Jewish. You’ll be
replaced by the picture of Madonna and Christ.”
Suddenly I heard a commotion in the courtyard.
The roundup had started. Through the window I saw
the familiar sight of the Gestapo at the corner of the
street. My blood raced to my brain but my brain was
no longer capable of sending signals to my legs. I
wanted to run but my feet were glued to the floor.
My heart was pounding ready to explode. I could
hear my rapid breathing and fear, a paralyzing fear
oozing from every cell of my body.
I thought: “Should I write a farewell note? What
can I write when I am all nerves? Should I take some
clothing? Yes, but where is my clothing?” I grabbed
the toothbrush from the table and put it in my pocket.
Aloud I said, “They’ll take me and I’m hungry. Not a
slice of bread is in the house, nothing.”
My mind raced from one idea to another and I
decided, “No, they’ll not find me so easily. Where
can I hide? The closet, the big closet. ‘Sally, please,’
I begged myself, ‘quiet down and move. ‘Take the
book with you and read, read. Read till they’ll come
to take you.’”
In the closet I read All Quiet on the Western
Front trying to detach myself from the events in the
streets but my sharpened ear heard the heavy
stampeding on the stairs. Then I heard the police
shout,” The building is clean, nobody’s left. Let’s go.”
I thought I smelled the odor of the people taken
to the trucks, but it was my own odor of fear. Now
all the commotion, yelling and screaming and roaring
of the trucks ceased; a deadly silence fell upon the
street. In this silence I started to cry and my tears
wetted the famous book. I couldn’t cry for the people
who were taken brutally away. I cried for my own
life, for my unfulfilled dreams, for the love I might
never know, and most of all I cried for my mother.
“They didn’t find you. Good girl.” My mother
touched my face as if not believing her own eyes,” I
have some news,” she said “The Nazis are leaving a
few hundred Jews to clean the ghetto, and your uncle
Mel, who is now a manager of the stable, offered us
the job to clean the stable and to take care of the
horses. Horses are benign animals. We have a chance
to be together for awhile, if we’re lucky.”
Before moving out, my father, a hard working
and frugal man, smashed his lifework, the sum of his
dreams, the furniture. First went the paralyzed clock
while I looked with a renewed interest at all the
elaborate internal mechanisms, now in pieces. With
a hammer he struck the big mirror and the flying
refracting crystals shone like diamonds in the sun on
this perfect summer day. With the last force of a
blinded Samson he threw the heavy couch out from
the third floor window. The flying couch hit the ground
with a canon-like blast. My father still hadn’t satisfied
his anger and looked for more objects to demolish.
I took on the task of destroying the painting of
Solomon while the book, All Quiet on the Western
Front, flew like a bird through the window. The
thunder of the falling heavy objects didn’t cause any
reaction. No one came to the open windows. No one
asked, “Mr. Herschenberg, what happened? What
are you doing throwing out a good couch? And books?
You must be crazy.” There were no racing steps, no
curious faces. The tenants were on their way to
Auschwitz. This was my father’s way of protesting
against the silence of the world, against the futility of
his life’s efforts, against bonding with material objects,
against Hitler, against Nazis, against God.
We left the building and went to a newly formed
camp to join about 600 Jews selected as cleaners of
Lodz-Ghetto. In that camp my mother approached
Mel.
“I’ll not stand for the morning roll call. Look at
me; I am so thin, so emaciated that I’ll be the first
victim for deportation. Tomorrow is the selection day,”
she said.
Mel was irritated and raised his voice. “The Nazis
have a prepared list of people for deportation and
your hiding is hopeless. It may endanger our lives,
too. Don’t tell me what do you want to do; I’ m better
off if I don’t know your plans.”
“Even so, no power will drag me to the morning
roll call,” she responded.
I looked at my mother and realized that she was
right. Grayish, parchment-like skin covered the bones
of her face and her black eyes rimmed by prominent
puffs sat deep in their sockets. The head was attached
to a body of a child. No doubt she’ll catch the Nazis’
eyes. Mel must have had a second thought for he
repeated, “Do what you wish. I don’t want to know.”
It was another sunny morning when we stood in
a double row shivering from the first cold and the
tense atmosphere in the courtyard. From a prepared
list the Germans called out loudly the names of persons
designed for deportation. Suddenly the name Rose
Herschenberg hit my ear. My mother! A thousand
thoughts moved with the speed of light through my
head. “They’ll start a search for her, they’ll find her,
and they’ll kill her on the spot,” I whispered to myself.
A horror movie of a Nazi hunt with guns and dogs
and my mother’s bloody body exposed in the
courtyard was rolling under my eyelids.
What to do? Where’s my father? I was blinded
by panic for my father was actually close by, totally
shocked by the events.
“Mel,” I whispered. “No, he’s of no help.” I saw
his stony face. The rows of Jews on the morning call
stirred impatiently like a small wave. You don’t play
with the Nazis and you don’t let the Nazis wait. We
looked at each other but nobody budged.
This time the German shouted: “ROSE
HERSCHENBERG!” A tall woman with gray hair
whose face I couldn’t see walked slowly toward the
group of people assigned for deportation. All the
adrenaline leaked out of my body leaving me with
cotton legs and a buzzing in the head. Now I saw my
father, and in his blood-drained face I saw a reflection
of my own.
Later, my mother said, “I would have gone to the
front line the first time the Nazi called my name. I
didn’t know that there was another Rose
Herschenberg in our camp.” I never asked where
she had hid but I knew that the safest place was in
the stable, between the horses, “the benign animals.”
In late fall a man secretly came to the camp. He
and his wife had hidden in one of the abandoned
buildings in the ghetto. He had prepared the hideout
anticipating the liquidation of Lodz-Ghetto. He came
in the darkness of the night, for his wife was bleeding
to death after giving birth to a boy.
“Help me,” he begged the Jewish commandant
of the camp, “do you have a doctor here?”
“Yes, he’s a well known surgeon in Lodz. Let’s
go to him.” They approached the famous and highly
respected doctor.
“You don’t expect me to risk my life,” the doctor
said, visibly agitated and shaken. “The Nazis are
roaming the streets at night with dogs looking for the
hiding Jews like you. In camp I have a fraction of
hope to survive. Going with you is a suicide.”
The Midwife from Lodz
cont’d on p. 14
TOGETHER 14 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
The surgeon’s wife didn’t leave the room; she
stood behind her husband and fully supported his
position. Finally, the unwelcomed young father left
the room.
“He’s right and I cannot order him to go with
you,” said the commandant. “But wait. We have a
midwife in the camp, let’s try, but it’s a slim chance.”
Rose, my mother, the skinny, scared woman, a far
cry from “mother courage” was the last resort. I
couldn’t understand why she agreed to take the
dangerous journey. The call of duty? The pained eyes
of the husband? My mother wasn’t under normal
circumstances a risk-taking person, but these were
not ordinary times. She left the camp with the night
visitor and disappeared into the labyrinth of empty
streets. The dark, wide-open windows of the abandoned
buildings slammed by the cold wind looked like the eye
of Cyclops. They walked cautiously but every step
could be heard meters away in the empty streets.
In a filthy, well camouflaged cellar my mother
examined the heavily bleeding woman, removed the
retained placenta by an ungloved and not too clean
hand. She waited till the bleeding stopped, checked
the baby, and then returned to the camp alone.
“Sally,” she reported, and her face radiated with
pride,”it’s a healthy and beautiful baby boy. I am
concerned about the sterility. But in obstetrics one
cannot predict the outcome. Sometimes you spit in
the wound and nothing happens and another time you
maintain 100% sterility and a full-blown infection
follows. I must see her again.”
“Oh no, Ma, it’s not an after-delivery visit; it’s a
dangerous journey. You’re tempting death. The
surgeon had enough common sense to refuse.
Besides, the woman was foolish to get pregnant in
hiding. It’s a double ticket to death. I don’t understand
how in the midst of hunger, destruction and deportation
one gets pregnant,” I reprimanded my mother as
though I were 25 years her senior and not the other
way around.
My mother answered, “The drive of intimacy is
very strong even in the lowest human conditions,
although hunger made a lot of us asexual. The husband
is a very courageous and intelligent man and he didn’t
follow the herd to the train station for a journey to...who
knows, it seems to me like death. He prepared the
hiding place to the last detail; he has electric power,
water, and even a small radio.The baby has more
chances to survive than we have. We are exposed
here in camp and are an easy target for a mass
execution while the baby, with a little luck, may live.
You don’t see something symbolic in this delivery?”
“No, I see a danger to your life and I’m not
interested in symbols,” I cried.
I wanted to scare and pain my mother, to tell her,
“You left me alone once to my own fate. Please don’t
do it again. Don’t let me die without you and don’t let
me survive without you. Don’t go.”
I was well aware of my own thoughts but I had
to put a clamp on my emotions to stop the out pouring
of resentment for the people in the hideout.
My mother, as though listening through a
stethoscope, was aware of my innermost thoughts.
“What?, yYou have a fixation that I’m risking my
life. I don’t run between shooting squads; our life in
the camp is riskier. The Nazis took away from us the
right to be pregnant and to bear children. I’m fully
trained to deliver babies, and babies are the promise
of life.”
My mother made a second visit, alone. She came
back beaming with joy and with a loaf of bread. The
mother and the baby were doing well, which proved
again that the impossible was sometimes possible in
the Lodz-Ghetto.
“Why did you take bread from the man?” I asked.
“We have enough food in the camp.”
“He insisted on giving me something for the
services and I took the only thing which in the ghetto
had the value of life. The baby is laughing a lot and
crying very little; a smart baby he is. He’ll see a better
world without Hitlers and the Nazis.”
My mother delivered another baby in the camp.
The woman was so slim that no one recognized that
she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her
husband came straight to my mother, having learned
that the surgeon under the watchful eye of his wife
would absolutely refuse to help. In the camp all news
traveled very fast. The woman’s bed was put in a
dark corner in the hall of the womens’ quarter. I sat
nearby and heard a slight commotion behind the
improvised curtain, the husband’s whispers and my
mother’s quiet voice, “Easy, easy.” No groan or moan.
There were only my mother’s quick steps and later a
weak cry, a chirp. Then there was a total silence
behind the curtain.
The women didn’t sleep. The air was heavy with
tension and fear and smelled faintly of blood. In the
early morningthere was no trace of the event and no
trace of the baby. The bed was in its usual position
and the woman was asleep. All sighed with relief
and no one asked questions. The woman went to her
usual work assignment with a deathly face; her
husband was silent and a shade paler. My mother
came to me in tears and said, “but the boy, the baby-
boy in the cellar, he’ll survive. You’ll see, he’ll survive.”
On January 17, 1945 the Red Army began its
final push to Berlin, crossed the Vistula in force and
liberated Lodz on January 19, 1945. We, 840 Jews,
the remnants of 250,000 Jews of Lodz survived.
The Nazis had no time left and ran West, leaving
behind six mass graves in the Jewish cemetery
prepared for us.
Today, I still remember and wonder, where is the
boy born in a cellar in a dying ghetto to brave parents
on November 1944, delivered by my mother who
never doubted in his survival as he became for her a
symbol of the rebirth of our nation?
cont’d from p. 13
The Midwife from Lodz
In 1942 a young French couple, Moussa Abadi
and Odette Rosenstock—Moussa, a Syrian-born
Sorbonne professor, and Odette, a recent medical school
graduate affected by the Gertman laws restricting
Jewish medical practice—relocated from
Paris to non-Vichy southern France. In Nice,
which was under Italian occupation, with a
background in acting and languages, Abadi
was hired as a teacher in a Catholic
theological seminary. In September 1943,
after the Germans occupied the area and
began deporting its Jews, Abadi decided to
set up a network to save children. He asked
for help from his employer, Monsignor Paul
Remond, the Bishop of Nice. The Bishop
gave him the title of superintendent of
Catholic education. The signed letter of
appointment enabled Abadi freedom of
movement and access to Christian
institutions in which he was able to hide
children. The couple secured safe lodgings in
convents and some private homes for 527
children, arranging for their expenses and
necessary papers.
Odette was arrested by the French in
1944 and turned over to the Gestapo. She survived a
brutal interrogation in Drancy without giving up any of
the children or revealing the scope of their operation,
and then sent to Auschwitz and subsequently to Bergen-
Moussa and Odette Abadi: A RemembranceBelsen. Moussa continued their efforts from hiding
until the end of the war. At the conclusion of WWII,
the reunited couple married and helped the children
find surviving family members or, if that was not
possible, find homes in orphanages.
Years later, now Archbishop Remond
was recognized by the Israeli government
as a “Righteous Gentile” for his
participation in the Abadi rescue operation.
For the Abadis themselves, the French
government has recently honored the
memory of their bold and selfless
work by renaming a site in the 12th
arrondissement in Paris after them:
“Place Moussa et Odette Abadi.”
Self-effacing and never recognized by
the Jewish community, it was only when
when Remond and other Christians who
had helped in Abadi operations were
honored as righteous gentiles that the
Abadis came to be known.
Moussaf Abadi died in 1997; a
distraught Odette took her life two years
later.
As Abadi noted in one of his last
speeches, “Do not accept that in this
world one kills. Be on guard; be arousers; talk to
your children and grandchildren. Talk, yell and
scream.”
Lesson 3 gives me hope. One patient, a survivor
of Auschwitz, recently lost her husband of 60 years.
She came to me severely depressed, with thoughts
of suicide.
I asked her, “How did you have any hope in the
camp, knowing that each day could be your last?”
She smiled briefly and told me a story (I reconstruct
her words from memory):
“My dear doctor, I believe in God, and he was
with me in the camp. But I also had several young
women from my town with me in the barracks.
“When we had to stand at attention for hours,
we stood together, propping up one another when
weak. When we dug ditches we did it together, one
holding and moving the arms and shovel for another
who didn’t have strength that day. We were
desperate, but never alone.”
I referred her to a social club we created for
older people with mild memory problems, and one
day I crept into the room during a discussion group
and hid behind a corner to listen.
One women spoke disparagingly of her memory.
“I am losing my mind,” she said. “It is so painful.”
Then I heard my patient respond in a resolute
voice: “You must have hope. We are all in the same
boat here, together.”
As I listened I could feel tears welling in my eyes,
but I kept myself hidden, afraid to let the group see
their doctor weeping. From my hiding place I
cont’d from p. 4
From a Place of Fire and Weeping
cont’d on p. 15
TOGETHER 15visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
Vilna – Jerushalaim de Lite:A TributeBY LILY M. MARGULES
Today, I stand before you to pay tribute to a city
where I was born and spent my happy childhood—to
my beloved Vilna—“Jerushalaim de Lite.”
An old legend tells us about the mighty Lithuanian
knight Gediminus, who many centuries ago while
hunting with his entourage in the Black Forest, slayed
a big black boar. The boar, king of this forest, had
roamed among the tall trees, roaring over his dominion.
A very dangerous and ferocious animal, his meat
proved sweeter than honey and practically melted in
one’s mouth.
After a huge and loud celebration, our hero fell
asleep on the fresh smelling green grass when he
was suddenly awakened by a strong, demanding voice
that commanded him to celebrate his victory by
building a fort, a castle carved from stone, high on
this mountain overlooking the majestic slowly flowing
waters of the Wiliya River. And so it was done. And
it was the beginning.
Through the ages Poles, Lithuanians, and
Russians settled here. And then Jews, the eternal
wanderers, came as well, liked what they saw and
steadily started to build communities around the tall
castle carved from stone. And soon a city was born.
Life was not easy, especially for the Jews. Vilna,
because if its geographic location and many natural
resources, was a “tasty morsel” worth fighting for.
Invaders came and went, and with them new customs
and languages had to be learned. But somehow the
Vilner Jewish population continued to grow, building
synagogues and yeshivot that became centers of
Jewish education attracting students from all over.
And then one day Napoleon Bonaparte, the little
corporal from Corsica and future emperor of France,
during his triumphant march through Europe on his
gallop to conquer the Russian bear, passed through
Vilna. The streets of the city were
all lined up with very excited
inhabitants shouting, “Vive le
France, Vive le Grand General.”
Napoleon was in his glory. Sitting
high on his white stallion, dressed in
a splendid uniform surrounded by
adoring generals, Napoleon savored
every minute of it. Then he suddenly
entered a very different section of
this great city. He started to look
with amazement at the narrow
cobblestone covered streets
overflowing with shabbily dressed
young men with pallid faces
carrying heavy books and shouting
their greetings in a strange, guttural
language. He asked one of his
adjutants to find out who these strange people were.
After being informed that he was in the Jewish
quarter, he announced with a big smile and great pride:
“Mon Dieu, I just conquered the Jerusalem of
Lithuania without firing a single shot!!” Hence the
name “Jerushalaim de Lite,” came into being.
And so with the passing years the Jewish
population continued to grow and prosper. The city
became a vibrant center of Jewish culture. We had a
Jewish theater where actors performed in all the
classic plays including Shakespeare. There were
libraries, daily and monthly newspapers, schools and
philanthropic institutions. The music school on
Rudnicka Street performed the opera Aida by Verdi
in Yiddish, etc., etc.
In the year 1939, from the 250,000 natives 80,000
were my brothers and sisters—Jews—basking in the
bright sun shining over Jerushalaim de Lite.
But then the bubble burst with the outbreak of
the Second World War. With the occupation of the
Nazi war machine, we, the Vilner Jews lost the right
to exist. We became persona non grata, hunted
animals destined for complete extermination.
On a grim, autumn day—September 23, 1943—
the date of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, with
tears in our eyes and great sorrow in our hearts we
marched in columns, men separated from women,
through the ghetto gate leaving our beloved city behind.
Vilna was now judenrein. This is the last time I was
there, never having the emotional or physical strength
to return.
Today the ancient city is renamed Vilnius and is
the capital of Lithuania, one of the Baltic states.
Vilna—guarded jealously by the tall silent castle built
a long, long time ago by Gediminus overlooking the
majestic slowly flowing waters of the Wiliya River,
once full of a vibrant Jewish life—lives now only in
the souls and hearts of Vilner like me.
Vilne Vilne undzer heim shtot
Unzer beinkszaft un bager
Ah—wie oft es ruft dein nomen
Fun mein oig arois a trer
Vilner geslach, Vilner taichun
Vilner velder barg un tol
Epes noiet, epes beink sich
Noch di zeiten fun amol.
Lily Margules is the author of Memories, Memories: From
Vilna to New York With a Few Stops Along the Way. This tribute
was made at the commemoration at the Hebrew Institute of
Riverdale, 9-23-93.
I enjoyed readingthe Dec. 2008issue of Together
but wanted togive you a headsup on the following.The issue contains
an article by a now-13-year-old young woman namedElyse Bodenheimer asking Jewish children andteenagers to send her Holocaust stories. I had comeacross her and her website some time ago, thoughtit was remarkable for such a young woman to becreating a website for Jewish Holocaust stories, andasked her if she’d like to put one of my stories onher website. She said she would and I sent it to her.When it was published, I noticed a number of errorsand sent them to her asking her to makecorrections.Instead of getting an answer from her, Igot an answer from her father saying she’s too busyto make the corrections, but he will. That was monthsago.
Sonia Pressman Fuentes
Dear Together newspaper staff,As I am the granchild of Holocaust survivors, I amdeeply moved that you continue to keep knowledgeof the Holocaust so that people understand thetremendous hardships that my grandparents wentthrough. I recently read your newspaper for the firsttime and tears came to my eyes. I am sure mygrandparents would be proud to have people cometogether to commemorate theirs and those like theirlives. So, I would like to say thank you on behalf ofmy family for remembering. Also, I would like toknow some organizations and/or anything to do withHolocaust survivors that I could possibly volunteerto help in Los Angeles.A Sincere Thank you, Dana
To the American Gathering,My name is Mary Wagner. I grew up on the eastside of Columbus, OH, where I was born 56 yearsago. I am a lifelong Catholic, and my pride in myheritage received an inestimable boost when PopeJohn Paul II called antisemitism what a Pope shouldhave forcefully called it long, long before: “a sinagainst God and man.”
I have known people with numbers tatooed ontheir arms my whole life. Our neighbor, Mr. Winter,never volunteered his stories of the camps unless Iasked, but I learned so much from him, and not justabout his ordeal—he was a great teacher of love.
I wanted to give you this context so that youwill, I hope, accept as sincere my own personaloutrage that Pope Benedict has permitted thisunreconstructed Shoah denier back into the Catholicchurch, which is in my estimate nearly carte blanchefor deniers of all stripe.
I know that the Pope’s plainly wrong action willdo nothing to heal the remaining distrust the Jewishcommunity as a whole, and especially the AmericanGathering, has of the institutional Catholic church—quite the opposite. But I hope you will at least knowthat Catholics in the pew do and will consider theVatican flat-out wrong on this matter.
My closely-held hope that John Paul’s heartfeltefforts to end anti-Semitism, and his example ofcalling himself, other Catholics, and the Catholicchurch to account for millenia of this sin, would createpositive momentum is obviously gone. And I couldnot be more disappointed.
I will not stop calling this matter out in my owncommunity and up the “chain of command” thatoversees this religion of 1.2 billion human beings. Weare all responsible for what we know, and I both knowthat this is wrong and how wrong it is. I promise to beyour voice whenever there is the trace of an opportunity.
witnessed a beloved patient begin to heal herself.These lessons from fire are not the only points of clinical knowledge that one needs to work with aging
victims of trauma, but they’re a good start. When facing the last generation of Holocaust survivors, I offer mypresence as a doctor and I feel strengthened by their words.
“Faith — I still have faith,” I hear a survivor say. “Doctor, hope for me!” another commands. These arethe primal gifts of life that we share.
Marc E. Agronin is a geriatric psychiatrist in Miami.
From a Place of Fire and Weeping cont’d from p. 14
TOGETHER 16 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
cont’d on p. 17
GERTA BAGRIANSKY
From her daughter, Rosian
Zerner
Gerta Bagriansky died peacefully
in her sleep. She was over 100
years old. Born on 8/8/08 in
Germany she lived in Lithuania,
Denmark, France, Austria and Italy before settling into
her Newton, MA, USA home in 1951. During World
War II she was interned in the Kovno and Vilno Ghettoes,
escaping both and surviving in hiding. The music degree
she received in Paris served her well after WWII when she became the
Konzertmeister of the Lithuanian Opera and taught piano. She continued to teach
and to play four-handed on her two pianos with her friends in the USA. An avid
gardener, she was always surrounded by plants and flowers.
ADAM BOREN
Adam Boren died on March 1, 2009 after a brief illness. He was 79. Adam was
born Adam Borenzstein in Warsaw, Poland, to chemist and businessman Israel
Borenzstein and his wife Sarah Gold Borenzstein. After the Germans occupied
Warsaw in 1939, Adam, his father and brother Mietek left Warsaw for the part of
Poland occupied by the Soviets. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Israel,
Mietek and Adam were captured and imprisoned. On the evening of their execution
Adam escaped. His father, brother and 40 other
Jewish prisoners were executed by hanging. Adam
returned to his mother in the Warsaw Ghetto to find
that his sister had died of typhus. Adam then
participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. His
mother was killed when her building was bombed.
Adam was wounded, captured, and eventually
transported to the first of three concentration camps.
He survived Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen
and a death march.
Adam immigrated to the United States and arrived in New York on December
20, 1946. He worked for several years in New York then decided to go west. He
moved to Denver in 1948 where he became a sales and service manager of
Telco Company, a television manufacturer. In 1956 he returned to New York and
formed Unico, a commercial refrigeration company supplying equipment to
supermarkets. In 1961 he formed the Adam Equipment Company, later called
Adamatic Corp., to manufacture and supply the wholesale bakery trade with
high-speed roll and bread production lines and ovens. In 1989 the Hobart Company
acquired Adamatic. Adam was retained as a COO of the Hobart division until he
retired in 1994 to be treated for pancreatic cancer.
After moving to Asbury Park, NJ, Adam met Claire Goldbarten on a blind
date in New York in May of 1961. They married December 10, 1961, and several
years later moved to Ocean Township, where they raised their daughter Sari and
son Jonathan. In 1990, Adam and Claire moved to Rumson.
Throughout their marriage, Adam and Claire were very involved in the Jewish
community and in their support of Israel. Adam was an active officer in the
International Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, the David S. Wyman
Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the Monmouth County Jewish Federation and
Jewish Community Center. Adam spoke frequently about his Holocaust experience
at schools, universities, Fort Monmouth, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and other organizations.
In 1996, to celebrate Adam’s miraculous recovery from cancer, Adam and
Claire’s friends established the Boren Holocaust Education Fund at the Jewish
Federation of Monmouth County.
After retirement Adam studied photography at the International Center of
Photography in New York and began taking a memoir writing class at New York
University. In 2000, the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project and the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum put out a call for manuscripts of Holocaust memoirs
to publish. From the over 1,000 manuscripts received, Adam’s memoir, Journey
Through the Inferno, was the first to be published in 2004.
RABBI IZYK MENDEL BORNSTEIN
by Yossi Bornstein
Rabbi Izyk Mendel Bornstein (Menachem) passed away on December 11, 2008 at
the age of 84. Izyk Mendel was a courageous Holocaust survivor of six Nazi
camps: Plaszov I, Plaszov II, Pionki, Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Gunskurchen.
He was the sole survivor of his family.
After the liberation he moved to Israel where he served in the army, actively
participating in the the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars.
After moving to the US in the ’80s, he became a very important
person in the community of Harrisburg, PA. In 2004, supported
and accompanied by his wife and four children, he decided to go
back to Poland. After reaching his hometown of Szczekociny, he
discovered to his dismay that all the remains of the Jewish religious
sites had been devastated and the memory of the town’s almost
3,000 Jews was completely lost. The two cemeteries had most of
the bones removed and a private house, a factory and public toilets were built on
top of them.
He then started a battle, together with his family, to have the toilets removed
and a monument built to commemorate all Jewish families from the town.
In June 2008, Izyk Mendel came back again to Szczekociny, this time to
participate in the first Festival of Jewish Culture. He said kaddish for the
Szczekociny Jews, his family included. He lit candles in their memory on the
remains of the old cemetery and spoke of times before the war.
My father used to believe that one man can make a difference. His spirit
remains as encouragement for us all and he himself was a model of bravery and
eagerness to change the world. His life story will be published as a book, B94—
The Spirit of the Survivor.
FELICA MUNN GALAS BRENNER
Felicia Brenner, 82, passed away on May 23rd, 2008. Mrs. Brenner survived the
ravages of the Lodz Ghetto, the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen
and the Salzwadel work camp. Her entire family—her parents and six brothers
and sisters—perished in death camps. Liberated in 1945, Felicia met her first
husband, Tibor Munk, at an American hospital in Frankfurt where they were both
recovering from typhus. Felicia and Tibor found his mother Roza, who also survived
Auschwitz , and the three of them immigrated to the U.S. in July 1946. Felicia
and her husband moved to Skokie in 1955 where they raised their two daughters
and where Felicia developed her reputation on the North Shore for her beautiful
handmade draperies and bedspreads. Felicia remarried in 1985. She and her
husband, Gershon Brenner, became founding members of the Illinois Holocaust
Museum and Education Center. A gifted speaker, she was invited numerous times
to speak to children and university students about her war experience. In 2005,
Felicia was named Mayor Daley’s Speaker of the Year at Chicago’s annual
Holocaust Memorial event. Everyone who knew Felicia was touched by her
struggles to overcome the incredible challenges of her life and admired her
indomitable will to survive.
GABRIEL BROSS
Gabriel Bross of Delray Beach, FL, passed away December 24, 2008. He was
90 years old. Mr. Bross was born in Dombrowice, Poland, the son of Rueben and
Chava Brzustowski. He survived the Holocaust and many infamous concentration
camps, arriving in the U.S. in 1946. Mr. Bross lived in New Jersey before retiring
to Florida. He worked in liquor distributing and owned a butcher shop and health
food store. He was married twice. Mr. Bross loved Judaism and studied to be a
cantor before the Holocaust.
MICHAEL ETKIN
Michael Etkin was born in Glubokie, Belarus, on Decem-
ber 25, 1932 together with a twin brother, Chaim Shabtai.
With the Nazi invasion of 1941, the family was moved from
their town of Krulevshchizna to the Glubokie Ghetto. His
mother Chava, a nurse, soon left the family and joined a
local partisan group that fought the Nazis in the forests of
Belarus. In 1943, when the Nazis began exterminating the
residents of the ghetto, Michael ran away, though he was shot in the foot in the
process. He was eventually found and brought to the partisans but it would only
be years later that he discovered his mother had been captured and hanged by the
Nazis. In 1946, along with 2,000 other orphans, he arrived in Israel, first to the Atlit
transfer camp and then to the Magdiel agricultural school. After his army service,
Michael studied physical education at the Wingate Institute and went on to a
career in sports and physical education. In 1956 he married Rivka Levy and had
five sons. He died on February 9, 2009.
ANN GILBERT (Chana Zylberstajn)
The Gazette (Cedar Rapids-Iowa City, IA)Ann was born on July 20, 1924, in Szydlowiec, Poland, to Josek and Laja
Zylberstajn. She spent over four years in concentration camps and was liberated
in April 1945. She married Fred Gilbert (Felek Gebotszrajber) on January 2, 1946,
TOGETHER 17visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
cont’d from p. 16
in Scwabisch Hall, Germany. Ann was a
consummate homemaker, an
accomplished seamstress, and devoted to
her family. She and Fred lived in Cedar
Rapids from 1949 to 1986, where she was
an active member of Temple Judah and
in the community. She was a lifetime member of Hadassah.
From 1986 to 2003, Ann and Fred lived in Los Angeles,
where she was a much sought after seamstress to film and
motion picture stars. Ann and Fred were also very active in
the survivor community. They were regular speakers at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center-Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. She and Fred lectured frequently
about their experiences. In 2003, she and Fred returned to Cedar Rapids. She
passed away on December 13, 2008.
PINKAS GRUSSGOTT
BY SAM GRUSSGOTT
Pinkas Grussgott passed away peacefully at the grand age of 93 on September
6th, 2008. My father, Pinchas Elemelech, was born on November 23, 1914 in
Pericin, Czechoslovakia. My father was the only survivor of his immediate family.
He survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dernau, Flossenburg and Schotterwork
and returned to Zetec to see who was left of his family. He later married my
mother, Margaret Stern. Before immigrating to America, they had my two brothers
Jack and Leslie. They left for the U.S. on the Queen Mary and nine months
later I was born. I remember on many occasions, my father asking me why he
had survived the Holocaust. My response to him was that he had survived to
have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
OLGA WEISZ GUTTMAN
Olga Weisz Guttman was born in Satoralyauhely, Hungary.
She was deported with her family from Hungary in 1944 to
Auschwitz, from there to Geislingen Steige, Germany, and
then to Allah, a subsidiary of Dachau. She was liberated on
April 30, 1945 in a cattle car by American Soldiers near
Iffeldorf, Bavaria.
She was truly a Woman of Valor and honored by many
Jewish organizations, including AMIT Women. She was very
involved in the Miami Holocaust Resource Center, and
lectured to many schools and organizations on her wartime experience. She
truly believed we must keep the memory alive, to that extent, that she even went
on the March of the Living with a large group of students from Miami in 1996.
IRENE LIEBLICH
BY JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of South Florida resident Irene
Lieblich on December 28, 2008. Mrs. Lieblich survived the Holocaust and created
evocative paintings that recorded shtetl life. She grew up in the Polish town of
Zamosc, and after the war settled in the U.S. as a wife to
Jakob and mother of Nathan and Mahli. Her childhood
memories expressed themselves through poetry and
painting. Her poems were published in Yiddish-language
newspapers, including The Forward, in the 1960s and ’70s.
But once she began painting in 1971, she found her
preferred medium. She studied at the Brooklyn Museum
and a year later won first prize at the Farband Arts Festival
in New York City. When Nobel-Prize winning author Isaac
Bashevis Singer saw Lieblich’s work at an Artists’ Equity
exhibition in Manhattan, in 1973, he asked Lieblich to illustrate his children’s
books. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, his publishers, engaged the then-unknown artist to
illustrate A Tale of Three Wishes, published in 1976. A second book, The Power
of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah, was published in 1980. The Women’s
Zionist Organization of America used her painting, Jerusalem of Gold, as the
design for its greeting cards. In 1995, an exhibition of her work was presented at
the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
at the Fountainbleau Hilton in 1995.
MASHA RAPOPORT
BY KEN RAPOPORT, NORTHBROOK, IL (abridged)
Masha Rapoport was born in Bedzin, Poland, on March 23, 1923, as Masza
Piotrkowska, the youngest child in a family of seven children. Her love of music
started early in life, and she learned to play the mandolin as a
child. After the death of her father, her mother ran the family
business, which was manufacturing and selling shoes. They
had a factory and store on the main street in Bedzin. With the
death of her mother just before the war, Masha went to live
with her eldest sister. The Nazis invaded her town on September
5, 1939, and the Jews were forced into the Kamionka Ghetto.
In August 1943 she and her family were taken to nearby Auschwitz. Her sisters
and all of their families perished there, along with one of her brothers—only one
brother survived. My mother could have been destined for the same fate, but God
intervened, in the form of the brilliant band leader of the Jewish Women’s Orchestra
in Auschwitz named Alma Rose. She was pulled out of a “selection” line when
they asked for volunteers who could play an instrument. Thus Masha went into
the women’s orchestra and played for the Nazis, who were eager for some soft
classical music after a hard day’s labor of torturing and murdering. Later she was
transported by cattle car to Bergen-Belsen. Liberated by British troops on April
15, 1945, she was given shelter in the DP camp there. Soon she met and married
Morris Rappaort. They immigrated to U.S., arriving in Chicago in 1950. Morris
would become successful in the construction trade while Masha devoted herself
to family. In 1960 they moved to the survivor community of Lincolnwood. Morris
passed away in 1998, a tragedy Masha would never overcome. Her heart finally
failed her in January 2009.
DORA FUCHS SAWICKI
Dora Fuchs Sawicki, 93, was born in a small town in Poland in 1916 and passed
away February 08, 2009. She was predeceased by her husband of 44 years, Moric
Sawicki, in 1990. Dora was a valiant and strong woman who managed to save
herself and two sisters from the Nazi genocide. She kept them all together during
internment in two ghettos, one of which was Lodz; the Ravensbruck Concentration
Camp, and finally liberated by the Russian army from the Wittenberg labor camp in
1945. Dora also saved a woman who was alone in the Lodz Ghetto by bringing her
into their family group and helping her survive to liberation. She and her late husband
Moric became U.S.citizens and managed to rebuild their lives in Rochester, NY. They
moved to Harrisburg, PA in 1989.
POLA HOROWICZ SIGIEL
By Sylvia Safer
The small number of remaining Holocaust survivors has been diminished by the
death of Pola Horowicz Sigiel of Suffern, New York, on March 11, 2009.
Pola Horowicz was born on April 12, 1923 in Czestochowa, Poland. She was
the only child of Aaron and Lea. In 1942, her parents were deported to Treblinka
and Pola survived as a slave laborer in the Hasag Pelcery. She was liberated in
Czestochowa.in January 15, 1945 by the Russians.
After liberation, in September 1945, Pola married David Sigiel in Czestochowa.
They then settled for a time in Bad Worishofen, Germany, where, in 1948, Pola
gave birth to her daughter Lea, who was named after her own mother. Five months
later, the Sigiels arrived in America and settled in the Bronx. David worked in the
garment center and Pola worked as a cosmetician, and became president of Lea’s
PTA. They enjoyed their family and friends and were known as positive, upbeat
people.Pola never stopped loving her hometown and, despite the tragic memories,
bravely took the opportunity to visit in October of 2006 during a reunion of the
World Society of Czestochowa Jews and their Descendants.
At that reunion, and in the years since, Pola was a surrogate mother to many
members of the second generation. With her enthusiasm, positive attitude,
intelligence, sense of humor, interest and above all, her exceptional memory for
people and places, Pola was a valued source of information and insight. She provided
a bridge to the past for the sons and daughters of survivors, and brought them
together. Lea called her the “Encyclopedia of Czestochowa” and she was indeed
that, and much more. She enjoyed speaking with fellow survivors and the second
generation about her beloved hometown, despite the painful war experiences.
This was submitted by Pola to the czestochowajews.org website in the “Lives
and Legends” section:
Everything on earth passes slowly
Memory of good fortune and of what brings pain
All that passes thus, seeks a purpose
One thing remains—memory.
In sweet memory of my friends, citizens of Czestochowa
who perished at the hands of the Hitlerites (1942):
Stefka Landau, Maryla Preger, Renia and Maryla Hoffman, Paulina Zeryker,
Marysia Lewkowicz, Gutka Baum, Janek Stawski, and for my best friend, Jerzy
cont’d on p. 18
TOGETHER 18 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Rozenblat, who died the death of a hero fighting the
Nazis, a member of the “ZOB” organization (Jewish
Fighting Organization.)Sylvia Safer is a member of the CzestochowaLandsmanshaft and board member of the North AmericanCouncil for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
LANI SILVER
Lani Silver, the founder the Bay Area Holocaust Oral
History Project that gathered 1,700 interviews of
Holocaust survivors and inspired Steven Spielberg to
create his similar Shoah Foundation, recently died of
brain cancer at her sister’s San Francisco home. She
was 60.
Silver, then a professor of political science and
women’s studies at San Francisco State University,
began recording survivors’ memories in 1981 after
attending the first World Gathering of Holocaust
Survivors in Jerusalem. Silver grew her one-woman
mission into a large team of interviewers, transcribers,
photographers and others, and she served as the
project’s executive director until 1997. She worked
as a consultant to Spielberg when he founded his
better-known Holocaust oral
history project, the Shoah
Foundation, in 1994 and
trained 500 interviewers for
Spielberg, whose foundation
has since collected tens of
thousands of interviews.
In the course of her
work, Silver researched and
promoted the story of Chiune
Sugihara, the consul general
from Japan who saved thousands of Jews by hand-
writing visas allowing them to travel to Japan. She
helped revive and promote his story which led to a
memorial being built to him in Tokyo in 2002. Silver
helped organize hundreds of workshops, exhibits and
programs around the world about his work and co-
wrote an opera about the story.
In 2000, Silver became project director of the
James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project, founded
by the family of Byrd, a father of three in Jasper,
Texas. In 1998 he was chained to a pickup truck by
three white supremacists and dragged to his death.
Silver coordinated 2,500 interviews about racism and
its impact on the lives of everyday Americans.
Born in Lynn, MA, to an attorney father and
homemaker mother, Silver was just 2 months old when
her family moved to San Francisco. After graduating
from Lowell High School, Silver traveled with friends to
South Africa when she was 19. Visiting Soweto changed
her life. “From that moment, she was an activist,” her
sister said.”
Silver earned a bachelor’s degree in political
science from the University of San Francisco in 1970
and an M.A. in government from San Francisco State
University in 1972. She obtained a second master’s
degree in political science from the University of
Chicago in 2005.
FLORA (MENDELOWICZ) SINGER
BY LAUREN WISEMAN
Flora (Mendelowicz) Singer, 78, who helped create a
curriculum for training Montgomery County, Maryland
public school teachers on the Holocaust and wrote a
memoir about her childhood in Nazi-occupied
Belgium, died Feb. 25 at her home in Potomac of
complications from a stroke.
In 1985, Mrs. Singer and two other Montgomery
County educators devised a course on how to teach
sensitive material about the Holocaust. The course is
still used today in county schools. She also spoke to
teachers and students about her experiences during
the Holocaust and how she survived.
In 2007, Yad Vashem and the Holocaust
Survivors’ Memoirs Project published her memoir,
Flora: I was but a Child, which recounts her
experiences as a Jewish girl hiding in Belgium during
the Holocaust.
Flora Mendelowitz was born in Antwerp,
Belgium. She was 11 when her family was forced
into hiding in 1942. She spent the next two years hiding
in convents with her two younger sisters until Belgium
was liberated. In 1946, she moved to New York with
her sisters and mother and
was reunited with her
father, who had left
Belgium in 1938. She
worked as a stenographer
during the late 1940s and
later as a dressmaker at her
home in Westbury, NY.
In the late 1960s, she
moved to the Washington area and helped her husband
and brother-in-law open Bagel Master, one of the
first bagel bakeries in the region. Later, she received
a B.A. in French and a M.A. in French literature,
both from the University of Maryland.
From the late 1970s until her retirement in 1993,
she taught foreign language classes at Cabin John
Middle School and Albert Einstein and Walt Whitman
high schools. She volunteered with the Jewish
Community Center of Greater Washington and the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She served as
co-president of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and
Friends of Greater Washington for the past eight
years. In 2007, the Potomac Chamber of Commerce
named her Potomac citizen of the year.
As Michael Berenbaum says of her, “The
beginning of Flora’s life was so difficult; the end of
Flora’s life was so hard, but the substance of her life
was of such inestimable value that we all felt graced
by her presence.”
DINA VIERNY
Dina Vierny was an art dealer, collector and museum
director and former artists’ model. Vierny was born
into a Jewish family (Aibinder) in Kishinev, Bessarabia
(now Chisinau, Moldova). At 15 years of age, she
became a model and muse to the 73-year-old sculptor
Aristide Maillol. Both Henri Matisse and Pierre
Bonnard, artists to whom Maillol sent Vierny, attribute
to the model a renewed
inspiration for painting and
sculpture.
Vierny, who had joinedthe Resistance early on during
World War II, led refugeesfrom Nazism across thePyrenees into Spain as part of
Varian Fry’s organizationoperating out of Marseille.
After several months of working for the Comité Fry,
Vierny was arrested by the French police. A lawyerretained by Maillol managed to get her acquitted. In1943, Vierny was again arrested, this time by the
Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six monthsin prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker,Hitler’s favorite sculptor.
Vierny began as an artists’ model in her mid-
teens and evolved from being a simple muse to taking
a serious interest in the business of curating the art
of those for whom she worked. She regarded Maillol
as her finest benefactor and mentor.
After Maillol’s death, in a car crash, Vierny collected
his work and dozens of his contemporaries, including
Matisse and Bonnard, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily
Kandinsky, Ilya Kabakov and Vladimir Yankilevsky.
These works are now displayed at the Musée Maillol
in Paris. She died in Paris at the age of 89.
RUBIN WAGNER
Born Ruvke Wajner (pro-nounced Viner) in Vilna,
Lithuania, the older son of Aron and Sore Chana,
both of whom perished in the Holocaust, and brother
of Mendel who disappeared into the Ponary forest. On
February 20, 1940 at the age of 20, Ruby eloped with
the love of his life, Sima Benosher. In June 1941, Soviet
Russia annexed Lithuania and closed Jewish institutions.
Sima, Ruby and baby daughter, Sheynelle, lived together
with his parents until the Germans entered Vilna. He
survived the war in concentration camps often working
as a barber, a skill he had learned in his mother’s thriving
beauty salon. Ruby was liberated in 1945 unaware that
his daughter had perished or that his wife survived. Sima
and Ruby were reunited to begin life again, lived in
Heidenheim, Germany among many friends, had their
first son, Aron (Harry), and in May 1949 set sail for
America.
Beginning in a railroad flat apartment at 1958
Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, Ruby did what he
had to do to support his family. He became a barber
in a shop in the basement of the famous Hearst
Building near Columbus Circle. A few years later he
had the opportunity to go into partnership to build one
single-family house in what was then the farmland of
Huntington, New
York. Founding
Ripley Associates
and Forest Green,
Ruby and his longtime
business partner,
Victor Cynamon, built
many homes, and
developed much property, at one time becoming a
large landowner in Huntington.
Moving to Roslyn, New York, then Aventura,
Florida, Ruby was always active in his community
whether planning cantorial concerts, doing what was
needed at his synagogues, or participating in Holocaust
remembrance.
Throughout his life Ruby was a proud Vilner, to
him a very special identity. Ruby was one of the
publishers of Vilna in Pictures, a highly regarded
pictorial history by Lazar Ran.
From his youth an aficionado of soccer, Ruby
came to love the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York
Mets. He loved his weekly poker games, vacations
in the Catskills; he loved happy occasions, Chivas,
and any food that starts with the letter “a” (as in a
shtikkele cake, a drink, etc.). Finally, Ruby deeply
loved the country that gave him and his extended
family the opportunity to rebuild their lives and flourish
from the horrors that they had survived.
MISHA WAJSMAN (FROM THE GAZETTE)
Misha Wajsman, who died at age 91, was born to a
prominent family in the city of Lutsk, then part of Poland,
now in western Ukraine.His father, Pinchas, was a
major sugar beet producer and sent Misha to college
in Warsaw. He was studying pre-law there when the
Germans invaded Poland in September 1939.
After a lull in the fighting, Wajsman returned to
Warsaw to resume his studies, but when the Germans
cont’d on p. 19
cont’d from p. 17
TOGETHER 19visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
pushed east to invade the Soviet zone of influence he
fled and ended up in the Soviet Union. He never saw
his father or only sister again, both of whom perished.
He joined the Red Army as a junior officer in its
transportation section and served until war’s end.
He and his wife, Dora Alperin, who lived in the
neighboring Polish town of Rovno emigrated to
Canada from France in 1959. She died in 1995.
Misha spent most of his working life as a sales
manager in the wholesale meat business.
Wajsman and survivors from the same area
established the Montreal branch of the Federation of
Wolynian Jews. At its height, this self-help
organization had a membership of 600 Montreal
families. With survivors in New York and Los Angeles,
they created a museum in the town of Givatayim,
east of Tel Aviv, called Hechal Wolyn, a two-story
museum dedicated to the memory of Jewish life in
the towns and villages they had abandoned.
In the early 1960s, he saw two women crying at
the Jewish cemetery on de la Savane Rd., his son
said. They were bemoaning the lack of a monument
with names of relatives and their towns, so they could
recite prayers for the dead. He was instrumental in
getting the monument built, as well as a memorial
outside Lutsk where about 17,500 people were
murdered by German soldiers.
He was also active in the campaign in the 1970s
to allow the emigration of Soviet Jews and other pro-
Israel campaigns.
DAVID WEISS
BY BARRY PADDOCK, ERICA PEARSON AND SIMONE
WEICHSELBAUM, DAILY NEWS
A Brooklyn man who survived both world wars,
the Auschwitz gas chambers and the deaths of four
wives perished at age 100 when he was trapped in a
fire in his Williamsburg home.
David Weiss had seen the worst of the world but
remained deeply faithful. He went to synagogue every
day, including the morning he died, when relatives
said he returned home for a forgotten prayer shawl
and was caught in the flames.
Born in Romania, Weiss was in his early 30s when
he was sent to the Polish concentration camp where
his pregnant first wife, Rivkah, and three children
were killed. After the war, Weiss moved to Israel
and became a truck driver. He and his second wife,
Chaya, had two girls and four boys. She died of cancer
years ago, and the widower moved to Brooklyn,
where he earned a living in a knitting factory despite
his difficulty learning English. He married twice more,
only to survive both wives.
MIRIAM (MITZI) WILNER
Miriam (Mitzi) Wilner of San Francisco passed away
on January 7, 2009, at age 91. A Holocaust survivor
from Lvov, Poland, she immigrated to the United
States with her husband in 1947 and lived in New
York and subsequently in San Diego and San
Francisco. Mitzi was dedicated to educating hundreds
of school children about tolerance and the perils of
prejudice. She was a volunteer speaker for the
Holocaust Center of Northern California. Mitzi also
volunteered at the California Pacific Medical Center
and was a devoted member of Congregation Beth
Sholom in San Francisco.
VICTOR ZARNOWITZ
Victor Zarnowitz, one of the world’s leading
authorities on business cycles, business indicators, and
forecast evaluation, died on Feb. 21, 2009, in New
York City. He was 89.
Dr. Zarnowitz was Senior Fellow and Economic
Counselor to The Conference Board in New York,
where he worked since 1999. He was also Professor
Emeritus of Economics and Finance, Graduate School
of Business, The University of Chicago, and Research
Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research.
From the 1950s on he helped develop tools to
measure and analyze business cycles around the
world. Journalists and peers sought Dr. Zarnowitz’s
expertise on global economic developments over the
course of six decades. In
October 2008, he was
recognized with the Isaac
Kerstenetzky Life
Achievement award from the
Fundação Getúlio Vargas in
Brazil.
Dr. Zarnowitz was born on
Nov. 3, 1919, in the small town
of Lancut in southeastern
Poland. He fled his hometown of Oswiecim just ahead
of the Nazi invasion in September 1939, was
imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp, and immigrated to
Germany after the war to earn his Ph.D. summa cum
laude at the University of Heidelberg. The Zarnowitz
family came to the United States in 1952, settled
initially in New York and moved to Chicago in 1959.
Dr. Zarnowitz was the recipient of many awards
and honors and was the author of Business Cycles:
Theory, History, Indicators and Forecasting. He
recently published his memoirs, Fleeing the Nazis,
Surviving the Gulag, and Arriving in the Free
World.
“Deadly
Medicine:
Creating
the Master
Race”
Exhibition
at the Jewish
Museum Berlin
March 13 to July
19, 2009
The exhibition
“Deadly Medicine” was
first shown at the United
States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington.
This overview exhibition has been extended for
the Berlin exhibition to include regional examples from
Berlin and Brandenburg.
The life story of a “euthanasia” victim is
presented in detail for the first time in an exhibition
through documents, letters, and photos.
An exhibition by the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in cooperation
with the Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstr. 9-14,
10969 Berlin.
For further information on the exhibition, please
visit the Museum’s website.
“Hidden Children of the Holocaust-Artists
& Authors” will be featured at the Gallery of the
Fair Lawn Public Library, 10-01 Fair Lawn Avenue
in Fair Lawn, NJ, from April 5 through May 31. The
exhibit will open with a reception on Sunday April 5
from 2-4:30 pm. Library hours are Mon-Thurs. 10-9,
Fri. 10-5, Sat., 9-5, Sun., 1-5. Free admission.
The Board of Friends of the Shalom
Foundation of Warsaw to Host
Jewish Life & Culture of Poland
Musical Soiree; Launch of Friends of
Shalom Foundation in U.S.
On April 26, 2009, the Friends of the Shalom
Foundation of Warsaw will present Jewish Life &
Culture of Poland Musical Soiree, a special event
celebrating the vitality and cultural vibrance of the
Polish Jewish heritage. Hosted by Board members
Chairman Sigmund Rolat, President Lydia Sarfati, Lea
Wolinetz,, Rivka Ostaszewski, and Paul Dykstra, the
event marks the launch of the Friends of the Shalom
Foundation in the U.S, a patronage of the organization
of the same in Poland. Featuring Golda Tencer,
Originator and General Director of the Shalom
Foundation Poland, Cantor Joseph Malovany of the
Fifth Avenue Synagogue and the Ariyon Ensemble
of Chicago, the event will serve as a celebration of
the culture and arts that are still flourishing in Poland.
The Foundation is hoping to encourage membership
and support. The thrust of the organization is to not
only concentrate on the tremendous tragedies that
have occurred but to place a focus on life.
When: Sunday, April 26, 2009
Where: Consulate General of the Republic of
Poland in New York, 233 Madison Ave, NYC
Time: 5PM- 7:30PM
RSVP: FriendsOfShalomRSVP@gmail.com or
call 201-549-4200 x248
Holocaust Documentation and
Education Center, Inc.
presents
Meet the AuthorChildren Who Survived the Final Solution by
Twenty–Six Child Survivors–Ed. by Peter Tarjan
Holocaust Documentation and Education Center,
Inc. 2031 Harrison Street • Hollywood, FL 33020 •
(954) 929-5690 • www.hdec.org
When: Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 2:30 p.m.
Where: Holocaust Documentation and Education
Center, 2031 Harrison Street, Hollywood, FL 33020
Cost: Free
RSVP: Seating is limited, so please RSVP to Regina
Burgess, Librarian, at (954) 929-5690 Ext. 209 or
email regina@hdec.org.
This anthology is the work of the twenty-six
authors of the individual stories, all survivors of the
Nazi Holocaust. The authors are Johanna Franklin
Saper (nee Hirschbein); Rita Bymel; Ruth B.
Schwartz; Gunther Karger; Nellie Lee; Anna Blitz;
Ruth Glasberg Gold; Tova Goldszer; Magda Bader;
George Klein; Jack Baigelman (Beigelman); Rose
Kaplovitz (Zaks); Bernard Mayer; David B. Zugman
(formerly Dow, Dov, Dave Zugman); Judy Berkowitz;
Arnold Geier; Faye Lazega Stern; Frances Cutler;
Louise Oberlender; Suzanne Ringel; Dena Axelrod;
Elizabeth Zielinski de Mundlak; Bianca Lerner;
Eugenia Schulz Rosen; Yosi Lazzar; and Peter Tarjan.
The book may be purchased online at sites such
as Amazon.com. It will also be available for purchase
after the presentation, when the authors present will
personally inscribe your copy on request.
cont’d from p. 18
TOGETHER 20 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
Israel’s Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, as Righteous
Among the Nations. Chiune Sugihara died in 1986.
In her memoirs and lectures, Mrs. Sugihara would
continue to remind that it was she who
urged her husband to keep signing. That
when her husband’s hand got tired and
he could not go on, she massaged his
arm so he could continue. In “Visas for
Life,” Mrs. Sugihara writes: “My
husband and I are Christians of the
Greek Church, so we desired earnestly
to help the Jews … My husband and I
talked about the visas before he issued
them. We understood that both the
Japanese and German governments
disagreed with our ideas, but we went
ahead anyhow…The Jews who passed
through Kaunas…shouted when we
were leaving Kaunas station. ‘We will
never forget you. We will never see you again.’ I’ve
heard that, as a people, the Jews never forget a
promise.” Mrs. Sugihara was the inspiration for “Visas
for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats
Project,” which was founded by and has been curated
since by Eric Saul. The “Visas for Life” project, which
has traveled all over the world, was a part of that
special 1994 trip to Japan. In his note to me about her
death, Eric Saul wrote: Mrs. Sugihara was an
inspiration to me and all those whom she met. She
spent the last 20 years of her life telling the story of
the Sugihara life-saving visas. We had the honor to
know her and to have her inspire us, and we will
continue her work.”
Mrs. Sugihara’s funeral took place at Fujisawa,
Japan. Her ashes [were] buried on November 8 at
Kamakura where (her husband) Chiune (and sons)
Hiroki and Haruki are buried. A son and grandson of
hers in the past have lived in Israel, spoke fluent
Hebrew and were in the diamond business.
In Memory of
Yukiko SugiharaBy Masha Leon, The Forward
http://www.forward.com/articles/14441
Were it not for Yukiko Sugihara, who died on
October 8 at age 94, I might not be writing this column,
nor would there be some 55,000 descendants of the
Jews her husband helped save from the Holocaust.
I first met Mrs. Sugihara in May 1989, when she
and her son Hiroki came to New York to accept the
Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s post-
humous “Courage to Care Award,” presented to her
husband. Across the table at the Summit Hotel, Mrs.
Sugihara responded to my questions in whispered
Japanese, which Hiro translated. Unexpectedly, I
began to weep. I explained that, like others, my mother
and I had been helped by agencies such as the Jewish
Labor Committee, American Joint Distribution
Committee, the Red Cross, yet here I was with an
individual—someone who changed history, who
could have told her husband not to put his family and
career in peril by issuing “illegal” visas to Jews at a
time when Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany. In
her book, “Visas for Life,” Mrs. Sugihara describes
the crowds of Jews waiting outside the consulate for
visas. “My mother was one of those,” I told her. While
I slept in our hiding place in Vilnius, fearing arrest by
Stalin’s NKVD, my mother took the night train to
Kovno to wait outside for one of those life-saving
visas—#1882.
As we parted, I told Hiroki, “Tell your mother
she is very beautiful.”
He blanched and did not translate. It went against
the grain of Japanese form. As they accompanied
me to the elevator, I tried again: “I
know it’s un-Japanese, but I wish
I could give your mother a hug.”
Both looked uncomfortable. The
elevator came; I bowed, and said
sayonara, good-bye. In August
1994, I returned to Japan for the
first time since 1941. When my
daughter Karen and I arrived in
Tokyo to attend special ceremonies
at The Hill of Humanity, a memorial
ceremony for Chiune Sugihara, set
high in the mountains near his
hometown of Yoatsu, near Tokyo, I
finally got to hug and kiss her.
The ceremony turned into a
media blitz, with dozens of
cameramen and reporters from American, European
and Japanese networks and press. Beneath a blazing
sun, hundreds of spectators and representatives of
American, Israeli and Japanese governments sat on
tiered cement bleachers, and watched as the stoic,
frail, still beautiful 80-year-old Yukiko Sugihara was
presented with flowers, as a Japanese church choir
sang “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of
Gold). During our stop at Tokyo’s Jewish Community
Center, former American vice president Walter
Mondale said: “Schindler got into [rescuing] to make
money… and to his credit saw the horror of it and
ended up saving those on his famous list. Raoul
Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews,
knew that his career was not at risk if he returned to
Sweden. What is unique about Sugihara was that he
and his wife were risking their lives and career
future… When asked why he did it, [Sugihara] said,
‘I did what we as human beings should do.’” In 1985,
Chiune Sugihara was honored by Yad Vashem,
Photo by Karen Leon
CORRECTIONIn our last issue of Together we erroneously
attributed this article. The article was written by
Masha Leon and had originally appeared in The
Forward. It is reprinted here with the correct
attribution.
The End of DaysBY FELICIA FIGLARZ ANCHOR
We are now in times we have dreaded but knewwere inevitable—when the eyewitnesses to the Shoahcome to the end of their days. Each death is a loss ofhistorical magnitude and significance; of personal lifestories and insights. As we mourn, our determinationto sustain memory, legacy and educational impactchallenges us and calls on us to be even morededicated and creative.
As the Chair of the Tennessee HolocaustCommission, it has been my privilege to facilitatehundreds of classroom and community visits by ourlocal survivors and refugees. We are told, consistently,that these visits are the highlight of our attempts toteach the lessons of the Shoah. But as the survivorsage, traveling and retelling these personal stories takesits toll. For me, like other educators, the challenge is tosustain the personal interaction and connections thatmean so much to the speakers and their audiences.
The solution came to me at 5 a.m. one morning.We would photograph and chronicle all of ourremaining Tennessee eyewitnesses. I made myproposal to the other members of the Commission.That’s how the exhibit, “Living On: Profiles ofTennessee Survivors and Liberators” was born.
For two years we reached out to our cities andsmall towns searching for those with an interest andwho were qualified to take part in our project. Ourinitial concept was to include portraits of Tennesseesurvivors, U.S. liberators, hidden children andrefugees from the Holocaust. Rob Heller, a faculty
experience for students and those who want to knowmore. The web-site also provides equal access to allsince the exhibit is not permanent in any city.Other exciting developments were the invitationproffered by the honorable Victor Ashe, Ambassadorto Poland, to show the exhibit in Poland, where itopened at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, andis now en route to showings in Auschwitz, Krakowand Breslau. Last year, the University of TennesseePress turned the exhibit into a beautiful photographicbook available for sale.
With support from the Claims Conference, weprovided teacher in-service training and now folksin even the most remote areas of Tennessee canaccess the materials made available to theclassrooms in the big cities.
Audiences standing before these photographs aremesmerized. They talk to each other about lifecircumstances that bring the subjects and the viewerstogether. Commissioner Leonid Saharovici was upsetbecause we didn’t think of it sooner. “Why didn’tyou think of this 20 years ago—when we wereyounger and more robust? Now our only images areof older people.”
We are steadily losing the members of oursurvivor community and saddened to have to say goodbye. We can never replicate their essence. Still, atthe very least, we have captured their images, theirlife stories and their energy. Their memories andlegacies will live on. That is what they hoped for. It iswhat we intended to do for them, and for us.
member at the University of Tennessee, and DawnWeiss Smith, a journalist, traveled across the state,capturing in word and image the stories of 77eyewitnesses to the Shoah, transforming them into ahaunting and beautiful exhibit that expressed theessence of their subjects’ lives.
Rob Heller said, “If you look into a person’s eyeslong enough, you can see into that person’s soul.” The30 by 30 inch black and white portraits, accompaniedby their biographical sketches, do just that.
And as the project developed, we realized thatthere was a microcosm of Holocaust history living inTennessee. In these 77 accounts, we met Kinder-transportees, infants handed off to strangers as parentswere deported, and those left to fend for themselves.There were those who fled to Russia or were hidden,and those who suffered in concentration and deathcamps. The stories covered the geography of the planet,from Greece to France and every country in between.We were introduced to 19-year-old American farmboy soldiers who climbed a hill and discoveredconcentration camps and their haunted, skeletalinhabitants. We met survivors of Berga, where U.S.soldiers were interred and enslaved. And we cameface-to-face with determination and human resilience.The exhibit has traveled to every corner ofTennessee—from the Civil Rights Museum inMemphis to the Historical Society of East Tennesseeon the other side of the state. Will Pedigo recordedthe interviews and created an Emmy-winning film toaccompany the exhibit, often aired on our PBSstations. Our website, www.tennesseeholocaust
commission.org/livingon, provides an interactive
TOGETHER 21visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
The Holocaust and War Victims Tracing
CenterThe Holocaust and War Victims Tracing
Center, http://www.redcross.org/services/intl/
holotrace/9-29-00.html, is a national
clearinghouse for persons seeking the fates
of loved ones missing since the Holocaust and its aftermath. We assist U.S.
residents searching for proof of internment, forced/slave labor, or evacuation
from former Soviet territories on themselves or family members. This
documentation may be required for reparations. All of our tracing services are
confidential and free of charge. We pioneered a process with the International
Tracing Service which results in expedited replies to searches. We use the
worldwide network of 181 Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the Magen
David Adom in Israel. We also consult museums, archives, and international
organizations to further facilitate tracing requests. Cases remain open, and if new
information becomes available, it is immediately shared with the inquirer. Watch
the CNN story of a Ukraine reunion after a 66 year separation http://
www.redcross-cmd.org/chapter/tracingnewsdec2008.html.
For more information contact: Linda Klein, DirectorAmerican Red Cross/Holocaust
and War Victims Tracing Center, 4800 Mt. Hope Drive, Baltimore, MD
21215(410)624-2091/ (410)764-7664 (fax) lklein@arc-cmc.org
(British) Association of Jewish RefugeesFrom Michael Newman, a Survivor in London, UK and director, (British)
Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR):
I am writing to ask for your help. As a recipient of your newsletter it occurred to
me that you might be able to help circulate information about a Holocaust archive
my organization has created. Refugee Voices is the Association of Jewish
Refugees’ Holocaust survivor audio-visual testimony archive. It contains 150 filmed
interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees. Each film has been transcribed
and each transcript is time coded to enable a researcher or user to pinpoint the
precise part of the testimony they wish to access. The collection also contains
personal photographs belonging to each interviewee.The project is framed by a
database, a searchable catalogue containing 44 separate categories of information
ranging from personal details to places of residence/occupation, as well as
information on peoples’ post-war lives. Together with a summary sheet and key
words section, the catalogue helps a user identify precise aspects of the interviews
for research on specific episodes or chapters.We are now seeking partner
organizations to deliver Refugee Voices at, amongst other institutions, universities,
libraries and research centers. Michael Newman,Director michael@ajr.org.uk
020 8385 3074/www.ajr.org.uk
The Kresy-Siberia GroupFrom Stefan Wisniowski, a 2g in Sydney, Australia and president, The Kresy-
Siberia Group:
The Kresy-Siberia Group is the international special interest group of over 750
survivors of the Soviet persecutions and their 2nd and 3rd-generation descendants.
Its objectives are to research, remember and recognize the persecution of Polish
citizens of all ethnic and religious backgrounds by the Soviet Union during the
Second World War, as well as supporting property claimants with information and
assistance. One of its current projects is developing a state-of-the-art “virtual
museum” on the Internet to commemorate this little-known chapter of the Second
World War. The “Kresy-Siberia Group” brings into contact people from countries
around the world with a special interest in the tragedy of over one million Polish
citizens of various faiths and “ethnicities” (Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Catholic,
Orthodox, Jewish, etc.) either deported from eastern Poland (Kresy) in 1940-41
or otherwise arrested and sent to special Soviet labor camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan
and eastern Asia. Some 115,000 of them were evacuated through Iran in 1942 as
soldiers of Anders Army and their families and eventually made their way to the
West. The circumstances of their odyssey and the tragic history of the Polish
citizens under Soviet Russian occupation during the war were hushed up during
the war to protect the reputation of the Soviet Union, an important ally in the war
against Nazi Germany. Almost seventy years later the survivors have aged and
many have died. The group brings together surviving deportees and their
descendants to remember, learn, discover and spread the word of their ordeal to
the world and to future generations. Regards Stefan Wisniowski PRESIDENT,
KRESY-SIBERIA FOUNDATION3 Castle Circuit CloseSeaforth NSW 2092
AustraliaTelephone +61 411 864 873 stefan.wisniowski@kresy-
siberia.orgwww.kresy-siberia.org PREZES, FUNDACJA KRESY-SYBERIA ul.
Wisniowa 40B lokal nr 602-516 Warszawa, PolskaTelefon +48 22 5424090 fax
+48 22 5424089Kom. +61 411 864 873 Stefan.Wisniowski@Kresy-
Syberia.orgwww.Kresy-Syberia.org Virtual Museum web site: www.Kresy-
Siberia.org.
From Rachelle Goldstein, a Survivor and, vice president, Righteous Among the
Nations-Hidden Child Foundation/ADL in New York, New York:
Some survivors have not yet submitted requests to Yad Vashem to have their
rescuers honored as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Paying tribute to the people
who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust is one of the primary
tasks of Yad Vashem and of the Hidden Child Foundation. Together, we urge you
to honor your rescuers if you haven’t yet done so by filing an application with the
Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem. Guidelines explaining
where and how to apply can be found on Yad Vashem’s website: http://
www1.yadvashem.org/righteous_new/index.html. The website also contains
stories about the Righteous, information about the program and a selection of
resources.
Call for witnesses: We’ve also been asked by Irena Steinfeldt, Director, Righteous
Among the Nations Department, Yad Vashem, to help in a search for survivors
who were helped by Noël Barrot, a French rescuer. This request, initiated by the
rescuer’s son, Jacques Barrot, follows: Noël Barrot was responsible for the work
of the “petits bergers des Cévennes” (the little shepherds of Cévennes), a group
that was founded by Alex Brolles (recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous
Among the Nations”) in the Yssingeaux area in France. From 1940, Noël Barrot
and fellow members of the “petits bergers des Cévennes,” welcomed Jewish
children and hid them from the Nazis. One of the hidden children, Jojo Falaise,
who lives in the United States today, sent the Barrot family a photo of a tree
planted in a memorial in the U.S. in honor of Noël Barrot. After the family moved
from Yssingeaux, this witness and others have proven difficult to find. The Barrot
family is asking for anyone who may have known Mr. Noël Barrot or Jojo Falaise
to please contact Laurent Muschel, Tel: +32-498-980152 or email Jacques.
Barrot@ec.europa.eu. RachelleRachelle GoldsteinVice PresidentHidden Child
Foundation/ADL605 Third AvenueNew York, NY 10158-3560212-885-7900fax:
212-885-5869
French Ministry of Education
I am pleased to inform you that the French Ministry of Education, as a conclusion
to a 2007 presidential decision to enhance further Holocaust education in
elementary schools, has created a new portal and a pedagogical leaflet providing
teachers with new resources on how to teach about the Holocaust to young
pupils. The website provides access to various links, and also to the
recommendations of the Ministry and of the Waysbord Commission on teaching
the Holocaust to young children. www.shoah.education.fr The main part of this
website is composed of a database of the 11,000 children deported from France.
http:/ /www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jPx-mm1-
okShlPDAN6gOKmul7cKg.
Warsaw Traces a Tragic PastBy Vanessa Gera / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WARSAW, Poland - Polish officials have marked the border of the former Warsaw
Ghetto with plaques and boundary lines traced in the ground to preserve the
memory of the tragic World War II-era Jewish quarter. The markers were
inaugurated recently with speeches by the Warsaw mayor and other officials. A
group of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community then made
their way in the rain together to reflect on the past at some of the 21 memorial
plaques.http://www.northjersey.com/news/world/34860554.html.
Help me find a shipFrom William Gross, a Survivor, in Long Island, New York:
Can you help me find the ship that my family and I came over on from Feldafing,
Germany to Ellis Island in may 1951? My father’s name was Jacob Gross born in
Lodz 1910 My mother’s name was Naja Gross born in Czestochowa in 1916. My
sister’s name was Dora Gross born 1942 in Siberia. My brother’s name was
Yiddle Gross born in 1947 in Germany. My name was Wolf Gross born in 1945 in
Siberia.If you can help William, please respond to him directly at:
williamgross@gmail.com.
From David Riba, a 2g in Clearwater, FL:
Does anyone on AllGen have a recommendation on where I can find the lists of
those on the Death Marches from Buchenwald to Theresienstadt in April and
May, 1945? The Nazis did keep “roll call” lists of the prisoners, and they probably
wound up at Theresienstadt. Any suggestions as to where (or if) those lists still
exist?
From Ruth Fertig
I am seeking a Czech-accented narrator for a Holocaust documentary. If you fit
the requirements and are interested, please contact me at ruthfertig@yahoo.com.
TOGETHER 22 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
COMPILED AND EDITED
BY SERENA WOOLRICH,
PRESIDENT AND
FOUNDER,
ALLGENERATIONS, inc.
PLEASE SEND ALL RESPONSES TO allgenerations@aol.com.
].
cont’d on p. 23
My name is David Kahan. I was born in Gheorghani, Hungary. We were deported
to Auschwitz from the Szasregen Ghetto to Auschwitz in the beginning of June
1944. My father’s name was Moishe Chaim Kahan. My mother’s name was
Rosa Reisel-Toba Czick. She was born in Koshice, Czechoslovakia. My father
was born in Belbest. His father’s name was Hersh Lieb Kahan. I know that the
Kahan’s were a large family in the Sighet area. I’m looking for any Holocaust
survivors who are relatives of my mother or my father.
q
From Joanne Aloni-Boldon
Looking for Ignatz or Ignacy Shapira from Lviv, Poland born on 10/6/05. He
survived Buchenwald. He was married to Ludwicka Laufer (1/20/32 or 33); one
daughter named Dana. They were separated during the war. Dana was a hidden
child. She and her mother immigrated to the U.S. She would like to know what
happened to her father after the camps. Can you help?
q
From Carole Turkeltaub Borowitz
I am currently involved as a volunteer researcher for a web site for Kutno, Poland,
and if there are any members of your group from Kutno who would
agree to e-mail me, I would be overjoyed to hear from them. Also,
Wloclawek. Maybe, maybe, there’s someone out there who would
turn out to be my cousin...
q
From Stanislawa (Stasia) Janowska, a survivor in Cambridge, MA:
I was born Hadasa Chajmowicz November 24, 1930 in Warsaw,
Poland. My childhood ended with the beginning of the ghetto in
1940. In mid-August 1942 I was smuggled out to a Polish friend. I
became Stanislawa Janowska, thanks to a birth certificate of a
dead child by this name. At the end I survived in a “children’s
home” in the eastern part of Poland. None of my family survived.
In 1946 I was transferred to a children’s home in Lublin. I finished
high school; 1950-1955 Medical Academy in Lublin; 1958 Pediatric Board. All
this time I have been searching for my brother, Franek Chajmowicz in Geneva,
USSR, and Ukraine. He was the son of Elka Wajc and Wolf Chajmowicz, residing
in Warsaw, Poland at 46 Nowolipki Street. If alive Franek would be 86-87 years
old now. He studied Mechanical Engineering in Wilno from 1937-1939. At the
end of 1940, he was smuggled to the Soviet Union hoping to make it to the USA.
Instead he got stranded in Stolpce and later on in Kostopol, both in Ukraine. I’ve
searched for him numerous times, but to no avail. Maybe an old colleague or an
acquaintance of his is still alive and could tell me something about him.
q
From Sharon Szeracki Kalman, a 2g in St. Louis, MO:
I would like to find out if my father has any living relatives. My father’s name
was Abraham or Abram Sieradzki. He was born in Babiasky (Pabienice) around
1910. His father was Mendel and his mother was Fajga (Feiga) nee Jakowbowicz.
I know my father had several siblings, but he never mentioned them by name. He
was married to a Regina nee Warszawski and had two children. He was told that
his wife and two children died in the Holocaust. He met my mother, Sura Ruchla
Golla, in the Displaced Person camp in Bergen-Belsen. They married in 1948. In
1949 they moved to St. Louis where I was born in 1950.I would love to try and
piece together my father’s family.
q
From Jay Kuperman, a survivor in Philadelphia, PA:
I am searching for several people: An uncle, Avram Cyne Glejcer, whom we
called Arthur. He was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, and was a watchmaker. When
ordered to present himself at the office of the Gestapo, he went East to Lwow
(Lemberg). He even sent us food packages from there. While in Lwow he became
a director of a Russian watchmakers cooperative. Maybe somewhere somehow
people met him? Another uncle, Leon Kuperman, born in Zwolen, Poland, was
married and possibly had two children. He lived in Rybnik and in Bedzin, Poland.
q
From Philip Leder, a Survivor in Baltimore, MD:
I was born on June 19, 1943 in Kazakhstan. My father was from Zamocz and
Izbetcha. He was always known as “Shlomo the Baker.” He was a survivor of
the Warsaw Ghetto; he escaped in 1942. He and my mother escaped to Russia
and kept running until they got to Kazakastan. During that time, my father did a
hitch in a Russian labor camp. After the war we lived in DP camps; the one I
remember is Fohrenwold. Both of my parents have passed away (my father in
1996 and my mother in 1998.) I am looking for someone who comes from either
Chelm or Raivitz and remembers anyone by the last name of Ergman (sp?). My
grandfather was Fievela Bach and my grandmother’s name was Rosa. He had a
shoe store.There were 11 siblings; my mother, Toba, was the eldest girl. Some of
the siblings names were Lazer, Mordichai, Schimuel, Tzirel and Surah.That’s all I
can remember from stories my mother told me. I have been doing research work
to find relatives on and off for the past 30 + years.
q
From Willy Lermer, a survivor in Melbourne, Australia:
Looking for Sabina Roth (Rosenberg), who lived in Krakow, Poland during the
war. She was last seen in 1941 with her son Wladek (Wolf).She was married to
Adolf (Abraham) Roth; he was in K.C. Plaszow till 1944.That’s all the information
I have.
q
From Jeannette Rapoport-Hubschman, a survivor in Neuilly Sur Seine, France:
I’m searching for members of my father’s family. My father was Meir Hubschman,
born in 1901 in Nadworna (actually in Ukraine). His mother’s name was Chaje
Hubscham. Thanks to JRI Poland, on Nadworna PSA AGAD Births, I discovered
he had two brothers and one sister, all registered in Nadworna like my father. His
siblings were Jutte, born in 1894, Abe born in 1897, Jacob born in 1899. The fact
that their surnames were Hubschman led me to think that there was not a civil
wedding for their parents, but only a religious one, which explains why my father
bore his mother’s name.My father was deported to Auschwitz, then to Mauthausen
where he died on February 26th 1945. Three months ago, I
discovered the documents that my father had to fill out to get
French citizenship. In these documents he specified that his father
was called Bernhard Pfeffer, and that he died on June 15th 1924.
My father wrote also that he had two brothers and one sister:
Simon Pfeffer born in 1892 tradesman in Jablonow; Lazar Pfeffer,
born in 1908, a bank employee; and Dora Leitner (I imagine her
maiden name to be Pfeffer), born in 1895 , married and living in
Nadworna.My father, never gave us precise information about
his family left in Galicia. I think that Bernhard Pfeffer can be my
paternal grandfather, because my father called one of my two
brothers (his eldest son) Bernard. Are the results on JRI Poland
absolutely reliable? It’s difficult to imagine that my father gave
false informations for such an important request.I would be very grateful for any
information and explanations that you could give me to solve my problem, and I
would be so happy if descendants of the families Hubschman and Pfeffer had
survived, and if I could get information from them.
q
From Deborah Ross, a 2g in Vancouver, Canada:
My mother’s maiden name was Ramm or Ram. Her first name was Nechama or
Niuta and her [mother’s] maiden name was Devora Baltupski. She was born in
the southern Ukraine but grew up in Vilna. She was a nurse in Warsaw at some
point. Her husband was Yonia Fain, an artist and poet who taught at the university
in Warsaw. They escaped with a Sugihara visa and went to Japan and then on to
Shanghai and after the war went to Mexico City where they hung out with Diego
Rivera and Frida Kalo. Also, my maternal grandfather was sent to Siberia before
the war (last name Ramm or Ram, first name was Chaim). I have hoped that he
survived in Russia and maybe started another family. My maternal uncle was
Israel Ram. I now live in Canada and have no relatives. I would love to find
someone who might be related to me.
q
From Iris Rozencwajg, a 2g in Houston, TX:
My family, Schlesinger/Ross/Rossova, was burned out of Kalnice, Czechoslovakia
in 1918. Schlesingers also came from Wiener Neustadt, Austria They ended up in
Trencin, south of Bratislava. I’m also looking for any cousins related to this family:
parents (my maternal grandparents) Max and Selma Ross; daughters: Elsa, Edith,
Olga, Blanka; Edith survived and lives in Florida. All from Kalnice and then Trencin,
Czechoslovakia. Looking for any collateral relatives, Anna Turteltaub, sister of
mother’s cousin Palo Turteltaub (later Turcan) and anyone who knew Palo and
wife Magda Turteltaub (Turcan) in the partisans or anyone who knew Frantisek
Sachistahl, Elsa Rossova’s fiance. Other cousins, including Oskar Brenner and
family, lived in England—Birmingham, I think. Anyone know them? Related to
Czechoslovakia family described above? Also, looking for any Rozencwajg children
from Czestochowa, Poland—some rumored to have been spirited to Denmark
before or during the war. Grandparents’ names would have been Idessa Wajl and
Izak Judka Rozencwajg. Possible parents’ names: Marek Rozencwajg (died in
Bialystok massacre after moving back to Czestochowa); Regina nee Rozencwajg;
TOGETHER 23visit our website at www.americangathering.comApril 2009
Loosia nee Rozencwajg; Helena nee Rozencwajg—all from Czestochowa, Poland.
q
From Israel Unger, a survivor in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada:
I was born in Tarnow, Poland in 1938. My nuclear family—father, mother, brother
and I—survived in hiding in Tarnow. My father came from Ryglice, a small village
near Tarnow. He had seven brothers and sisters. My grandfather’s name was
Josef Pincus Unger and my grandmother’s name was Hana Leia (nee Leser)
Unger. One brother, Abraham, moved to England prior to the war. The other six
siblings, along with my grandparents, were all murdered by the Nazis. I do not
know the names of my uncles and aunts, my father’s sisters and brothers. If any
one knows their names and what happened to them please let me know.
q
From Mietek Weintraub, a Survivor in Arligton Heights, Illinois:
It would be so reassuring to find Jerzyk Geller, a survivor and dear friend and pre-
war classmate from Itzhak Kacenelson’s School in Lodz. We saw each other
soon after the war in Lodz in 1945, but lost contact since.If anyone knows of his
whereabouts, please let me know.
q
From Diana Gerzenstein, a 2g in Melbourne, Australia:
I’m still searching for my father’s family, any survivors of the Lazar family from
Transylvania, Szilagy Somlio.I don’t know how to get any more information. I
applied to Yad Vashem, to the Australian Red Cross (not much help there) to
Arolson, to the museum in Szilagy Somlyo (Simleul Silvaniei in Romanian).My
dream will be if someone survived and married and had children.In fact I know
that Bela Lazar survived Dachau and was in Paris DP camp in 1945—but after?
q
From Sam Malbin, a survivor in Johannesburg, South Africa:
My parents, Mottel and Hinda Malbin (now deceased), and their
families were born in Steibst, now known as Stolpste, Belorussia.
Thesurvivors emigrated to South Africa and Argentina circa 1925-
1939, but many of their kin were murdered in 1942 and the
remainder in concentration camps. There may hopefully be surviving
children who, like me, are continually hunting for possible
connections.
q
From Eugen Schoenfeld, a Survivor in Atlanta, GA:
I am seeking any person who is related to the Neuman family—
my grandparents—who lived in Talamas. The family also resided
in Huklivoh and Voloc. Also, I am looking for anyone who was related to my
grandmother, Feiga, nee Berman, born in Poland and her brother who emigrated
to Israel before World War I. He had a wood and coal store in Haifa on Rechov
Hanamal.
q
From Lev Raphael, a 2g in Okemos, MI:
Does anyone have any relatives from Lithuania or Latvia with the name Garbel?
I’ve struck out on JewishGen and everywhere else I’ve looked. I have found
some things my late mother wrote about the war and she lists two (2) sub camps
of Kaiserwald: Strassdenhoff Labor Camp and Yugla Seidenfabrik. She was there
as Liale or Lalke or Lidja Kliatshko (Klaczko) along with a good friend, Frieda
Zewin. I have their numbers at Stutthof (where they were transferred from Riga)
and they’re consecutive—both however had changed their last names, perhaps
to be considered sisters? Did anyone who was in these camps know my mother,
Lidja Garbel (aka Lidja Klatchko) from Vilno? Does the name Garbel ring bells
for anyone out there?
q
From Daniela Coray, a 3g in Cornwall, England:
I am hoping to find out some information about my relatives. I know some very
basic facts about my family, primarily names and towns. My grandparents were
from Hungary and were survivors of the Holocaust. My grandmother was born
Eva Judit Forro in 1938 to Bela Forro and Blanka Judit Birnbaum in either Szolnok
or Szeged in Hungary. Bela’s surname was originally Friedman, but was changed
during the war in an attempt to hide his family’s Jewish origins. This didn’t work,
as he was sent to a work camp. He had four brothers; Laszlo, Josef, Sandor and
Zoltan. Zoltan died in one of the camps; Josef and Sandor immigrated to the US
in 1938; and Laszlo in 1950. Blanka’s parents were Markusz and Margaret
Birnbaum from Miskolc. Blanka had two, possibly more sisters, Olga and Erzsebet.
Olga survived the war, but Erzsebet and her family died in one of the camps.
Olga had one child, Tomas Verebes, who still lives in the US (maybe New Jersey).
My grandmother’s family lived in Miskolc until 1950 when they moved to Budapest.
They fled the country during the revolution in 1956 and settled in Southern California.
My grandfather, Elemer Elek, was born in 1937. I’m not sure where he was born,
but he grew up in Siofok before moving to Budapest to go to university. His father
was Balint Elek and was born in Szeghalom in SE Hungary. His mother’s name
was Anna Gulyas. My grandfather had a
brother, Erno Elek, and a sister, Erzsebet Elek.
I don’t know anything else about his family
besides the fact that he played a large role in
the Hungarian revolution as a student.
q
From Lou Appleman, a survivor in Queens, NY:
I am looking for any survivors of the Pinsk Ghetto. Most of my family escaped
from there just before it was liquidated and survived with the partisans in the
Zawistcze forest. I would like to know of any other Pinsk Ghetto survivors and to
hear from them.
q
From Leo Braun, a survivor in São Paulo, Brazil:
I am a survivor from Vienna, Austria, born in 1926 now living in São Paulo, SP,
Brazil. I had a school friend of my age, also from Vienna, named Hans Singer. As
far as I know he escaped to Valparaiso or Santiago, Chile in 1938/39. I wonder
whether you could help me to find him or maybe his children, if any.
q
From Rosalyn Kliot Heims, a child survivor in Redmond, OR:
Both of my parents are now deceased; however, I would like information about
the camp from which they escaped in 1944—I believe it was named Goldplatz, in
Estonia. Both my parents, Leon (Lippa) and Vera Kliot (nee Borowick) were
originally from Vilna, were transported to the Vilna Ghetto, then on to various
labor camps in Poland and finally Estonia. And any information about my mother’s
little brother, Avram, who at the age of 10 was designated as a “political prisoner”
(per records), was sent to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chamber.
And, additionally, any information about my grandmother, who
was sent to Stutthoff—also murdered. Her name was Esther
Borowick.
q
From Peter Paisley, a Survivor in Essex, Chigwell, UK:
I am looking for an old friend, a fellow survivor, a fellow inmate
of various internment camps in Vichy France.It is Paul Stern,
born 1920 or 1921 in Cologne, who lived in Belgium prior to May
1940. After our escape in August 1942, we met again in Lyons at
the time of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, then went our
separate ways and were both lucky enough to survive the ordeal.
We met again in Brussels in 1946 when Paul had something to
do with a Swiss newspaper.We have lost contact since and if by any stroke of
luck he is still alive, I would love to hear from him. My name used to be Herbert
Peiser but I changed it while in the British armed forces and my present name is
Herbert Peter Paisley. I am well and live in England. Incidentally, if there should
be some other former inmates of St. Cyprien and/or Gurs with whom I have not
already been in touch, I would love to hear from them.
q
From Miriam Feldman, a 2g in Morton Grove, IL:
I’m a 2G. Both my parents survived the camps. My father died at the age of 51 in
1964. His name was Rolf Salomon, born in Berlin on 09/22/1912. Somehow, he
survived Auschwitz. He was in Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945. I was 13
when he died. He never spoke to me about his time in Auschwitz, or my sisters.
My mother was never really able to tell us much; she said they preferred not to
talk about it.My mother is alive today, 86 years old, but she was diagnosed five
years ago with Alzheimer’s disease.I am wondering if anyone can tell me if they
have any information on them.
q
From Lilly Weiss, a survivor in Oak Park, MI:
I am looking for my relative Imre Weiss (father’s name was Bela Weiss), last
seen in Balassagyarmat, Hungary in 1944-45. He would be 75-80 by now.
q
From Frances Nunnally, a survivor in Richmond, VA:
I am a survivor from Vienna, Austria and am wondering if anyone ever came
across my brother, Leopold Huppert (called Poldi). He fled from Vienna to Belgium
in 1938, and later on to France. For a while he was at a camp called St. Cyprien.
Later he hid in Paris where he found wrok as a radio technician. Betrayed, he
was sent to Drancy and then Auschwitz in 1944. From Auschwitz he was
transferred to other camps. Does anyone have any more information about him?
q
From Debbie Long, a 2g in Chapel Hill, NC:
I am searching for any information about Regina-Rifka (nee Galas) Loeffelholz
of Lodz and Brzesko, who may have survived Ravensbruck. I am also searching
for her brother, Israel-Sruellek Galas and her sister, Sara-Bluma Galas who were
last seen in the Cracow Ghetto. Any information about the Loeffelholz family of
Cracow or Brzekso, or the Galas family of Lodz, would be much appreciated.
TOGETHER 24 visit our website at www.americangathering.com April 2009
An Urgent
Appeal
to Our
Readers
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants is the foremost umbrella
organization of survivors located in North America with a mission to advocate for survivors and to
advance and encourage Holocaust remembrance, education and commemoration. As part of its mission,
the American Gathering maintains a number of ongoing projects:
The CONFERENCE ON JEWISH MATERIAL CLAIMS AGAINST GERMANY
The American Gathering is a key member of the Board of Directors. With the present negotiating committee
composed solely of survivors and chaired by the American Gathering’s chairman Roman Kent, hundreds of
millions of additional dollars are coming from Germany to better provide for current health care and assistance
to survivors in desperate need.
The MEED REGISTRY OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
Established in 1981 to document the names of survivors who came to the Americas after World War II, the
Registry, the only one of its kind, was moved in 1993 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
(USHMM). Along with the Museum, the American Gathering continues to manage the database and to
seek new registrants via its quarterly newspaper Together and its website, http://www.american
gathering.com, among other venues. As a result of the American Gathering’s efforts, the Registry now
includes over 185,000 records related to survivors and their families and is a resource for Holocaust
historians and scholars, as well as families looking for lost relatives.
THE SUMMER SEMINAR PROGRAM ON HOLOCAUST AND JEWISH RESISTANCE
Initiated in 1984 by Vladka Meed and jointly administered by the American Gathering and the USHMM,
this program takes middle school and high school teachers, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike, on trips to
Holocaust sites in Poland and to Israel. Participating scholars come from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the
Study Center at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, and the USHMM in Washington, D.C. A biannual Alumni
Conference of the program’s participants further reinforces its goals to foster remembrance and toleration.
TOGETHER
Founded in 1985, Together is the official publication of the American Gathering. With a circulation of
approximately 85,000, it reflects the collective voice of survivors, the second and third generations, and
includes news, opinions, information on education, commemorations, events, book reviews,
announcements, searches, and articles on history and personal remembrance. Contributors include
professional writers, poets, thinkers, historians and Holocaust scholars.
The GATHERING IS A MEMBER OF OTHER ORGANIZATIONS such as the World Jewish
Congress, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, the JCRC and the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations. In that capacity, its mission is to use its moral authority to influence
issues of importance to the survivor community and to the world Jewish community.
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
The American Gathering actively assists survivors on a daily basis. Whether it is through sitting on the
Claims Conference, Self-Help Boards, manning an office to offer information, applications for assistance
or interfacing with other related agencies on behalf of survivors, the American Gathering does its utmost
to insure that survivor issues are addressed.
NATIONAL HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATIONS AND MEMORIALS
The collective and individual initiatives of the American Gathering leadership has fostered Holocaust
commemoration, remembrance events and the establishment of Holocaust memorials in many communities
throughout the United States and in almost every State House in the Union. While the American Gathering
continues to sponsor its own annual commemoration program with the Museum of Jewish Heritage and
WAGRO, it has been instrumental in the creation of the ongoing Holocaust programs at both the United
Nations and the U.S. Congress.Please make a meaningful,
tax deductible
contribution payable to the
“American Gathering.”
Thank you.
American Gathering, 122 West 30th Street, Suite 205, New York, NY 10001
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