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TOGETHER 1visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
APRIL 2008APRIL 2008APRIL 2008APRIL 2008APRIL 2008 VVVVVOLUME 22 NUMBER 1OLUME 22 NUMBER 1OLUME 22 NUMBER 1OLUME 22 NUMBER 1OLUME 22 NUMBER 1
American Gathering ofAmerican Gathering ofAmerican Gathering ofAmerican Gathering ofAmerican Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust SurvivorsJewish Holocaust SurvivorsJewish Holocaust SurvivorsJewish Holocaust SurvivorsJewish 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
Polish Prime Minister Commits to
Restitution LegislationDonald Tusk, the new Prime Minister of
Poland, recently announced at a meeting with
Jewish organizations at the Polish Consulate
in New York that his government will soon
address the issue of private property
restitution, long an issue with Polish
Holocaust survivors.
For years, the World Jewish Restitution
Organization has been pressing the issue of
Polish property restitution legislation.
The Prime Minister was urged to
introduce comprehensive legislation to
address the return of Holocaust-era conf iscated private property. He
responded that legislation on reprivitization of property would be introduced
in the Sejm (the Polish parliament) in the spring and that he would make
every effort to ensure that it would be passed by the fall. (See page 4)
By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz
Israeli Holocaust commission on treatment ofsurvivors wraps up hearings
The Dorner Commission on the Israeli government’s treatment of Holocaust
survivors recently ended the hearings phase of its work with testimony by
Reuven Merhav, executive committee chairman of the Conference on Jew-
ish Material Claims against Germany. The commission will now begin its
deliberations and submit its report in a month.
Merhav insisted on testifying despite retired justice Dalia Dorner’s asser-
tion that the Claims Conference is an American organization and outside the
commission’s purview. However, Merhav reportedly wanted to set the record
straight following criticism of Claims Conference policies over the past year.
The commission also heard testimony from Finance Minister Roni Bar-
On, who said the new government plan for benefits to Holocaust survivors
is better than the German government’s compensation law.
The Claims Conference has reportedly pressured various beneficiary
bodies in Israel to thank them and not to criticize it.
“The matter of showing gratitude is basic,” Merhav told Haaretz. “Not
only do they not recognize those who help, they claim they are not getting
any help at all.”
The Jewish Agency’s treasurer recently wrote the Claims Conference
that the agency withdrew its criticism.
“We are studying the letter and considering the right way to continue
working with the agency,” Merhav said.
Last year, the draft report of an audit by Jewish Agency Chairman Zeev
Bielski and Pensioner Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan leaked to the media re-
vealed the Claims Conference had a billion-dollar surplus. The Conference
said the funds were earmarked for future nursing care for survivors.
MERKEL ADDRESSES THE KNESSETGerman Chancellor Angela
Merkel addressed the Israeli
parliament recently amid
controversy—a few MPs
boycotted the speech while
Hamas slammed Merkel for
being blind to what it called
Israel’s “Holocaust” against
Palestinians.
Merkel’s three-day solidarity
visit to Israel to mark the 60th
anniversary of the creation of
the Jewish state following the
Nazi holocaust climaxed with
a historic speech to the
Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
Merkel told Israel’s
parliament that Germans are
f illed with shame over the
Nazi Holocaust and that she
bows before the victims. In an
emotional speech, delivered in
German and a smattering of Hebrew, Merkel said her country will always be
committed to Israel’s security, particularly in light of growing threats from
Iran.
On March 30, 2008, the “Visas for Life” exhibit opened on New York City’s
famed Ellis Island. The program included speeches by ambassadors, Jewish
community leaders, relatives of honored diplomats and the presentation of
plaques and medals. Among the speakers and awardees were American
Gathering chairman Roman Kent and Board of Directors member Dr. Eva
Fogelman.
“Visas for Life: The Righteous Diplomats” is an exhibit that tells an
important and largely untold story of the Holocaust. The exhibit features
dramatic stories of diplomats from different countries, cultures and
backgrounds. Risking their careers and even their lives, these diplomats
issued visas, including exit visas and transit visas, citizenship papers, protective
papers and other forms of documentation that allowed Jews to escape the
Nazis. They smuggled refugees across international borders and frontiers,
they established safe houses and went on missions to halt deportations to the
death camps. Some even hid Jews in their embassies and in their personal
residences. Between 1938 and 1945 these coureagous diplomats saved over
200,000 lives.
This exhibition is based on original photographs collected from the
families of the diplomats, eyewitness accounts of survivors and original
government records.
This exhibit is sponsored by the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights and the Visas for Life: The Righteous
Diplomats Project.
Visas for Life
Donald Tusk
TOGETHER 2 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
TTTTTOOOOOGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERApril 2008 Volume 22 Number 1
c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s
TTTTTOOOOOGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHER
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’’zHonorary 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
ISABEL ALCOFF
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, Chairman
Hirsh Altusky, l’’zJeanette 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
JEFFREY WIESENFELD
Secretary
JOYCE CELNIK LEVINE
Treasurer
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Polish Prime Minister.................................................................................. 1
Merkel Addresses the Knesset.....................................................................1
Israeli Holocaust Commisssion Hearings....................................................1
Visas for Life...............................................................................................1
Holocaust Educators Reunion Conference..................................................3
Menendes Supports Museum in Warsaw.....................................................3
The Courage of a Few Helped Save Thousands by Sharon Adarlo.............4
Switzerland Honors its Righteous Among Nations by Max Liebmann........4
Poland Wants Property Restitution by Etgar Lefkovits................................4
Israeli Government of Survivor Pensions....................................................4
Yehuda Bauer on Holocaust Education......................................................5
Saving Jewish Children During the Holocaust...........................................5
Jews Saved by Schindler March................................................................5
UN and Israel Launch Holocaust Stamp.....................................................6
Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews by Kirsten Grieshaber.........7
Announcements..........................................................................................8
Books.........................................................................................................9
In Memoriam...................................................................... ......................10
Jewish Champion of Faith by Rafael Alvarez........................................... 12
Rabbi Herbert Friedman by Dr. Alex Grobman........................................ 13
Crumbs by Sheldon P. Hersh.................................................................... 13
Picture of My Past by Brenda Smolovitz.................................................. 14
Yaffa Eliach by Jeanette Friedman........................................................... 15
Survivor Mitzvah Project..........................................................................16
Remembering Austria by Renee Balaban..................................................16
Surviving the War in Lwow by Renata Kessler.........................................17
A Hidden Child Found by Helga A. Morrow............................................18
My Name is Edmund by Edmund Rosianu...............................................19
The Prince and the Jew by George Oscar Lee..........................................20
Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich)........................................21
Dear Friends:
If you are moving, have already moved and
wish to continue receiving Together, please
contact us with your new address. The postoffice 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
Annual Gathering
in Observance of Yom HaShoah
Holocaust Remembrance Day
Sunday, May 4, 2008
3:30 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
Tickets must be reserved by April 28.
ELLIS ISLAND PROJECTS FOR SURVIVORS AND THEIR DESCENDANTSThe 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 byimmigrants for immigrants. If you are interested in participating in eitherof these projectsCONTACT: ERIC BYRON, MUSEUM DIVISION212-363-3206 EXT. 153
TOGETHER 3visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
Holocaust educators holdreunion conference
The 13th national alumni conference of the
Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’
Program, co-sponsored by the American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the
American Federation of Teachers and the Jewish
Labor Committee recently took place in
Washington, D.C.
This year’s reunion of teachers who
participated in a program that took them to Poland
and Israel, was held at the Mayflower Hotel. Some
155 teachers from more than 20 states, including
Hawaii, attended the three-day round-robin of
meetings, lectures and social gatherings that
reinforced the objectives of the Teachers’ Program.
Among the guest speakers were Professor
Deborah Lipstadt, Dr. Aaron Hass, and Sonia
Beker, author of Symphony on Fire.
A number of Holocaust survivors, including
Vladka Meed, Sam Bloch and Simcha Stein
delivered poignant addresses to the largely non-
Jewish attendees.
This summer, another 30 to 40 new teachers
will participate in the program.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Robert
Menendez (D-NJ) and Benjamin L. Cardin
(D-MD) recently introduced a bill that
would provide assistance for the Museum
of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw,
Poland. The museum, which will stand on
the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, has
great historic and symbolic significance
and is expected to attract hundreds of
thousands of people from all over the
world. The bill, “Support for the Museum
of the History of Polish Jews Act of 2008,”
would authorize a contribution of up to
$5 million to the museum.
“The museum will protect a spirit deeply
connected to our own, a heritage we cannot afford
to let slip away. I think it deserves our strong
support, and I am proud to have introduced this
bill,” said Sen. Menendez.
“The museum will be an educational and
cultural center commemorating a thousand years
of Polish Jewish history and is being widely
supported and funded in both the public and
private domains—by the City of Warsaw, the
Polish Government, the German Government, as
well as by corporate and foundation support in
Poland, the United States, Israel and throughout
Europe. In 2006, the museum moved into the last
phase of project design and in June 2007, an
off icial groundbreaking ceremony took place
presided over by Poland’s President Lech
Kaczynski. The museum is expected to open to
the public in early 2011.
Senator Menendez (D-nj) Introduces Bill To Support TheMuseum Of The History Of Polish Jews In Warsaw
“According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 9
million Americans and 80% of Jews are of Polish
ancestry. Because it is vital to the interests of our
nation to preserve and protect artifacts associated
with the heritage of United States citizens and to
encourage scholarship and learning about that
heritage, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews
deserves our support. At the beginning of World
War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population
in Europe, a population that was largely eradicated
during the war. The Jewish presence in Poland
spanned a period of 1000 years—from their arrival
in medieval Poland, through the golden ages of
the 16th and 17th centuries, the pre-war years,
the Holocaust, after World War II, and up to the
present. The Museum will focus on all these
periods, on the enriching affect of the Jewish
culture in Poland, and on building bridges between
people of diverse cultures.”
The courage of a fewhundred helped savethousandsBy Sharon Adarlo, Newark Star-Ledger
Bruce Teicholz was a survivor by chance, but a
hero by choice.
With most of his family decimated in
concentration camps, Teicholz, a Polish Jew, risked
his life fleeing Nazi soldiers in the woods and
valleys of Central Europe until he came to
Hungary.
There, Teicholz joined an underground effort
issuing fake visas to fellow Jews desperate to
escape. Some 300 people—most of them
diplomats—located throughout a ravaged Europe
did the same thing and had saved untold
thousands by the end of World War II.
“He could have been killed immediately on
the spot, but he felt he couldn’t stand by,” said his
daughter, Debbie Teicholz-Guedalia, of Demarest
in Bergen County, New Jersey.
She echoed the sentiments of many of the
rescuers. As one of the few Jews involved in the
covert effort, Teicholz was honored at the Ellis
Island Immigration Museum, where “Visas for
Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats”
recently opened. The exhibit is about the
diplomats from 27 countries who helped save
Jews from the Holocaust.
Some 10 million people, 6 million of them
Jews, were beyond the reach of liberators, and
they died in the Holocaust.
Under the arched tile ceiling of Ellis Island’s
Registry Hall, where long lines of immigrants once
gathered, more than 200 family members of
survivors and their rescuers greeted each other
and exchanged stories of how their loved ones
made it to safety or how they helped.
Teicholz-Guedalia received, on behalf of her
father who died in 1993, the Raoul Wallenberg
Award. The medal is named after the famous
Swedish diplomat who sheltered Hungarian
Jewish refugees from the Nazis by creating safe
houses and handing out fake passports.
In fact, Teicholz and Wallenberg collaborated
on the secret rescue mission, Teicholz-Guedalia
said. In the exhibit, a picture shows the two men
together.
“It was his fortitude. It was his will to live,”
Teicholz-Guedalia said about her father’s survival
and determination to save others.
On the third floor of the museum, guests and
tourists stopped to look at photographs of
diplomats and visas, which will be on display
until Sept. 1. On the first floor, an exhibit about
American officials who helped free Jews also
was on view.
Eric Saul, founder of “Visas for Life,” said he
began the project in 1994 when he heard about a
Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, who saved
thousands of Jewish refugees in Lithuania by
giving out visas and letters for safe passage out
of the country.
“He was doing it without permission,” said
Saul, a professional curator based in Morgantown,
West Virginia.
After the war, Chiune was fired from his post for
issuing the documents and went back to Japan, where
he was forgotten, Saul said.
When he first became interested in Sugihara,
Saul contacted his wife, Yukio, who told him, “I
know the Jewish people are grateful, and someday
they will really show it.”
Saul, touched by her comment, mounted the
f irst exhibit about Sugihara in 1995 in San
Francisco. From there, the project snowballed as
family members of other diplomats who helped
in the rescue effort reached out to Saul.
As for the number of people the diplomats
saved, Saul said he can only guess, but the visas
issued numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
The rescuers have died, but Saul did get a
chance to interview a few several years ago.
“They said, ‘Wouldn’t you have done it under
the same circumstances?’” Saul said.
Agnes Hirschi said her father, Carl Lutz, a
Swiss diplomat, felt a compulsion to help because
of his strong Christian faith.
“He did it out of the conviction that God gave
him this task,” she said.
Vera Goodkin, a Lawrenceville resident who
could not make it to the opening ceremonies, said
she was saved by Wallenberg when he had her
whisked away from a Hungarian prison and
transferred to an orphanage. She later reunited
with her parents.
“Every rescuer has the same thread running
through their life and that’s the thread of courage
and decency,” she said in a telephone interview.
“You don’t have to save a hundred thousand like
Raoul Wallenberg. If you save one life, it’s as if
you saved all of humanity.”
Ellis Island
TOGETHER 4 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
Switzerland Honors itsRighteous Among Nations inGenevaby Max Liebmann, Senior Vice President,
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants
Geneva–On January 28, 2008, Cicad
Coordination Intercommunautaire Contre
l’Antisemitisme et la Diffamation, the Swiss
counterpart to the ADL, for the first time ever
organized an evening to honor Swiss “Righteous
Among the Nations.” The reception was held in
Geneva and was attended by 500 invited guests,
including the president of Switzerland, Pascal
Couchepin, whose presence gave the event special
significance. Also present were a number of Swiss
dignitaries, including the president’s immediate
predecessor, Mme. Ruth Dreyfus.
The president of the Cicad, Mr. Grumbach,
opened the proceedings and introduced President
Couchepin, who celebrated more than 60 Swiss
nationals recognized by Yad Vashem for their
saving Jewish lives during World War II, while
facing the strong disapproval of their own
government.
He also acknowledged that it was Switzerland
who asked Germany to add a “J” to all German
Jewish passports which led to tragic consequences
when Switzerland refused them entry.
There are only a few Righteous Swiss still alive.
Present that evening was August Bohny, who was
responsible for running three group homes for the
Swiss Red Cross Children’s Aid in the famous
Huguenot village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the
surrounding area in France. He is directly responsible
for saving approximately ten Jewish teenagers who
lived in one of these homes, including Hanne Hirsch
Liebmann. This is her story.
“One day at the end of August 1942, French
police suddenly appeared in Le Chambon in the
middle of the night to arrest a group of teenagers.
Each child was interrogated individually in the
presence of Mr. Bohny, the director, who kept his
composure. He explained to the police–eloquently,
diplomatically and persuasively–that the arrests
could not be made because the teens were under
the protection of the Swiss Red Cross, a statement
he was not authorized to make.
The police seemed to accept his explanation,
and went to confirm his statement with their higher-
ups. Before they left, they warned him that he
must keep the teens at the home and that they
would return if his statement was false. Early the
following morning, after a hasty breakfast, the
teens were sent into the woods and ordered to stay
there until help arrived. Help arrived that evening.
The group was split up and dispersed to local
farms, where they were hidden. Thanks to Mr.
Bohny, they all survived. Some escaped to
Switzerland, while others remained hidden in the
village and surrounding area.”
Hanne Hirsch Liebmann spoke at the event.
Pierre Sauvage, the documentary filmmaker
who produced and directed Weapons of the
Spirit, translated her remarks from English, as
Mrs. Liebmann is no longer fluent in French.
Mr. Sauvage, whose parents were in hiding in
Le Chambon, was born there during the
Holocaust.
The ceremony was tastefully arranged, with a
non-alcoholic cocktail hour. Mr. Bohny played
some children’s songs on the accordion he had
acquired in Le Chambon during the war. A
wonderfully rehearsed children’s choir sang, and,
later on in the ceremony, a Klezmer band
performed. At the end of the evening, the choir
sang “The Partisaner Hymn.” The event was
oustanding...and the rescuers were f inally
recognized in their own country, albeit by a Jewish
organization.
(l-r) August Bohny, Pierre Sauvage, Hanne Hirsch
Liebmann, and Max Liebmann.
At the request of the Government of Israel,
the Claims Conference is providing technical
assistance for the distribution of pensions to
Holocaust survivors in Israel. The pensions are to
be funded by the Government of Israel under its
recent decision. The technical assistance being
provided by the Claims Conference will greatly
assist in expediting these Government payments
to survivors in Israel, who do not currently receive
Holocaust-related pensions.
The following is a translation of the statement
issued by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office:
The Government is quickly moving forward
to transfer pensions to survivors of camps and the
ghettos who do not receive a monthly pension
from any other source.
As part of the preparation, the Prime
Minister’s Office has requested from the Claims
Conference technical assistance in locating eligible
survivors who are receiving a governmental
income supplement. At this time, the Ministry of
Finance’s Department of the Disabled will transfer
the funds until another decision is made by the
Finance Minister.
The assistance of the Claims Conference was
required in order to identify a first group of eligible
survivors. The Claims Conference represents the
Jewish people in negotiations with the German
government and currently pays monthly pensions
from its Article 2 fund, funded by the Germany,
to approximately 23,000 Israeli citizens. The
willingness of the Claims Conference to join the
effort, without any compensation, and allow
access to its database will greatly speed up the
beginning of payments to the neediest.
The Claims Conference has agreed to the
request and announced that it would offer all the
measures required to provide the technical
assistance needed. The chief of staff of the Prime
Minister’s Office, Raanan Dinur, thanked the
organization’s directors for their willingness to be
a part in promoting this issue and pointed out the
professionalism with which this matter was dealt.
It should be pointed out that the arrangement
as to who will pay the pensions to the general
group of survivors has yet to be reached. In
accordance with the Government’s decision , the
Treasury is looking into a number of options in
order to guarantee the payments in a fast and
credible manner.
Government of Israel Pensions to Holocaust Survivors
After years of delay, the Polish government
aims to complete the issue of Holocaust property
restitution by the end of the year, Polish
Ambassador to Israel Agnieszka Magdziak-
Miszewska recently announced.
The core of a bill, which was accepted by
the Polish parliament in draft form two years ago,
is ready, and the Polish government hopes to
reach a resolution by the end of the year.
The bill would pay 20% compensation to
former property-owners—both Jewish and non-
Jewis—whose property was seized during World
War II. Polish officials estimate that the Jewish-
owned private property makes up nearly 20% of
all property taken.
The biggest claimants are from non-Jewish
Polish nobility whose assets—including lavish
palaces—were confiscated. Moreover, many of
the areas populated by Jews ahead of WWII—
the so-called Galicia region—are now located
outside the boundaries of present-day Poland and
fall in Ukraine.
“It is [both] moral justice and the real
economic interest of Poland to end this issue.”
Magdziak-Miszewska said the Polish government
was currently considering whether to increase
the amount of compensation it would offer.
The total value of seized property is estimated
to be around 16 billion-18billion euros ($21b.-
24b.), according to Polish groups working to
attain the compensation.
Magdziak-Miszewska’s remarks came ahead
of a forthcoming visit to Israel by Polish Prime
Minister Donald Tusk. The visit, which is the first
such trip by a Polish premier in nearly nine years,
comes as Israel plans its 60th anniversary and as
burgeoning ties between Israel and Poland are
now among the strongest in Europe.
Tusk’s visit also coincides with the
inauguration of “Polish Year” in Israel, an effort
to increase cultural ties between the two
countries.
“We need to work for the future—
remembering the Shoah, but also 1,000 years of
coexistence,” Magdziak-Miszewska added.
Poland wants Holocaustproperty restitutionEtgar Lefkovits , THE JERUSALEM POST
TOGETHER 5visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
Professor Yehuda Bauerreflects on HolocaustEducation in the 21stCentury
CHGS Newsletter Winter/Spring 2008
Now may be a good time to ponder about the directions of our work. Good
work has been done in a professional way. Teacher training seminars,
guidelines for education, investments in exhibitions and seed money for
films and documentaries, and much more, have hopefully had an impact on
Holocaust awareness and education in many countries. I say hopefully,
because we cannot (yet?) measure the effect our work has had, though it is
true that without it the situation would have been much worse, or perhaps
much less good. However, my purpose this time is not to engage in self-
gratulatory exercises, justified as they may be, but to point to problems that
I see in our efforts.
1. There is a tendency in our work to view the Holocaust as what National
Socialist Germany and its allies and supporters did to the Jews. In other
words, to deal with the perpetrators and their motives. This is of course
centrally important, but it represents only one of the sides of the Holocaust.
The victims tend to be seen as the objects of genocidal policy, and in only
few of our efforts do they appear as subjects. But, there will always be more
victims than perpetrators, and it is at least equally important to deal with
who the victims were before they became victims, and how they reacted
after they became victims, as it is to deal with evil and the perpetrators. We
are all more likely to become victims or bystanders (we actually are
bystanders today) than perpetrators. For all of humanity, and not only for the
Jews, to deal with the victims and their perspective is a central issue. The
genocide of the Jews was the most extreme
form of genocide (to date), and it has been
duplicated many times over since, not in
the same form, but in somewhat similar
approximations. It is therefore a central
issue for humanity.
2. We need to concentrate more on the
relationships between the Jews and the
populations among whom they lived. In
Europe, no one has a clear conscience. In
all the countries, without any exception,
there were collaborators with the Nazis, in some more than in others. Projects
need to be undertaken that will ensure that this is not swept under the carpet.
Nor are the Jews themselves an exception: Jewish policemen and some of
the Jewish Councils were forced into the role of hangmen of their own people.
3. We deal with rescuers, and so we should. But not only non-Jews
rescued Jews; Jews rescued Jews as well, and even non-Jews were rescued
by Jews on occasion. We should emphasize clearly that central and crucial
as these stories are, they are on the margin of the Holocaust. They make it
possible for us to teach the Holocaust, because they show that there was
another way of action, apart from yielding to persuasion and terror of the
Nazis. But we need to say clearly that the rescuers were a small minority,
often persecuted by their own countrymen for their rescue work.
4. We need to ‘globalize’ the teaching of the Holocaust vertically and
horizontally. Vertically—all over the globe, as Jewish refugees were refused
entry to Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, not only
to North America and Western Europe. We need to talk about the refugees in
Shanghai and the attitude of the neutrals. We need to contextualize the
Holocaust in the framework of international relations and the conduct of
World War II. We can only hint at these things, for lack of time, but we must
at least do that. Vertically: we need to understand the history of the Jews, its
European and global context, the background of antisemitism; we need to
make our listeners aware of the European and global situation—and its
historical background—that made the genocide of the Jews possible. And
we need to contextualize the Holocaust as a genocide, parallel to, similar to,
and different from other genocides.
All this is a very tall order, and we have to examine ways in which these
things can, slowly, be integrated into our work.
We have experts who can prepare materials that will reflect these points,
and we have governments that are committed to provide a protective umbrella
to such work. It will take time, no doubt. But there is a Jewish saying that
you are not obliged to finish the work; but you are obliged to try.
Yehuda Bauer is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University.
Saving Jewish Children During the HolocaustHaaretz
A British man who saved hundreds of Jewish children from
Czechoslovakia from the Nazi concentration camps in the Holocaust, has
been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. Sir Nicholas Winton,
dubbed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as “the British Oskar
Schindler,” was a young stockbroker when he pressed the London
authorities into agreeing to take in the
children if he could find homes for them.
And he did. The 669 youngsters were sent
to foster parents—mostly in England, a small
number in Sweden. In all, eight trainloads
carried the mostly Jewish children from
Prague through Hitler’s Germany to Britain.
Winton kept his heroic deed to himself
for half a century. His pivotal role in the rescue
operation was revealed in the late 1980s after
his wife found a scrapbook documenting his
work in their attic. In October 2007, 98-year-
old Winton was awarded the Cross of Merit
of the 1st class by Czech Defense Minister
Vlasta Parkanova for saving the children. At
the ceremony, Foreign Minister Karel
Schwarzenberg said that the Czech diplomats
decided to back schoolchildren who had
collected more than 32,000 signatures in their bid to nominate Winton for
the Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded another top Czech decoration, the
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk Order, in 1998.
Previous Peace Prize laureates include former Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon
Peres, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and Elie Wiesel.
Jews saved by Schindler marchAP—KRAKOW, Poland: Hundreds of people joined some two dozen
Holocaust survivors, including several saved by German industrialist Oskar
Schindler, at a recent march marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation
of the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis. Family members, historians and Krakow
residents and officials gathered with survivors at a square in the heart of the
former ghetto to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
The group then set out to retrace the steps of Jews driven from the ghetto
during its 1943 liquidation to the forced labor camp in Plaszow about a mile
away where some 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish Poles were murdered during
the war.
The marchers left flowers at a preserved fragment of the ghetto wall.
Some of the survivors were making their first trip back to Poland since World
War II.
Jan Dresner, 85, a retired dentist from Tel Aviv, said he, his parents and
sister were spared when Schindler hired them from Plaszow to work in his
factory in what is now the Czech Republic.
“I will always remember that he saved my life and gave me the chance
to raise a family and have a career and...a good life,” Dresner told The
Associated Press on the eve of the march. “He did something that very
few people did: He saved 1,100 souls,” said Dresner, who joined the march
at Plaszow.
On March 13, 1943, German soldiers started a two-day action in which
they emptied the ghetto of its estimated 16,000 Jewish residents, shipping
them to Plaszow and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some 2,000
Jews were killed during that time.
Only 3,000 of the ghetto’s former inmates survived the war, and just 60
of the Jews that Schindler saved are still alive.
The Plaszow camp was the setting for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Oscar-
winning film Schindler’s List, which chronicled the German businessman’s
efforts to shield more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring
them to work in his factories in Krakow and Moravia in the present-day
Czech Republic.
Since the release of Spielberg’s film, tourists to Krakow have sought out
the place where Schindler kept the emaciated, frostbitten Jews, claiming
their work was essential to the survival of his metal works factory.
Schindler spent his fortune feeding the Jews he saved. After the war, he
emigrated to Argentina with his wife, Emilie, but returned to Germany in 1958,
dying there in 1974. He was buried in Jerusalem at his own request.
TOGETHER 6 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
UN and Israeli Postal
Company Launch Holocaust
Memory Stamps
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 28—The United Nations
and Israel recently jointly launched stamps in
observance of the International Day of
Commemoration in memory of the victims of the
Holocaust.
The launch at the U.N. Headquarters was
attended by the head of the U.N. Department of
Communications and Public Information
(UNDPI), Kiyotaka Akasaka, Israel’s
Communications Ministers Ariel Atias and U.N.
Ambassador Dan Gillerman.
In a message delivered by Akasaka, U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the
stamp “demonstrates the commitment of the
United Nations to pay tribute to all the victims of
the Holocaust, honor the survivors, and reaffirms
its efforts to help prevent future acts of genocide.
In this way, we can help inspire succeeding
generations to overcome hatred and bigotry.”
Atias said the joint issuance of the stamps
“represents an important step in worldwide efforts
to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten.”
The launch of the stamps, which incorporates
the award-winning logo of the UNDPI’s “Holocaust
and the United Nations Outreach Program,” marked
the f irst time that a U.N. stamp was launched
simultaneously with a national stamp.
The logo features a pair of barbed wires,
colored in grey and set against a black
background, run horizontally across the page and
f inally transform into a green-hued vine from
which a pair of flowers blossoms.
The U.N. stamp is available in denominations
of 41 cents, 0.85 Swiss francs and 0.65 euro at the
U.N. Headquarters in New York, and the U.N.
Offices in Geneva and Vienna, respectively. The
national stamp, issued by the Israel Postal Company
in Hebrew, is in a denomination of 4.6 shekels.
The U.N. Postal Administration has also made
available a joint silk first day coversheet featuring
all three U.N. stamps in English, French and German,
canceled with the first day of issue postmarks.
Today, important
officials and members
of the press gather to
witness the issuance of
a United Nations Postal
Stamp to commemorate
the Holocaust containing
the phrase “Remembrance
and Beyond.” But for
me, a prisoner in Auschwitz and a survivor of the
Holocaust, the word remembrance is entirely
superfluous.
It is impossible for me, even for a moment, to
forget the horrific experiences I endured in the
concentration camps. The barbed wire on the
stamp instantly conjures up and brings to my mind
the unbearable memories I associate with the gate
to hell known as Auschwitz. My recollection of
the horrific atrocities committed there is more than
enough to keep me awake at night until the end
of time. Regardless of how many years go by,
how can I ever forget?
The brutality and bestiality that occurred daily
in the camps is indelibly etched in my mind. The
look of pleasure and laughter on the faces of the
murderers as they tortured innocent men, women,
and children is beyond description and will always
linger in my consciousness. How can I erase thesight of the living skeletons, still alive just skin
and bones? How can I ever forget the smell ofburning flesh that constantly filled the air? The
heartbreaking sobbing of children, as they weretorn from their mother’s arms by the inhuman
actions of their captors, will ring in my ears until Iam laid to rest. I often wonder if the cries of these
youngsters penetrated heaven’s gate.Thus for me, and for all other Holocaust
survivors, the word “remembrance” is indeedredundant and superfluous. However, this does
not apply to the world at large. Even if the storyof the Holocaust was repeated forever, it would
still not be enough. As such, it is extremely fitting
REMARKSBY ROMAN KENT at the
UNITEDNATIONS
for the word “remembrance” to appear on the new
stamp.
However, the wording “and Beyond” engraved
on the commemorative stamp is of great
importance to me, as it should be to each one of
us. It has taken more than sixty years for the United
Nations to fully comprehend that today the fate
and destiny of mankind is closely connected and
intertwined with the Holocaust. It is therefore
crucial that future generations understand what
took place.
Hopefully, teaching future generations about
this brutal catastrophic occurrence in our history
will help prevent such a thing from ever
happening again. But just to remember is not
enough. In Hebrew it is said “Lo Haikkar
Hamachshavah Elah Hamaaseh”...it is the deed
rather than the thought that it critical.
Sadly, we did not accomplish this goal; we
have not as yet taught the world at large that wars
and killing do not achieve anything. They only
create fertile ground for another round of
bloodshed. Today, there is widespread violence,
not just in the Middle East, but in almost every
continent on this planet.
So what are my thoughts about “and
Beyond”? The United Nations, with the issuance
of this new stamp commemorating the Holocaust,
has seized the moment at a most opportune time.
The use of this stamp will be a continual reminder
of the destruction and evil of the Holocaust and
hopefully help to prevent such an occurrence in
the future.
As a survivor, I dare not forget the millions
who were murdered. For if I were to forget, then
the conscience of mankind would be buried
alongside the 6,000,000 victims. As a survivor, I
can truly understand the pain of a mother losing
her child in today’s violent world; for her pain is
the same, regardless of where and why her child
is being murdered.
I personally feel that if the words “and
Beyond” appearing on the stamp have any
possibility of succeeding, we must educate—and
educate properly—the new generations to come.
We must instill in our children what happens
when prejudice and hatred are allowed to
flourish. It is my conviction that only through
education can any calamity be prevented. We
must teach our children tolerance and
understanding both at home and in school; for
tolerance cannot be assumed, it must be taught.
We must stress to our children that hate is never
right and love is never wrong.
Finally, this innovative stamp “Remembrance
and Beyond” can have a tremendous positive
impact. It enters the world with the international
capability of transmitting our letters, documents
and written words to all corners of the globe.
Thus, when I or any one else sees this stamp on
a document, in effect it is a direct response to
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
any other denier of the Holocaust. It asserts that
the United Nations, an international body of
governments, recognizes the fact that not only
did the Holocaust exist, it was an unprecedented
crime against humanity, and Jews in particular.
So let the stamp be widely used, and I
thank the Uni ted Nat ions for i ssuing i t .
Together with the proper commentary, this
wi l l sure ly be an impor tant s tep toward
collective understanding that we are all one
people, living on one planet.
TOGETHER 7visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER The Associated Press
BERLIN — Barbara Preusch vividly remembers the day the Nazis searched
her Berlin home for hidden Jews—and left without finding the mother and
daughter her family was sheltering.
Now 76 and still living in the same house, hidden behind tall hedges in
a leafy suburb, she leads a visitor to the claustrophobic, hidden space between
the hallway and a bedroom where Rachela and Jenny Schipper stayed from
1943 to 1945.
“The Nazis were suspicious of us but never found our hideout,” said
Preusch, a woman with a stern air, glasses and gray hair. “They took only
our apples and cigarettes.”
Sixty-two years after the end of World War II on May 8, 1945, people
like Preusch—a teenager when her grandmother began helping fugitive
Jews—are being honored with a museum in Berlin.
Israel recognized gentiles who helped Jews escape the Holocaust as early
as 1963, and honored 443 Germans at the Yad Vashem Memorial as
“Righteous among the Nations.” But similar honors have been long delayed
at home.
The “Silent Heroes” museum is to open in 2008 in an old tenement
building in the center of Berlin. It will be based in Otto Weidt’s former
workshop for the blind, where several Jews survived in a secret room, and
include two more floors that are vacant and still under renovation.
The new museum will focus on both rescuers and survivors with
multimedia presentations and witnesses’ documents that reveal the
motivations and dangers faced by the protectors.
About 1,700 Jews survived in Berlin, and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000
non-Jewish Germans actively hid them, according to historian Johannes
Tuchel, the head of the German Resistance Memorial Center which is in
charge of the museum.
The motivations of the rescuers were manifold, Tuchel said. “We can’t
come up with a typical profile: Some were workers, some academics or
devoted Christians; others helped spontaneously or for political reasons.”
There are no exact statistics for the numbers of hidden Jews and their
German helpers for all of Germany, Tuchel said. More than 350,000 German
Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
“The number of Berlin rescuers might sound impressive at first,” Tuchel
said. “But compared to the 4 million who lived in Berlin at the time and
didn’t help, 20,000 are not a lot at all.”
To recognize the rescuers would have come close to acknowledging
that there was an alternative to blindly following the Nazis, Tuchel said—
something many Germans in the postwar years were reluctant to acknowledge.
Today’s generation, untainted by their parents’ and grandparents’ crimes,
are in some ways more openly dealing with the country’s past and
acknowledging different individuals and groups who actively resisted the
Nazis.
The Schipper’s ordeal in hiding began after February 27, 1943, when
the Nazis started to deport the remaining Jews in Berlin to concentration
camps. Hiding was the only chance.
For Barbara Preusch, the Schippers became like family, hiding with them
on and off from February 1943 until the end of the World War II in May
1945.
“We shared everything with them: our beds, our food stamps, our joy
and our fears,” said Preusch.
“One of our neighbors was an ardent Nazi and he’d constantly watch
our home with his binoculars,” Preusch said. “But he never saw Rachela and
Jenny because we had our curtains drawn day and night.”
Preusch, whose grandfather was Jewish and deported to Auschwitz a
few months before her non-Jewish grandmother started helping other Jews,
said that even after the war it took her a long time until she felt she could
trust anybody in Germany.
“Even though I was young, I knew that I couldn’t tell anybody about it,”
Preusch said. “This is the first time I have ever told my story to the public.”
However reluctant she is in sharing her story with outsiders, Preusch often
talks about the past by phone with Jenny Schipper, who emigrated to the
U.S. after the war and now lives in Skokie, Ill.
Weidt’s workshop was turned into a small memorial center by a group of
university students a few years ago. In the former workshop visitors can see
a secret hiding room that was connected to the small factory and learn about
Weidt and his Jewish workers, who produced brooms and brushes. Weidt
helped his workers with forged papers, brought them food and even tried to
Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews
get one of them liberated from a concentration camp after she had been
deported.
Weidt hired mostly blind and deaf Jews assigned to him from the Jewish
Home for the Blind. But not all of Weidt’s employees were handicapped.
Some, like Inge Deutschkron, also worked in his workshop as secretaries.
The 82-year-old often gives tours of the workshop, telling visitors about her
non-Jewish German rescuers.
“Until a few years ago, nobody wanted to know anything about the
‘good Germans’ who helped Jews during the Holocaust,” Deutschkron said.
During the time she spent hiding from 1943-1945, she had about 20 different
rescuers who fed, hid and helped her with false identity papers.
Getting caught could mean execution or deportation to a concentration
camp, but that did not stop Sylvia Ebel and her family from hiding several
Jews at home. Ebel, an 80-year-old retiree who lives in the former East-
Berlin neighborhood of Hellersdorf, despised the Nazis, especially after her
father, a fervent communist, was imprisoned and later murdered at the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
“We sometimes had a whole group of Jews at our apartment, even though
we only had two rooms,” Ebel said. They moved frequently to avoid raising
suspicions among
neighbors.
One of the Jews
who temporarily hid
at Ebel’s place was
Larry Orbach.
The 82-year-old,
who emigrated to the
U.S. after the war in
1946, remembers
how he and Ebel
ventured out during
Allied bombing to
loot food stores.
“You really had
guts to go out at
night. I was not Anne
Frank, hiding in a
house. I had to
breathe. I had to eat. I
had nothing to eat. I
couldn’t buy water,”
Orbach said during an
interview at his home
in New York.
Orbach, who
worked in the jewelry
business in New York
and is retired now, is
still in touch with
Ebel.
“My mother always
said, they are part of the
family,” Ebel said. “It
wasn’t a question of
receiving awards or
feeling heroic, they
simply had to live and
survive.”
In 2004 the building at 39 Rosenthaler Straße was purchased with funds
from the German government and the Klassenlotterie Foundation Berlin. The
purchase was made with the specific purpose of expanding the Museum
Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind and establishing a central “Silent
Heroes” Memorial Center. In April 2005 the German Resistance Memorial
Center was given responsibility for planning the content and organization of
this new museum. The “Silent Heroes” Memorial Center will open in 2008.
TOGETHER 8 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
Call for manuscriptsThe Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) is establishing a Worldwide Shoah
Memoirs Collection in electronic form of previously unpublished or unavailable memoirs written by survivors of the
Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is serving as Honorary Chairman for this program. As he has said previously on this topic, “I
repeat now what Dubnow said to his companions when they went to their death: “Write, write, write! And I’m saying it
to you now, to us. Please write. This is the last chance. Thirty years from now, who will still be here?”
The Claims Conference is rescuing old stories with new technology. With increasing numbers of elderly Holocaust survivors dying, it is crucial that
their memoirs be preserved so that future generations may learn of the Holocaust from those who survived. Each unique account of survival brings a new
perspective to the history of the Holocaust and broadens public knowledge of its scope.
Joining in this effort are Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Mémorial de la Shoah/Centre de Documentation Juive
Contemporaine, the Jewish Historical Institute and the Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Project.
At this time, WE ARE CONCENTRATING ON THE URGENT COLLECTION OF UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS IN ELECTRONIC FORM.
Our concern is for previously unpublished or unavailable memoirs to be identified, preserved, and made available for future generations who will not be able
to meet survivors first-hand. This is an international program, as Holocaust survivors live in 75 countries; submissions will be accepted in all languages.
Documents in this electronic collection will be made available to appropriate organizations and individuals to assist them in their critical work of
research and documentation of the Shoah. Ways in which memoirs may be made publicly accessible, after appropriate review, are under discussion.
Inclusion of manuscripts in the Worldwide Shoah Memoirs Collection will be determined by historians and other experts reviewing all submissions.
All submissions must be electronic or typed; handwritten documents cannot be included. Information about the Worldwide Shoah Memoirs Collection
and instructions for submission are at http://memoirs.claimscon.org.
Jewish Records Indexing - Poland is the only
organization with the mission to index the Jewish
vital (and other) records of Polish Jews. JRI-Poland
has indexed ALL the surviving Jewish vital
records of Bilgoraj. There are entries for more than
50 records for the family name SZAC in the
Bilgoraj database. If you have an interest in the
Jewish vital records of any town in Poland, check
the JRI-Poland website at www.jri-poland.org.
While there are indices to more than 3 million
records already online, please note that there an
additional 1/2 million entries that are not online
for one reason or another. Please contact me
directly regarding any town in which you may
have an interest.
Stanley Diamond (Montreal)
Executive Director, Jewish Records Indexing -
Poland
Jewish Records Indexing inPoland
The Songs of Life International Choir
Festival will be held in Bulgaria and Israel, from
November 21 – December 1, 2008. Songs of Life
is a festival of thanksgiving which will
commemorate the heroic rescue of all 50,000
Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust.
It has been 65 years since the people of
Bulgaria stood firm and saved their entire Jewish
population from Hitler’s grasp. Not one single
Jew was deported from Bulgaria during World
War II. The festival will serve as a celebration of
the preservation of life.
We are inviting cantors, choirs and auditors
from the USA, Canada and Israel to join the
Bulgarian host choir “Morski Zvutsi” for the
Bulgarian premiere performance of Ernest
Bloch’s major choral work, Sacred Service. This
monumental liturgical work will be performed
in four cities: Plovdiv and Sofia, Bulgaria and
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel .
The 12-day itinerary also allows for
individual presentations, sightseeing, guided
tours and visits to historical and archeological
sites.
We will commemorate this unprecedented
heroic rescue by presenting 50,000 flowers to
the people of Bulgaria, one for every Jew that
was saved. Each group will represent its city and
county in Bulgaria and Israel and present a
bouquet of flowers to the Bulgarian people on
behalf of its community.
It is our hope that Songs of Life will transcend
cultural and religious lines and instead continue
to build bridges among all that it touches.
For additional information, we invite you to
visit our website at www.songsoflife.org. To
download a brochure please click on “Join the
Tour” page and then click on download a pdf
Brochure at the top of the page.
Kalin and Sharon Tchonev
113 Dupre Mill Court
Lexington, SC 29072
Tel: (803)358-2382
Fax: (803)358-6823
www.varnaworkshop.com
www.songsoflife.org
Songs of Life InternationalChoir Festival
Many of you have been reading in newspapers
around the world about a “newly” announced
Belgian compensation program of $170 million
for looted, lost or abandoned assets, and you’ve
been calling to ask us where and how to apply.
Please know that this money refers to the sum that
was allocated to the Buysse Commission some
years ago, and this latest press release was made
upon the recent issuance of the Buysse
Commission’s final report. (You can read all about
it at www.combuysse.fgov.be.) In short, there is
no new Belgian compensation. Jews who
survived the war in Belgium will not be getting
any new or additional money, and the decisions
of the Buysse Commission (now completed) or
of the ongoing Solidarity 3000 program (past
deadline for application) remain unchanged.
“New” BelgianCompensation
needs volunteers
I am currently working with Nick Doob and Shari Cookson on a
documentary about Alzheimer’s that is being produced by HBO in
association with the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s
Association. It is part of a series of films that will take a comprehensive
look at the disease. The film that Nick Doob and Shari Cookson are
making is about the experience of having Alzheimer’s; it is a personal
testimony that will tell the stories of people in an authentic way, that
shows the effect of Alzheimer’s from an inside point-of-view. The film will be shot in simple verite
style by the two filmmakers, without additional lighting, and in most cases, without formal interviews.
It will consist of ten to twelve personal stories, which will range from someone who has been recently
diagnosed with the disease to someone in the advanced stages of it.
As the community of Holocaust survivors age it seems unavoidable that Alzheimer’s disease is a
new challenge that many of them must face. I recently worked on a documentary about a group of
Holocaust survivors who summered together in the Catskill Mountains and three of our 15 main
characters had Alzheimer’s disease, two of whom have since passed away. I would very much like to
reach out to some of the survivors who are suffering with this disease and possibly feature them in this
documentary. My contact information is below.
Elyssa Hess
HBO Documentary Films
1114 Ave of Americas
G26-14B
New York, NY 10018
email: [email protected]
office: (212) 512 5506
mobile: (914) 645 3386
PLEASE SEND US YOUR
STORIES, ARTICLES, POEMS,
AND LETTERS FOR INCLUSION
IN TOGETHER AND OUR WEB
SITE.
TOGETHER 9visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
TOGETHER 10 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
Miles LermanMiles Lerman, who fought
against the Nazis in Poland
and helped found the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington,
D.C., died Jan. 22 in his
home in Philadelphia. He
was 88.
Lerman was from a
prosperous family whose
flour mills were seized by
the Nazis. He escaped from a slave labor camp and
fought the Nazis with other partisans for nearly two
years in the forests of Poland.
“Our job was to raise havoc, to raise hell with
them and survive,” he once told the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
Mr. Lerman and his wife, Rosalie, immigrated
to New York City in 1947. He worked as a grocery
warehouse clerk in Brooklyn, N.Y., then had a
chicken farm in Vineland, N.J. He later started a home
heating oil business that grew into a major
distributorship, and invested in real estate.
Mr. Lerman was involved in the Holocaust
Museum from the planning stages, through its
opening on the Mall in 1993 until he retired in 2000.
Appointed to its governing board by President Carter,
he was reappointed by the next three presidents.
As chairman of the Campaign to Remember,
he helped raise $190 million to build, equip, and
endow the museum. At the same time, he was
chairman of the museum’s International Relations
Committee, which negotiated with Eastern
European countries for the artifacts that became
the museum’s permanent exhibition. Among them
were a railroad boxcar of the type used to transport
Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination
camp; barracks from the Birkenau camp; suitcases,
combs, shaving kits and toothbrushes from
Auschwitz; 5,000 shoes from Majdanek; and
canisters that had held Zyklon B, the gas used to
kill Jews.
“He was indispensable,” Michael Berenbaum,
the project director for the creation of museum,
told The New York Times. “He spoke many
languages and knew how to deal with East
European officialdom at the time the Soviet Union
was collapsing.”
The museum’s current director, Sara J.
Bloomfield, said Mr. Lerman’s “breadth of vision”
extended beyond building the collections. As
museum chairman, Bloomfield said, Mr. Lerman
started the Committee on Conscience, which deals
with contemporary genocide.
After retiring, Mr. Lerman was the board’s
chairman emeritus.
He also led efforts to build a memorial at the
Belzec death camp in Poland, where his mother
died.
Thomas Peter LantosThomas Peter Lantos was a Democratic member
of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981
until his death.
An American by choice, Lantos was born in
Budapest, Hungary, on February 1, 1928. He was
16 when Nazi Germany occupied his native
country. As a teenager, he was placed in a
Hungarian fascist forced labor camp. He
succeeded in escaping and was able to survive in
a safe house in Budapest set up by Swedish
humanitarian Raoul
Wallenberg.
In 1947, Lantos
was awarded an
academic scholarship
to study in the United
States. In August of
that year, he arrived in
New York City. Just a
few weeks after he left
Hungary, the Communist
Party seized control of
the country.
Lantos attended the University of Washington
in Seattle, where he received a B.A. and M.A. in
economics. He moved to San Francisco in 1950
and began graduate studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, where he later received his
Ph.D. In the fall of 1950 he started teaching
economics at San Francisco State University.
In the summer of 1950, Lantos married his
childhood sweetheart, Annette Tillemann. For three
decades Lantos was a professor of economics, an
international affairs analyst for public television,
and an economic consultant to businesses. He also
served in senior advisory roles to members of the
United States Senate.
Lantos made his first run for office in 1980,
when he defeated one-term Republican
congressman Bill Royer by 5,700 votes. He never
faced another contest nearly that close, and was
reelected 13 times. He was the only Holocaust
survivor ever to serve in Congress.
Henri Zvi Deutschby Suzanna Deutsch
Henri Zvi Deutsch was born in Antwerp, Belgium.
He was 9 when he fled Belgium with his family
and 10 when they arrived in New York City. His
immediate family, which consisted of his father,
Bernard, his mother, Helen, his brother Simon and
his sister, Josette, survived. His extended family
all perished in the Holocaust.
Deutsch lived in Israel from 1963-1970 and
taught at Tel Aviv University. It was there that he
met his wife, Suzanna Deutsch, who came from
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The couple had three
children and returned from Israel to live in
Milwaukee.
Henri Zvi Deutsch devoted his life to
educating both Jews and non-Jews about the
Holocaust. He was a teacher and a writer. Many
of his plays were about the Holocaust and other
Jewish themes. They were presented locally and
also were produced and presented by the Eden
Theater. He also did a great deal of writing for
children. His plays for children were shown on
“The Open Door,” a Chicago television show,
presented in the 1980s. He also wrote for Shofar,
a magazine for Jewish children that is no longer
in publication.
In the 1980s he found out that his family had
been saved by a righteous diplomat, Aristides de
Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul in
Bordeaux, France who saved around 30,000 lives.
Deutsch devoted much of the rest of his life to
teaching people about the life of de Sousa Mendes
as well as other Holocaust related history.
Stephen FeinsteinStephen Feinstein, the
director of the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide
Studies (CHGS) and
adjunct professor of
history at the University
of Minnesota, died
suddenly on March 4. He
was 64.
Feinstein joined the
faculty at the University
of Minnesota in 1997,
serving f irst as the
acting director of the CHGS and then being named
director two years later.
Feinstein was known around the world as an
advocate for Holocaust survivors and genocide
education and, in particular, for his expertise on
artistic expression and genocide. He trained Polish
teachers on Holocaust education, spoke at Yad
Vashem in Jerusalem and frequently commented
in the media on anything Holocaust- and
genocide-related.
Feinstein received his doctoral degree in
Russian and European history from New York
University in 1971. He earned an undergraduate
degree in economics from Villanova University
in 1964.
Melvin HanbergBy Julian and Francine Hanberg
Lt. Col. Melvin Hanberg, whose loss of 17
family members in the Nazi Holocaust stirred him
to launch a new approach to Holocaust
remembrance as a pioneering Jewish family
historian, has died at age 84.
Born in Detroit on May 28, 1923, raised in
Chicago and graduated from Austin High School
in 1941, he settled in Los Angeles in 1947 after
service in World War II. In 1942, reported mass
atrocities against European Jews caused Hanberg
to ask the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
about his father’s family in the Warsaw Ghetto.
HIAS’ response that all Jews were in extreme
danger led him to volunteer for duty in Europe.
Instead, he was sent to the Pacific where, as part
of the Army Air Corps Signal Corps, he broke
enemy codes and transmitted coded instructions
to troops for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s liberation
of the Philippines and New Guinea.
He returned to uniform in the Korean War and
eventually rose to lieutenant colonel in the Army
Reserves.
At World War II’s end, he learned that among
his many relatives in Europe, only one cousin had
survived the Holocaust. At this time, he made it
his task to remember the victims and honor a lost
civilization by activating the virtually unknown
pursuit of Jewish genealogy.
He discovered that although Jewish
communities were nearly wiped out, the Nazis had
carefully preserved vital records. After tracing his
family back to the late 1600s, he organized and
cont’d on p. 11
TOGETHER 11visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
served as first president of the Jewish Genealogical
Society of Los Angeles (JGS-LA) in 1979.
A cofounder and first president of the Polish
Genealogical Society of California starting in July
1989, he also spoke at numerous family-history
conventions, conferences and seminars.
Halina Lasterby Rositta Kenigsberg
Halina Laster, who
passed away on March
22, 2008 (maiden name
Zemanska) was born on
June 4, 1921 in Tomaszow
Mazowiecki, Poland.
During the Holocaust,
she used the name
Halina Kronenberg. Halina lived in Lodz prior to
the war. She was arrested in February 1940 and
was imprisoned until November of that year. She
later lived in the Tomaszow Mazowieck Ghetto
and was then taken to several concentration camps
including Blizin, Auschwitz, Reichenbach,
Beindorf and then marched to Hamburg, Altona
where she was liberated on April 28, 1945 by the
Swedish Red Cross. She lived in Sweden until 1958
when she moved to New York.
Halina Laster resided in Pembroke Pines,
Florida, where she became president of the
Century Pines Holocaust Survivor Group, one of
the largest survivor groups in the country.
In addition, for over 15 years, Halina served
with distinction and honor as a member of the
Board of Directors of the Holocaust Documen-
tation and Education Center.
In tribute to Halina, the Survivors Club that
she was president of for many years, just renamed
the club “The Halina Laster Chapter, Pembroke
Pines Holocaust Survivor Group.”
Today Halina’s story, which is committed to
memory and hope, will forever bear witness within
the walls of the soon-to-be First South Florida
Holocaust Museum.
Leo LauferLeo Laufer, 85, beloved
husband, father and
grandfather, died in
Dallas, on July 21, 2007
and was buried, as was
his wish, in Jerusalem.
Laufer was born in
Lodz, Poland on March
15, 1922 into a large,
fervently Orthodox
family. Soon after the start of World War II, the
Nazis sent him to a series of work camps and
concentration camps throughout Poland and
Germany. Under the Nazis, every remaining
member of his direct family perished—his parents
and his six other siblings. He was liberated by the
American army from Ohrdruf in April 1945 and
worked for the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA) in the immediate post-war
years. He immigrated to the United States in 1948
and moved to Dallas soon afterwards.
In 1949 he began his career at K. Wolens,
where he remained for 31 years. He later opened
two clothing stores of his own. Laufer married
Shirley Somer, Dallas-born daughter of Katie and
Marcus Somer, in 1950. They had four daughters.
Leo was deeply involved in the campaign for
the release of Soviet Jews and, when the Iron
Curtain was finally raised, with the resettlement
of Soviet Jews who came to make their lives in
Dallas. He also lectured widely on the Holocaust.
William LoefflerEscaping from Nazi Germany in 1936—his
sisters being shipped off to England while he was
sent to the United States to an uncle in upstate
New Yor—William Loeffler lost 125 members of
his extended family during the war. He married
Erna Sophie Melchior and found work as a welder
at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine,
eventually becoming a foreman. After the shipyard
suffered economic decline and he was let go,
Loeffler moved on to various jobs eventually
retiring to take care of his wife who had suffered
a number of strokes. After her death in 1988, he
became a volunteer in the community and found
everlasting fulfillment as a foster grandparent in
the People’s Regional Opportunity Program. Each
day, he would go the the Carl J. Lamb School and
work with children as a surrogate grandfather. A
respected role model, in 2006 he received the
WCSH’s “6 WHo Care” Award. William Loeffler
was 92 when he passed away in January.
Boris LurieNew York art rebel and
Holocaust survivor
Boris Lurie died
recently. He was 83.
Born in Leningrad,
Lurie was an artist
and author who
survived several
c o n c e n t r a t i o n
camps.
He moved to
New York in 1946, where he and several artist
friends founded the Anti-Pop-Art movement
NO!art in 1959 which saw art as a motivator of
social action.
For most of his life he dealt aggres-sively with
the themes of war and the Jewish genocide. His most
famous—as well as most controversial—workis the
Railroad Collage of 1959—a photo collage of a
stripper disrobing on a flatbed rail car piled high
with corpses from the gas ovens.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Lurie aimed his NO!art
movement against the prevailing art direction of
abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol’s pop
art. Together with Stanley Fisher and Sam
Goodman, Lurie advocated using art to come to
grips with the themes of real life. For them, that
included war and violence, oppression and
colonialism, racism and sexism.
Lurie last exhibited in Germany in the 1990s.
In 1995, there was a two-part exhibit at the Neuen
Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kunst in Berlin. His
work was also shown at the memorial museum at
Buchenwald concentration camp from December
1998 to May 1999. His pieces are included in
permanent collections of the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
Rema Nadelby Harry Langsam
The Nadel, the Langsam and the Friedberg families
in California, have had a terrible loss. Rema (Fruma
Ryvka) Nadel (nee Langsam) the daughter of Anna
(Chana) and Harry (Yechezkiel Chaim) Langsam
passed away the second of Elul after she lost her
fight with a cancerous brain tumor.
She was an Emesdige Yiddishe Mame and a
Yiddishe Tochter, a child of Gulag survivors after
her parents escaped from the Nazi hellishfire.
She was devoted to Judaism physically and
spiritually, always ready to give a helping hand
to a worthy cause, while working for the Board
of Jewish Education in Los Angeles, where a
scholarship was established in her name to help
the annual March of the Living. She was an
enthusiastic lover of Hebrew and Jewish folk
songs and music, Hasidic nigunim and chazanut.
Rema clung to her life until she embraced her
new granddaughter, Sheindl. At her request, the
baby was named after her mother’s sister, a victim
of the Shoah. Rema was proud of her ancestral
origin as a relative of the founder of the Dinov
rabbinic dynasty.
Paula OrensteinPaula Orenstein was a Holocaust survivor who
was born in Warsaw in 1913. Paula left the
Warsaw Ghetto with her husband Aron and
daughter Miriam before it was closed. A Polish
farmer in a small town hid Paula and Miriam
while Aron, who died in 1990, was in Treblinka
but escaped to live in the woods of Poland.
After the war, they were able to reunite and
the family was sent to a displaced persons camp
in Germany. Except for relatives who left before
the war, they were the only survivors of both
their families. In 1952 they immigrated to the
United States and settled in New York. Despite
their horrif ic experiences, their faith in the
Orthodox way of life never wavered. Both were
members of WAGRO, Shaare Zedek and Bet-El.
Paula also was a member of Emunah, Hadassah
and the Young Israel of Hillcrest.
Julius Paltielby Ernest Michel
My friend, Julius
Paltiel, whom I knew
in Auschwitz and met
again at the World
Gathering in 1981
died in February of
this year. He was
given a state funeral
attended by the King
of Norway, members
of the government, leaders of the city and civic
leaders from throughout the country. He became
a spokesman not only for Holocaust survivors but
for all people who are depressed. In this role, he
became well known throughout the country.
I had the pleasure of being at his 75th birthday
party in Trondheim, the most northern Jewish
community in the world. He was president of the
local synagogue, president of the survivors group
in the country and a very successful business man.
He is survived by his wife Vera, children and
grandchildren.
Julius was a unique individual. He was one
of a small number of Jews that were sent to
Auschwitz in 1943. That is where I got to know
him. I lost a close friend whose memory will
always be with me.
cont’d on p. 12
TOGETHER 12 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
Jewish Champion of FaithBy Rafael Alvarez/Baltimore Examiner
The kids in the eighth
grade at Yeshivat
Rambam, a Jewish
school on Park
Heights Avenue at
Strathmore, have
been getting ready to
interview Holocaust
survivors. Their oral
history project is
several months too
late to include a
giant from those
days, a man raised
in a grocery store
not far from their school, down at the corner of
Smallwood and Pressbury streets.
Rabbi Judah Nadich, a World War II
Armychaplain with the rank of lieutenant colonel,
was General Eisenhower’s adviser on Jewish
affairs when refugees flooded Western Europe at
war’s end. He died at age 95 Aug. 26 in New York
City. In the class at Rambam, students questioned
the impact that atrocity, particularly the cruelty
that humans visit upon one another, has on faith.
When Nadich arrived at a Displaced Persons
camp outside Munich in August 1945—where up
to 40 hungry survivorswereshoved into rooms
designed for six, survivors held behind barbed
wire as if the war had never ended—the answer
was not academic.
“He struggled as a result of what he witnessed,”
said Shira Nadich Levin, a daughter. “But he
eventually realized that without faith . . . there
could be no explanation for so much in this world
—acts of great courage, feelings of love.”
Described at length by Nadich in his 1953
book, Eisenhower and the Jews, the post-
Holocaust experience was horrific enough for him
to avoid the pulpit after returning to the States.
“He didn’t feel ready to return immediately,”
said his daughter Leah Meir, as though recounting
a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. “It was difficult
for him to see the kind of ‘normal’ life that
American Jews wereleading, with the parties and
the spending of money.”
It was very important to Nadich that he had
served in the military dur- ing World War II, his
family said—he volunteered the day after Pearl
Harbor—almost as important as it was to serve
“his people, in whom he never lost faith” as a
rabbi.
“He spent the years after leaving the military
until 1947 raising funds for the care and
resettlement of the displaced Jews of Europe,” said
Meir. “It was the defining time of his life.” And
thus it is that doubt defines faith, for without doubt
there is no need of faith.
As Judah Nadich’s stepmother, Nettie Gifter,
had no doubt that without an education, her son
could expect little in this life, she asked him more
than once as she stocked the shelves: “Do you
want to grow up to be a truck driver?”
At 14, Judah left his father Isaac’s grocery
store at 1655 N. Smallwood St.—the pickles in
the barrel, the red wagon he used to
makedeliveries, his little sister Esther upon whom
he doted—and went to board at a yeshiva in New
York.
“I went back to see the family store six or eight
years ago and it had shrunk,” said Esther Nadich
Rosenberg, 85. “It was my mother who created
faith in Judah, like she created it in all of us.”
That faith led Judah Nadich to become a
cornerstone of the Conservative movement of
Judaism in the United States, to include women
in all aspects of the faith and to protest segregation
in the decade following World War II.
“Freedom is colorblind and the yearning for
it is God-implanted,” he said in a 1960 sermon
excerpted in his New York Times obituary. “To help
those . . . who have a right to it is our sacred
obligation.”
Shira Levin came across her fa- ther’s remarks
about faith in a video someone made while
interviewing him. The words were strong and
clear, but they didn’t tell the whole story.
“When he gave his answer, the intensity of
his belief and optimistic view of the world and its
beauty was apparent,” said Levin. “But he also
said there will always be darkness for which we
have no explanation.”
Violet (Ibi) Schwartzby Elly Berkovits Gross
Violet (Ibi) Schwartz, née
Farkas was born in
Marghita, Romania in
1926 and had a happy
childhood until the horrors
of the Nazi regime ruined
her young life. Violet was
taken to Auschwitz when
she was 18 and after that
to Zalzveden, where she worked as a slave laborer.
After liberation she returned to her hometown
to f ind only her sister Eva and a few cousins
having survived. Violet married Emeric and had a
son, Peter. Later, the family emigrated to the U.S.,
where Peter became a successful plastic surgeon.
Recently, Violet was diagnosed with brain
cancer and bravely subjected herself to surgery,
radiation and chemotherapy hoping to be able to
enjoy more of what life had to offer. On March
20, 2008, Violet succumbed to her disease. Her
family will always cherish her memory.
Jerry UngarA true lady of gentility and
class, Jerry worked clan-
destinely for the Haganah in
New York before and after the
birth of Israel. Among the
Institutions she and her
husband, entrepreneur and
philanthropist William Ungar,
supported were the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C., the
Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, and
the Solomon Schechter Day School in Queens.
She was greatly admired by her children and
her 17 grandchildren.
Morris WaldBorn Moses Wloski in Wolkovysk, Poland in
1921, Delray Beach, Florida-resident Morris Wald
succombed to cancer on January 15, 2008.
He had five sisters, together with his mother and
stepfather, all of whom perished in concentration
camps. An Auschwitz survivor, he was later
relocated to Burgerhaven, outside the Polish harbor
of Danzig, where the Third Reich maintained a naval
base and he had to repair U-boats.
Escaping during a death march, Morris made
it to safety with the help of the Jewish Brigade.
Treated for tuberculosis in Italy and Sweden, he
eventually made it to the U.S., where he met and
married Ruth, his wife of 51 years. They raised
four children and were blessed with 11
grandchildren.
His testimony is part of Jeffrey Wolin’s Written
in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust.
Morris stretched every day to its fullest, loved
his family, Israel and life, and sang “Hava Negila”
with his last breath.
Leon L. WolfeLeon L. Wolfe, who survived the Plaszów, Gross-
Rosen and Langenbielau concentration camps and
went on to play a prominent role in Jewish
education and Shoah remembrance, died recently in
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Born Löbel Wolf
in Kraków, Poland in
1916, his law studies
at the Jagiellonian
Uni-versity of Kraków
were inter rupted by
the war. In 1941,
Wolfe married Henia
Karmel. Together they
were interned in the
Kraków Ghetto and
the Plaszów concentration camp. After being
separated to different camps in 1943, Wolfe was
liberated by the Russian Army and returned to
Kraków to search for his family. There he learned
that his family had been killed. Though also
reported dead, he found Henia and her sister Ilona
alive in a Leipzig hospital. Wolfe brought the
sisters home and eventually gained entry to
Sweden before immigrating to New York in 1948.
Wolfe was a teacher and principal in
numerous New York City-area Hebrew schools
before working as the director of the Department
of Youth and Education at the Jewish National
Fund. Following his retirement from JNF, he
worked as curator at the Judaica Museum of the
Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale. He
supported Henia in resuming her writing, and
celebrated the publication of her short stories and
novels.
After Henia died, Wolfe married the artist and
sculptor Rita Rapaport. He was a co-founder of
the Westchester Holocaust Commission (now
known as the Westchester Holocaust and Human
Rights Education Commission) and was
instrumental in the creation of the Garden of
Remembrance in White Plains, New York.
Most recently, Wolfe saw a long-standing
dream come true when Henia and Ilona’s wartime
poems, translated into English by the American
poet Fanny Howe, were published as A Wall of
Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from
Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond.
TOGETHER 13visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
Rabbi Herbert Friedman: AnAdvocate For His PeopleDr. Alex Grobman
Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, a former CEO,
executive vice-chairman and lay leader of the
United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and the founding
president of the Wexner Heritage Foundation died
on March 31 at age 89. Articles will be written
about his pioneering work in Jewish philanthropy
and Jewish education; few know the extent of his
critical role in assisting the survivors of the Shoah
in post-war Europe.
Friedman was a 27 year-old Reform rabbi
serving as an American chaplain in the American
Army stationed at Head-
quarters Berlin District when
Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, then
Advisor on Jewish Affairs
U.S. Zones, Europe, asked
him to serve as his assistant.
The Jewish Displaced Persons
(DP) required an advocate to
explain their needs to the
military, and Friedman was
recruited to help them.
The Allies assumed that
like the other refugees at the
end of the war, the Jews
wanted to return to their
former homes. They did not
appreciate that for a
signif icant number of them,
this was no longer a realistic option. Failure to
understand the need for Jews to be given legal
status as refugees, or to provide them with
adequate shelter, clothing, kosher food and a way
to re-institute contact with family and friends,
caused the military many problems. In July1946,
Friedman was assigned to visit the DP camps
throughout the American Zones of Occupation to
interpret the survivors needs to them.
As thousands of Jews fled Poland into the
American zone of Germany and Austria in the
wake of the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, when
47 people were killed and more than fifty injured,
the American Army decided to ease the crowding
in the camps by moving Jews to less crowded
facilities. On September 30, a trainload of survivors
arrived at Babenhausen, a former prisoner of war
camp near Frankfurt.
When the survivors saw the inferior condition
of the site with barbed wire still surrounding parts
of the installation, they refused to disembark. After
Lt. General Geoffrey Keyes, commanding general
of the Third Army came to assuage their fears,
most agreed to enter the camp. Friedman, who
was there when the survivors arrived, remained
to ensure they received the food, shelter and care
the general had promised.
Even before Friedman became Assistant
Advisor for Jewish Affairs under Bernstein, he
was intimately involved with helping the Jews.
He arrived in Berlin during the first week of April,
1946 and immediately began working with
Brichah, the organized and spontaneous illegal
movement to smuggle Jews out of Europe and
into Palestine. He furnished the Palestinian Jews,
who were members of the Jewish Brigade, with
trucks, gasoline, false papers, clothing, housing,
cigarettes, and a cover story to justify their
presence in the city. Established in September
1944, the Brigade worked with survivors in Italy
and later with those in Germany.
Cigarettes were especially important since
money had no value in post-war Europe. A carton
of American cigarettes was valued at 1,500 marks
or $150. Friedman and other Jewish chaplains
used cigarettes to bribe Russian
soldiers to smuggle Jews into the
American Zone of Berlin. With
one package, you could smuggle
one Jew into the city. Jewish
soldiers and other chaplains gave
Friedman cigarettes; his father
sent him 500 cartons every
couple of days.
Friedman’s illegal activities
almost resulted in him being
court-martialed. Only Bernstein’s
intervention saved him. At the
end of the war, the Allies found
huge amounts of books stolen
from Jews randomly strewn in
“makeshift depots.” To protect
and restore this enormous
collection, they established the Offenbach
Archival Depot in a vast f ive-story warehouse,
across the river from Frankfurt. Fearing that these
priceless books might not be properly cared for
or might disappear altogether, he arranged for
1100 of the most valuable books to be shipped to
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
After the military discovered how Friedman
had appropriated these books without their
approval, his services were no longer required.
He left Germany in May 1947, ostensibly to be
discharged upon arrival in the States. When he
landed in the U.S., Henry Morgenthau, Jr., former
Secretary of the Treasury, asked that he speak at
an emergency UJA conference. His talk went so
well that Morgenthau, then national chair of the
UJA, had him speak around the country for the
next month.
When Friedman reported to be discharged, he
was arrested for being absent without leave. He
spent four days in military prison until
Morgenthau’s cable arrived explaining that
Freidman had been authorized to speak for the
UJA. After leaving the army on July 18, 1947, he
became executive director of the UJA.
Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame:
American Jewish Chaplains and the Remnants of
European Jewry, 1944-1948. His latest book is Nations
United: How The UN Undermines Israel and the West.
JTA—During a recent visit to Israel, President
Georgi Parvanov of Bulgaria took responsibility
for the deaths of 11,000 Jewish residents of Thrace
and Macedonia, areas that were annexed to
Bulgaria in April 1941, Israeli media reported.
Acting under Nazi orders, Bulgarian police
arrested Jews in those territories and deported them
to Treblinka in 1943. The history of those Jews
often has been played down in the face of the
saving of 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria proper by the
country’s religious and political leaders.
“When we express justif iable pride at what
we have done to save Jews, we do not forget that
at the same time there was an antisemitic regime
in Bulgaria and we do not shirk our responsibility
for the fate of more than 11,000 Jews who were
Bulgarian President apologizes for Jewish Deaths
by Sheldon P. Hersh
Crumbs have never had it easy. Remnants of
a once proud past, these hapless has-beens are
often viewed as useless, unappetizing fragments
that should be thrown out with the rest of the
garbage. Such was not the case, however, in my
mother’s kitchen. In her protected domain, great
respect was shown to the beleaguered crumb, for
how could a Holocaust survivor ever knowingly
permit food of any size to be so casually discarded.
Great value was placed on our family’s protected
crumbs and once detected, they were methodically
collected and saved from the pitiful fate that awaits
most other crumbs.
While gently cupping her hand, my mother
would conscientiously brush every visible crumb
into a waiting bag designated to be the sacred
repository for our collected crumbs. “How can I
throw away this food? It would have given us
nourishment and hope in the camps and ghettos
where there was so little to eat,” she would often
sigh. When it came to the subject of food, nothing
was ever to go to waste; it was simply unthinkable.
During the war, survivors quickly became the
masters of improvisation, deftly turning
undesirable edibles and scraps into presentable,
life-sustaining meals. If we children happened to
be present during the collection of crumbs, stories
related to food, or the lack thereof, would
accompany her hand’s softly sweeping motions—
all in the hope that we would appreciate and
understand why it was she gave such importance
to that which nearly all others find so unimportant.
“We scavenged for crumbs,” she tearfully related,
“crumbs meant life, crumbs meant survival.”
As days passed, the bag would slowly fill and
once it was decided that the right amount was
present, my mother would dutifully make her way
to a chosen site in the back yard and begin
sprinkling crumbs in circular motions upon the
empty, drab ground. Within seconds, birds,
accompanied by an occasional squirrel, would
suddenly appear and descend upon a feast of
tantalizing crumbs. The symphonic rhythm of the
birds’ frantic pecking interspersed with the
sporadic flapping of wings had become an
unforgettable melody that would bring a knowing
smile to her face.
This family custom was to quickly disappear
with my mother’s passing, as her children no
longer had any desire or inclination to gather
crumbs. There were presently more important
things to do with one’s time. Although many years
have since passed, I often find myself inexplicably
drawn to the window that overlooks my own yard
as birds begin their descent in search of
nourishment. At the very moment the newcomers
begin pecking at the barren, frozen ground, I sense
their disappointment as they glance in my direction
with a look that conveys a simple, yet urgent,
request: remember...remember.
deported from Thrace and Macedonia to death
camps.”
Parvanov, a member of the socialist—formerly
Communist—party, is the first Bulgarian leader
to accept responsibility for the deaths.
TOGETHER 14 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
Picture of My PastBy BRENDA SMOLOVITZ
It was the day before my parents 50th wedding
anniversary. My brother and I were visiting them.
We’ve known since we were 16, when our mother
let slip one day that she was our father’s second
wife, that our father had lost his first wife and three
young children in Auschwitz. Long before that
revelation, we’d heard about our father’s other
relatives who were killed in Auschwitz.
Our father occasionally told us stories of these
people. The stories often ended with, “They were
taken to Auschwitz.” I can’t recall a time when I
felt a need for further explanations. Auschwitz was
a part of our family history that I inhaled as
naturally as many other far less remarkable facts.
It seemed as if it was always there—like air—not
really hidden, but usually invisible.
Though our father some-
times spoke of his parents,
brother and sisters who perished
in Auschwitz, he never
mentioned his f irst wife and
children. And while there were
pictures of his other relatives in
our family photo albums, we
never saw any pictures of his
wife and children. Our mother
did tell us once that shortly after
she and our father married, she’d
found a photo of them in his
wallet, had asked him about it
and had not seen it since.
It wasn’t until I was in my
late 40s that I f inally braved
talking with my father about
his first family. He did not seem
surprised then that I knew
about his wife and children. I
asked for stories about them, asked him to
describe what they looked like. And he did. Briefly,
haltingly, and with so much pain and sadness on
his face that, feeling guilty about opening old
wounds, I always dropped the topic after a few
minutes—only to f ind myself, days, weeks or
months later, feeling compelled to bring it up again.
But, I never asked about the picture of his first
family.
Finally, on this golden anniversary visit, I got
my father alone and asked him if he had a picture
of his f irst wife and children. (Not wanting to
create problems between my parents, I didn’t tell
him that I already knew of its existence from my
mother.) My father made a grimace, looked away,
and said, “No.” I wanted to spare him the pain,
but my longing to see these people had become
so strong that I persisted.
“Are you sure you don’t have any pictures of
them? Weren’t there any left when you returned
from the camps?”
Irritated, he snapped back, “You don’t
understand. There was nothing left in my house.
They were using it as a stable.”
In my best investigative reporter/prosecuting
attorney manner I continued. “But you have
pictures of your parents and brother and sisters.”
He went on the defensive, “I have no idea
where I got those from. Maybe from one of my
sisters who wasn’t taken to the camps.”
I was about to give up, but my mother,
overhearing our conversation from the kitchen,
called out now. “Herman, you used to carry one
in your wallet. I saw it. It was of your wife and
two of the children.”
My mother began setting the table for supper.
I joined her and we worked silently. I could hear
my father rummaging in his study. A few minutes
later he was back, carrying a small black prayer
book. Holding it open to the middle with one hand,
he was f ingering a small photo with the other.
Softly, in a tone of wonder, he said to my mother,
“You are right, Blanka, the children are here.”
I reached for the photo but he stopped me
and said, pointing to the page in the book opposite
where the picture had been secreted all these
years, “See, this is where I recorded your birth
dates.” I looked where he was pointing and there,
in my father’s beautiful Hebrew printing, was the
abbreviated heading “Boruch Hashem, Blessed
is the Lord.” Below that, my brother’s and my
Hebrew names, the date of our birth according to
the Jewish calendar and the
words, bonai hajkarim, my
dear children.
I stared silently at the
writing and the picture. I
stood frozen, numb. A myriad
of conflicting emotions
stormed through me. Many
of them I only recognized
and sorted out weeks and
months later.
Resentment and jealousy—
Lord help me—because I didn’t
have the page to myself; I need
share it, of course with my
brother, and also with these
other children. I’d always only
thought of them as my
father’s first children. But I
now realized—they are also
my half brothers and sister.
Rage. My f ists clenched, my jaw clamped.
What kind of monsters could order these people
into gas chambers?
Pain. Like the agony of someone whose
anesthesia has worn off after major surgery. For
the briefest moment, before I am overwhelmed by
the horror of it and need to push the emotions away,
I truly feel my father’s anguish. How he must have
ached when he looked at this picture. What was it
like to lose your wife and three children like that?
Next comes grief. For the first time in my life
I began to consciously grieve for my dead brothers
and sister and for the woman who might have been
my mother.
Hard on the heels of the grief came guilt—
recognition of my father’s and my own. I
understood that when he insisted on showing me
what he had written in his prayer book before
allowing me to see the picture, my father was
perhaps trying to reassure me that he loved me as
much as his other children. In my father’s prayer
book, and maybe in his silent prayers, all his
children were together. Did he ever feel guilty that
he was betraying their memories by loving us?
And there were my feelings of guilt, of shame;
the by now familiar guilt and shame of the child
of a survivor of the Holocaust; shame that I might
dare feel resentment and jealousy in the face of
the horrific losses my father has endured; guilt,
that my very existence mocks those losses. After
all, I might not have even been born were it not
for these people dying.
Finally, through the din of all these emotions, I
recognized gratitude. My father was giving me a
priceless gift. He was telling me, in the only way in
which he was capable, that I have been dear to
him; that he has loved me, loved us, though he
needed to keep his love secret, as he kept secret
his love and grief for his f irst family. Bonai
hajkarim, my dear children. He was letting me
know that, contrary to the way I’ve sometimes felt,
I’ve not been merely a replacement, a sad,
inadequate substitute, for all he has lost.
Finally, I admitted to myself that perhaps the
reason I hadn’t dared ask my father about his first
family was not only to spare him pain but because
it was too painful for me—too painful to
contemplate that my mother and brother and I
might not be first in his affections. I saw how we
conspired, colluded together to keep these secrets.
Perhaps I, like my father, also needed to pretend
all these years that these people have disappeared
from our lives.
And for the first time in my adult life I began
to think of him not as my hand-me-down father—
the father who first belonged to these other three
children—but as my own father; worn, torn,
patched and faded by all he experienced before I
was born, but still shielding me, protecting me, as
he was unable to shield and protect his first children.
I stared at the picture between the pages of
the book my father was holding. I could not look
at my father. Finally, I reached out and picked up
the picture. I held it gingerly, as though it was a
rare archeological artifact.
Taken sometime in the mid-’30s, it is a sepia
toned, informal, outdoor portrait of my father’s first
wife, Etta, his oldest son, Ernö, and his daughter,
Zelda. Etta, smiling faintly, clearly pregnant with
their third child Gyuri, is sitting on a simple wooden
chair, her hands folded in her lap, wearing the
traditional wig of orthodox Jewish women. Zelda,
blonde and plump, about four years old, wearing a
simple, short white dress and white knee socks, is
standing to her left, looking suspiciously into the
camera. Ernö, two years older, is standing next to
his sister, wearing a dark cap, white sailor outfit
with short pants, also with white knee socks, and
holds a small ball in front of him.
I pulled the picture close. I tried to see if there
is a resemblance between my half-brother and
sister and my brother and me but I was too stunned,
numbed to be able to make that judgment. To this
day I can’t tell. However, I noticed with some
amazement the strong resemblance between my
father’s first wife and my own mother.
I noticed something else. Three sides of the
photo are professionally trimmed, but the fourth,
the side where Ernö stands, is uneven and
rough. Suddenly, I recalled another photo, one
that I have seen before, in one of our family
albums. It is of my father, seated in a chair
identical to Etta’s. I realized with a start—this
was a family portrait that had been cut in half. I
was holding the picture of the family that was
torn away, destroyed in Auschwitz. My father
had been hiding them ever since, keeping them
safe, as he was not able to then.
I asked my father, “Why was this picture
cut?” I reminded him of the other half. Did he
cut it so he could fit this half into his wallet? Or
had someone else cut it?
My father looked at me incredulously, “This was
more than 50 years ago. Do you think I remember?”
cont’d on p. 21
Painting by Gabriele Alexander
TOGETHER 15visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
By Jeanette Friedman
On March 26, 2008 Prof. Yaffa Eliach, the
Holocaust scholar and founder of the The Shtetl
Foundation and her beloved husband, Dr. Dovid
Eliach, the principal of Yeshiva Flatbush, were
honored with a lifetime achievement award by the
American Friends of Yeshivot Bnai Akiva in Israel.
In addition to being leading religious Zionists,
Yaffa Eliach has been a leader and founder of the
Holocaust education and commemoration
movement in the United States.
Dr. Yaffa Eliach, whose early childhood was
a recipe for personal disaster, has become one of
the pre-eminent Modern Orthodox Jewish female
scholars in the last 40 years. A pioneer in the field
of Holocaust Studies, author, professor and
lecturer, and founder of the Shtetl Foundation, she
is one of the best illustrations of how AMIT used
inspiration and perspiration to inject a passion for
Judaism in children and to help them heal from
the devastation they experienced under the Nazis
and the Bolsheviks. The people of AMIT gathered
them in youth villages like Tel Ranan and in
schools like Kfar Batya, where they were able to
heal and shape children’s lives by the way they
were taught and treated.
Yaffa Sonensohn-Ben-Shemesh arrived in
Kfar Batya after a tortured journey through the
hell that was the Holocaust. Liberated in July 1944,
her family returned home to Eishishok, near Vilna,
and were at dinner when Polish fascists, neighbors
known to the family, stormed the house and went
on a killing spree that took her mother and baby
brother. Yaffa survived because her mother’s body
shielded her from a hail of bullets.
The Communists brought the killers to justice,
and then her father was denounced by a Jewish
neighbor as a Zionist. He was imprisoned in the
local jail as the Soviets prepared to send him to
Siberia. Yaffa was brought to him by a Soviet police
officer to say good-bye. He did so, lovingly, in
three languages: in Russian, Yiddish and Ivrit.
“My child, I am Moshe and your mother was
Tzipporah, just like in the Chumash [Pentatuch].
God spoke to him in Ivrit, and I speak to you in
Ivrit.
“Yaffaleh, they are killing so many Jews now,
and you saw thousands killed, and your mother
and your two brothers. [Another brother was killed
before the attack on their home.] My child, you
must make sure that never again would Jews be
killed like this. You must do everything to make
sure it never happens again. The Torah says, ‘U
barchata chaim,’ choose life. Jewish life is the
center. My child, you must do everything for
Chaim Ha Yehudim [the life of the Jews]. Life is
our center. You must focus on life and you must
love good people, Ve ahavta le rayacha komocha
[You must love people as you love yourself, for
they are like you.]
“And my child, you must study and study and
study. You must study all the time because that is
how you learn to do what you need to do. We are
descendants of the Vilna Gaon, the eighth
generation. Do not forget who you are. They tried
to kill you in Radom and now they have me.
Therefore, focus on bacharta bechaim. Do not
cry. Study and study.”
This precocious 7-year-old was then sent on
her way, alone in the world, with her father’s words
burned into her soul. She knew she might never
see him again, and his words drove her to make
decisions and carry out acts other children her
age would never have been able to.
Yaffa left his cell and dug up money that had
been hidden in the yard of the house in which
they once lived. She made her way to Vilna to the
home of a woman her father thought would help
her. The woman took the money and threw the
child into the street. Yaffa immediately went to a
police officer who told her about a Communist
Jewish school. She got there, but when the
headmaster told her, “We know and respect your
father, and we want you to stay, but you cannot
speak Ivrit here and you cannot speak about loving
the land of Israel or they will send you to Siberia,
too,” she left.
Before the war, Yaffa’s uncle Shalom had lived
in Mandate Palestine and had official passports
for himself and his first wife and daughter. They
had been trapped in Europe during the Holocaust
and his wife and daughter were murdered. Now he
was somewhere in Vilna and Yaffa found him. His
second wife, Miriam, insisted on adopting Yaffa as
their own child and added two years to her age so
they could use his deceased daughter’s passport
for her. Miriam was also the name of Shalom’s first
wife, so the passports were useable. They could
now try to make their way to Eretz Yisrael.
When they arrived in the American sector,
Yaffa and Miriam were both very ill and taken to
different hospitals. Yaffa was near Munich, where
the staff told her they were going to baptize her.
She refused to allow it and screamed that Jesus
was a Jew and that Christianity could never exist
without Jews. One nun, Sister Henrietta, came to
her defense and said, “I love what you are saying,
I will help you run away. But when you get to
Jerusalem, you have to go the tree of Jesus in the
Old City and send me a branch so I know Jesus
saved me for saving you.” Yaffa promised.
One night, Sister Henrietta brought American
soldiers who took Yaffa from the hospital and
brought her to Shalom. It was miraculous, because
he and Miriam had given up on trying to find her
and were leaving the city the next morning. With
Yaffa and the baby in tow, they wandered Europe,
trying to get to a port city on the Mediterranean.
At last they found berths on a boat to Egypt and
months later made their way to Tel Aviv, finally
settling in Jerusalem. They were in a beautiful
apartment provided by the people from Eishishok
and Yaffa attended school where Shaul Barcali,
an Eishishoker, was the headmaster. Their great
hope was that her father and one surviving brother
would be released and come to Israel.
Almost immediately after arriving in
Jerusalem, Miriam and Yaffa went to look for the
Tree of Jesus, took a branch and sent it to Sister
Henrietta. With the branch as her personal sign
from her Saviour, the Sister helped the chief rabbi
of Israel gather 12,000 Jewish children who had
been hidden by Christian families and send them
to Israel.
Yaffa, now 10 years old, was told that Shalom
no longer had enough money to support her and
that she needed to go to Youth Aliyah offices,
where they handled war orphans. After an
interview, Yaffa was designated as nonreligious,
against her will, and assigned to Hashomer
Hatzair, the nonreligious socialist organization.
Yaffa ran to the Nazir of Jerusalem, one of
the religious leaders in the city, who was a family
friend and showed him the slip from Youth Aliyah.
He was furious and called his wife and her friend,
who both worked at AMIT’s Meshec Yiladim
Motzah, a children’s village for survivors of the
Holocaust. The women marched Yaffa back to the
Youth Aliyah office and confronted the director.
Her assignment was quickly changed.
Yaffa Ben-Shemesh was brought to Tel Ranan,
where a beautiful new village had been built.
“Every morning the boys and girls were taken to
the school in Bnai Brak. AMIT brought us beautiful
books and concentrated on teaching us more than
the superf icial. They made learning exciting,
allowed us to read what we wanted and allowed
us to make presentations about our independent
studies. They cared about us and made us feel
loved, whole and close.”
Yaffa graduated from elementary school in
1951 and went to Kfar Batya, where Rabbi Dovid
Eliach was the headmaster. When she attended her
first class with Eliach a few days later, Yaffa says,
“I realized he was the best teacher I ever had, and
became very active in the school. He inspired me,
and gave me the nerve to ask my teachers to teach
about the Jews of Europe in a positive way, because
they were stressing the negative.”
In 1951, Yaffa and her classmate, Shulamit
Mussler, through the efforts of AMIT, were the
first two Orthodox young women to study Talmud
in Israel.
“Yaffa was also an athlete, a track star, a
basketball player, a swimmer and one of the best
students in the drama club. This was because Kfar
Batya taught an open Orthodoxy. We woke our
children with classical music every morning; we
kept our minds open to new ideas.”
Soon after Yaffa Sonensohn graduated in
1953, she asked Dovid Eliach to marry her. To
the chagrin of many of his colleagues, he agreed,
and two months after they married, he came to
America to take up his career at the Yeshiva of
Flatbush. Yaffa followed nine months later.
By 1972, she had established the pioneering
Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn that
became the core collection of artifacts for the
Museum of Jewish Heritage-Living Memorial to
the Holocaust in New York City. She designed
and taught the first Holocaust Studies course in
the City University of New York and sustained a
successful university career that spanned 30 years.
She conceived of and designed the powerful Tower
of Eishishok at the United State Holocaust
Memorial Museum. Today, she is the director and
founder of the Shtetl Foundation, an educational
center about the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust
being built in Rishon LeZion, Israel.
Yaffa Eliach: The Best and the Brightest
TOGETHER 16 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
SURVIVOR MITZVAHPROJECTLOS ANGELES, CA.—It has been more than half
a century since the dust has settled from the
ravages of Word War II. The Survivor Mitzvah
Project recognizes that for many Holocaust
survivors living in Eastern Europe, the war
continues to haunt them every day. Throughout
the world, these forgotten heroes struggle to live
out their remaining years with incomes too meager
to pay for even their most basic needs: food,
medicine, heat and shelter.
Reaching out to these silent sufferers is Zane
Buzby, a Hollywood insider who has directed
countless hours of episodic television for classics
such as The Golden Girls, Newhart, Married...With
Children, and the upcoming new media comedy,
Stomp the Run.
Zane’s lifelong fascination for the Jewish
history that paved her family’s identity prompted
her 2001 trip to Lithuania and Belarus, where she
confronted the suffering that still existed there
among elderly Holocaust survivors who were
battling poverty and illness. Many were bedridden
and could not afford healthcare or medication.
She decided immediately that it was her mission
to care for these people. She asked herself, “If
not me, who?” reflecting on the Jewish tradition
of tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase that means
“repairing the world.”
Buzby is accomplishing her goal with the help
of philanthropist and fellow Angeleno S. Chic
Wolk, with whom she co-founded the Survivor
Mitzvah Project in 2004, and with Russian
translator Sonia Kovitz, who lives in Columbus,
Ohio, who joined them in 2005. All are volunteers.
The three malokhim fun Amerike (angels from
America), as the survivors call them, assist by
sending money and, even more critically, by
providing friendship and hope to people who are
among Eastern Europe’s poorest, loneliest and
most forsaken Jews.
Many of the survivors, currently ages 70 to
100, are ill with such ailments as heart disease,
diabetes, digestive disorders and thyroid cancer.
Many never married, others have outlived their
spouses and children and some are caring for
disabled or mentally ill offspring.
Additionally, many have limited or no vision,
and most have no teeth. And almost all experience
numbing loneliness, some because they are
immobile and confined to a walk-up apartment,
and some because they are the sole surviving Jew
in their family or village.
Since they are not off icially Holocaust
survivors—they were not imprisoned in ghettos
or concentration camps—they are not eligible for
reparations from the German government.
Nonetheless, they were forced to flee their homes
and lost everything.
Whatever pensions or savings accounts they
had accumulated were obliterated when the
communist regimes of the former Soviet Union
collapsed. Prior to that time, depending on their
ages, they also suffered through the Russian
Revolution, World War I, the famines of the 1930s,
World War II, Stalin and the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster.
“These people have not gotten one break since
the day they were born,” Buzby said.
What the Survivor Mitzvah Project does for
these survivors—and what other Jewish social
service organizations, such as the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC),
cannot do because monetary gifts are taxable,
according to JDC CEO Steven Schwager—is
provide direct cash allotments, enabling them to
supplement their meager pensions, often as low
as $16 a month, to purchase essential and specific
foods, medications and services.
“A dollar or $1.50 a day can make a substantial
difference to these people,” said Buzby, who would
ideally like to provide each one with $50 to $100
per month. But with about 700 individuals needing
help, and with limited resources, this is not
possible.
While Buzby is always doing triage, making
critical decisions about how the funds are
distributed, she stresses that all the monies go
directly to the survivors, whose economic situation
has been carefully vetted beforehand. There is no
paid staff, and any expenses, such as postage, are
covered by her or Wolk.
Buzby disperses funds through a complicated
and secure network, either as checks or cash sent
through registered mail or money wired to local
couriers. Recently, she herself took an emotional
16-day whirlwind trip to Lithuania and Belarus,
distributing $25,000, as well as mezuzahs, Stars of
David and other small gifts such as magnifying
glasses and compact mirrors, to about 100 survivors,
whom she met in person for the first time.
But money is only one part of the mitzvah.
The other, equally valuable, is the friendship and
hope that Buzby, Wolk and translator Kovitz bring
the survivors.
“A letter from America is just as incredibly
golden today as it was in 1911,” Buzby said, noting
that each survivor, except those in Moldova where
the mail is unreliable, receives a personal letter,
written in Russian, every six to eight weeks, along
with an addressed return envelope for the reply.
Some have never previously received letters.
Buzby, Wolk and Kovitz send holiday greetings
and share their family histories. They also send
photos of themselves and their relatives, which
occupy places of honor in the survivors’ home.
The three become family for the survivors, who
read and reread their letters, admire the photographs
and worry when they don’t hear from them.
“I have been accustomed to hunger since
childhood. I wanted at least in old age to live in a
human way. Thank you very much that you do
not forget me,” Raisa K. wrote.
“Our organization is working to help these
individuals live out their f inal years in some
measure of comfort and dignity, with the
knowledge that they are no longer alone,” says
Zane.
Over the past several years, The Survivor
Mitzvah Project has reached out to hundreds of
Holocaust survivors in over seven countries in
Europe. Her organization is the only one of its
kind where 100% of the funds go directly into the
hands of those in need.
The Survivor Mitzvah Project is committed to
improving the lives of the world’s Holocaust
survivors by placing financial aid directly into their
hands. Beyond monetary aid, the organization
offers hope, love, friendship and comfort and is a
beacon of light for survivors.
For more information on the Survivor Mitzvah
Project, or to make a donation, please visit
www.survivormitzvah.org or call 800-905-6160.
REMEMBERING AUSTRIAby Renee Balaban
Four years ago with the backing of the Austrian
government, a small group of people organized
one of the largest school projects in the entire
country entitled, “A Letter to the Stars.” To date,
more than 40,000 high school students have
participated, many of them researching the
histories and experiences of Austrian victims and
survivors of the Holocaust. They participated in
inspiring memorial events and have shown
themselves capable of dealing with Austria’s past
in a touching and hopeful manner. The group has
compiled a unique list of 2,500 people from
Austria who survived the Nazi regime in
concentration camps, in hiding or in exile and now
live dispersed around the world. My mother as
well as many others were asked to be involved in
this wonderful and exciting program.
In 2003, 15,000 students released white
balloons attached to letters they had written to
Austrian citizens who died during the Holocaust,
80,000 in all, from Heldenplatz in Vienna.
In 2004, students helped plan and moderate
an event commemorating the liberation of
Mauthausen concentration camp, planting
100,000 sunflowers on a field outside the camp
and releasing hundreds of doves of peace above
a crowd of 20,000 people.
In May 2005, during the “Night of Silence,”
the students held a silent all-night vigil at the
Mauthausen concentration camp where 100,000
memorial candles were lit in memory of the
100,000 people killed there.
In 2006, “A Letter to the Stars” project
included “flowers of remembrance.” On May 5,
2006, more than 15,000 students placed 80,00
white roses in front of every house or apartment
in which an Austrian victim of the Nazi regime
lived before his or her deportation and murder—
a stark reminder to Austrians of how “visible” the
disappearance of their neighbors had been.
cont’d on p. 21
TOGETHER 17visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
Being a child of survivors who were hidden
during the Holocaust, I have always felt a strong
sense of identification with Anne Frank. On Yom
Kippur of my 9th year, my parents told me about
the tragedy that befell our family and countless
others during the Shoah. By the Yizkor candles lit
for my dead grandparents, aunts, uncles, and
cousins, I was also told about the righteous gentiles
who hid my parents and saved their lives.
After reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I felt
inspired to keep a diary and write poems. My mother
told me that my father, Edmund Kessler, also kept
a diary during the war in which he wrote beautiful
poems. I understood some Polish and asked my
mother to read them to me. “When you are older,”
I was told. When I was 15 years old I translated a
poem my father wrote about the Lwow Ghetto. I
did not find this poem until after my mother’s death.
Toward the end of my father’s life, my parents
shared with me several more poems that my father
wrote while hiding in an underground bunker with
23 other people in Lwow. My father read the poems
out loud while my mother typed them. I translated
them into English. He became very emotional and
began experiencing chest pains, at which point we
had to stop. My mother then reassured my father,
“What you did not do, Renata will do,” knowing
that I had a way with words and an ability to write.
Though my father died in 1985, it was only
until after my mother’s death in 1996, while going
through everything in her apartment, that I found
the poems interspersed in a wartime diary that my
father kept from 1942-1944. The diary had been
hidden in a linen closet between sheets and towels
among various other personal papers. I wanted to
understand more about my parents’ lives during
the Shoah and decided to have the diary translated
into English.
One of the people hidden in the bunker, Leon
Wells, author of the Janowska Road, connected me
with a translator, Eugene Bergman, himself a
survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. I also contacted
the son of my parents’ rescuers, Kazimierz
Kalwinski, who as a teenager was a primary
caretaker for hidden Jews. He brought food, took
out waste, and informed the hidden Jews of news
from the outside world. He slept over the bunker
and kept vigil at night. He and his family were part
of the resistance movement in Poland and
distributed an underground newspaper for the
Home Army.
Kazimierz and I exchanged a series of letters
between 1997-1998. He invited me to come to
Poland and meet him. Our meeting was a joyous
occasion. The son of Wojciech and Katarzyna
Kalwinski helped me to become whole, as had
reading my father’s diary for the first time. The
shadows from the past that had haunted me all my
life came to light, bringing a new clarity and a new
purpose to my life. I realized that the story of the
Kalwinski family hiding the Jews in the bunker
during the Nazi reign of terror had great moral
value. We decided to share this story with others
and conceived the idea of writing a book, as a lesson
for future generations.
During my first visit to Poland, I was advised
not to visit the hiding place, because Lviv (the former
Lwow) was not considered safe. However, after the
diary had been translated, my desire to go there
overcame my fear. I knew it was necessary for me to
see my city of origin in order for me to write a
meaningful epilogue for my father’s book. My
epilogue, “The Search,” was an odyssey to find my
true identity.
In 2004, accompanied by my cousin Anna from
London, I visited Lviv, Ukraine, the former “City
of Lions,” our ancestral home. We also visited the
bunker where my parents were hidden for a period
of almost two years. A simple farmhouse had been
the place of my parents’ salvation, a place where
ordinary people did extraordinary things at great
risk to their own lives. My father wrote about the
Kalwinski family in his diary, “So in my life I have
met with both good and evil. Now I know that I
owe my life to the fact that admirable people still
live in this world.”
Visiting Lviv was a powerful experience. It was
indeed heartbreaking to see firsthand the historical
buildings owned by my family for generations now
in the hands of strangers. The architectural elegance
of the city was impressive, but it had been left
neglected since the war. Lwow had been reputed to
equal Krakow, Vienna, and Prague—having also been
the summer residence of the Polish King. During our
visit, we were protected and guided by the Jewish
Community of Lviv. These contacts were given to us
by the Jewish Historical Institue in Warsaw, which
also became became interested in publishing my
father’s diary along with the memoirs of Kazimierz
Kalwinski and my personal search for my past.
In December 2007, my parents’ dream came
true. The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler was
published in its original Polish language by the
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw under the title
Przezyc Holokaust We Lwowie (Surviving The
Holocaust in Lwow).
The diary, an eyewitness account written in raw
documentary style by my father, a Jewish attorney,
describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the
Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an
underground bunker where he was hidden by a
Polish farmer and his family for a period of almost
two years until the Soviet liberation of Lwow in
July 1944.
After the liberation, my parents repatriated to
Poland. After experiencing two post-war pogroms
in Rzeszow and Krakow, they fled to Vienna, where
I was born. In Vienna, my father was associated
with the International Committee for Jewish
Refugees and Concentration Camp Internees. He
served in the capacity of secretary and later as
chairman from 1946-1952. This Committee
administered the refugee camps in Vienna, including
camp Rothchild through which were processed over
200,000 Jewish refugees. The Committee and
Edmund Kessler were recognized for their efforts
by the Austrian AJDC, the U.S. High Commission,
the Austrian Government, and the IRO.
My search for the story is documented in the
book’s epilogue. The search took me to Israel,
Poland, and the Ukraine. I have collected the
testimonies of the other survivors of the bunker,
Leon Weliczker Wells (who wrote the foreword)
and Lusia Sicher (now Lea Gera), who lives in
Israel. Kazimierz Kalwinski contributed a chapter
to the book as well. He describes his parents as
“Noble and big Poles,” people of rare bravery and
goodness who exposed themselves to mortal
danger by saving 24 lives Jewish lives during the
bloodthirsty German occupation.”
The Kalwinski family was honored by Yad
Vashem as Righteous Among The Nations. Their
brave deeds are a testament to the other types of
neighbors, who risked their lives to save Jews. In a
newspaper account which reported on reactions to
the NBC-TV Holocaust series, Mrs. Kalwinska
explained her bravery by saying, “If God had
wanted me to die because I saved Jews, I was ready
to go up on the cross, like Jesus.” The New School
for Social Research set up a fellowship in her honor.
This is a story of Christians who risked their
lives to save Jews and also the story of Jews who
prevailed against those who sought to wipe them
off the face of the earth. Edmund Kessler reflects
on the slaughter of the Jews as the world stood by.
In his diary he writes, “Regardless of victory or
defeat, the idea is to kill off all the Jews, no matter
the war’s outcome. Neither morality or law count.
We had believed that the world would be outraged
and aghast at such atrocities. Since then life has
become even more terrible and our sufferrings
redoubled. The world should sit on the bench of
the accused!”
The diary addresses collective responsibility
and the need for moral self-examination about the
Holocaust.
Close to my parents hiding place, a nearby
Christian family was found hiding Jews. They were
all hanged from trees in the marketplace with signs,
“hiding Jews,” and left there for several days for
all to see. Upon hearing the news, my parents and
the other Jews hidden in the farmer’s bunker wanted
to leave their hiding place, so as not to jepordize
the farmer and his family. The farmer realized that
they would be caught and tortured to reveal their
hiding place and he said, “If we die, we all die
together.” Fortunately, they lived to tell the story.
This story has become my legacy.
Przezyc Holokaust We Lwowie can be ordered by sending
an e-mail to the JHI Bookstore at [email protected]. An
educational seminar about the book is being planned at
the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The seminar is
aimed at historians, Holocaust educators, students, and lay
people interested in the Jews of Lwow.
Surviving The War in Lwow: The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler, 1942-1944by Renata Kessler
TOGETHER 18 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
A Hidden Child FoundBy Helga M. Morrow
On Friday, January 19, 2007, the Executive
Director of our community association informed
me that her office had received an email from
someone who was looking for Helga Morrow.
Although she forwarded the email to me, she
wondered whether it was a hoax. It was not. The
episode referred to in the email happened 63 years
ago during the Second World War in the
Netherlands when I was a Jewish child in hiding.
The email started as follows:
“Dear Mrs Morrow,
I’m looking for Mrs Helga Morrow, the
daughter of Mr Felix & Eva Magnus. If you are so,
you’ll understand the reason of this mail. I’m Leo
Bielders, the youngest son of the Bielders family,
in Houthem St. Gerlach, the Netherlands. My family
is looking for contact with your family, as after so
many years we wish to remember an important
episode of both families during WWII.”
Here is my story: I am Jewish—a Holocaust
survivor—and was a hidden child during World
War II in the Netherlands.
In May 1940, when the Germans invaded and
quickly conquered Holland, we lived in Breda, a
small city in the southern part of Holland.
Restrictions on Jews in Breda, the city of my birth,
began in 1941. There were eleven of us in our
household—my parents and their five children,
my mother’s sister Paula and her daughter Ruth,
my grandfather and Jennie, the daughter of my
father’s sister. The first directive was that all Jewish
people in our town had to register with the local
authorities. The Jewish community was small, well-
organized and readily participated in the registration
process, not knowing at that time that this action
would greatly facilitate the round-up and
deportation of its members. The information that
was collected included the addresses, places of
work, gender and date and place of birth of every
Jewish person in the community. The efficient
registration system made it very easy for the Nazis
to find us. During the first seven to eight months
of 1941, other than the registration process, my
family was able to continue to lead relatively
ordinary lives. Although my parents became
increasingly aware of the attacks on Jews in
Holland, they did not yet feel the imminent danger
that would overwhelm us so completely and in such
a short time.
The dramatic changes began in late 1941, when
Jews were ordered to reregister and were issued
new identity cards imprinted with a large J. Those
cards were necessary to receive rationing coupons,
which allowed us to buy food and other necessities.
We were also ordered to put yellow and black
patches with the J on all our clothing. Other
restrictions followed rapidly: all radios, binoculars,
and cameras were confiscated, shopping hours were
restricted to one hour a day between 3-4 p.m., we
were not allowed to have servants or other non-
Jewish people living in our house, nor were Jewish
children allowed to attend school.
Deportations to the concentration camps started
in the spring of 1942. The first member of our
family to be “called up” was my cousin Jennie,
who was ordered to go to the Dutch transit/work
camp in Westerbork in the north of Holland, where
she was held a prisoner for several months before
she made a daring escape. She and her sister Hettie
were able to stay in hiding during the remaining
war years, but both her parents were transported to
Auschwitz, where they died. My aunt Paula and
her 15-year-old daughter Ruth were next to be
called up. They were told to report for work at
Westerbork as well, and although my aunt had been
offered a hiding place with a dentist for whom she
worked, they went as ordered. After a few days in
Westerbork, they were transported to Auschwitz,
where they were murdered a short time later.
The remaining members of our family stayed
in our house until one night in September 1942
when there was a knock on our door. My father
opened the door and found a gentleman standing
on our doorstep who asked to come in. My father
recognized him, as he was the brother of the woman
who owned a little grocery store just down street
from where we lived and where we shopped. His
name was Mr. Van Pinxteren and he turned out to
be one of our saviors. He told us that he had seen
my grandfather walking in the neighborhood with
his grandchildren in tow and that he also knew what
was happening to Jewish people. Of course on the
sleeve of my grandfather’s coat was the J. He
informed us that there was to be another round-up
(razia) of Jews and that we would likely to be among
them. He told my parents that, as he was an official
with the city government, he could help us get false
papers. He also informed us that we had to leave
Breda immediately and that he would help us to
get new names. We left a few days later, splitting
up the family. My sister Anita and my brother
Norman left first to live temporarily with a family
in another part of town. Their bed was a bathtub
and they were told not to make any noise. The family
was afraid that if the people living in the apartment
below them would find out that there were Jewish
children hiding there, they would report this to the
Nazis, and everyone’s life would be in danger. After
two weeks of living in the bathroom, they left on a
night train for Bilthoven, a small city in the middle
of the country, where the Boeke family voluntarily
took them in. Betty and Kees Boeke, devout
Quakers, founded the first true Montessori School
in Holland called the Werkplaats and they
welcomed Anita and Norman along with several
other Jewish children with open arms. My baby
sister Rita was placed with a wonderful Catholic
family in Lisse. She died of diphtheria a year later
because as a child in hiding she could not obtain
medical care. My parents, grandfather, one other
sister and I took a train to Maastricht—a city in the
South of Holland. My sister Ingrid and I did not
stay there long, rather we were sent to the center of
Holland and moved from stranger to stranger and
house to house throughout the remaining years of
the war. After some painful encounters with cruel
families, we finally also ended up in Bilthoven with
a daughter of the Boeke family. This was a
tremendous relief for us.
Meanwhile, my parents and grandfather
remained in soutern Holland, living as non-Jewish
refugees in a number of hotels and boarding homes
for two years. Finally, in early 1944, my mother
found a few rooms she could rent with the Bielders
family in Houthem, a small town near Maastricht
in the southernmost tip of Holland. The families
shared the kitchen but maintained separate
households. Later, in 1944, my mother, at great risk,
traveled to Bilthoven to visit her children and to
bring my sister Ingrid and me “home” to the
Bielders’ house. We stayed there until the end of
1944. It was a mixed blessing. Of course, we were
grateful to be back with our parents and to be in
Houthem. We were among the first Dutch to be
liberated on September 17, 1944. Had we stayed
in our hiding places further north, we would not
have been liberated until April/May 1945. Yet, it
was extremely difficult for all of us to live with
our unwilling hosts. It seems that due to the severe
housing shortage, people with spare rooms were
forced to take in refugees and our hostess was
angry that she was required to shelter us. The
Bielders had been told that my family was
Christian and had lived in Emden, Germany, but
had moved back to Holland when the war broke
out. Of course none of that was true. We were
Jewish refugees with false passports, false names
and false identity cards and our family was split up.
All families who voluntarily sheltered Jews
risked their own lives. The danger that Jews in
hiding faced daily became apparent to us after
liberation when we were told that someone known
to us in Houthem would have denounced us to the
Nazis if that person had known we were Jewish.
Whether this would have happened in actuality we
will never know.
It is surprising that among the many people
who voluntarily helped us survive the war years
that it is a member of the Bielders family, who made
so much effort to find us. He searched Google and
eventually found me listed as a member of the
Board of RRLRAIA in one of the newsletters now
readily available on the Web. He contacted the
office and the rest is now history.
Since that email from Leo Bielders, both my
sister Anita and I have had been corresponding with
him and his older brother. We are trying to
understand each side of the story, hoping to shed
some light on a period in history that was so
traumatic to so many.
There is much more to our Holocaust
experience than written here in this article. Most of
our large extended family died in concentration
camps. Anita made a tape of our Holocaust story,
which is available at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington. Anita and I have also told our story
to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, so that
that period in history will never be forgotten.
Through our efforts, Mr. Van Pinxteren and
Kees and Betty Boeke were officially recognized
by the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem as
Righteous Gentiles. Trees were planted in their
honor and they will always be remembered for the
sacrifices they made.
It is generally not known that 95% of all Jews
in Holland perished during WWII—a larger
proportion than any country in Europe. My
immediate family was among the few fortunate
ones and we will always be extremely grateful to
those who put their own lives at risk so that we
could survive.
TOGETHER 19visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
My name is Edmund “Eddie” Rosianu. I was
born in 1929 in Bucharest, Romania. This is the
story of my life—my struggles, determination and
perseverance, and ultimately of my success in
achieving my dreams.
The persecution of the Jews in Romania began
in 1941. Jews were randomly taken from their
homes to slaughterhouses and killed. It was
obvious to me that I had to leave Romania if I
was to survive.
In 1946, at the age of 16, I left Romania with
eight other boys and one girl. Each of us had a
different destination—mine the U.S.A., the others
destined for Canada and South America. As we
crossed the border into Hungary, a person who
pretended to be a border guard detained us. He
was armed and threatened to kill us if we didn’t
give him our money and possessions. In the dark
of night and obviously scared, we gave him
everything. Afterward, our journey to Budapest
took a few weeks. Along the way we were helped
by rabbis who provided us with shelter in their
synagogues. I had left Romania with $200 but
arrived in Budapest with nothing.
We were taken in by a Jewish refugee
organization that sent us to a vinyard to work.
After two months, I was able to correspond
with my family. I learned that one of my
brothers, Iona, after numerous attempts, had
finally escaped from Romania and was now
in Hungary. We were reunited at the vinyard.
One afternoon, we received word that we
were to leave at midnight for the Hamburg
shore, where we were to take a ship to Israel.
At midnight, a man from Palestine appeared
to guide us on our journey. Along the way
we were joined by other refugees. Over the
next few days, we made a few stops for food
and rest, f inally reaching Belgrade,
Yugoslavia at night. As we made our way to
the train station, we were surprised to see that
the train platform was filled with soldiers who
were there to prevent anyone from entering their
country. Our leader told us that if we were asked
from where we came that we were Jewish refugees
from Nazi camps and that we should speak only
in Yiddish.
Luckily, we had no problem boarding the train
and arrived in Trieste early in the morning on a
cold December day. We were joined by more
refugees and soon boarded the Rafiah, a boat
normally used to transport cattle. Now it was
occupied by 800 people from Romania, Hungary
and Bulgaria. We slept in bunks below deck in
conditions so terrible as to be beyond description.
There was very little food and water, however we
kept going by our motivation to reach Israel. After
sailing for three days in the Mediterranean, the
ship was greeted by thunderstorms. Adding to the
danger was the captain hearing through his
shortwave radio that British patrol boats were
nearby.
Because of the rough waves, the captain
decided to seek refuge in Greek waters. On
December 7, 1946 at 4 p.m., the Rafiah hit some
rocks and began to sink. This was definitely the
most terrifying event of my life. I thought that I
would never survive. There was chaos everywhere
as men, women, children panicked. There was
crying everywhere. With the help of some sailors
who supplied us with a cable, we were able to
temporarily attach the boat to the rocks and
prevent it from rapidly sinking. People began to
jump overboard in desperation. Some of these
people were able to jump onto the rocks to safety
but others were sent to their death as they were
crushed between the rocks and the boat. I, along
with another man, attempted to help an old man
who was in the water between the boat and the
rocks. We tried to get him to hold onto a pole,
however he was a few feet too short. My brother
and friends were able to get on top of the rocks
and they called out for me to jump to them. I had
planned to jump into the water from the other side
of the ship. I was a strong swimmer and could
have easily reached the shore. In the end, I listened
to my brother and jumped toward the rocks.
Unfortunately, the rocks were slippery and I sank
several feet. I was injured and tired but managed
somehow to hold on. My brother and his friends
saved me by taking their pants’ belts and attaching
them to form a long line and used it to reel me in
to safety.
After 25 minutes, the ship sank. Twenty people
were killed, their dead bodies floating around us.
We collected the bodies and buried them on the
Greek island. Following that tragedy, our real hell
began.
We were stranded on the island of Cyrene.
Among us were ten Israelis who were our
commanders. We were told not to divulge who
they were in the event we were rescued by anyone
from a foreign country. The island itself was
deserted with the exception of a family consisting
of a husband, wife, and their two children, ten
sheep and a few chickens. Despite our difficult
situation, before the ship sank an S.O.S had been
sent so knew it was just a matter of time before
we were rescued.
In the meantime, the Israelis were able to strike
a deal with the family for an undisclosed amount
of money in $20 gold coins to kill the sheep for
food. First the children, pregnant women, sick and
the elderly ate, then, the young people. That was
the only food. There was no water readily
available, but since it was raining, we were able to
save some rainwater. After several days of
searching the island, we found a cave where our
presumably helpful island family had hidden a
barrel of raw f ish. We were happy to f ind an
additional source of food and within an hour had
consumed all of it. We were suffering, but
determined to survive.
Our first priority of course was the women,
children and sick people. They slept in the chicken
house, the dog house or the cave. As time went
on we began to lose hope of being rescued before
dying of starvation or malaria or some other
disease. Some of us had already developed a fever.
Despite having no shortage of doctors among us,
there was no medicine.
In the meantime, when the S.O.S had been
received in Israel, Mrs. Golda Meir, the then leader
of the Labor Department (the Sachnut) spoke with
a high-level English official to search for us. On
the fifth day, British, Greek, and French planes
began flying above and spotted us. Within hours,
they returned and parachuted to us medicine,
blankets, water and milk chocolate.
However, on the sixth day, British soldiers
came on the island and took us to the British ship
Independence. Seven hundred and eighty people
were sent down to the bottom of the ship where,
during the war, tanks and soldiers had been
transported to the front. Before going below, some
of us were stopped and escorted to a cabin where
two officers and one evil person sat at the top of
the table. I was one of those selected for
questioning. They first wanted to know where I
was originally from and who was my leader? They
promised that if I cooperated they would provide
me with documents to immigrate to my country
of choice along with any members of my
family. They asked their questions in
English, Italian, German and Russian. I
knew some French from my school days
so I understood what was being asked of
me. The question was “Who is our leader?”
I answered with my finger pointed towards
my chest as I spoke in Romanian. Then,
they released me.
We were locked in below deck and
were told that we were being sent to
Cyprus where there was a British camp
for Jews who had tried to enter Palestine
illegally. Our Israeli leader told us that we
should go on a hunger strike if they didn’t
take us to Haifa. All 780 people on the
ship started chanting “Haifa, Haifa,
Haifa.” However, when we arrived in
Cyprus, they forced us out with tear gas.
After spending nine months in a camp, an
order was given that priority would be given to
sick people, pregnant women, and children under
the age of 16 and elderly over 60. I was 17 but
looked much younger so I could have gone.
Eventually, however, we finally arrived in Palestine
and were put directly into a quarantine camp for
three months. After I was liberated from the
quarantine camp, I was sent to the small town of
Kfar-Saba. I worked during the day and every
other night I worked with the Haganah helping to
secure the border against the Arabs. Six months
later, my brother and I had to choose one of us to
join the army. I decided to go since I was seven
years younger.
The English occupation of Palestine was in
its last days. Israel began to form its own army
and we started training. I fought for Israeli
independence from 1947 until I was discharged
in 1949. After 25 years, in 1971, a committee
was organized to bring to Israel the bones of our
fallen friends. With help from institutions, activist
groups and a politician survivor from the Rafiah,
our friends’ dream to live and die in Eretz Israel
will someday be fulfilled.
My Name is Edmund...by Edmund Rosianu
TOGETHER 20 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
The Prince and the JewBy George Oscar Lee
There is an antisemitic (only if told by gentiles)
joke that goes like this: In a small Galician town
in Eastern Poland, there was a monument erected
to an Unknown Soldier of the first World War. If
one should come close enough to read the
inscription, he or she would see that it was
dedicated to the memory of Isidore Gottlieb. But
how could that be? Unknown soldier Isidore
Gottlieb? Yes, patiently the inhabitants of the town
would explain that Isidore Gottlieb was well known
as a furrier, but as a soldier he was indeed
unknown. The joke is even funnier when told by
Jews to other Jews.
But if a joke could be coined there would be
another side to this story. There was and still is a
Galician town in what is now Ukraine called
Drohobycz which, at the time of the first World
War, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The town was booming because from nearby
Boryslav petroleum was flowing via pipelines to
Drohobycz’s oil ref ineries and transported the
world over. Another nearby town, Truskawiec,
became a famous resort place, where fancy people
drank waters to help their kidneys.
The town of Drohobycz also had salt mines,
several high schools (Gymnasiums), army
regimental headquarters and three railroad
stations. Every Monday was a market day
(Yannark). Peasants from the surrounding areas
would bring their agricultural products and cattle
to sell to the town’s population and at the same
time buy other needed items from the mainly
Jewish merchants living in the town. There were
also Jewish tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers,
artisans, and a unique shop that manufactured
leather goods, such as pocketbooks, attache cases,
valises, and steamer trunks for people traveling
abroad. In that shop was a foreman known for the
quality of his workmanship. His leather goods
would last a lifetime.
At the age of 20, after working in the shop
seven years, Isidore was made the shop’s foremen.
To celebrate his promotion and his birthday, Joel
Einsiedler bought a bottle of schnapps. Even the
owner was so pleased with Joel that he insisted
on having a drink with him. As they drank a prosit
to each other, someone walked into the shop
waving a local newspaper with big black headlines:
“Archduke Ferdinand Assassinated in Sarajevo.
Austria Declares War.”
Hardly six months later Joel was conscripted
into the Austrian Army along with other young
Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians from the area. For
basic training he was sent to the larger town of
Przemysl. There he became an assistant medic
(stretcher bearer). The discipline was very harsh.
Having an antisemitic Slovak drill sergeant wasn’t
exactly a picnic, but a crocodile leather
pocketbook given to the Sergeant’s girlfriend
changed everything. Joel started to tolerate the
Army especially on the day of becoming a
Gefreiter (Private First Class) of the Austrian 77th
Infantry Regiment, better known as “Sim-Sim
KooKooRicoo” (7-7 Early Reveille). Joel was
given a week’s furlough to go home and straighten
out his civilian affairs, saying good-bye to his
parents living on Zupna Street, and saying good-
bye to his girlfriend, a Ms. Sellinger. Nothing in
life goes faster than a furlough. His whole family
accompanied Joel to the railroad station where,
after tearful good-byes, Joel boarded the train to
join his army unit.
As soon as he was issued all the components
that make a soldier a soldier he was shipped to
the Eastern front along with several other young
men from his hometown. Joel was basically a shy
person having left town only once at the age of
15 to see Vienna, otherwise he never left the town.
Of medium height he was of stocky build and
quite strong physically. As a result he could keep
his own against the gentile Jew haters. In the army
he tried to get along with everyone, but try as he
might he had constant arguments with a Czech
fellow by the name of Hans Malina, who was at
least a head taller than Joel. Only fists could solve
their differences. On one occasion, Hans brought
two other friends to teach Joel “good manners.”
The situation became rather grim for Joel. But help
came from totally unexpected quarters. Two
fellows from Joel’s hometown named Stanislaw
Tomaszewski, a half Pole and half Ukrainian, and
Miroslaw Pyc, all Ukrainian.
Both had been known in town
as Jew haters, but in this case
were rescuing a fellow
countryman.
With the odds evened out,
Joel and his new friends beat
the living daylights out of
Hans and his company.
Surprisingly, nobody reported
the f ight to the Sergeant
Major. Joel, Stanislaw, and
Miroslaw became very close
friends watching out for each
other. From that day on
nobody ever bothered Joel
again. No wonder they were
called the three Musketeers.
In the meantime, after initial successes, the
war started to turn against the combined Austro-
Hungarian-German forces. Joel’s company started
to spend more and more time in the trenches. Rain,
snow, rats, lice and hunger started to take its toll
on the men. Even the camp followers, the local
whores, stopped “servicing” the soldiers.
The frontal attacks, preceded by the artillery
barrages, produced zero results, just more and
more dead and wounded on both sides. The
Germans would yell,”Gott mit uns” (God with us)
and the Russians would yell “Hurrah” when
attacking. God was with no one in particular. The
Germans were deathly afraid of the Russian long
bayonet, which was triangular in shape with deep
grooves so that blood could flow more easily. The
Russians adhered to General Suvorov’s principle:
“Pula-dura, shtik molodets,” a bullet is blind, but
a bayonet never fails.
All kinds of rumors and stories were flying.
Joel heard about a Jewish soldier from Buczacz,
who captured single handedly nine Russian
soldiers all of whom were Jewish. It seems that
on a clear moonlit night he yelled out of his
trenches towards the Russians: “Yidn, I need nine
men for a minyan” (Jewish quorum needed for
prayer service), and nine men crawled over the
barbed wire towards the German lines. When they
reached this fellow from Buczacz he yelled
“Hande hoch” (“hands up”), and brought the nine
prisoners to the company’s headquarters. For this
he was decorated and promoted to Feldfebel
(Corporal) and given two weeks furlough.
In one of those ill-conceived attacks, the loss
of life was particularly heavy. The calls for medics
and stretchers were everywhere. Joel ran from
place to place trying to help and at the same time
watch out for his own behind.
Suddenly the cry of “Helfmir, helfmir, bitte”
(“Help me, help me, please”) came from a man
laying near a bush. Upon approaching, Joel
discovered a bloody mess. On a closer look Joel
noticed it was a staff off icer with a major’s
insignia. The major was bleeding profusely. Joel
immediately attended to his wounds and stopped
the bleeding. Later on he carried the major,
piggyback style all the way to the First Aid station.
An Army doctor noticing Joel carrying an officer
came over and called for medical orderlies.
Although the major was in much pain and had
lost a lot of blood, he still had the presence of
mind to ask Joel: “Wie heisst Du?” (“What is your
name?”). “Gefreiter Joel Einsiedler, Herr Major,
zum Befehl.” (“Private First Class Joel Einsiedler,
at your service, sir.”) Joel also mentioned his unit
and the name of his company C.O.,
Captain Dieter Jelenik.
“Danke” said the major, and
shook Joel’s hand. Then Joel went
back to his duties. About two to
three weeks later Joel was called to
the company’s headquarters to see
Captain Jelenik. This time Joel was
really scared. To see the captain?
The captain never bothered with
the likes ofa PFC Einsiedler. Joel
brushed clean his uniform,
polished his metal buttons, belt, and
boots and on the double ran to the
captain’s bunker. He was stopped
at the door by a sergeant who said
“Warten Sie ein Moment” (“Wait a
minute”). A couple of minutes later he was ushered
into the captain’s presence. Joel clicked his heels
and saluted smartly and said “Gefreiter Einsiedler,
meldete Gehorsam” (“PFC Einsiedler, reporting
as ordered”). The captain returned Joel’s salute
and said, “At ease soldier.” Joel glanced around.
In addition to Captain Jelenik,were other officers.
Sitting near the captain’s desk was no one else
but the major whom Joel carried from the
battlef ield. The only difference now was the
major’s rank. This time he was an Oberst (full
colonel). The colonel seemed to be a bit pale, but
looked fine nevertheless.
“Hapt ach” (“Attention”). Joel stood at
attention, scared even to breathe. “In der Name
den Kaiser Franz-Josef Und Vateriand, I decorate
you for your bravery under fire and saving the
life of Oberst-Count Kurt von Schuschnigg with
an Iron Cross II Class and promote you to the
rank of Feldfebel (Corporal).” Joel shook hands
with everybody in the room including the colonel
who quietly said, “Ich werde es Dier nie mahl
fergessen” (“I’ll never forget you”).
Joel returned back to his dugout where he was
quickly surrounded by his buddies who tossed
him in the air several times. As a bona fide hero
everyone treated him with respect. He was
excused from many menial duties. Eventually, the
“war to end all wars” finally ended.
Joel was one of the f irst soldiers to be
discharged. He made his way back to his home
town and after a few days of rest went back to his
shop. The owner had aged in those years beyond
Count Kurt von Schuschnigg
cont’d on p. 21
TOGETHER 21visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
recognition. “Joel, the shop can be yours, just pay
me off with the profits of the next two years.”
Joel without any hesitation accepted the generous
offer. All they had to do was to shake hands on
the deal. Joel’s next step was to ask Ms. Sellinger’s
parents for her hand in marriage. Permission was
quickly granted, maybe a bit too fast. The times
were tough. Skyrocketing inflation, marauding
bands of Ukrainian Cossacks trying to establish
an independent Western Ukraine, the Polish
Legions of General Haller, fighting to carve out
Poland after many years of disappearance from
the map of Europe finally came to pass. A new
Polish government took over. Joel worked hard in
his new shop. His wife gave him a son and two
daughters. In the late ’20s and early ’30s he
received a couple of letters from Heir Schushnigg,
who eventually became the Premier of Austria.
Schushnigg lasted till Hitler’s Anschluss. That was
the last time that Joel ever again heard from Herr
Schushnigg.
The ’30s marked growing Polish antisemitism
and Ukrainian chauvinism. The diff icult years
became even more difficult on September 1, 1939
when Germany invaded Poland. By the end of
September of the same year the German troops
entered the town of Drohobycz to a jubilant
welcome from the Ukrainian population. Poles and
Jews hid in their homes. The Germans remained
in Drohobycz only a few days, but they managed
to give the Jewish community a taste of things to
come. In their place soon entered the Red Army,
which in turn was greeted with joy by the Jews of
the town.
Poles hated the Ukrainians and the Jews. They
could not understand why the Jews greeted the
Russians. The Jews didn’t have any options left.
The Germans wanted to kill them and the Poles
always discriminated against them, at least the
Soviets promised equal rights, work, and the
possibility of education. There was no contest. The
“honeymoon” lasted just a few months. Another
reality crept in: The Red Terror. Many people
disappeared in the middle of the night including
clergy of all kinds, intelligentsia, well-to-do
merchants and so on. Among those arrested was
a high percentage of Jews.
On June 22nd, 1941 the Germans, “for a
change,” invaded the Soviet Union. Joel found
out that the so- called propaganda was the bitter
truth. The Germans that came to Drohobycz were
not the same Germans he knew or admired. Soon
the killings, the pogroms, hunger and disease
began to diminish a once prosperous and vibrant
Jewish community.
Joel and his immediate family managed to stay
alive primarily due to his skill as an artisan. He
manufactured beautiful leather goods for the SS,
police and their families. What SS man couldn’t
use a new holster for his gun or a new pocketbook
for his mistress? His luck ended, however, when
his wife and both daughters were shipped to
Stuthoff and Bergen-Belsen. The oldest daughter
had a 4-year-old girl whom she gave to a friendly
gentile woman for safekeeping. The problem was
that nobody knew who that woman was.
And finally, his turn came when two young
Ukrainian militia men came after him. Joel
recognized them at once. They were the sons of
his friends from WWI, Tomaszewski and Pyc.
“Chloptsi boys, I am an old friend of your fathers,
we served together in the Austrian Army,” said Joel.
“That was then and this is now, you dirty Jew.
Let’s go!”
Resigned, Joel started to move when an order
in German came in: “Lass mahl.” Let him live
another few days because he has to finish a job
for me.” These words were spoken by an
Untersturmfuehrer Otto Liebmann. Noticing the
commotion, two other German off icers came
over to see what the ruckus was all about. “Was
gibt loss?” (“What’s going on?”) asked
Obersturmfuehrer Jelinek. “This Jew is going to
do something for me,” said Untersturmfuehrer
Liebmann. “I hope that the Obersturmfuehrer
doesn’t mind?”
“But I do,” answered the Obersturmfuehrer.
What does this Jew do?”
Joel answered in pure German about his skills
with leather goods and told the Obersturmfuehrer
that he served in the German Army in WWI under
a captain of the same name, Jelinek, and that he
was decorated for bravery with an Iron Cross.
“Schau mahl, der dreckicke Jude spricht
Deutch wie ein richtiger Oestreicher” (“Look,
this shitty Jew speaks like a real Austrian”). He
has a gall to say that he has the same decoration
as our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. Where did you steal
it? And he hit Joel, splitting his lower lip.
“Aber Herr Obersturmfuehrer...” Joel tried
to say. “Maul hatten” (“Shut up!”) and he hit
Joel again in the area of his left ear. Joel sank to
his knees as the Obersturmfuehrer kicked him
in the ribs for good measure. “Take that carcass
away,” ordered Jelinek.
Joel was shipped along with other remaining
Jews in a cattle wagon to the concentration camp
in Plazow near Cracow and a few days later to
Mathaussen, where he died a few weeks before
the liberation.
There is no monument or even a gravestone
for a hero like Joel Einsiedler or millions like
him. I thought that he deserved a monument.
After all, he was my mother’s older brother.
Picture of My Past
Was it my father who cut this photo? Was it
he who literally cut himself out of the picture,
cut himself off from his first wife and children,
as he was cut off from them by the Nazis? Was
it he who removed himself from them,
disappeared from the picture, as in a way he
also has from us, his second family?
In the next few days, I searched meticulously
through all my parents’ photo albums. I could not
find the other half of the picture anywhere. I began
to question whether I ever did see it.
But I knew I had. It was the only picture of
my father from that period of his life. Did he
hide that picture too? Did he throw it away? Has
it vanished as completely as the man he was
then?
More than a year went by before the other
half of the photo turned up. I moved a book
shelf my mother wanted to relocate and the
picture, along with a few inconsequential scraps
of paper, was underneath it. Neither of my
parents had any idea how it got there. I put the
jagged edges of the two pictures side by side.
They f it perfectly. Together, they formed a
picture of my past; a past I never saw, yet a past
I can never forget.
cont’d from p. 14
cont’d from p. 20
Another project in 2006 entitled,
“Ambassadors of Remembrance” was organized
so that Austrian high school students were able to
visit their “pen pals” in their homes all over the
world. The students traveled to the United States,
Israel, the United Kingdom and South America,
among others, as ambassadors of a new Austria
that wants to learn from its history. As ambassadors
of the heart, these young people want to bring
some reconciliation to these survivors. The
students lived with the families of the survivors
for a few days and learned more about their stories
and history. One of the survivors is my mother,
Suzanne Balaban.
And now, in 2008, it’s time for 250 survivors
to come home… A new project, entitled “1938/
2008” is bringing back to Vienna on May 1st, 250
victims of the Nazi Holocaust. On May 5, Austria’s
“National Commemoration Day Against Violence
& Racism in Remembrance of Victims of
NationalSocialism,” students from all over Austria
will be constructing an elaborate and moving
Holocaust memorial on Vienna’s Heldenplatz. It
will be dedicated to more than 80,000 people
persecuted by the Nazis.
The survivors will speak at their “pen pals’”
schools throughout the country. These meetings
will be documented on film by the students and
will be archived and stored in a video databank
entitled, “The Last Witness.” Then the survivors
will have an opportunity to visit places from their
youth. The trip will be from May 1 to 8, 2008.
The “A Letter to the Stars” committee is trying
to educate by participation about the history of
the Holocaust. The committee feels that this
generation and those that come after should be
aware of what the Holocaust did to Austria and
the world.
After the ceremonies on May 5th in Vienna,
we will be heading up to a town called Zwettl,
where my mother and aunt will speak at my
mother’s pen pal’s school. I understand that the
area is beautiful. We will be staying at a castle
converted to a hotel.
On May 8, we will be traveling to another place
to have a second family reunion in a town called
Weitra, near the Czech Republic.
My grandparents, aunt, and mother left Vienna
in 1938 to seek freedom and a new life. I’m
traveling with my mother and aunt, Ruth Ellinger,
on May 1st to Vienna. This will be the first time
that my mother and aunt will return there together
in 70 years. My younger sister and cousins will
join us on May 3rd. We will walk in the footsteps
of our family who have survived and those who
didn’t. We will rejoice with relatives we found alive
over the past few years and meet younger
generations who will join us this year at our family
reunion. My fondest hope is to find others still
alive from the Katz, Diamant, and Balaban
families.
Remembering Austria
cont’d from p. 16
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cont’d on p. 19
From Professor Fabrizio Lelli, an Italian scholar, is doing research on
Italian DP camps in the very south of Italy for the University of
Lecce: Seeking people connected with these camps. Professor Lelli was
extremely interested in our, ”DP Camps in Italy” e-mails and he would like
to hear from the members in that group and from any other individuals who
were there, born there, etc. Please contact Professor Lelli at: [email protected]
From Karen Lazar, B’nai Brith Canada’s Institute for International
Affairs in Toronto, Ontario: Seeking Survivors from Trawniki or Poniatowa:
B’nai Brith, Canada’s Institute for International Affairs is urgently seeking
Holocaust survivors from Trawniki or Poniatowa concentrations camps in
Poland, between April 1943 and January 1944. Please contact Karen Lazar
at: 416.633.6224, ext. 140 or at: 1.800.892.2624.
From Mark Litvak, in Miami, Florida (and Montreal, Canada): Seeking
Sugihara Survivors:
Filmmaker Diane Estelle Vicari, (Sugihara: Conspiracy of
Kindness) is interested in contracting, and possibly meeting
Sugihara survivors. If you or your list know of any, please
forward the information DIRECTLY TO: Diane Estelle Vicari
at [email protected] or Mark Litvak at: [email protected]
From Diana Lazar Gerzenstein, a 2g in Melbourne, Australia:
I try so hard for a long time to find out if any of so many
relatives survived the war; I made that promise to my father,
Arpad Lazar, born in Simleul Silvaniei in 1921. My
grandfather, Jakob Lazar, was the son of David Lazar and Roszi
Braun. It was David’s second marriage; his first wife Bella
Goldberg had two sons, Albert (born in Mocirla 1881;died
1933] and Ignac (born 1863 in Akos; died 1932). He was married three
times and had 10 children; he was a shoemaker. My grandfather Jakob’s
first marriage ended in divorce (they had a son). Later on he married my
grandmother, Helena Farkas (from Bacau), and they had my father, Arpad,
and a daughter, Adela. In 1924 they moved to Argentina (where I was born).
Except for an aunt and two cousins, all the rest of my mother’s family perished
in the Holocaust ( they were from Hungary).
From Sylvia Green, a 2g in Melbourne, Australia:
I am looking for members of the Welner family who originated from Bedzin,
Poland. The family descended from Joachim Welner and Uta Moren, and I
know that they hadsix sons: Sender, Yitzhak, Yidel, Aaron, Wolf and Joseph.
Possibly there were even more children that have not been identified. My
family connection is through Joseph, born 1883. I have good reason to
believe that a branch of that family (through Sender Welner) now lives in
South America. Can any of your readers point me in the right direction to
begin that search? I have no Spanish or Portuguese language skills and do
not have the faintest idea how or where to begin.
From Alice Gross, in Southbury, CT:
I’ve been doing for the last year. I have been trying to find whatever material
there is for a shtetl near Bialystok (when it was under the Russian or Polish
flag). The transliterated Yiddish name is TRESTYNYE. The Polish seems to
be GORIADZNE. What I’m really after is information re the GROSS/
KUSHNER family members who emigrated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
From Mary Jean Gunden, in Moraga, CA:
I am wondering if any of your members may remember my aunt, Lois
Gunden. She went to France in 1941 at the age of 26 under the auspices of
the American Mennonite Central Committee, but it is possible that she could
have served with Quakers as well. She was director of a children’s home
called “Villa St. Cristophe” (spelling may not be correct) The children
sheltered in the home were from the Rivesaltes refugee/detention camp.
She remained at Rivesalte through December 1942, when she was taken
prisoner. She was held in Baden-Baden until 1944 when she returned to the
US as part of a
prisoner exchange. As has happened to too many familes, we (her nieces
and nephews) knew of her experiences, but didn’t ask for details when she
would still have been able to tell them. If you have some mechanism for
asking your members if they might remember that children’s home and
perhaps even my aunt Lois, it would mean a great deal to me to know of such
memories.
From Esor Ben- Sorek, a 2g in New York, New York:
My father was born in Dereczyn and I am interested to know more of its
history. I have the Dereczyn Memorbuch and have met with landsmen in
Israel. Thank you for your help.
From Florin Klein, a 2g in Romania:
I would like to find information about my family but here in Romania it is
impossible. My father, Florian Klein, (born Oscar Klein) is the last descendant
of the big Klein family. My great grandfather, Samuel Klein (1863-1939)
was from Oradea Romania. Several members of our family were deported
from Oradea, Romania around 1944: Czili Klein; Rella Klein; Ernest Weiss;
Adler Miklos...and many others.
From Solange Lebovitz, a Survivor in Pittsburgh, PA:
I am a hidden child from Paris, France where my parents emigrated from
Sighet in the 1920s. My grandfather, Shimshon Herskovitz, came from Hust
or Retz in the Ukraine and lived in Sighet, Transylvania. He did not come
back from deportation. His mother’s name was Yetta
Davidovici. He also had a sister who I believe lived in Boston.
I am also seeking information about anyone named Dratler,
my maiden name. There is a Erica Dratler in Israel, but I do
not know where. Would anyone know if Marcel Dratler (who
died July 6, 2007 in Los Angeles), was married and had
children? His mother was deported. She was my cousin and I
just received an album of photos about his family. I would
appreciate any information. Thank you.
From Marcel Apel Lezer, a Survivor in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands:
I am seeking any information about Joka Meyer from The
Hague. I knew her when she was about 7 or 8 years old when she was hiding
in the village of Tzummarum, Friesland (province) in 1942/43, with the
Wetterauw family for about 6 months.
From Tobie Dimont, a 2g in Tucson, AZ:
Looking for survivors from Shirvint (or Servintos) or Kovna in Lithuania.
My mother is a survivor from there.
From Robert Fried, a 2g in Highland Park, NJ:
Seeking any information about my grandfather, Jeno Fried and the Fried
family from Berehovo (Bereczacz), Czechoslovakia and Nir Mada, Hungary.
My father’s siblings are Leo, Harry, Joseph, Martin, Ilonka and Sharika. My
grandparents had a coffee house/ bakery/ ice cream store. Please help us
find some link to our possible family.
From Esia Baran Friedman, a survivor in West Hartford, CT:
Looking for any information about Chaja Sczeranska, who lived on
Wilkomierska Street in Vilno. We attended school together. Her family owned
a bakery. It is possible that she may have moved to Israel.
From Fred (Fewel) Glassman, a survivor in Des Plaines, IL:
Fred (Fewel) Glassman was born in Nowy Dwor, Poland. At the time of the
occupation of Poland, Fred was ten years old and living in Warsaw. His father
was murdered immediately after the occupation. Fred, his mother, and two
sisters were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. His older brother, Yankel had a grocery/
farm store in another city (possibly Nowyblanca). His two youngest brothers,
Avram and Dovid, just vanished one night. Fred was sent out of the ghetto to
get food for his family. When he returned, his mother was dead. His sisters
were eventually taken away and he fled. He used a gentile friend’s name and
went to work on a Volksdeutch farm with a family with several children. One
of the older daughters on the farm found out he was Jewish, but kept that
information to herself. His mother’s family was from Nowy Dwor. His mother’s
brother had a farm and orchard there. This family also seems to have
disappeared from the face of the earth—they were Altzteinsdp (sp?). After
]
TOGETHER 23visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008
the war, and still using a friend’s name, he tried to find his family but could
not find anyone. He had been shot by the Germans in the closing days of the
war and was taken to Italy for medical care. Owing to his current age, all of
his memories are fragmented. I hope that this information will be sufficient
to at least get things going.
From Sarita Gocial, a 2g in Philadelphia, PA:
Many years ago there was a forum for Children of Holocaust Survivors.
This was held at NYU in New York. At the time I literally bumped into a
young woman whose name was Sara Flint. Unbelievably, my grandmother
was Sara Flint, and my name is Sara (Sarita) Flint Russ. We were both delighted
to meet each other. Over the years I have wondered where Sara is. I know
that she lived in Los Angeles, and then I believe Wisconsin, but I have lost
track. I would like to find her and see whether we can figure out whether we
are indeed related. Any information would be very much appreciated.
From George Torrey, a survivor in Longmeadow, MA:
Does anyone have any information about my uncles, Shmuel and Fischel
Frenkiel, and David and Marek Terkeltaub, all of Lodz? They went to Russia
early in the war and never returned.
From Roslyn Mazer:
I am looking for any guidance you may have about how to track down what
became after 1945 of my grandfather’s sister, Rachel Kleinman (nee’ Mazur
or Mazer), for whom I am named. She was married and had six children
Simcha, Lieb, Kreise, Oliia, Lea and Chaya). If any of the family
survived, I was hoping to track down any descendants. She
was originally from Wishnioweicz, Kremenets Uyezd, Wolynsoi
Guberni. Her parents’ names were Leib Mazur (or Mazer) and
Ronia (nee’ Goldenberg). She was last seen at age 54 in Pilzen
on Aug 26, 1945, when an American doctor convinced the
American military command to take her off a railroad car where
she was being loaded for transport back to Poland. There was
an article about the incident in the Daily Forward, which I have
in Yiddish and English. I would be deeply grateful for any
advice you may send my way. My father is 87 now and I
committed to him that I would try to solve this mystery so we
might one day have a grand reunion. Thank you.
From Mrs Emanuela (Lita) Nadel (nee Singer), a survivor in Sydney,
Australia:
I am a child Holocaust Survivor born in Lemberg (Lwow), Poland. I am 78
years old now and have been living in Sydney, Australia since December
1950. In 1948 and 1949 I lived in Paris until mother and I immigrated to
Australia. It occurred to me that your organization might have/find some
addresses of the nursing class I was a member of in Hopital Rotschild Paris
metro Picpus (Ecole d’ Infermiers). I only remember two names from my
nursing school: Janine (Janka) Gradstein, and Irena (Irka) Anikst. We were
20 girls housed in this hospital for a year. I presume that some of them
immigrated to Israel.
From Mordechai David Pelta, a 3g in San Francisco, CA:
I am seeking any information available from oral history to any photos of
any of the following family members: Jurkewicz family; Herszberg family;
Sawicki family and Korn family. My father’s family is from Sulejow, Tomaszow
Mazowieck, and Konskie, Poland. His parents are Lejbus (Leon) and Szyfra
(Shefka Jurkewicz) Pelta. Grandma is from Tomaszow Mazowiecki; her father
was from Sulejow, where she lived with her family til she was 3 years old,
then moved to Tomaszow. Grandpa was a master tailor and my grandmother
was a homemaker. Grandpa was born on June 12, 1907 and died July 20,
1984 and grandma was born March 18, 1916. They had a baby daughter,
Gitla Pelta, born in Samarkand c1943, died at approximately 7-8 mos. of
age from small pox and a son, Jakow Berisz Pelta, born January 1, 1945 in
Samarkand. My grandparents escaped from a labor camp in Novosibirsk to
Samarkand where they lived from 1942-45. My mother is from Turt, Halmeu
and Satu-Mare, Romania. Her parents are Nicholas (b. March 27, 1909) and
Helen (Elena Weisz) Farkas (b. Dec. 10, 1924). Helen lives in New York.
From Bela Rosenthal (Joanna Millan), a survivor, in London, England:
My grandfather, Benjamin Schallmach (1865-1932) was born in Posen and
lived in Berlin till his death. He had a daughter with his first wife called
Bella Schallmach who came to the USA through Ellis Island on the Reliance
from Hamburg arriving 9 November 1923. I believe that she was also born
in Posen. On arrival in Ellis Island she gave
an address of Manila Street in Cleveland,
Ohio. I know that she married and had a
son and a daughter Marion but it is not
listed in the next census so I must believe
that she married between arriving in the
USA and the subsequent census. I am also
trying to discover whether Benjamin had any brothers and sisters and if so
what happened to them. Benjamin’s second wife (my grandmother) was
Auguste (nee Breslauer) who was born in Posen on 19 October 1872 and
who died in Auschwitz 1943. Her father was Abraham Breslauer. I would
like to find out whether she had brothers and sisters and what happened to
them. My paternal grandmother was Minna Rosenthal nee Stensch born 24
November 1864 in Meseritz (Northern Germany) and who died in Berlin 21
June 1935 living in Grenadier Strasse 35. I know that she had several brothers
and sisters and would like to find out if any survived and what happened to
them.
From Salo and Ruth Sherer, survivors in Laguna Woods,CA:
Looking for any information about Itzhak Weis (Weiss) born in Munkacs
living somewhere in Israel (perhaps in a retirement home).
From Carol Shoemaker, a survivor in Copperas Cove, TX:
I believe I may have been born in a DP camp, outside of Augsberg, Germany.
I was told I was a German Jew, born June 12, 1946. I was adopted in 1949
and was raised in Maryland. My birth name is supposedly
Carolyn Spong (Carol Shoemaker is my adoptive name). I
do have memories of something similar to a orphanage.
From Christopher Stern, a 2g in Manchester, England:
I would be very interested to communicate with anyone from
Svalyava where my father Izhak Alexander Shtern was born.
He died in 2000 never telling anyone anything about his
past, or perhaps more accurately anyone at all with any link
to Svalyava however remote.
From Mrs. “U,” a survivor:
I was born in Ungvar in 1931. My father was Dr. Zoltan
Grossman; did anyone know my family? I had a friend named Agnes Klein
in Ungvar. As I recall her father worked or owned a dress shop on Fo utca. If
you knew them kindly respond.
From Mietek Weintraub, a Survivor in Arlington Heights, IL:
When I searched for my mother’s youngest sister, Hela Wester (nee
Riesenberg), born circa 1918, I got a note from Bad Arolsen, Germany, in
1958, that Hela was among the survivors of the Skarzysko (maybe
Kamienska, I don’t remember) camp in Poland. If she was indeed the one
for whom I was looking, she would have arrived there after the liquidation
of Lodz Ghetto in September 1944. Unfortunately my subsequent search
with the Polish authorities as well as with the German proved unsuccessful.
If any survivors of the Skarzysko camp knew Hela Wester (nee Riesenberg)
from Lodz, I’d appreciate hearing from you.
From Mordechai Wiesel:
Seeking children who were in Langenbilo Sportshule, near Reichenbach.
From Timothy Steger:
I am desperately looking to contact any Holocaust survivors who were
adopted by Christian/Catholic families during the wa. I am living in Israel
and especially want to connect with anyone here. I went to Yad Vashem but
they did not have much information. My father is Jewish, and I was adopted
as a baby, but I was adopted by antisemitic Catholics, so much so that my
adopted sister became a neo-Nazi. I was very involved in anti-neo-Nazi
movements and have since made aliyah. I am writing my story and want to
interview others. Can you help me? [email protected].
From Marlene Yoskowitz, a survivor in New Jersey:
I am searching for the following children born in Poland in the 1930s and
hoping that at least one of them survived (their parents were from Wyszkow,
Poland): Srulek Elman, Leah Elman, Sara Elman, Isaak Elman, Hanna
Grinberg, Leah Grinberg, Leah Gurman (?) and baby girl Gurman. They are
my first cousins and I have been looking for them since 1955.
TOGETHER 24 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008
An
Appeal
to Our
Readers
For years we have been disseminating our publication, Together, free of charge to
survivors, descendants, and the Jewish community at large. It has been our contribu-
tion to the clarion call to “never forget” and to offer our readers as much information
as we can gather to reflect the current state of affairs of Holocaust-related issues. But
as with all things, our resources dwindle. And so, we have come to ask for support
from our readers to help defray the costs of production and mailing. Please make a
meaningful, tax deductible contribution payable to the “American Gathering” and
forward it to the address below. Thank you.
send to: American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
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Our recordsconsist of175,000survivors,the only
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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
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The cost of each marker is US $100
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Make checks payable to:
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Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
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