american society for yad vashem - vol. 47-no. 2 issn 0892-1571 … · 2020. 12. 3. · forefront of...

Vol. 47-No. 2 ISSN 0892-1571 November/December 2020-Kislev/Tevet 5781

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEM

This fall, the American Society for YadVashem hosted three nationwide Vir-tual Galas, Resilience 2020, honoringsix deserving individuals, individuals

who, each in his or her own way, have helped tofurther Yad Vashem’s mission of Holocaust edu-cation and commemoration. Because of COVID-19, we were unable to host our usual TributeDinner, where hundreds of people gather to rec-ognize the important work of this sacred institu-tion. However, we were still able to gather inspirit from the comfort of our own homes.

The Seattle, National, andLos Angeles Virtual Galaswere co-chaired by AdinaBurian and Mark Moskowitz,and vice-chaired by HannaRubinstein and Karen Sandler.All three events centeredaround the theme of Re-silience — the ability to re-spond to the evils of theShoah, rebuild one’s life, andinspire others by building forfuture generations.

The MC for the galas wasactor Michael Zegen, JoelMaisel on The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel, and himself the grand-son of Holocaust survivors.Throughout the programs, weheard survivors’ stories of re-silience and messages fromspecial guests, including GalGadot, Alex Borstein, JesseEisenberg and Susie Essman.We also had special musicalperformances by Israeli superstar Idan Raichel.But the real stars of our Virtual Galas were ourincredible honorees.

At the October 25 Seattle Virtual Gala, wehonored Nancy E. Powell, ASYV Benefactor andadvocate of Holocaust education and teachertraining. Nancy is dedicated to inspiring studentsand teachers to study the Holocaust, creatingand supporting education programs for teachersto advance their professional careers, supportingfaculty and student research, and preserving sur-vivor testimonies.

During the National Virtual Gala on November8, we honored Avner Shalev, chairman of the YadVashem Directorate, and Shaya Ben Yehuda,managing director of the International RelationsDivision at Yad Vashem. Avner was presented

with the Lifetime Achievement Award and Shayawith the Outstanding Leadership Award. From thebeginning of Avner’s tenure in 1993, he pioneeredthe redefinition of Holocaust remembrance andeducation, planning and implementing a compre-hensive multiyear redevelopment plan with a goalof preparing Yad Vashem to meet the challengesof relevant Holocaust remembrance in the 21stcentury. To that end, he placed education at theforefront of Yad Vashem’s activities by foundingthe International School for Holocaust Studies, aswell as enlarging Yad Vashem’s archives and re-

search facilities, and building a new HolocaustHistory Museum.

Shaya has been the managing director of theInternational Relations Division at Yad Vashemsince 1999. During this period, he managed theenhancement of Yad Vashem’s fundraising op-erations in order to meet the organization’s ex-panding needs, including major capitalcampaigns and an exponential increase in pro-grammatic activities. In addition, Shaya estab-lished the Christian Desk at Yad Vashem andwas instrumental in establishing Friends soci-eties in some 20 countries. He is a highly expe-rienced educator and a veteran of the IDF,achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel.

At the Los Angeles Virtual Gala on December2, we honored Susanne Czuker, Todd Morgan

and Thomas M. Priselac. Susanne Czuker is aHolocaust survivor, Founding Benefactor of YadVashem, and national ASYV board member. Asa young girl in Budapest, Hungary, Susanne wasplaced in a convent, in different camps, and ulti-mately on a transport train destined forAuschwitz. But when she saw an opportunity toescape, Susanne was hoisted through the roofby fellow “captives,” jumped off the train, and sur-vived by her wits and sheer determination. Fol-lowing the war, she and her parents stayed in DPcamps in Austria and Italy before ultimately emi-

grating to the US in 1952. Susanne builta successful interior design companyand became active in the California Jew-ish community. She and her husbandJan, z”l, endowed Yad Vashem’s “Bridgeto a Vanished World,” leading to the en-trance of the Holocaust History Mu-seum, and they are Benefactors of YadVashem’s Eternal Fund.

Todd Morgan is the chairman andCEO of Bel Air Investment Advisors andfounder of the Morgan Aging with DignityFund, which provides emergency assis-tance to Holocaust survivors. Todd is for-mer chairman of the United JewishFederation Council of Greater Los Ange-les and has served in various roles at sev-eral charitable organizations, includingvice chairman of the Coalition to Free So-viet Jews and lifetime trustee of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Thomas M. Priselac is the presidentand CEO of Cedars-Sinai and was alsonamed president and CEO of the Cedars-Sinai Health System when it was formed

in 2017. An author and invited speaker on policyissues regarding the delivery and financing ofhealth care, Thomas has served the health carefield in various roles during his career, includingas past chair of the Association of American Med-ical Colleges. He is also an adjunct professor atthe UCLA School of Public Health.

Throughout our three hour-long programs, wereflected on the lessons of those who rose fromthe ashes to recover and rebuild, and paid tributeto six inspiring honorees. These outstanding in-dividuals work tirelessly to help the American So-ciety for Yad Vashem achieve its mission, and itwas a privilege to recognize their dedication andcommitment.

BY JILL GOLTZER

ASYV GALAS: RESILIENCE 2020

Galas’ honorees: (top row L to R) Nancy E. Powell, Avner Shalev, Shaya Ben Yehuda; (bottom row

L to R) Susanne Czuker, Thomas M. Priselac, Todd Morgan.

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE November/December 2020 - Kislev/Tevet 5781

IRA ROLLOVER

If you are actually over the age of 70½,you can make a qualified charitable dis-tribution (QCD) of up to $100,000 an-nually from your individual IRA

(traditional or Roth) to the American Societyfor Yad Vashem before the end of the calen-dar year. This type of gift is also commonlycalled the IRA charitable rollover. Many char-ities are recommending this option fordonors over the age of 70½, especially to-ward the end of the calendar year.

DETAILS

A donor older than 70½ can individuallydistribute up to $100,000 each year from hisor her IRA (through its administrator) to theAmerican Society for Yad Vashem (ASYV)without having to recognize the distributionas income to the donor. This distribution canbe used to satisfy the RMD (required mini-mum distribution) for the year the distributionhas been made. HOWEVER, THERE IS NOREQUIRED MINIMUM DISTRIBUTIONFOR 2020, in accordance with the 2020CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Eco-nomic Security) Act. Please note that the giftmust be completed by December 31 (checkcashed by ASYV) in order to qualify, and nobenefit may be received by the donor fromthe charity.

As the American Society for Yad Vashemis a public charity, it falls within the permittedcharitable recipients of an IRA charitablerollover. The donor must notify the adminis-trator of the IRA to make a direct distributionto the charitable beneficiary in order to qual-ify. This giving opportunity was made perma-nent by the passing of the PATH (Protecting

Americans from Tax Hikes) Act in Decemberof 2015 by Congress.

TAX CUTS AND JOBS ACT OF 2017

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017made a number of significantchanges regarding income taxesfor individuals and families. Most

important among them is that there are nowa total of seven income tax brackets, lower-ing taxes for some and raising taxes for oth-ers. We are living with the impact of the 2017law, as it has simplified tax preparation formany, but significantly increased taxes for in-dividuals living in states where there are highstate income taxes, such as New York, NewJersey, Connecticut and California.

DETAILSThis coming tax season again will pro-

duce much angst for individuals and familiesdomiciled in states that have state incometaxes, as the final version of the Tax Cutsand Jobs Act of 2017 maintained this deduc-tion, but limited the total deductible amountto $10,000, which includes income, salesand property taxes. This limitation on de-ductibility has been quite significant for mostupper-income individuals and families. Therewas an expectation that this limitation mightbe eliminated in 2020 by Congress, but it hasnot come to pass. Also included in the TaxCuts and Jobs Act was an increase in the de-ductibility of cash gifts from 50% to 60% ofAGI (adjusted gross income). The 2020CARES Act raises the limit to 100% of AGIfor 2020 only. This deductibility does notapply to donations to donor advised funds orsupport organizations.

In addition, the standard deduction for in-

dividuals will be $12,400 in 2020, for headsof household will be $18,650 in 2020, and formarried couples filing jointly and widows willbe $24,800 in 2020. Some additional conse-quential income tax deductions were elimi-nated by Congress as a part of the Tax Cutsand Jobs Act of 2017, a few of which arelisted here: most insurance casualty andtheft losses; tax preparation charges; movingexpenses; and employee expenses not re-imbursed by the employer. Many more indi-viduals and families utilized the standarddeduction in 2020 than in past years.

DONATING APPRECIATED SECURITIES

TO CHARITY

One tried and true option is to uti-lize appreciated (increased invalue) publicly traded securitiesas a method of donation to a

charity such as ASYV. If the stock has beenheld for one year by the donor, the donor isentitled to deduct the fair market value ofthe security (based on the average of thehigh and low on the date of transfer to thecharity) and avoid paying capital gains onthe increase in value of the security or se-curities transferred. This is a wonderful wayto maximize the value of the donation.

Remember, it is always wise to check withyour accountant or tax advisor as part ofyour review process. If you have any ques-tions, please feel free to contact me by tele-phone at 212-220-4304 extension 213, orby e-mail: [email protected].

BY ROBERT CHRISTOPHER MORTON,Director of Planned GivingAmerican Society for Yad Vashem

2020 END-OF-YEAR

TAX PLANNING

November/December 2020 - Kislev/Tevet 5781 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

Twelve-year-old Hélène Bach wasplaying in the garden with heryounger sister, Ida, when they saw amilitary truck approaching and rushed

inside. The two girls and their mother had lefttheir home in Lorraine, in northeastern France,after the German invasion in May 1940 andstarted travelling toward the “free zone” in thesouth of the country.

To reduce the risk of the whole family beingcaught, it had been decided that the father, Aron,and oldest daughter, Annie, would make the jour-ney separately. But when Aron and Annie werearrested in 1941 and taken to a detention campnear Tours, Hélène’s mother rented a housenearby. And they were still there a year later,when the German soldiers came driving up theroad.

Hélène and eight-year-old Ida ran into thekitchen to warn their mother.

“My mother told us to run — to hide in thewoods,” Hélène says. “I was holding my little sis-ter by the hand, but she did not want to comewith me. She wanted to go back to my mother. Icould hear the Germans. I let her hand go andshe ran back.”

Isolated in the woods, Hélène hid until she feltthe coast was clear.

Then she crept back to the house and foundsome money her mother had left on the table.

“She knew I would come back,” she says.Hélène went to stay with a friend she’d made

in the area. She never saw her mother oryounger sister again.

Hélène’s older sister, Annie, had her own nar-row escape. After a year at the camp near Tours,she succeeded in escaping through some fenc-ing and running away.

Aged 16, Annie succeeded this time in mak-ing the journey alone to her aunt’s home in thesouthern city of Toulouse, but even there shewasn’t safe. While her aunt’s family were not of-ficially registered as Jews and could pretend tobe Catholics, this wasn’t an option open to Annie.

One day in the autumn of 1942, the policerang at the door. “They ordered, ‘Show your fam-ily book and all your children, we want to check!’”she says.

“The luck of my life is that my cousin, Ida, hadgone to buy bread — that’s why sometimes I be-lieve in miracles. So my aunt said this is Estelle,Henri, Hélène and, pointing at me, Ida.”

Not long after Annie’s arrival in Toulouse, heraunt received a letter from Hélène, from her hid-

ing place near Tours. She then made arrange-ments for her to be rescued.

So one night a young woman from the FrenchResistance, the Maquis, knocked at the door ofthe house where Hélène was staying.

“She said that she came to find me, to crossthe demarcation line,” Hélène remembers. Toshow that she could be trusted, the visitor pulledout a photograph of Hélène that her aunt hadprovided.

It was a difficult journey. The young womanhad false papers in which she and Hélène weredescribed as students, even though Hélène wasso young. They were stopped and questionedseveral times.

The “free zone” in the south of Francedid not live up to its name. The gov-ernment of Marshal Philippe Pétain,based in Vichy, passed anti-Jewish

laws, allowed Jews rounded up in Baden and Al-sace-Lorraine to be interned on its territory, andseized Jewish assets.

On August 23, 1942, the archbishop ofToulouse, Jules-Geraud Saliège, wrote a letterto his clergymen, asking them to recite a letter totheir congregations.

“In our diocese, moving scenes have oc-curred,” it went. “Children, women, men, fathersand mothers are treated like a lowly herd. Mem-bers of a single family are separated from eachother and carted away to an unknown destina-tion. The Jews are men, the Jewesses arewomen. They are part of the human race; they

are our brothers like so many others. A Christiancannot forget this.”

He protested to the Vichy authorities abouttheir Jewish policy, while most of the FrenchCatholic hierarchy remained silent. Out of 100French bishops, he was one of only six whospoke out against the Nazi regime.

Saliège’s message struck a chord with SisterDenise Bergon, the young mother superior of theConvent of Notre Dame de Massip in Capdenac,93 miles northeast of Toulouse.

“This call deeply moved us, and such emotiongrabbed our hearts. A favorable response to thisletter was a testament to the strength of our reli-gion, above all parties, all races,” she wrote afterthe war in 1946.

“It was also an act of patriotism, as by defend-ing the oppressed we were defying the persecu-tors.”

The convent ran a boarding school, and Sis-ter Denise knew it would be possible to hide Jew-ish children among her Catholic pupils. But sheworried about endangering her fellow nuns, andabout the dishonesty that this would entail.

Her own bishop supported Pétain, so shewrote to Archbishop Saliège for advice. Sherecords his response in her journal: “Let’s lie,let’s lie, my daughter, as long as we are savinghuman lives.”

By the winter of 1942, Sister DeniseBergon was collecting Jewish childrenwho had been hiding in the woodedvalleys and gorges of the region

around Capdenac, known as L’Aveyron.As roundups of Jews intensified — carried out

by German troops and, from 1943, by a Fascistmilitia, the Milice — the number of Jewish chil-dren taking refuge in the convent would eventu-ally swell to 83.

Among them were Annie Bach, whose auntrealized she would be safer there than inToulouse, shortly followed by Hélène, taken di-rectly to the convent by her guide from the Re-sistance.

Hélène finally felt safe, though she was over-whelmed with emotion on her arrival.

“At the beginning, Madame Bergon took meinto a room and she tried to make me feel as ifmy parents were here, and so she was like amother really,” she says.

At the same time, the fate of her younger sis-ter, Ida, weighed heavily on her.

“Every evening, we had to first do our home-work. And then when we finished we could goout and play. I always thought if my sister had notlet go of my hand, she would have been in theconvent with me,” she says.

Another Jewish refugee from Alsace-Lorrainewas a boy called Albert Seifer, who was a fewyears younger than the sisters.

“Surrounded by big walls, we were like in afortress,” he says. “We were very happy. We didnot really feel the war despite the fact that wewere surrounded by danger.”

Parents and guardians would send their chil-dren with money, jewelry or other valuables inorder to pay for the children’s upkeep, beforethey did their best to escape from France. SisterDenise kept careful records.

“From the beginning of 1944, the roundups ofJews were becoming tighter and numerous,” sherecalled in 1946. “Requests came from all

(Continued on page 5)

THE DARING NUN

WHO HID AND SAVED

83 JEWISH CHILDREN

Sister Denise Bergon.


The Holocaust and North Africa.Edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya

Stein. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, Cal.,2019. 349 pp. $30 softcover.

T he Holocaust and North Africa, editedby Aomar Boum and Sarah AbrevayaStein, is an exceptionally valuablevolume focusing on an area of study

far too long in the shadows. True, only Tunisiacame directly under Nazi German occupation,but we quickly learn that the French (underVichy) and the Italian colonial powers (think Mus-solini) eagerly followed the Nazi lead in theirNorth African colonies. In fact, sometimes it feelsas though they couldn’t wait to align themselveswith the Nazis when it came to the Jews — en-acting anti-Semitic laws evenbefore they were pressured todo so. Making it all easier wasthe fact that European non-Jewish colonists living in therespective countries examined— Algeria, Morocco, Libya andTunisia — were often alreadyanti-Semitic for their own na-tionalist reasons.Indeed, manyof the essays contained in TheHolocaust and North Africapoint out how colonial powereasily turns Fascist.

For example, once Algeriawas ruled by Vichy France in1940, Algerian Jews, number-ing more than 100,000, werealmost immediately — and, weare told, particularly “rigor-ously” (more so than in Vichyitself) — subjected to a barrage of anti-Semiticrulings that destroyed the community economi-cally and socially. Jews lost their jobs, their prop-erty was “Aryanized,” and more. Then Vichystripped Algerian Jews of French citizenship. In-terestingly, French colonists living in Algeriadidn’t mind this at all. They never liked the factthat Algerian Jews had a “say” in their country —

and citizenship had given them that right! Thenthere were the camps in Algeria, like Bedeau, aforced labor camp, where some “2,000–3,000Jews” were sent. An interesting sidelight here isthe story of the Algerian Jewish soldiers sent toBedeau, where their denigration continued evenwhen the changing tides of war should have sub-stantially improved things for them “post Vichy.”

For the Jews in Morocco, numberingmore than 200,000, most in theFrench protectorate — again ruled byVichy — things were a bit better. The

reason was ironic. In Algeria, when Jews losttheir French citizenship, they were deemed arace; but in Morocco, where Jews had beenconsidered “colonial subjects,” now they were

deemed a religion. Thisseemingly minor distictionended up making a big differ-ence since racial laws werethen more “difficult” to apply.Then, too, there was thepower Moroccan authoritiesstill wielded, oftentimes pro-tecting Jews from economicdisaster for the benefit of Mo-rocco. Nonetheless, Moroc-can Jews living in “outlyingneighborhoods” had to moveinto restricted Jewish zonesor mellahs. Additionally,many Jews, again, were sentto forced labor camps.

Meanwhile, Italian Fas-cists, both soldiers and set-tlers, were unhappy with, andhad been making life difficult

for, Jews in Libya, Italy’s North African colonysince the 1920s. In 1938, however, when raciallaws were promulgated, the persecution of the30,000 to 40,000 Libyan Jews became “orga-nized.” This resulted in the “impoverishment” ofmany Jewish families. But still worse was tocome, particularly after 1940 when Libya itselfbecame a battleground. At that point Italian Fas-

cist accusations of Libyan-Jewish collaborationwith the British — Italy’s immediate enemy inLibya — led to attacks on Libyan Jews, scape-goats for any and all losses. In the end, underMussolini’s direction (and most probably influ-enced by Nazi Germany) Libyan Jews were de-ported or sent to internment camps, the worstof which was, Giado.

Finally, Tunisian Jews numbering about80,000 were subjected to anti-Semitic laws pro-claimed by Vichy — much like Morocco’s Jews.The difference in their experience? The lawswere initially moderately enforced. Some say itwas because Resident-General Admiral JeanPierre Esteva, the Vichy governor in Tunisia,wasn’t keen on them. Additionally, it appears thatthe bey, among other local Tunisian officials, hadsome power in Tunis, and he wasn’t keen onthem either. Things got much worse, though, in1941, once Xavier Vallat, heading the Commis-sariat-General for Jewish Questions for the Vichygovernment — “a newly created agency” —came on the scene to check on how racial lawswere being implemented. Then when the NaziGermans arrived in November 1942, under theleadership of Colonel Walther Rauff, TunisianJews felt the full brunt of Nazism. “Jews were tar-gets of harassment, physical violence, unex-plained arrests, internments and generalspoliation. Men between the ages of 16 and 60were transported to camps” for forced labor . . .“individuals were assassinated or deported toconcentration camps in Europe.” Luckily, the Al-lies arrived a few months later to save them . . .and all North African Jews.

Needless to say, The Holocaust and NorthAfrica is an absorbing work that will undoubtedlywhet the appetite of many a student of the Holo-caust, eager to know more about what happenedto Jews in that part of the world during the waryears.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKINProfessor of Media, Communication and Visual Arts at Pace University

THE HOLOCAUST AND NORTH AFRICA

Yad Vashem and the University ofNotre Dame have signed a Memo-randum of Understanding (MoU) setto promote Holocaust education and

research among the “next generation of histori-ans and researchers.”

The agreement between the World Holo-caust Remembrance Center and the SouthBend, Indiana, university forwards YadVashem’s vision to increase Holocaust educa-tion and research across the globe.

“It is with great satisfaction that Yad Vashemis signing this important agreement with the Uni-versity of Notre Dame,” Yad Vashem director-general Dorit Novak said in a statement. “YadVashem is committed to ensuring that the historyof the Holocaust continues to be relevant todayand for future generations, and is not relegatedto yet another chapter in human history.

“Our efforts aim to equip students and teach-ers alike with the necessary tools and materialsto address the topic of the Holocaust and engageyoung scholars in the need for further researchinto its multifaceted nature and relevance today,”she said. “Yad Vashem hopes that this agree-ment will open opportunities at many more uni-versities and college campuses across theUnited States and in the rest of the world.”

In addition to the MoU, scholars from bothinstitutions intend to explore how the Holo-caust came to be — dehumanizing andmurdering millions in the process — and

the role “healing justice plays in our worldtoday.”

This specifically is the focus of Yad Vashem’snew online educational tool, based on its Learn-ing Center — the Center for Major QuestionsArising from the Holocaust — which is intended

to induce thought and discussion.“The University of Notre Dame is very proud

to enter into this partnership with Yad Vashem,”said vice president and associate provost for in-ternationalization at the University of NotreDame Michael Pippenger. “For our studentswho study abroad in Jerusalem, the collabora-tion will allow for greater access to YadVashem’s extraordinary resources — both itsworld-renowned experts and its unparalleledarchives — to pursue their research and be-come a part of the global conversation on Holo-caust studies.”

The associate provost added that “for ourstudents on campus, we hope that the partner-ship will lead to a better understanding of thehistory and legacy of the Holocaust and whatthat understanding calls us to study and act ontoday.”

YAD VASHEM, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

TO PROMOTE HOLOCAUST EDUCATION


(Continued from page 3)sides, and we received around 15 little girls,some of whom had just escaped in a miraculousway from the pursuit of the Gestapo.”

She added: “They had simply become ourchildren, and we had committed ourselves to suf-fer everything so as to return them safely to theirfamilies.”

Other than Sister Denise, only theschool’s director, Marguerite Roc-ques, its chaplain and two other sis-ters knew the truth about the

children’s origins. The other 11 nuns were awarethat a number of the children were refugees fromAlsace-Lorraine, but did not know they wereJewish — nor did the officials whom SisterDenise pressed for more and more ration books.

The children’s lack of familiarity with Catholicrituals threatened to expose them, but an expla-nation was found.

“We came from the east of France, a placewith many industrial cities and a lot of workerswho were Communists,” says Annie. “So weposed as Communist children who knew nothingof religion!”

The longer the war continued, the more dan-gerous the children’s position became and SisterDenise began to worry about possible searches.

“Even though all compromising papers andthe jewelry from the children’s families had al-ready been hidden in the most secret corners ofthe house, we did not feel safe,” she wrote in her1946 journal. “So, late at night, when everyonewas asleep in the house, we dug a hole for thehidden things in the convent’s garden and weburied as deep as possible anything that couldbe compromising.”

In May 1944 a battle-hardened elite SS divi-sion known as Das Reich arrived in the area fromthe eastern front.

About this time, Annie remembers that amember of the Resistance arrived with an alarm-ing warning.

“One day the doorbell rang. Since the sisterin charge of the door was a bit far, I opened it

myself,” she says.“A young man was standing there. He said:

‘Quick! I must speak to your director! It is very,very urgent!’

“The man told us that we had been de-nounced. News had spread that the convent washiding Jewish children.”

Sister Denise hatched a plan with the Resist-ance, who agreed to fire warning shots if theenemy was approaching.

“The children would go to sleep, the olderones paired up with the younger ones and, at thefirst detonation heard in the night, in silence butin haste, they must get to the woods and leavethe house to the invaders,” she wrote in 1946.

But soon she decided to hide the childrenwithout waiting for the invaders to arrive. Onegroup, including Annie, was taken to the chapel.

“The chaplain was strong and could lift thebenches. He opened a trap door. We slid downin there,” she says.

The tiny underground space was 2.5 meterslong and less than 1.5 meters high.

Seven children huddled together there for fivedays. They could not stand up or lie down tosleep during the long nights, and were only al-lowed out for short periods in the early hours ofthe morning, to exercise, eat, drink and go to thetoilet.

Air came through a small vent that opened ononto the courtyard.

“After five days there it wasno longer possible to endure,”Annie says.

“Imagine if the nuns hadbeen arrested,” she adds.

Those days hidden under-ground marked Annie for life —she has slept with a night-lightever since. Hélène was fortu-nate enough to be housed in-stead with a local family.

Though they didn’t enter theconvent, the SS did leave a trailof destruction right on the con-vent’s doorstep.

“We found some maquis-ards [members of the Maquis]who had been killed and tossedon the road. The Germans setan example so that others didnot resist,” Annie says.

Sister Denise wanted to payher respects to the dead andasked Annie to help her placeflowers on each of the deadbodies.

In June 1944, Das Reichwas ordered north to jointhe effort to repel the Allied landings in Nor-mandy. On the way it took part in two mas-

sacres designed to punish locals for Maquisactivity in the area. Then, on arrival in Normandy,it was encircled by the US 2nd Armored Divisionand crushed, losing 5,000 men and more than200 tanks and other combat vehicles.

After southern France was liberated, in Au-

gust 1944, the Jewish children slowly left theconvent. Albert Seifer was reunited with his fam-ily, including his father, who returned alive fromAuschwitz.

Annie and Hélène weren’t so fortunate.Although their aunt survived, their parents

and younger sister, Ida, were murdered inAuschwitz.

They refer to Sister Denise as “notre dame dela guerre” — our lady of the war.

They were sad to say goodbye to her, andregularly visited her for the rest of her life.

When Annie’s children were young she oftentook them with her, in order to keep this periodof history alive for them — a constant reminderof what the Jewish people endured.

Sister Denise remained at the convent andcontinued working until her death in 2006 at theage of 94. Later in life she helped disadvantagedchildren, and then immigrants from North Africa.

In 1980, she was honored by Yad Vashemas Righteous Among the Nations. A street isnamed after her in Capdenac, but apart fromthat the only memorial is in the grounds of theconvent.

It says: “This cedar tree was planted on 5 April1992 in memory of the saving of 83 Jewish chil-dren (from December 1942 to July 1944) byDenise Bergon… at the request of MonsignorJules-Geraud Saliège, archbishop of Toulouse.”

It stands close to the spot where SisterDenise buried the jewelry, money and valuableitems parents left behind — which she gaveback, untouched, after the war to help the fami-lies start again.

BY NIAMH HUGHES, BBC News

THE DARING NUN WHO HID AND SAVED

83 JEWISH CHILDREN

Helene and Anne’s mother, Cecile Bach.

Hélène and Annie at the entrance to the convent.


On October 30, 2020, the Florida De-partment of Education issued amemorandum designating the sec-ond week of November as Holo-

caust Education Week. This state-enforcedlegislation adds to the existing Holocaust Educa-tion Mandate that Florida adopted in 1994.

The School District of Palm Beach County in-vited Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, director of edu-cation for the American Society for Yad Vashem,

to present professional development opportuni-ties for South Florida educators and students,grades 6–12 in public schools. This invitationwas in connection with the newly designatedHolocaust Education Week that took place thisyear from November 9-16.

In connection with this initiative, Dr. Yahalompresented in middle schools and high schools inPalm Beach County using the Besa and “NoChild’s Play” traveling exhibits developed by YadVashem. Her presentations also included mean-ingful discussions using Holocaust-related artifactsthat gave life and meaning to the historical infor-mation that was introduced to these students.

To meet the changing landscape of classroomlearning due to COVID-19, we have adapted stu-dent-centered teaching strategies for use online.Dr. Yahalom worked with regional educators inFlorida to ensure meaningful learning about theHolocaust using educational resources devel-oped by Yad Vashem and engagement with sur-vivor testimony and primary source study.Through the use of digital tools and resourcesand lesson plans tailored to meet standards inthe Holocaust Education Mandate, Dr. Yahalompresented to no fewer than 1,784 students ofgrades 6-12 and their teachers in South Floridaduring the week.

Designating the second week of Novemberas Holocaust Education Week also offers an ap-propriate platform to commemorate Kristall-nacht — the Night of Broken Glass, when, onNovember 9, 1938, a wave of terror began inGermany. The outburst appeared to be a spon-taneous expression of national anger in re-

sponse to the November 3, 1938, assassinationof Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official inParis, by a Polish Jewish youth, Herschl Gryn-szpan. The assassination became the pretext forwhat was to follow: within 24 hours, more than1,000 synagogues were set on fire and de-stroyed, rioters smashed synagogues with ham-mers and axes, 91 Jews were killed, and morethan 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16and 60 were arrested and sent to concentrationcamps.

Kristallnacht was the culmination of nearly sixyears of systematic discrimination and persecu-tion. During this time period, the identification,separation, isolation and deprivation of rights es-calated, all disguised as lawful measures withinthe justice system. These measures were amongthe first of the racist Nazi laws that culminated inthe Holocaust. Dr. Yahalom presented informa-tion and historical connections about Kristall-nacht in each presentation so students couldlearn about and understand the relevance ofcommemorating this impactful date in Holocausthistory.

Our goals of Holocaust education re-main as relevant as ever before. Weare obligated to remember andteach the Holocaust, honor the

memory of the victims, commemorate and paytribute to the lost Jewish communities of Europe,and safeguard this information against Holocaustdenial and distortion. It is clear from recent sur-veys regarding decreased Holocaust awarenessand rising rates of anti-Semitism and Holocaustdenial that our responsibility and outreach areneeded more than ever before.

We need to identify the relevancy of the Holo-

caust and sustain interest in Holocaust educationand instruction. This includes empowering edu-cators to teach and sustain the lessons of thisevent in their classrooms. We are also obligatedto teach this subject to address rising rates ofanti-Semitism, a lack of basic Holocaust knowl-edge, and a continuous escalation in efforts topromote Holocaust denial and distortion.

With schools pivoting to remote or hybrid ven-ues, our educational outreach continues to adapt

to new and existing educational settings. Ourprofessional development programs in SouthFlorida this fall have ensured meaningful instruc-tion about the Holocaust through innovative ed-ucational resources developed by Yad Vashem,engagement with Holocaust testimony and pri-mary source study, and the use of artifacts as atool to enrich and give meaning to historicalfacts. Our impact in South Florida to accommo-date to recent legislation enforced in Florida toenrich its existing mandate is quite significant inthis regard. We will continue to work with educa-tors and students in this region throughout the2020–2021 school year.

Students provided positive feedback followingthe workshops, including: “Your presentationhelped me learn a lot about the Holocaust…,” “Ilearned much more than I knew about it…,” “Thepart that impacted me the most was ‘No Child’sPlay’...,” “It was very enlightening. All in all I lovedit. Thank you!…,” “I am so glad I learned aboutwhat my ancestors had to go tthrough…,” and “Ibelieve that schools don’t usually cover the Holo-caust enough, so I think that what you did wasvery important.”

A note of gratitude from the Palm BeachCounty School District stated that “These beautiful,informative exhibits [‘No Child’s Play’ and ‘Besa’]have left a lasting imprint on the teachers and stu-dents that viewed them, but the most important im-pactful part of the exhibit was the thirty- pluspresentations that you gave virtually. Your dedica-tion to Holocaust education is commendable. Welook forward to reaching more students together.”

Stay tuned for increased outreach and profes-sional development programming. We continueto work in South Florida and are expanding our

work to other locations, including Los Angelesand Seattle. Check our website for updates andschedules for events through the 2020–2021school year.

Contact Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, Directorof Education — [email protected] —for more information about the American Societyfor Yad Vashem’s educational workshops andvirtual academic opportunities.

CLASSROOMS WITHOUT BORDERS

Palm Beach County middle school students learning about

“No Child’s Play” during Holocaust Education Week 2020.

Meaningful lessons about Jewish life during the Holocaust and Jewish resilience and survival in a post-Holocaust world.


Seventy-five years ago, on September17, 1945, the first trial to apply inter-national law to crimes committed byNazi functionaries opened in

Lüneberg, Germany. Pushed to end before themid-November start of the Nuremberg trials,which focused on “crimes against peace,”“crimes against humanity” and “war crimes,”Britain’s “Belsen trial,” convened under its RoyalWarrant, sought solely to prosecute those whoacted criminally in concentration camps, partici-pating in a system calculated to murder millions.By admitting evidence of atrocities committed byGermans against German or Axis nationals, it seta precedent for the series of trials to follow: Nolonger would “sovereign immunity” automaticallyshield war criminals. This position was not agiven.

The British Second Army had liberatedBergen-Belsen on April 15. What they found inthe then-largest concentration camp was inde-scribable. Still, the Belsen trial’s first witness,Brig. H. L. Glyn Hughes, the military officer whohad assumed responsibility for medical relief atBelsen, tried to give a picture. In Camp One, fivecompounds contained more than 41,000 emaci-ated inmates in severely overcrowded, filthyhuts. Seventy percent of them required immedi-ate hospitalization. Of these, Hughes estimatedthat 14,000 would die before they could receivetreatment. Ten thousand unburied corpses lay inmounds on the ground, among the living in somehuts, and floating in concrete ponds of water.Epidemics of typhus, tuberculosis and gastroen-teritis raged. Camp Two contained another15,000 starving prisoners.

Accompanying the British Army into Bergen-Belsen was its Film and Photographic Unit. To-gether with journalists, this group capturedevidence of Nazi barbarity. Though the AlliedControl Council had yet to provide a uniformbasis for prosecuting war criminals, outragedBritish citizens demanded justice. A trial slated tobegin in July was delayed only because moretime was needed to collect evidence. All sum-mer, investigators, military officers and transla-tors walked through the camp with stacks ofphotographs of guards and kapos, gathering af-fidavits from witnesses.

Most of the 45 SS and kapos charged withparticipating in the ill-treatment and murder of in-mates at Bergen-Belsen had earlier served inAuschwitz. While overseeing a compound of18,000 women, Irma Grese (then 19) used herspecial whip. Juana Borman, at 52 the oldest ofthe female guards, delighted in watching herdogs tear prisoners to pieces. Josef Kramer, whosupervised the gassing of thousands atAuschwitz, went on to become kommandant andthe “Beast of Belsen.” He casually shot 22 pris-oners the day before the British arrived. Thesemurderers sat among the other defendants in adock in the gymnasium-turned-courtroom in theoutskirts of Lüneberg. Hundreds more had fledat the time of the liberation.

Just as the British were unprepared for what

they found in Bergen-Belsen, they (and their al-lies) had no experience investigating and prose-cuting such criminality. The act and effects ofdenying humans habitable quarters, medical andsanitary facilities, and food and water defiedcomprehension. How to proceed? Was “theproper treatment of citizens of nations occupiedby a belligerent” outlined in Britain’s Manual ofMilitary Law a fair consideration? Deciding to ad-here to judicial norms, the British court wouldstrive for evenhandedness and moderation.

Observers called the approach blasphemous.

Colonel Smith, a London Universityprofessor of international law broughtin to help the defense, argued thatactions consonant with German law

— which permitted the annexation of territory, theestablishment of concentration camps, the con-finement therein of prisoners, and the construc-tion and use of gas chambers — were lawful. As“war crimes” had only to do with actual warfare,National Socialist racial policy, which subjectedcivilian prisoners to atrocities, fell outside thepurview of the charges. The 11 defense lawyersconcurred; the German’s duty was to obey hiscountry’s law, even if it conflicted with interna-tional law.

Defense lawyers attacked survivor-witnesseswho omitted in their testimonies incidents men-tioned in earlier statements — or who mentionedincidents not in statements. They accused wit-nesses of combining trivial incidents to producegrave ones and of attributing rememberedevents to those in custody. They failed to under-stand the impossibility ofknowing and keepingtrack of dates and times,and that questions mightevoke recollections.

Helen Klein accusedFranz Hoessler of select-ing her for the gas cham-ber at Auschwitz, of tellingher that at age 19 she had“lived long enough.” An-other witness told howHilda Lobauer beat anddrowned women prison-ers by pushing them into aditch. Ada Bimko re-counted, with tears, howmembers of her family, in-cluding her six-year-old son, died at Auschwitz.She explained how the sonderkommando wereforced to bring bodies from the gas chambers tothe crematoria. She identified Karl Francioh, su-pervisor of the cookhouse at Belsen, as the manwho shot an inmate the day before the British ar-rived. And she saw Kramer kicking and beatingprisoners. A defense counsel suggested that shefabricated statements about Kramer’s brutality.

Survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch concludedthat the trial was a “huge farce.” Others, too,thought the bending over backwards to allow thetestimony and defense of the perpetrators an in-sult to those who had died and to Belsen’s liber-

ators. Criticizing protracted British justice and in-dulgence of the defendants, a Russian reportercalled for the trial’s immediate end. A Moscowradio commentator said it encouraged Fascistseverywhere.

In his affidavit, Dr. Klein, one of the accused,said that he told Kramer that had he been theEnglish officer in charge, he would have takenthem both, put them against the wall and shotthem.

The Belsen trial defense attorneyswould not have the final word. In hisclosing speech, prosecuting attorneyCol. T. M. Backhouse of Headquar-

ters, British Army of the Rhine, refuted each ofthe points raised by Colonel Smith. He submittedthat interned civilians, including inhabitants ofcountries occupied by Germany during the war,were entitled to the same treatment as prisonersof war (as outlined by the Geneva Convention of1929), and that all forms of cruel treatment wereprohibited. He detailed the murderous schemeto which Auschwitz internees were subjected,and the continuation of brutalization and massmurder, in a different form, in Bergen-Belsen. Hereviewed the testimony incriminating each of theaccused and noted the problems of collecting ev-idence from those preoccupied, post-liberation,with trying to survive or save the dying. He re-marked on the telling consistencies among vari-ous affidavits.

The Belsen trial’s verdict: 14 of the defen-dants were acquitted; 31 were found guilty. Ofthese, 11 were sentenced to death. The meticu-lous executioner Albert Pierrepoint hanged theeight men and three women on December 13,1945, in a jail in Hamelin.

Like the Belsen trial, the Nuremberg trialswould reject summary executions and seek tocreate authoritative, historical records. Focusing

on the Nazi regime’s conspiracy to aggression,the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that pro-duced Nuremberg — comprising the UnitedStates, Britain, France and Russia (each with itsown prosecution agendas) — set standards forprosecuting crimes against humanity. It looked toan example, among hundreds of trials it over-shadowed: the Belsen trial, the first to considernot only defendants’ individual war crimes, butalso their part in a scheme to torture and murderJews and other targeted victims, regardless ofnationality.

BY BERNICE LERNER, JNC

THE TRIAL BEFORE

NUREMBERG

Irma Grese (second from left) at the Belsen trial.


It is clearly a watercolor painted by a child.Cinderella is wearing a baby-blue dress,her hair in braids with matching bows. Aprincess greets her in a drawing room

where another woman sits playing the piano.Ironically, the brightly colored scene couldn’t befurther from the life of the young artist — then-six-year-old Nelly Toll. Toll created her art duringthe nearly two years she spent hiding in a lockedroom with her mother, waiting for Poland to beliberated from the Nazis.

As Toll recalls that time so long ago, shesmiles at her rendition of Cinderella beinggreeted by a beautiful princess and not a hand-some prince. Toll has always thought outside thebox, even while living within one.

Her odyssey began in 1943 when Germanywas invading Poland, rounding up Jews andother people the Nazis considered undesirable.

“The Jews were being taken by the Germansto be killed,” Toll says. Her father found refugefor his wife and daughter in the home of a tenantwho was renting an apartment from him.

“We lived in an apartment on the street levelin a very fashionable Christian neighborhood,”Toll recalls. “My father was going to join us lateron, after he placed other family members. Tokeep me busy, my mother got me a watercolor

box. I just made fairy tales of a happy childhood.“My mother taught me how to write. The peo-

ple who hid us couldn’t read or write, but theyhad a friend who could go to the library. Shecould only bring grown-up books, because shehad no children. So I read Maupassant, Dos-toyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and my mother made iteasier for me to understand.”

The room had three sec-tions: one for Toll and hermother; one for the tenant, aman she calls Mr. W; and thethird housed a beat-up sofawhere the man’s wife slept.There was also a bathroomand kitchen.

“We had what I call a dou-ble-decker danger on the out-side and the inside,” she says.“Outside, the Germans couldcome at any moment. Inside,the man used to beat his wifeterribly. She would sometimesget on the windowsill in thekitchen and call for the police,and we were in that room whilethe police came to the kitchen.”

“The doors were locked, so Mrs. W would pre-tend to look for a key, at which point we would dis-appear to a hidden place in that room. I knew thatif she turned the key to show them the room, ithad to be empty and free of the watercolors, waterand brushes. I couldn’t spill a drop of water. Therecould be no evidence that we were there. It was amatter of a few seconds that this had to be done.We would go into a hidden window.”

“Before the war the room had three windows,and it was very cold. So my father bricked a win-dow on the outside, but inside there was a win-dowsill. So he put in a wooden board and trapdoor, and when we needed to we would go inthere and put a rug over it. It was touch and go

because there was so little time. The policewould ask Mrs. W why it took so long to look fora key.”

During air raids, Toll and her mother couldn’tbe seen going to an air raid shelter for fear of

being turned in, so they would hide in the bath-tub. One of her pictures shows two women va-cationing in the country in a red house.

“Afterward, they would be tired and the cham-bermaid would make a beautiful bath,” Toll says,describing how she reinterpreted the bathtub inher painting.

Though Toll doesn’t remember how shelearned the story of Cinderella, shecreated a series of pictures to illustrateher version of the tale. “This Cinderella

had a bad stepmother, so she ran away,” Tollsays.

“A butler lets her in, and she goes into thisroom where the princess sits on one chair andon the other end is a woman playing the piano.Cinderella is received by the princess and in thenext picture they go into a car — that was a bigdeal in those days — and they go for a ride.”

Alongside the pictures, Toll included writtennarrations of her illustrations. She created 60stories during her time in hiding, most recallingwhat her life had been like before the war. Sheand her younger brother were raised in an afflu-ent family, living in an apartment house in Lwow[now Lviv, Ukraine], Poland, where her motherloved to play the piano.

While most of Toll’s pictures depict happyscenes, she drew one black-and-white picture ofmarching German soldiers. She was also morerealistic about her life in the diary she kept.

“I recorded everything. That became the basisfor my book, Behind the Secret Window,” shesays. “That diary is still in my possession.”

Toll vividly recalls the day the Russians lib-erated Poland. “When the Russians came I dis-regarded my mother and ran out of the house.The soldiers put me on top of their tank andgave me chocolates,” she remembers. Sadly,she never saw her father, younger brother orcousins again.

Toll emigrated to the United States in 1951,first landing in Vineland, N.J. She got marriedand settled in Cherry Hill. Today Toll’s home isfilled with her artwork, mostly watercolors, alongwith some pottery. Some pieces are from longago, while others are very recent. “I love color,”she says. “There’s no inspiration, I just paint.”

BY TERRI AKMAN, SJ Magazine

BEHIND THE SEALED WINDOW

Nelly Toll.

“Girls in the Field,” Lwow, 1943.

“Mother, Governess and Mother’s Three Children.”


It’s factually accurate, yet reductive, to callthe elegiac new film The Song of Names aHolocaust story. The historical drama, isbased on a 2002 novel by cultural critic

Norman Lebrecht, tells the story of a young Jew-ish violin prodigy from Warsaw, Dovidl Rapoport,from age nine to 55. In the film, the character isportrayed by three actors, including Clive Owen.

During the 1930s, before Hitler’s invasion ofPoland, Dovidl is sent to live with a nurturingLondon family and develops a close brotherlybond with their son, Martin. As a young man in1951, Dovidl is bursting with talent, his promo-tional recording acclaimed as “music from thegods,” yet he’s tormented by uncertainty over hisfamily’s fate during the war years.

The film’s central mystery is why Dovidl dis-appears right before he’s about to make his biginternational concert debut on the London stage.Even 35 years later, Martin (now played by TimRoth) is mystified and bereft. He begins an ob-sessive quest to find out why Dovidl vanished,and whether he might still be alive.

As the conundrum unfolds, and Martin andDovidl eventually reunite, we learn why Dovidlwas a no-show for his big debut, and how achance visit he made at age 21 to a London syn-agogue would determine his life’s path.

Ever since the temple’s cantor introducedDovidl to the film’s title song, a haunting fictionalrecitation of the names of all those who died in theTreblinka concentration camp, Dovidl has lived

with acute survivor’s guilt. It’s an almost unbear-able burden that forever changes his commitmentto classical music, to family and to his own faith.

Yet, despite its heartbreaking World War IIsubject matter, one of the first things French-Canadian filmmaker François Girard says abouthis new movie is that “it’s important that we’re notlooking at the Holocaust straight on.”

T he Song of Names has none of theusual scenes one expects in a storyabout Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Thereare no re-creations of the Warsaw

ghetto where Dovidl’s family was sequestered,no graphic images of starving prisoners, no com-bat scenes or the eventual uplift of liberation.

Instead, there is music. Lots of beautifulmusic (composed by Oscar winner HowardShore, known for his work on the Lord of theRings trilogy) that serves as a requiem for thoselost and to affirm the degree to which song andmemory are linked.

“The bigger story of history, of World War II,is always present, but we never look at it head

on,” Girard said by phone from Montreal. “Welook instead at its reverberations, its ripple ef-fects. And music is the central language fortelling that story.

“I think music might actually be the most pow-erful vehicle we have for remembrance.”

Girard, 56, was an inspired choice to direct Le-brecht’s story, with a screenplay by Jeffrey Caine(who wrote The Constant Gardener, and whose

parents died in the Holocaust). Much of Girard’swork on screen, as well as in theater and opera,over the past two decades has explored the similarintersection of classical music and history.

“I think I trust music more than words,” Girardsaid, especially when it comes to wringing emo-tion on screen from characters like Martin andDovidl, who are both grappling with profoundloss. “That might be a very personal thing, butone thing for sure is that the power of music cap-tures states of mind and experiences wherewords fail us. We’ll never need subtitles or trans-lations with music because it reaches beyondborders.”

Music’s universality, along with thelimits of language, was on Girard’smind when determining how to filma pivotal scene in The Song of

Names, as the adult Martin (Roth) and Dovidl’sformer lover (played by Magdalena Cielecka)visit the Treblinka memorial, where a small forest

clearing is filled with thousands of jagged grave-stones commemorating the Nazi exterminationcamp’s 900,000 victims.

In preparation, Girard, Cielecka and productiondesigner Franco̧is Seguin visited Treblinka to-gether. “It was an extremely emotional experi-ence,” Girard said, one that informed the script,“which originally had the characters talking as theywalked, and then that no longer seemed right. Wespent three hours walking the fields, and we didn’texchange one word. What can you possibly say?

“I wrote a long letter to the memorial’s authori-ties, explaining the film and why we needed toshoot there. You feel such a responsibility to betrue, that that’s not a place where you want to playwith special effects and green screen. You needthe actors to walk the ground if the characters do.”

The production was quickly granted approval,and The Song of Names became the first featurefilm to shoot with permission on the Treblinkamemorial.

“We human beings have grown a very shortmemory, collectively,” Girard said. Combating thatamnesia “was my motivation for the heart of thisfilm, and hopefully is the film’s contribution. I thinkwe have to push back to keep memory alive. Wehave to look backward and remember. Because,if we can’t look backward, we can’t look forward.”

BY JESSICA ZACK, Datebook

THE SONG OFNAMES

Tim Roth plays Martin, who visits the memorial at Treblinkain The Song of Names.

Luke Doyle (left) and Misha Handley star in The Song of Names.


Vilna, or Vilne (nowadays known by itsLithuanian name, Vilnius), was oftencalled “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.”On the eve of World War II, the city

was home to some 60,000 Jews, comprisingover a quarter of its population. Vilna Jews en-joyed a variety of educational institutions, includ-ing both Yiddish and Hebrew gymnasiums, aswell as public libraries. There were Jewish or-chestras and a choir and a drama studio, printinghouses, newspapers and periodicals. “TheJerusalem of galut, the consolation of the East-ern people in the north,” it was called by poet Zal-man Shneur, who had spent a couple of yearsthere in his youth at the turn of the century.

Following the outbreak of the war in Septem-ber 1939, Vilnius underwent a series of up-heavals and shocks. Captured by the Red Army,it was first handed over to the Lithuanians, onlyto be later annexed by the Soviet Union. OnJune 22, 1941, Germany invaded its easternneighbor and former ally, and two days after thatthe Wehrmacht conquered the city.

Vilna Jews soon suffered a series of Aktions,beginning in early July, when some 35,000 peo-ple were murdered by the Germans and theirLithuanian collaborators. But they were nottransported by train to extermination campsdozens or hundreds of miles away; rather, themass murder of Vilna’s Jews took place in thecity’s own backyard — Ponar, a wooded arealess than five miles southwest of the city, on theroad to Grodno. Before the war the residents ofVilnius would enjoy holiday strolls there, gather-ing berries and mushrooms. Jewish schoolswould also go there on hikes, and at night sitaround the campfire and sing and dance.

The Nazis saw a different potential in Ponar.The Soviets had dug large pits in the forest tostore fuel tanks, but they left them behind beforethe project was completed. “Just as the Germansarrived, they discovered it,” wrote the great Yid-

dish poet Avrom Sutzkever in his prose ac-count, Fun vilner geto, “a place as though tailor-made for their murderous plans. On the right, aroad to transport the victims in cars; on the left,the Vilnius–Warsaw railway line.”

In December 1941, the great Aktions ceased.The Germans needed cheap labor, and sinceJewish forced laborers were much cheaper toemploy than non-Jews, they decided it wouldserve their purposes to keep them alive for themoment. The interval before the summer of 1943is thus referred to as “the period of relative quiet,”during which the murder of individuals accusedof “crimes” like food smuggling continued, as didthat of the elderly and the sick deemed unfit forwork. Nevertheless, the Jews of the ghetto clungto the belief, fostered by the Germans, that theirwork was essential and increased their chancesof survival.

At the end of 1941, half a year into the Ger-man occupation, only about one-third of theJews of Vilna, some 20,000 people, were stillalive and crowded into seven alleys in the ghetto.Despite their inconceivable distress, an exten-sive program of educational and cultural activitywas carried out there under the protection of thehead of the ghetto, Jacob Gens. “The cultural lifein the Vilna ghetto began the very day we en-tered there,” Sutzkever wrote.

Ghetto dwellers had not only kindergartensand elementary schools, a heder and yeshivas,a vocational school and a gymnasium — towardthe end, they even began having compulsoryschool attendance — but also schools of music,art, eurhythmics and theater, a children’s cluband a youth club. There were a theater, a sym-phony orchestra and choirs (a Yiddish choir andtwo Hebrew ones, large and small), as well as acultural center with a lending library and a read-ing room, an archive, a statistical bureau and amuseum. Concerts, literary evenings, lectures,exhibitions and sports competitions were held.

Such was the setting of Gens’ decisionin December 1942 to hold a competi-tion for which the song that later be-came “Quiet, Quiet” was composed

by young Alexander (Alek) Wolkowyski. The orig-inal poem was written by his father, Dr. Noah(Leon) Wolkowyski, in Polish, the language spo-ken in their home. The man who translated it intoYiddish, the mother tongue of most Vilna Jews,and added two stanzas to it was Shmerke Kacz-erginski, who was involved in saving thousandsof Jewish books and tens of thousands of Jewishdocuments from the Germans. He was a mem-ber of the United Partisan Organization (FPO),an organizer of many cultural events of theghetto, and — no less important — a prolific lyri-cist, who expressed the reality of ghetto life in hissongs, many of which became hits. It wasWolkowyski Sr. who chose the lullaby form — arather understandable choice coming from aman who wished to help his young son deal withthe impossible reality of the ghetto.

All that is known about the original Polishverse is that its first words were: “Hush, hush,

hearts are crying”. The Yiddish version begins asfollows: “Shtiler, shtiler, lomir shvaygn, / Kvorimvaksn do. / S’hoben zey farflanst di sonim, / Gri-nen zey tsum blo. / S’firen vegn zu Ponar tsu, /S’firt keyn veg tsurik. / Iz der tate vu farshvundn/ Un mit im dos glik.” In English:

Quiet, quiet, let’s be silent,Graves are growing here.They were planted by the enemies,See their bloom appear.All the roads lead to Ponar now,There are no roads back.Papa too has vanished somewhereAnd with him our luck.A Hebrew translation of the song, written by

the renowned Israeli poet Avraham Shlonsky,was published in Mandatory Palestine in Sep-tember 1945, only a few months after the end ofthe war and even before the original, Yiddish ver-sion appeared in print, in the first issue of thechildren’s magazine Mishmar LaYeladim. Duringthe war, as news of the genocide taking place inEurope leaked out, the lullabies published in thechildren’s magazines of the Yishuv served as ameans of mediating the events to young readers.For the sake of those who might not have heardof Ponar, a note appeared under the lyrics: “Aforest near Vilnius, where tens of thousands ofJews were murdered.” Rather blunt for a chil-dren’s magazine, perhaps, but then, even today,more than seven decades later, educators stilldebate the correct way to educate children aboutthe Holocaust.

Having escaped the ghetto just beforeits liquidation and fought as a parti-san until liberation in the summer of1944, Kaczerginski set to systemati-

cally collect and publish the songs of the ghettosand camps. When the original “Quiet, Quiet” firstappeared in print in December 1945, in the NewYork Morning Freiheit, he spoke about theunique characteristics of ghetto songs. “In ordi-nary times, songs have a long way to go beforethey become popular. But in the ghetto … a per-sonal work turned into folklore right before oureyes. Any newly created song that expressed thefeelings and experiences of the masses imme-diately caught on as though it were their own.”Daily life in the ghetto, he said, not only influ-enced the themes of the songs but was also thereason their form was often “not polished butrather simple, though unmediated and true.”

The song was performed before a large au-dience in the ghetto theater. There are no pho-tographs of this performance, let alone audio orvideo recordings, but we do have an accountgiven by someone who witnessed it. NehamkaRahav (then Shuster) was a 16-year-old girl atthe time, the same age as the singer, Mirele. In-terviewed by Ofer Gavish in 2000, she de-scribed Mirele as a beautiful girl with curly blondhair. She didn’t remember her last name, butshe knew that she had perished in the Stutthofconcentration camp in 1945, toward the end ofthe war.

(Continued on page 13)

THE REMARKABLE STORY

OF “SHTILER, SHTILER”

Alexander Wolkowyski (later Alexander Tamir), right, at lib-

eration.


It is a near-forgotten chapter in 20th-centuryhistory: the rescue of thousands of Jewishmen from the Nazis, brought to a camp onthe outskirts of the medieval town of Sand-

wich in Kent as darkness fell across Europe.The Kitchener Camp rescue began in Febru-

ary 1939, and by the time war broke out sevenmonths later about 4,000 men — mainly Germanand Austrian Jews — had arrived by train andboat. Although the story of the 10,000 Jewishchildren brought to the UK on the Kindertransportis well known, the Kitchener Camp has receivedmuch less attention.

“It’s not even well known in [UK] Jewish com-munities,” said Clare Weissenberg, an exibitioncurator at the Jewish Museum in London.

On September 2, a blue plaque was unveiledin Sandwich in the presence of descendants ofthe rescued men, as well as the son and daugh-ter of two Jewish philanthropist brothers who ranthe camp.

Among those present was Paul Secher,whose father, Otto, arrived in May 1939.

“My father didn’t talk about it very much,” saidSecher. “I sensed it was a painful subject for him.He managed to escape, but his parents and asister didn’t. The burden must have been im-mense.”

After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November1938, when Jews and their property were vio-lently attacked, about 30,000 Jewish men wererounded up and taken to Dachau, Sachsen-hausen and Buchenwald concentration camps.

The Central British Fund (CBF), a Jewish aidorganization in the UK now known as World Jew-ish Relief, persuaded the British government toadmit some refugees. Adult men were brought tothe UK on condition they would not be grantedUK citizenship, they must not work, and theymust emigrate onward to the US, Australia andelsewhere.

The CBF organized transport and rented aderelict army base at Richborough, near Sand-wich, to house the men. Their first task was totransform the site into a small town. They builtor refurbished 42 accommodation huts, showerand toilet blocks, two synagogues, a medicalclinic, a post office and shops. A 1,000-seat cin-ema was constructed with money donated byOscar Deutsch, the founder of the Odeonchain.

The men were not interned; they could re-quest a pass to leave the camp. They playedfootball against local teams, they visited nearby

beaches, and some illicitly worked for cash onKent farms. Nine editions of a newsletter, theKitchener Camp Review, were published.

At the time, the population of Sandwich was3,500. The arrival of 4,000 refugees could havebeen overwhelming, but they were largely wel-comed. Hundreds of people attended concertsperformed by refugee musicians, and local chil-dren visited the camp to play table tennis.

The men expected their families — parents,siblings, wives and children — to follow them tothe UK. Some women were granted “domesticservice visas” enabling them to escape theNazis, but arrivals abruptly ended with the out-break of war on September 1, 1939.

Nearly all Kitchener men were categorized intribunals as “friendly aliens,” withthe words “refugee from Nazi op-pression” stamped on their papers.“Enemy aliens” were interned.

After the start of the war,887 Kitchener men en-listed in the PioneerCorps. But after the

Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940,public opinion turned against Ger-man-speaking refugees, whomsome suspected of being spies orsaboteurs. Those not serving inthe war effort were interned or de-ported to Australia and Canada.The Kitchener Camp was closed.

Weissenberg began investigat-ing the camp’s history after she “in-herited [my father’s] Germansuitcase. I saw references to theKitchener Camp and thought,‘What on earth is that?’”

She set up a website andbegan collecting stories and mem-orabilia from descendants of Kitch-ener men. “Often they hadn’ttalked about it. Many of the menlost wives, children, parents —survivor guilt is a huge thing. Manyfamilies didn’t know much about the history,” shesaid. “As a child [of Holocaust survivors], youknew ... not to ask, almost to protect your par-ent.”

An exception was Lothar Nelken, who hadbeen a judge in Germany before being strippedof his position under the Nuremberg Laws andinterned in Buchenwald concentration camp. “Hewrote a diary throughout the war. I grew up

knowing about his experiences in Buchenwald.He never kept secrets, he shared his memories,”said his son, Stephen.

On Thursday, July 13, 1939, Lothar Nelkenwrote: “At around 9 pm we arrived in the camp.…We were welcomed with jubilation. After supperwe were taken to our huts; Hut 37/II. I chose anupper bunk. One hut sleeps 36 men. The bedsare surprisingly good. One sleeps as if in a cra-dle.”

In 1973, Clare Ungerson discovered a plaquein Sandwich, “but the wording was very strange,referring to refugees from Nazi oppression.” Thedaughter of a German Jewish refugee, Ungerson“realized it must refer to Jews, but I’d neverheard of this camp.”

After she retired, she researched and wrote abook, Four Thousand Lives. In terms of the ter-rible history of the time, the Kitchener Camp maybe a small detail, she said, “but it’s not small tothe many descendants of Kitchener men, whowould not exist if those men hadn’t been res-cued.”

BY HARRIET SHERWOOD, The Guardian

THE FORGOTTEN HAVEN:

THE KENT CAMP THAT SAVED

4,000 GERMAN JEWS

A quartet practicing. Refugee musicians gave concerts for the locals.


Abook that recounts the horrors of theNazis’ Family Camp and its Chil-dren’s Block at Auschwitz-Birke-nau — including rapes, floggings and

being shot for going to the toilet — has beenpublished to a wider audience for the first time.

The Children’s Block, originally published inCzech as a book called The Painted Wall in1993, tells the true story of 500 Jewish childrenheld in special areas of the Nazi death campsconstructed to deceive the Red Cross about hor-rifying conditions for Czech families captured bythe Germans.

Although fictional, it was written by survivorOtto B. Kraus, who served as a child counselorin the Family Camp, which existed from Septem-ber 1943 to December 1944, and documentslargely autobiographical experiences.

Kraus’ account offers distressing insights intohow the young inhabitants suffered, despitethem being labeled as “SB,” Sonderbehandlung(“special treatment”) — part of a ploy to fool theRed Cross Commission, which was permitted tovisit the ghetto-turned-concentration-camp,Terezín, in former Czechoslovakia, home countryof many of the families.

The Jewish residents of Terezín were kept inhealthier conditions to mask the reality of Nazicruelty.

When it became too full, inhabitants would besent to the Family Camp and its Children’s Blockat Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The camps served to disprove that Jews werebeing exterminated at the Nazi camp — and thereason why the prisoners appeared to be gettingtreated more favorably was only discovered atWorld War II’s end.

The first Terezín residents to arrive atAuschwitz-Birkenau got to keep their oldclothes — not the striped uniform most wereforced to wear; their heads weren’t shaved andthey received better meals. Children wouldspend time in the Children’s Block in the day andreturn to the Family Camp in the evening.

In reality, the children would be brutallykilled — in the gas chambers — six months afterthe day of their arrival in the camp. In total, morethan 17,500 Jews entered the Family Camp, withmore than 15,000 per-ishing from execution,disease or hunger.

The characters thatKraus, who died in 2000,created represent peo-ple he met while there,with the narrative basedon the diary of fictitiousChildren’s Block teacherAlex Ehren, who shieldsthe children he encoun-ters from the terroraround them.

The book’s forewordwas written by Kraus’ li-brarian wife Dita, whosereal-life story was thebasis for Antonio Iturbe’sbest-selling book The Li-brarian of Auschwitz.

She explains how afriend of Kraus’, also aninstructor on the Children’s Block, urged him towrite about their experiences, saying: “Therewas nothing like it in the entire Nazi machineryof the extermination of the Jews.”

During his research, Kraus discoveredthat more of the adults who worked onthe Children’s Block remained alivethan of those who were sent to other

camps, coming to the conclusion that it was thesense of duty they felt toward the children that

motivated them to stay alive.The book evokes the terror and

ultra-violence Jewish prisoners weresubjected to in the camps. Kraus de-picts harrowing scenes based on truestories.

Upon arriving at the camp, Alex ishorrified to discover that SS guardswould shoot Jewish people whoneeded the toilet if they strayed fromthe group they were in to empty theirbladder.

A couple caught being intimate wasflogged in front of all prisoners, ascene which is witnessed by the chil-dren in the book. And Kraus revealsthat mothers of children in the block,and many other women, were rapedon a nightly basis by other prisoners.

The novel’s main protagonist, Alex, comesfrom the Terezín ghetto, as Kraus did. A poet, hegets enrolled as a worker in the Children’s Blockafter his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau inDecember 1943.

The story sees him in charge of eight unrulychildren, boys and girls, from dawn until dusk.

“Teachers” were actually forbidden to teach thechildren, Kraus explains, but says they wouldfind a way to educate clandestinely from the SSguards.

When he’s not handling the children, makingsure they shower, get fed and answer roll call,Alex dreams of an uprising and fleeing the hor-rors of the camp.

The children in the Family Camp were not toldabout the “chimney” or death, and lived relativelysheltered from the horrifying scenes of the camp.The “school” of the Children’s Block seemedcompletely different from the usual representa-tion of concentration camps.

Unlike the French or German children or Jew-ish children from other countries, the Czech chil-dren could play, visit their parents, and put onshows attended by SS officers.

They also had stronger rations of food, whilemany around them died of starvation. Posses-sions looted from death prisoners, while theymainly went to the SS, were also sometimesgiven to the Children’s Block.

Yet six months after their arrival at Auschwitz,each cohort would be exterminated.

The first group of Terezín residents sent toAuschwitz-Birkenau, 3,800 people, died in thenight between March 7 and 8, 1944, and the sec-ond contingent, of more than 10,000, on the July11 and 12, 1944.

A further 2,750 inmates were sent to Ger-many and, of these, only 1,167 were still alivein various slave-labor camps at the end of thewar.

The Family Camp had a survival rate of about6.6 percent, according to Kraus’ research, but,astonishingly, most of the adults who worked onthe Children’s Block survived.

BY CLAIRE TOUREILLE, Mailonline

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S BOOK

REVEALS HORRIFYING REALITY

OF “PRIVILEGED” FAMILY CAMP

A child’s drawing found in the concentration camp at Terezín. It was drawn

by Margit Koretzova, who died aged nine on October 4, 1944, and was part

of the Germans’ attempt to mask the atrocities they were carrying out.

Archive photo showing children arriving at Auschwitz with their mothers.


(Continued from page 10)

In 2001, director Racheli Schwartz went toVilnius to gather material for her documen-tary Ponar, which followed Gavish’s re-search and was dedicated to “Quiet, Quiet”

and its composer, Alek — Alexander Tamir. Thefilm reaches a climax with a moving tribute in thevery same theater hall almost six decades afterthe song came into being. The performance in-cluded three renderings of the song: an artisticreading by Sima Skurkowitz, who was an actressand singer in the ghetto; a Yiddish performanceby a student at the local Jewish school, about theage of Wolkowyski-Tamir when he composed thesong; and a Hebrew rendition by Meital Trabelsi,accompanied by the composer, who had re-turned to his hometown for the first time. It wasthere that Nehamka Rahav spoke about the per-formance back in 1943. Her words indicate thatthe experience was utterly cathartic:

“Mirele, a tiny little girl, goes up to the stage.And when she starts singing — her voice soundslike bells — everybody begins to cry. Not hyster-ically, not wailing — their sobbing was terrible butsilent, out of the depths. It was perhaps the firsttime people there had let themselves expresswhat they had been feeling for a year and a half.I didn’t cry when they took my father away andmurdered him in Ponar. I didn’t cry, not once. Butthat day I cried too, and my tears kept falling, andMirele stood there, singing — that’s somethingI’ve never wanted to forget.”

The song concludes with the mother’s wordsof hope to her child:

Let the wellspring calmly flow,You be still and hope:Papa will return with freedom,Sleep, my child, oh sleep.Like the Viliya — liberated,The trees renewed in green,Freedom’s light will soon shineUpon your face,Upon your face.

Among the 37 songs gathered by Kaczergin-ski after the war in the anthology Dos gezang funvilner geto (Songs of the Vilna Ghetto), almostall of them written in the ghetto, there is noother song that contains such reference toPonar. The enchanting melody must havedone its part, too: in Tzila Dagan’s gentle,serene voice in Hebrew, as in the thunder-ous, pompous performance of Sidor Be-larsky in Yiddish, this melody still enchantstoday, as the song is one of only a handfulwritten during the war that are performedin Israel’s national Holocaust Remem-brance Day ceremonies.

In the spring of 1946, “Shtiler, Shtilerwas published in the journal for Jew-ish ethnography Reshumot. The pub-lication was accompanied by

biographical details about the poet, Kacz-erginski, including his activities during thewar. The editors could even say that “themelody was written by the youngestamong the Jewish composers in theghetto, an eight-year-old boy, Dr. Wolkowyski’sson, and it is rumored that he is now in Eretz Is-rael.”

The rumor was true. After the liquidation ofthe ghetto in September 1943, young Alek wassent to a labor camp in Estonia, where his fatherserved as a camp doctor. As the Soviets ap-proached, a Selektion was conducted, in whichthe two were separated: His father was killed.Alek was sent to another camp, and from thereto yet another, where he managed to surviveuntil he was liberated by the French army in April1945, at the age of 14. A few months later he em-igrated to what would soon become Israel andreunited with his surviving relatives.

In the early 1950s he studied at theJerusalem Academy of Music, where he later be-came a professor, and in 1955 he joined BrachaEden in the creation of a classical piano duo,which performed for 50 years. Alek Wolkowyski,

the little boy who composed a song for a contestin the midst of all the horror and succeeded be-yond anyone’s expectations, became Alexander

Tamir, the famous Israeli concert pianist. In 1968,the duo founded the Targ (now the Eden-Tamir)Music Center in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, whereTamir still lives.

The hope expressed in the song was eventu-ally realized, but only on a tiny scale. By the timeVilna was finally liberated, the vast majority of theJewish community — not only those in the“Jerusalem of Lithuania” but in all of Lithuania —had been decimated; out of over 200,000 Jewswho had remained in the country under Germanoccupation, only 5% — 1 in 20 — survived, as did12,000 more who had been deported or escapedto the Soviet Union. About 70,000 Jews werekilled in Ponar alone; the Nazis didn’t plant anygraves there, but rather made every effort to hidetheir deeds. Tamir’s father, like most fathers —and mothers, and children — never came back.

BY AVIAD TE’ENI, Tablet Magazine

THE REMARKABLE STORY

OF “SHTILER, SHTILER”

Tamir with his musical partner, Bracha Eden.

A“vanishingly small number” of Germanswere unaware the Holocaust was goingon during World War II, say the makersof a chilling new documentary.

The acclaimed British director Luke Hollandinterviewed more than 300 elderly Germans andAustrians, including many former SS members,for Final Account.

Holland, who died in June, spent more than adecade befriending former Nazis and persuadingthem to talk about what they knew for his monu-mental work.

Producer Sam Pope said Holland was able togather the remarkable testimony because hespent years gaining the trust of his subjects.

While many struggled with their consciences,others were unrepentant and proud of serving inthe SS “where you could rely on every man 100percent.”

Others denied the Holocaust while openly ad-

mitting they knew about massacres. “Don’tblame Hitler,” one said. “The idea was correct...[but the Jews] should have been driven out of thecountry” rather than killed.

But Pope said the interviews with noncombat-ants, particularly women, gave the lie to the ideathat few ordinary people in Germany and Austriaknew what was going on.

“A common refrain was that it was after thewar that we learned of these horrible crimes,” theproducer told reporters.

“In the process of these interviews, I think thatas a possibility becomes vanishingly small.

“Even if you weren’t there or didn’t participate,you knew someone, or had heard a rumor. Yourbrother who was a soldier came home and toldyou stories,” said Pope.

Yet one of the film’s most chilling scenescomes from modern Germany, when an elderlyformer SS soldier is shouted down by young

neo-Nazis for making them feel “ashamed to beGerman” by talking about his guilt.

The long emotional exchange happensaround the table in Wannsee House, the statelyhome in a Berlin suburb where the Final Solutionwas drawn up.

In his epigraph for the film, Holland — whosemother’s family perished in the Holocaust — re-fused to damn his subjects, most of whom werein their 90s.

“Perpetrators are not born, they are made,”he wrote.

Yet he did not pull away from asking the hardquestions of men and women he had befriended.

Co-producer Riete Oord said it was clearmany knew exactly what was going on “but theyrepressed it. There is a guy who says, ‘If 99 peo-ple in front of me thought it was OK to slaughterJews, I would go with it too.’ The abnormal be-comes very normal in such circumstances.”

MOST GERMANS KNEW HOLOCAUST WAS HAPPENING


The Germans invaded Poland in 1939.I was 14 years old at the time. Shortlyafter the invasion, I and several otheryoung boys were selected by the

Nazis to work on the roads. The work of repairingthe roads was physically very demanding. Wewould gather every morning at the synagogue,at which time the German soldiers in chargewould give us each one piece of bread for theday. We were then taken to the area in which wewere working.

I worked on the roads for about two years. Idon’t remember exactly how it happened, but atone point I was taken from the road work andgiven the task of chopping wood and building thekitchen fires for the kettles. This kitchen servedas a food preparation center for the Nazis, whowere constructing Hitler’s bunker in Stempina.The structure which was to become the bunkerhad, coincidentally, been my father’s childhoodhome. There were other workers in the kitchen,primarily Poles who had been forced into labor.They did general kitchen work, including peelingpotatoes.

Each night I was permitted to go home to myfamily. Needless to say, times were very difficultand food was very scarce.

One day I was coming into the kitchen holdinga bucket filled with coal and firewood. In thekitchen there was a beautiful German woman Ihad not seen before. She was there, I imagine,looking for her husband, who, I learned, was a

high-ranking officer. She looked at me, seemedpensive for a moment, and then reached andgrabbed two loaves of bread from the shelf andfurtively put them in the bucket, an act for which,if caught, she would have faced grave conse-quences.

I brought the bread home to the great delightof my father, brothers and stepmother. Breadwas a delicacy which my family had not eaten forseveral years.

During the course of the next day I again cameinto the kitchen with the bucket, and again foundthe officer’s wife there. She once more put twoloaves of bread in the bucket. Have you any ideaof the value of four loaves of bread at that time?

I continued to work for a short while longer inthe kitchen, but times were getting more difficultfor the Jews, and there was talk of the Naziscoming to our town and liquidating the remainingJews. I escaped to the forest and joined a smallresistance group. The Nazis were intent on elim-inating this small partisan group, and I ultimatelyfound refuge with a Polish family.

Isurvived the Holocaust, and in 1946 afterliberation and the end of the war, I and sev-eral of a group of survivors went to Munich,Germany, and planned to celebrate our sur-

vival. The party was to be held in a local hotel.When I got to the hotel I went into the diningroom, which was filled with perhaps as many as200 men and one woman. She was sitting alonein a booth. Something about her seemed famil-

iar. I passed her and took a look at her face. Thiswas the very same woman who, several yearsearlier at a time of desperation and need, hadgiven me four loaves of bread. I sat down at atable, called over the waiter and pointed to thewoman, saying, “Give her the best meal moneycan buy. I will pay for it!” He brought her the foodand she said in surprise, “I did not order this mealand I cannot pay for it.”

The waiter informed her that the tab wasbeing covered by a gentleman in the restaurant.When she finished the meal I approached her.She asked if I had paid for the meal, to which Ireplied “Yes.” She questioned why I had paid forit since we had never met. I responded, “Oh yes.We have met. Do you remember the shtetl ofFrysztak?” “Yes,” she answered. “Do you re-member a young boy of 16 to whom you gavefour loaves of bread?” Yes, she remembered.

It was now 1946, the Nazis and German armyhad been defeated, and the Allies were seekingformer Nazis in order to bring them to trial fortheir heinous deeds. Times were now, needlessto say, very difficult for former Nazis and theirfamilies. I, however, remembered what she haddone, and wanted to help her. I asked for her ad-dress, intending to send her food. She gave mean address, but it proved to be incorrect. Per-haps she feared I would inform the Allies. In anycase, I never saw her again. It is now 78 yearslater, and I vividly remember her act of kindnessshown during a time of unprecedented horror.

BY AARON APPELBAUM Recorded by Goldie Apfelbaum Librach

THE ACT OF KINDNESS

In Jewish culture, we believe that only avery few, the most virtuous of all, have thedistinction of passing through the “gatewayto the Lord” while still in this world. Similarly,

very few endangered their lives in order to savepersecuted Jews during the Holocaust.

The ten Boom family — Corrie, her fatherCasper and her sister Elisabeth — are certainlydeserving of this privilege. In their honor, a treewas planted in Yad Vashem, the World Holo-caust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, whenthey were recognized as Righteous Among theNations. This is why I’m very happy that the Mu-seum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., has cre-ated a special exhibit this summer to honorCorrie ten Boom.

She and her family, believers, were spots oflight in the thick darkness that descended on Eu-rope and North Africa as the fist of the Nazis andtheir collaborators sought to annihilate the Jews.

Corrie had been taught by her father from an

early age to cleave to the Bible and to recognizethe special position of the Jewish people. Whenthe Nazis invaded the Netherlands and begantheir oppression of the Jews, with the ultimate in-tention of sending them to the death camps, theten Booms sought to provide a refuge for perse-cuted Jews. Their courage and sense of virtuesaved many Jews, including numerous children.

Corrie and her family, motivated by the obli-gations of their religious belief and their sense ofconscience, offered protection to the victimizedJews, who, for them, were the chosen people.

It is these people the prophet Malachi wasreferring to when he wrote: “In this veinhave those who revere the Lord been talk-ing to one another. The Lord has heard and

noted it, and a scroll of remembrance has beenwritten at His behest concerning those who re-vere the Lord and esteem His name.”

The ten Boom family put their faith in the Lord,helped many Jews reach safety, and were ulti-

mately arrested and imprisoned for their efforts.Corrie may have survived her time in theRavensbruck concentration camp only becauseshe was released because of a clerical error —the other women her age were sent to the gaschambers. She lived to old age, dying in the early1980s.

Yad Vashem has recorded their actions andrecognized them as Righteous Among the Na-tions. The tree that was planted in their name willcontinue to tell the story of Corrie ten Boom andher family for the generations to come.

I hope many Jews and Christians will passthrough the gates of the Museum of the Bible inWashington, D.C., as thousands do each year atYad Vashem in Israel, to learn a story we mustremember so that we can tell it to our children,and to their children, for generations.

BY SHAYA BEN-YEHUDA, Washington Examiner

THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY

OF CORRIE TEN BOOM


When her classmates were sentfrom occupied Holland to deathcamps, Emmy Korodi and herDutch Jewish family were safe

in Hungary — one of Nazi Germany’s closestallies.

Her family were among some 90 Jews who,at the height of World War II, survived for the

unlikeliest reasons: They fled the Germans andlocal police in the Netherlands — a country thatmany people credit for its population’s effortsto save Jews — and found safety in Hungary,a perceived perpetrator nation of the Holo-caust.

The story of the Dutch Jewish refugees inHungary was told for the first time in a documen-tary titled The Train Journey by the award-win-ning Dutch-Israeli filmmaker Willy Lindwer.

Coming amid new revelations about Europe’sHolocaust-era record, the film’s story highlightsin a striking manner the complexity and ambigu-ity of the Holocaust in countries with checkeredhistories.

“Compared to life in Holland, life in Budapestwas fantastic,” Korodi, a Holocaust survivor whowas a child when her family fled to Hungary in1942, said in the documentary. “We could go out,there was a wonderful swimming pool betweenBuda and Pest with hot springs. You’d see theremen playing chess in the water.”

Holland’s collaborationist police force left theKorodis alone in Holland and later allowed themto come to Hungary because they were Hungar-ian citizens under the active protection of Hun-gary’s pro-Nazi government under Miklos Horthy.Hungarian Jews in Holland were even exemptedfrom wearing the yellow star.

The murder of Hungarian Jewry began inearnest in May 1944, under Horthy. BetweenMay 15 and July 9, about 430,000 HungarianJews were deported, though not from Bu-dapest.

Horthy defended the vast majority of Bu-dapest’s Jews from being murdered. Neverthe-

less, Horthy was a hardened anti-Semite whosepolicies of exclusion earned Hungary its reputa-tion as one of Europe’s most anti-Semitic na-tions. Years before the Nazis’ rise to power,Hungary under him became the first Europeancountry to implement a quota on Jews in highereducation and some professions.

His policies led thousands of Jews to leaveHungary — includingfor Holland. One ofthem was Korodi’s fa-ther, a retired army of-ficer who set up abusiness selling den-tures in the Nether-lands.

“When he came toHolland he saw it’s alovely place; there wasno anti-Semitism andafter World War I hemoved here,” Korodisaid of her father.

“Horthy protectedthe interests of allHungarians livingabroad — even theJews,” said WillyLindwer, the film-maker. A “convincedanti-Semite,” Horthy’s

“nationalist feelings were nevertheless stronger,”Lindwer added.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, a democracywhose relative tolerance had drawn Emmy Ko-rodi’s father to settle there before the Germansoccupied it in 1940, local police and volunteerswere hunting for Jews — including Hungarianones.

In 1942, Korodi recalls Dutch police arrestingher and her father briefly — until her mother gotthem freed on account of their Hungarian citizen-ship.

As the Netherlands became increas-ingly dangerous for the HungarianJews, their government told them itcould no longer vouch for their safety

in Holland and arranged special trains to bringthem back.

Hungarian Jewish men, including the oneswho returned from Holland, were drafted to spe-cial labor units supervised by police and the mil-itary. Many died from the grueling conditionssuffered by those drafted. Anyone caught dodg-ing the draft would be summarily shot, some-times with their relatives.

But at least their children and wives weresafe.

Living in Hungary also meant more and betterfood than in the Netherlands, where some22,000 people died of famine during World WarII.

“We were extremely happy because therewas food [in Budapest],” said Vera Gyergyoi-Rudnai, another person who survived the Holo-caust by fleeing from Holland to Hungary.

But the overthrow of Horthy in 1944 and his

replacement with the Nazi puppet government ofFerenc Szalasi of the Fascist Arrow Cross move-ment again threatened the survival of some360,000 Jews who were then living in Budapest.Notorious for their thirst for Jewish blood, Sza-lasi’s men murdered thousands of Jews in Bu-dapest.

Emmy Korodi in 1944 very nearly becameone of the victims of the Arrow Cross, who wouldmutilate Jews on the street and shoot them ingroups on the banks of the Danube river.

Running errands for her family because shewas blonde and did not look stereotypically Jew-ish, she was nonetheless arrested by thedreaded Arrow Cross, who said she had es-caped the ghetto.

Normally, any person facing the accusationwould be immediately killed.

Korodi remembers seeing the bodies of anentire Jewish family who had been shot by ArrowCross militiamen and then propped up on a parkbench, either as a perverse joke or an attempt toterrorize other victims.

Yet she and many of the Dutch refugees wereable to survive even that purge thanks to anothertwist in their fateful story: they obtained life-sav-

ing documents from Raoul Wallenberg, aSwedish diplomat who saved tens of thousandsof Hungarian Jews by issuing them visas of sortsto Sweden.

“I let them see the Wallenberg papers andthey let me go,” Korodi recalls in the documen-tary.

Of the 89 Jews who fled Holland to Hungary,73 survived World War II.

None of them remained in Hungary.To Lindwer, the story of the 89 Jews who fled

Holland to Hungary illustrates how the “sheercomplexity and unpredictability” of the Holocaust“defies both sweeping generalizations and pop-ular perceptions,” he said.

BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ, JTA

WHEN DUTCH JEWS FOUND HAVEN

IN AN ANTI-SEMITIC HUNGARY

A Jewish family reunited in Budapest in 1943 following the arrival there of family members

from Holland.

Anki Tauber is among 73 Jews from Holland who survived

the Holocaust in pro-Nazi Hungary.

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The American Society for Yad

Vashem was founded in 1981 by a

group of Holocaust survivors and led

by Eli Zborowski, z”l, for more than

thirty years. Our Legacy Circle is

named in memory of Eli Zborowski,

z”l, who was greatly respected for

his work and accomplishments on

behalf of Yad Vashem and is missed

by all who knew him.

The Eli Zborowski Legacy Circle is

open to anyone who includes Yad

Vashem in their estate plans. This in-

cludes a bequest by will, funding a

Charitable Remainder Trust or Charitable Gift Annuity, donat-

ing a paid-up life insurance policy or contributing an IRA or

retirement plan.*

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

future in which Holocaust remembrance and education will

serve as a powerful antidote to Holocaust denial, distortion,

hate and indifference.

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

The Talmud

For further information about the Eli Zborowski Legacy Cir-

cle, please contact

Robert Christopher Morton,

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

212-220-4304; [email protected]

*ASYV now has nearly 100 individuals and families who have joined the

Zborowski Legacy Circle.

ELI ZBOROWSKI LEGACY CIRCLE


Martyrdom & Resistance

Stanely H. Stone

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the American Society

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

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

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

american society for yad vashem - vol. 47-no. 2 issn 0892-1571 … · 2020. 12. 3. · forefront of...

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