vol. 45-no. 4 issn 0892-1571 march/april 2019-adar/nissan

IN THIS ISSUEFrench Jew risked her life spying against the Nazis in World War II..........2

Jewish survivors in Poland and Israel remember homecoming.................4

The final testimony..........................................................................................5

Stateless: when Germany deported thousands of Polish Jews..................6

“Fear is a luxury I could not afford”...............................................................7

Photo highlights from the ASYV YLA winter gala.......................................9In the shadow of death: the revival of the Jerusalem of Lithuania............10

Unlocking the mystery of Polish diplomats who rescued Jews................11

Why the U.S. bombed Auschwitz, but didn’t save the Jews......................12

Forgotten Holocaust history found in Dutch countryside home...............14

Vol. 45-No. 4 ISSN 0892-1571 March/April 2019-Adar/Nissan 5779

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEM

The Education Department of theAmerican Society for Yad

Vashem and the Young LeadershipAssociates held our 21st AnnualP r o f e s s i o n a l D e v e l o p m e n tConference on Holocaust Educationon March 24, 2019.

Our theme this year was Survival,Courage and Resilience: Lessons fromParkland. This year’s program providedan opportunity for educators to considerthe legacy of Holocaust education, paytribute to the victims and lost communi-ties, recognize the resilience andstrength of Holocaust survivors, andtransmit the lessons of this event topresent and future generations.Included in these considerations are thequestion of the relevancy of this eventand how to sustain this relevance to ourstudents with substance and meaning.

The conference’s impact continuesto be effective and dramatic: over its20-year history, the conference,through its thousands of participants,has touched more than 100,000 stu-dents. In 2019, over 180 educatorsattended the conference, which wasorganized by Dr. Marlene WarshawskiYahalom, director of education of theASYV. The conference represents acollaborative effort between the ASYV,the Association of Teachers of SocialStudies of the UFT, the Educators’Chapter of the UFT Jewish HeritageCommittee, and the School ofEducation of Manhattanville College.

For the conference and its othereducational works, the AmericanSociety received the 2015 President’sAward for its contributions to socialstudies education nationally. Theaward commends the AmericanSociety for implementing best educa-tional practices in using documents,inquiry, critical thinking and action forstudying the Holocaust.

The Conference is named inmemory of Barbara Gutfreund

Arfa, z’l, a long-standing supporter ofthe American Society. It is generouslysponsored by the Barbara GutfreundArfa Endowment Fund for HolocaustEducation, which was created byHarvey Arfa and Caroline and Morris

Massel as a tribute to Barbara Arfa’scommitment to Holocaust education.

The keynote speakers at the 2019Conference were Eyal Kaminka, PhD,and Ivy D. Schamis, MEd. Dr. EyalKaminka, director of the InternationalSchool for Holocaust Studies at YadVashem, strongly represented thework of Yad Vashem in education andits efforts to give the victims back aname, a face and a life story that wastaken away from them. He illuminatedthe value of educating current andfuture generations using technology,and the need to reform existing edu-

cational methods so that students canbetter understand the complexities ofthe Holocaust.

Ms. Schamis is a Holocaust educa-tor at the Marjory Stoneman DouglasHigh School in Parkland, Florida, anda survivor and witness to the eventsthat took place at that school in

February 2018. She shared herthoughts on connections between theHolocaust and the tragic events atParkland in February 2018, and howour responsibility as educatorsincludes teaching our students tobecome model citizens and advo-cates for social justice, and instillingvalues to emphasize their ultimateresponsibilities as people.

Other speakers were Ron Meier, theexecutive director of the ASYV;Caroline Massel, Executive Boardmember of Yad Vashem; and CarolynHerbst, the past president/chair of theATSS/UFT. Ron Meier spoke aboutthe Arfa Conference coming of age inits 21st year.

Caroline Arfa Massel shared touch-ing and poignant remarks about hermother Barbara, z”l, and how theConference has evolved to sustainBarbara’s vision of Holocaust remem-brance through education. CarolynHerbst gave greetings on behalf ofthe ATSS/UFT, and presented athoughtful discussion of her own con-nections between the events atSquirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, the events

at Parkland and the Holocaust. Sheemphasized how we must learn fromhistory and inspire our audiences tobe proactive to ensure the lessons ofthe Holocaust are instilled in our lives.

Dr. Marlene W. Yahalom, directorof education of the ASYV,

opened the program and remarkedhow the charge before us inHolocaust education is to convey theimpossible and the unimaginableevents that took place. Our aim is toempower students and educators todraw meaningful lessons from theseevents and to think about various per-spectives on the Holocaust that other-wise might go unnoticed. She brieflyreviewed the educational strategydeveloped by Yad Vashem to studythe Holocaust, and its connection toYad Vashem as an institution, to laythe groundwork for today’s speakersand workshop moderators.

The program also showcased thetraveling exhibit, “No Child’s Play.”This exhibit was developed, curatedand authenticated by Yad Vashem,and starkly portrays the experiencesof children during the Holocaust —their coping, resilience, tragedies andsurvival during the Holocaust. Theexhibit opens a window into the worldof children during the Shoah. It focus-es on toys, games, artwork, diariesand poems, highlighting some of thepersonal stories of the children andproviding a glimpse into their livesduring the Holocaust. The exhibitiontells the story of survival — the strug-gle of these children to hold on to life.

Our annual conference aims toenrich educators with additional knowl-edge, resources and perspectivesabout the Holocaust and how to bringthese important messages to theclassroom. The legacy of theHolocaust is acutely relevant to under-standing the resurgence of anti-Semitism and related issues that sig-nal us to be aware and diligent tostrongly address these matters andcollectively work toward “putting outthe flames” of hatred, bigotry and intol-erance to differences.

In conclusion, it is not enough tolearn from history or to simply remem-ber an event. It is imperative to chal-lenge, debate, discuss and teach sothis event remains a contemporaryissue.

(See photo highlights on page 8)

SURVIVAL, COURAGE AND RESILIENCE

Eyal Kaminka, PhD, director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem;

Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, director of education, ASYV; Caroline Massel, Executive Board mem-

ber, ASYV.

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2019 - Adar/Nissan 5779

BY JULIE WURTH, THE NEWS-GAZETTE

Marthe Cohn crouched in thebushes along the Swiss border

with Nazi Germany, too terrified tomove.

It was 1945, and the 24-year-oldFrench nurse was just yards from thecountry road that marked German ter-ritory, watching as two armed guardsmarched back and forth along a hugefield marking the only open stretch ofborder between the two countries.

Cohn, who is Jewish, wasn’t tryingto escape. Blond, blue-eyed and flu-ent in German, she had been recruit-ed as a spy by the French army.

She and her Swiss guide had hid forhours in the nearby forest, waitinguntil evening when Cohn could crawlthrough the field to the bushesunseen while the guards’ backs wereturned.

Up until that point she hadn’t hadtime to be afraid. She carried only asmall suitcase with a few clothes,German money and a card with aforged identity — but no compass,map or radio.

Now, hiding in the bushes, waitingfor the guards to separate again soshe could cross into Germany, shewas frozen with fear.

“I suddenly realized the immensityof what I was going to undertake,”Cohn, 98, recalled in a recent inter-view.

She sat there for several hours untilshe summoned the courage to walkout onto the road. As one guardturned and saw her — just 4-foot-11— she raised her right hand and said,“Heil Hitler.” He asked for her identifi-cation as she held her breath.

“He gave it back to me withoutquestion. I was now in Germany,” shesaid.

Cohn ended up providing crucialintelligence to Allied forces aboutGerman military operations, and laterwas honored as a hero by the Frenchgovernment with the Croix de Guerre,for distinguished service in the fightagainst the Axis, and the Médaille mil-itaire, for bravery in action against anenemy force.

Marthe Cohn was born in 1920 inthe French city of Metz in Alsace-Lorraine, near the German border.Her parents, Regine and FischelHuffnung, had grown up speakingGerman, as the area was underGermany’s control until World War I.Marthe spoke both French andGerman.

In her 2002 book Behind EnemyLines, she describes a happy child-hood growing up with two brothersand four sisters.

But there were disquieting signs.Her father was roughed up by police.As young as five, she heard thetaunts of “dirty Jew” from neighbor-hood children.

As Hitler rose to power, and Jewsbegan fleeing Germany, her familysheltered refugees as they made theirway to Palestine, America or othercountries.

Among them was a young boynamed Jacquie, the son of herfather’s cousin in Germany. He wassent to live with them at age threeafter Kristallnacht, when his homewas trashed by the Gestapo and hisfather narrowly escaped arrest.

In 1939, as the war heated up, theHuffnung family moved with otherJews to Poitiers, a university townabout 400 miles from the Germanborder.

But by the summer of 1940 theGermans had conquered much ofFrance, including Poitiers, and lifegrew difficult for the town’s Jews. Firstthey had to register and carry papersidentifying them as Jews. Their shopswere marked as Jewish busi-nesses. They were bannedfrom most professions. Thentheir property and businesseswere confiscated.

But the townspeople resistedin their own way.

Marthe and her sister,Stephanie, continued to helphundreds of Jews make theirway to a nearby town thatstraddled the line betweenGerman-occupied France andthe “free zone.” Farmers therehelped thousands of peopleescape by letting them crossinto unoccupied France ontheir property.

The secret police had beenwatching one farmer in particu-lar, and when they raided hishouse in July 1942, they founda note from Stephanie meant for oneof the refugees. They arrested her,hoping to get information on thefarmer. But she refused to implicatehim.

Stephanie, then 20, was sent toprison for a month and then to a

concentration camp on the edge ofthe city. She was a medical studentand cared for children in the camp.The family made arrangements forher to escape with the help of twoFrench guards. But Stephanierefused.

“When I reminded her that her moth-er needed her as much as the chil-dren, she answered me, ‘If I escape,you are all going to be arrested,’”Marthe said. “She was right.”

Marthe, who was the oldest childstill at home, decided the familyshould leave Poitiers so thatStephanie could escape and they’d allbe safe. But Stephanie died severalyears later in Auschwitz.

Marthe’s co-worker had made iden-tity cards for her family without the redstamp identifying them as Jews. Shehad initially declined, saying it wouldbe too dangerous for him.

“He said, ‘If I didn’t help you, I couldnot live with myself,’” she recalled.”‘IfI can save at least one family, I wantto do it.’”

Marthe arranged for her family to goto the south of France, where herbrothers were already living, with helpfrom her nursing school classmatesand her fiancé, medical studentJacques Delauney. A Resistancefighter, he was caught and executedby the Germans in October 1943.

The night before the family was toleave Poitiers, one of Marthe’s class-mates came to the house saying theGermans were arresting French Jewsand insisted they come to her house.Marthe was reluctant, but “she startedcrying and told me she was not goingto leave until we came to her house. Iknew she saved our lives.”

They made their way to a nearbytown, where a friend had arranged for

a priest to help them get to unoccu-pied France. They had to walk pastseveral French farms to the border,and Marthe worried that someonemight turn them in, as the Germansoffered enormous rewards for“denunciations.”

“I approached the first farm. An oldman got out of his chair and startedpraying for our safety. From farm tofarm until the line where we had tocross into non-occupied France, allthe people prayed for our safety.Nobody denounced us. It’s the mostbeautiful story I know from the war,”she said.

A few months after Paris was liber-ated in August 1944, Marthe joinedthe French army. She was initiallyassigned to be a social worker for aregiment headquartered in Alsace,near the German border. There shemet the commander, Col. PierreGeorges Fabien, who was famous forkilling the first German soldier inFrance in 1943. Once he discoveredshe spoke German, he asked if shewould consider working for the army’sintelligence service.

“I did not hesitate at all,” she said. “I

felt that if such an opportunity weregiven to me, I had no right to refuse it.So many French people had riskedtheir lives to save ours during the fiveyears of occupation, I felt that it wasabsolutely my duty to do as much as Icould to help our country.”

She had many close calls but wasnever captured. Initially, she

worked with the French army, interro-gating German prisoners of war, andwas able to provide valuable informa-tion about the Nazis’ plan of retreatfrom Alsace to Germany.

Her crossing at the Swiss border in1945 was her first trip alone intoGermany. She had two missions: toget information on the German mili-tary and find out how civilians werereacting to the war.

She posed as a German nursenamed Marthe Ulrich seeking word ofher fiancé, Hans, a German soldierbeing held as a prisoner of war inFrance. The real Hans had beencoerced into writing love letters andsigning a picture to “My BelovedMarthe,” which she carried. He waskept in isolation while she was inGermany to ensure he could notescape or warn others about her mis-sion.

She made her way to Freiburg anddeveloped relationships with civiliansand soldiers, learning about infantrynumbers and the regiment’s nextmoves. She regularly walked to afarm near the Swiss border to reportto her handlers.

Because of the Allied bombardment,there was no public transportation inthe daytime, so Germans walkedeverywhere in groups. One day shejoined a group that included an SSsoldier who had just come back fromthe eastern front. He said he’d beenwounded and was now beingassigned to the Siegfried line, anunderground fortress along theGerman border between Switzerlandand Belgium.

“He told us that he would smell aJew a mile away. But that morning hissmell was pretty bad,” she said.

He also talked about all the atroci-ties the soldiers had committed. Tokeep her cover, she pretended to beimpressed, like the other Germans.

At one point the man fainted andCohn tended to him. He was sothankful he gave her his phone num-ber and invited her to visit him at theSiegfried line.

Three weeks later, she heard onGerman radio that the Allied armieswere closing in on Freiburg. Shedecided to go to the Siegfried line tofind out what was happening there.

It was a 10-kilometer walk, andwhen she arrived the area was empty.She saw a few remaining Germansoldiers, who told her that section hadbeen evacuated. She hurried back toFreiburg to alert the Allies.

(Continued on page 5)

FRENCH JEW RISKED HER LIFE

SPYING AGAINST THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR II

Marthe Cohn in uniform in 1945.

March/April 2019 - Adar/Nissan 5779 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

“The opposite of love is not hate,

it’s indifference.”- Elie Wiesel

Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images. Used with permission.

We implore all leaders and citizens to refrain from

hateful discourse, and to reaffirm the common humanity

that binds us together.

Divisive anti-Semitic language and distorted Holocaust references voiced by politicians and

too many others are deeply troubling.

We have learned to be alert and responsive to indicators of anti-Semitism and racism, before

they deteriorate from alarming hate speech into destructive action.

Tragically, the world has recently witnessed horrible results of unbridled hatred,

from Pittsburgh to New Zealand.

We urge you to join us in this battle for humanity.

yadvashemusa.org

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON MARCH 25


“What! Still Alive?!” JewishSurvivors in Poland and IsraelRemember Homecoming.

By Monika Rice. SyracuseUniversity Press: Syracuse, NewYork, 2017. 254 pp. $60 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

First off, it is important to note that“What! Still Alive?!” Jewish

Survivors in Poland and IsraelRemember Homecoming by MonikaRice investigates a time period that tillnow has drawn little attention. Makingit the focus of an entire book has, asfar as this reviewer knows, neverbeen done. Thankfully, Rice does so,conscientiously documenting thatwhich surely needs to be part of theHolocaust record. For, indeed, all thatoccurred was a result of what theHolocaust fostered and emboldened.

At the same time, Rice, an excep-tionally adept researcher, also high-lights another aspect in this book,making her volume especiallythought-provoking and interesting tostudents of the Holocaust and historygenerally. For she emphasizes thefact that the historian-researchermust see beyond what is written andeven why something isn’t. Thus, utiliz-ing “two unique collections of [sur-vivor] testimonies that have not yetbeen investigated” — “testimoniescollected between the years 1944 and1950” in Poland “and currently stored

in the archives of the ŻydowskiInstytut Historyczny (ŻIH, JewishHistorical Institute) in Warsaw,” andsurvivor testimonies “depositedbetween 1955 to 1970” in Israel, to befound in the archives of Yad Vashem,Jerusalem — shemakes us realize thatjust where and whensurvivors submitted thenarratives of theirHolocaust experiencesmatters!

In sum, Rice learnsand shares with us

how about a few hun-dred thousand PolishJews returned toPoland after the war.Some were survivorsfrom camps, othersreturned from theforests where they hadfought or hidden, some returned fromthe Soviet Union. While there wereJews who came and then quickly leftPoland when they saw that there wasno one and nothing to return to(referred to as the “cemetery syn-drome”), there were returnees whoseriously considered staying inPoland and recreating their livesthere. But that idea was soon“quashed.” The “hostile” and “sur-prised” looks Jews got from a consid-erable number of Poles, the sarcasmthat greeted them, the shocking and

unexpected difficulties encountered atevery turn — all communicated thatthey weren’t welcome. For that mat-ter, even “friendly” Poles who hadactually helped Jews during the warencouraged them to leave . . . and

were often forced toleave themselves, fear-ing retribution for theiraltruistic acts from theirvery own countrymen!Then came actualpogroms, like the one inKielce on July 4, 1946.That frightening eventconvinced “approxi-mately 100,000 to120,000” survivors whohad returned that Polandwas no longer “home” tothem. In sum, in 1951,“when Poland closed itsborders to all emigra-

tion,” only “70,000 to 80,000 Jewsremained in Poland.”

A long with discovering all thisthrough her diligent work, Rice

also came to understand, particularlyin utilizing the aforementionedarchives — the one in Poland and theother in Israel — that in most casesmuch more was usually said by thesurvivors about their return to Polandin testimonies offered up once theywere in Israel. Why? The fact is thatthe collectors in Poland were moreinterested in finding out what hap-

pened to Jews while Germany occu-pied Poland and what they had expe-rienced during that time period. Fewquestions related to their return.Hence there was less talk about it bysurvivors, and little was volunteered.Another, and for the readers of M&Ran even more telling, point is thatmany survivors still in Poland weren’tcomfortable talking about what hadhappened upon their return there.However, once in Israel, unafraid,most did — and in an “emotionallyrevealing way.” Interestingly, too,while in Poland, when Jews talkedabout being helped by Poles, mostnoted it but did not elaborate on thepoint.

Nor is the above all Rice coulddeduce with her close and fascinatinginvestigation of these testimoniesthat, in fact, offer so much more thanthey initially appear to . . .

Needless to say, this volume isespecially timely now, what withPoland offended by any hint of “sym-pathy” its people might have had withthe Nazis!

On a more personal note, the Poleswere not the only ones “disappointed”with Jews — few as they were—returning home after the war.Lithuanians felt very much the same.

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

“WHAT! STILL ALIVE?!” JEWISH SURVIVORS

IN POLAND AND ISRAEL REMEMBER HOMECOMING

Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beateand Serge Klarsfeld.

By Beate Klarsfeld and SergeKlarsfeld; translated by Sam Taylor.Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York,N.Y., 2018. 464 pp. $15.50 hardcover.

REVIEWED BY PETER E. KORNBLUM,JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL

“Anti-Semitism,” Jean-PaulSartre wrote, “is not an opin-

ion. It is a crime.” Such a resoluteview, quoted by Beate and SergeKlarsfeld, has spurred their fearlesspursuit of Nazi war criminals for morethan fifty years. Recently translatedfrom the French by Sam Taylor,Hunting the Truth presents a rivetingrecord of their dedicated researchand action since the 1960s. Nowgrandparents at 79 and 82, Beate andSerge have continually sacrificedtheir own comfort and security tomake sure that “former Nazis realizethat they [are] not safe anymore.” TheKlarsfelds admit to reservations aboutcompleting this extensive autobio-graphical project. Indeed, in 2012they asked their editor to be releasedfrom the contract; they felt reluctant torevisit their past without possessinggreater “talent for storytelling.”However, with the memoir accom-plished, they have no regrets.Presented as alternating first-person

accounts, the resulting volume couldbenefit from further shaping and edit-ing. However, it will surely allow theirdescendants and readers to know “ifnot who [the Klarsfelds] were, at leastwhat [they] did.”

In fact, we do learn about the per-sonal background of the Klarsfelds.Beate, raised in Berlinas an EvangelicalLutheran, had lost herfaith in God by thetime she emigrated toFrance in 1960 at theage of 21. Serge,whose father perishedin Auschwitz in 1943,did not inherit a Jewishidentity through reli-gion or culture. Intruth, he is not “abeliever,” but his is aJewish identity definedby the “Holocaust andan unswerving attach-ment to the Jewishstate of Israel.” He says, “I do notwant to pass on my Judaism, since Imarried a non-Jew.” As both lookback on early formative influences,they give special mention to the WhiteRose movement led by the Catholicsiblings Hans and Sophie Scholl.Arrested for distributing anti-Nazileaflets at their university in Munich,

they and their associates were givenshow trials and then executed in1943. As Beate says, the Scholls“were driven to act, to give their lives,[and] I saw myself in them.” For hispart, Serge sees the Scholls’ publicdissent as “doomed to failure, but itproved to be a fertile failure,” which

forged “the existenceof another Germany.”To emulate theScholls’ heroic exam-ple, Beate adds, onemust recognize“before acting thatsuccess is not a cer-tainty.” Instead, theessential point is to“try courageously tofollow your con-science, with youreyes wide open.”

The Klarsfeldsmet on the

Paris Metro on May11, 1960, the very day

that the Israelis kidnapped AdolphEichmann in faraway Buenos Aires.The “epitome of the Nazi criminal,”Beate writes, is the one “who fled tothe ends of the earth to avoid cap-ture.” However, their eventual focuswould mainly be on those Nazi crimi-nals who had remained in Europe,especially those who had slyly reen-

tered German civil society after serv-ing the Nazi cause in France. TheKlarsfelds’ relentless pursuit of the“Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, inremote Bolivia, was distinctive butatypical. Their usual targets were theformer “desk killers”: ex-Nazi bureau-crats in occupied France, who hadbeen living “normal” German livessince the war’s conclusion. Decadesof methodical inquiry and pursuitemptied out a veritable barrel of hid-ing snakes, from Kurt Kiesinger toHerbert Hagen and JosefSchwammberger. In later years, theyhelped to unmask the Nazi past of for-mer UN Secretary General andAustrian presidential candidate KurtWaldheim. The couple’s way of “act-ing scandalously to make people seethe real scandal” was vividly dis-played in Beate’s public shaming ofsuper-assimilated ex-Nazi andGerman Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger in1968. Just minutes after this dramatic“slap,” Serge was “already firing off apress release“ that clearly “contextu-alized the act.” Added to their boldactions and publicity skills, the mem-oir reflects the couple’s tireless dedi-cation to detailed investigation andresearch. Serge, and later their son,Arno, both used their legal training inthis phase of the Klarsfelds’ work.


HUNTING THE TRUTH


(Continued from page 2)The townspeople, terrified of the

coming invasion, were locked in theirhouses. Cohn went to the empty mainavenue and waited for the Allied tanksto roll in, wondering how to signal thatshe was a friend, not an enemy.

“I had no documents to prove who Iwas. So I went in the middle of thestreet and raised my right arm as highas I could and made the V sign, thevictory sign of Winston Churchill,” shesaid, “hoping that they would under-stand.”

As usual, she was lucky. Thetank stopped. She asked for the

officer in charge. He was French.“I told him that I had very important

information and to take me to head-quarters immediately,” she said. “Hadit been an English-speaking Army, Idon’t know how I would have commu-nicated with them.”

At headquarters, she gave the sus-picious commander the phone num-ber of the intelligence service and“they assured him he could trust me,”she said.

After a patrol verified her report, shewas treated to a VIP dinner at Frenchheadquarters. The commander askedif she wanted to return to France, butshe declined, saying, “My mission ter-

minates the day of the armistice.”She asked for a bicycle and the next

day pedaled into southern Germany, amountainous area the Allied armieshad not yet reached. Riding down a hill,she saw a group of German militaryambulances on the side of the road.

She stopped to talk to them, and thecolonel in charge, a doctor, said theywere headed into Switzerland andthen Austria to avoid becomingPOWs. She told him she had leftFreiburg that morning to escape the

French army and complained that theGerman army wasn’t defending its cit-izens as it should. He reassured herthat the war wasn’t over.

“He told me exactly where the rem-nant of the German army was hiddenin ambush in the Black Forest, waiting

for the Allied armies,” she said. “Thatwas major, major information.”

She rode straight to the Swiss bor-der, where she crawled under barbedwire and handed a note with the infor-mation to a customs agent. The intel-

ligence was relayed to the Frencharmy.

A fter the war, Cohn worked as anurse with the French army in

Vietnam, moved back to Paris, then in1953 went to Geneva to live with hersister, Cecile, who had married aSwiss violinist.

She planned to go to England to jointhe World Health Organization, soshe started taking English lessons.Her tutor’s roommate was anAmerican medical student namedMajor L. Cohn. They soon began dat-ing, and in 1956, he brought her backto America. They got married in 1958in St. Louis, where he was a residentat Washington University and shewas in anesthesiology school.

They eventually landed inPittsburgh, where he earned a PhD inbiochemistry, and they workedtogether for many years on anesthe-sia research at the University ofPittsburgh hospital. She retired at 70,and the couple now lives in the LosAngeles area.

They have two sons: RemyBenjamin, who lives in San Pedro,California, and anesthesiologistStephan Jacques Cohn of Chicago,who is named for her sister,Stephanie, and her former fiancé.

FRENCH JEW RISKED HER LIFE

SPYING AGAINST THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR II

BY HARRIET SHERWOOD, THE GUARDIAN

The Last Survivors featuressome of the last people still

alive in the UK who can offer first-hand testimony of Holocaust horrors.

An old school photo slides from theprinter into Frank Bright’s hands. It isblack and white because it dates fromMay 1942. But since it was taken, tinyred and blue stickers have been scat-tered over the image.

Red for dead; blue for survived.Most are red.

Bright, now 90, points to a youngerversion of himself, a tall lad in the backrow. Some time after the photo wastaken, he and his mother arrived atAuschwitz. She was immediately sentto the gas chambers; his father hadalready been killed at the camp.

Bright spent years researching thefate of his classmates, cataloguingthem on a spreadsheet. Number 24:“She had ginger hair as far as I remem-ber … sent to Auschwitz in October1944, did not survive.” Number 9: “Avery pretty girl — I think I had a crushon her but from a distance. Sent toAuschwitz, did not survive.”

In the BBC documentary The LastSurvivors, Bright says: “I can’t reallycommunicate with others properly,because they don’t know what I’m

talking about. I mean how many peo-ple in England have their parentsmurdered, or see a gas chamber inaction? It has affected me, yes.”

He adds: “You’ve got to forget aboutit, you’ve got to wear blinkers.” If onegot too emotionally involved, “I’d besitting here crying my eyes out.”

The Last Survivors features a hand-

ful of people, now in their 80s and90s, who were children when theyexperienced the horrors of theHolocaust and the Nazi death camps.

There is no central record ofHolocaust survivors in the UK, andthe exact number of those still alive isunknown. But these are among the

last people who can provide firsthandtestimony of what happened.

Arthur Cary, the documentary’sdirector, said: “It’s a film that

will be very difficult to make in five or10 years from now, simply becausethere won’t be many survivors left,and those that are still here may notbe in a position to engage in the

same way.“I think it was a comfort to these

survivors to know that, after theywere gone, the film would endureand there would be an opportunityfor future generations to hear theirtestimonies.”

Some of those featured in The Last

Survivors did not talk about theirexperiences for many decades,believing it was better for them andtheir children to move on.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 93, whosurvived Auschwitz because sheplayed the cello in the camp orches-tra, says the Holocaust was “notfamily conversation…. It doesn’t fitinto normal life, and I wanted to havea normal life.”

Ivor Perl, 86, who returns to the siteof the Auschwitz camp for the firsttime in the documentary — a deeplypainful visit, in the company of hisdaughter and granddaughter — saidhe had been reluctant to tell his chil-dren what had happened. “But run-ning away from it wasn’t the rightthing either.” He adds: “I’m crying inmy heart every day.”

Many survivors simply wanted to geton with their lives after the Holocaust,said Cary. “But now they are thinkingof the past more than they ever didbefore. Knowing they may only havea few more years to live, they are in amore reflective space.

“It’s very traumatic for them to goover the past, but they also feel aresponsibility to do something withtheir status as survivors. And theworld is looking to them more andmore because we are conscious theywon’t be with us much longer.”

Parisians on the first Bastille Day under Nazi occupation, in 1940.

THE FINAL TESTIMONY: FILM TELLS STORIES

OF LAST HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Frank Bright, 90, is one of the Holocaust survivors interviewed in the documentary The LastSurvivors.


BY LAURA F. DEUTSCH, AISH.COM

My father’s cousin, Stan, wasborn in Poland in the early

1900s. Although he escaped Polandduring the war and survived theHolocaust, his family did not. Stan

rarely spoke of their deaths; it was toopainful. But sometimes he shared,and there was one story which alwaysmade him cry. It was about his moth-er and her belief that family together-ness would keep them safe.

In the early 1900s thousands ofPolish Jews moved to Germany andAustria. They hoped to escape thepoverty and anti-Semitism in Polandand create a better life. Stan’s mater-nal uncle, Avram, was one of thehopeful. He left for Germany around1915. Stan’s mother sometimes weptbecause she missed Avram so much.Even though she understood his rea-sons for moving away, she thoughthim foolish. “He should be here,” sheinsisted. “How can he raise his chil-dren among strangers? People aresafest when they stay close to homeand family.”

By 1938, approximately 50,000Polish Jews had moved to Germanyand 20,000 to Austria. Many of themhad lived abroad for decades andconsidered themselves more Germanthan Polish, but they did not holdGerman citizenship. After the annexa-tion of Austria in 1938, the Polish gov-ernment feared a mass return ofPolish Jews living abroad. It passed alaw which affected the passports ofpeople who had lived outside Polandfor over five years. These passportsnow needed a special endorsementstamp to stay valid. Failure to get thestamp by October 30th meant loss ofcitizenship and closed borders.

The German Reich began deportingthese “stateless” Jews on October 27,1938. During this “Polenaktion”(Polish Action), 17,000 Polish Jewswere arrested, detained, loaded ontotrains or marched to the Polish bor-der. In many instances, the govern-

ment deported only men because itbelieved women and children wouldfind a way to join theirhusbands/fathers. Sometimes, entirefamilies — including Avram’s — wereexpelled. Along the way, people diedfrom strain and illness; some commit-

ted suicide. When they reached theborder, the Germans made them turnover all money except for tenReichsmarks.

Polish border guards allowed thefirst group of Jews to come intoPoland. Thereafter, they refusedadmittance. When Avram, his wifeand three children were hustled off atrain and marched to the Polish bor-der, the guards denied them entry.Avram and his family — along withthe other Jews from his train — hur-ried away from the border on foot,bewildered and frightened. Germanpolice forced them to turn around.

And so it went, back and forth,Jews treated like tennis balls in

a macabre game. Polish guardsscreamed and brandished weapons;

German police fired shots in the airand laughed; barking dogs strainedagainst their leashes.

The Polish government finallyallowed the Jews to stay in severalborder towns in a bizarre “no man’sland.” Food and medical care werescarce. Thousands of displaced Jewssought shelter in stables and sheds.Avram and his family slept on the floorof an old mill amid flour sacks andbins. Jewish organizations in Polandset up refugee camps while the Polishgovernment tried to get Germany totake the Jews back.

“No one wants us,” Avram wroteStan’s mother in one of many letters.“We have nothing and don’t knowwhere to go.” Avram considered emi-gration, but it was a difficult and expen-sive process. Perhaps he should stayby the border in case the situation inGermany improved. Stan rememberedhis parents discussing ways to con-vince Avram to live with them. “My

mother was heartbroken to imagineher brother homeless and vulnerable.”

In November 1938, Poland agreedthe Jews could stay as Polish resi-dents. Avram and his family moved inwith Stan’s parents. Stan’s motherwas not blind to the existing dangers

in Poland and the rising threat inGermany. But she told Avram: “Nowyou will be safe. We are safe when

we are together.”Stan remembered Uncle Avram and

his family as being distinctly foreign.The children spoke Yiddish andGerman and understood only a smat-tering of Polish. They dressed differ-ently and seemed sophisticated.Cosmopolitan. Even Avram and hisPolish-born wife were disconnectedfrom local ways. Stan’s motherencouraged Avram to adapt, moveforward and rebuild a life in Poland.Inspired by her optimism, Avrambelieved he could start again.

All Polish Jews were gone from theborder towns by August 1939. And onSeptember 1, 1939, Germanyattacked Poland.

Most of us are familiar withKristallnacht in November

1938, which the Germans stated wasretribution for the murder of a German

diplomat in Paris. (HerschelGrynszpan, the young man responsi-ble, claimed he acted to protest thePolenaktion and his parents’ deporta-tion to a Polish border town.) But forStan, the October Polenaktion wasmore significant than the bombs andburnings of November. Although theGerman government had victimizedJews for years, the Polenaktion was aprecursor to sudden arrests,roundups, deportations, violence,seizure of property and countriesmaking clear Jews were not welcome.

Stan was forcibly separated from hisfamily during the war. He escapedPoland and later discovered that hisparents, Uncle Avram, and his wifeand children had been rounded up ona single day, shot and thrown into apit. What made Stan weep the mostwas remembering his mother’s opti-mism and joy in Avram’s return. Shedidn’t understand that “no man’s land”was not confined to the border andwould soon come to their front door.She didn’t realize the strength of fam-ily bonds was not enough to repel theevil.

Stan’s mother prayed for the familyto be together. And at the end —except for Stan — they were.

STATELESS: WHEN GERMANY DEPORTED

THOUSANDS OF POLISH JEWS IN 1938

A Jewish soup kitchen in the border town of Zbaszyn.

Polish Jews being deported from Germany.

In the no man’s land.


(Continued from page 4)

Well before the advent of digitalmedia, the Klarsfelds were

“poring over the microfiche everynight” and compiling “precisedossiers” to document the crimes oftheir Nazi targets.

The creation of the FFDJF, theAssociation of Sons and Daughters ofJews Deported from France, hasbeen the foundation for the Klarsfelds’life work. For Serge, the 1978 publica-tion of their book, Memorial to theJews Deported from France, is per-haps their most important act. Citingtheir rigor in documenting the identi-ties of the 80,000 Jews deported fromFrance, one French commentatorhonored the Klarsfelds as the “knights

of benign memory.” This book alsohelped them secure a lifetime annuityfor the orphans of the Jewish-Frenchdeportees. Their later work aided inthe conviction of the Holocaust denierRobert Faurisson, and the recentdefeat of the far-right presidentialcontender and National Front leader,Jean-Marie Le Pen. In appreciation oftheir effective support, FrenchPresident Emmanuel Macronresponded with a personal letter ofgratitude. Anti-Semitic hatred, inSartre’s formulation, “is first of all apassion.” By presenting their manyyears of struggle for a “great, justcause,” the Klarsfelds’ memoiraffirms a far higher and more endur-ing passion.

HUNTING THE TRUTH

HANAN GREENWOOD, AP

Germany has agreed to one-timepayments for survivors, primari-

ly Jews, who were evacuated fromNazi Germany as children, many ofwhom never saw their parents again,according to the organization thatnegotiates compensation with theGerman government.

The New York–based Conferenceon Jewish Material Claims AgainstGermany said the government hadagreed to payments of 2,500 euros($2,800) to those still alive fromamong the 10,000 people who fled onthe so-called Kindertransport.

About 1,000 survivors are thought tobe alive today, with about half living inBritain, and the payment is seen as a“symbolic recognition of their suffer-ing,” Claims Conference negotiatorGreg Schneider said.

“In almost all the cases the parentswho remained were killed in concen-tration camps in the Holocaust, andthey have tremendous psychologicalissues,” Schneider told TheAssociated Press.

Following the Nazis’ anti-Jewishpogrom in November 1938 known asKristallnacht, the British governmentagreed to allow an unspecified num-ber of Jewish children as refugeesfrom Nazi Germany or territories ithad annexed.

Jewish groups inside Nazi Germanyplanned the transports, and the first

arrived in Harwich on December 2,1938. The last transport fromGermany left September 1, 1939 —the day World War II broke out withthe Nazi invasion of Poland — andthe final transport from continentalEurope left the Netherlands on May14, 1940, the same day Dutch forcessurrendered to the Nazis.

In all, about 10,000 children fromGermany, Austria, Czechoslovakia andPoland were taken to Britain, about7,500 of whom were Jewish, accordingto the museum. About half were placedwith foster families, while the othersstayed in hostels, schools or farms.

In addition to those who remained inBritain, many resettled in the U.S.,Israel, Canada, Australia and else-where, Schneider said.

Today, survivors are at least intheir 80s, and most continue to

look back on their escape as thedefining moment of their lives, as theywere put alone onto trains into theunknown, saying goodbye to parentsand siblings often for the last time,Schneider said.

“This money is acknowledgmentthat this was a traumatic, horriblething that happened to them,” he said.

Some survivors already receivedsmall payments in the 1950s, but thatwill not bar them from receiving thenew benefit, the Claims Conferencesaid.

The Claims Conference carries outcontinuous negotiations withGermany to expand the number ofpeople eligible for compensation.

Since 1952, the German governmenthas paid more than $80 billion to indi-viduals for suffering and losses result-ing from persecution by the Nazis.

In 2019, the Claims Conference willdistribute approximately $350 millionin direct compensation to more than60,000 survivors in 83 countries, theorganization says. In addition, it willprovide some $550 million in grants tosocial service agencies that providehome care, food, medicine and otherservices for Holocaust survivors.

GERMANY TO COMPENSATE

KINDERTRANSPORT REFUGEES

A commemorative statue in memory of the

Kindertransport near Berlin’s Friedrichstrassetrain station.

BY RACHELLE BERGSTEIN, NEW YORK POST

Hanni Weissenberg sat alone,stone still, as the Gestapo

pounded on the door.On that cold morning in 1943, the

German police had all but emptied thebuilding of Jews while 18-year-oldHanni was at the doctor’s with a badlyinjured finger. By the time shereturned, the family she’d been livingwith — friends of her late parents,who had been sickly — were gone.

Now the Gestapo was back. Hanniheld her breath, gripped the edge ofthe table and tried to block out thenoise.

“Open up, open up,” they persisted.But Hanni — “a rather shy, obedientyoung girl,” she tells The Post with thehelp of a German translator —refused. “It was very difficult not to fol-low that order,” she remembers. “Onehas to really hold on, in order not tobe obedient when such a strongdemand comes.”

Eventually, the officers left. Hannirealized there was only one way toavoid getting captured and deported:she had to run.

But she didn’t go far. In fact, shenever left Berlin. As shown in TheInvisibles, she and 1,500 otherGerman Jews survived the Nazis’annihilation without leaving Berlin.

Hanni — now Hanni Levy, a 94-year-old great-grandmother living inParis — is one of four formerBerliners who share their extraordi-nary stories in this 2017 German film,which cuts between traditional docu-mentary-style interviews and drama-tized scenes of their lives.

After the Gestapo stopped theirdoor-pounding and moved on, Levycowered in the building’s stairwell.Then — with nothing but her purse inhand and with the mandatory yellowStar of David sewn to her coat — sheran to the nearest subway stop, andshowed up quavering at the doorstepof some non-Jewish friends.

It was the lady of the house, who’d

known Levy’s mother, who gave herthe simple idea that ultimately savedher life.

“She made me an appointment witha hairdresser,” says Levy. After alabor-intensive, three-day process,the once dark-haired Levy looked inthe mirror and saw herself as a styl-ish, corn silk blonde.

To disguise her identity even further,she renamed herself HanneloreWinkler. “I said to myself, ‘I reallyhave to change now,’” Levy says, dur-ing a visit to New York. “I’m a differentperson. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

Part of that transformation, shesays, was deliberately letting go ofher fear.

“Fear is a luxury I could notafford,” the auburn-haired

Levy says today, her eyes vividbehind her glasses. “Of course, I wasworried that someone would still rec-ognize me. But if you are scared, youbecome insecure, and that is reallymore dangerous than anything.”

Over the next year, Levy stayed witha few families in the neighborhood,helping out with their children anddoing whatever odd jobs she couldhandle with her worsening finger (“Iwouldn’t go to a doctor because theywould take down your personal data,”she says, gesturing with the missingtip of the pointer of her right hand).She let people believe that she, likemany German civilians at the time,had lost her home in a bombing.

When she wasn’t working, sheloved going to the movies, “because itwas dark, it felt protected.” There, shemet a handsome young man namedOscar Kolzer, who’d just been draftedinto the army. Before he left, he askedLevy for a favor: Would she pleasekeep visiting his mom, who sold tick-ets at the theater?

Levy said she would, and their rela-tionship eventually became much likethat of mother-and-daughter.

After the Allies took Berlin, she andLevy, then 22, moved to Paris togeth-er.

“It took me a long time to feel safe,”says Levy, admitting she found it chal-lenging to adjust to her new home.She didn’t speak French at first, andGerman was treated as the hostilelanguage of the occupiers. She wasalso surprisingly naïve for her age,she says: “I hadn’t lived. I had onlysurvived.”

But in time, she moved on, marrieda Frenchman, had two children andreturned to Berlin — “home” — when-ever she could.

Levy says she’s happy that TheInvisibles pays homage to thosewhom she calls the “quiet heroes”: theGermans who risked their lives tohelp out desperate Jews with food,money, jobs and shelter.

“It was very difficult,” she says of herremarkable journey. “But the will tolive is stronger than anything else.”

“FEAR IS A LUXURY

I COULD NOT AFFORD”

Hanni Levy as a young woman.


PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 21ST ANNUAL BARBARA

GUTFREUND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE

ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

Eyal Kaminka, Ph.D, Director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem;

Ivy Schamis, educator from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD,

director of education, ASYV; Harvey Arfa; Caroline Herbst, ATSS/UFT; Caroline Massel,

Executive board member, ASYV; Ronald Meier, PhD, executive director of ASYV.

Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, director of education, ASYV; Eyal Kaminka, PhD, director of the

International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, holding the ATSS/UFT President’s

Award for contributions to social studies education.

Learning in progress.

Captivated audience.


PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ASYVYOUNG LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATES WINTER GALA

Nearly 400 young professionals came together for the Young

Leadership Associates 2019 Winter Gala on February 21st at the

Prince George Ballroom in New York City. The event was chaired by

Jonathan Fine, Rachel Krakowski and Elizabeth Savetsky. The YLA is

committed to spreading awareness and educating about the horrors

of the Holocaust while working to ensure that the memories of both

the victims and the survivors are not forgotten. But Yad Vashem is not

only about the past, but also shaping the future. So at this year’s YLA

Gala, we celebrated the lives the survivors rebuilt as well as the gen-

erations that will continue their legacy. We reaffirmed our commitment

to stand up to hate and anti-Semitism and proudly let the world know

that #WeAreStillHere.

ASYV Chairman Lenny Wilf with the 2019 YLA Gala team.

Barry Levine (ASYV board member), Jacqueline Bloom (YLA board member), and Erica & Mike

Distenfeld (YLA board members).

Shaya Ben Yehuda (director of International Relations Division, Yad Vashem) with Jonathan

Friedman and Sam Friedman (YLA board members).

Siggy Flicker (second from left) with representatives from Israel’s Mission to the United Nations.


BY GIL WEISSBLEI, THE LIBRARIANS

The wanderings of the Jewishpeople, especially during thelast century, have brought

some incredible life stories to theNational Library in Jerusalem, pack-aged in very unusual ways. Oneexample is this suitcase, donated tothe National Library of Israel in May1994, by the famous Yiddish poet,Avraham Sutzkever.

A closer look at this suitcase revealsthat it is not a typical piece of luggage.It was not manufactured in a factoryor even a proper workshop and it cer-tainly wasn’t purchased in a fancydepartment store. The suitcase has arather crude appearance, but thestory behind it makes up for it all.

This suitcase was made in theNaroch forest in Belarus, not far fromthe border of Lithuania, exactly 50years before it was deposited in theNational Library of Israel inJerusalem. It was made of tin frag-ments from the wings of a crashedairplane and contained, among otherarchival materials, a small but aston-ishing collection of photographssaved from the Vilna ghetto

The failure of the German Blitzkriegagainst the Soviet Union and the cre-ation of a permanent state of war cre-ated a serious problem for the Nazieconomy, including a deficit in man-power. The thousands of Jews wholived in the Vilna ghetto, and in other

ghettos in Lithuania, were an impor-tant source of labor for the Germanoccupiers. The Nazi regime electednot to murder the remaining Jews inthe area and to instead use them asslaves to bolster the dwindling workforce. This is how the Jews of theVilna ghetto gained some semblance

of stability and peace from the start of1942 into the spring of 1943. Duringthis time there were no mass killings,though numerous murders did takeplace. Most of the Jews worked invarious factories and workshops inand around the ghetto. The internal

organization of the ghetto becamevery developed as cultural, educa-tional, health and welfare institutionswere established.

Avraham Sutzkever, then a 28-year-old poet, had an important

role in the cultural activity of the ghet-to. “As long as I live a poet’s life in this

valley of death,” he wrote later, “I shallbe redeemed from my misery.”

Sutzkever became the artistic direc-tor of the ghetto theater, translatingand adapting various pieces for thestage, and his poetry, written in theghetto, was a central part of the pop-

ular reading evenings which tookplace there. Cultural activity flour-ished among the residents of theVilna ghetto, with the establishment ofschools, a theater, Yiddish andHebrew choirs, an orchestra, opera,ballet, a children’s puppet theatre, anactive library, a newspaper, and evensports competitions. Lectures and lit-erary events were also a commonoccurrence. “The Jerusalem ofLithuania,” one of the most importantJewish communities in Europe, wasrevived under the shadow of death.

Sutzkever wasn’t just creating cul-ture in the ghetto; he was activelysaving significant cultural treasuresfrom the Nazis. Along with his closefriend, the poet ShmerkeKaczerginski, he joined the “PaperBrigade,” headed by ZeligKalmanowitz, Dr. Hermann Kruk andthe famous librarian Chaikel Lunski.The story of this group dedicated tothe preservation of local Jewish cul-ture was wonderfully described byDavid Fishman in his research, TheBook Smugglers.

Within the various materialsSutzkever managed to gather, thephotographs are especially interest-ing. Only a few dozen survived andreached us at the Library, but they allwonderfully reflect the spirit of theJews in the Vilna ghetto during thattime. Surprisingly, some of the resi-dents of the Vilna ghetto managed todabble in photography. Based on the


IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH:

THE REVIVAL OF THE JERUSALEM OF LITHUANIA

BY DAMIEN MCGUINNESS, BBC NEWS

It was big-budget, American TVstarring Meryl Streep. And in

1979 the miniseries Holocaust trans-formed how Germans saw their ownhistory.

It brought the horrors of Nazi crimesinto people’s living rooms and turnedthe word “Holocaust” into a common-ly used term in the German language.

In March the drama was shownagain on German TV — and it is asrelevant as ever.

A third of West Germany’s popula-tion, some 20 million people, watchedat least some of the four-part series in1979.

Holocaust tells the story of a fiction-al Jewish family — Josef Weiss, asuccessful Berlin doctor, and his wifeand children — charting their tragicjourney from bourgeois affluence tothe gas chambers.

A parallel story focuses on Erik Dorf,an unemployed lawyer, who is initiallyapolitical, but gets a job with Hitler’sSS and becomes part of the Nazikilling machine.

The series sparked a nationaldebate. Surveys show that 86% of

viewers discussed the Holocaust withfriends or family after watching theprogram.

Ten thousand Germans called thebroadcaster WDR afterwards, manyin tears, to express their shock and

shame. In some cases former sol-diers got in touch to confirm thedetails of Nazi crimes.

This was the first time that a majormainstream drama had portrayed thelives of Hitler’s victims.

Until then, serious documentaries

had dealt with facts and figures, andduring the 1960s the debate focusedprimarily on perpetrators — sparkedin part by the Auschwitz trials, held inFrankfurt between 1963 and 1965.

“Survivors came to the Auschwitz

trials, and journalists didn’t even inter-view them. No one cared about thevictims. That changed with (the TVseries) Holocaust,” says historianProfessor Frank Bösch.

He has written a book (Zeitenwende1979) about key events of 1979 that

transformed the world. He believesthis TV drama is one of them, along-side the Iranian Revolution and theelection of Margaret Thatcher.

The Holocaust miniseries tellsemotional, personal stories of

everyday people — easy for viewersto identify with and accessible tomainstream society.

Unusually, perpetrators are notdemonized as freakishly diabolicalsadists, but appear as ordinaryGermans, cogs in the Nazi machine,who contributed to the Holocaustthrough small everyday acts of cruel-ty or cowardice.

The series was controversial andalmost never came to Germany. Itwas made by the American TV stationNBC and in 1978 watched by 120 mil-lion Americans.

But German commentatorsslammed the series, calling it a kitsch,melodramatic soap opera that trivial-ized the Shoah (Holocaust).

Left-wingers accused US broad-casters of cynically exploiting Nazicrimes for the sake of TV ratings.Right-wing nationalists complainedthat German war victims were beingforgotten.


Wolf Durmashkin with the ghetto symphonic orchestra, Vilna ghetto, September 5th, 1942.

HOW A US TV SERIES CHANGED GERMANY

Actor James Woods (r.) played Jewish artist Karl Weiss, married to Inga.


Enlarged Shoah Heritage Campusto include millions of documents andartifacts, from a toddler’s shoemarked with the day she died to aportrait of a Nazi painted on a Torahscroll.

BY AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

During a behind-the-scenes tourof Yad Vashem’s new curatorial

center this winter, the IsraelHolocaust museum’s Sarah Shor heldup a petite child’s shoe and pointed toa pair of knitted gloves. Shor told thegroup of Jewish journalists seated inthe glass-walled room that they hadonce belonged to two-year-old HindaCohen, who was born to Tzipporahand Dov Cohen in the Kovno ghetto inLithuania on January 18, 1942.

The table was littered with dozens ofartifacts, from a portrait of a Nazi sol-

dier painted on a Torah scroll to thestriped pajamas of a camp intern.Every item had a story behind it,attesting to the life of the formerowner. But there are few things more

chilling than seeing the physical rem-nants of a life cut too short: bluegloves with a purple design worked inby the hands of a loving mother, andwell-polished minuscule shoes.

Shor turned the shoe over andshowed the journalists the dateetched on its sole: March 27, 1944.That morning, while her parents wereslaving at the Aleksotas forced laborcamp, the Nazi guards enacted a“Children’s Aktion” at the ghetto andtook Hinda, along with all the childrenthey could find.

Father Dov etched the date into theshoe, found under her bed with scantfew other items, and vowed to keep ituntil his death, a promise he kept.

On Holocaust RemembranceDay, the day commemorating

the loss of six million Jews in theHolocaust, Israel’s Yad Vashem brokeground on a new state-of-the-art sub-

terranean center to house and con-serve millions of artifacts such asthese. The more than 210 million doc-uments, 500,000 photographs,131,000 survivor testimonies, 32,400

artifacts and 11,500 works of art inYad Vashem’s collections to date bearwitness to the lives of those lost to theNazis’ genocide, not only theirdeaths.

“The German Nazis were deter-mined not only to annihilate theJewish people, but also to obliteratetheir identity, memory, culture andheritage,” said Yad Vashem ChairmanAvner Shalev in a press release.

“For many, all that remains is atreasured work of art, a personal arti-fact that survived with them, a photo-graph kept close to their person, adiary or a note. By preserving theseprecious items — that are of greatimportance not only to the Jewishpeople, but also to humanity as awhole — and revealing them to thepublic, they will act as the voice of thevictims and the survivors, and serveas an everlasting memory.”

Yad Vashem, the World HolocaustRemembrance Center, was foundedin 1953 and immediately began gath-ering such artifacts. Today, its store-rooms are overflowing, and conserva-tionist Shor told the journalists thather team does not have the resourcesto properly treat items on site.

This overflow is in part due to a wild-ly successful eight-year campaign,“Gathering the Fragments,” whichurges the public to deposit Holocaust-related artifacts with the museum. Thegranddaughter of Tzipporah and Dovhearkened to the call and brought theetched shoe and pair of gloves to themuseum as part of this campaign.

According to a Yad Vashem pressrelease, the new structure will coveran area of 5,880 square meters and“allow for optimal control and supervi-sion of the conservation climaterequired for preservation of the arti-facts.”

Other benefits of the planned cen-ter include the ability to “streamline

the process of receiving, preservingand cataloguing items collected byYad Vashem, with the express goalof making them accessible to thepublic.”

According to a Yad Vashemspokesman, there are other

upgrades planned for the Mount ofRemembrance, including a renova-tion of its auditorium and a newgallery for families and children.

The campus-wide construction andfacelift is meant to be completed bythe summer of 2021. According toYad Vashem, funding has beensecured already for much of the proj-ect. The institute is confident it willfind the rest of the needed money.

“The Holocaust is a very particularstory with a deep universal meaning,”remarked Shalev to the group of jour-nalists this winter.

There are few symbols more univer-sal than the little shoe that oncebelonged to Hinda Cohen.

YAD VASHEM BROKE GROUND ON NEW ARTIFACTS

CENTER ON HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

BY ITAMAR EICHNER, YNETNEWS

After 77 years, the discovery ofa small note attached to a

Purim basket from the Warsaw ghet-to in 1942 illustrates the sacrificemade by Jews who chose to observethe religious holidays, even as theirloved ones were starving to death infront of their eyes.

A Polish man stumbled upon thenote by mistake, but did not fullyunderstand its significance. Nearly80 years later, his son contacted theShem Olam Faith & the HolocaustInstitute, where it was recognized forits importance as a glimpse of Jewishlife under the Nazis.

The note attached to the Purimbasket — a holiday in which gift-giv-ing is traditional — is also evidenceof the unimaginable reality of life inthe ghetto. The envelope bears the

stamp of “the companythat supplies theJewish quarter inWarsaw” and a Star ofDavid, and underneathin Hebrew is printed“Purim 1942.”

The envelope alsoincludes an instructionto “check the weight”of the small 100g par-cel of ginger cookieswithin, implying that itwas not to exceed thedaily limit of caloriesthat the Nazis allowedeach Jew in the ghet-to.

T he Jews in theghettos did

tough physical labor under extremeconditions on 500 calories per a day;every loaf of bread or bowl of soup

was essential to their physical sur-vival. (According to British govern-ment guidelines, men should havean intake of around 2,500 calories

per day, while women should con-sume around 2,000 calories daily.)

Shem Olam chief RabbiAvraham Krieger calls the dis-

covery unique, as it “reflects a will-ingness by the Jews in the ghetto toobserve their traditions despite thechaos and hunger that were a part oftheir everyday life, and despite therisk of dying for observing a holidaytradition.”

Krieger added: “The Purim holidayhad a strong meaning for the Jews inthe ghetto because they saw Hitleras the “Haman” of their time, andprayed for his defeat.

“The amount of cookies was small,but it was so much more. had a muchbigger spiritual meaning. It was asymbol of the Jews’ battle to pre-serve their spirituality and their faith,as well as a human, social frame-work to keep their lives together.”

A RARE MOMENT OF PURIM SWEETNESS IN THE WARSAW GHETTO

The note attached to the Purim basket.

A shoe belonging to two-year-old Hinda Cohen, who was killed at Auschwitz on March 27, 1944.

Her father Dov etched the date on the sole upon discovering his daughter was taken during a

“Children’s Aktion.”

Yad Vashem’s Sarah Shor shows a group of

journalists the “canvas” for the portrait of a

Nazi soldier — a Torah scroll — at Yad

Vashem in Jerusalem.


BY RAFAEL MEDOFF, HNN

Seventy-five years ago — onMarch 19, 1944 — German

troops marched into Hungary. Thecountry’s 800,000 Jews, the lastmajor Jewish community to haveeluded the raging Holocaust, now laywithin Hitler’s grasp.

The railway lines and bridgesacross which Hungary’s Jews wouldbe deported to the Auschwitz deathcamp in Poland were within range ofAmerican bombers. So were the gaschambers and crematoria in the campitself. The refusal of the Rooseveltadministration to drop bombs onthose targets is one of the most well-known and troubling chapters in thehistory of international responses tothe Holocaust.

What few realize today is that U.S.planes actually did bomb part ofAuschwitz — but they left the mass-murder machinery, and the railwaysleading to it, untouched. Why?

The same week that the Germansoccupied Hungary, two Jewish prison-ers in Auschwitz were in the finalstages of plotting to escape, some-thing that only a tiny handful ofinmates had ever accomplished.Their goal was to alert the free worldthat the gas chambers of Auschwitzwere being readied for the Jews ofHungary. They hoped these revela-tions would prompt the Allies to inter-vene.

On April 7, 1944, Rudolf Vrba, 19,and Alfred Wetzler, 25, slipped awayfrom their slave labor battalion andhid in a hollowed-out woodpile nearthe edge of the camp. On the adviceof a Soviet POW, the fugitives sprin-kled the area with tobacco and gaso-line, which confused the Germandogs that were used to search forthem.

After three days, Vrba and Wetzleremerged from their hiding place andbegan an eleven-day, 80-mile trek toneighboring Slovakia. There they metwith Jewish leaders and dictated a30-page report that came to be knownas the “Auschwitz Protocols.” Itincluded details of the mass-murderprocess, maps that pinpointed thelocation of the gas chambers and cre-matoria, and warnings of the impend-ing slaughter of Hungary’s Jews.“One million Hungarian [Jews] aregoing to die,” Vrba told them.“Auschwitz is ready for them. But ifyou tell them now, they will rebel.They will never go to the ovens.”

WHAT FDR KNEW, AND WHEN

The fate of Hungarian Jewryunfolded before the eyes of the

world. Unlike previous phases of theHolocaust, which the Germans par-tially succeeded in hiding from theinternational community, what hap-pened in Hungary was no secret.

A common refrain among defendersof President Franklin D. Roosevelt’sresponse to the Holocaust is the claimthat he and his administration learnedabout the deportations from Hungarytoo late to do much about it. Forexample, a recent essay in The DailyBeast, by journalist Jack Schwartz,claimed that “The Allies learned of theHungarian deportations and theirlethal destination in late June” — thatis, not until five weeks after the depor-tations commenced.

But in fact, Washington knew whatwas coming. At a March 24, 1944,press conference, FDR, after first dis-cussing Philippine independence,farm machinery shipments, and warcrimes in Asia, acknowledged that

Hungary’s Jews “are now threatenedwith annihilation” because theGermans were planning “the deporta-tion of Jews to their death in Poland.”The president blurred the issue bycoupling it with a remark about thedanger that “Norwegians and French”might be deported “to their death inGermany,” but the key point is clear: Ifwe wonder “what did they know, andwhen did they know it,” the answerwith regard to Hungary is that theRoosevelt administration knew plenty,and knew it early.

The Holocaust in Hungary waswidely reported, and often in timelyfashion, by the American news media(although it was not given the promi-nence it deserved). For example, onMay 10, nine days before the deporta-tions to Auschwitz began, the NewYork Times quoted a European diplo-mat warning that the Germans werepreparing “huge gas chambers inwhich the one million Hungarian Jewsare to be exterminated in the samefashion as were the Jews of Poland.”

Likewise, on May 18, the Timesreported that “a program of massextermination of Jews in Hungary”was under way, with the first 80,000“sent to murder camps in Poland.”The notion that the Roosevelt admin-istration only learned about all this in

“late June” is preposterous.

APPEALS FOR BOMBING

Meanwhile, copies of theAuschwitz escapees’ report

reached rescue activists in Slovakiaand Switzerland. Those activists thenauthored an appeal to the Rooseveltadministration to bomb “vital sectionsof these [railway] lines, especiallybridges” between Hungary andAuschwitz, “as the only possiblemeans of slowing down or stoppingfuture deportations.” The pleareached Washington in June.

Numerous similar appeals forbombing the gas chambers, or the raillines and bridges leading to them,were sent to U.S. officials by

American Jewish organizationsthroughout the spring, summer andfall of 1944.

Assistant Secretary of War JohnMcCloy was designated to reply to therequests. He wrote that the bombingidea was “impracticable” because itwould require “diversion of consider-able air support essential to the suc-cess of our forces now engaged indecisive operations.” He also claimedthe War Department’s position wasbased on “a study” of the issue. Butno evidence of such a study has everbeen found by researchers.

In reality, McCloy’s position wasbased on the Roosevelt administra-tion’s standing policy that militaryresources should not be used for “res-cuing victims of enemy oppression.”

The aforementioned Daily Beastarticle claimed that the administra-tion’s rejection of the bombingrequests “reflected military reality asperceived by a defense establishmentwith stretched resources trying tomeet the diverse demands of an all-encompassing war.”

That’s nonsense. The “military reali-ty” was that at the same time McCloywas saying Auschwitz could not bebombed, Auschwitz was beingbombed. Not the part of Auschwitzwhere the gas chambers and crema-

toria were situated, but rather the partwhere slave laborers were working inGerman oil factories.

On August 20, a squadron of 127U.S. bombers, accompanied by 100Mustangs piloted by the all-African-American unit known as theTuskegee Airmen, struck the facto-ries, less than five miles from the partof the camp where the mass-murdermachinery was located.

WHAT ELIE WIESEL SAW

Future Nobel laureate ElieWiesel, then age 16, was a

slave laborer in that section of thehuge Auschwitz complex. He was aneyewitness to the August 20 bombingraid. Many years later, in his best-sell-ing book Night, Wiesel wrote: “If abomb had fallen on the blocks [theprisoners’ barracks], it alone wouldhave claimed hundreds of victims onthe spot. But we were no longer afraidof death; at any rate, not of that death.Every bomb that exploded filled uswith joy and gave us new confidencein life. The raid lasted over an hour. Ifit could only have lasted ten times tenhours!”

There were additional Allied bomb-ing raids on the Auschwitz oil factoriesthroughout the autumn. American andBritish planes also flew overAuschwitz in August and September,when they air-dropped supplies to thePolish Home Army forces that werefighting the Germans in Warsaw.They flew that route twenty-two times,yet not once were they given theorder to drop a few bombs on thedeath camp or its transportationroutes.

Adding insult to inaccuracy, JackSchwartz claimed (in The DailyBeast) that “in Palestine, the JewishAgency [the Jewish community’s self-governing body] overwhelminglyopposed the bombing [of Auschwitz]on the grounds that it would likely takeJewish lives,” and “American Jewishleaders were equally divided over theissue, which led to recriminations dur-ing and after the war.”

Wrong, and wrong again. The min-utes of Jewish Agency leadershipmeetings show they opposed bomb-ing for a period of barely two weeks,and even then only because they mis-takenly thought Auschwitz was alabor camp. Then they received theVrba-Wetzler “Auschwitz Protocols,”revealing the true nature of the camp.At that point, Jewish Agency repre-sentatives in Washington, London,Cairo, Geneva, Budapest andJerusalem repeatedly lobbied U.S.,British and Soviet officials to bombAuschwitz and the routes leading to it.

As for American Jewish leaders, agrand total of one of them urged theAllies to use ground troops againstAuschwitz instead of air raids. Bycontrast, pleas in support of bombing


WHY THE U.S. BOMBED AUSCHWITZ,

BUT DIDN’T SAVE THE JEWS

Arrival of a transport of prisoners from the Carpathians at the main ramp at Auschwitz.


(Continued from page 10)photographs, we can assume thatnone of them were professional pho-tographers and that these imageswere likely developed in difficult con-ditions.

There are not many known pho-tographs of the Vilna ghetto.

Holding a camera or dealing with pho-tography was, of course, strictly for-bidden by the Nazis. The photo-graphs from the Sutzkever collectionare, therefore, a rare documentationof everyday life in the ghetto asshown by some of its inmates, whowere likely amateur photographers.Most of these pictures are anony-mous. We have found Sutzkever’sinscription, with the photographer’sname — B. Kaczerginsky — on theback of only one of the photos. Theinscription likely referred to BerlKaczerginsky, one of the Jewishpolicemen of the ghetto, who owned acamera. Many of the pictures werelikely taken by the same policemen,as a relatively large number of photosfeature the ghetto police and the headof the ghetto, Jacob Gens.

Some of those photographs werestaged, and it is quite clear that thesubjects of the photos were verymuch aware of the camera in front ofthem. In some pictures, they evenlook directly into the camera lens. Aparade of the ghetto gate guard, agroup photograph of the guards andphotographs of their commander,Moishe Levas, give us a glimpse ofone of the most hated institutionsamong the ghetto inmates. On theother hand, the ghetto guards werethose who enabled Sutzkever and hiscolleagues in the Paper Brigade to

smuggle books, archival materialsand various works of art into the ghet-to. Moishe Levas was very muchaware of the activity of Sutzkever andhis friends, and he assisted them insmuggling those materials into theghetto in various ways.

Sutzkever managed to collect pho-tographs which reflected the daily lifein the ghetto from various aspects:simple street scenes, various adver-tisements on the walls, and pictures

of cultural and educational institu-tions.

Without knowing the circum-stances in which the photo-

graphs were taken, one could thinkthey were created in a typicalEuropean city during peaceful, nor-mal times. The clock on the ghetto’smain street, the morning advertise-ments hung up on the ghetto walls,

and of course, the cultural activities ofthe Jewish community, all stir up afeeling of amazement at the simplicityand banality of the images, consider-ing all that is happening around them.

The most incredible photograph inthe bunch is that of the ghetto orches-tra with its conductor, WolfDurmashkin. This renowned musi-cian, who before the war was the con-ductor of the Vilna symphonic orches-tra, is seen standing strong and digni-

fied wearingtuxedo tails, asthe other musi-cians aroundhim smile for thecamera. Theshining shoes ofthe first violinistleave no doubtas to the moodthese peoplewere in. Thisp h o t o g r a p hproves thestrength of thehuman spirit,even in the mostdifficult times.The orchestra’spiano, thoughnot included inthe photo-

graphs, was smuggled into the ghettopiece by piece and then rebuilt by aspecialist. It is important to recognizethat, just as Sutzkever never stoppedwriting poetry, Durmashkin and hismusicians always continued playingand creating music, dedicated to pre-serving their art and their human dig-nity.

To paraphrase Hanna Arendt’s con-

troversial concept, “the banality ofevil,” these photographs reflect howthe ghetto inmates desperately triedto hold on to the banality of life underevil, and to pretend they could keepliving normally despite the death andmisery that surrounded them. Thephotographers were full partners increating this illusion. Since there wasa need for cooperation between thephotographer and the subjects, it canbe assumed that the maker of theimages also sought to transmit abanal and normal picture of life, bycreating a visual image using themost ordinary of methods.

Unlike in photographs from otherghettos, and even from ghettos

in Lithuania itself, none of the truehorrors that were experienced arecaptured in the photographs in theSutzkever collection from Vilna. Thereare no photographs of children dyingin the streets, starving people or themany other miseries faced by theghetto inmates. The terrible reality ofthe ghetto, as Sutzkever described indetail in his testimonial book, was notreflected at all in the photographs hehad collected during his stay there. Itseems that, in real time, the ghettoinmates wanted to stay as far as pos-sible from the abnormal circum-stances in which they lived, and triedto reflect a stabilized, ordinary way oflife, which was, of course, just an illu-sion. Sutzkever’s photographs, there-fore, do not document the life of theghetto as it really was, but rather lifeas its inmates wanted it to be. By thepower of their spirit, these LithuanianJews miraculously escaped from real-ity and created an alternate universefor themselves.

(Continued from page 10)Neo-Nazis even bombed two televi-

sion transmitters in an attempt to stopthe broadcasts in Germany.

The series still has its critics today:some Holocaust survivors have saidthe drama is sanitized and simplistic.

But it has transformed how Germanydeals with its Nazi past.

Initially some German officialsfeared the series would spark anti-

German sentimentabroad, says ProfessorBösch. But the nationalsoul-searching provokedby the drama has led torespect for howGermany faces up to itspast crimes.

A few months after theseries was broadcast,Germany scrapped thestatute of limitations formurder, to enable Nazisto be tried for their partic-ipation in the Holocaust.

And the nationwidedebate led to a thirst formore knowledge. Duringthe 1980s, schoolsdemanded more teach-

ing material, German historians start-ed focusing more on the Holocaust,and concentration camps opened the

first major exhibitions and memorials.

Now, as the miniseries comes toan end on TV, Germany has

been reassessing howthe drama changed thecountry 40 years ago.

Remembrance of theHolocaust and thewords “never again”have become key princi-ples of modernGermany’s political iden-tity.

But the far-rightAlternative for Germany(AfD) says Germansshould now move onand draw a line underthat culture of commem-oration.

Last year AfD leaderAlexander Gaulanddescribed Nazi rule as“mere bird droppings in over 1,000years of successful German history.”

And less than half of German 14- to16-year-olds know what Auschwitz

was, according to a survey by theKörber Foundation.

Forty years after Holocaust was first

broadcast in Germany, accessibledramas that highlight Nazi crimes arestill needed.

Avraham Sutzkever (right) and Shmerke Kaczerginski in the Vilna ghetto.

Berl Kaczerginsky photographed the two friends on the balcony of their

apartment on Strashun Street, on July 20, 1943. They look as if they were

just a group of friends, not inmates of the ghetto, starving laborers under a

cruel regime, condemned to death.

IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH:

THE REVIVAL OF THE JERUSALEM OF LITHUANIA

HOW A US TV SERIES CHANGED GERMANY

Meryl Streep played a Christian woman, Inga, married to one of

the Weiss sons.

Karl Weiss suffers Nazi brutality in Buchenwald concentration

camp.


BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ, JTA

Despite its rustic charms, thedream home that Roxane van

Iperen and her partner bought nearlyruined their marriage.

Van Iperen, a 42-year-old novelist,underestimated the amount of reno-vating needed on the countrysideestate east of Amsterdam. Shebought the place in 2012 with JorisLenglet as a home for the couple andtheir three children.

“We almost separated by the time itwas done,” she recalled in a interviewon the NPO 1 television channel.

But amid “the arguing, misery andwork,” as she described it, the couplemade discoveries whose significancethey realized only months later: dur-ing the Holocaust, their new homehad been the center for one ofHolland’s most daring rescue opera-tions conducted by Jews for Jews.

Recounted in a best-selling bookthat van Iperen published last year,the story generated strong mediainterest amid a wave of introspectionabout the Dutch society’s checkeredHolocaust-era record.

“Many Jews resisted, but of most ofthem we know very little,” said theJewish filmmaker Willy Lindwer, whohas produced several documentarieson the Holocaust in his nativeNetherlands. He said the High Neststory “shows not all Dutch Jews wentlike lambs to the slaughter, and that’svery important.”

But to general readers, part of thebook’s appeal lies in the strong charac-ters of the people who did the rescuingat van Iperen’s home: sisters Jannyand Lien Brilleslijper and their families.

Daring anti-Fascist activists —Janny fought as a volunteer combat-ant in the Spanish Civil War — theyused connections to hide from theGermans in the house in Naarden, sit-uated 10 miles east of Amsterdam.But at great personal risk, they thenopened their safe house to Jews and

others in need.

Van Iperen found evidence of thesisters’ ingenuity as soon as the

renovations began, discovering dou-ble walls, secret doors and walled-offannexes that had been concealed sowell that they were left undetected fordecades. In one secret space, vanIperen even found wartime resistancenewspapers.

Dozens of Jews passed through thesafe house, which is “perfectly locat-ed near Amsterdam but in the middleof nowhere,” van Iperen said. Thenine-room estate is mostly hidden

from view by large trees that affordedprivacy to the tenants.

The operation’s secrecy kept it outof the history books even though itwas a rare case in which Dutch Jewsnot only escaped the genocide buthelped others avoid capture.

The sisters, intellectuals from aLiberal Jewish family, arrived at theestate near Naarden in 1943, amiddeportations to death camps andgrowing awareness of the annihilationof Europe’s Jews by Hitler.

By that time, the Nazis had killed 75percent of the Netherlands’ prewarJewish population of about 140,000— the highest death rate in Nazi-occupied Western Europe.

“Everyone who could was in a panic

to find a hiding place,” van Iperensaid.

And yet at the Brilleslijpers’ house,“there was actually a lot of music andlust for life during that time, whichmakes it different to the typical sur-vival-in-hiding story we know in thiscountry,” van Iperen said.

She found sheet music that the sis-ters — Lien was a well-known singer— and their guests composed andperformed on musical evenings.There were worldly debates and gar-den dinners — several of the peoplein hiding were artists — amid the

laughter of children.

One of the rug rats was RobertBrandes, the 5-year-old son of

Janny and her husband, BobBrandes. Robert Brandes, now 79and an artist, gave van Iperen, whotracked him down, a yellowing photo-graph taken at her home in 1943. Heis seen splashing in a metal tub on asunny day in the backyard, flanked byhis cousin, Kathinka Rebling, (Lien’sdaughter), and another child.

Around the corner from the Jews inhiding lived the lover of AntonMussert, the head of the pro-NaziNSB party and the top collaboratorwith the Nazis. He would often stayover, van Iperen also discovered.

But in June 1944, Eddy Musbergen,

one of the hundreds of Dutch gentileswho betrayed or hunted Jews in hid-ing, reported his suspicions about theestate to the authorities.

It was an eventuality for which thesisters had planned, according toRebling, Lien’s daughter. During theGestapo raid, her mother removed avase from a window sill overlookingthe access path — a secret sign forother tenants that the house had beencompromised.

The raid occurred when Janny andher son were out. Janny saw the vaseas they returned and attempted tocatch up to Robert, who was skippingalong ahead of her. But the Germanssaw them and they were arrested.

The sisters and their families weresent to the Westerbork concentrationcamp, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

At Bergen-Belsen, Janny met thefamily of Anne Frank.

“She was concealed in a blanket,”Janny, who died in 2003, recalled in a1988 documentary by Lindwer. “Shehad no more tears to cry. They hadrun out a long time before.”

Janny went to check on Anne a fewdays later and saw Anne’s sister,Margot, lying dead on the floor. Annedied shortly thereafter, Janny said.

Both Brilleslijper sisters survived theHolocaust — partly because theywere persons of interest to the Nazisbecause of their anti-Fascist creden-tials, van Iperen discovered. This pre-vented them from being sent directlyto the gas chambers at Auschwitz,allowing them to survive.

Robert Brandes was spared depor-tation because after his detention, hewas deemed by the Nazis to be onlyhalf Jewish. Rebling, who was threeand whose parents were both Jewish,was spirited away from a detentionfacility by a resistance fighter and sur-vived the war in hiding.

“That we are still alive,” Rebling saidduring the November interview withNPO 1, “can only be explained by anunbroken chain of miracles.”

A DUTCH COUPLE FIND FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST

HISTORY IN THEIR COUNTRYSIDE HOME

Lien Brilleslijper with her daughter Jalda in Berlin in the 1970s.

BY RO ORANIM, THE LIBRARIANS

Felix Nussbaum painted multipleself-portraits during the

Holocaust, giving us a unique artisticinsight into the experience of oneman, among the millions that weremurdered.

Imagine witnessing your fate unfold-ing before your eyes. Imagine havingthe ability to know what the futureholds, to know how death will comeand to know that there is no way foryou to change that. What would youdo with that knowledge in hand? ForFelix Nussbaum the answer was obvi-ous. He had dedicated his life to hisart, and spent his final years illustrat-ing life as a Jew under the Nazi

regime through his paintings, sharinghis own journey and experiences as atarget of persecution and the horrorsthat came along with being a Jew inthe Holocaust, in the best way heknew how.

Felix Nussbaum was born onDecember 11, 1904, in Osnabrück,Germany, into a well-respected andwell-off Jewish family. His parents,Phillip and Rahel, recognized theirson’s budding artistic talents at ayoung age. Phillip was also an ama-teur artist himself, in addition to own-ing an ironworks firm. Felix’s parentsdecided to encourage their son todevelop his natural skill, and support-ed him as he attended different artschools across the country from

Hamburg to Berlin. In 1927, Felix heldhis own art show, and later he partici-pated in group shows and designed aseries of covers for a Berlin-based artmagazine.

In 1932, Felix applied for and wasaccepted to the Berlin Academy’s

Villa Massimo in Rome. In October ofthe same year, Felix left Berlin andmoved to Rome together with hispartner, Felka Platek, who was also abudding Jewish artist. Little did heknow that he would never return to hishome country.

In December of 1932, Felix receivednews that a fire had started in hisBerlin studio, a space he had rentedout to fellow artists for the duration ofhis absence. He lost over 150 pieces

to the flames and was understandablydevastated. Just a few months later,in the first half of 1933, the Nazi partyrose to power and the political andcultural atmosphere took a sharp turn.Dr. Joseph Goebbels visited Romeand made a stop at the German acad-emy to meet the students. Goebbelsgave a lecture on Nazi art doctrineand explained that the Aryan race andheroism were the main themes thatthe Nazi artist should develop. Felixquickly understood that his time in theacademy was limited, as there was nospace for him within the world ofNational Socialist art.

The Nazi regime, however, did havean immediate impact on Felix’s art as


PAINTING A SELF-PORTRAIT OF DEATH IN THE HOLOCAUST


(Continued from page 12)were made in Washington by multiplerepresentatives of the World JewishCongress, Agudath Israel, the LaborZionists of America, and theEmergency Committee to Save theJewish People of Europe (theBergson Group). Calls for bombingalso appeared in the columns of anumber of American Jewish newspa-pers and magazines at the time.

MOTIVES FOR REJECTION

Now we come to the vexingquestion of why the Roosevelt

administration rejected the bombingrequests.

The explanation that the administra-tion gave at the time — that bombingAuschwitz or the railways wouldrequire diverting bombers from battlezones — was clearly false, since weknow that U.S. bombers did bombother targets within the Auschwitzcomplex (the oil factories).

A second argument has been madeby some FDR apologists: that bomb-ing was a bad idea because some ofthe Auschwitz inmates would havebeen killed. But that does not hold up,either — first, because that was notthe reason given for the rejections atthe time; and second, because it failsto explain why the administrationrefused to bomb the railway lines andbridges, which would not haveinvolved any risk to civilians.

So what, then, was the real reasonfor the administration’s rejection?

In all likelihood, it was the result ofseveral factors. One was old-fash-ioned anti-Semitism. The anti-Semiticsentiments rife among senior officialsof the State Department and WarDepartment have been amply docu-mented. What about the WhiteHouse? Jack Schwartz, in The Daily

Beast, mocked any suggestion thatPresident Roosevelt harbored anti-Semitic feelings, pointing out that he“surrounded himself with Jewishadvisers” and “staffed the NewDeal…with Jewish activists.” In otherwords, some of FDR’s best friendswere Jewish.

A more informed perspective wouldconsider Roosevelt’s actual state-ments on the subject. For example,

as a member of the Harvard board ofgovernors, he helped impose a quotaon admitting Jewish students so theywould not be “disproportionate,” as heput it. He called a questionable taxmaneuver by the owners of the NewYork Times in 1937 “a dirty Jewishtrick.” He said in 1938 that the behav-ior of “the Jewish grain dealer and theJewish shoe dealer” was to blame foranti-Semitism in Poland.

FDR continued to make suchremarks (behind closed doors) in the

1940s. He complained to his cabinetin 1941 that there were “too manyJews among federal employees inOregon” (which he had recently visit-ed). In 1942, he used the slur “kikes”in reference to Jewish Communists.At the Casablanca Conference in1943, he said strict limits should beimposed on North African Jews enter-ing professions, in order to “eliminatethe specific and understandable com-

plaints which the Germans boretowards the Jews in Germany, name-ly, that while they represented a smallpart of the population, over fifty per-cent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, college professors, etc., inGermany, were Jews.”

Do such statements reflect anti-Semitism? Or when it comes toassessing anti-Semitism, shouldthere be one standard for revered for-mer presidents and a different stan-dard for everyone else?

Another factor in the decision not tobomb Auschwitz was a practical con-sideration: rescuing Jews meant theAllies would be stuck with a lot ofJewish refugees on their hands. Atone point during the war, a seniorState Department official warned hiscolleagues that any U.S. action to res-cue Jewish refugees was “likely tobring about new pressure for an asy-lum in the Western hemisphere.”Another official characterized Jewishrefugees as a “burden and curse,”and he worried about the “danger”that the Germans “might agree to turnover to the United States and to GreatBritain a large number of Jewishrefugees.”

This is not to say that anti-Semitismand the fear of pressure to admitrefugees were the decisive factors.More likely they served to buttress orreinforce the main factor, which wasthe overall mindset in the administra-tion that America had no nationalinterest nor moral obligation to pursuehumanitarian objectives abroad.

This attitude was articulated, mostnotably, in the War Department’sinternal decision, in early 1944, that itwould not utilize any militaryresources “for the purpose of rescu-ing victims of enemy oppressionunless such rescues are the directresult of military operations conduct-ed with the objective of defeating thearmed forces of the enemy.”

Bombing bridges and railway linesover which both deported Jews andGerman troops were transportedcould have qualified as necessary formilitary purposes. But not when theprevailing attitude in the White Houseand other government agencies wasone of hardheartedness when it cameto the Jews, reinforced by anti-Semitism and nativism.

WHY THE U.S. BOMBED AUSCHWITZ,BUT DIDN’T SAVE THE JEWS

President Roosevelt reviewing troops at Rabat, Morocco, while at the Casablanca Conference in

1943.

(Continued from page 14)he began painting what he saw as thefall of civilization. His painting“Destruction” reflects his feeling ofimpending doom, show-ing a couple standingamong the architecturalruins and destroyed art-works. Forced to leaveRome and the academybut unable to return toGermany, Nussbaum andPlatek moved to Alassio,Italy, where they livedcomfortably with the sup-port of Felix’s parents.

In 1935, Felix andFelka left Italy and

moved to Belgium viaParis, in what became anomadic existence ofexile from their homecountry. Felix continuedhis painting at each destination, tak-ing comfort in his work, through his artfrom this period clearly reflects thegrowing discomfort and anxiety he felt

at the ever-increasing danger to theJewish community.

In 1940, German troops marched onBelgium. Felix Nussbaum was arrest-

ed, along with 7,000 others, and sentin a wagon to the internment camp atSt.-Cyprian. He managed to escapeand returned to Brussels, where he

went into hiding with the help of afriend, an art dealer. Felix, ever theartist, drew the horrors of life in theinternment camp. His painting “Self-

Portrait in the Camp”reflects the inhumaneand humiliating condi-tions he experiencedwhile in the camp.

Throughout histime in hiding,

while living in constantfear for his life, he con-tinued to express him-self through his art, per-sistently chronicling theever-worsening condi-tions and the perpetualdread that their hidingspot would be discov-ered by the authorities.

Felix recognized theinevitable, and he

resigned himself to his predestinedfate as a consequence of his Jewishidentity. He painted his people, thepoor and damned. He did not reflect

hope or survival in his works, choos-ing instead to paint from reality. In oneof the works he painted himselfbacked into a corner with the knowl-edge that there would be no escape.

His final major work, “The SkeletonsPlaying for the Dance,” reflected thehopelessness of the situation from hisperspective. Skeletons play musicalinstruments from the ruins of modernsociety — a cultured society of sci-ence, technology, art and music.Among the skeletons, behind theorgan, sits one figure who, whilegaunt and malnourished, appears tobe alive, suggesting that Felix heldsome hope that he would count him-self among the survivors — a hopethat would never be realized.

In July 1944, the Gestapo discov-ered Felix Nussbaum and FelkaPlatek’s hiding place. The couple wasarrested and sent to the Malines tran-sit camp, where they were put on thevery last transport to Auschwitz onJuly 31, 1944. They met their untime-ly deaths on August 4 of that year.

PAINTING A SELF-PORTRAIT OF DEATH IN THE HOLOCAUST

“Death Triumphant (The Skeletons Playing for the Dance),” Felix Nussbaum, 1944.

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Martyrdom & Resistance

Ron B. Meier, Ph.D.,

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the American Society

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

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli Zborowski**

Marvin Zborowski

Mark Palmer

Sam Skura**

Israel Krakowski**

William Mandell

Sam Halpern**

Isidore Karten**

Norman Belfer**

Joseph Bukiet**

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

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The American Society for Yad

Vashem was founded in 1981 by a

group of Holocaust survivors and led

by Eli Zborowski, z”l, for more than

thirty years. Recently approved by the

Board of Directors of the American

Society for Yad Vashem, our Legacy

Circle is being named in memory of Eli

Zborowski, z”l, who was greatly

respected for his work and accom-

plishments on behalf of Yad Vashem

and is missed by all who knew him.

The Eli Zborowski Legacy Circle is

open to and will recognize anyone who includes Yad Vashem

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

ing a Charitable Remainder Trust or Charitable Gift Annuity,

donating a paid-up life insurance policy or contributing an

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

eficiary of a Charitable Lead Trust. Individuals can make gifts

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

ment vehicles that can accommodate those of modest means,

as well as those with substantial wealth.

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

future in which Holocaust remembrance and education will

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

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

For further information about the Eli Zborowski Legacy Circle,

please contact

Robert Christopher Morton,

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

212-220-4304; [email protected]

ELI ZBOROWSKI LEGACY CIRCLE


vol. 45-no. 4 issn 0892-1571 march/april 2019-adar/nissan

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