IN THIS ISSUE Yad Vashem marks 75 years since murders of Polish Jewish educators........2 The Nazis built a luxury camp to lull the Jews before murdering them......3 Stolen words: The Nazi plunder of Jewish books.........................................4 Why are there crosses on Eastern Europe’s Holocaust memorials?..........5 “He should be as well known as Schindler”.................................................6 Saved by art: How one man’s skill got him through seven Nazi camps....8 “I condemned my mother to the gas chamber with one wrong word”......10 The Jews who fought for freedom in the ring..............................................14 Jewish woman who entered the lion’s den..................................................15 Save the date: ASYV Annual Tribute Dinner ................................................16 Vol. 44-No. 1 ISSN 0892-1571 September/October 2017-Tishri/Cheshvan 5778 AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM BY JOANNA BERENDT, THE NEW YORK TIMES M ore than 72 years after the lib- eration of Auschwitz, the first traveling exhibition about the Nazi death camp will begin a journey later this year to 14 cities across Europe and North America, taking heart- breaking artifacts to multitudes who have never seen such horror up close. The endeavor is one of the most high-profile attempts to educate and immerse young people for whom the Holocaust is a fading and ill-under- stood slice of history. The Anne Frank House, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others all find them- selves grappling with ways to engage an attention-challenged world with a dark part of its past. Yet anything that smacks of putting Auschwitz on tour instantly raises sensitivities. Organizers of the exhibi- tion, which include the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum itself, took pains to explain that, yes, visitors would probably be charged to enter in at least some locations. But officials at that museum and the company behind the exhibition say that their intent is not to create a moneymaker out of the suffering of millions of Nazi victims. Several prominent Jewish leaders expressed support for taking pieces of Auschwitz to people who might not otherwise see this history. They said that they were not overly concerned about an entrance fee; organizers said that they would ask for it to be small, if any, and for admission to be free for students. “If you’re telling me, ‘Gee, they’re coming out and they’re going to be millionaires over this,’ I would object,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, who founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human-rights organization. “But if they’re making what is normal- ly considered to be a fair amount of profit since the final end is that hun- dreds of thousands of people maybe in different places all over the world will see the exhibit — I think that’s quite legitimate.” The exhibition will include pieces from the museum such as a barracks; a freight car of the same type used to transport prisoners; letters and testi- monials; and a gas mask, a tin that contained Zyklon B gas pellets and other grim remainders from the com- plex’s gas chambers. Seven years in the making, the exhi- bition is a response to growing anti- Semitism in Europe and elsewhere, those involved with it said. “We have never done anything like this before, and it’s the first project of this magnitude ever,” said Piotr Cywinski, director of the state muse- um, which is on the site of the former camp, in southern Poland. “We had been thinking about this for a long time, but we lacked the know-how.” Even though the Holocaust remains a major focus of study by historians and is a staple of school curriculum in many countries, knowledge about the camps is fading for younger genera- tions, he said. T he exhibition will make its first stop in Madrid, aiming for an opening around December, and then tour for seven years. It is no longer enough to “sit inside four walls, stare at the door and wait for visitors to come in,” Mr. Cywinski said, so museum officials decided to reach out to a more global audience. The exhibition was broached in 2010 when Musealia, a family-owned company whose shows include arti- facts from the Titanic, approached the museum. Luis Ferreiro, the company’s direc- tor, said the idea came while he was grieving the death of his 25-year-old brother. He had found consolation in Man’s Search for Meaning, a book by a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, about his experi- ences in four extermination camps after his pregnant wife, his parents and brother all perished. Inspired by the book’s lessons for spiritual survival, Mr. Ferreiro said he decided to try to bring the subject of the Holocaust closer to those who might never have a chance to visit the museum. It took time for Mr. Ferreiro to gain the trust of the board of the Auschwitz museum, which was surprised to receive such a request from an exhi- bition company outside the museum world. The museum demanded that the artifacts be kept secured at all times and that the exhibition comply with the museum’s strict conservation requirements, including finding proper transportation and storage, as well as choosing exhibition spaces with suffi- cient lighting and climate control. The museum also insisted that the artifacts be presented in historical context, especially because many aspects of World War II are only vaguely understood by younger gen- erations. For instance, in Spain, ask- ing about the history and place of Jews in Europe “would probably get some strange answers.” The exhibi- tion will show that Spain — which dur- ing the war was led by Francisco Franco, a dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler — was not home to large Jewish communities and did not have extensive connections with the Holocaust; yet there were notable exceptions, like Ángel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat who saved more than 5,000 Jews in Hungary from deportation to Auschwitz. “In other words, we want to show that the Franco regime was certainly very sympathetic to the Nazis,” said Robert Jan van Pelt, a history profes- sor at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a Holocaust scholar who has been working on the exhibition. “But individual Spaniards could make, and made, a difference.” As for the morality of charging money to see artifacts from a death camp, and potentially turning a profit, Mr. Ferreiro said that traveling exhibi- tions like this one usually generated huge expenses. Putting the display together has already cost more than $1.5 million, and there are no guaran- tees “the exhibit will even be sustain- able,” Mr. Ferreiro said. Musealia will offer museums that want to host the exhibition a flat fee for transportation, installation, design and all the content. “We need to earn an income to sus- tain ourselves and keep the enter- prise going,” Mr. Ferreiro said, “but our goal is to focus on larger social (Continued on page 13) AUSCHWITZ ARTIFACTS TO GO ON TOUR A child’s shoe and sock.
Transcript
IN THIS ISSUEYad Vashem marks 75 years since murders of Polish Jewish educators........2The Nazis built a luxury camp to lull the Jews before murdering them......3Stolen words: The Nazi plunder of Jewish books.........................................4Why are there crosses on Eastern Europe’s Holocaust memorials?..........5“He should be as well known as Schindler”.................................................6Saved by art: How one man’s skill got him through seven Nazi camps....8“I condemned my mother to the gas chamber with one wrong word”......10The Jews who fought for freedom in the ring..............................................14Jewish woman who entered the lion’s den..................................................15Save the date: ASYV Annual Tribute Dinner................................................16
AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM
BY JOANNA BERENDT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
More than 72 years after the lib-eration of Auschwitz, the first
traveling exhibition about the Nazideath camp will begin a journey laterthis year to 14 cities across Europeand North America, taking heart-breaking artifacts to multitudes whohave never seen such horror upclose.
The endeavor is one of the mosthigh-profile attempts to educate andimmerse young people for whom theHolocaust is a fading and ill-under-stood slice of history. The Anne FrankHouse, the Jewish Museum Berlin,the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum and others all find them-selves grappling with ways to engagean attention-challenged world with adark part of its past.
Yet anything that smacks of puttingAuschwitz on tour instantly raisessensitivities. Organizers of the exhibi-tion, which include the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum itself, tookpains to explain that, yes, visitorswould probably be charged to enter inat least some locations. But officialsat that museum and the companybehind the exhibition say that theirintent is not to create a moneymakerout of the suffering of millions of Nazivictims.
Several prominent Jewish leadersexpressed support for taking piecesof Auschwitz to people who might nototherwise see this history. They saidthat they were not overly concernedabout an entrance fee; organizerssaid that they would ask for it to besmall, if any, and for admission to befree for students.
“If you’re telling me, ‘Gee, they’recoming out and they’re going to be
millionaires over this,’ I would object,”said Rabbi Marvin Hier, who foundedthe Simon Wiesenthal Center, aJewish human-rights organization.“But if they’re making what is normal-ly considered to be a fair amount ofprofit since the final end is that hun-dreds of thousands of people maybe
in different places all over the worldwill see the exhibit — I think that’squite legitimate.”
The exhibition will include piecesfrom the museum such as a barracks;a freight car of the same type used totransport prisoners; letters and testi-monials; and a gas mask, a tin thatcontained Zyklon B gas pellets andother grim remainders from the com-plex’s gas chambers.
Seven years in the making, the exhi-bition is a response to growing anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere,those involved with it said.
“We have never done anything likethis before, and it’s the first project ofthis magnitude ever,” said PiotrCywinski, director of the state muse-
um, which is on the site of the formercamp, in southern Poland. “We hadbeen thinking about this for a longtime, but we lacked the know-how.”
Even though the Holocaust remainsa major focus of study by historiansand is a staple of school curriculum inmany countries, knowledge about the
camps is fading for younger genera-tions, he said.
The exhibition will make its firststop in Madrid, aiming for an
opening around December, and thentour for seven years.
It is no longer enough to “sit insidefour walls, stare at the door and waitfor visitors to come in,” Mr. Cywinskisaid, so museum officials decided toreach out to a more global audience.
The exhibition was broached in2010 when Musealia, a family-ownedcompany whose shows include arti-facts from the Titanic, approached themuseum.
Luis Ferreiro, the company’s direc-tor, said the idea came while he wasgrieving the death of his 25-year-oldbrother. He had found consolation inMan’s Search for Meaning, a book bya Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist,Viktor E. Frankl, about his experi-ences in four extermination campsafter his pregnant wife, his parentsand brother all perished.
Inspired by the book’s lessons forspiritual survival, Mr. Ferreiro said hedecided to try to bring the subject ofthe Holocaust closer to those whomight never have a chance to visit themuseum.
It took time for Mr. Ferreiro to gain
the trust of the board of the Auschwitzmuseum, which was surprised toreceive such a request from an exhi-bition company outside the museumworld.
The museum demanded that theartifacts be kept secured at all timesand that the exhibition comply withthe museum’s strict conservationrequirements, including finding propertransportation and storage, as well aschoosing exhibition spaces with suffi-cient lighting and climate control.
The museum also insisted that theartifacts be presented in historicalcontext, especially because manyaspects of World War II are onlyvaguely understood by younger gen-erations. For instance, in Spain, ask-ing about the history and place ofJews in Europe “would probably getsome strange answers.” The exhibi-tion will show that Spain — which dur-ing the war was led by FranciscoFranco, a dictator and ally of AdolfHitler — was not home to largeJewish communities and did not haveextensive connections with theHolocaust; yet there were notableexceptions, like Ángel Sanz Briz, aSpanish diplomat who saved morethan 5,000 Jews in Hungary fromdeportation to Auschwitz.
“In other words, we want to showthat the Franco regime was certainlyvery sympathetic to the Nazis,” saidRobert Jan van Pelt, a history profes-sor at the University of Waterloo inCanada and a Holocaust scholar whohas been working on the exhibition.“But individual Spaniards could make,and made, a difference.”
As for the morality of chargingmoney to see artifacts from a deathcamp, and potentially turning a profit,Mr. Ferreiro said that traveling exhibi-tions like this one usually generatedhuge expenses. Putting the displaytogether has already cost more than$1.5 million, and there are no guaran-tees “the exhibit will even be sustain-able,” Mr. Ferreiro said.
Musealia will offer museums thatwant to host the exhibition a flat feefor transportation, installation, designand all the content.
“We need to earn an income to sus-tain ourselves and keep the enter-prise going,” Mr. Ferreiro said, “butour goal is to focus on larger social
In August Yad Vashem hosted aday of events to remember Polish
Jewish educators Janusz Korczakand Stefania Wilczynska, who sacri-ficed their lives to care for orphans inthe Warsaw ghetto.
Both refused to abandon the chil-dren for safer hideouts. On August 5,1942, the Nazis rounded up Korczak,
Wilczynska and the 200 children ofthe orphanage. They marched in rowsto the Umschlagplatz gathering point,with Korczak in the lead. Togetherthey were sent to Treblinka, wherethey were all murdered.
Members of the HamachanotHaolim youth movement participatedin an educational seminar, conductedby Yad Vashem in conjunction withYossi and Reuven Nadel of the IsraeliEducational Institute in Memory ofJanusz Korczak, and Liron Avnat,representing Hamachanot Haolim.
Yossi and Reuven are the sons ofShlomo Nadel, who is one of tworemaining Holocaust survivors who
lived in Korczak’s orphanage inWarsaw; the other is Yitzhak Belfer,88. Neither man was able to attendthe event owing to their health, butBelfer, who had been scheduled tolay a wreath beside the monumentcommemorating Korczak and the chil-dren sent to their deaths, released astatement in his honor.
Yitzhak Belfer recalled the “greatlove” he had for Korczak. “I wasseven years old when I arrived at the
orphanage, andwas granted theopportunity to beeducated underhim for eight of themost importantyears of my life,”he said. “The doc-tor walked amongus like any otherperson, neverpatronizing —spreading loveand concern forthe children’sneeds. In theorphanage, we
learned to believe in people, in theinclination for good that exists withineach and every one of us.”
“When we talk about the Holocaust,we are not used to talking or eventhinking about love,” said Dr. NaamaShik, director of the e-LearningDepartment at Yad Vashem’sInternational School for HolocaustStudies, who moderated the seminar.“We almost always think of the Shoahfrom the end —– the shooting pits, thegas chambers, the terrible journeystoward them. We think about thehunger, the cold, the horrors, thethreats and the loss. We think aboutthe breakdown of solidarity and the
uncompromising battle for survival,the desperation, and often theextreme loneliness. But not aboutlove.
“Janusz Korczak wasthe quintessential fatherfigure, educator anddemocrat in a world of notomorow,” Shik contin-ued. “He was a man ofboundless love and dedi-cation toward the childrenunder his protection andcare in the orphanage.”
At the conclusion of theseminar, a memorial cere-mony took place at YadVashem’s JanuszKorczak Square, with arepresentative of thePolish Embassy amongthose in attendance. Afterthat, Hamachanot Haolimmembers flew dozens ofkites, to representKorczak’s educationalworldview, and to honorhis legacy of respect, love and equal-ity of rights.
Janusz Korczak was the pen nameof Henryk Goldszmit, a doctor, authorand educator. He dedicated his life tocaring for children, and believed theyshould always be listened to andrespected. In 1912, Korczak becamethe director of a Jewish orphanage inWarsaw.
Wilczynska and Korczak met in1909, and began working
together. When World War I brokeout, Korczak became a military doctorwith the rank of lieutenant, leavingWilczynska in charge of the orphan-age. (He served again as a doctor inthe Polish Army with the rank of majorduring the Polish-Soviet War.) In
1935, Wilczynska visited MandatoryPalestine and lived at kibbutz EinHarod before returning to Warsaw in
1939. After the Nazi occupation ofPoland, the members of Ein Harodarranged for her to leave Poland, butshe turned the offer down and movedto the ghetto along with Korczak andthe children.
“The legacy of Janusz Korczak andStefania ‘Stefa’ Wilczynska is anessential part of the educational mis-sion of Hamachanot Haolim youthmovement,” Avnat said. “Throughoutthe year we discuss and utilize manyof their teachings and use many ofthe tools they left for us for our activi-ties and all of our groups.... The prin-ciples and beliefs that Korczak devel-oped, nearly 100 years later are stillrelevant and useful in educating ouryouth and future generations.”
YAD VASHEM MARKS 75 YEARS SINCE MURDERS OF POLISH JEWISH EDUCATORS
Janusz Korczak and Stefania Wilczynska.
Janusz Korczak Square at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
BY PAUL GOLDMAN, NBC
The piano standing in the livingroom looks and sounds like a
typical instrument, but it hides in itsnotes a story of defiance and survival.
When the Margulies family fledGermany in 1939 to escape their Nazioppressors, they refused to leavebehind the instrument on which theirtwo sons learned to play.
Nearly 80 years on, the piano now
stands in Yad Vashem — a symbol ofone family’s resilience.
Shlomo Margulies was 15 when heescaped the German town of Chemnitzwith his parents and older brother. “Thefurniture we had was too heavy to ship,but my mother didn’t want to leave ourpiano behind,” he said.
As with so many other Jewish fami-lies of the time, the piano had pride ofplace in the family living room andwas the center of entertainment andculture in the home. “It was commonwith many German families that kidslearn two crucial skills by the age ofsix — swimming and how to play thepiano,” said Margulies.
Margulies, 94, decided to donatethe instrument to Yad Vashem inJerusalem as a reminder to futuregenerations of his family’s journey.
Seeing the instrument in its newhome, Shlomo refused to play it, say-ing: “It reminds me of this whole storyof survival, it was almost 90 years agothat I played it, it’s like a dream but it’sa fact.”
The Margulies are believed to bethe only family to escape Nazi
Germany by chartering an airplane andone of the few who managed to savesuch precious belongings. In October
and November 1938, Nazi paramilitarygroups’ pogroms made the familydecide it was time to leave Germany.
Margulies, sent to Berlin to buy ferrytickets for his family, found that there
was no more space on the boat sodecided to charter a plane instead.
“I have no idea if this decision tocharter the flight was naive, stupid orgenius, but it saved our lives,” he said.
On March 26, 1939, the family leftBerlin on a three-day flight toPalestine, stopping off in Italy andGreece. Their belongings, includingthe piano, were shipped to Haifa.
Most of their extended family, whoremained in Europe, were killed in theHolocaust.
“The story of the piano and the arti-facts here is a way to tell the stories ofthe Jews who managed to escapeand those who suffered from the terri-ble Holocaust,” said Michael Tal,curator and director of the YadVashem artifacts department.
Recently, Margulies stood proudlywith his wife, two sons and eightgrandchildren next to the piano. Hesaid he had decided the memorialcenter was the right place for it.
“If I were to hear this story told byanother Jew I would have said he wasout of his mind,” he said.
FAMILY PIANO THAT SURVIVED HOLOCAUST JOINS YAD VASHEM MUSEUM
Shlomo Margulies, 94, sits in front of his fami-
ly’s piano, which is now part of a display at the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. Bracha and her son Shlomo Margulies pose for
Nothing about the footage thatRudolf Breslauer filmed here on
May 30, 1944, suggests that it wastaken inside one of Europe’s largestNazi concentration camps.
In the film by Breslauer, a GermanJewish inmate of the Westerborkcamp in Holland’s northeast, prison-ers are seen playing soccer enthusi-astically in team uniforms, completewith a referee in a special outfit.
A middle-aged man wearing a suitand a boy who may have been hisgrandson stroll cheerfully in the sunpast spectators. In other segments,inmates are seen putting on theaterperformances, working in modern fac-tories and even going to church — anactivity undertaken by many GermanJews before the Holocaust, includingsome who had converted toChristianity just before or during theHolocaust in a vain effort to escapepersecution by the Nazis.
The film is one of only two cinemat-ic works known to have been pro-duced inside a functioning concentra-tion camp for Jews — the other was inTheresienstadt.
Commissioned by Westerbork’scommanders for propaganda purpos-es, Breslauer’s film is a rare documen-tation of the sophisticated facadeemployed by the Nazis at the camp,where 75 years ago they began carry-ing out the systematic murder of three-quarters of Dutch Jewry — the high-est death rate in Nazi-occupiedWestern Europe. Westerbork servedas a so-called transit camp from which100,000 Dutch Jews were shipped toNazi death camps in Poland.
The subterfuge maintained the illu-sion that the camp’s inmates weresent to work camps, giving them hopeand an incentive to comply withorders that helped ensureWesterbork’s deadly efficiency,according to Johannes Houwink tenCate of the University of Amsterdam,who is among the world’s foremost
experts on the Holocaust in theNetherlands.
According to ten Cate, the deceitextended far beyond the possiblystaged scenes that Breslauer cap-tured with his camera. (Breslauer wassent to Auschwitz with his wife andthree children in 1944. Only theirdaughter Chanita survived the war.)
“The size of camp Westerbork’shospital, which was one of the bestand largest hospitals of its kind, sym-bolizes the Nazi lie that Jews weregoing to be put to work” further east,ten Cate told JTA in an interviewahead of the 75th anniversary of thefirst death transport out of the camp,which took place on July 15, 1942.
“It was one of a great many Germanefforts focused at making sure thatJews did not understand what theNazis were up to,” he added.
These efforts paid off, according toHenny Dormits, 87, a Holocaust sur-vivor who lived in the camp with herfamily for two years before they weresent to Theresienstadt.
While Jews in many other partsof Europe were subjected to
violence, torture, abuse and murder incamps, in Westerbork, “people were
not abused, they were treated correct-ly,” she said during an interview forDutch television in 2011. She spoke atthe former living quarters of AlbertGemmeker, the Nazi commander ofWesterbork, which is the only part ofthe camp that still exists today.
The Germans “did everything possi-ble to keep people calm here so noone was afraid,” Dormits recalled.And so when people were shipped offin cattle carts, “everyone assumedwe’d be going to another work camp.”
Westerbork included many ameni-ties that Jewish concentration campinmates elsewhere could only dreamof, including permits to leave campwithout supervision — given exclu-sively to people with family still insidethe camp, so they would not escape— and cabaret productions with musi-cal instruments.
But it was the quality of medical
treatment in Westerbork that clinchedthe illusion, according to Dormits.
“People were operated on here bythe best doctors, they would be hospi-talized for entire weeks as they healed,and when they were all better theywere put on a transport,” she recalledin the documentary. “This was themake-believe world in which we lived.”
This form of deception wasextremely effective, according to DirkMulder, the director of the CampWesterbork Memorial Center, a non-governmental organization with statefunding that is responsible for com-memoration and educational work inthe former camp.
The message of the hospital was,“We Germans have the best inten-tions for you, get better in this largehospital so we can put you to work
elsewhere,” Mulder said in the Dutchdocumentary.
Still, not everyone was duped.Gemmeker, who had a friendly relation-ship with the Jewish filmmakerBreslauer, once told the cameramansomething that made Breslauer realizethe transports were a one-way ticket,according to Chanita Moses,Breslauer’s daughter. Her father did notsay exactly what Gemmeker told him,she told the Dutch television film crew.
Philip Mechanicus, a Dutch JewishHolocaust victim who secretly chroni-cled his stay in Westerbork before hewas murdered, wrote about his“tremendous fear” of when he wouldbe shipped out.
On September 13, 1943, a 65-year-old woman in Mechanicus’ barrackscommitted suicide, he wrote. She wasput on a list of deportees toTheresienstadt, prompting her daugh-ter to volunteer to leave with hermother. The mother killed herself “toprevent her daughter from making thesacrifice,” wrote Mechanicus.
Camp Westerbork originally was setup in 1939 as a detainment facility bythe Dutch government in a remote,rural area of the country for fewerthan 2,000 Jewish refugees who fledNazi Germany. Two years after theGermans invaded in 1940, they tookover the space and massivelyincreased its capacity. They treatedthe first German inmates as a pre-ferred prisoner population. And they
set up an unarmed Jewish policingunit that was responsible for takingpeople to the trains to be shipped offto death camps in the east.
Today, what used to be the campgrounds, in a grassy flatland,
borders a large radio observatory. Amemorial area contains informationalplaques and several monuments,including a German cattle car of thesort used to transport Jews and astatue featuring railway tracks thatcurl up heavenwards.
Whereas elsewhere in Europe, for-mer Nazi camps were preserved andused as educational exhibits aboutthe Holocaust, the original barracksand facilities of Westerbork wereused for housing refugees fromIndonesia in the 1970s, until the facil-ities were stripped for wood.
The failure to preserve Westerborkwas part of a greater reluctance in theNetherlands, where many non-Jewsfelt victim to the Nazi occupation, toacknowledge the uniqueness of theJewish tragedy, according to tenCate. He said the Dutch also werereluctant to look at the role of ordinaryDutchmen, including police officerswho rounded up Jews.
This began to change in the 1990s,making way for a wave of renewedinterest in the Holocaust in recentyears. But the belated timing meansthat Amsterdam is one of Europe’svery last capital cities to receive aHolocaust museum: it opened lastyear and is still in its “infancy stages,”ten Cate noted.
Back in Westerbork, Dutch ChiefRabbi Binyomin Jacobs, whose par-ents survived the Holocaust in hidingand who often speaks about thegenocide at the former camp toschoolchildren, told JTA that thecamp’s story is a constant reminderagainst giving in to wishful thinking.
“When disaster happens slowly, ininstallments, people have a tendencyto accept each installment,” saidJacobs, who in 2014 shocked manyDutchmen when he said that anti-Semitism in the Netherlands meanshe would advise his congregants tolive in Israel or the United States.“This is what happened here. So Ithink we cannot afford to stay silentand just hope for the best.”
IN HOLLAND, THE NAZIS BUILT A LUXURY CAMP TO LULL THE JEWS BEFORE MURDERING THEM
Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs’ parents survived the Holocaust in hiding, and he often speaks
about the genocide at Westerbork to schoolchildren.
Jews from Amsterdam on their way to the transport to Westerbork transit camp .
By Mark Glickman. The JewishPublication Society: Philadelphia,Pa., 2016. 327 pp. $22.31 hardcover.
REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN
At this point, the world is wellaware of the six million Jews
murdered during the Holocaust.Popular films like The MonumentsMen and Woman in Gold have alsomade many aware of the invaluableartwork stolen by the Nazis during theHolocaust, a goodly portion of it fromthose selfsame Jews. Mark Glickman,the author of the fascinating, thoroughand well-written book, Stolen Words:The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books,now shines a bright light on the mil-lions of books — many of themunique and priceless — stolen fromthe Jews by the Nazis during thoseyears.
Wisely, in order for the reader tofully appreciate the crime perpetratedby this ruthless looting, Glickmanbegins his work by reviewing howcentral the word and hence the reli-gious book and, indeed, all books areto Judaism. Thus, we are initially pre-sented with a very interesting shorthistory highlighting the stages of thedevelopment of the word becomingthe Jewish religious book and booksgenerally, alongside no less interest-ing and important information on theearly development of the print indus-
try among Jews. It is here, too, thatwe read about the specific rules forthe care, handling and disposal of reli-gious books especially — such wasthe exceptionally high esteem theywere held in!
As we approach thevery heart ofGlickman’s work, welearn that, in fact, theidea of burning Jewishbooks was not “intro-duced” by the Nazis.“The first recordedincident of Jewishbook destruction datesback to the secondcentury BCE, duringthe Maccabean revolt.”Then, sadly, with timeand more books avail-able, came more con-flagrations, often due to the rulings ofvarious Popes. In sum: aside from the“sturdy, boot-pounding songs whoselyrics the crowds sang with beer-hallgusto,” and the “inflammatory Nazioratory” culminating in excited mobresponses of “Heil Hitler” and Nazisalutes, the burning of Jewish booksin Germany in the spring of 1933 wasnothing new.
On the other hand, the premeditatedand organized extermination and cre-mation of a people, while the belovedbooks they lived by — “the literarylegacy of an entire civilization” —were taken: that was, it appears,
“introduced” by the Nazis. Indeed,the Nazis pillaged the books andmanuscripts of countless prestigiousJewish institutions, libraries, book-shops and private collections acrossthe continent with cruel impunity,
even as they forced thoseJewish scholars who hadonce utilized these treas-ured works into thepainful position of sortingthem — and by so doing,deciding which would“live” and which “die,” orbe consigned to the“nearby pulp mill” fordestruction. Interestingly,here Glickman tells ushow two Jewish poets,Abraham Sutzkever andShmerke Kaczerginskitried to undermine this
“selection” process by saving the bestof them . . . a highly dangerous under-taking.
So, why did Hitler and the Naziswant these books?
Among other reasons, we readhow “during the late 1930s . . .
Hitler . . . envisioned an academy thatwould demonstrate the great achieve-ments of German intellect and culture.”“One goal of this developing academicimpulse was to provide scientific justifi-cation for the Nazis’ racism and anti-semitism.” In short, then, a great libraryof Jewish books was needed for“research and education,” and Nazi
leaders, including Alfred Rosenbergand Heinrich Himmler, would competeto see to its realization.
Finally, we come to what is surelythe most absorbing part of StolenWords: the discovery of these booksafter the war, stored in “castles, aban-doned mine shafts, and warehouses,”and the story of the well-known schol-ars and Jewish leaders, includingSalo W. Baron, Cecil Roth, LucySchildkret (soon to be Lucy S.Dawidowicz), Hannah Arendt andJudah L. Magnes, who would dedi-cate themselves to finding a caringhome for them once more.
Needless to say, students of theHolocaust will find Stolen Words: TheNazi Plunder of Jewish Books excep-tionally valuable. For that matter, thissingular work belongs in the library ofall those of us who love books!
P.S. On a more personal note: afterthe war, this reviewer’s father,Abraham Cypkin, a well-known lyricistof the Kovno ghetto, had the honor ofhaving a number of his works appearin Kaczerginski’s 1948 collection ofpoems and songs written in the ghet-tos and camps — Lider fun di Getosun Lagern. In Stolen Words Glickmannotes that this volume “remains thelargest and most significant collectionof its kind.”
Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia, Communication, and VisualArts at Pace University.
STOLEN WORDS: THE NAZI PLUNDER OF JEWISH BOOKS
BY JOSEFIN DOLSTEN, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
From Anne Frank’s diary to ElieWiesel’s Night, books about the
Holocaust remain some of the mostpowerful and well-known pieces of lit-erature published in the past century.Books have the power to educateabout the Shoah’s unimaginable hor-rors and bring to life the stories of itsvictims, as well as unearth hiddendetails about wartime crimes.
JTA reached out to Jewish studiesscholars across the country, seekingtheir recommendations on recentlypublished books dealing with theHolocaust. Their picks, all publishedin the past three years, include aninvestigation into the 1941 massacreof Jews in the Polish town ofJedwabne (two scholars recommend-ed the same book on that topic), acritical examination of theories tryingto explain the Holocaust, and a lookat how Adolf Hitler saw Islam as a reli-gion that could be exploited for anti-Semitic purposes.
The Crime and the Silence:Confronting the Massacre of Jewsin Wartime Jedwabne (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2015). By AnnaBikont.
Joshua Zimmerman, professorial
chair in Holocaust studies and EastEuropean Jewish history and associ-ate professor of history at YeshivaUniversity, writes:
This book, a winner of the 2015National Jewish Book Award, waswritten by a Polish journalist who dis-
covered she was Jewish in her 30sand became deeply engaged in thetopic of Polish-Jewish relations. AfterJan T. Gross’ controversial bookNeighbors: The Destruction of theJewish Community in Jedwabne,Poland (2000) proved that the localPoles — not the Germans — commit-ted the massive pogrom in that town
in July 1941, Bikont went toJedwabne and its surroundings, inter-viewing eyewitnesses to the crime inthe years 2000 to 2003, sheddingnew light on the character of the per-petrators, the bystanders and theintricate way the crime was concealed
for 50 years after the Holocaust. It iswritten in the form of a journal of theauthor’s travels and conversationswith people.
Barbara Grossman, professor ofdrama at Tufts University and formerUS Holocaust Memorial Councilboard member, also recommendedBikont’s book. She writes:
I first read about the Jedwabnemassacre in Gross’s book and stillremember being riveted by the coverimage of a barn engulfed in flames.Perhaps because my paternalgrandfather was from Łomża, Poland— a city relatively near Jedwabne —I felt a particular connection to thisatrocity, as well as gratitude to him forleaving the country years before theHolocaust. I directed TadeuszSłobodzianek’s Our Class, a playloosely based on the events inJedwabne, at Tufts in 2012, andremain fascinated by this story ofgreed, treachery and cruelty, a horrif-ic crime in which as many as 1,600Jewish men, women and children per-ished. Bikont’s magnificent work ofinvestigative journalism details hermeticulous reconstruction of the mas-sacre and its subsequent decades-long coverup. It is a sobering andcompelling account of anti-Semitism,denial and isolated acts of heroism.
The Archive Thief: The Man WhoSalvaged French Jewish History inthe Wake of the Holocaust (OxfordUniversity Press, 2015). By LisaMoses Leff.
Jonathan Sarna, professor ofAmerican Jewish history at BrandeisUniversity, writes:
(Continued on page 13)
SEVEN BOOKS ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST SCHOLARS SAY YOU SHOULD READ
something to mark the spot in his vil-lage where dozens of Jews were exe-cuted by the Nazis, he did it the onlyway he knew how: he built a cross.
Together with the children from hisschool in the village, he cut down anacacia tree, chopped away thebranches and erected a three-meter-high cross on the top of a hill, justabove a ravine into which the bodiesfell. He painted the cross bright blue,simply because that was the onlycolor he had. To this cross heattached a wooden board with hand-written words: “Jewish families wereexecuted on this spot by the Nazis.”
“We didn’t know that the Jewishcustom is to put a six-pointed star onthe grave,” he said. “We did what wecould do by ourselves; we didn’t haveany financial help.”
There are a few similar monumentsin villages and small towns in Belarus,Ukraine and Russia — although thephenomenon has remained largelyunknown until now. Experts who haveglimpsed these rare memorials saythey are created with the best ofintentions, but some Jewish leadersin the former Soviet Union object tothe crosses.
According to the Yad Vashem muse-um’s database, Romanian Fascistsmurdered almost 100 Jews inStolnichani, which sits in the north ofMoldova, near the Romanian border,in July 1941. One of the peasants wit-nessed the massacre as it happened:The Romanian Fascists forcedJewish children, women and elderlyinto the forest, lined them up andbegan shooting. Many people who fellwere only injured. But for days, thesoldiers guarded the spot so that noone could come to help the injured,Timoshko said.
It is hard to imagine that somethingso terrible could have happened here:Cherry and apple trees grow allaround, fat rabbits jump into the bush-es when they hear someoneapproaching, and sunflower fieldsbeg to be photographed. But the vil-
lagers remembered exactly where theJews were murdered, because afterthe war they planted poplar trees tomark the spot, Timoshko said. He stilluses these tall trees as a guide whenhe tries to find his cross, because it ishard to see it from the road.
“There are just a handful of thesemonuments, because most of the[Holocaust] monuments are built byJews,” said Arkadi Zeltser, director ofthe Center for Research on theHolocaust in the Soviet Union at theYad Vashem museum in Israel. “Mostlikely, they were built by localactivists. The authorities probably did-n’t build them.”
He said he knows of two more suchmonuments — in Cherikov, Belarus,and in Yudendorf, in Crimea, where
the Holocaust monument has aChristian cross on one side and aJewish star on the other. He saidthere might be one or two more simi-lar monuments in Russia. InCherikov, Belarus, on the spot wherebetween 300 and 500 Jews were exe-cuted in the fall of 1941, a monumentwith a cross was built after the originalmonument was vandalized in the1980s, according to information onthe Yad Vashem’s website.
This journalist independently dis-covered three more Holocaust monu-ments with Christian symbols inPetrikov, Begoml and Anatovka inBelarus and one more in Moldova —all of them built after the fall of theSoviet Union.
“It’s a new phenomenon — in Soviettimes this didn’t happen,” Zeltser said.“Now it’s the new generation whobelieve that it’s not good when agrave of hundreds of people isn’ttaken care of. So they put a monu-ment in accordance with their ownideas of how to take care of theseplaces.”
Indeed, people in Stolnichanialways wanted to build some kind ofmonument, said Timoshko, a 69-year-old Communist and the son of aWorld War II veteran — but no onetook the initiative until he became theprincipal of the school.
“We had a discussion with the chil-
dren in our village, so afterwards wedecided to mark the spot,” he said.
Zeltser said he does not think suchmonuments are anti-Semitic or inten-tionally meant to erase the memory ofgenocide against the Jews.
“If they wanted to forget that Jewswere killed there, they wouldn’t put amonument at all. When people put intheir own money and their effort — Idon’t think those people wanted toforget that Jews were executedthere,” he said. “Do you think theyknow that Jews don’t put a cross onthe grave? I am not sure. Believe me,it doesn’t even occur to them that forJews it might be offensive.”
But others in the Jewish communitysaid a cross that marks the spotwhere Jews were killed is not histori-cally accurate and is disrespectful tothose who died.
Boris Bruk, who helped to build 17Holocaust monuments in Belarus inrecent years, said it’s important thatthe word “Jew” be written clearly onmemorials.
In particular, the Jewish communityin Belarus is working to replace theold description of the victims as“Soviet citizens” with the word “Jews.”
“If it’s only a cross and Jews areburied there, we are not happy aboutthat,” Bruk said. “It’s not right. It cre-ates the wrong impression about whowas executed there. It needs to bechanged.”
A cross that stands on a Jewishgrave is problematic from a religiousstandpoint as well, said BoleslavKapulkin, spokesman for the ChabadLubavitch community in Odessa,Ukraine. Jewish souls can’t rest ingraves marked by the symbol of a for-eign religion, he said.
Then, too, the people who murderedthe Jews were Christians.
“I can understand the reaction of theJewish community to Holocaust mon-uments that are built by Christiansbecause the Germans wereChristians and the Nazi uniforms hadthe inscription, ‘God is with us,’” saidHanna Wegrzynek, the chief special-ist in the research department at the
POLIN Museum of Jewish history, inPoland.
But in Moldova, the response hasbeen more positive.
“If Christians honor the memory oftheir Jewish neighbors in a fashionwhich is familiar to them, that’s a verywonderful thing,” said Irina Shihova,curator of Moldova’s Jewish HeritageMuseum.
While there are no Jews left in thevillage of Stolnichani, Leon Akerman,who is one of the 10 Jews who stilllive in the nearby town of Edinits, saidhe sees nothing wrong with a crossthat marks the spot where a mas-sacre took place.
“It’s better than nothing,” saidAkerman, 72, whose grandparents,aunt and uncle were murdered duringthe Holocaust. “A lot of places wherepeople were executed have no monu-ments at all, a lot of places have beenforgotten.”
For instance, retired city councilorIurii Zagorcea, who is Christian, haserected five Holocaust monuments innorthern Moldova and has lobbied thepresident of Moldova to include a uniton the Holocaust in the country’sschoolbooks. In the coming years hehopes to build five more Holocaustmonuments.
“My goal is to educate the futuregenerations so that it doesn’t happenagain,” he said. “We must tell the truth— so that people see the stones and
they will know what happened here.”Most of the monuments he built
have the Star of David on them, butone — in the village of Terebna —features a cross on the left side withthe names of the six Christian soldierswho were executed by Fascists, andon the right a six-pointed star for the64 Jewish victims from the same vil-lage.
Next to this monument stands a tallcross.
“People ask why we put a crossthere,” Zagorcea said. “It is our cus-tom to put a cross in the honoraryplace at the entrance to the village. Itshows the respect of the local peopleto those who were killed.”
WHY ARE THERE CROSSES ON EASTERN EUROPE’S HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS?
A Holocaust memorial with a Christian cross in Edinits, Moldova.
He lived for decades in relativeanonymity in Toronto, where he
ran a construction company. But doc-uments shared with The Globe showthat Julius Kuhl — who died in 1985— should have been one of Canada’smost celebrated citizens, a hero of theHolocaust who saved hundreds, per-haps thousands, of lives.
Julius Kuhl arrived in Toronto short-ly after the Second World War with hisyoung family and a suitcase full ofSwiss watches that he hoped to sell.
He was also carrying a story of brav-ery and sorrow that he shared onlywith those close to him — one thatmight have made him an internationalcelebrity had he chosen to tell it.
Mr. Kuhl’s death in 1985 made noheadlines in Canada or beyond. Butdocuments stored in Switzerland,Jerusalem and Washington — sharedexclusively with The Globe and Mailand Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, aPolish newspaper — reveal Mr. Kuhl’srole as a savior of hundreds, perhapsthousands of fellow Jews during theHolocaust. It is a story that deservesto be considered alongside those offamous Holocaust heroes such asOskar Schindler and RaoulWallenberg.
Described by his family as a short,devout and gregarious man who wasconstantly puffing on a cigar, Mr. Kuhlwas a low-level diplomat at the Polishlegation in Bern, the Swiss capital,during the Second World War. He wasalso the center of a network that man-ufactured fake Latin American pass-ports that were then smuggled intoNazi-occupied Europe.
Personal letters, diplomatic cablesand Swiss police records show that,starting in 1941, Mr. Kuhl acquiredthousands of blank passports fromthe consuls of Paraguay and otherSouth and Central American coun-tries in Switzerland. He and a col-league then entered by hand thenames and dates of birth of EuropeanJews — including many who weretrapped inside the Warsaw ghetto —before pasting in their black-and-white photos.
The effort continued for two years —until Swiss police, anxious to avoidirritating Hitler’s Germany, broke upthe fake documents ring. Theybrought Mr. Kuhl and his collaboratorsin for questioning and demanded thatthe Polish legation, which represent-ed the London-based government-in-exile of Nazi-occupied Poland, dis-miss Mr. Kuhl.
“He should be as well known asSchindler, because he saved as manylives as Schindler,” said MarkusBlechner, who worked for years tocollect the documents proving the talehe heard as a child about Mr. Kuhland the life-saving passports. Mr.
Blechner, the grandson of Holocaustvictims, took up the cause of preserv-ing Mr. Kuhl’s story after Mr. Kuhlattended his bar mitzvah as an hon-ored guest shortly after the war.
Mr. Schindler protected more than1,000 Jews by employing them at hisfactory in Nazi-occupied Poland. Mr.Wallenberg saved almost 10,000Hungarian Jews by issuing them pro-tective passports identifying them asSwedish citizens.
One of the reasons Mr. Kuhl’s storyisn’t as widely known is that his pass-port scheme was only partly success-ful. Mr. Blechner, who now serves asthe honorary Polish consul in Zurich,says thousands of fake passportswere distributed via Mr. Kuhl’s net-work, but only a minority of the recipi-ents are believed to have survived theHolocaust.
Jews holding passports from neutralcountries were considered exemptfrom Nazi laws that confined Jews toghettos and mandated that they iden-tify themselves by wearing yellowstars on their clothing. Those third-country passports allowed many Jewsto flee ahead of the mass extermina-tions that followed.
An estimated six million EuropeanJews were murdered during theHolocaust.
While some of the Jews whoreceived passports produced inSwitzerland used them to escapefrom Nazi-occupied Europe, themajority were sent to internmentcamps — many, apparently, to acamp in Vittel, in Vichy France. Mr.Blechner says the Nazis’ original planwas to hold the “Latin Americans” until
they could be traded for German citi-zens detained in camps in Canadaand the United States.
But the sheer number of LatinAmerican passport holders in occu-pied Poland eventually raised suspi-cions. As Swiss police moved to shutdown Mr. Kuhl’s passport ring in thefall of 1943, Germany demanded thatLatin American countries verify thatthe passport holders were really theircitizens.
When Latin American govern-ments said they had no
knowledge of the passport holders,the Jews in Vittel and other intern-ment camps were sent to Auschwitzand the horrific fate from which Mr.Kuhl’s network had tried to savethem.
Another reason Mr. Kuhl’s exploitswent unheralded is that Mr. Kuhl him-self was uninterested in publicizing orromanticizing his exploits.
“[He] wasn’t interested in fame. Hedid this for a certain period in time,then he was selling watches inToronto, then he became a construc-tion magnate. People say, ‘Why didn’the promote his story?’ Because hewas busy,” said Mr. Kuhl’s son-in-law,Israel Singer. “He was a man trying tobuild a new life, just like the[Holocaust] survivors were.”
But Mr. Kuhl did tell his four children— two of whom still live in Toronto —and many grandchildren about thework he did during the war. The inspir-ing story they heard is supported bydocuments seen by The Globe andMail in Bern, as well as by photo-copied passports and other recordsthat were anonymously donated tothe United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum shortly after Mr. Kuhl’sdeath. Other documents that corrobo-rate Mr. Kuhl’s heroics are stored inthe archives of the Yad Vashemmuseum in Jerusalem.
A 1945 letter from the AgudathIsrael World Organization states thatMr. Kuhl and his colleagues played acritical role in “rescuing many hun-dreds of Polish Jews.”
“These stories are not apocryphal.They’re actually real. There’s docu-mentation,” said Mr. Singer, whoserved from 1986 to 2001 as secre-tary-general of the World JewishCongress and then as chairman until2006 —– doing work, he said, thatwas frequently inspired by the legacyand teachings of his father-in-law.
One of the many saved by Mr.Kuhl’s efforts was Aharon Rokeach,the chief rabbi of the Belz Hasidicdynasty. Mr. Rokeach was considereda top target of the Gestapo, and sav-ing the rabbi became paramount forthe Hasidim.
He escaped Nazi-occupied Europein 1943 using a passport created byMr. Kuhl and sent via diplomaticpouch by Archbishop FilippoBernardini, the papal nuncio to Bernwho repeatedly used his office to aidMr. Kuhl’s efforts. The rescue pre-served the lineage of the Belzer
dynasty, which has since reestab-lished itself in Israel.
Mr. Kuhl’s tombstone near BneiBrak in Israel says he saved the livesof thousands of Jews, including thatof Mr. Rokeach. Mr. Singer says theinscription was added at the “insis-tence” of the rabbi’s son.
Mr. Kuhl was born into poverty in thesoutheastern Polish town of Sanok in1917 but was sent at the age of nineto live with his uncle in Zurich. Hisfather had died when he was young,and his mother wanted him to get abetter education than he couldreceive in Sanok. Mr. Kuhl fulfilledthat wish by obtaining a PhD in eco-nomics shortly before the outbreak ofthe war.
His mother was deported to Siberiaafter the Nazi-Soviet invasion ofPoland on September 1, 1939. Shedied shortly after the end of the war.
In 1940, Mr. Kuhl was hired by thePolish legation as deputy head of theconsular section, with a special remitto aid Polish refugees.
The passport-smuggling operationbegan in October 1941. The first res-cue was accomplished by EliSturnbuch, a Polish Jew living inSwitzerland who purchased a blankParaguayan passport in Bern andfilled it in with the details of hisfiancée, Guta Eisenzweig, who wastrapped in the Warsaw ghetto.
When that effort succeeded,Switzerland’s Jewish community real-ized they might be able to save farmore people. Mr. Kuhl and his net-work began buying dozens, then hun-dreds, of blank Paraguayan passportsfrom the cooperative Paraguayanconsul in Bern.
As the operation expanded, the net-work began buying blank passportsfrom other countries that hadremained neutral. Bank transfersfound among the documents in Bernshow that American Jews aided theeffort by sending money via the Polishconsulate in New York.
Mr. Kuhl and his colleague Konstanty (Continued on page 11)
July 22, 1942, dawned hot andmuggy in the Warsaw ghetto.
Two years earlier, the Nazis hadforced the Jewish population ofGerman-occupied Poland into anarea occupying just 1.3 square miles,surrounded by a 10-foot wall toppedby barbed wire.
And this was the day on which theywere to embark on one of the mosthorrifying examples of mass murderin human history.
Armed with lists and maps, SS sol-diers moved methodically among thefilthy, disease-ridden Jewish apart-ment blocks to round up the first can-didates for extermination.
Children cried, women screamedand old men begged for mercy, butthis was an operation that was to becarried out with no consideration ofage, sex or infirmity.
On that first day 6,000 Jews wereput aboard trains as the Holocaustmoved into its industrial-scale phase.They were told they were to be reset-tled in the east.
Instead, the cattle wagons theyboarded were destined for a complexcalled Treblinka, just two hours north ofthe city. It had been fitted out with 10gas chambers disguised as showerblocks which could suffocate thou-sands of people per day in batches of200.
There was no need to tattoo theinmates with serial numbers.Treblinka was purely a death factory,with most of its victims dead andburied within two hours of arrival.
The courage and suffering of adoomed people, carted away dayafter day during that terrible summer,is recalled by the very few who sur-vived the ghetto to bear witness to adark period the Jews called “the greatdeportations.”
They include people such as EdHerman, an economist, who was bornin Warsaw in 1931. A decade later hewas walled up with all the other Nazi-defined Untermenschen or sub-humans — including Roma, Slavs,the mentally disabled and physicallyhandicapped — in the ghetto.
“I had close relatives who lived rightacross from Pawiak prison, run by theGestapo, where executions tookplace daily,” he recalled. “I used tovisit my family there often. On onesuch visit to their house, crossing a
checkpoint manned bypolice, I was beaten up bya policeman simplybecause I was there.
“In the early summer of1942, my mother decidedthat for my survival it wasnecessary for me to besmuggled out. It was justin time, because the trans-port of Warsaw Jews tothe death camp ofTreblinka started a fewmonths later.”
Between July 22 andSeptember 21, up to
300,000 inhabitants of theghetto were deported toTreblinka. Herman sur-vived by being taken in bya Christian family beforemaking his way toHungary. He lost many rel-atives, but his mother andfather survived.
Maja Grabowska wasalso a child when she
heard the nail-studded Nazi jackbootsclattering through the ghetto streets.
“Day after day the Germans werecarrying out human hunting — comb-ing block after block for the wholemonth,” she said. “The action wasproceeding with a lot of shouting,screaming, beating the helpless, firingat them and using all kinds of abuse.Surviving the first wave left us fright-ened and terrorized.
“From the start of the ‘action’ oursmall family group — mama and I,my grandparents, and my aunt, withsix-year-old Lenka — moved severaltimes because our first temporaryhome at Zamenhoff Street wassearched a couple of times and leftdeserted. Those who were not suc-cessfully hidden were taken to theUmschlagplatz — the collection pointfor the trains — and perished.
“In each house we moved into, thefirst thing to do was to find the hidingplace: an attic, or cellar, or some wallcloset, which we could disguise. Theghetto was almost empty. Houseswere abandoned, apartment doorswide open. In succeeding rooms weentered there was still food on thetable, clothing and toys around,unmade beds. Tenants disappeared,probably already gassed in Treblinka.
“I remember thinking with envy of
H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man and fantasiz-ing about remaining invisible and notjust hidden in the cellar, under the bed,in the closet or behind the furniture.
“We slept in crumpled beds, hug-ging each other, but this time our luckran out. Shortly after we moved in, the
next round-up began and our hidingplace in the attic was discovered.”
She was marched with her family tothe Umschlagplatz — known as the“vestibule of hell” — but their fate wasdeferred because the last train of theday was full.
“The last train left, leaving on theplatform dead and dying people. Iheard horrifying screams. Blood wasflowing so profusely that it was pour-ing into the building nearby.”
In the event, a Jewish policemanworking for the Nazis led them to
safety. While the rest of her familywere to perish in the Warsaw ghettouprising the following year, Maja, now84, was smuggled out of the ghetto.But the horror of those days hasnever left her.
“It is always with me,” she says.Another child survivor, Janina
Davidowicz, 87, recalled how theghetto Jews were lied to — promisedbread if they went willingly to the col-lection point to board the trains.
She said: “People were offered twoloaves of bread, some margarine orsome sugar if they reported to the
Umschlagplatz. Nobodyimagined they weregoing straight to a gaschamber.
“You heard every lan-guage in the street —Y i d d i s h , P o l i s h ,Hungarian, German. Wecooked on sawdustbetween two bricks andfetched water from acommunal tap. Food wasbread mixed with saw-dust and potatoes.”
Her father joined thepolice and ensured theirsurvival while their neigh-bors vanished aroundthem.
“Our block of flats wasempty. The father of thetwins living above usthrew himself out of thewindow when he camehome and didn’t find his
children there.”In the winter of 1942 Janina’s father
smuggled her to a Christian district.As he had police identification papers,he was allowed to escort lorries outthrough the gates, and she slippedout under his watch.
Outside the ghetto in the city, shewas kept hidden by nuns and changedher name, but neither her mother norher father survived the war.
She now lives in London. Germantroops returned to the ghetto in April1943 to remove its remaining inhabi-
tants. But by then news of the massmurder had spread and hundreds ofbrave Jews rose up.
They all perished, but the “Jews ofWarsaw” had defied the evil NaziGerman state, and in doing so gavethe future state of Israel, God’s prom-ised land, its motto: “Never again.”
THE DAY NAZIS TOOK WARSAW GHETTO JEWS TO TREBLINKA EXTERMINATION CAMP
Deportation of Polish Jews to Treblinka extermination camp
from the ghetto.
Janina Davidowicz recalls how the Jews were promised bread if
they willingly boarded the trains.
Ed Herman escaped the ghetto a few months before Nazis started moving its residents to Treblinka.
Kalman Aron is a prolific artist.Even during his internment at
seven Nazi camps, he didn’t stopdrawing — and his artwork saved hislife.
“I probably have in Germany a hun-dred drawings, drawings of soldiers,”the 92-year-old artist said during arecent interview. “They wouldn’t payme anything, but I would get a pieceof bread, something to eat. Withoutthat, I wouldn’t be here.”
Speaking in the living room of hismodest Beverly Hills apartment, Aronwas surrounded by his artwork, col-
lected over decades. Paintings arestacked five and six deep againsteach wall, with more in his bedroomand even more in a basement store-room.
Aron immigrated to Los Angeles in1949 and built a life, a career and acircle of friends. They were artists andmusicians. Now, apart from his wifeand a part-time caretaker, it’s hispaintings that keep him company.
Aron was born with a preternaturaltalent for portraiture. At 3, he wasdrawing likenesses of family friends inRiga, Latvia. At 7, he had a one-manshow at a local gallery. At 13, he wona commission to paint the prime min-ister of Latvia. He was 16 years oldand a student at Riga’s art academyin 1941 when the Germans occupiedthe country.
Seven camps, four marriages andnearly 80 years later, he’s proven tobe a resourceful and dogged survivor.In the long and circuitous course ofhis life, art and survival have gonehand in hand.
It began in the ghetto in Riga, whenhe did a pencil drawing of a guard andshowed it to him. The guard liked itenough to spread the word about histalent. The formula repeated itselfover and over in the coming years ofpersecution and hardship.
Still, for a Jew to have writing mate-
rials in the camps was considered arisk, so German troops who wanted alikeness would hide him in a lockedbarrack while he drew them or workedfrom a photograph to draw their rela-tives.
“Once I did a portrait and other peo-ple liked it, they would do the samething: lock me in the room, not let meout,” he said.
Aron managed to leverage his skillanywhere he spent a significantamount of time, particularly the Rigaghetto and the labor camps ofPoperwahlen in Latvia andRehmsdorf in Germany. In eachplace, he attracted a clientele of rank-and-file soldiers and high-ranking offi-
cers who rewarded him with scraps offood and pulled him out of hard labor.
What seems like lifetimes later, hebelieves painting still keeps him alivetoday.
“Friends of mine, they get old andthey don’t know what to do, and theydie of boredom,” he said in his diningroom, his eyes widening with intensi-ty. “Boredom! And I’ll never die ofboredom, as long as I have a piece ofpaper.”
“MOTHER AND CHILD”
Decades before he spoke openlyabout what he saw during the
Holocaust, Aron painted it.Until 1994, when he was inter-
viewed by the USC ShoahFoundation, he tended not to describewhat he had seen. But during thoselong decades of silence, he produceda number of artworks — in oil, water-color, pastel and charcoal — depict-ing his memories of that trying time.
There was Aron at the head of a lineof inmates on a forced march. Therewas Aron at Buchenwald, sleepingoutside with a rock for a pillow. Therewere haggard portraits of fellowinmates.
But the most well-known of thesepaintings is “Mother and Child,” whichnow hangs in the lobby of the LosAngeles Museum of the Holocaust.
Aron moved to Los Angeles in 1949with a young wife, $4 in his pocketand zero English proficiency after fin-ishing art school in Vienna. In 1951,he had a job illustrating maps inGlendale when one day, he decidedto glue two city maps to a board tocreate an 8-foot-tall canvas.
He brought home the oversizedsheet, and after four or five nights oflaboring past midnight, he finished apastel, showing a scene he had wit-nessed many times in the camps: amother clutching her child tightly toher face, as if they were one, boundtogether no matter what abuse theymight have to face.
As he worked on the painting, herecalled, “I wasn’t feeling. I saw ithappening.”
He went on, “I just said, ‘I’m going toput it on paper.’ I wanted to drawthem. That’s why.”
“Mother and Child” sat in his studiofor nearly 60 years as he found him-self unable to part with it, the glue heused to create the canvas bleedingslowly through the paper to create abrownish tint. Today, it is consideredone of his masterpieces.
At the time he painted it, Aron wasunable to put his trauma into words.During his later Shoah Foundationinterview, as a videographer switchedtapes, Aron chatted with the inter-viewer, a fellow survivor, apparentlyunaware that audio still was beingrecorded, and described his difficulty.
“About 30 years ago, I couldn’t doit,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I wouldchoke up if I did it. I’m fine now.”
Sherri Jacobs, an art therapist out-side Kansas City, Mo., told theJournal that art sometimes enablessurvivors of trauma to express whatthey otherwise could not. Jacobs hasconducted an art therapy workshop ata Jewish retirement home nearKansas City for 15 years, workingwith many Holocaust survivors.Though they rarely paint explicitlyabout their Holocaust experience, asAron has, creative expressionnonetheless helps put shape andform to their trauma, she said.
“They can express things in ametaphorical way,” she said, “in a waythat it’s leaving their mind, leavingtheir body and going on paper.”
PAINTING MEN AND MONSTERS
Drawing in the camps, Aron saidhe was not thinking of his
hatred or fear of his subjects — onlyof surviving.
In Poperwahlen, for instance, thecamp commandant gave Aron a pho-tograph of his parents and orderedhim to draw a miniature that could fitin a locket mounted on a ring.
Aron had seen Jews randomly beat-en or shot by guards at the camp.More than anything, he was thinkingabout his own survival as the com-mandant locked him in a barrack with
a pencil and paper.“I mean, in my head is, ‘Am I going
to be alive tomorrow?’ ” Aron said inhis apartment nearly eight decadeslater. “Watching them killing the Jewswas terrible, terrible, terrible. I havevery bad nights sleeping here.”
The task could have taken him twodays, he said. But he stretched it overmore than a week for the exemption itafforded him from back-breakinglabor.
It’s difficult for Aron to estimate howmany portraits he drew. He knew onlythat the same interaction repeateditself many times with Nazi troops.
“Wherever I was, I made sure I hada piece of paper and pencil,” he said.
As the months passed, he parlayedhis skill into gaining more materials,piecing together a sheaf of drawingsthat he carried with him. Observinghis assured manner and his materi-als, camp guards mostly left himalone.
“When they saw that, they knew,‘Don’t touch this guy, he’s doingsomething for us,’ ” he said.
By the end of the war, his skillaccounted for perhaps an extra fivepounds on his skeletal frame, he toldthe Shoah Foundation interviewer —a small but critical difference.
“There also were people that weretailors and shoemakers,” he said in
(Continued on page 9)
SAVED BY ART: HOW ONE MAN’S SKILL GOT HIM THROUGH SEVEN NAZI CAMPS
1994. “They would also get fed muchbetter. They were indoors. Theywould sew, you know. These are thekind of people that had more of achance of survival than a guy whowas digging ditches.”
RECLAIMING A WORLD OF LIGHT AND COLOR
Jacobs, the art therapist, saidunderstanding Holocaust sur-
vivors as the product of a single expe-rience can be misleading, traumaticthough it may have been. And in tryingto understand Aron through his art, put-ting the Holocaust constantly front andcenter would indeed be a mistake.
Of the hundreds of paintings thatline his apartment, relatively few dealwith the Holocaust. More often, theyare landscapes of the places he’s vis-ited, views from his balcony lookingout at downtown L.A. and portraits ofthe women he’s loved. Prominentlydisplayed is a 2006 oil portrait ofMiriam Sandoval Aron, his fourth andcurrent wife, straight-backed, wearing
a baseball cap during their honey-moon in Hawaii.
His earliest landscapes in LosAngeles are often devoid of color: Arambling house in Bunker Hill is ren-dered in shades of gray with no signof life; a monochromatic landscape ofSilver Lake shows not a single inhab-itant. But soon enough, he took topainting colorful tableaus of the city atvarious times of day.
Eventually, he made enough moneyto rent a West Hollywood studio withhigh ceilings and northern light, wherehe hosted parties that lasted until sun-rise. Over the years, his art has beenexhibited at several museums andgalleries. He has painted a number ofcelebrities and public figures, includ-ing novelist Henry Miller, pianist andcomposer André Previn and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.
For months at a time, he traveledthrough North America and WesternEurope — though never to Germany— stopping whenever he was movedto paint.
Recently, Aron agreed to be fea-
tured in an upcoming documentaryabout his life and art, backed by tele-vision producer Norman Lear.
“We’re going for the Oscar on thisthing, and you can quote me on that,”said Edward Lozzi, Aron’s longtimepublicist, who introduced him to thedocumentary’s director and executiveproducer, Steven C. Barber.
Aron said he hopes the extra public-ity will help him sell paintings and payrent, which even at his advanced agecontinues to be a concern. But in gen-eral, he’s content to sit at home andpaint.
Though Aron sometimes strugglesto remember words and names, heremains spirited enough, painting forhours each day and eagerly engagingvisitors in conversation. “I can man-age six languages,” he said. “But Ican’t remember people’s names.”
These days, his paintings are main-ly nonobjective rather than represen-tative.
“I used to go to the park,” he said, sit-ting in an airy corner of his apartment,next to the kitchen, where he keeps his
home studio. “I used to meet people.Now, I’m not allowed to drive at myage. So I’m here all the time.”
Lacking subjects for portraiture,Aron paints sheet after sheet ofshapes and colors.
“I enjoy the design, the design,” hesaid, holding up a recent painting, aset of undulating neon waves.“Movement, movement. This moves,it doesn’t stay still.”
Aron considers himself lucky tohave a gift and a passion that keepshim occupied into his old age.
“My situation may be a little bit bet-ter than some people who came outof the camps,” he told Magee duringtheir interviews. “They may havenothing else to do but watch televi-sion and think about those bad daysin the camps. I did that in the begin-ning, but I got away from thinkingabout it by doing portraits, land-scapes, traveling and painting. Ithink that kept me away from all thisagony of ‘How did I survive?’ or ‘Whydid I survive?’
“I did, and that’s it.”
SAVED BY ART: HOW ONE MAN’S SKILL GOT HIM THROUGH SEVEN NAZI CAMPS
BEAU DONELLY, THE AGE
As she has done for so long,Vivianne Spiegel searches the
fading photographs for her parents’faces among the piles of bodies.
She was seven years old when shesaw her mother, Tauba, for the lasttime. It was Paris, July 1942. Herfather, Moshe, a Polish shoemaker,had already been captured andturned over to the Nazis.
He was among the first prisonersdelivered to the concentration campwhere history’s largest genocide inone location would take place.
Then came the notorious Vel’ d’HivRoundup: more than 13,000 Jewsarrested and locked in a bicycle velo-drome not far from the Eiffel Tower.
They suffered in hot, cramped con-ditions with no food or water. Mostwere sent to transit camps, then herd-ed onto cattle trains destined for thegas chambers at Auschwitz.
In a lifesaving turn of fate, Taubaand her three children were releasedafter appealing to a sympatheticFrench policeman.
When they made it back to theirapartment, police tape stretchedacross the front door. Tauba knew theonly way to protect her children wasto get them out of the city.
She put them on a train bound forChaufour-Notre-Dame, in the coun-try’s northwest, to the small farmwhere they would spend the next twoyears in hiding.
Vivianne remembers her mothercrying at the station. She promisedthe war would be over soon; that thefamily would be together again. Shetold Vivianne to take care of her littlebrother, six-year-old Albert, and her14-month-old baby sister, Regine.
Not long after the train pulled out,Tauba was denounced. Years laterVivianne would learn how her motherran up the stairs of their building whenthe police came for her. Tauba wasfinally captured on the roof.
This is the last thing Vivianne knowsabout what happened to her mother,except that she, too, was murdered atAuschwitz.
“We never saw her again,” Viviannesays. “She knew what was going tohappen, but we didn’t know and shecertainly didn’t tell us. She told methat we were only going to the coun-
tryside for a short while.”It has been more than seven decades
since the last of the men and womenand their children arrived at DeathGate, were divided into groups andwere sent either to work or to the grave.
Tauba and Moshe were amongmore than 1.1 million people who per-ished at the Nazi concentration campthat stretched to the horizon, span-ning a terrifying 40 square kilometers.
Mostly they were Jews, but Poles,Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war,gay and disabled people were alsotargeted.
Vivianne doesn’t know if her par-ents were reunited behind the
barbed-wire fences before they died.She hopes they were. They aretogether now, in the frame she keepson the dressing table in her home.The black-and-white photograph ofeach of her parents, taken from theiridentification papers, is all she has leftof them.
In 2010, Vivianne and her two sonsretraced her childhood in France andtravelled to Auschwitz for the annualMarch of the Living. They walked threekilometers from Camp Number One toBirkenau in tribute to her parents.
“It was a nightmarish experience forme, but it was also a form of closure,”she says. “I’ll never go again. It’s toohorrible.”
Born Berthe, she changed hername to Vivianne — meaning life oralive — after coming to Melbourne.She feels her mother gave her asecond life when she put her on the
train out of Paris. But for 40 years Vivianne didn’t utter
a word about her parents. Not even tothe family who adopted three orphansof the Holocaust shipped to Australiaafter the war.
Now 81, the grandmother sharesher story at the Jewish HolocaustMuseum in Elsternwick. She speaks
about her fear of death and of therecurring nightmares. But she ishaunted most by photos of themassed bodies.
“At first I couldn’t look, but slowly Iacquired the strength. And then Istarted looking for their faces,”Vivianne says. “When I think of themon top of the piles of corpses it sendsshivers down my spine.
“But I still look for them when I seenew footage. It’s something I’vealways done. I’ve never found them.”
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S LIFELONG SEARCH FOR HER DEAD PARENTS
Edith Eger was just 16 when sheand her family were sent toAuschwitz in 1944. She accidental-ly sentenced her mother to deathby revealing she was over 40.Here’s her story.
Music is playing as we arrive atAuschwitz. It’s a cold dawn in
April 1944 and we’ve just beendecanted from a cattle car, in whichseveral people have died along theway.
But my father has just spied a bigsign above the gates: “Arbeit machtfrei,” it says — work sets you free. Heis suddenly cheerful.
“You see,” he says, “it can’t be a ter-rible place. We’ll only work a little, tillthe war’s over.”
If the platform weren’t so crowded, Iswear he’d break into a dance.
Soldiers start herding the men into aseparate line — maybe they are beingsent on ahead, to stake out a placefor their families. I wonder where we’ll
sleep tonight. I wonder when we’ll eat.My mother, my elder sister Magda
and I stand in a long line of womenand children, inching toward a manwith cold and domineering eyes. Idon’t yet know that this man is Dr.Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel ofDeath.
As we draw near, I see a boyishflash of gapped teeth when he grins.His voice is almost kind when he asksif anyone is sick. Or over 40 or under14. When someone says yes, hesends them to a line on the left.
My mother has grey hair, but herface is as smooth and unlined asmine. She could pass for my sister.Magda and I squeeze her between usand we walk three abreast.
“Button your coat,” says my mother.“Stand tall.” There is a purpose to hernagging. I am slim and flat-chested,and she wants me to look every dayof my 16 years. Unlike me, she hasrealized my survival depends on it.
Our turn now. Mengele lifts his fin-ger. “Is she your mother or your sis-ter?” he asks.
I cling to my mother’s hand. But Idon’t think about which word will pro-
tect her. I don’t think at all. “Mother,” Isay.
As soon as the word is out of mymouth, I want to pull it back into mythroat. Too late, I have realized thesignificance of the question. “Sister,sister!” I want to scream.
Mengele points my mother to theleft. Panicking, I start to run after herbut he grabs my shoulder.
“You’ll see your mother very soon,”he says. “She’s just going to take ashower.” He pushes me to the right.Toward Magda. Toward life. My moth-er turns to look at me and smiles. It isa small, sad smile.
Magda and I are marched off tostand in front of some low buildings.We are surrounded by thin women instriped dresses. One reaches for thetiny coral earrings, set in gold, thathave been in my ears since birth. Sheyanks and I feel a sharp sting.
“Why did you do that?” I ask. “I’dhave given you the earrings.”
She sneers. “I was rotting here whileyou were free.”
I wonder how long she has beenhere and why she is so angry. “Whenwill I see my mother?” I ask her. “I wastold I’d see her soon.”
She gives me a cold, sharp stare.There is no empathy in her eyes; justrage. She points to the smoke risingfrom a distant chimney.
“Your mother is burning in there,”she says. “You’d better start talkingabout her in the past tense.”
“WE DON’T KNOW WHAT’SGOING TO HAPPEN”
Just a month before, I had been apretty ordinary teenager — but
with an extraordinary ambition. Iwanted to represent Hungary at theOlympics.
For years I’d done five hours of rig-orous ballet practice every day afterschool; then I’d discovered gymnas-tics and joined an Olympic trainingteam.
Recently, my teacher had taken measide. She was crying. My team placehad to go to someone else, she said,because I was Jewish.
I wasn’t the only one with a talent.My sexy and flirtatious sister Magdaplayed the piano, and our middle sis-ter Klara had mastered theMendelssohn violin concerto whenshe was five.
She was away studying music inBudapest on the night the Germanscame for us. Storming into our flat,they told us we were being resettledand had to leave now.
Despite a chill in the air, I put on athin blue silk dress — the one I’d beenwearing when my boyfriend Eric gaveme my first kiss. It made me feel pro-tected.
Daylight was breaking as wearrived at a large brick factory,
where 12,000 Jews would be held fornearly a month without beds, runningwater or adequate rations. A girl onlya little older than me tried to run away.The Nazis hanged her in the middle ofthe camp as an example.
All too soon we were on our way toAuschwitz, 100 of us crammed ineach cattle car. For what seemed likedays, my parents didn’t speak.
Then, one night, I heard my moth-er’s voice in the dark.
“Listen. We don’t know where we’regoing. We don’t know what’s going tohappen. Just remember, no one cantake away from you what you’ve put inyour mind.”
Her words helped to save my life.I am in shock. I can’t picture my
mother being consumed by flames. Ican’t fully grasp that she has gone.And I can’t even grieve. Not now. Itwill take all my concentration to sur-vive the next minute, the next breath.
Night is falling when we aremarched to gloomy, primitive bar-racks where we will sleep on tieredshelves, six to a board.
With our bunkmates, Magda and Itry lying on the top tier. Then I hearthe sound of woodwind and stringsand think I must be imagining it. Aninmate quickly explains that the camphas an orchestra.
The door rattles open. On thethreshold is the uniformed officer fromthe selection line.
Dr. Mengele, it turns out, is not onlya killer but also a lover of the arts. Hetrawls the barracks in the evenings insearch of talented inmates to enter-tain him.
He walks in tonight with hisentourage, casting his eye over thenew arrivals. The inmates alreadyknow I’m a trained ballerina and theypush me forward.
“Little dancer,” Dr. Mengele says,his eyes bulging, “dance for me.”
The familiar opening strains of theBlue Danube waltz filter into the room.I’m lucky. I know a routine to this. As Istep, bend and twirl, he never takeshis eyes off me. But he also attends tohis duties as he watches. I can hearhim discussing with another officerwhich one of the 100 girls in our bar-racks should be killed next.
If I do anything to displease him, itcould be me.
I’m dancing in Hell. I close my eyesand hear my mother’s words again:“Just remember, no one can takeaway from you what you’ve put inyour own mind.”
And as I dance, I have a piercinginsight. Dr. Mengele, the man whohas just murdered my parents, ismore pitiful than me. I’m free in mymind, which he can never be. He will
always have to live with what he hasdone.
I close my routine by doing thesplits, and pray he won’t kill me. Buthe must like my performancebecause he tosses me a loaf ofbread — a gesture, it turns out, thatwill later save my life. When heleaves, I share the bread with all mybunkmates.
“My little dancer. Come.”After that, I work hard at developing
my inner voice. This is temporary, Itell myself. If I survive today, tomor-row I’ll be free.
One day, as I’m taking a showerwith other inmates, I notice a
sudden quiet. I feel a chill in my gut.The man I fear above all others is atthe door, gazing right at me.
“You!” Dr. Mengele calls. “My littledancer. Come.”
He leads me, naked and wet, downa hall and into an office with a deskand chair. He leans against the deskand looks me over, taking his time. Ihope whatever he plans to do to mewill be over quickly.
“Come closer,” he says, and I inchforward, shaking. I can smell menthol.His fingers are working over his coatbuttons. I am naked with my mother’skiller.
Just as I’m close enough for him totouch me, a phone rings in anotherroom. He flinches. He re-buttons hiscoat. “Don’t move,” he orders as heopens the door.
I hear him pick up the phone in thenext room, his voice neutral and curt.And I run for my life.
The next thing I know, I’m sittingbeside Magda as we devour the dailyladle of weak broth, with little pieces
(Continued on page 12)
“I CONDEMNED MY MOTHER TO THE GAS CHAMBER WITH ONE WRONG WORD”
The Elefant family in Czechoslovakia in 1928 (left to right: Helen, Edie, Magda, Klara, Ludwig).
(Continued from page 6)Rokicky filled in each document byhand from the safety provided by thePolish legation’s diplomatic status.
Another key figure in the opera-tion was Adolf Silberschein, a
Polish Jew who fortuitously happenedto be in Switzerland attending a con-ference when the war began. In exile,Mr. Silberschein established a groupcalled the Committee for Relief of theWar-Stricken Jewish Population andsent regular lists to Mr. Kuhl and Mr.Rokicky — sometimes two or three aweek — containing the names, per-sonal details and photographs ofJews trapped in occupied areas andin need of fake passports.
Rodolfe Hugli, the honoraryParaguayan consul to Switzerland,also played a vital role — though acontroversial one, because of theprofit he made. Mr. Hugli sold blankParaguayan passports to the network,then affixed his official stamp to thedocuments after Mr. Kuhl and Mr.Rokicky prepared them.
Some of the documents were collect-ed by Mr. Blechner, while others wereassembled by diplomats currently sta-tioned at the Polish embassy in Bern.
While many details of the passport-smuggling operation have becomepublic over the decades, the scale ofthe Polish legation’s involvement wasnot publicly known until now. Nor wasMr. Kuhl’s Canadian connection.
“It is unfortunate to note that someofficials of the Polish Legation werevery closely mixed up in this affair,”reads a 1943 Swiss police documentthat lays out the scheme and its par-ticipants. “Mr. Julius Kuhl was repeat-edly given Paraguayan passports byMr. Hugli, which he then took to thePolish Legation, where the names ofPolish Jews were entered [into them],although [the recipients] had no claimto the possession of such papers.”
Several documents demonstratethat the entire effort took place withthe active assistance and protectionof Aleksander Lados, Poland’s defacto ambassador at the time.
It was Mr. Lados who had hired Mr.Kuhl and — despite increasing pres-sure to dismiss his deputy consul —gave his activities diplomatic protec-tion.
(The government-in-exile of Nazi-occupied Poland had diplomatic rep-resentation in Bern via the samebuilding that now houses the coun-try’s embassy here. The Swiss gov-ernment granted Mr. Lados and hiscolleagues diplomatic status throughSwitzerland but, to avoid provokingthe Nazis, never formally acceptedMr. Lados’s credentials as Poland’sambassador.)
“The Polish Legation in Bern, wish-ing to save its citizens, is doing all itcan,” reads an August 1943 letterfrom Mr. Silberschein, the man whocompiled the lists for Mr. Kuhl’s net-work, to Archbishop Bernardini.“Thanks to these means, a few thou-sand lives have been saved.”
“Mr. Lados was the head and he tol-erated and protected what Mr. Kuhldid,” said Mr. Blechner, who believesMr. Lados should be added to theRighteous Among the Nations, anhonour bestowed by the state ofIsrael on non-Jews who risked theirown safety to rescue Jews from theHolocaust.
The possibility of obtaining a LatinAmerican passport was a ray of hopefor those trapped in Nazi-occupiedPoland.
“I’d like to have Uruguayan pass-port, Costa Rican, Paraguayan — justso one can live peacefully in Warsaw,after all, it is the most beautiful oflands,” wrote Wladislaw Szlengel, apoet who lived in the Warsaw ghettountil he was executed in May 1943.
As the pace of the killings accelerat-ed, so did the secret passport opera-tion — until Swiss police broke it up.
Police records show Mr.Silberschein and his colleague PennyHirsch were arrested in September1943, and found to be in possessionof an assortment of Latin Americanpassports, as well as several foreigncurrencies.
Under interrogation, the Moscow-born Ms. Hirsch told police she wasaware of “between 200 and 300 pass-ports” that had been distributed toJews living in German-occupied partsof Europe. She told the police thatshe and Mr. Silberschein knew theyhad been breaking the law but thattheir motivations were purely humani-tarian. “We did not intend to harmSwitzerland,” she added, according toa police transcript.
While American Jews providedfinancial support to Mr. Kuhl and hisnetwork, the U.S. government wasless helpful — apparently out of con-cern that German spies might reachNorth and South America using thepassports. “The Legation of theUnited States in Bern informed thePolish Legation some time ago that itwas not satisfied with this traffic inpassports,” Mr. Silberschein said dur-ing his own interrogation by Swisspolice.
He said the network paid anywherebetween 550 Swiss francs for a blankHaitian passport and 1,200 for aParaguayan one. (The averagehourly wage at the time was less thantwo francs.)
But when asked how many pass-ports he had helped smuggle in, Mr.Silberschein claimed not to know. “Idon’t have a very good memory fornumbers,” he told the police.
By the fall of 1943, Swiss police hadfocused their investigation on Mr.Kuhl, and Mr. Lados was summonedby the Swiss Foreign Ministry toexplain the activities of his diplomat.
Mr. Lados swung between pleadingwith the Swiss — telling them thepassport scheme had been motivatedby “the desire to save the lives ofmany good people” — and subtlythreatening to expose how Swisspolice had themselves granted state-less passports to Jews crossing thecountry on their way toward neutralPortugal and Spain.
Mr. Lados and Mr. Kuhl remained intheir posts until September 1945,when they were replaced by emis-saries from Poland’s postwarCommunist government.
Stripped of his diplomatic status, Mr.Kuhl was told that, despite having aSwiss wife and two Swiss-born chil-dren, he had to leave Switzerland. Hemoved to Toronto with his young fami-ly “because the Canadians would havehim. Jewish migrants were not wel-come everywhere,” Mr. Singer said,adding that his father-in-law also triedliving in New York but “felt lost” there.
“Toronto’s Jewish community wasvery welcoming to immigrants. Hefound his Judaism renewed in Torontoto a degree that never would havehappened to him in Switzerland,” Mr.Singer said. “He arrived with a brief-case full of watches and became animportant businessman and aCanadian citizen.”
Mr. Kuhl remained in Toronto until1980, when he moved to Miami. Bythat point, he was already sufferingfrom the emphysema that would claimhis life.
A curiosity among the documentsseen by The Globe is a 1960 letter Mr.Kuhl received from Roland Michener,then a Progressive Conservative MPand the Speaker of the House ofCommons.
“It is indeed a remarkable story ofwhich you have reason to be proud,”wrote Mr. Michener, who wouldbecome Canada’s 20th governor-general. But Mr. Michener appears tohave been referring to Mr. Kuhl’scareer in the construction industry,not his life-saving efforts during theHolocaust.
Mr. Singer says that while Mr. Kuhlnever saw himself as a hero, it’s timehis father-in-law was acknowledgedas such.
“My view is that Dr. Kuhl was in theright place at the right time, andinstead of doing nothing — like mostpeople — he did the right thing.”
“HE SHOULD BE AS WELL KNOWN AS SCHINDLER”
Anew search in Germany forbooks stolen from Jews during
the Third Reich is beginning to bearfruit.
Recently, a man in California whowas the only survivor of the Holocaustin his family received a book fromGermany that had been dedicated tohim by a teacher. The only otherthings he has from his childhood are apiece of clothing and one familyphoto, the Deutsche Welle newsagency reported.
Last fall, it was announced that 500books from the library of Jewishdepartment store owners Edith andGeorg Tietz had been rediscovered inthe city library of Bautzen.
The “Initial Check” project — dedi-cated to finding stolen books and theirrightful heirs — is a relatively new partof Germany’s government-sponsoredsearch for stolen art, coordinated bythe Magdeburg-based Lost ArtFoundation. For over a year, threeprovenance researchers have beensearching through libraries, starting inthe former East German state ofSaxony-Anhalt. In all, there are some6,000 libraries that eventually will beexamined by researchers, UweHartmann, head of provenanceresearch at the Lost Art Foundation,told Deutsche Welle.
The successes may not be as sen-sational as the returns of paintings byfamous artists to heirs. But accordingto a report in Deutsche Welle, thereturn of a book can be just as mean-ingful to the family involved, as in thecase of the Holocaust survivor fromCalifornia.
According to Hartmann, the Nazisbegan confiscating books from Jewsin Germany after the so-calledKristallnacht pogrom in November1938. Some Jews fleeing Germanysold their books and other belongingsfor far less than they were worth.Other books were looted from homesand collections in Nazi-occupiedareas during the war.
One source of information for prove-nance researchers is a list of bookskept by the Reichstauschstelle, anoffice of the interior ministry that wascreated in the 1920s. The Nazis ulti-mately used it as a resource, essen-tially making stolen books available tohelp restock German libraries thathad been damaged in the war.
But for the most part, theresearchers rely on help from locallibrarians, who know the contents oftheir shelves and have picked upclues over the years.
In addition to books and paintings,the Lost Art Foundation is seeking toreconnect musical instruments, furni-ture, household articles and evencars with their proper heirs.
(Continued from page 10)of potato skin bobbing up like scabs.But the fear never goes away — thathe’ll find me again, that he’ll finishwhat he started, that he’ll select mefor death.
As the months go by, we starve andlose strength. In our heads, though,it’s a different story: we spend most ofour time cooking.
At 4 am roll-call in the freezing dark,we can smell the rich aroma of meatwe have just roasted. We give eachother cooking lessons; we salivateover our imaginary dishes; we fightover how much paprika you put inHungarian chicken paprikash, or howto make the best seven-layer choco-late cake.
I try to blank out the horrors. Theday SS officers tie a boy to a tree anduse his limbs for target practice. Theday a woman goes into labor and theytie her legs together. I have neverseen such agony.
One day, an officer separates usall into two lines. It’s impossible
to tell which one leads to death.Magda and I are in different lines.
Nothing matters except that I stay
with my sister; even if she’s in thedeath line, I want to die with her.
I don’t have a plan. And then I’msuddenly doing cartwheels, hands toearth, feet to sky. I expect a bullet atany second but I can’t stop myself.
A guard raises his gun. But he does-n’t shoot; he winks at me. In the fewseconds that I hold his completeattention, Magda has run across theyard into my line.
Now they are herding 100 of ustoward the platform. As we standthere, waiting to climb a narrow rampinto a cattle car, the Russians areapproaching Poland from one side,the Americans from the other. TheNazis have decided to evacuateAuschwitz, bit by bit.
I lose track of the time we are inmotion. We end up working at a
thread factory. After a few weeks, theSS come for us one morning withstriped dresses to replace our greyones.
We board a train carrying ammuni-tion. This time we are forced to sit ontop of the cars — human decoys todiscourage the British from bombingthe train, but they do anyway.
Somehow, Magda and I survive. Weget off the train and march, maybe forweeks. There are fewer of us everyday. The roadside ditches run red withblood from those shot in the back orthe chest — those who tried to run,those who couldn’t keep up.
We’ve gone without food for daysand now we are at Mauthausen, aconcentration camp at a quarry,where prisoners have to hack andcarry the granite destined for Hitler’snew Berlin.
Rumors shudder down the line.They make you stand along the so-called Parachutist’s Wall, at the edgeof a cliff. At gunpoint, you then have tochoose: either push the inmatebeside you off the cliff or be shot your-self. Magda and I agree to push eachother.
Night falls and word goes round:we’ll be killed tomorrow. Have wereally been marched these many hun-dreds of miles only to die? What hasit all meant? I think of my boyfriendEric’s voice and lips. If I die tomorrow,I’ll die a virgin.
I wonder what a man looks likenaked. There are naked dead men allaround me: it wouldn’t hurt their pridefor me to have a look. Afterwards, Ifeel satisfied: at least I won’t die igno-rant.
At daybreak, the line starts to move.Some wail. Some pray. Everyone isbeing sent in the same direction. Itreally is the end.
And then the line stops. We are ledtoward a crowd of SS guards by agate. “If you fall behind, you’ll beshot,” they shout at us.
We limp on. A march of skeletonsfrom Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. Itis a relatively short distance, about 50km (31 miles) or so, but we are soweak that only 100 of the 2000 of uswill survive.
Magda and I cling to each other,determined to stay upright. Eachhour, hundreds of girls fall into theditches on either side of the road. Tooweak or too ill to keep moving, theyare killed on the spot.
Every part of me is in pain. I don’trealize I’ve stumbled until I feel armslifting me. Magda and other girls havelaced their fingers together to form ahuman chair.
“You shared your bread,” one ofthem says. A girl who sharedMengele’s loaf with me nearly a yearago has recognized me.
When we stop marching, we arecrowded into huts where we sleepthree deep. If someone below us dies,we don’t have the strength to haulthem away.
It is now five or six months since weleft Auschwitz. I can no longer walk.Although I don’t know it yet, I have afractured spine and I’m suffering frompleurisy, typhoid fever and pneumo-nia.
Here, in hell, I watch a man eathuman flesh. I can’t do it; I eat grassand try to stay conscious.
Once, I see Magda crawling back tome with a Red Cross can of sardinesthat glints in the sun. But there’s noway to open it.
One day, the SS rig the groundaround us with dynamite. With myeyes closed, I wait for the explosionthat will consume us in its flames.
“THE AMERICANS ARE HERE!”
Nothing happens. I open myeyes and see jeeps rolling
slowly in through the pine forest thatobscures the camp from the road.Feeble voices shout: “TheAmericans are here!”
Watching from the tangle of bod-ies, I see men in fatigues. I see anAmerican handing cigarettes toinmates, who are so hungry thatthey eat them.
“Are there any living here?” theAmericans call out in German.“Raise your hand if you’re alive.”
I try to move but I can’t. A soldiershouts something in English. Theyare leaving.
And then a patch of light explodeson the ground. The sun is flashingon Magda’s sardine tin. Whether onpurpose or by accident, she hascaught the soldiers’ attention with atin of fish.
I feel a man touching my hand. Hepresses something into it. Beads.Red, brown, green, yellow.
“Food,” the soldier says. He helpsme lift my hand to my mouth. I tastechocolate.
He pulls the dead away from me,
and now Magda is beside me in thegrass. She is holding her can of sar-dines.
We have survived the final selec-tion. We are alive. We are together.We are free.
COULD I HAVE SAVED MY MOTHER?
After recuperating, Magda and Iwere reunited with Klara. My
boyfriend Eric had died in Auschwitzthe day before liberation.
At 19 I married Bela, a Slovakianwhose mother had been gassed at thecamp. He wasn’t the love of my life buthe made me laugh and feel protected.Later we’d have three children, divorceand marry each other again.
In 1949, my husband, Magda and Iemigrated to the US, where sheworked as a piano teacher and I did aPhD in clinical psychology, becomingan expert on post-traumatic stressdisorder. I was helping others, but itwas years before I felt free in my ownmind.
Could I have saved my mother?Maybe. I can continue blaming myselfforever for making the wrong choice— or I can accept that the moreimportant choice is not the one I madewhen I was 16 and hungry and terri-fied, when we were surrounded bydogs and guns and uncertainty.
It’s the one I make now, to acceptmyself as I am: human, imperfect.The choice to stop asking why Ideserved to survive. The choice tostop running from the past.
“I CONDEMNED MY MOTHER TO THE GAS CHAMBER WITH ONE WRONG WORD”
(Continued from page 4)This award-winning book recounts
the amazing story of ZosaSzajkowski, the scholar who rescuedarchives that might otherwise havebeen lost in the Holocaust.Szajkowski wrote numerous booksand articles, but was also a knownarchive thief, caught red-handedstealing valuable papers from theNew York Public Library. Leff’s metic-ulous account reads like a thriller, yetconveys invaluable information con-cerning the fate of Jewish archivesduring and after the Shoah, and whyremoval of archives from their originalhome matters. Brandeis Universityand my late father, Bible scholarNahum Sarna, play bit parts in thisstory. I remember Szajkowski, too; infact, I took a class with him as aBrandeis undergraduate. He told lotsof stories in class about his archivalexperiences during and after WorldWar II, but it was only after readingLeff’s wonderful book that I under-stood “the rest of the story.”
Why? Explaining the Holocaust(W.W. Norton & Company, 2017).By Peter Hayes.
David Engel, professor of Holocauststudies and chair of Hebrew and Judaicstudies at New York University, writes:
I recommend this book for a lucid,well-crafted introduction to the historyof the Holocaust. Unlike most workson the Holocaust written for a generalaudience, which tend to emphasizehow the Holocaust was carried outand experienced, Hayes’ book con-centrates, as its title suggests, onhelping readers to understand whythe Holocaust occurred when it did,
where it did, in the manner it did andwith the results it produced. It offersreaders a window onto how historiansgo about finding answers to thesequestions, why some answers turnout to be more compelling than othersand how new evidence can changeunderstanding.
Probing the Ethics of HolocaustCulture (Harvard University Press,2016). Edited by Claudio Fogu,Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner.
Omer Bartov, professor of Europeanhistory and German studies at BrownUniversity, writes:
This book comes out a quarter of acentury after the publication of SaulFriedlander’s crucial edited volume,Probing the Limits of Representation:Nazism and the “Final Solution“(1992), which had challenged the con-ventional discourse on the mass mur-der of the Jews and critiqued its popu-lar representation. The current volumeattempts to grapple with the widerimpact of Holocaust scholarship, fic-tion and representation in the interven-ing period. It includes fascinatingessays on new modes of narrating theShoah, the insights provided by the“spatial turn” on research and under-standing of the event, and the politicsof exceptionality, especially the con-textualization of the Holocaust withinthe larger framework of modern geno-cide. As such, it enables readers tounderstand both the ongoing presenceof the Holocaust in our present cultureand the different ways in which it hascome to be understood in the early21st century.
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War(Belknap Press, 2014). By David
Motadel.Susannah Heschel, professor of
Jewish studies at Dartmouth College,writes:
This is a major work of scholarship,examining the various ways the Nazisfostered a relationship with Muslimsboth before the war and especiallyduring the war. Jeffrey Herf wrote abook a bit earlier, Nazi Propagandafor the Arab World, detailing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda sent, in Arabictranslation, to North African Muslims,and Motadel expands the range ofinfluence: that Hitler understood Islamas a warrior religion that could beexploited for propaganda efforts andto serve in both the Wehrmacht andthe SS. The indoctrination of Muslimswith Nazi anti-Semitic propagandamay well have had effects lasting longpast the end of the war, a topic thatdeserves additional attention.
My Grandfather Would Have ShotMe: A Black Woman Discovers HerFamily’s Nazi Past (The Experiment,2015). By Jennifer Teege and NikolaSellmair.
Michael Rothberg, professor of Englishand comparative literature and chair inHolocaust studies at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, writes:
Teege’s memoir, published inGerman in 2013 and translated intoEnglish in 2015, is a fascinating con-tribution to the discussion of the ongo-ing impact of the Holocaust over mul-tiple generations. When she was inher late 30s, Teege discovered thather grandfather was a Nazi war crim-inal. And not just any Nazi: he wasAmon Goeth, the commandant ofPlaszów depicted in the film
Schindler’s List. Because Teege isherself a black German woman — thedaughter of a Nigerian father and awhite German mother who was her-self the daughter of Goeth’s mistress— her story takes on additional reso-nance. Intercut with contextualizingpassages by Sellmair, a journalist,Teege’s memoir both confronts histor-ical conundrums about race, reconcil-iation and responsibility for the past,and offers glimpses of very contem-porary questions about the contoursof German identity. Her earnest reck-oning with family and national historycan inspire us all to reflect on what itmeans to be implicated in histories ofracial violence, even those we havenot participated in directly.
They Were Like Family to Me:Stories (Scribner, 2016). By HelenMaryles Shankman.
Jeremy Dauber, director of theInstitute for Israel and Jewish Studiesand professor of Yiddish at ColumbiaUniversity, writes:
Writing literature about theHolocaust is many things, but it isnever easy; and writing Holocaust lit-erature in the vein of magic realism ismore difficult yet. It risks taking thegreat horror of the 20th century andrendering it ungrounded, imaginative,even — God forbid — whimsicallyslight. But when a skillful writer pulls itoff — David Grossman, for example,and now Shankman — the fantasticcasts illuminating and terrible light onthe dark shadows of the history of thewar against the Jews. The stories inher collection are by no means factu-al in all respects. But they containunmistakable truth.
SEVEN BOOKS ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST SCHOLARS SAY YOU SHOULD READ
(Continued from page 1)goals such as enlightenment andeducation.”
The Auschwitz museum will get afixed amount that will be given to ityearly to cover any expenses arisingfrom the project, though neithermuseum officials nor Musealia speci-fied how much. If the exhibition isprofitable, the amount the museumreceives will be increased, Mr.Ferreiro said.
The story of Auschwitz, as toldthrough the artifacts, will cover thephysical location of the camps and theirstatus as symbols of structuralizedhatred and barbarity. The exhibition willbegin with the history of Oswiecim, thePolish site of the German camps,whose population was about 60 per-cent Jewish before the war. That histo-ry will be followed by the origins ofNazism after World War I.
Of the 1,150 original pieces to be dis-played, 835 will come from the statemuseum. The rest have been lent byother institutions, like Yad Vashem inIsrael, or directly by survivors and theirfamilies; many of those pieces have
not been displayed before.Each artifact, however, was chosen
to help lay out the history of theHolocaust. Mr. van Pelt mentioned a
brown blanket that belonged toSiegfried Fedrid, a Jew born in
Vienna who was a prisoner at Nazicamps in Lodz, a city in centralPoland, and Auschwitz. The blanket ison loan to the exhibition from the
Holocaust Center for Humanity inSeattle, which got it from the family of
Mr. Fedrid, who died in 1963.Mr. Fedrid shared the blanket with
five other prisoners, probably savingtheir lives during a grisly winter march.
Rabbi Hier said that the Holocaustartifacts must travel the world to makesure memories of the era do not fadeaway.
“We’re in the period of the last rem-nants, last decades, where personalsurvivors or witnesses, who candescribe the events, are living on thisplanet,” he said. “We will soon haveno survivors.”
Mr. Cywinski, of the Auschwitzmuseum, said he expected the exhibi-tion to be provocative, with somepatrons drawing connections betweenthe rise of Nazism and events aroundthe world today. He mentioned pop-ulism, propaganda, institutionalizedhatred and an international communi-ty that he regarded as sometimesseemingly blind to these social forces.
“Memory that is intelligent, reflexive,is not limited to the past, but allowsyou to define the reality and projectthe future,” he said. “Otherwise, whywould we even need memory?”
AUSCHWITZ ARTIFACTS TO GO ON TOUR
Siegfried Fedrid, who survived Nazi camps in Lodz, Poland, and Auschwitz, with his family before
Back in the 1920s, there weremore Jews with professional box-ing licenses than any other ethnicgroup in the United States. It waspart of a new Jewish ethos thatcalled for self-defense.BY USHI DERMAN, HAARETZ
“Muscular Judaism,” whichbecame a popular Zionist
slogan, was a term coined by MaxNordau during the Second ZionistCongress in Basel in 1898. Nordau, aphysician and Hungarian Jewishauthor, was a dignified, proud individ-
ual. He sought to fight the image ofthe Diaspora Jew as a weakling and acoward, someone who, duringpogroms, chose to hide behind thepages of his Talmud and Mishnainstead of swinging a punch.Nordau’s call for a conscious revolu-tion did indeed resonate here andthere. However, old habits die hard,and aversion to the use of force wasstill deeply rooted in Jewish con-sciousness during this period.
Five years later, in 1903, a Jewnamed Hayim Nahman Bialik visitedthe city of Kishinev in the Bessarabiaregion of the Russian empire, andwas shocked to discover tens ofJewish women, men and childrenspread out lifeless on the ground,their limbs askew and the fear ofdeath reflected in their wild eyes.Appalled by the barbarity of thepogroms, but even more so by thehelplessness of the Jews, Bialik wrotehis famous poem “In the City ofSlaughter.” In it, Bialik rebukes his fel-low Jews who hid in their holes andprayed that the evil would not come tothem, when in front of their eyes theirmothers, wives and daughters wereraped and killed.
The Kishinev pogrom was a water-shed moment in the history of Jewishpower. Bialik’s poem shook theJewish public, and Jewish self-defense units sprang up like mush-rooms after the rain. In Palestine, agroup called Bar Giora was created;the Bund, a socialist self-defenseorganization, was established inEastern Europe; and in other areas
sports organizations were founded,including Hakoach, Shimshon,Hagibor and others.
There was a new Jewish ethos: theethos of boxing. This influenced notonly the Ostjuden (Eastern EuropeanJews) who migrated eastward towardthe Vistula River, but also the manyJews who crossed the ocean at theend of the 19th century and emigrat-ed to the United States. The fact thatin the New World pogroms were not asignificant threat did not mean thatthese Jewish immigrants were able toleave their sense of fear and victim-ization, inherited from their ancestors,at Ellis Island, the entry point to theU.S. However, in contrast to previousgenerations, these immigrants adopt-ed the new ethos and chose to fight(both literally and figuratively) for theirfreedom.
RAISED FISTS IN NEW YORK
In his fascinating book WhenBoxing Was a Jewish Sport, Allen
Bodner describes the golden age ofJewish boxing in the United States,from the days of mass immigrationuntil the Second World War. Duringthis period, Bodner counts 23 differ-ent Jewish boxers who won worldtitles. The scope of the phenomenonof Jewish boxing is reflected in thefact that in 1928 there were moreJews with professional boxing licens-es than any other ethnic group in theUnited States. Between 1905 and1934 there were 10 world championtitle matches that were foughtbetween two Jews — when therecould be only one champion fromeach weight category.
Among the major Jewish boxersduring this era — including Eli Stoltz,Artie Levine and “Lefty” LewTendler — the most prominent wasBenjamin Leiner, whose Hebrew
name was Dov Ber ben AvrahamGershon and who later adopted theAmerican name Benny Leonard.Leonard was born on the Lower EastSide in New York. He commented, “Igrew up in a Jewish neighborhood. ...to the south were the Italians, to thenorth were the Irish, and the publicbathhouses were down the block onour street. When the Italian and Irishkids came to bathe, we had twooptions: to fight, or not to leave thehouse.”
Leonard, who regularly boxed with aStar of David on his shorts, symbol-ized the New Jew, who was no longera wagon driver, a peddler or a money-lender, but rather a determined fighterwho went into the ring and raised hisfists in the name of all of the previousgenerations. Leonard was alreadycrowned as the greatest Jewish boxerof all time at the beginning of hiscareer, over the course of which heearned 88 victories, 68 of which wereknockouts. His love for boxing did notend with his retirement, when hechose to become a referee. He alsofulfilled the phrase “he died doingwhat he loved” when he died of aheart attack in the middle of a fight hewas refereeing in New York.
FROM THE RING TO THE CAMPS
The connection between deathand boxing became more chill-
ing during the period of the Holocaust,and was embodied by two famousJewish boxers: Salamo Arouch andVictor Perez. A Tunisian Jewish boxerwho found success in Europe, Perezwas born in 1911 in Dar El-Berdgana,the Jewish quarter in Tunis, the capi-tal of Tunisia. At 5’1” (158 centime-ters), his short stature did not preventhim from dreaming about a boxingcareer, and when he was 17 heforged a passport and moved to Paristo make his dreams a reality. Duringthe day he worked as a shoe sales-man, and in the afternoon he wouldtrain. After three years in Paris, Perezwas crowned the premier flyweightboxer in Europe and France.
When he returned to Tunisia in1931, Perez was given a royal wel-come. At the port, no fewer than100,000 fans waited to receive him:the biggest welcome in the history ofthe country. The celebration upon hisreturn also included donations to thesynagogue and the Jewish school inhis city. One of the most famous fightsin Perez’s career as a boxer tookplace in 1938 — days afterKristallnacht — when he fought inBerlin against a German championwhile wearing shorts embroideredwith a Star of David. When he enteredthe arena, the Nazi spectators booedPerez, who surveyed the anti-Semiticcrowd impassively.
In 1943 Perez was deported toAuschwitz. Nazis in the camp identi-fied him, and not long thereafter hebecame the camp’s boxing entertain-er. Perez was forced to participate ina series of showcase fights against
Nazi opponents. He won them allexcept for one particularly cruel andunusual bout that he fought againstan extremely heavy German. Duringthis time the Nazis made sure Perezworked in the kitchen so he couldhave enough food to continue to fight.In the kitchen Perez met anothergreat Jewish boxer: Salamo Arouch,the Balkan champion who lived inThessaloniki and, like all the city’sJews, was sent to Auschwitz in 1943.
In one of the first roll calls inAuschwitz after Arouch’s arrival, an
SS officer walked among the prison-ers and asked if anyone there knewhow to box. Arouch was pushed out ofthe line by those who knew him andhis boxing history. That night he wonhis first fight in the camp. He wouldfight approximately 200 more times,all of which he finished on his feet asthe winner. Because of boxing,Arouch was able to survive Auschwitzuntil he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in 1945, where he worked asa slave laborer until the camp was lib-erated. After the war, Arouch metMarta Yechiel and they fell in love.The couple was among those whocame to Israel during the illegal immi-gration of 1945. Once in Israel,Arouch continued to box during hisfree time, but not professionally.
Unlike Arouch, Victor Perez did notsurvive the Holocaust. During thedeath march, Perez tried to give foodto a friend, but was shot by the Nazis.His body was left to freeze on thesnowy ground on the side of the road,without a burial or a sign marking theplace where he was murdered. Anumber of years later, the stories ofthese champions were told on film inFrance and the United States —Triumph of the Spirit, about SalamoArouch (1989); Victor “Young” Perez,(2013); and a short film by ESPNabout the career of Benny Leonard.
The 4’11” French Jewish womanwas walking through a field of
snow when the ground underneathher began to crack. She was a spy forthe Allies, sent to infiltrate the Germanfront, but her military guide had neg-lected to mention the frozen body ofwater along the way. When the icebroke and Marthe Cohn fell into thecanal, she wondered if this was final-ly the end.
“I told myself, if you don’t get outfrom here as fast as you can, you’regoing to die of hypothermia,” recalledCohn, now 97.
But perishing wasn’t an option.Dying would mean giving up on hertop-secret mission and squanderingthe courage those closest to her hadshown in the face of terror.
Her siblings worked to save fellowJews from the horrors of the Naziregime. Her fiancé, Jacques, wasalso involved with the resistance. Hewas later executed by the Germanarmy for his actions.
Cohn herself had been threatenedand insulted for her religion. But shewas a spy now — a spy with animportant task, and she had no inten-tion of returning to her superiorsempty handed.
“I was very lucky,” Cohn told TheTimes of Israel recently about thatnight. After pulling herself out of thecanal, she wandered around in circlesfor hours. In the morning, she met upwith a Moroccan army regiment. Shewould have to try again another day.
In the chaos and confusion of war,countless stories of bravery and hero-ism can slip through the cracks. Forfive decades, one of those talesbelonged to Cohn, a young Jewishwoman who snuck into Germany tospy on the Nazis at the tail end of thewar. Her rise from loving sister andfriend to nurse, to intelligence officer,is one of remarkable perseverance,and will soon be explored in anupcoming documentary, An UnusualSpy, from German director NicolaHens.
“This woman needs to be portrayedas long as she’s still alive,” said Hens.“There are not so many witnesses tothe life [of a spy in World War II], andnot so many who have such a greatability to express themselves and areactually willing to talk about it.”
“WE WERE SO NAÏVE”
From her home in Rancho PalosVerdes, sitting among framed
family photos and the honors andawards she received for her work inWorld War II, Cohn spoke about herupbringing and the events that led toher work for the Allies.
Her story begins in the city of Metz,where she was raised with her foursisters and two brothers. Her parents,both fluent German speakers (a skillthey passed onto their children), were
Jewish, and her grandfather was arabbi who founded the Orthodox syn-agogue in town. But with the rise ofAdolf Hitler, everything changed.
“We were horrified, but we neverthought that it could come to France,”she said of the Third Reich. “We wereso naïve.”
When the Germans pushed intoFrance, her family was urged by theFrench government to leave theirhome and head south to Poitiers.There, they assisted Jews fleeing per-secution.
“Hundreds of people would ring ourbell,” said Cohn. “We never knewwhere they came from or who theywere, but they needed help.”
Meanwhile, Cohn was training tobecome a nurse at the French RedCross School of Nursing. After Pariswas liberated in 1944, she joined thearmy, expecting to put her medical
skills to use. But when she arrived,she faced immediate pushback froma superior officer, who accused her ofnot doing her most for her countrysince she never officially joined aresistance group. She explained tohim that she had tried but had beenrebuffed.
“Several times I was interviewed bythe chief of the resistance,” saidCohn. “They looked at me — I wasonly four-foot-eleven, I was very thin,I was very blond with blue eyes andhad light skin — and they felt I hadabsolutely no substance. So theynever accepted me.”
Instead of letting her become a mili-tary nurse, the officer relegated Cohnto social work, which she didn’t knowanything about, but acceptednonetheless. A few weeks later, shemet another officer, Colonel Fabien,who asked her to answer his phoneduring a lunch break.
“I went with him to his office, heshowed me around, and said, ‘I amsorry, there is nothing to read here foryou. I have only German books,’”recalled Cohn. “And I said, ‘But I readGerman fluently.’”
Intrigued, Fabien asked if she spokeGerman as well. When Cohn said shedid, he offered her a transfer into thearmy’s intelligence service. Cohn saidyes immediately.
“I didn’t even think,” she said. “He
left and then I sat down in a chair andwondered if I was a little crazy, andwhat predicament I had put myself in.But it was too late.”
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
Off Cohn went to Mulhouse, andlater Colmar, in eastern France
to train, learning how to identifyGerman uniforms, read maps, fireguns –– something she had neverdone before.
“It was amazing, I was 100 percent.I had very, very good eyesight,” shesaid.
Most importantly, she developed heralibi: that of a young German womannamed Martha Ulrich, whose parentshad been killed in a bombardmentand whose Nazi fiancé had been cap-tured by the Allies.
She was then assigned to the com-manders of Army of Africa, a regiment
of the first Frencharmy. Cohn wasasked to interro-gate prisoners ofwar, and eventual-ly sent to cross theGerman front, amission that failedmore than a dozentimes (includingthat ill-fated nightwhen she fell intothe canal) owing tofaulty intelligenceand the rapidlychanging condi-tions of war.
But her biggestchallenge was yet
to come: going into Germany itself.“I was sent to Germany for two pur-
poses,” she said. “To get military infor-mation, but also information abouthow the German civilians were react-ing to the war, because we didn’tknow. We had very little information.”
After crossing through Switzerlandinto Germany, she stayed in the coun-try for a month, gathering intel andsending it back to her handlers.
For a Jew in Nazi territory, the workwas extraordinarily dangerous. ButCohn survived thanks to her strongalibi and the relationships she devel-oped with Germans.
“I helped them any time I found thepossibility to do it, and in exchangethey offered me to stay at their homesand fed me,” she said. “That did notprevent me of getting in deep troubleseveral times, but I always found theright thing to tell them to get out of it.”
The information Cohn would gatherthere about a military encampment inthe Black Forest — along with infantryunits, numbers and strengths she hadmemorized thanks to her near-photo-graphic memory — helped Alliedcommanders prepare for Germantroop movements. For her efforts, shewas awarded the Croix de Guerre, aFrench military decoration given dur-ing World Wars I and II.
“I hadn’t become a spy for the glory,”wrote Cohn in her 2002 memoir,
Behind Enemy Lines. “To be thankedfor my efforts so publicly was some-thing I hadn’t expected.”
When the war ended, she wasn’table to grasp why she was alive andso many others had perished. It wouldbe seven years before Cohn evenlearned of her sister Stéphanie’s fate,which was ultimately deportation toAuschwitz.
“I always thought I may find her,”said Cohn. “But I didn’t. We didn’tknow what was going on in the con-centration camps. The American andEnglish governments kept us in thedark....
But when we drove north with theregiment, I met survivors. I thoughtthey were coming from a psychiatrichospital. I couldn’t believe what theywere saying. It was inconceivable thatit happened. That’s where I under-stood that she probably didn’t live.”
THE SECRET IS UNVEILED
Years later, Cohn would marry anAmerican medical student
named Major L. Cohn, move to theStates and give birth to two children.But she would keep her past a secret.
“I felt as long as I didn’t talk about it,it was a very pure story,” she said.“And once I talked about it, it was notas pure anymore.”
“I never even asked how she got intothe army. All I knew was that she wasa nurse and she ended up inGermany,” added her husband, Major.
But in 1996, the truth finally cameout when she reached out to theShoah Foundation after spotting anadvertisement that asked for thosewho fought the German army to beinterviewed about their experience.
Then, in 1998, on a trip back toFrance, Cohn decided to approachthe French military for copies of herrecords, which led to her beingawarded the Medaille Militaire, one ofthe highest military honors in France.She was later given the title ofChevalier of the Order of the Legiond’Honneur, in 2005, and theVerdienstKreuz, the Order of Merit ofGermany, in 2014.
Along with her memoir, the additionalhonors gave Cohn’s story a boost. Thenew documentary aims to do the same.
Back at home, in between sips oftea, Cohn joked that the filmmakingprocess, which included Hens docu-menting her speeches and trips backto France, has been “a pain in theneck,” but she appreciated that herstory will continue to get told.
Even at 97, Cohn’s mind is stillsharp, and she is able to recall dates,names and other events with remark-able clarity.
“I think it’s just important to keep thememory alive,” said Hens. “I thinkWorld War II for many people is faraway. But if you look at [Cohn] stillalive, it’s not so far away, and if youlook at world politics, there is dangerthat things might repeat themselves.It’s important to not forget what hap-pened.”
JEWISH WOMAN WHO ENTERED THE LION’S DEN
Marthe Cohn being filmed by director Nicola Hens for the upcoming
Eli Zborowski**Marvin ZborowskiMark Palmer Sam Skura**Israel Krakowski**William MandellSam Halpern**Isidore Karten**Norman BelferJoseph Bukiet**
*1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, CampInmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION: A PLANNED GIFT TO ASYV
Empower, educate and strengthen ourfuture by making an endowment gift to theAmerican Society for Yad Vashem. Yourlegacy will help to support Yad Vashem inJerusalem and keep the memory of theShoah, its victims, survivors and heroesalive forever. You can make a generous contribution
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