OLDEST HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR TURNS 108
Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, celebrated her 108th birthday in London on November 25. A native of Prague and professional pianist in her mid-teens, Mrs. Herz-Sommer, her husband and young son were sent to the Nazi show camp at Terezin in 1943, where she played more than 150 concerts as Jews were sent to their deaths and for visitors from the Red Cross.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s husband did not survive the war, but their son, Raphael, who also took part in performances at Terezin, did. Alice swam daily until the age of 97, and continues to play her piano every day. (JTA, November 27.)
A DAY OF INFAMY
Robert Rozett
Jerusalem Post, December 6, 2011
On December 8, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—(is) a date which will live in infamy.” Of course he was talking about the Japanese surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, the attack that catapulted the United States into the Second World War 70 years ago.…
As momentous as the attack on Pearl Harbor was, December 7, 1941 was also the date of another event of no less consequence for mankind. The first transports set out for the first extermination camp, Chelmno, which began its murderous operations the following day, December 8. Over the course of the next three-and-a-half years, the Nazis would murder some three million Jews in a handful of extermination camps, most infamous among them Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Another three million Jews were murdered in a wide variety of venues, first and foremost in the killing fields of Eastern Europe by shooting—a process that had actually begun several months before Chelmno went into operation. December 7, however, marks the start of the unprecedented industrialized mass murder of innocent human beings at a complex designed solely for that purpose.
The American entry into the war is really the beginning of America embracing its role as a great world power. It is true that Nazi Germany was defeated primarily on the ground by Soviet forces in a long, drawn out and extremely deadly war.… Nevertheless, America’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany was crucial. To a very large degree, it was American supplies that allowed the Soviets to fight for four long years, and certainly after the D-Day invasion of June 1944, the American fighting man made a considerable contribution to the fall of Nazi Germany. The reluctant entry of the Americans into the war on December 7, 1941, to say the least, greatly hastened the destruction of Hitler’s regime.
Significantly, another outcome of the attack at Pearl Harbor was the dawn of the age of nuclear weapons. The first nuclear weapon was not deployed against Nazi Germany, rather the Americans deployed it against Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.… In its wake, the world now would face issues of nuclear arms proliferation and escalation, nuclear arms deterrence, and still true today, the very real fear that such weapons in the wrong hands could wreak new and unimaginable destruction.…
The start of systematic industrialized mass murder in Chelmno is less well known, but has no less importance for mankind. In the Chelmno extermination camp the Nazis murdered over 150,000 people, almost all of them Jews. The murder method was asphyxiation in gas vans—group after group, after group. As is now well known, before being murdered in the extermination camps, Jews were shorn of their hair, fleeced of their valuables and robbed of their clothing and any other possessions they had brought with them.…
The idea that in the name of an ideology a regime could plan and carry out the despoliation and murder of an entire people, using the most modern means available and doing so in a “rational,” “dispassionate” way, continues to reverberate profoundly.…
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the advent of murder in the first extermination camp, Chelmno, are historical signposts that need to be marked and remembered. The first for its great impact on the course of human affairs and role in the ultimate defeat of the consummate evil embodied by the Nazis, and the latter as a ghastly warning of what can happen when barbarians, imbued with an ideology of hate, have the unfettered freedom to act. After 70 years, the significance and caveat of December 7 remain as compelling as ever.
(The writer is director of the Yad Vashem Libraries.)
A DISQUIETING BOOK FROM HITLER’S LIBRARY
Timothy W. Ryback
NY Times, December 7, 2011
On Thursday, a Manhattan auction house will be accepting bids on one of the more disturbing books to come onto the U.S. antiquarian book market in some time: Adolf Hitler’s personal copy of a city-by-city, state-by-state guide to the location of America’s Jewish population.
The book includes detailed data on towns like Peabody and Brookline, Massachusetts, the boroughs of New York City, as well as the farther-flung population clusters in states like Arizona, Arkansas, Minnesota and California. It also provides details of several hundred Jewish organizations, including B’nai B’rith and the Anti-Defamation League, along with names of key individuals and their addresses. In light of the Holocaust, it is a disquieting compendium.
The 137-page report, “Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada” (Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada), was compiled in 1944 by Heinz Kloss, a German linguist who specialized in minorities and visited the United States in the early 1930s. Like many Nazi-era publications, the Kloss report, printed on cheap, highly acidic paper, is brittle and chipping. The cover, which bears a diagonal warning “For Official Use Only,” has become detached. On the verso is a bookplate with a stylized eagle perched on an oak branch clutching a laurel-wreathed swastika in its talons. It is framed, in bold-face type, “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.”
The Hitler book was among the thousands taken by American G.I.’s from the Nazi leader’s alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden in the spring of 1945. Most have ended up in attics, basements and bookshelves across America. One of the more notable examples I have seen is Hitler’s personal copy of Shakespeare’s collected works, 10 volumes bound in fine Moroccan leather with a swastika and the letters AH embossed on the spine.…
The Kloss report is being sold by Kestenbaum & Co., a Manhattan auction house that specializes, according to its Web page, in “fine Judaica” and “rare kosher and vintage wines.” The owner, Daniel Kestenbaum, observes that he would normally not auction a Hitler book, or any other object from the Nazi era for that matter, unless it related somehow to “the Jewish experience.…” He has estimated the sales price between $3,000 and $5,000. “I have been in this business since 1986. If I haven’t seen it before, it is rare.”
The price is rather high for a Hitler book. Most such volumes go for a few hundred dollars. But this particular volume, given its provenance and disturbing historical resonances, may be worth the price. The book underscores with stark statistical data how assiduous the Nazis were, even as late as 1944, in pursuing their goal of world domination as well as their designs for extending the geographic compass of the “final solution.” That such a volume found its way into Hitler’s personal library is as understandable as it is chilling.
“When a person gives they have to take,” Hitler once said. “And I take what I need from books.” Hitler was an obsessive reader from childhood, and his understanding of America was shaped in great part by his readings, in his youth, of the cowboy-and-Indian stories of the adventure novelist Karl May, and later in life of the anti-Semitic writings of Henry Ford. Hitler kept copies of Ford’s “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” on a table outside his office and included it in a list of books “every National Socialist should know.…”
The Kloss report is a fitting addition to Hitler’s American reading list, but this particular book comes with a double-barbed moral hitch. What kind of price tag belongs on a book that would have, but for the defeat of the Nazis, provided a blueprint for the horrific consequences of similar data-collecting efforts across Europe? More problematic still, who would want to own such a book that was almost certainly perused and quite likely studied by Hitler during one of the ritual nocturnal reading sessions, usually with a cup of tea, in his upstairs study at the Berghof?
It would be best if the Kloss report were acquired by an individual or institution willing to donate it to a public collection, ideally, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. There it could join 1,200 other surviving volumes from Hitler’s private library and not only be readily accessible to scholars and historians but also occupy appropriate shelf space with an equally sinister companion book from Hitler’s private book collection, a 1925 German translation of Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race,” bearing a personal inscription to Hitler.
(Timothy W. Rybackis author of “Hitler’s Private Library:
The Books That Shaped His Life.”)
THE SHOAH FOUNDATION WIDENS SCOPE
Ian Lovett
NY Times, November 16, 2011
Since Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994, the organization has devoted itself exclusively to the memory of Holocaust survivors. Its archives house more than 50,000 video interviews, in 32 languages, with survivors from 56 countries—the largest such collection in the world.
But in a dramatic expansion of its mission, the foundation is now incorporating testimonies from mass atrocities other than the Holocaust into its archives. Five survivors of the Rwandan genocide are learning the organization’s archiving methods at the Shoah Foundation Institute, part of an effort to add at least 1,000 interviews with Rwandans to the foundation’s archives.… And the foundation will soon begin adding testimonies about other mass killings, including those of Armenians and Cambodians.…
With the broadened scope…the foundation has stepped into a contentious and continuing debate about the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust. Some historians are concerned that the voices of Holocaust survivors could be lost in a deluge of voices from survivors of all sorts of conflicts, its significance and singularity diminished. Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants who also teaches about law and genocide at Columbia Law School, said that one of the responsibilities descendants of survivors have is to maintain “the integrity of memory.”
“I think it is extremely important to record and preserve the first-person accounts of all genocides,” Mr. Rosensaft said. “My concern would be that we not blur the individual experiences of survivors of the Holocaust, or survivors of Rwanda, into one large blur. Every genocide is a separate act, and must be remembered and chronicled as such.”
The Shoah Foundation was born from Mr. Spielberg’s experience making “Schindler’s List,” his 1993 Academy Award-winning film about the Holocaust. Nearly 50 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Mr. Spielberg felt an urgent need to preserve remembrances of the Holocaust before survivors died.
In 2000, after the lion’s share of the 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors had been conducted, the foundation’s leaders began to turn their attention toward teaching lessons from the Holocaust to younger generations. Members of the foundation’s board of councilors said the addition of testimonies about other genocides was a natural next step and something Mr. Spielberg had always intended, which his spokesman confirmed. (Mr. Spielberg no longer runs the foundation…but he still has an advisory role and is consulted for all major decisions by the foundation.).…
Some historians argue that the Holocaust—in which the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, many in gas chambers designed specifically for that purpose—was the only genocide in history, the only systematic effort to wipe an entire race of people from the earth. In Rwanda, around 800,000 people were killed during a few bloody months in 1994, many of them with weapons like machetes. Steven T. Katz, a professor of Judaic studies at Boston University, calls the killings in Rwanda “mass murder,” not genocide. And while Professor Katz, too, supports scholarly efforts to document all cases of mass atrocities, he said the drift toward studying the Holocaust primarily alongside these other mass murders risks misunderstanding the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as just one case of mass murder among many. “With certain kinds of events, one needs to be able to say, this is new, or singular, or unprecedented,” he said.…
SURVIVORS RETURN TO DIG UP TREASURES
Jordana Horn
Forward, December 8, 2011
‘Buried Prayers,” directed by Steven Meyer, stretches the definitions of Holocaust-related cinema by examining not only what happened on the unholy ground of the World War II death camp Majdanek, but also what happened underneath it.
In the spring of 1943, survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Majdanek just outside Lublin, Poland, and were forced to wait in a field for days. During that time, realizing that they were to be killed, many families secretly buried their few personal possessions in the dirt beneath them.
Based on witness testimony, the film documents a team of archaeologists and survivors…returning to Majdanek in 2005 to unearth what was hidden more than 60 years ago. The particular survivors featured in the film were teenagers at Majdanek in 1943 who, after the war, moved to Melbourne, Australia. Their English stumbles past the dual impediments of thick accents, both Eastern European and Australian, making an odd-sounding mix for an American audience, but their stories transcend the thickets of their vowels.
Adam Frydman recalled having seen families bury the treasures they hoped could be used as currency to keep them alive. In the film, he speaks of his own time at Majdanek in similar terms: “It’s better to bury it and forget about the whole thing.” But Frydman, sensing that he was approaching the end of his life, told investigators working with the filmmakers, that he had seen people in the Majdanek midfield—an open field where people were forced to wait for their fates for days at a time—hiding personal items.
Frydman supposed, and the film concurs in this analysis, that such efforts were a final act of defiance by people who refused to give their last remaining valuables to the Nazis. Liberating the objects, then, the film convincingly argues, will be a redemption of sorts for the dead. “They said, ‘Let it rot in the ground—the bastards won’t get it,’” recalled survivor David Prince, a trustee of the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre. “It was meant to be found by people exactly like us.”
Tessie Jacob and Ella Prince, along with Frydman, accompany the archaeological crew to Majdanek, recounting the horrors of their past along the way. The film delicately exposes the terror, bitter sadness and fear involved in this difficult journey for the survivors. The camera hangs back and observes people with a sidelong glance rather than a direct scrutiny, and in doing so sensitively avoids a voyeurism of their unspeakable grief.…
At one poignant moment, the 80-year-old Jacob—in the trappings of adulthood, with a red coat and red earrings, but with the unguarded vulnerability of the child she once was—speaks to her parents, who were killed at Majdanek: “I came to apologize. You told me to save yourself. I couldn’t have saved you. I was the baby, and I could not.”
By the time the archaeologists dig up the field and, in two days alone, find more than 80 pieces of jewelry, coins and other keepsakes, it is clear that they find only remnants of the true treasures: those who were murdered in the gas chambers of Majdanek. Though some of these remnants have monetary value—the film points out the precious stones, for example, found in some buried jewelry—we come to realize that their value as links to the past is priceless.
This little film says more implicitly than it does explicitly, and that is its greatest strength. It is humble in that it does not overstep its boundaries and try to tell the story of the Holocaust; rather, it shows the evidence of a simple and singular act of rebellion with a sensitive treatment of the past and present. The archaeologists’—and, for that matter, the film’s—act of excavation, becomes, in its own turn, an act of defiance. And defiance of the murderers will continue, as the producers of the film are currently looking for high school and college students to do more excavations at Majdanek this summer. Nothing is truly gone, the film makes clear, if there are still those who are willing to look for it.
IN ISRAEL, GATHERING FRAGMENTS OF THE HOLOCAUST
Joel Greenberg
Washington Post, December 9, 2011
The elderly men and women trickled in one by one, carrying physical scraps of memory: yellowing letters and postcards, old photos, personal belongings and frayed documents left behind by relatives who lived through the Holocaust.
At tables set up in a senior citizens home in [Netanya, Israel], the visitors talked as interviewers listened and took notes. The stories swirled through the room—told in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, conjuring up the painful past as pictures and papers were carefully passed back and forth, examined, read and registered.
The scene unfolded at a collection day organized this week by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, as part of a national campaign to find and preserve materials from that period that are scattered in homes across the country. Since its launch in April, the project, called “Gathering the Fragments,” has accumulated more than 33,000 items, including diaries, art works, personal belongings, letters and photographs.
Israel has the largest population of Holocaust survivors of any country—some 200,000—and organizers say they are in a race against time to locate the items while aging survivors can still tell the stories behind them. “We consider this as a last-minute rescue operation, to pass on the story to the next generation,” said Haim Gertner, the archives director of Yad Vashem.
While many items from the Holocaust years have been discarded over time by people unaware of their significance, the campaign is an opportunity to recover materials that have been saved by survivors and their children, Gertner said. To preserve what remains, the items brought to collection points across Israel are examined on site by a team of Yad Vashem staff and volunteers who interview the donors, evaluate the materials and scan them for digital documentation. They are then added to the Yad Vashem collection in Jerusalem, conserved, catalogued and made digitally accessible. Organizers say items of special interest could be considered for public display.
On Monday in Netanya, Mendel Roizman, an 82-year-old immigrant from the former Soviet Union, handed over two items left by his father, who was sent to a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1943 and survived the war. They were a Yom Kippur prayer book and phylacteries, the small leather boxes containing parchment strips of Hebrew scripture worn by Jewish men during morning worship. “I kept these for years and brought them to Israel, and I want them preserved for the next generations…” Roizman said in Russian, his words translated by the Yad Vashem interviewer, who examined the items with gloved hands.
Yisrael Zvi Halevy, a 61-year-old school principal, produced a letter sent by his father in 1945 to a sister in Jerusalem informing her that he had survived the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Halevy said he could not part with the letter, written from a hospital days after the camp’s liberation, but he was happy to have it scanned for the Yad Vashem archives.…
Sara Peled, 65, a retired teacher, grew tearful after handing over a sheaf of family papers, including her father’s report cards from a Jewish school in Poland—Hebrew documents that testified to the vibrant Jewish life in the country before the war. Peled’s father immigrated to British-ruled Palestine before the Nazi invasion of Poland, but the rest of her relatives who stayed behind perished in death camps, and she brought albums filled with their pictures. “I feel like I’m giving up part of me,” she said, “but I discussed it with my children, and it’s better that it be preserved for generations to come.”
Natan Rom, 82, who escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland and, after a tortuous journey through the Soviet Union and Iran, reached Palestine with other orphaned children in 1943, handed over an autograph book signed by fellow child refugees. “I’m leaving the most precious thing I have,” he said, “but it shows that this once happened.”
Gertner, the Yad Vashem archivist, said that donors described a sense of closure and even relief at having unburdened themselves of items that evoked painful memories, but he said they also voiced confidence that the objects were in safe hands. With its vast Holocaust database, library and research tools, Yad Vashem could enhance the understanding of these materials, he said. “These items connect us with the stories of individuals,” he said. “Through our documentation, we can link them to the bigger story and give them meaning.”
