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The Plight of Hungarian Jewry During the Holocaust

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The Plight of Hungarian Jewry During the Holocaust Allegiance to Invasion: The Plight of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust Interviewer: Beverley Howard Interviewee: Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits Instructor: Alex Haight February 11, 2014 Table Of Contents Interviewee release form…………………………………………………..2 Interviewer release form…………………………………………………...3 Statement of purpose……………………………………………………....4 Biography……………………………………………………………….....5 Historical Contextualization: Living Through the Holocaust……………………………………………..8 Interview Transcription……………………………………………………29 Audio Time Index Log Sheet………………………………………………71 Interview Analysis…………………………………………………………72 Appendix…………………………………………………………………...79 Works Consulted…………………………………………………………...84 Statement of Purpose The purpose of this project is to acquire a better understanding of the challenges Hungarian Jew’s faced during World War II through an oral history of Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits. A young man for most of the War, Rabbi Berkowits was subjected to life in several Nazi Concentration camps. He recalls Germany invading the Hungarian capital of Budapest and from that moment on he was not longer human, but a number. This interview offers the Rabbi’s unique experience during the Holocaust and it shows, unlike a textbook would, the emotional and physical toll the Nazi regime cost him and other people. Biography Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits was born on February 29th of 1928. He grew up in the small country town of Derecske, Hungary. He lived with parents, two older sisters, a younger brother, and a younger sister. In the small community of Derecske there were about 11,000 people, but only 1,800 of them were Jewish. Growing up, his orthodox religion was very important to him, his family and the community. The temple was the center of life for all the Jews in his hometown. While he was in the concentration camps Rabbi Berkowits said, “Reading the prayer book was an act of passive resistance, an assertion of self” (Berkowits 46). The Nazis tried to take away his faith, but that same faith is what kept him alive. In 1943, at age 15 Rabbi Berkowits, his father and two older sisters relocated to Budapest, Hungary in search of jobs; however, he left behind his mother, younger brother and sister. His father and him worked at the Central Jewish Cemetery of Budapest and his job was raising and tending to the flowers. While the men were working at the Cemetery his older sisters worked as nannies. Rabbis Berkowits loved working with the flowers in the cemetery and the physical labor prepared him for the harsh conditions he would withstand in the concentration camps. On Sunday July 8th of 1944 he and his entire family were arrested and sent to the central Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Rabbi Berkowits managed to escape the ghetto, but he was worried that his father would wonder where he had gone so he proceeded to sneak back in. The next day they were shipped to Auschwitz- Birkenau in the boxcars. When he arrived he was assigned to Block 11 of Camp E. While in Auschwitz -Birkenau Rabbi Berkowits found his two schoolboy friends Arthur and Jack. Those two boys would be his constant companions throughout the war. On November 11th 1944, 119 days into his stay at Auschwitz- Birkenau, Berkowits, Arthur, and Jack were shipped to Braunschweig, a labor camp. In Braunschweig factory he labored to repair vehicles, but the Allies were dropping bombs so, the camp was evacuated in March. From there Rabbis Berkowits was sent to Watenstedt, and then Ravensbruck. From Ravensbruck he was deported for the last time, to a camp called Wobbelin. Jack, Arthur, and Rabbi Berkowits were only in Wobbelin for ten days before the American 82nd Airborne unit liberated the camp on May 2nd of 1945. After their liberation the boys were sent to Sweden to recuperate. In January of 1948 they all came to the United States. In 1954 Rabbi Berkowits was drafted into the Army and was stationed in Hawaii. He was in the 25th Infantry Division and eventually was promoted to a Specialist, 3rd Class. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor until 1956, and during his service he became a Chaplains assistant. Through work with the Chaplain he realized he wanted become a Rabbi. Rabbi Berkowits wanted to go to Hebrew Union College, but he first go a B.A in Sociology from the University of Cincinnati. In 1961, while at Cincinnati he met his future wife Judy. He graduated from Hebrew Union College with a Masters and then in June of 1963, he received his rabbinical ordination. Shortly after his ordination, on July 1st of 1963 he got a job with Temple Rodef Shalom, a small budding temple in Falls Church, VA. Rabbi Berkowits worked for the temple for 45 years until his retirement in 1998. Under his guidance the temples congregation grew from just 30 members who held services in congregant’s basements, to the largest temple in the D.C Metropolitan area with over 5,000 members. The Governor of Virginia granted him membership to the Virginia Human Rights Commission as recognition of his great works, and the Fairfax City Council also honored him. Today, Rabbi Berkowits is happily retired and surrounded by his wife, two daughters and five grandchildren. Living Through the Holocaust The Sonderkommando were a group of concentration camp prisoners whose job it was to deliver, burn, and scavenge the bodies of dead Jews. Filip Muller worked in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando and when he could not bear to escort any more Jews to their deaths; he decided to be gassed with them, but an SS officer noticed him and said, “You bloody shit, get it into your stupid head: we decide how long you stay alive and when you die, and not you. Now piss off to the ovens!” (Bauer 226). When the Jews were brought to the largest extermination camp under German control, Auschwitz, they were greeted by a sign saying, “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Makes One Free” (Auschwitz); however, nothing would free the 1 million Jews that perished there. A new term was needed to describe the systematic and purposeful murders of the Jews during the Second World War. Polish scholar and attorney Prof. Raphael Lemkin formulated the term “Genocide” after WWII because before then there was no word to describe the systematic murder of an entire race. The study of the Holocaust helps us to understand the level of influence society has on the minds of people and to the violent acts peer pressure can generate. The agenda of Adolf Hitler shifted the precarious social position of the Jews dramatically, and caused the citizens of Germany to view them as an enemy of the state. To understand the Holocaust one must first examine the history of the mistreatment of Jews, Germany post WWI with the formation of the Nazi party and the Holocaust in the country of Hungary; as well as hear a first hand perspective of a survivor. The Jewish culture has been openly persecuted in Europe for hundreds of years. In the Middle Ages, highly respected leaders within the Church preached that the Jews were heretics. This anti-Semitic belief within the Church came from the common misconception that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The highly respected St. John Chrysostom, a priest in the Middle Ages, relayed this anti-Semitic message to his congregation, “ The Jews sacrifice their children to Satan. They are worse than wild beasts and the synagogue is a brothel, a den of scoundrels, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews, a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ” (Bauer 8). In more modern times, anti- Semitic works flourished and further biased the minds of people against the Jews. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is a famous forgery that was published in 1903 and 1905 and it is alleged to be the record of a meeting between the real rulers of the West and the Jewish elders at the first Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897 (Bauer 45). According to The Protocols, “The elders met at the Zionist Congress to plot the subversion of all civilization and the imposition of Jewish rule” (Bauer 45). Truthfully, agents of the Russian police devised the Protocols in Paris between 1897 and 1899. The Protocols were meant to ruin the reputation of the Zionist movement by painting the Jewish community as a lustful nation seeking world domination. Anti- Semitic campaigns like the Protocols helped shift the public’s perceptions of Jewish people from hardworking individuals to a dangerous subgroup of humanity that was consumed by greed, and world domination. The connotation ultimately attributed to the persecution and mass murder of the Jews hundreds of years later in World War Two. World War I began in 1914 and ended in 1919 with the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty left the military of Germany weak, its economy devastated, and its citizens mortified. The treaty broke up the territories of Tsarist Russia, Austria- Hungary, and Germany by establishing the land into the new states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (Bauer). The economic structures of the larger states of Russia, Austria, Hungary, and Germany were thrown into severe crisis due to the tariffs imposed on them by the new smaller states. The Weimar Republic, established in Germany after World War I, was highly scrutinized. The humiliation felt by the citizens of Germany over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles only cultivated the weakness of the Weimar regime, while strengthening existing conflicts between the distinctive social groups in Germany. The Washington Post on July 31, 1934 commented on the result of the Treaty of Versailles, “ It was that abortive treaty that paved the way for Hitler and his Nazis and enabled them to delude the minds of a suffering people” (“Hitler’s Rise Credited To Versailles” 9).
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