AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM

Vol. 43-No. 4 ISSN 0892-1571 March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 DOCUMENTATION, ACCOUNTABILITY AND HEROISM: LEARNING FROM THE PAST TO ENHANCE THE FUTURE Barbara Gutfreund Arfa Professional Development Conference on Holocaust Education he Education Department of the Holocaust, a tragic chapter in human about the creation of this program and claims. T American Society for Yad history, will not repeat itself. This con- the establishment of the Barbara President Eisenhower’s ability to Vashem and its Young Leadership ference, organized by Dr. Marlene W. Gutfreund Arfa Endowment Fund for foresee the era of Holocaust denial, Associates held its nineteenth annual Yahalom, director of education of the Holocaust Education in memory of and thereby plant the seeds to ulti- professional development conference American Society, has proven to be a her mother, Barbara Gutfreund Arfa, mately meet the challenges present- on Holocaust education on March 19, strong vehicle to promote the mission z”l. Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, ed by these false claims, is a testa- 2017. This year’s program was gen- of Holocaust remembrance and mem- Director of Education of the American ment to his sharp understanding that erously supported by the by ordering the creation of this Barbara Gutfreund Arfa visual evidence, his actions Endowment Fund for would shape the course of Holocaust Education. Holocaust memory and the con- This program is a collabora- duct of future leaders. By creat- tive effort with the Association ing evidence, President of Teachers of Social Studies Eisenhower ensured that the of the United Federation of behavior of future leaders would Teachers, the Educators’ be accountable. Chapter of the UFT Jewish Mary Eisenhower, grand- Heritage Committee, and the daughter of President Dwight D. School of Education of Eisenhower, and CEO of Manhattanville College. People to People International, Participants in this year’s pro- was our keynote speaker this gram, which included educa- year. She spoke about the tors from all five boroughs of importance of ethics and New York City and from the responsibility, and the role of tri-state area, received in- documentation and the obliga- service credit for completing tion to accurately document the the conference. The program Holocaust so that the informa- also included a display of the tion taught is verified, authenti- educational unit developed by cated and recorded for present the International School of and future generations. She Holocaust Studies, “The emphasized that the lessons of Legend of the Lodz Ghetto the Holocaust need to be Children.” This educational (left to right) Mary Eisenhower, keynote speaker, Caroline Massel, Executive Board member; and David Silberklang, sen- mandatory education for stu- resource, along with our array ior historian at Yad Vashem. dents, to enable them to be of Traveling Exhibitions, is available ory through education over the years. Society, spoke about the importance proactive in their lives to be a part of to schools to enrich their educational The conference was created by of this program in its efforts to raise the effort to ensure this part of history programs on the Holocaust. Caroline Arfa Massel, Founding Chair Holocaust awareness through educa- does not repeat itself. Dr. David Through teaching we warn about of the Young Leadership Associates tion, and acknowledged the heroism Silberklang, senior historian at Yad the consequences of extreme and of the American Society and and foresight of President Dwight D. Vashem, shared his remarks on the baseless hatred and prejudice. We Executive Board member of the Eisenhower in documenting and ver- topic of “Does War Have a Moral educate to promote tolerance, in the American Society, in 1999. ifying the atrocities he saw in his visit Compass: Reflections on Allied hope that through our efforts, future Caroline Massel opened the pro- to Ohrdruf. Responses to the Shoah.” generations will make sure that the gram with very poignant remarks n April of 1945, then General Dr. Yahalom presented a workshop IEisenhower toured Ohrdruf —a to participants on the role of postage subcamp of the Buchenwald concen- stamps in documenting the tration camp. It was as result of this Holocaust, and provided teaching IN THIS ISSUE difficult visit that President strategies to introduce students to The Holocaust’s great escape...... 3 Eisenhower ordered army photogra- learn about the Holocaust, and pre- The clandestine history of the Kovno Jewish ghetto police...... 4 phers and filmmakers, members of serving its memory through postage Treasure in a suitcase...... 5 the news media and legislators to cre- stamps. Researchers uncover vast numbers of unknown Nazi killing fields...... 6 ate visual evidence of the atrocities ur program and theme this year, On the run from the Nazis...... 8 that his visit revealed to the world. His ODocumentation, Accountability Global initiatives virtually commemorate the Holocaust...... 9 thinking was that if ever in the future and Heroism: Learning from the Past Diaries of a Nazi monster...... 10 there should develop a tendency to to Enhance the Future – Role Models Love letters of the Holocaust...... 11 call this “propaganda,” then this visu- for our Children, represents an oppor- The true story of the zookeeper who hid Jews...... 15 al evidence, supported by affidavits, tunity to reflect on our obligations to ASYV Annual Spring Luncheon...... 16 would meet the challenges of those (Continued on page 2) Page 2 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 DOCUMENTATION, ACCOUNTABILITY AND HEROISM: LEARNING FROM THE PAST TO ENHANCE THE FUTURE (Continued from page 1) programs for studying the Holocaust but also to offer connections between complexity, horror, content and obli- honor the memory of Holocaust vic- to the public schools of New York this subject and other fields of study. gation of remembrance that this sub- tims, create and preserve the accu- City." In this way we hope to raise aware- ject presents. To meet these chal- rate record of the events of the This award also acknowledges that ness and make the information more lenges, we offer teachers connections Holocaust through education, and the ATSS/UFT commends the relevant to students. As educators we between this event and contemporary sustain this education in a post- American Society for implementing are aware how the events of the issues. In this way, we hope to raise Holocaust world. We also recognize best educational practices in using Holocaust include a wide array of awareness and make the information the need to understand the founda- documents, inquiry, and critical think- challenges to teachers and students more meaningful and relevant to our tion laid by the events of the ing and action in studying the because of their complexity, horror, students.” Holocaust that underscore the impor- Holocaust. content and obligation to remember She also acknowledged the inspira- tance of these themes. In her remarks to participants, Dr. that the subject presents.” tional leadership of Leonard Wilf, chair- She added that “our own man of the American Society, and how awareness of Holocaust “through programs such as the confer- survivors should include ence, we can teach participants about the changing image of the many themes to consider in this Holocaust victims who sur- undertaking: the multifaceted contours vived and who perished. of human behavior, the dangers of For those who perished, we extreme and baseless hatred, the role need to consider how they of the Holocaust in public memory, the want to be remembered. lives of the heroes and the victims, and For those who survived, we the overarching challenge to make should realize how they sure neither group is forgotten.” have been transformed She concluded, “Our responsibility from victims to heroes. as educators includes that we teach They are our eyewitnesses our students the meaning of accurate- to history, and their resist- ly recording historical events as a way ance efforts are symbols of to honor the memory of the victims. the strength and of the This process calls for the need to resilience of the human explore and introduce to our students spirit.” how historical events may be present- r. Yahalom told the ed and re-presented over time. It is Dparticipants that “as exactly during this transformation of educators, by sharing the facts that we need to sustain the responsibility of teaching accuracy of the information. Participants at the 2017 Arfa conference. the lessons of this event to “President Eisenhower’s unusual The workshop topics complemented Yahalom spoke about the “importance future generations, you make a posi- foresight and sense of history laid the the theme of the program: “Teaching of empowering educators to transmit tive and meaningful contribution to foundation for establishing evidence Social Justice through Survivor the lessons of the Holocaust to their Holocaust education and remem- for the future to ensure history is Testimonies;” “Documenting History – students through education. As an brance since your efforts help secure properly recorded. His actions carved Survivors as EyeWwtnesses;”{ institution, Yad Vashem is a symbol of the historically valid memory of this a path for educators to be instrumen- “Liberation and the Efforts of DDE to both destruction and rebirth. Through event for the future. Documenting the tal in meeting these responsibilities.” Document What Happened for the Future;” “Diaries and Documentation — Creating Historical Memory through Testimonials.” Carolyn Herbst, past president /past chairperson of the ATSS/UFT, emphasized that this conference is a valuable resource for increasing awareness and sensitivity to intoler- ance and injustice. Carolyn remarked on the challenge of teaching this topic without reducing the topic to numbers and statistics, and emphasizing the human elements of the events — vic- tims, rescuers, perpetrators and bystanders. She added on the impor- tance of educators realizing how this topic must be taught and sustained in our educational communities. he American Society for Yad T Vashem was awarded the 2015 President’s Award by the Association of Teachers of Social Studies/United Federation of Teachers for the Society’s contributions to social stud- ies education nationally. This is the first time this award was given to an organization. Dr. Marlene Yahalom, Director of Education, presenting “Holocaust Memory through Postage Stamps.” "The ATSS/UFT presented the education, these parallel messages Holocaust and preserving its memory For more information about ASYV award in recognition of the valuable are conveyed to the community at is the driving force behind Holocaust educational programs and events, part the American Society plays in large. One of the ways in which we history. As educators, we are aware and Traveling Exhibitions, contact social studies education, and of the provide teachers with enrichment how the events of the Holocaust Marlene Warshawski Yahalom, PhD, American Society's turning to the about this subject is to provide include a wide array of challenges to Director of Education – mwy@yad- ATSS/UFT for assistance in bringing resources to teach about this subject, teachers and students because of the vashemusa.org. March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 3 THE HOLOCAUST’S GREAT ESCAPE happened at Ponar, lest Nazi com- amplifies the horror. which had also housed a vast library, BY MATTHEW SHAER, mand be linked to the mass murder of “From the moment when they made kosher meat stalls and a communal SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE civilians. All the bodies would have to us bring up the corpses, and we well, had at one time been the crown be exhumed and burned. The wood understood that we wouldn’t get out jewel of the city, itself a center of hortly after dawn one January collected by Zeidel and his fellow pris- of there alive, we reflected on what Jewish life in Eastern Europe — the day in 1944, a German military S oners would form the pyres. we could do,” Zeidel remembered. “Jerusalem of the North.” By one esti- truck departed the center of Vilnius, in By late January, roughly 80 prison- And so the prisoners turned to one mate, at the turn of the 20th century what is today Lithuania, and rattled ers, known to historians as the thought: escape. Vilnius was home to some 200,000 southwest toward the fog-laced towns Burning Brigade, were living in the *** people, half of them Jewish. But the that ringed the city. Near the village of camp, in a subterranean wood-walled ichard Freund, an American synagogue was damaged after Ponar, the vehicle came to a halt, and bunker they’d built themselves. Four archaeologist at the University Hitler’s army captured the city in June a pale 18-year-old named Motke R were women, who washed laundry in of Hartford, in Connecticut, special- 1941, and herded the Jewish popula- Zeidel, chained at the ankles, was led large metal vats and prepared meals, izes in Jewish history, modern and tion into a pair of walled ghettos, and from the cargo hold. typically a chunk of ice and dirt and ancient. He has been traversing the then sent them, in successive waves, Zeidel had spent the previous two potato melted down to stew. The men globe for almost three decades, work- to Ponar. After the war the Soviets years in German-occupied Vilnius, in were divided into groups. The weaker ing at sites as varied as Qumran, razed the synagogue entirely; today the city’s walled-off Jewish ghetto. men maintained the pyres that smol- where the Dead Sea Scrolls were dis- an elementary school stands in its He’d watched as the Nazis sent first dered through the night, filling the air covered, and at Sobibor, a Nazi exter- place. hundreds and then thousands of with the heavy smell of burning flesh. mination camp in eastern Poland. Lithuanian archaeologists had dis- Jews by train or truck or on foot to a The strongest hauled bodies from the Unusually for a man in his profession, covered remnants of the old syna- camp in the forest. A small number of earth with bent and hooked iron he rarely puts trowel to earth. Instead, gogue — evidence of several intact people managed to flee the camp, subterranean chambers. “The main and they returned with tales of what synagogue floor, parts of the grand they’d seen: rows of men and women Tuscan pillars, the bimah” — or altar machine-gunned down at close — “the decorated ceiling,” Freund range. Mothers pleading for the lives explained. “All of that had been of their children. Deep earthen pits underground, and it survived.” piled high with corpses. And a name: Freund and his colleagues, includ- Ponar. ing Harry Jol, a professor of geology Now Zeidel himself had arrived in and anthropology from the University the forest. Nazi guards led him of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and Philip through a pair of gates and past a Reeder, a geoscientist and mapping sign: “Entrance Strictly Forbidden. expert from Duquesne University, in Danger to life. Mines.” Ahead, through Pittsburgh, were brought in to explore the gaps in the pines, he saw massive further. They spent five days scanning depressions in the ground covered the ground beneath the school and with fresh earth — the burial pits. the surrounding landscape with “This is it,” he said to himself. “This is ground-penetrating radar, and the end.” emerged with a detailed digital map The Nazi killing site at Ponar is that displayed not just the syna- today known to scholars as one of the gogue’s main altar and seating area first examples of the “Holocaust by but also a separate building that held bullets” — the mass shootings that a bathhouse containing two mikvaot, claimed the lives of upwards of two A proposed museum in the former Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, features portraits of fami- or ceremonial baths, a well for water million Jews across Eastern Europe. lies who once lived there. and several latrines. Afterward, Unlike the infamous gas chambers at poles. One prisoner, a Russian Freund, who is rumpled and stout, Freund met with the staff at the Vilna places like Auschwitz, these murders named Yuri Farber, later recalled that with eyes that seem locked in a per- Gaon Jewish State Museum, named were carried out at close range, with they could identify the year of death petual squint, practices what he calls after the famed 18th-century Talmudic rifles and machine guns. Significantly, based on the corpse’s level of “noninvasive archaeology,” which scholar from Vilnius, and a partner on the killings at Ponar marked the tran- undress: uses ground-penetrating radar and the Great Synagogue project. Then, sition to the Final Solution, the Nazi People who were murdered in 1941 other types of computerized electron- Freund said, “We asked them: ‘What policy under which Jews would no were dressed in their outer clothing. ic technology to discover and else would you like us to do? We’ll do longer be imprisoned in labor camps In 1942 and 1943, however, came the describe structures hidden under- it for free.’” or expelled from Europe but extermi- so-called “winter aid campaign” to ground. The next day, a museum staffer nated. “voluntarily” give up warm clothing for One day this past fall I walked the named Mantas Siksnianas took Zeidel braced for the crack of a rifle. the German army. Beginning in 1942, grounds of the Ponar forest with Freund and his crew to the forests of It never came. Opening his eyes, he people were herded in and forced to Freund and a couple of his col- Ponar, a 20-minute drive from the city found himself standing face to face undress to their underwear. leagues, who had recently completed center. Most of the nearby Nazi-era with a Nazi guard, who told him that Double-sided ramps were built a surveying project of the area. burial pits had been located, beginning immediately, he must work inside the pits. One crew hauled Although he was raised some 5,000 Siksnianas explained, but local with other Jewish prisoners to cut stretchers filled with corpses up the miles from Lithuania, on Long Island, archaeologists had found a large down the pine trees around the camp ramp, and another crew pushed the New York, Freund has deep roots in area, overgrown with foliage, that and transport the lumber to the pits. bodies onto the pyre. In a week, the the area. His great-grandparents fled looked as if it might be an unidentified “What for?” Zeidel later recalled won- Burning Brigade might dispose of Vilnius in the early 20th century, dur- mass grave: Could Freund and his dering. “We didn’t know what for.” 3,500 bodies or more. Later, the ing an especially violent series of colleagues determine if it was? A week later, he and other members guards forced prisoners to sift through pogroms undertaken by the Czarist As Siksnianas led Freund through of the crew received a visit from the the ashes with strainers, looking for government, when the city still the woods, he told an astonishing camp’s Sturmbannführer, or com- bone fragments, which would then be belonged to the Russian Empire. “I’ve story about a group of prisoners who mander, a 30-year-old dandy who pounded down into powder. always felt a piece of me was there,” had reportedly tunneled to freedom wore boots polished shiny as mirrors, All told, historians have documented Freund told me. and joined partisan fighters hiding out white gloves that reached up to his at least 80,000 people shot at Ponar Which made him all the more in the forest. But when Freund asked elbows, and smelled strongly of per- between 1941 and 1944, and many intrigued to hear, two years ago, to see exactly how they made it out, fume. Zeidel remembered what the believe the true number is greater about a new research project led by he got only shrugs. No one could commandant told them: “Just about still. Ninety percent of those killed Jon Seligman, of the Israel Antiquities show him; no one knew. Because a 90,000 people were killed here, lying were Jews. That the Nazis charged a Authority, at the site of Vilnius’s Great tunnel had never been definitively in mass graves.” But, the brigade of prisoners to disinter and Synagogue, a once towering located and documented, the story Sturmbannführer explained, “there dispose of the bodies, in the most Renaissance-Baroque structure dat- had come to take on the contours of a must not be any trace” of what had sickening of circumstances, only ing to the 1630s. The synagogue, (Continued on page 7) Page 4 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 THE CLANDESTINE HISTORY OF THE KOVNO JEWISH GHETTO POLICE The Clandestine History of the ghetto Jewish police tried their best to respected head, Dr. Elkanon Elkes, With the growing realization of just Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police. help in that life-and-death struggle. chosen by trusted leaders in the whom they were dealing with, the Translated and edited by Samuel Thus this work, translated from the Kovno Jewish community “to relay Elder Council and the Labor Office Schalkowsky. Introduction by Samuel Yiddish, and “cover[ing] events from German orders” and to represent continued fulfilling German demands. D. Kassow. Indiana University Press: the start of the German attack on them to the Germans, have done They had to. And some of the Bloomington 2014. 389 pp. $28.56 Russia, on June 22, 1941, through something? Could the ghetto’s German demands for workers were hardcover. most of 1943,” begins with the story of Jewish police, the organization that real. But, we learn, they also began to the “terrible turmoil” that gripped Jews would act on decisions made by the do more — often with the police act- REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN as they witnessed the Soviet army Council and its head, and led by ing and the leadership and Labor ow do you survive Hell? Do you fleeing Kovno, occupied respected individuals Office sanctioning these acts, some- Hfight your way out or die trying? by them in consequence chosen by the same thing not so common in other ghettos. Do you react with nonviolent civil dis- of Hitler’s earlier Molotov- aforementioned trust- In sum, food was smuggled into the obedience? Do you follow orders hop- Ribbentrop Pact with ed leaders, have taken starving ghetto and children smug- ing that even the devil has a heart or Stalin. It chronicles how some action? gled out. Bribes were given where that, in time, you’ll be rescued by the terror-stricken Jews nfortunately, they would do the most good — to some hero in this world or one coming of Kovno, having heard Utotally helpless, Lithuanians and even Germans. from the next? According to highly horrifying rumors about completely unfamiliar Weapons of all kinds were smuggled respected Holocaust historian Lucy S. the Nazis, tried, unsuc- with this new enemy, into the ghetto, fixed, and smuggled Dawidowicz, the reason most Jews cessfully to flee as well. and with the survival of out again with those who wanted to caught in the Nazi maelstrom chose We read about how the the community its fight and join the partisans. the third alternative was because they anti-Semitic Lithuanians overwhelming con- True, there were scoundrels to be had no experience with an enemy took full advantage of the cern, the Council and found even among Jews. This work whose goal was their total annihila- chaos, looting, raping, its head tried their best doesn’t deny it. But there were also tion. They only knew that just as they and savagely “butcher- to appease the Nazi heroes, even among the hated police. had survived earlier pogroms, they ing” Jews, even before overlords, hoping, The proof: “On March 27, 1944, the would survive this one . . . the Germans took control of Kovno. undoubtedly, that time would see this same day that the German command Interestingly, The Clandestine Indeed, this last was so awful that evil pass, as so many others had launched an action against the ghet- History of the Kovno Ghetto Jewish Kovno Jews welcomed the German passed before it. This meant that to’s children and elderly inmates” Police found in the ruins of the Kovno creation of a ghetto. Ironically, Jews when demands were presented to the almost forty policemen, indeed, the ghetto and translated and edited here felt it would protect them from their Council and later the Jewish Labor Jewish ghetto police leadership, gave now by Samuel Schalkowsky, was bloodthirsty “neighbors”! Of course, it Office — generally for workers or their lives rather than divulge where written by anonymous members of only made it easier for the Nazis to do some such excuse — demands were ghetto hiding places were or “any the Kovno Jewish ghetto police who their “organized” dirty work vis-à-vis fulfilled for fear of reprisal. This also information useful to the Germans.” were frequently accused by Kovno the Jews, even as the Lithuanians meant that the ghetto police charged Needless to say, The Clandestine ghetto dwellers of being traitors to continued their attacks. In sum, by with enforcing these demands and History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto their own. However, what we come to late October 1941, the Jewish popula- rounding people up, were soon hated Police is an exceptionally important learn by way of this unique volume — tion of Kovno was approximately half by the general ghetto populace. Still, work! which if discovered by the Nazis of what it had originally been. Only neither the Council, the Labor Office, would have cost the life of its leading 17,400 Jews remained in the Kovno nor the Jewish police could have Dr. Cypkin is a Professor of Media, author and the lives of contributors to ghetto. imagined that any of their actions Communication, and Visual Arts at the document (all police) — is how a Could anything have been done to would result in the merciless murder Pace University. Her parents and broth- community struggled to survive and prevent or mitigate this bloodletting? of so many. But then the Nazis were er survived the Kovno ghetto to be liber- how, in fact, a majority of the Kovno Could the ghetto’s Elder Council or its masters at subterfuge! ated by the Russians, August, 1944. MISCHLING, A HOLOCAUST TALE OF TWIN SISTERS IN MENGELE’S GRIP Mischling. Though the children he selected Its 12-year-old twin heroines seem to the same time capturing the resilience By Affinity Konar. Little, Brown and were spared immediate death, they have been partly inspired by the twins of many prisoners, their ability to hang Company: New York, 2016. 352 pp. were subjected to monstrous surger- Eva and Miriam Mozes (whose story on to hope and kindness in the face of $16.26 hardcover. ies and deliberately infected with dis- Eva told in Echoes From Auschwitz: the most awful suffering — to remain, eases; he injected chemicals into Dr. Mengele’s Twins). in Mr. Wiesel’s words, humane “in an REVIEWED BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI eyes, in an effort to Yet for all her novel’s inhumane universe.” The world Ms. uring the period of the past change their color, and indebtedness to source Konar depicts is straight out of “Dcentury that I call Night,” Elie kept some of his sub- material, Ms. Konar Hieronymus Bosch — a place of tor- Wiesel wrote in a 2005 essay, “medi- jects in tiny cages. Of makes the emotional ture, cruelty and anguish, where cine was practiced in certain places about 1,500 pairs of lives of her two spirited death is everywhere and the sky is lit- not to heal but to harm, not to fight off twins in Mengele’s narrators piercingly real, erally red with fire and ash. It’s a death but to serve it. In the conflict “Zoo,” fewer than 200 as they recount, in alter- place that robs Stasha and Pearl of between Good and Evil during the individuals survived the nating chapters, the har- their innocence and childhood, and Second World War, the infamous Nazi war. rowing story of their threatens to indelibly change their doctors played a crucial role. They Mengele’s crimes form efforts to survive: Pearl, very sense of who they are. preceded the torturers and assassins the backdrop of Affinity once the more outgoing he girls, inseparable in their in the science of organized cruelty Konar’s affecting new of the sisters, becomes T past life, find themselves grow- that we call the Holocaust.” novel, Mischling, which more methodical, more ing apart — fiercely devoted to one The quintessence of that evil was takes its title from the focused on memories to another, but broken in different ways embodied in Josef Mengele, the term the Nazis used to get through each day; by Mengele’s hideous experiments, Auschwitz physician who not only denote people of mixed while Stasha grows feisti- which damage Stasha’s hearing and sent countless men, women and chil- heritage. The novel draws heavily — er and more cunning — “a creature sight; and leave Pearl in a cage, her dren to the gas chambers, but also even in granular detail — on the 1991 capable of tricking her enemies and ankles snapped and her feet performed grotesque experiments on nonfiction book Children of the rescuing her loved ones.” smashed. Mengele, who alternates selected prisoners — especially Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado What is most haunting about the displays of avuncular concern with twins, whom he eagerly sought out and Sheila Cohn Dekel, and on novel is Ms. Konar’s ability to depict chilling sadism, seems to take plea- upon arrival. Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. the hell that was Auschwitz, while at (Continued on page 11) March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 5 TREASURE IN A SUITCASE After both his parents died, André recounts. When he opened them, he Jewish weddings from the may have been assisted by the Boers took the suitcase his mother found 8-mm film — movies from his Holocaust. Dutch underground. He may have forbade him ever to open and parents’ wedding on April 18, 1939 in Watching Boers’ parents’ wedding paid money to have her freed. I don’t found a family treasure: his par- the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, the movie is a jarring experience. It pro- know,” his son recounts. ents’ wedding video. After he capital of the province of Friesland. “I vides a fascinating glimpse at the From that point, in August 1942, watched it, he realized that nearly saw so many people in it that I didn’t good life of the Jewish community in their amazing escape began, which all of the guests had perished in know, aunts and uncles that I could- the Netherlands the next few years. n’t identify,” he recalls with emotion. shortly before almost In the years that elapsed since they all of it was BY OFER ADERET, HAARETZ opened the suitcase, André Boers destroyed. As noted, or decades the home movies and his sisters deliberated over what most of those in the Ffrom the wedding of a Dutch to do with their historical family dis- movie would not have Jewish couple, Mimi Dwinger and covery. “On one hand, my parents been alive to attend Barend Boers, lay in a suitcase that never spoke about the war and didn’t André’s brit milah, his no one was to open. The bride and want to deal with what happened,” Jewish ritual circum- groom, who miraculously survived he explains. On the other hand, the cision. the Holocaust, did not tell their chil- movie was an extraordinary and rare Those who perished dren about the special keepsake item from the period and the region. included André’s from their 1939 nuptials. It’s possible In the end, its historical importance mothers’ parents and that they were afraid to look at the won out. Boers, who is now the his father’s two broth- film in light of the fact that, grimly, chairman of the Center for Research ers. “All of them were murdered in the camps. I never met them,” he says. The movie also fea- tures a prominent fig- ure — the chief rabbi of North Holland, Abraham Salomon Levisson, who offici- ated the wedding. At the end of World War II he was liberated from the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp on a “freedom train,” but died on the train on May 5, 1945, Mimi Dwinger and Barend Boers on their wedding day. the day the was to take them through Belgium, Netherlands was liberated from Nazi France and Spain and included occupation. crossing the Pyrenees mountains, alking to Haaretz, André Boers arrests, flight and liberation, ending T rattled off the history of his Barend Boers on the left, with a rifle. family with ease. Mimi Dwinger was in Jamaica, where the Joint based on the survival statistics of of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew born in 1917 to a family that had Distribution Committee set up a Jews in their town, 80 percent of the University of Jerusalem, understood been living in Friesland since 1542. camp for Dutch Jewish refugees. people who appear in it, including that the research value of such an Barend Boers was born in Barend Boers left there for relatives and friends, would not have item is priceless. Amsterdam in 1910, to a family that Canada, where he joined a Dutch survived the Holocaust. Several months ago, he showed could trace back its roots there to battalion. After military training he “Most of the people that you see in the movie to an emotional staff at the 1620. The two families knew one was sent to England and later partic- this wedding movie were not alive a film archive of the province of another, as both were in the textile ipated in the invasion of Normandy. few years later,” says André Boers, Friesland. “They fell off their chairs. business. When he returned to the one of the couple’s children. “As chil- They had been looking for years for When Barend Boers was 14, he left Netherlands, he discovered that his dren, we knew that there was a suit- documentation of the life of the local school and was sent as an appren- brothers had been murdered, but he case that we wouldn’t touch. We Jewish community and had recon- tice to learn the trade with his future found his mother alive. She had hid- weren’t allowed to.” Ultimately, in ciled themselves to the fact that it father-in-law in Leeuwarden. His den in a closet for three years in the 1979, when his father died, he asked didn’t exist,” he said. future wife was just 7 at the time. home of one of the employees of the his mother to allow him to open the At the end of January, the movie Years later, in 1938, on his parents’ family plant in Amsterdam. suitcase. “No, no need, there’s no was posted on YouTube; it has been advice, he returned to Leeuwarden Mimi stayed in Jamaica for a year time,” she told him repeatedly. “I viewed 21,000 times in the short to take Mimi as his wife. He was 28 and then moved to England. Her two eventually understood, of course, time since. It also quickly caught the and she was 21. brothers were pilots who fought the that it was hard for her to deal with eye of Haim Giozli, the director of the The wedding, in 1939, in keeping Nazis. One of them, who served in what was in the suitcase,” he says. database department at the Beit with local custom, took place in the the British army, appears in the wed- A decade ago, in 2007, his mother Hatfutsot Museum of the Jewish bride’s hometown, at the city hall and ding film. The second, who was in died as well, shortly before her 91st People in Tel Aviv, who realized that in the synagogue, after which the cou- the Dutch army, missed the wedding birthday. It was only then, with fear it was a real archival treasure. ple settled in Amsterdam. The cere- because he was in a flight course at and trembling, that the son With the help of Simona Binyamini, mony is well documented in the film, the time. approached the suitcase in the com- who is in charge of the museum’s which features not only the wedding pany of his sisters and opened it. film collection, Boers found a resi- couple but their families and friends, On May 5, 1945, Mimi received a What they saw included letters, dent of the Israeli town of Zichron the rabbi and the synagogue. telegram from her soldier husband. documents and even medals that Ya’akov who is the son of one of the In 1940, the Nazis invaded the “Holland is liberated. You can their father, who participated in the couples who appear in the film. A Netherlands. Mimi was arrested and return,” it read. Barend Boers decid- invasion of Normandy, was awarded. copy of the film is to be provided imprisoned. From there, it would ed to reopen the family textile facto- But the real treasure awaited them shortly to Beit Hatfutsot, as an addi- have been expected that she would ry that the Nazis had burned. He underneath everything else. tion to its existing archives, which be sent to a transit camp and from worked there until he was 60. Mimi “On the bottom of the suitcase I document Jewish communities there to her death. But despite great was a housewife and raised three found little boxes that had the name around the world. The collection difficulty, her husband managed to children. One of them, André, emi- Kodak written on them,” André already includes two films of Dutch get her released from prison. “He grated to Israel. Page 6 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST: THE FILMS OF BORIS MAFTSIR vived, for a survival rate of between had only 10 to 15 percent of the materials became evidence in the BY IZABELLA TABAROVSKY, TABLET 2.7 percent and 4 percent. (Estimates names.” This figure stood in contrast Nuremberg trials. of victims include only those who died to the names of Western European But the findings of the commission n a series of spellbinding docu- as a result of direct anti-Jewish Jews who died in the Holocaust, 90 were never published in the USSR. mentaries, Boris Maftsir, an Israeli I actions by the Nazis; they do not percent of which were known at the Many of those who worked on the filmmaker, has been racing to prevent include hundreds of thousands of time. Black Book were executed a few the last traces of the Holocaust in the Jews who fell in battle while serving in Maftsir spent the next several years years later, charged with disloyalty, as USSR from vanishing for good. He the Red Army or died during sieges of traveling to some 160 Shoah sites in the campaign against “rootless cos- went deep into the forests of Belarus Leningrad and Odessa from bomb- the former Soviet Union, a mind-bog- mopolitanism” unfolded. It would have to film the remnants of Tuvie Bielski’s ings, hunger, illness and other caus- gling number that is nevertheless only been ideologically uncomfortable for partisans’ camp and document es. These are estimated to constitute a fraction of the total of 2,000 sites Stalin to emphasize Jews as a partic- instances of Jewish resistance that several hundred thousand.) connected to the Holocaust. Today, ular target, for doing so could have have not been widely known until Maftsir doesn’t mince words when these sites are spread out across sev- detracted from the special status of now. While it is hard to imagine any- he talks about the near-erasure of the eral post-Soviet states. Step by step, the USSR as a whole as a target of thing remains to be said about the eastern half of the Holocaust. “The he built a network of local volunteers Hitler’s aggression. It could also have Shoah, that, says Maftsir, is because place of memory of the Holocaust is who sought out Holocaust survivors, given credence to Hitler’s propagan- we keep retelling half the story — the already taken up,” he says. “There is non-Jewish witnesses, and local da about the Judeo-Commune and story of the destruction of Western reinflamed anti-Semitic tendencies European Jewry, from ghettos to gas among the local populations that chambers and everything those stand needed to be reintegrated — and for: the merciless, mechanized, reindoctrinated — after prolonged industrial-scale killing machine that periods of living under the German organized the murder of millions into occupation. a precise, assembly-line-like opera- In the vast majority of cases, there tion. were no monuments or other works While half of all the Shoah victims commemorating the execution sites. died in the Soviet Union, they died In the few cases with some sort of very different deaths. Here, people memorial, the inscriptions referred to died in mass executions in ravines, the victims as “peaceful Soviet citi- forests, and village streets, at the zens.” Relatives were not permitted to hands of Germans or local collabora- gather at the memorial sites. Those tors. They perished right where they who did were often arrested. Western lived, in front of people who had been scholars were denied access to the their neighbors. Lubavichi Aleksey Kizeev, Righteous Among the Nations, in , today’s Russia. archives to conduct research. Because the Nazis put Soviet Jews, the Victim — Anne Frank. There is the memory activists — the so-called “What do deniers of the Holocaust whom they called Judeo-Bolsheviks, Saint — Janusz Korczak. There is the guardians of remembrance. “We did say?” asks Maftsir. “They say: Look at in a separate category and viewed Villain — Adolf Eichmann. There is not work with archives,” Maftsir the USSR. Show us the corpses. But them as particularly dangerous (and Hell, it’s Auschwitz. There is heroism emphasized. “We were looking for liv- everything there is burned down, because they expected a quick victo- — the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And ing memory.” everything is ground down, every- ry here) with a few notable excep- that’s it.” His team collected hundreds of thing is destroyed. The forgetting by tions, they almost never bothered with *** thousands of names. And at the end the Soviet power for 40–50 years has organizing the Jews into long-term met Maftsir in September 2016 in of his seventh year on the project, led to the fact that there is no direct ghettos or transporting them to far- Kyiv, where I was attending a Maftsir realized that he needed to connection anymore. And that is how away places. Jews began dying the I series of events commemorating the bring this story before a larger audi- memory goes away.” moment Germans invaded the Soviet 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar mas- ence. As a professional filmmaker, he *** Union on June 22, 1941. sacre. At one of the events, Maftsir chose film as his medium. In 2012 he s Dr. Inna Gerasimova, the “By the end of 1941,” writes Timothy showed the first film of his Holocaust resigned from the project at Yad founder of the Museum of Snyder in Holocaust: The Ignored A in the USSR project, The Guardians Vashem to make The Guardians of Jewish History and Culture of Belarus, Reality, “the Germans (along with of Remembrance. It was the first time Remembrance. tells her story in one of the opening local auxiliaries and Romanian in my life that I, who grew up in the “What does it mean to shoot almost scenes of The Guardians of troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union, saw people I could rec- everyone or to destroy nearly 3 million Remembrance, the camera pans Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is ognize and relate to — survivors from people across a span of a given terri- across a square garden in the center of the equivalent of the total number of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine — speaking tory?” asks Maftsir. The question is Minsk, where she and Maftsir are dis- Jews killed at Auschwitz during the to me from the screen, in Russian, only partly rhetorical. In the USSR, it cussing the events of November 1941. entire war. By the end of 1942, the about the horrors of the Holocaust. meant there were virtually no sur- “This is where the gallows stood,” Germans (again, with a great deal of They told the story of a Holocaust that vivors left to tell their stories. Those she tells him, motioning with her local assistance) had shot another happened in places where my family who had managed to evacuate before hand. Around them is a street scene 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish had lived. the German invasion or who had that is unremarkable in its normalcy. populations under their control had Maftsir has been working on his served in the Red Army came back to Passers-by are going about their ceased to exist. … By 1943 and 1944, project since 2013, but its roots go find empty homes and mass graves. business, some with the habitual when most of the killing of West back to his time at Yad Vashem, Their grief was suppressed under the urgency of a city-dweller, some just European Jews took place, the Israel’s memorial to the victims of the blanket Soviet policy of silence and strolling. Most are oblivious to the Holocaust was in considerable meas- Holocaust, where for seven years he denial of the specificity of the Jewish cameras. It’s a gray, rainy afternoon ure complete.” headed up the effort to recover the nature of the Holocaust. in late November, and pedestrians A different set of numbers throws names of the Soviet victims of the The Soviets, of course, knew exact- are studiously avoiding the puddles. this into even sharper relief. An esti- Shoah. When he took the job in 2006, ly what had happened to the Jews in You can almost feel the chill in the air. mated 25 to 27 percent of Amsterdam he was shocked to discover how their territory. Even before the war “It is precisely here that once in a Jews who found themselves under many were still missing. ended, a special state commission while they hanged people,” occupation survived — the lowest “I knew that in Soviet times, for ide- began investigating German crimes, Gerasimova continues, and the grow- rate in Western Europe. In France, 75 ological and political reasons, there including those against the Jews. A ing dissonance between her words percent of Jews survived the Nazi was neither documentation, nor group of Soviet Jewish writers began and the humdrum, quotidian reality on occupation. By contrast, of the con- memorialization, nor the study of the collecting witness testimony and the screen sets off a barely detectable servatively estimated 2.61 to 2.75 mil- Holocaust,” he told me. “But I couldn’t preparing it for publication in a work alarm bell of internal discomfort in the lion Soviet Jews who found them- imagine that out of the 1.5 million that became known as the Black viewer. selves living under Nazi occupation, Jews we believe died in Ukraine, we Book of Soviet Jewry. Some of these (Continued on page 13) an estimated 103,000 to 119,000 sur- March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 7 THE HOLOCAUST’S GREAT ESCAPE (Continued from page 3) with the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, 10. The first group emerged from the washed his hands many times a day. fable, and three-quarters of a century today held at an archive at the United tunnel without incident. Zeidel recalled When she was 17, Amir took a class on, it seemed destined to remain a States Holocaust Memorial Museum. slithering on his stomach toward the about the Holocaust. “How did you legend without any verifiable evi- “We really fell like the dead. But,” edge of the camp. He scarcely dared escape, Papa?” she remembers ask- dence to back it up — a crucial piece Zeidel continued, “the spirit of initia- to exhale; his heart slammed against ing afterward. He agreed to explain, of the historical record, lost to time. tive, the energy, the will that we had” his chest wall. Later, Farber would but what he recounted were mostly So the following year, in June 2016, helped sustain them. Once oxygen in speculate that it was the snap of a twig technical details: the size of the Freund returned with two groups of the tunnel became too scarce to burn that alerted their captors to the escape. bunker, the number of bodies con- researchers and using a collection of candles, a prisoner named Isaac Dogim attributed it to a blur of move- sumed by the flames. He explained aerial photographs of Ponar shot by Dogim, who had worked in Vilnius as ment spotted by the guards. that in addition to the five men who Nazi reconnaissance planes and cap- an electrician, managed to wire the The forest burst orange with gunfire. had fled with him to the Rudnitsky tured during the war, which helped give interior with lights, powered by a gen- “I looked around: Our entire path was Woods, six other members of the the researchers a better sense of the erator the Nazis had placed in the filled with people crawling,” Farber has Burning Brigade had survived the camp’s layout, Freund and his col- bunker. Behind the fake wall, the tun- written. “Some jumped up and started escape. The rest had perished. leagues turned their attention to finding nel was expanding: 10 feet in length, running in various directions.” Farber Over the years, Zeidel’s recalci- clues about how the camp’s fabled sur- 15. Gradually, the entire Burning and Dogim cut through the fence and trance melted away. In the late 1970s, vivors were able to find a way out. Brigade was alerted to the escape tore off into the woods, with Zeidel and he sat for interviews with Lanzmann, Relying on a surveying device plan. Dogim and Farber promised that three others in tow. The men ran all a few minutes of which were included known as a total station Reeder set no one would be left behind. night, through rivers, through forests, in the 1985 documentary Shoah. To about measuring minute elevation There were setbacks. In March, the past villages. After a week, the Lanzmann, Zeidel confided that after changes across the land, searching diggers discovered they were tunnel- escapees were deep inside the his escape, he was sure he stunk of for subtle gradations and anomalies. ing in the direction of a burial pit and Rudnitsky Woods. Farber introduced death. Later Zeidel agreed to partici- He zeroed in on a hummock that were forced to reroute the passage- himself to the partisan leader. “Where pate in the making of Out of the way, losing days in the do you come from?” the man asked. Forest, a 2004 Israeli documentary process. Not long after- “From the other world,” Farber said. about the role of Lithuanian collabora- ward, Dogim was on bur- “Where’s that?” tors in the mass killings at Ponar. ial pit duty when he “Ponar.” In one of the most affecting scenes unearthed the bodies of *** from Out of the Forest, Zeidel circles his wife, mother and two he escapees spent several the area of the old bunker, looking for sisters. Every member of T months hiding in the forest. In the entrance. “Everything was demol- the Burning Brigade lived early July, the Red Army, having ished,” he tells the camera, finally, with the knowledge that launched a new offensive against the shaking his head in frustration. some of the corpses he Germans, encircled Vilnius. Zeidel “Everything. Not that I care it was was helping to burn joined with other partisans to fight demolished, but I was certain there belonged to family mem- alongside the Soviets to liberate the would be an opening, even if a bers. And yet to see one’s city, and by mid-July the Germans blocked one, so I could show you the wife lying in the pit was were driven out. tunnel.” As it turned out, Zeidel had Ponar is dotted with new monuments to Jewish victims, after the first was demolished by the Soviets in 1952. something else entirely, Once the war ended, Zeidel traveled been standing very close to the tun- and Dogim was con- overland before smuggling himself in nel; he just couldn’t know it. looked like the earthen side of a sumed with sadness and fury. “[He] the autumn of 1945 to bunker, long since overgrown with said he had a knife, that he was going what would become moss and foliage, and roughly 100 to stab and kill the Sturmbannführer,” the State of Israel. He feet away, a telltale dip in the earth. Farber later recalled. Farber told was among the esti- They were looking at a tunnel. Dogim that he was thinking selfishly — mated 60 million peo- *** even if he succeeded, the rest of the ple unmoored by the he digging got under way the prisoners would be killed in retribution. seismic violence of T first night in February 1944, in a Dogim backed down; the diggers the Second World storeroom at the back of the bunker. pressed on. On April 9, Farber War. He had no family To disguise their efforts, the prisoners announced that they’d reached the left: His parents and erected a fake wall over the tunnel’s roots of a tree near the barbed-wire siblings were pre- entrance, with “two boards hanging fence that encircled the camp’s sumed killed by the on loose nails that would come out perimeter. Three days later, he made Nazis or their collabo- with a good tug, making it possible to a tentative stab with a makeshift rators. In 1948, he pass through,” Farber recalled in The probe he’d fashioned out of copper married a woman he’d The Ninth Fort museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, includes this 1984 Complete Black Book of Russian tubing. Gone was the stench of the first met, years earlier, memorial to the more than 30,000 Jews killed there by Nazis in 1941. Jewry, a compilation of eyewitness pits. “We could feel the fresh April air, in the Jewish ghetto testimonies, letters and other docu- and it gave us strength,” he later at Vilnius. He died in 2007, in his Last summer, Amir returned home ments of the Nazi campaign against recalled. “We saw with our own eyes sleep, the last living member of the from a trip to the store to find her Jews in Eastern Europe. that freedom was near.” Burning Brigade. phone ringing. “Everyone wanted to The men worked in shifts through- The men selected April 15, the dark- This past fall, I reached out to Hana know if I’d heard about my father,” out the night, with saws, files and est night of the month, for the escape. Amir, Zeidel’s daughter, and we she recalled. She booted up her com- spoons stolen from the burial pits. Dogim, the unofficial leader of the spoke several times over Skype. puter and found an article about Under the cover of darkness, they group, was first — once he emerged From her home in Tel Aviv, Amir, who Freund’s work. “I started to shake,” smuggled wood planks into the from the tunnel, he would cut a hole in is slight and spectacled, with a gray she told me. “I thought, ‘If only he lengthening tunnel to serve as struts; the nearby fence and mark it with a bob, told me about how she learned were here with me right now!’” as they dug, they brought sandy earth white cloth, so the others would know of her father’s story. In a Skype call this fall, Amir cried as back out and spread it across the which direction to run. Farber was sec- “My father was of a generation that she described Zeidel’s final trip to bunker floor. Any noise was con- ond. Motke Zeidel was sixth. The pris- didn’t talk about their emotions, didn’t Ponar, in 2002. He’d traveled with cealed by the singing of the other oners knew that a group of partisan talk about how they felt about what Amir and her brother and three of his prisoners, who were frequently forced fighters were holed up nearby, in the they’d been through,” Amir told me. grandchildren, and the family clus- to perform for the Sturmbannführer — Rudnitsky Woods, in a secret camp “This was their coping mechanism: If tered together near a burial pit. arias from The Gypsy Baron, by the from which they launched attacks on you’re so busy with moving forward, Cursing in Yiddish and Lithuanian, Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, the Nazi occupiers. “Remember, there you can disconnect from your memo- Zeidel shook his fist at the ghosts of were a favorite. is no going back under any circum- ries.” But there were signs that the his former Nazi captors. “Can you see After a day of disinterring and burn- stances,” Farber reminded his friends. past wasn’t done with Zeidel: Amir me?” Zeidel asked. “I am here with ing corpses, “we returned [to the “It is better to die fighting, so just keep believes he suffered from recurrent my children, and my children had chil- bunker] on all fours,” Zeidel recalled moving forward.” nightmares, and he was fastidious dren of their own, and they are here, years later, in a series of interviews They set off at 11 p.m., in groups of about his personal hygiene — he too. Can you see? Can you see?” Page 8 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 ON THE RUN FROM THE NAZIS dren are taken to Disney in Paris as a months in a coal cellar, where she “The items are incredible. Helen’s BY EMILIA MINCHEVA, BBC trip to entertain them, but I was taken survived mainly on bread and water. story is not the survival story many to Terezin to look for a family that may Soon after the war ended, Helen people think about. She is not in a udy Wertheimer has had to live have died.” moved to Manchester to live with rel- camp. She is not in a ghetto. with the legacy of the Holocaust J Judy’s childhood was punctuated by atives. She had holi- all her life, even though she was born the “burden” of hearing stories about dayed in the city before long after it happened. Now she tells the Holocaust and the relatives she the war and wanted to the story of her mother Helen had lost. start a new life. Taichner, a Polish Jew, who spent Her mother spent the first part of the She remarried and a years alone and in hiding from the war with her first husband and their few years later gave Nazis. young child, fleeing from town to birth to her daughter. town. Malnourished, she was Judy, who lives in unable to feed her baby, who died Cheadle Hulme, in around 1939 when Helen was Greater Manchester, 25. said the Holocaust has In 1943, the couple decided to cast a long shadow over separate to maximize their her life, but she is deter- chances of survival. It is not clear mined the same should what happened to him after that, not happen to her fami- but they never saw each other ly. again. He died during the war. “I can’t pass it on to Judy said she wanted to raise more awareness about the Holocaust Later that year, when she was my children,” she said by donating some of the possessions her mother had during her life 29, Helen stayed with a family who of the family history. “It on the run from the Nazis. gave her a missal and taught her wouldn’t be fair. They have to know, “She is by herself and she really how to behave in a church and but they mustn’t feel the burden.” relies on other people to help her hide how to pray. elen died in 1993, and Judy has throughout the war. It is an incredible “She was pretending to be a Hnow decided to donate some of story.” Catholic,” Judy said. “If anybody her mother’s possessions to the The donated items include a sock stopped her, she knew the bless- Manchester Jewish Museum, where Helen wore while in hiding, a dress ings, she knew the prayers.” they will be permanently stored and she wore on trips out of the cellar, a Helen slept under trees and in passed on to future generations. missal she used to disguise herself as Helen Taichner, born as Rachel Rosenberg. churchyards until she met a maid It is a part of the museum’s appeal, a Christian, and wooden shoe stretch- who offered to shelter her in the which aims to “find those treasures” es hollowed out to hide gold. When she was a child, most of house where she worked — a build- that could tell the stories of Jewish Judy is concerned that people do Judy’s friends went to the seaside for ing divided into apartments. people in Manchester. not know enough about the Holocaust their holidays. But for her, as the The maid allowed Helen to sleep in Alex Cropper, curator at the and there are many “nonbelievers daughter of a Holocaust survivor, one of the toilets without her employ- Manchester Jewish Museum, said: who say it never happened.” summer breaks involved trips to find er’s permission. “The appeal is really about going out “One of the main reasons to give my out what happened to her relatives in Judy said: “Anybody who looked to the community and finding out if mother’s things to the museum is so the Nazi war camps. after a Jew was putting themselves in there is anything in people’s attics that it can be there as a permanent Her mother, Helen Taichner, spent a very great danger. These people and back rooms that could be in our record and people can go in and actu- years evading capture by the Nazis in were putting their lives on the line to galleries in the future.” ally see it,” she said. Poland — hiding anywhere she could save my mother. If they had been She added that Helen’s story was “The bottom line is, this should not find, including in a toilet and a coal caught, they would have been killed.” “really special” and the museum happen again. Nobody should rise up cellar. But that was not the end of the would be privileged to store some of and try to take over people and just She told the BBC: “Nowadays chil- struggles for Helen. She hid for five her belongings. kill them for the sake of their religion.” HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS’ GRANDCHILDREN CALL FOR ACTION OVER INHERITED TRAUMA Glass began speaking to other chil- He said he soon realized he was not weren’t even there,” he said. BY JEAN WEST, THE GUARDIAN dren and grandchildren of Holocaust alone in being scarred by the traumat- Glass adds that other grandchildren ewish activists in Scotland have survivors, initially for an academic ic pasts of his relatives. of survivors have experienced clinical Jstarted a campaign to support depression, anxiety, addiction and the grandchildren of Holocaust sur- eating disorders, which they blame on vivors across the world, saying the the impact of their families constantly trauma of the extermination camps retelling stories of the horrific events continues to haunt the descendants their relatives endured. of those who suffered there. en Feinstein, a second-genera- Dan Glass, 29, from London, said Ktion family member, whose par- he heard constant tales of the ents were Holocaust survivors and Holocaust as he grew up, which have who grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire, deeply affected him into adulthood. told of how his school teacher, who “All four of my grandparents narrow- also survived, insisted that children as ly avoided the gas chambers in young as eight watch documentaries Auschwitz, and countless of their on the subject. friends met with this fate. For my “When kids would look away from it father, it was a daily conversation in she would yell at them, ‘You have no my teens and early 20s, and even right to do that. I buried my family.’ We though I very profoundly understood must have been about seven or eight Dan Glass of the Never Ever Again! group wants a move away from the “melancholic memorial- his pain, one day I had to say to him, ization” of the Holocaust, and is calling for mental health provision to treat inherited trauma. years old. How do you prepare chil- ‘Dad, I can’t talk about this anymore.’ dren of this age for something like My father had a whole wall of books thesis, then later as part of the group “I have been privileged to hear so that? They just showed it to us and on the subject of the Holocaust — it he founded Never Ever Again!, a ref- many stories from young people who kind of traumatized us. It was definite- was all he wanted to talk about, but it erence to the 1948 Universal should now be able to live with joy — ly meant to shock us into never for- was so harrowing for me.” Declaration of Human Rights pledge. but their lives are damaged and they (Continued on page 13) March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 9 GLOBAL INITIATIVES VIRTUALLY COMMEMORATE THE HOLOCAUST — IN A VERY REAL WAY moving to Israel, began working at Singer said that through the tools of Foundation. Using some 50 cameras BY AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN, Yad Vashem in 1994 and joined the social media, WJC hopes to engage at once, a dozen Holocaust survivors THE TIMES OF ISRAEL fledgling Internet department in 1999. the youth, “because, soon, it will be have individually been filmed giving 10 to 25 hours of testimony in an t is remarkable to feel a connec- effort to create a 3D virtual “eyewit- tion with someone you’ve only met I ness to history.” online. Even more so when he has Set to launch in two museums this been dead for the past 75 years. And year, New Dimensions was in beta yet, a random matching program on stage for some five years and had a Yad Vashem’s IRemember Wall con- 2015 trial run at the Illinois Holocaust nects between a Facebook user and Museum and Education Center, with victim of the Holocaust in a deeply the first completed interactive testi- personal way. mony of Holocaust survivor Pinchas For this writer, the name Chaim Gutter of Toronto. Gindel was drawn from the museum’s In addition to recounting the horrors Central Database of Shoah Victims’ of the Holocaust, the interactive holo- Names. He was born to David and gram survivor can be asked questions Leja in Ołyka, Poland, in 1928. He and prompted to sing songs and tell was a 14-year-old student when he of life before the tragedy. For many was murdered in the Shoah. His who wouldn’t dare ask personal ques- cause of death is unknown. tions for fear of insulting, interacting The too-short story is recounted on An undated photo of the Gindel family taken in Poland before the Holocaust. with this artificial intelligence can be a Page of Testimony that was submit- Today, the museum’s online presence their responsibility to tell the story and freeing. ted in 1997 by a surviving cousin in is robust and growing. ensure that humanity never forget.” According to project literature, a sur- Woodmere, New York. If one is inter- “In 1999 I don’t know that we really The project was adopted by Jewish vey of the Illinois pilot found that over ested, that handwritten page can be had any expectations, we couldn’t schools around the world, with many 95 percent of visitors felt the technolo- viewed, as well as the names of his envision what could happen and what pupils creating short films that were gy “enhanced their ability to connect” siblings who also perished in the the possibilities were,” said Porath. In posted and shared widely. with Gutter’s story. Additionally, 68% of Holocaust. addition to the myriad of educational Stefan Bialoguski, the public rela- students reported “above-average criti- Somehow, after pairing with this once materials, the museum has presented tions officer for World ORT, said that cal thinking ability after the interaction.” anonymous stranger, the concept of some 150 curated online exhibitions well over 1,000, “perhaps in the thou- “Everything is now in post-produc- the “six million” is less about a quantifi- — currently “Last Letters from the sands,” of students in schools and tion to meet expected deployment in able number and more a shorthand for Holocaust: 1941” — and dozens of colleges across the former Soviet 2017,” state project materials, and the a collective of individual humans. social media projects. Union, Israel and Europe took part. project should open at the first two Five years ago, Yad Vashem began World ORT claims to be the largest confirmed museums: the Illinois the IRemember Wall project in which global Jewish education and voca- Holocaust Museum, and in Terre participants are linked with specific tional training NGO. Haute, Indiana, the CANDLES names of victims. The algorithm is “The energy which World ORT stu- Holocaust Museum and Education purposefully random, because, said dents have devoted to the Center. Porath, “Every victim deserves to be remembered.” The project is held only once a year for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Said Porath, it becomes “a collective experience” that combines the wall and the com- ments it garners. She said she expects to reach at least 3,000 partic- ipants this year. “The possibilities created by tech- nology have allowed us to reach out Yad Vashem Internet Department Director Dana Porath. and engage in ways we couldn’t imagine,” said Porath. “Many, if not most, people don’t have a particular person or name that PROMPTING THE NEXT they know and commemorate,” said GENERATION’S MEMORY Dana Porath, Yad Vashem’s Internet eading up to International Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as appearing on the hologram-like interactive presentation department director. developed by the USC Shoah Foundation. Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust L some 250,000 posted on social media #WeRemember project should reas- In an era of technological leaps and memorial, is one of several museums using the hashtag, “#WeRemember” sure us that not only has the history of bounds, the ability to engage a new and institutions tapping into the — from New York Senator Chuck the Holocaust been passed on intact audience is vastly magnified and the potential of online presence and Schumer to Dr. Ruth Westheimer to to a new generation, despite the worst impulse to ride social media buzz is social media campaigns to raise French philosopher Bernard Henri- attempts of deniers, but also that our strong. awareness among an audience that Levy. Some 120 million were reached children are unbowed by the weight of To capture the world’s attention, increasingly has little first-person con- in the World Jewish Congress cam- what happened to our people within said Yad Vashem’s Porath, her team tact with the horrors of the Holocaust. paign, according to a spokesperson. living memory,” Bialoguski told The strives to make the commemoration “We realized in the last couple of The international organization repre- Times of Israel. of the Jewish victims and their life years, particularly in social media, sents Jewish communities in 100 before the Holocaust accessible that people want to do something A 3D VIRTUAL countries. through contemporary issues such as more participatory. It’s fine to read, “EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY” “The goal is to reach those who the Olympics or International learn and explore, but with the oppor- don’t know much about the t is this same impulse to preserve Women’s Day. tunity to engage with a particular topic Holocaust, or who might be suscepti- historical continuity in an era of “We are always trying to have or issue, people really want to do I ble to those who deny it, and to fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors meaningful, relevant and respectful something,” said Porath. remind the world that such horrors that has propelled another unusual content,” said Porath. “But to make Porath, who was a Jewish educator could happen again,” said World project, the New Dimensions in the Holocaust respectful in 140 char- for 15 years in North America before Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer. Testimony by the USC Shoah acters — that’s a challenge.” Page 10 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 DIARIES OF A NAZI MONSTER s the architect of the Nazi ing historical significance.” On the same day he calls for new Himmler describes the wedding day, A Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler And Himmler researcher Dr. guard dogs at Auschwitz “capable of from 9 am to 7 pm, beginning with the was in charge of a mass slaughter Matthias Uhl said: “Himmler is a beast ripping apart everyone but their han- greeting of guests and going on to tell that included the murder of six million of contradictions. dlers.” of a lunch held at the home of Hitler’s Jews. “On the one hand, he was the ruth- In 1943, he writes about witnessing secretary, Martin Bormann. Now diaries have been discovered less enforcer who pronounced death the “effectiveness” of the diesel He then moves on to the wedding which show he was more concerned sentences and planned the Holocaust. engines at the Sobibor death camp in celebrations held at the Berghof, with what he was having for lunch, “On the other hand, he was, for his Nazi-occupied Poland, where 400 Hitler’s mountain residence. than the monstrous massacre he was SS elite, family, friends and acquain- people were put to death purely as an The wedding day was to culminate masterminding for his Führer, Adolf tances, a meticulous carer. exhibition of the new technology for with a trip to the tea house at the top Hitler. Himmler’s benefit. of the mountain, a relic from Nazi And in 1944, at the height of the Later the same day, he times that still exists to this day. Nazis’ Final Solution, the head of the records that he was In May 1945, Himmler fled Berlin SS and Gestapo recorded how he “feted” at a banquet disguised as an ordinary soldier with had a massage, before personally thrown by SS men. false papers, only to be captured by overseeing the shooting dead of 10 The journals are dotted Allied forces in northern Germany Polish detainees. with references to Puppi, Recognized later, he was taken for After the end of the war, his 1938, Himmler’s nickname for interrogation, but soon bit down on a 1943 and 1944 diaries were assumed his daughter Gudrun, cyanide capsule contained in a tooth to have been lost. In fact, they had who is still alive at 86. and was dead within minutes, aged 44. fallen into the the hands of the Soviet Himmler was obsessed Auschwitz survivor Leslie Kleinman, Red Army and had been gathering with astrology and the 86, of Westcliffe-on-Sea, Essex, said: dust in a military archive in Podolsk, Aryan myths and legends “I am not surprised Himmler was able near Moscow. on which Nazi propagan- to write about his life and then at the Filed under the single word Himmler in 1936 before the true horror of Nazism was revealed. da was founded, and also same time be responsible for Dnewnik — meaning diary in “The archive documents are the key devoted time to studying strange Auschwitz and the other concentra- Russian — there are more than 1,000 to fully understanding Himmler and all diets. tion camps.” pages of entries. his cruel works.” he diaries chronicle how, early Leslie, whose parents and seven They reveal that between 1943 and Himmler was known to be squeam- T in 1943, he recommended to brothers and sisters were all put to 1945 Himmler officially met 1,600 ish at the sight of blood, despite hav- Hitler that trapped SS men fighting death in the gas chambers, said: “All people. ing personal control of the Nazi death with the German 6th Army at of Himmler’s SS men shared the But it is the entries which cover the camps. Stalingrad should be fed dried rations, same ability to slaughter Jews without minutiae of his life which are most In August 1941, when witnessing like those Genghis Khan gave his becoming upset. chilling. the mass shooting of Jews into a pit warriors. “I, of course, never met Himmler, but Of a visit to the Buchenwald con- outside the city of Minsk, in modern- The diary also mentions Himmler’s we all knew he was the man respon- centration camp in Germany, he day Belarus, he almost fainted when favorite leisure activities, including sible for Auschwitz. writes: “Took a snack at the cafe in the brains of one of his victims splat- curling, watching movies and star- “I remember how the guards the SS-Casino.” tered on to his greatcoat. gazing. enjoyed what they were doing as we Researchers from the German But he was quite happy to order On June 3, 1944, three days before heard the screams and wails of those Historical Institute in Moscow have atrocity after atrocity, if not to witness the D-Day landings, Himmler wrote who were about to die. been sifting through the diary entries them in person. about the SS general Hermann “They were quite happy to do it, and for months. In a 1944 diary entry, he records Fegelein’s marriage to Gretl Braun, that must have come from Himmler. The director, Professor Nikolaus having a massage from his personal the sister of Hitler’s mistress Eva They had no emotion.” Katzer, described the collection as “a doctor...and then ordering the shoot- Braun, at the Führer’s holiday retreat document of shudderingly outstand- ing of 10 Poles. in Bavaria. First published in the Mirror. UNCOVERING MY FAMILY’S HIDDEN HOLOCAUST STORIES Holocaust stories. But because of from their mistakes — by the time the ies. In April 1942, 400 Jewish boys BY NOAH LEDERMAN, these grim bedtime tales, my father grandchildren were around, their from Otwock were sent to a labor THE TIMES OF ISRAEL slept with a packed suitcase beneath Holocaust stories were reduced to camp set up in Karczew. The rowing up, I had always heard his bed. The Nazis, he assumed, whispers. Discussions about Otwock, “Karczew Boys,” as they were known Gthe names Otwock and Karczew, the ghettos and the camps — Poppy, my grandmother’s father Karczew. Both are neighboring towns were off the table. Though I constant- and two brothers among them — dug near Warsaw. ly pressed them for stories, they kept irrigation channels. Before the Holocaust, Otwock was silent. But once the murders happened — home to some 14,000 Jews. Karczew n 2004, however, I traveled to 4,000 Jews were massacred in had about 500 Jewish residents and IOtwock. I discovered the four syn- Otwock’s forest, in addition to the became home to a Nazi forced-labor agogues had been dismantled, the 8,000 who were rounded up and sent camp during World War II. town hall had no records, Grandma’s to Treblinka’s gas chambers — they While both places may have little street had vanished from the map, the received new orders: bury the dead. name recognition around the world, in supposed “Jewish Center” had no My grandparents eventually my family the names loomed large. Jews. escaped Otwock, ending up in the They were as common to all of us as While the trip was disappointing, my Warsaw ghetto. They nearly died in the names of Poppy and Grandma’s visit broke Grandma’s silence. For the the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and were murdered siblings. next six years, Grandma shared her later persecuted in Auschwitz and My grandparents had grown up in stories. I also interviewed other sur- Majdanek. Otwock. They fled to the Warsaw vivors, pored through texts, wrote to But at least these places had muse- ghetto following the summer of 1942, tracing services, begged for records ums or memorials. Even Otwock, a when they were teenagers, after the and watched my grandparents’ Shoah town that forgot its Jews, was men- Foundation testimonies. tioned in American Holocaust muse- Nazis had murdered 12,000 of the The Jewish cemetery in Otwock. 14,000 Jews living in their town. The research left me with questions ums and in literature documenting the Years later, having survived the war would inevitably storm his Brooklyn unanswered — there were, I realized, Nazis’ crimes. and immigrated to the United States, apartment. My aunt developed an concentration camps without records Facts on Karczew, however, my grandparents had children. They eating disorder. Nightmares were and histories that had vanished with- seemed nonexistent. raised their two kids as best they constant. out a trace. In 2000, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial could, often falling back on their But Poppy and Grandma learned Karczew was among those myster- (Continued on page 12) March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 11 LOVE LETTERS SPLIT UP BY HOLOCAUST, TOP COLLECTION OF YIDDISH WORKS OF THE HOLOCAUST WILL REUNITE DIGITALLY his is a story about the power of reassuring each other that they were T letters to span both years and all right, as both sides walked ginger- part of its national heritage, but it has miles, and to unite the hearts of chil- ly across the land mine of loneliness BY JOSEPH BERGER, agreed to assist in having all 250,000 dren and their parents when powers and worry. THE NEW YORK TIMES pages of documents and 4,200 books digitally copied and integrated into a they can’t control force them apart. The letters’ dates span the years ike a family split apart by the Web portal, where they will be avail- More than a dozen years ago in beginning in late 1938, when the upheaval of war, what is now L able to scholars around the world. Worcester, Massachusetts, professor Kristallnacht pogrom and the general known as the YIVO Institute for The YIVO collection — an archive of Deborah Dwork got a letter from a anti-Semitism of the time mobilized Jewish Research, considered the 24 million items that includes the man in Switzerland she’d never heard the Jews in Greater Germany to try to world’s foremost collection of Yiddish immigrant Jewish experience in of. Ulrich Luz told her about some- send as many children as possible to books and cultural artifacts, was torn America as well as the almost van- thing he’d discovered, packed away safety. apart as a result of the German occu- in a suitcase among his late aunt’s hen war broke out the follow- pation of Vilna, belongings, that might be of interest W ing year, civilian mail stopped Lithuania, in 1941 to Dwork. moving freely and Luz managed to and the Nazis’ plan Indeed it was — so much so that keep the correspondences going by for studying a people she is now writing a book about his taking a more central role as letter they determined aunt’s quiet heroism and the lasting writer. “Dear Tante Elisabeth,” a child would be extinct. treasure she managed to preserve. might write to her. “Please tell my Much of the prewar It turns out the nephew, a retired mother I am fine and doing well in collection was soon professor of theology in Switzerland, math.” Or a father might ask her to turned to pulp. But a had heard about both the work of the convey, “Dear Elisabeth, please tell large part was Strassler Center for Holocaust and my son to dress warmly and that we shipped to Frankfurt Genocide Studies at Clark University, send our love.” for an anti-Semitic for which Dwork is the founding direc- Most of the families’ correspondenc- institute for “the tor, and Dwork’s book Children with a es stopped cold by 1945, by which study of the Jewish Star. So when Ulrich Luz discovered time the majority of the parents were question.” more than 1,000 letters his aunt presumed murdered; others contin- The American Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in the institute’s archives in Manhattan. Elisabeth Luz had sent back and forth ued into the 1960s. It is still unknown Army recovered that between hidden children and their how many of the children survived, material and sent it to YIVO’s new ished Jewish culture of Eastern parents from the time of the but presumably far more than the par- home in New York. Still, much of the Europe — will also be digitized. The Holocaust, he had a hunch Dwork ents, most of whom were unable to collection remained in Vilna, now project is expected to take seven might find the collection to be of escape the Nazis’ murderous net. Vilnius, where in a gripping saga it years. value. But one of the enduring mysteries was rescued during the war by hese materials are Holocaust about the collection of letters is enslaved Jewish laborers who risked “Tsurvivors,” said David E. that they are all originals, writ- their lives to squirrel away precious Fishman, a professor of Jewish histo- ten by these parents and chil- books, diaries, paintings and sculp- ry at the Jewish Theological Seminary dren. No one knows for sure tures in underground bunkers, attics who is working on a chronicle of the why, in the era before Xerox, and crannies. YIVO collection’s rescue. “Like a sur- Luz rewrote each of the 1,000 Now, 70 years later, YIVO has vivor, these materials were controlled letters by hand and sent them announced a $5.25 million project to by the Germans. Like a survivor, they out. reunite the scholarly treasures, digi- were in hiding. The fact that they were The prevailing theory? “Trying tally. saved is miraculous.” to fool the censors,” says The Lithuanian government did not Vilna was known as “the Jerusalem Dwork, who included several of want to surrender what it considers (Continued on page 14) the letters in her book Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933–1946. MISCHLING, A HOLOCAUST TALE “This churchgoing Christian OF TWIN SISTERS IN MENGELE’S GRIP lady, who often spoke about the importance of giving aid and (Continued from page 4) Theodor Adorno’s warning of the dan- help, spent years doing this sure in watching what effect separa- gers of making art out of the painstaking work and at no tion will have on the sisters. Holocaust (“through aesthetic princi- small risk to herself,” she says. The second half of Mischling large- ples or stylization,” he argued, “the The Strassler Center at Clark ly takes place after the advance of unimaginable ordeal” is “transfigured One of the more than 1,000 letters that Ulrich Luz sent to University is still scanning, sort- the Soviet Army and the liberation of and stripped of some of its horror”), professor Deborah Dwork. ing, transcribing and translating Auschwitz. Pearl is taken care of by but these doubts are steamrollered by “He began sending packets of the the letters, and the public should be Miri, a Jewish doctor whom Mengele Ms. Konar’s ability to powerfully con- letters…over 1,000 in all,” says able to access them by early 2018, forced to work as his assistant, while vey the experiences of her heroines: Dwork, who is also the Rose but several of them are going to be Stasha finds herself wandering, with their resourcefulness and will to sur- Professor of Holocaust History at used at the center’s Summer a friend named Feliks, through a vive; their resilience and faith in a Clark. She was ready for the fragile Holocaust Institute to help high school blasted, war-torn landscape that future even in the face of extermina- old sheets of paper, having assem- history and literature teachers inte- can’t help but remind the reader of tion; and Pearl’s remarkable determi- bled white cotton gloves, archival grate the Holocaust into their curricu- Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. nation to embrace forgiveness. paper, acid-free sleeves, and tweez- lum. Survival — simply finding food, water Forgiveness “did not remove my ers. “The letters are a great opportunity and shelter — is paramount, but pain or blunt my nightmares,” she “It was such a treasure, and an to engage with this time period first- Stasha becomes increasingly says. “It was not a new beginning. It amazing thing to hold them,” she hand and understand some of the obsessed with hunting down was not, in the slightest, an end. My recalls. Then began the long process concerns these parents and children Mengele and exacting revenge. forgiveness was a constant repeti- of translating the letters, which had had,” says Sarah Cushman, who Such plot points can seem melodra- tion, an acknowledgment of the fact gone from parents in Greater directs the summer institute. matic and contrived, and Ms. Konar’s that I still lived; it was proof that their Germany to their children hidden in Cushman also expects the letters to prose occasionally eddies into self- experiments, their numbers, their France, Belgium, the Netherlands, resonate with high school students. consciously pretty writing: “For eight samples, was all for naught — I and England. “The average American kid will months we were afloat in amniotic remained, a tribute to their underes- In all, several hundred families are understand these kids’ concerns with snowfall, two rosy mittens resting on timations of what a girl can endure. represented in the collection. Many of their futures, and even petty gripes the lining of our mother.” These pas- In my forgiveness, their failure to the letters were from parents and kids (Continued on page 12) sages call to mind the philosopher obliterate me was made clear.” Page 12 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 UNCOVERING MY FAMILY’S HIDDEN HOLOCAUST STORIES (Continued from page 10) include Poland. I had to stand in the a photograph of the Karczew Boys. last places in Otwock or Karczew Museum tasked researchers with cre- horrifying place where my grandfa- Somewhere in that roll call, I knew, where a Jew could survive. ating an encyclopedia that would be ther, barely out of boyhood, worked stood Poppy. I looked around Karczew. The bar- the most comprehensive, single- past exhaustion as a gravedigger. Rakowski showed me a book he racks and irrigation channels were source record to document the thou- * * * had written about the persecution of gone, but this time I knew the record sands of Nazi-established persecu- stood along the fence at the Jews in Otwock during the war. It con- — however small — remained. I tion sites. At the time, they estimated Ilocked Karczew cemetery, staring tained a photograph of an old mill — pulled up the encyclopedia entry on 5,000 sites existed, including forced at the assemblage of Jewish tomb- when I reached this mill, he said, I’d my phone. labor camps, military brothels, ghet- stones atop the hill. I was grateful it be standing on the site of the Karczew “The 400 Jewish forced laborers,” it tos, POW camps and concentration was protected but saddened I couldn’t camp. read, “were put to work digging camps. visit the graves. (I was told the key I headed there by car immediately. drainage channels along the But by 2001, their estimate doubled. had gone missing.) By contrast, the The mill was defunct: windows Jagodzianka River.” When all seven volumes are pub- Jewish cemetery in Otwock, hidden smashed, concrete chipped, grass I felt chills. Poppy — an unnamed lished, the Encyclopedia of Camps deep in a red pine forest, where overgrown. Grapes grew in the shade fighter in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and Ghettos, 1933–1945 will contain tipped tombstones were accompa- like smoothed amethysts. Next to the a Jewish teen who stuck a pitchfork more than 42,500 sites that the Nazis nied by smashed beer bottles and mill was a scrap-metal yard with through a Nazi’s neck — was no had used to persecute, exploit and deserted campfires, had no gate. everything crushed beyond recogni- longer overlooked. murder their victims. tion. Fences and climb- “According to Leon Lederman,” the “Quite frankly,” Geoffrey Megargee, ing plants hid homes, as text said, “those working in the camp the project leader told me, “you could if no one wanted a were watched mainly by around 30 put it much higher than that.” reminder. members of the Jewish police from ccording to a 2013 New York As I stood there, my Otwock.” A Times article on the project, family’s Karczew stories I tried to picture the Karczew Boys. “The numbers astound: 30,000 slave- came flooding back to “Leon Lederman also recalls that labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; me: Grandma, who had when his own family was deported to 980 concentration camps; 1,000 pris- hidden in the boys’ camp Treblinka from the Otwock ghetto, a oner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled after her mother was group of Jews from the Karczew with sex slaves; and thousands of murdered, once told me camp was taken there to dig a mass other camps used for euthanizing the about the time the Nazis grave for the Jews killed locally during elderly and infirm, performing forced came searching the bar- the Aktion.” abortions, ‘Germanizing’ prisoners or racks. A small boy hid in I tried to imagine the horrors of that transporting victims to killing centers.” The defunct mill in Karczew, where there once was a Nazi forced- the bunks. Grandma task. Two volumes have been published, labor camp. begged him to follow her, “Leon Lederman also noted that [in totaling nearly 4,000 pages and more Since my first visit 12 years before, but he wouldn’t. the fall of 1942] around 300 of the than 2,200 camps and ghettos. Otwock had made some changes. A “They killed him,” she said. remaining inmates of the Karczew These discoveries shocked me. stone was placed to remember the thought of Poppy’s escape from camp ‘were sent to the Warsaw ghet- Last year, I started writing an article site of one synagogue, now a shop- Ithe Karczew camp during the liqui- to,’ although he says he went into hid- about the project. For the story, I ping mall; another stone memorial- dation of Otwock. He was attempting ing first for a while and then went to would travel to Germany and visit ized 2,000 Jews killed at one location to save his family but ended up on a the ghetto.” some sites. Since only two of the in the forest. There was also a small train to Treblinka. Using a wire he hid To read these words reminded me seven volumes have been published, museum with a modest exhibit about around his waist, however, he sawed that Poppy mattered, and that I asked to preview forthcoming the local Jews. (It had actually existed through the bars of the cattle car, sur- Karczew mattered. Every single one entries. I asked for Karczew, which in 2004, but none of the residents or vived the fall and the Nazi gunners, of these encyclopedia entries — will be part of Volume 6, slated for employees at the town hall, where the and watched his friends and family chronicling the tens of thousands of publication in 2020. museum had originally been housed, journey to their deaths. He ran back places like Karczew — all matter. The entry was shocking. Poppy’s knew about it.) to Karczew and was put to work dig- They will paint a picture of what was name — Leon Lederman — appeared This time, I met with the curator, ging graves. Until the grim task was lost — and encourage remembering in the text. I changed my itinerary to Sebastian Rakowski. He showed me complete, the camp was one of the by all of us.

LOVE LETTERS OF THE HOLOCAUST (Continued from page 11) “These letters are positive proof that it family to hear it. It was so reassuring.” maintain some semblance of a rela- between them and their friends,” she happened.” Or of course, it could be tragic, as is tionship,” says Garbarini. “And it was says. he letters could also be a heal- the case when one receives a all done for the sake of the child This often comes as a surprise, T ing force for any of the children wartime letter from someone who had whose life depended on maintaining says Cushman, explaining that with who remain alive, adds Stein, whose been killed during the time it took the the fiction they had all created — the “our 20/20 hindsight, we know all too own father survived Auschwitz to letter to reach its destination. parents, the child, and the adoptive well the outcome for most of these emerge as the only member of both rofessor Alexandra Garbarini, family too. It reminds us that very families, but the letter-writers of his family and his community in Pwho teaches modern European small acts when done in such num- course could not. The number six mil- Hungary to live on. Jewish history at Williams College in bers means it’s no longer a very small lion is an abstraction, but one docu- “So many of the kids grew up never Williamstown, Massachusetts, says act but a big one.” ment from a real person can make the even knowing they were Jewish so she’s looking forward to seeing the “As they spiraled into different Holocaust real for today’s teens.” these letters could be a reminder of letters. Having studied parents writing worlds, the children pined for their Dwork agrees. who they really are. As all that is left diaries for their children during the parents and the parents yearned for “These personal letters are a com- behind of their parents, how precious Holocaust years and written about it the children,” says Deborah Dwork. pelling way to teach aspects of the these letters would be to their chil- in Numbered Days: Diaries of the “This allowed them to keep close. It Holocaust because they relate how dren,” she says. Holocaust, Garbarini says “there’s a was a quiet but poignant example of families dealt with the problems and Indeed, even the flimsiest paper let- newfound respect for the original doc- resistance.” pain they endured,” she says. ter can contain great power, says uments from those who lived history, Janet Stein mused, “On some level Indeed, the letters just may serve Professor Amos Goldberg, who not just studied it. And here you actu- did this woman have the foresight to another function. teaches Jewish history at Hebrew ally get to read the words of the chil- think about history and that people “Google ‘Holocaust’ and the first University of Jerusalem. dren, which is very rare.” might discover these someday? sites that come up are all deniers,” “Especially in times of war the mail Elisabeth Luz’s quiet actions had Could it have occurred to her that says Janet Stein, president of the could bring a warm message from a immense influence, she adds. these were valuable not just to the American Association of Jewish loved one very far away,” Goldberg “Because she was willing to play the families then but to people in the Holocaust Survivors and their says. “You watch for the mail and role as messenger between hidden future too?” Descendants of Greater Boston. when the letter arrives you gather the children and their parents, they could First published in The Algemeiner. March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 13 THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS’ THE FILMS OF BORIS MAFTSIR GRANDCHILDREN (Continued from page 6) of mass executions; learned to decades later. Bystander testimony CALL FOR ACTION... he people began to panic manipulate and control crowds of can be particularly problematic, Dr. “T from the very beginning. They future victims to prevent panic from Kathleen Smith, a professor at (Continued from page 8) felt frightened because right away setting in too early; learned what Georgetown University focusing on getting,” said Feinstein. they realized the most scary thing — incentives worked to supply them with issues of memory and historical poli- A young woman from London told the complete permissiveness that streams of local collaborators. It was tics, told me: “Bystanders are people Glass of how her grandmother, who was indulged in by those who kept out of the chaos of these early who perhaps weren’t specifically tar- was in the Dutch resistance, avoided them here. They raped women, they months of the Holocaust that the well- gets of repression. They were there, starvation at times by digging up flower raped girls, and they did it openly.” As oiled extermination machine of later and one might ask, well, what were bulbs and sucking out the nutrients. she speaks, the camera cuts over to a years arose. you doing? Were you a collaborator or The woman later developed anorexia well-dressed young woman with two To be sure, Germans had their were you just someone who was and believes it was related to the war school-age sons. The boys look back orders to annihilate Soviet Jews, but, scared? Were you someone who tried stories that had been passed down the at the camera, giggling the way pre- in Maftsir’s view, there wasn’t an to help the victims? It’s much more line and never processed. teen boys anywhere might do. organized plan. messy when you try to pull information rauma research about the Gerasimova’s narrative of the horror “Take the example of the out of people who were bystanders.” In T impact of the Holocaust on sub- that took place in these very streets Romanians,” he says. “Why is it that fact, it is well known that neighbors sequent generations varies; some clashes with the visual of the often benefited from the studies conclude there is no effect of weirdly normal, peaceful Jews’ misfortune. trauma two generations on, while oth- scene playing out on- When I put these questions ers claim that breast milk of survivors screen. to Maftsir, he is careful to was affected by stress hormones that And suddenly it hits you. It emphasize that his witnesses impacted on the physiology of the next was people just like these — were children or teenagers generation. Some in the field of epige- regular, ordinary residents when the events took place. netics say the intergenerational effects whom any one of us could “Each of them talks about of the Holocaust are very pronounced identify with — who became what they saw. And they do it and that the atrocities altered the DNA swept up in the horrible sometimes very honestly,” he of victims’ descendants, so that they events she is describing. says. “It was a terrible time. It have different stress-hormone profiles Suddenly you can visualize was occupation. I don’t know compared to their peers. and feel in your gut the how people lived and how Psychologist Ruth Barnett, whose shock and horror of seeing they survived. Even the right- Jewish father fled Germany for the gallows erected in the eous who saved people did Shanghai, narrowly escaping the Holocaust, says she has witnessed heart of your city. It could Holocaust survivor Shoshana Noeman at the train station in Chernivtsi. From not do it for free: they had to have been anyone who hap- here, she and her family were deported to Transnistria in October 1941. get food for the people. inherited trauma in some of her clients. pened to be a Jew. It could Those who saved them- “Constantly talking about events like have been you. in Zhmerinka you have an ‘exemplary’ selves had to pay for it.” the gas chambers to grandchildren is It is Maftsir’s ability to create this ghetto, and in Bershad hundreds are Not a single historian who has a way that traumatized people try to presence that makes his films so dying each day? That one is run by viewed his films has ever raised get rid of it — by sucking it up. But powerful. To achieve this, he films on Romanians and this one is run by objections about the veracity of testi- unless it is processed properly, they location, at the same time of year Romanians. In Bogdanovka there are monies, says Maftsir. “I don’t make make even more anxiety for them- when the events his informants executions taking place locally, but in things up and I don’t uncover any- selves and other generations.” describe took place. This means that the northern part of Vinnytsa region thing new,” he stresses. “All the Never Ever Again! wants to move he’s had to film in 1 degree F in people are basically told to live or die events that are described are well from what it calls “melancholic memo- Sukhari in Belarus, 104 degrees F in any way they wish.” documented. I simply recreate these rialization” to “positive action,” and is Zmievskaya Balka in the south of This lack of organization and pre- events. Each witness talks only about calling for mental health provisions to Russia, and in the pouring rain in planning, in his view and that of many what she saw.” treat inherited trauma, as well as cam- Minsk. His films are based entirely on historians, extended even to such In fact, a number of organizations in paigning on various issues, including witness and survivor testimony, and massive events as Babi Yar. Israel use his films in their Holocaust increased surveillance of Fascist he takes his witnesses to the places “Babi Yar was a horrible tragedy,” education programs, including the groups across Europe, supporting the where they experienced the events. says Maftsir. “But it wasn’t the first. Ghetto Fighters’ House museum. Human Rights Act and challenging He asks them to tell their stories in the And it wasn’t even unique in its scale.” “To what extent are these testi- anti-immigration legislation. language they spoke in their child- He rattles off several notorious mass monies history? I don’t know,” he Glass says that while it is essential hood, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, execution sites. Kamenets-Podolsk: says. “It’s memory. And my entire to preserve historical facts, the trau- Ukrainian, or Romanian. two days, 23,600 people, a full month project is about the restoration of matizing effect of memory should be This produces a lot of difficulties. before Babi Yar. The Rumbula mas- memory about the Holocaust in the addressed now. “Our grandparents “Physically, it’s very hard,” he told me. sacre in Riga: 25,000 Jews over two USSR. I collect imagery to convey the went through one horror, but it is “You come to Berezhany in Western nonconsecutive days in late scale, the prevalence, the unique- important that we learn to process Ukraine with a witness. He is over 80, November and early December 1941. ness, the systematic nature of what and debrief from their story to bring he is afraid of getting sick. And the By then, he says, “they already knew happened through personal stories.” about wholesale recovery for this rain starts, and he thinks, naturally — how to do it.” In a strange way, Maftsir’s films give generation and the next. what will happen to me? And you *** one a sense of hope. After all, these “We should be releasing these old have to work with people so they o far, Maftsir has completed four are the stories of survival and resurrec- wounds to something beautiful, rather don’t cry, so they can tell the story.” Sof the nine films he has planned. tion of memory; stories that defied the than staying paralyzed in memory and And they do tell their stories. They All four — The Guardians of intended triple annihilation of death, fear. Until then we cannot properly cel- tell their stories all over the Holocaust Remembrance, Holocaust: The burial in mass graves, and forgetting. ebrate their lives or any kind of victory. country of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Front, Beyond the One of the most emblematic scenes “What would our grandparents have from Nalchik to Khatyn to Lubavichi, Nistru (parts 1–3 and 4–5), and Until in the film is one of a Soviet World felt if they had known we have had to the birthplace of Chabad. The relent- the Last Step — are available online. War II veteran, Emil Ziegel, who now carry their torment through genera- less narrative of Maftsir’s films, in Of particular interest in Until the Last lives in Israel, coming back to tions? Wouldn’t they have wanted us which each episode of annihilation Step, which is shot in Belarus, are Mineralny Vody, Russia, with his to find the peace that was robbed from unfolds chronologically as one story stories of little-known instances of Israeli grandson to show him where them? Wouldn’t they want us whole builds on another, paints a picture of Jewish resistance. he came from and tell him the story of and living lives that they lost? what he refers to as “the organized How reliable are the accounts he losing his family in the Shoah. “By the “I realized that if they could speak to chaos” of the Holocaust in the USSR. presents? Witness testimony is a con- time you have children, I probably us from beyond the grave, many In many ways, it can be said that it tentious issue among historians. One won’t be alive,” he says to him. “You would have agreed the mourning has was here that the Nazis invented, problem is that people’s memories bring them here, tell them what I told to stop and be replaced with some- practiced, and perfected techniques can be unreliable, especially many you today.” thing more constructive.” Page 14 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 FACEBOOK POST HELPS POSTHUMOUSLY HONOR DUTCH COUPLE FOR HOLOCAUST HEROISM adine Wojakovski tells the beyond the war years. to be the great-nephew of Aad have her daughter back and prayed Nincredible story of tracing rel- My sister uploaded a photo of Aad Versnel. for the couple to have their own child. atives of those who saved her and Fie Versnel and posted it on e learned that Aad Versnel Exactly a year later, in June 1946 Aad mother during World War II. Facebook, asking if anyone knew this W and his older brothers were and Fie were blessed with a daughter, In 2015 I published a memoir, based couple. I thought little of it, as the God-fearing Protestants. Another Els Renate (named after my mother), on the true story of my mother Renata chances of success were unrealistic, brother also hid a child, while a third followed by another daughter, Cobie, Bitterman’s life in hiding as a child brother, Klaas in 1948. born in wartime Amsterdam — Two (grandfather of After we made contact with Hans, Prayers Before Bedtime. Hans), owned a following the Facebook post, he put It is the story of the bravery of Aad lithography stu- us in touch with Els and Cobie. We and Fie Versnel, a childless couple in dio and was a secretly invited them to London in their thirties who took in one-year-old forger of ID 2015, where they were guests of Renata and nurtured her between cards and food honor at a huge family celebration. A 1942 and 1945. They risked their stamps for the surprise emotional reunion took place lives, loving her and treating her like Zaanse between my mother and Els and their own flesh and blood, in their Resistance. He Cobie after more than fifty years. home in Wormerveer, just twelve was arrested in Thereafter I applied to Yad Vashem miles away from Amsterdam. 1944 and died for Aad and Fie Versnel to be recog- For the last fifty years my family had in a German nized as “Righteous Among the lost all contact with the Versnel family, prison a few Nations.” The special committee is as the older generations had died out. weeks before chaired by a retired judge of the But when the memoir came out my the end of the Supreme Court. The process was a family felt that, in spite of my mother’s war. lengthy one, as Yad Vashem needed previous attempt to find the Versnel Renata with Aad and Fie Versnel, circa 1945. In 1945 Aad to verify information going back to the family, we had to redouble our efforts. especially given the fact that we lived and Fie Versnel, who were childless war years. Finally, in January 2017 My mother presented my sisters and in different countries. However, I for many years, found it too painful to we received the long-awaited news: me with a box of black-and-white pho- shared the post with a handful of return Renata to her parents and after 75 years, Aad and Fie Versnel tos, of the Versnels and the Dutch friends. One of the friends brother, who had miraculously sur- have been awarded the title of Bittermans, spanning twenty years — shared it with her friends….and in an vived the war. Five out of seven Dutch Righteous Among the Nations “for from 1942 up until my parents’ wed- incredible turn of events, within just Jews were killed in the Holocaust — help rendered to Jewish persons dur- ding in 1962 — reflecting a most spe- three days the post had reached a so a family reunion was no trivial mat- ing the period of the Holocaust at the cial relationship that extended well certain Hans Versnel, who turned out ter. Renata’s mother Cilla begged to risk of their lives.” SPLIT UP BY HOLOCAUST, TOP COLLECTION OF YIDDISH WORKS WILL REUNITE DIGITALLY (Continued from page 11) Arranging the project involved a del- are interested to preserve these doc- including works from another impor- of Lithuania” for both its intellectual icate diplomatic minuet and included uments because they are part of our tant Jewish collection, the Strashun and religious eminence, though mem- meetings in Vilna with Mr. Brent, gov- heritage,” Mantvydas Bekesius, a Library — inside their clothing and bers of a nationwide community that ernment officials and leaders of the vice minister in Lithuania’s foreign smuggled them into the Nazi-demar- once numbered over 200,000 Jews Jewish community, which now num- affairs ministry, said in an email, using cated Jewish ghetto. There, they — half in Vilna — sometimes speak of bers 5,000. a term for Lithuanian Jews. were hidden behind apartment walls, it as if it were the Jerusalem of all of Mr. Brent wanted Lithuania to send The Lithuanians, perhaps eager to beneath floors and in a ventilated Europe. Indeed, YIVO, which was the materials to New York, since it felt cement their image as an enlightened bunker 60 feet underground that had started in 1925 to foster conscious- YIVO was the owner. But when democracy in the wake of the Soviet been constructed by an engineer for ness of the rich 800-year-old history Lithuania balked, he said: “I proposed Union’s breakup, have been extraor- his paralyzed mother. After Vilna was of Eastern European Jews, housed to Lithuania that we hold moot the dinarily cooperative, Mr. Brent said. liberated by the Soviets in July 1944, materials from across the continent. question of ownership. Our job is to The breakup of the collection start- those workers who had not been Among the materials that will be preserve materials for future genera- ed with the German invasion of the killed at the Ponar mass murder site made available are many that offer a tions and make them available to Soviet Union. The Nazi ideologue unearthed the hidden papers. flavor of how Jews lived: Yiddish the- Alfred Rosenberg But they had to rescue them all ater posters; student geometry note- and his subordinates over again because the Soviets books from a Yiddish school, com- rounded up Judaica under Stalin, trying to wipe out any plete with rough sketches; records of collections for their ethnic chauvinism, started to destroy synagogues, rabbinical schools, char- so-called research the collection. Some items were ities, fraternal and professional asso- institutes, but they smuggled to New York, and some ciations and Zionist movements; early needed people who were hidden in the basement of a editions of Hebrew books, some dat- could expertly ana- Catholic church by a gentile librarian, ing from the 1500s; the original script lyze Yiddish works, Antanas Ulpis. of Jacob Gordin’s Mirele Efros, a clas- and so forcibly draft- Starting in 1989, about two-thirds of sic of Yiddish theater sometimes ed intellectuals like the surviving collection in Vilna was known as the “Jewish Queen Lear”; the Yiddish poets shipped in crates to New York for missing script pages from another Abraham Sutzkever copying and then returned. But that dramatic classic, The Dybbuk, by S. and Shmerke was the age of Xeroxes and micro- Ansky, in the author’s own hand; and Kaczerginski to sift films, which are not permanent and two etchings by Marc Chagall. Items in 1947 after their rescue; some remained in Lithuania. through the material cannot be easily disseminated world- Some of the materials had been hid- and pack it. Just as wide, and the new project will include den, crumpled into balls and covered scholars worldwide who can make the Jews were selected for deporta- the material that was not sent over with earth. Those will now have to be sense of these materials. We’re able tion to concentration camps, books then. flattened, cleaned and paired up with to create an electronic bridge over a and documents were selected for Worldwide access, Mr. Brent said, their missing pages. troubled stream.” shipment to paper mills. is the beauty of digitization, some- “This is cultural paleontology,” said “The Litvaks’ culture and history But over several years Sutzkever, thing the scholars who assembled Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive constitute an integral part of Kaczerginski and others stuffed thou- YIVO decades ago could never have director. Lithuania’s culture and history, so we sands of books and documents — imagined. March/April 2017 - Adar/Nissan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 15 THE TRUE STORY OF THE ZOOKEEPER WHO HID JEWS IN HIS ZOO DURING WORLD WAR II he director of the Warsaw zoo to which it is best to hide in plain sight. the extra mouths by faking ravenous and rubbed and when we came out of T and his wife always carried “My father knew that it wouldn’t appetites. the bathroom, Rysiek (nickname for cyanide during World War II. Danger occur to the Germans that so many “I can’t believe how much they eat! the Zabinskis’ son) cried out, ‘Mum! was ever-present, but they were people could be hiding in a place like I’ve never seen anything like it!” she What did you do? That’s squirrel ready to take their secret to the grave. this with open windows and no cur- recalled the housekeeper muttering. color,’” Tirosh said, of the inadvertent The couple hid nearly 300 Jews and tains,” the 73-year-old told AFP. Tirosh had suffered two years in the reddish color. resistance fighters on zoo grounds Most hid in empty animal enclo- ghetto, marked by hunger, typhus and The family became known as The during most of the war, under the sures or the villa’s basement. Others near deportation to the Treblinka Squirrels. Others also had animal noses of the German Nazis occupy- were able to stay with the family death camp. nicknames, including The Starling, ing Poland. upstairs by taking on fake identities as To escape Warsaw’s Jewish quar- The Hamsters and The Pheasants. It sounds like a Hollywood movie, Antonina’s tailor or their son ter, his family paid off the guards, and “Theirs was a house where both ani- and now it is. But The Zookeeper’s Ryszard’s tutor. Tirosh and his sister were thrown over mals and people always found help,” Wife is based on actual events. etween 1940 and 1944, nearly the wall in sacks while their parents said Teresa, who was born at the zoo Inside the zookeeper’s villa, whose B300 people found refuge, some climbed over. and had a raccoon-like coati from windowless cellar had a secret tunnel for just a few hours or days, but oth- On their arrival at the zoo, Antonina’s Mexico as a childhood playmate. leading to the garden, Jan Zabinski ers remained months or even years. empathy and reassuring calm told Aptly, her mother’s memoirs were and his wife Antonina gave refuge to “Around 30 people would stay here them they were in good hands. entitled People and Animals. the mostly Jews smuggled out of the at once,” said Olga Zbonikowska, 38, “She was extraordinary. I was a They describe how Antonina pushed city’s ghetto. who works for the to raise funds to reopen the zoo after “I remember squatting under this Panda Foundation, the war while Jan was in a Nazi concrete shelf in the basement and which takes care of German prisoner-of-war camp, having keeping my hand over my sister’s the villa now. fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising. mouth to muffle her cries because The stakes were American author Diane Ackerman she was constantly crying, day and high. In occupied relied heavily on the memoirs when night,” said Moshe Tirosh, aged five at Poland, even offering writing her own 2007 nonfiction book the time. Jews a glass of water The Zookeeper’s Wife, which inspired “When someone slammed the door was punishable by the movie. Directed by Niki Caro, it upstairs, fear would pass through me, death. stars Golden Globe winner Jessica lest they find us,” the 80-year-old told Whenever a Nazi Chastain. AFP in a telephone interview. soldier got too close The Zabinskis died in the early The retired businessman and for comfort, Antonina 1970s. grandfather of seven, who has lived in would warn everyone The villa is now a museum where Israel since 1957, still cannot believe by playing an operetta visitors can make an appointment to what he lived through. on the piano. see the life-saving secret tunnel and “I saw children’s dead bodies on the The hidden guests basement. street. Terrible things. I remember would escape through Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust wondering why everyone wants to kill the tunnel or hide in a wardrobe small boy who was very afraid of remembrance center later recognized us. I couldn’t understand it,” he said. upstairs that opened on both sides everything. But when I saw her face, I the Zabinskis as Righteous Among All but two of the zoo’s hidden guests like a magician’s trunk. calmed right down. I still remember the Nations. survived the war, and Nazi troops sta- The couple also hid the Jews from that feeling,” Tirosh said. “They believed it was the right thing tioned on the bombed-out zoo grounds their housekeeper out of fear she Before the family moved on, to do,” Teresa said, of her parents’ never unearthed the subterfuge. could give them away. Antonina tried to make them “look wartime actions. “My parents figured that it’s always “The hardest was explaining away less Jewish” by bleaching their hair “My father always said that’s what a darkest under a lamppost,” the zoo the increase in daily meals” to the lighter. decent person should do.” couple’s daughter Teresa Zabinska housekeeper, Antonina wrote in her “She locked herself in the bathroom said, citing a Polish saying according 1968 memoirs, saying the family fed with us and dyed our hair. She rubbed First published by IsraelNationalNews RIGHTEOUS ALBANIA n preparation for the Wannsee ulation protected the Jews. In 1944, days when Jewish families lived there received official status from the gov- IConference in 1942, Adolf the Nazis ordered all Jews living in in friendly and synergetic relations ernment. With the rise of Nazism in Eichmann, the head of the Jewish the capital, Tirana, to register with the with their Albanian neighbors continu- Germany and Austria and throughout department of the SS, was asked to Gestapo, forcing them to flee to ing after the war ended. In recognition World War II, hundreds of Jews from make a list of the number of Jews in friendly villages outside the cities. of their heroic acts in saving Jews, those countries and other countries in each and every European country. Many found refuge with Albanian fam- Yad Vashem honored 70 Albanians the Balkans and Europe found refuge While the decision on the Final ilies and the partisans. Albanians not as Righteous Among the Nations. in Albania. After the war, as men- Solution — the extermination of the only hid the Jews but also provided he Jewish community in Albania tioned, about 2000 Jews were living in Jews of Europe — had already been them with local names, clothes and T has its roots in the 15th century, Albania. made, the conference members still education and treated them as part of when a large group of Jews arrived in Today, Albania is a small developing had to discuss a plan of action. the region following the expulsion their family. When the Nazi authorities country with a population of about One of the countries on Eichmann’s demanded that Albanian officials give from Spain. According to some histo- three million people, of which around list was Albania, and next to it stood a them a list of Jewish families living in rians, the first Jews settled in Albania 70 percent are Muslims. number. At that time, according to the the country, the Albanians refused during the first century of the The brave connection between the records of the Reich, 200 Jews lived and instead warned the Jews and Common Era, after being exiled from Jewish and the Albanian peoples con- in Albania. After the war, however, promised to protect them. ancient Israel by the Romans, and there were about 2,000 Jews, ten One of the principles that explains their descendants are the ones who tinues today and grows even times more. Albania, a small the willingness to protect the Jews is built the first synagogue in Saranda stronger. They cooperate with Israel Southeastern European republic with the Albanian code of “besa,” which lit- 400 years later. As in other areas near in a variety of fields, often under pres- a predominantly Muslim population, erally means “to keep a promise.” Albania, this community consisted of sure and criticism from Arab and thus became the only country in Because of this code, Jews who were these Romaniotic Jews and Muslim states. Europe where the number of Jews taken in by Albanian families could Sephardic Jews who arrived in Nowadays, the Albanians are put- after World War II was higher than have complete trust in them. To this Albania from Spain. ting a lot of effort into commemoration before the war. day there are streets in cities like In a census conducted in 1930 only and perpetuation, and have recently During the war, under Nazi and Berat and Vlora that are known as 200 Jews were registered in Albania. joined the International Holocaust Italian occupations, the Albanian pop- “the streets of the Jews,” recalling the In 1937 the Jewish community Remembrance Alliance. 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