NOVEMBER 2020 JOURNAL the Association of Jewish Refugees
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VOLUME 20 NO.11 NOVEMBER 2020 JOURNAL The Association of Jewish Refugees BACK TO BASICS Remembering November is always one of the AJR’s busiest months but this year we are busy in different ways, as Michael Newman the Ghettos explains on page 4. For example, we are commemorating In November 1940, eighty years ago this month, the Warsaw Kristallnacht in different formats, including an online memorial service (see page 3) Ghetto was officially sealed, cutting off 380,000 Jews from the and a moving testimony by Kurt Marx rest of the world. It was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied (page 13). Poland. “When the ghetto was finally separated from the rest Equally moving are stories of how AJR members are giving something back of Warsaw,” writes Bryan Cheyette in his book, The Ghetto, (Pages 10-11) and a Korean third published in September, “it covered 452 acres and was surrounded generation refugee’s perspective (page 14 - 15). by 11 miles of roughly built wall… Thirty per cent of Warsaw’s population were jammed into 2.5 per cent of the city…” News ............................................................ 3 Why this November is different .................... 4 Letter from Israel .......................................... 5 Letters to the Editor .................................6 - 7 Art Notes...................................................... 8 Learning to swim the American way ............ 9 Giving something back ........................10 - 11 It’s the way we tell ‘em .............................. 12 A Kristallnacht Tale ..................................... 13 Kitchener through the eyes of a stranger ........................................14 - 15 The National Holocaust Memorial .......16 - 17 Reviews ...............................................18 - 19 Events & Looking for .................................. 20 Please note that the views expressed throughout this publication are not necessarily the views of the AJR. AJR Team Chief Executive Michael Newman Rozenfeld, Punkt etapowy (Etap point) - one of the very few surviving drawings from Finance Director David Kaye the Warsaw Ghetto, courtesy of Poland’s Jewish Historic Institute Heads of Department Community & Volunteer Services Carol Hart HR & Administration Karen Markham There are deeply moving accounts of the children of those who died. Some Educational Grants & Projects Alex Maws the Polish ghettos by those who never escaped during the war, but a surprising Social Services Nicole Valens survived. But some of the most powerful number stayed on in post-war Poland but AJR Journal accounts of the Nazi ghettos in Poland fled the Communist regime in the 1950s Editor Jo Briggs are by refugees, offering very different and ‘60s. Editorial Assistant Lilian Levy perspectives, as witnesses, survivors, Continued on page 2 Contributing Editor David Herman 1 AJR Journal | November 2020 AJR Journal | November 2020 Remembering the was deported to Auschwitz with the last the Polish ghettos. There are two things transport from Łódz‘ in 1944.” which stand out from these very different YOUNG AMERICANS UNAWARE Ghettos (cont.) accounts. First, we are not seeing The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote Like Hamermesh, Janina Bauman (née the ghetto as through a transparent two of the greatest poems about the Levinson) grew up in a middle-class windowpane. Bauman’s closing image Warsaw Ghetto from the point of view of Jewish family, but she was born and reminds us that what seems to be a an observer. Both were written in Warsaw grew up in Warsaw. Her family was description of a room could also be a in 1943 and are about testimony and the assimilated. “No one in my large family description of herself after her terrible guilt of the survivor. The final verse of A spoke Yiddish,” she later wrote in her experiences over six years. Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto reads: remarkable memoir, Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – A Young Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece, Shoah, “What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Girl’s Story, “wore beards, skullcaps or raises a similar question. It ends not in Testament, traditional Jewish gaberdines. Nobody 1945, like Bauman’s account, but in 1943 KRISTALLNACHT Waiting two thousand years for the was religious.” with the Ghetto Uprising and it ends not second coming of Jesus? in Warsaw but in Israel. These are the SERVICE My broken body will deliver me to his Bauman describes life in the Ghetto: the last words of the film: “l didn’t meet a sight fear of typhus, “the homeless, tattered, living soul. At one point, l recall feeling MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER, 2PM And he will count me among the helpers undernourished people we brushed a kind of peace, of serenity, when l said of death: The uncircumcised.” against in the streets”, rumours of a to myself, ‘l’m the last Jew. l’ll wait for Please join us for our Annual Service war between Germany and the Soviet morning and for the Germans.’’’ The deeper the red, the higher the percentage of young Americans in that state who, which will be led by Rabbi Jonathan His most famous poem, though, is Union, “shops with luxury goods, cafés according to the survey, believe that Jews caused the Holocaust Wittenberg and live streamed from Campo dei Fiori, named after the and restaurants” in the Ghetto, Germans Lanzmann’s film begins with Simon Belsize Square Synagogue. square in Rome where Giordano Bruno hunting people who traded on the black Srebnik, one of the few survivors of was burned for heresy in 1600. Milosz market, naked bodies buried in “a huge, Chelmno, and ends with the testimony 15 percent of American Millennials and revealed that nearly 20 percent of young Our guest speakers will be AJR continues, deep, rectangular hole in the ground” of two of the survivors from the Warsaw Gen Z think it is acceptable to hold neo- New Yorkers feel the Jews caused the member Professor Robert Shaw, and, worst of all, the mass deportations. Ghetto. It is about the terrible isolation Nazi views and almost a quarter of them Holocaust. The state of New York has Austrian Ambassador Michael “I thought of the Campo dei Fiori On Sunday 6 September she and her of the last Jews, the few who survived. believe that the number of Jews who died one of the lowest levels of Holocaust Zimmerman, and Hannah Lessing, in Warsaw by the sky-carousel family were suddenly woken. They It ends, crucially, with Jewish survivors in the Holocaust has been exaggerated. awareness, alongside Alaska, Delaware, General Secretary of the Austrian one clear spring evening had less than four hours to get ready. in Israel. It is as carefully structured as Maryland, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, National Fund. to the strains of a carnival tune. “Anybody found in the block after 10am Milosz’s poems or Bauman’s memoir. The results of the first ever 50-State Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The bright melody drowned would be shot dead.” On 25 January Second, all these acts of testimony survey on Holocaust knowledge were https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ the salvos from the ghetto wall, 1943 she escaped from the Ghetto with remind us of the devastation of these published by the Claims Conference in The full report can be seen on ajr-annual-kristallnacht-service- and couples were flying her mother and sister and after some experiences, whether the guilt of the September. The state-by-state analysis www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/ tickets-124989758733 high in the cloudless sky. extraordinary adventures managed to witness or survivor. One of the survivors survive the war. Her father didn’t survive. of the Warsaw Ghetto tells Lanzmann, At times wind from the burning She later discovered that he had been “lf you could lick my heart, it would would drift dark kites along shot at Katyn. poison you.” Mira Hamermesh begins GREAT HONOURS and riders on the carousel her memoir after the war, in London in Mazel Tov caught petals in midair. Towards the end of the book she 1959. She has gone to see Wajda’s film, The AJR warmly congratulates all That same hot wind describes returning to a flat. “I explained Generation, at the Academy Cinema on members who were included in HM The blew open the skirts of the girls that in that flat, under the rubble of Oxford Street. The film, she writes, “had Mindu Queen’s recent Birthday Honours list for and the crowds were laughing a half-ruined room, I had buried my torn open old wounds. My feet carried their services to Holocaust Education and on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.” manuscripts just after the Warsaw me through London streets, but my head AJR member Mindu Hornick Awareness, including: remained in Poland, unable to part from Uprising… It still looked as I remembered has been awarded the Lifetime Lilian Black - OBE In 2009, the Polish refugee filmmaker, it, one leg of the piano dangling over the characters, and, by association, from Ellen Davis - MBE Mira Hamermesh, returned to Łódz‘, the precipice. And here they were, all my my own family. It exploded my defence Achievment Award from the Pride Eve Glicksman - OBE where her parents had been locked system, a makeshift survival kit devised to exercise books and loose sheets covered of Birmingham for her educational Renate Inow - BEM up in the Ghetto. She wrote about with my untidy handwriting, hidden release me from my accountability to the Hana Kleiner - BEM her experience in The Guardian. She safely in a hole in the floor, under a few dead.” work on the Holocaust in the Lady Zahava Kohn - MBE and her brother left Łódz‘ soon after bricks.” Midlands and beyond. Tomi Komoly - BEM the German invasion and after an Films and writings about the ghettos in Marcel Ladenheim - BEM extraordinary journey, described in The imagery is fascinating. Everything Poland seem so clear and straightforward. Having survived Auschwitz, Mindy Elfriede Starer - BEM her memoir, The River of Angry Dogs, is in ruins and destroyed: “rubble”, “a They are not.