Polish Prime Minister Commits to Restitution Legislation Visas for Life

TOGETHER 1visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comApril 2008

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Polish Prime Minister Commits to

Restitution LegislationDonald Tusk, the new Prime Minister of

Poland, recently announced at a meeting with

Jewish organizations at the Polish Consulate

in New York that his government will soon

address the issue of private property

restitution, long an issue with Polish

Holocaust survivors.

For years, the World Jewish Restitution

Organization has been pressing the issue of

Polish property restitution legislation.

The Prime Minister was urged to

introduce comprehensive legislation to

address the return of Holocaust-era conf iscated private property. He

responded that legislation on reprivitization of property would be introduced

in the Sejm (the Polish parliament) in the spring and that he would make

every effort to ensure that it would be passed by the fall. (See page 4)

By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz

Israeli Holocaust commission on treatment ofsurvivors wraps up hearings

The Dorner Commission on the Israeli government’s treatment of Holocaust

survivors recently ended the hearings phase of its work with testimony by

Reuven Merhav, executive committee chairman of the Conference on Jew-

ish Material Claims against Germany. The commission will now begin its

deliberations and submit its report in a month.

Merhav insisted on testifying despite retired justice Dalia Dorner’s asser-

tion that the Claims Conference is an American organization and outside the

commission’s purview. However, Merhav reportedly wanted to set the record

straight following criticism of Claims Conference policies over the past year.

The commission also heard testimony from Finance Minister Roni Bar-

On, who said the new government plan for benefits to Holocaust survivors

is better than the German government’s compensation law.

The Claims Conference has reportedly pressured various beneficiary

bodies in Israel to thank them and not to criticize it.

“The matter of showing gratitude is basic,” Merhav told Haaretz. “Not

only do they not recognize those who help, they claim they are not getting

any help at all.”

The Jewish Agency’s treasurer recently wrote the Claims Conference

that the agency withdrew its criticism.

“We are studying the letter and considering the right way to continue

working with the agency,” Merhav said.

Last year, the draft report of an audit by Jewish Agency Chairman Zeev

Bielski and Pensioner Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan leaked to the media re-

vealed the Claims Conference had a billion-dollar surplus. The Conference

said the funds were earmarked for future nursing care for survivors.

MERKEL ADDRESSES THE KNESSETGerman Chancellor Angela

Merkel addressed the Israeli

parliament recently amid

controversy—a few MPs

boycotted the speech while

Hamas slammed Merkel for

being blind to what it called

Israel’s “Holocaust” against

Palestinians.

Merkel’s three-day solidarity

visit to Israel to mark the 60th

anniversary of the creation of

the Jewish state following the

Nazi holocaust climaxed with

a historic speech to the

Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Merkel told Israel’s

parliament that Germans are

f illed with shame over the

Nazi Holocaust and that she

bows before the victims. In an

emotional speech, delivered in

German and a smattering of Hebrew, Merkel said her country will always be

committed to Israel’s security, particularly in light of growing threats from

Iran.

On March 30, 2008, the “Visas for Life” exhibit opened on New York City’s

famed Ellis Island. The program included speeches by ambassadors, Jewish

community leaders, relatives of honored diplomats and the presentation of

plaques and medals. Among the speakers and awardees were American

Gathering chairman Roman Kent and Board of Directors member Dr. Eva

Fogelman.

“Visas for Life: The Righteous Diplomats” is an exhibit that tells an

important and largely untold story of the Holocaust. The exhibit features

dramatic stories of diplomats from different countries, cultures and

backgrounds. Risking their careers and even their lives, these diplomats

issued visas, including exit visas and transit visas, citizenship papers, protective

papers and other forms of documentation that allowed Jews to escape the

Nazis. They smuggled refugees across international borders and frontiers,

they established safe houses and went on missions to halt deportations to the

death camps. Some even hid Jews in their embassies and in their personal

residences. Between 1938 and 1945 these coureagous diplomats saved over

200,000 lives.

This exhibition is based on original photographs collected from the

families of the diplomats, eyewitness accounts of survivors and original

government records.

This exhibit is sponsored by the Office of the United Nations High

Commissioner for Human Rights and the Visas for Life: The Righteous

Diplomats Project.

Visas for Life

Donald Tusk

TOGETHER 2 visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at visit our website at wwwwwwwwwwwwwww.americang.americang.americang.americang.americangathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.comathering.com April 2008

TTTTTOOOOOGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERApril 2008 Volume 22 Number 1

c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s

TTTTTOOOOOGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHERGETHER

AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

AND THEIR DESCENDANTS

122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 · New York, New York 10001 · 212 239 4230

Founding President

BEN MEED, l’’zHonorary President

VLADKA MEED

President

SAM E. BLOCH

Honorary Chairman

ERNEST MICHEL

Chairman

ROMAN KENT

Honorary Senior

Vice President

WILLIAM LOWENBERG

Senior Vice President

MAX K. LIEBMANN

Regional Vice-Presidents

ISABEL ALCOFF

MEL MERMELSTEIN

JEAN BLOCH ROSENSAFT

MARK SARNA

CHARLES SILOW

Counsel

ABRAHAM KRIEGER

Director of Communications

JEANETTE FRIEDMAN

Editor Emeritus

ALFRED LIPSON, l’’z

Publication Committee

SAM E. BLOCH, Chairman

Hirsh Altusky, l’’zJeanette Friedman

Dr. Alex Grobman

Roman Kent

Max K. Liebmann

Vladka Meed

Dr. Romana Strochlitz Primus

Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Dr. Philip Sieradski

Vice Presidents

EVA FOGELMAN

ROSITTA E. KENIGSBERG

ROMANA STROCHLITZ PRIMUS

MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT

STEFANIE SELTZER

JEFFREY WIESENFELD

Secretary

JOYCE CELNIK LEVINE

Treasurer

MAX K. LIEBMANN

Polish Prime Minister.................................................................................. 1

Merkel Addresses the Knesset.....................................................................1

Israeli Holocaust Commisssion Hearings....................................................1

Visas for Life...............................................................................................1

Holocaust Educators Reunion Conference..................................................3

Menendes Supports Museum in Warsaw.....................................................3

The Courage of a Few Helped Save Thousands by Sharon Adarlo.............4

Switzerland Honors its Righteous Among Nations by Max Liebmann........4

Poland Wants Property Restitution by Etgar Lefkovits................................4

Israeli Government of Survivor Pensions....................................................4

Yehuda Bauer on Holocaust Education......................................................5

Saving Jewish Children During the Holocaust...........................................5

Jews Saved by Schindler March................................................................5

UN and Israel Launch Holocaust Stamp.....................................................6

Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews by Kirsten Grieshaber.........7

Announcements..........................................................................................8

Books.........................................................................................................9

In Memoriam...................................................................... ......................10

Jewish Champion of Faith by Rafael Alvarez........................................... 12

Rabbi Herbert Friedman by Dr. Alex Grobman........................................ 13

Crumbs by Sheldon P. Hersh.................................................................... 13

Picture of My Past by Brenda Smolovitz.................................................. 14

Yaffa Eliach by Jeanette Friedman........................................................... 15

Survivor Mitzvah Project..........................................................................16

Remembering Austria by Renee Balaban..................................................16

Surviving the War in Lwow by Renata Kessler.........................................17

A Hidden Child Found by Helga A. Morrow............................................18

My Name is Edmund by Edmund Rosianu...............................................19

The Prince and the Jew by George Oscar Lee..........................................20

Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich)........................................21

Dear Friends:

If you are moving, have already moved and

wish to continue receiving Together, please

contact us with your new address. The postoffice does not forward Together.

If someone has passed away, please contact

us with the information. This is important

for the Registry so as to preclude

unnecessary mailings.

Thank you.NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

NEEDING ASSISTANCE

Financial assistance is available for needy Holocaust survivors. If

you have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or

other emergency, you may be eligible for a one-time grant. These grants

are funded by the Claims Conference.

If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in your area, please

discuss your situation with them. If there is no such agency nearby,

mail a written inquiry describing your situation to:

Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance

P.O. Box 765

Murray Hill Station

New York, NY 10156

Annual Gathering

in Observance of Yom HaShoah

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Sunday, May 4, 2008

3:30 p.m.

at Congregation Emanu-El

Fifth Avenue and 65th Street

New York, NY

Sponsored by the

Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and

Their Descendants

and

Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization

For more information or to reserve tickets

please call 646.437.4227between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. (Monday -Friday) or e-mail

[email protected]

Tickets must be reserved by April 28.

ELLIS ISLAND PROJECTS FOR SURVIVORS AND THEIR DESCENDANTSThe Museum at Ellis Island is seeking Holocaust survivors who came throughEllis Island when they arrived in the United States. They are also seekingvolunteers to transcribe and translate Yiddish recordings made byimmigrants for immigrants. If you are interested in participating in eitherof these projectsCONTACT: ERIC BYRON, MUSEUM DIVISION212-363-3206 EXT. 153

[email protected]


Holocaust educators holdreunion conference

The 13th national alumni conference of the

Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’

Program, co-sponsored by the American

Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the

American Federation of Teachers and the Jewish

Labor Committee recently took place in

Washington, D.C.

This year’s reunion of teachers who

participated in a program that took them to Poland

and Israel, was held at the Mayflower Hotel. Some

155 teachers from more than 20 states, including

Hawaii, attended the three-day round-robin of

meetings, lectures and social gatherings that

reinforced the objectives of the Teachers’ Program.

Among the guest speakers were Professor

Deborah Lipstadt, Dr. Aaron Hass, and Sonia

Beker, author of Symphony on Fire.

A number of Holocaust survivors, including

Vladka Meed, Sam Bloch and Simcha Stein

delivered poignant addresses to the largely non-

Jewish attendees.

This summer, another 30 to 40 new teachers

will participate in the program.

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Robert

Menendez (D-NJ) and Benjamin L. Cardin

(D-MD) recently introduced a bill that

would provide assistance for the Museum

of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw,

Poland. The museum, which will stand on

the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, has

great historic and symbolic significance

and is expected to attract hundreds of

thousands of people from all over the

world. The bill, “Support for the Museum

of the History of Polish Jews Act of 2008,”

would authorize a contribution of up to

$5 million to the museum.

“The museum will protect a spirit deeply

connected to our own, a heritage we cannot afford

to let slip away. I think it deserves our strong

support, and I am proud to have introduced this

bill,” said Sen. Menendez.

“The museum will be an educational and

cultural center commemorating a thousand years

of Polish Jewish history and is being widely

supported and funded in both the public and

private domains—by the City of Warsaw, the

Polish Government, the German Government, as

well as by corporate and foundation support in

Poland, the United States, Israel and throughout

Europe. In 2006, the museum moved into the last

phase of project design and in June 2007, an

off icial groundbreaking ceremony took place

presided over by Poland’s President Lech

Kaczynski. The museum is expected to open to

the public in early 2011.

Senator Menendez (D-nj) Introduces Bill To Support TheMuseum Of The History Of Polish Jews In Warsaw

“According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 9

million Americans and 80% of Jews are of Polish

ancestry. Because it is vital to the interests of our

nation to preserve and protect artifacts associated

with the heritage of United States citizens and to

encourage scholarship and learning about that

heritage, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

deserves our support. At the beginning of World

War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population

in Europe, a population that was largely eradicated

during the war. The Jewish presence in Poland

spanned a period of 1000 years—from their arrival

in medieval Poland, through the golden ages of

the 16th and 17th centuries, the pre-war years,

the Holocaust, after World War II, and up to the

present. The Museum will focus on all these

periods, on the enriching affect of the Jewish

culture in Poland, and on building bridges between

people of diverse cultures.”

The courage of a fewhundred helped savethousandsBy Sharon Adarlo, Newark Star-Ledger

Bruce Teicholz was a survivor by chance, but a

hero by choice.

With most of his family decimated in

concentration camps, Teicholz, a Polish Jew, risked

his life fleeing Nazi soldiers in the woods and

valleys of Central Europe until he came to

Hungary.

There, Teicholz joined an underground effort

issuing fake visas to fellow Jews desperate to

escape. Some 300 people—most of them

diplomats—located throughout a ravaged Europe

did the same thing and had saved untold

thousands by the end of World War II.

“He could have been killed immediately on

the spot, but he felt he couldn’t stand by,” said his

daughter, Debbie Teicholz-Guedalia, of Demarest

in Bergen County, New Jersey.

She echoed the sentiments of many of the

rescuers. As one of the few Jews involved in the

covert effort, Teicholz was honored at the Ellis

Island Immigration Museum, where “Visas for

Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats”

recently opened. The exhibit is about the

diplomats from 27 countries who helped save

Jews from the Holocaust.

Some 10 million people, 6 million of them

Jews, were beyond the reach of liberators, and

they died in the Holocaust.

Under the arched tile ceiling of Ellis Island’s

Registry Hall, where long lines of immigrants once

gathered, more than 200 family members of

survivors and their rescuers greeted each other

and exchanged stories of how their loved ones

made it to safety or how they helped.

Teicholz-Guedalia received, on behalf of her

father who died in 1993, the Raoul Wallenberg

Award. The medal is named after the famous

Swedish diplomat who sheltered Hungarian

Jewish refugees from the Nazis by creating safe

houses and handing out fake passports.

In fact, Teicholz and Wallenberg collaborated

on the secret rescue mission, Teicholz-Guedalia

said. In the exhibit, a picture shows the two men

together.

“It was his fortitude. It was his will to live,”

Teicholz-Guedalia said about her father’s survival

and determination to save others.

On the third floor of the museum, guests and

tourists stopped to look at photographs of

diplomats and visas, which will be on display

until Sept. 1. On the first floor, an exhibit about

American officials who helped free Jews also

was on view.

Eric Saul, founder of “Visas for Life,” said he

began the project in 1994 when he heard about a

Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, who saved

thousands of Jewish refugees in Lithuania by

giving out visas and letters for safe passage out

of the country.

“He was doing it without permission,” said

Saul, a professional curator based in Morgantown,

West Virginia.

After the war, Chiune was fired from his post for

issuing the documents and went back to Japan, where

he was forgotten, Saul said.

When he first became interested in Sugihara,

Saul contacted his wife, Yukio, who told him, “I

know the Jewish people are grateful, and someday

they will really show it.”

Saul, touched by her comment, mounted the

f irst exhibit about Sugihara in 1995 in San

Francisco. From there, the project snowballed as

family members of other diplomats who helped

in the rescue effort reached out to Saul.

As for the number of people the diplomats

saved, Saul said he can only guess, but the visas

issued numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The rescuers have died, but Saul did get a

chance to interview a few several years ago.

“They said, ‘Wouldn’t you have done it under

the same circumstances?’” Saul said.

Agnes Hirschi said her father, Carl Lutz, a

Swiss diplomat, felt a compulsion to help because

of his strong Christian faith.

“He did it out of the conviction that God gave

him this task,” she said.

Vera Goodkin, a Lawrenceville resident who

could not make it to the opening ceremonies, said

she was saved by Wallenberg when he had her

whisked away from a Hungarian prison and

transferred to an orphanage. She later reunited

with her parents.

“Every rescuer has the same thread running

through their life and that’s the thread of courage

and decency,” she said in a telephone interview.

“You don’t have to save a hundred thousand like

Raoul Wallenberg. If you save one life, it’s as if

you saved all of humanity.”

Ellis Island


Switzerland Honors itsRighteous Among Nations inGenevaby Max Liebmann, Senior Vice President,

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust

Survivors and Their Descendants

Geneva–On January 28, 2008, Cicad

Coordination Intercommunautaire Contre

l’Antisemitisme et la Diffamation, the Swiss

counterpart to the ADL, for the first time ever

organized an evening to honor Swiss “Righteous

Among the Nations.” The reception was held in

Geneva and was attended by 500 invited guests,

including the president of Switzerland, Pascal

Couchepin, whose presence gave the event special

significance. Also present were a number of Swiss

dignitaries, including the president’s immediate

predecessor, Mme. Ruth Dreyfus.

The president of the Cicad, Mr. Grumbach,

opened the proceedings and introduced President

Couchepin, who celebrated more than 60 Swiss

nationals recognized by Yad Vashem for their

saving Jewish lives during World War II, while

facing the strong disapproval of their own

government.

He also acknowledged that it was Switzerland

who asked Germany to add a “J” to all German

Jewish passports which led to tragic consequences

when Switzerland refused them entry.

There are only a few Righteous Swiss still alive.

Present that evening was August Bohny, who was

responsible for running three group homes for the

Swiss Red Cross Children’s Aid in the famous

Huguenot village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the

surrounding area in France. He is directly responsible

for saving approximately ten Jewish teenagers who

lived in one of these homes, including Hanne Hirsch

Liebmann. This is her story.

“One day at the end of August 1942, French

police suddenly appeared in Le Chambon in the

middle of the night to arrest a group of teenagers.

Each child was interrogated individually in the

presence of Mr. Bohny, the director, who kept his

composure. He explained to the police–eloquently,

diplomatically and persuasively–that the arrests

could not be made because the teens were under

the protection of the Swiss Red Cross, a statement

he was not authorized to make.

The police seemed to accept his explanation,

and went to confirm his statement with their higher-

ups. Before they left, they warned him that he

must keep the teens at the home and that they

would return if his statement was false. Early the

following morning, after a hasty breakfast, the

teens were sent into the woods and ordered to stay

there until help arrived. Help arrived that evening.

The group was split up and dispersed to local

farms, where they were hidden. Thanks to Mr.

Bohny, they all survived. Some escaped to

Switzerland, while others remained hidden in the

village and surrounding area.”

Hanne Hirsch Liebmann spoke at the event.

Pierre Sauvage, the documentary filmmaker

who produced and directed Weapons of the

Spirit, translated her remarks from English, as

Mrs. Liebmann is no longer fluent in French.

Mr. Sauvage, whose parents were in hiding in

Le Chambon, was born there during the

Holocaust.

The ceremony was tastefully arranged, with a

non-alcoholic cocktail hour. Mr. Bohny played

some children’s songs on the accordion he had

acquired in Le Chambon during the war. A

wonderfully rehearsed children’s choir sang, and,

later on in the ceremony, a Klezmer band

performed. At the end of the evening, the choir

sang “The Partisaner Hymn.” The event was

oustanding...and the rescuers were f inally

recognized in their own country, albeit by a Jewish

organization.

(l-r) August Bohny, Pierre Sauvage, Hanne Hirsch

Liebmann, and Max Liebmann.

At the request of the Government of Israel,

the Claims Conference is providing technical

assistance for the distribution of pensions to

Holocaust survivors in Israel. The pensions are to

be funded by the Government of Israel under its

recent decision. The technical assistance being

provided by the Claims Conference will greatly

assist in expediting these Government payments

to survivors in Israel, who do not currently receive

Holocaust-related pensions.

The following is a translation of the statement

issued by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office:

The Government is quickly moving forward

to transfer pensions to survivors of camps and the

ghettos who do not receive a monthly pension

from any other source.

As part of the preparation, the Prime

Minister’s Office has requested from the Claims

Conference technical assistance in locating eligible

survivors who are receiving a governmental

income supplement. At this time, the Ministry of

Finance’s Department of the Disabled will transfer

the funds until another decision is made by the

Finance Minister.

The assistance of the Claims Conference was

required in order to identify a first group of eligible

survivors. The Claims Conference represents the

Jewish people in negotiations with the German

government and currently pays monthly pensions

from its Article 2 fund, funded by the Germany,

to approximately 23,000 Israeli citizens. The

willingness of the Claims Conference to join the

effort, without any compensation, and allow

access to its database will greatly speed up the

beginning of payments to the neediest.

The Claims Conference has agreed to the

request and announced that it would offer all the

measures required to provide the technical

assistance needed. The chief of staff of the Prime

Minister’s Office, Raanan Dinur, thanked the

organization’s directors for their willingness to be

a part in promoting this issue and pointed out the

professionalism with which this matter was dealt.

It should be pointed out that the arrangement

as to who will pay the pensions to the general

group of survivors has yet to be reached. In

accordance with the Government’s decision , the

Treasury is looking into a number of options in

order to guarantee the payments in a fast and

credible manner.

Government of Israel Pensions to Holocaust Survivors

After years of delay, the Polish government

aims to complete the issue of Holocaust property

restitution by the end of the year, Polish

Ambassador to Israel Agnieszka Magdziak-

Miszewska recently announced.

The core of a bill, which was accepted by

the Polish parliament in draft form two years ago,

is ready, and the Polish government hopes to

reach a resolution by the end of the year.

The bill would pay 20% compensation to

former property-owners—both Jewish and non-

Jewis—whose property was seized during World

War II. Polish officials estimate that the Jewish-

owned private property makes up nearly 20% of

all property taken.

The biggest claimants are from non-Jewish

Polish nobility whose assets—including lavish

palaces—were confiscated. Moreover, many of

the areas populated by Jews ahead of WWII—

the so-called Galicia region—are now located

outside the boundaries of present-day Poland and

fall in Ukraine.

“It is [both] moral justice and the real

economic interest of Poland to end this issue.”

Magdziak-Miszewska said the Polish government

was currently considering whether to increase

the amount of compensation it would offer.

The total value of seized property is estimated

to be around 16 billion-18billion euros ($21b.-

24b.), according to Polish groups working to

attain the compensation.

Magdziak-Miszewska’s remarks came ahead

of a forthcoming visit to Israel by Polish Prime

Minister Donald Tusk. The visit, which is the first

such trip by a Polish premier in nearly nine years,

comes as Israel plans its 60th anniversary and as

burgeoning ties between Israel and Poland are

now among the strongest in Europe.

Tusk’s visit also coincides with the

inauguration of “Polish Year” in Israel, an effort

to increase cultural ties between the two

countries.

“We need to work for the future—

remembering the Shoah, but also 1,000 years of

coexistence,” Magdziak-Miszewska added.

Poland wants Holocaustproperty restitutionEtgar Lefkovits , THE JERUSALEM POST


Professor Yehuda Bauerreflects on HolocaustEducation in the 21stCentury

CHGS Newsletter Winter/Spring 2008

Now may be a good time to ponder about the directions of our work. Good

work has been done in a professional way. Teacher training seminars,

guidelines for education, investments in exhibitions and seed money for

films and documentaries, and much more, have hopefully had an impact on

Holocaust awareness and education in many countries. I say hopefully,

because we cannot (yet?) measure the effect our work has had, though it is

true that without it the situation would have been much worse, or perhaps

much less good. However, my purpose this time is not to engage in self-

gratulatory exercises, justified as they may be, but to point to problems that

I see in our efforts.

1. There is a tendency in our work to view the Holocaust as what National

Socialist Germany and its allies and supporters did to the Jews. In other

words, to deal with the perpetrators and their motives. This is of course

centrally important, but it represents only one of the sides of the Holocaust.

The victims tend to be seen as the objects of genocidal policy, and in only

few of our efforts do they appear as subjects. But, there will always be more

victims than perpetrators, and it is at least equally important to deal with

who the victims were before they became victims, and how they reacted

after they became victims, as it is to deal with evil and the perpetrators. We

are all more likely to become victims or bystanders (we actually are

bystanders today) than perpetrators. For all of humanity, and not only for the

Jews, to deal with the victims and their perspective is a central issue. The

genocide of the Jews was the most extreme

form of genocide (to date), and it has been

duplicated many times over since, not in

the same form, but in somewhat similar

approximations. It is therefore a central

issue for humanity.

2. We need to concentrate more on the

relationships between the Jews and the

populations among whom they lived. In

Europe, no one has a clear conscience. In

all the countries, without any exception,

there were collaborators with the Nazis, in some more than in others. Projects

need to be undertaken that will ensure that this is not swept under the carpet.

Nor are the Jews themselves an exception: Jewish policemen and some of

the Jewish Councils were forced into the role of hangmen of their own people.

3. We deal with rescuers, and so we should. But not only non-Jews

rescued Jews; Jews rescued Jews as well, and even non-Jews were rescued

by Jews on occasion. We should emphasize clearly that central and crucial

as these stories are, they are on the margin of the Holocaust. They make it

possible for us to teach the Holocaust, because they show that there was

another way of action, apart from yielding to persuasion and terror of the

Nazis. But we need to say clearly that the rescuers were a small minority,

often persecuted by their own countrymen for their rescue work.

4. We need to ‘globalize’ the teaching of the Holocaust vertically and

horizontally. Vertically—all over the globe, as Jewish refugees were refused

entry to Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, not only

to North America and Western Europe. We need to talk about the refugees in

Shanghai and the attitude of the neutrals. We need to contextualize the

Holocaust in the framework of international relations and the conduct of

World War II. We can only hint at these things, for lack of time, but we must

at least do that. Vertically: we need to understand the history of the Jews, its

European and global context, the background of antisemitism; we need to

make our listeners aware of the European and global situation—and its

historical background—that made the genocide of the Jews possible. And

we need to contextualize the Holocaust as a genocide, parallel to, similar to,

and different from other genocides.

All this is a very tall order, and we have to examine ways in which these

things can, slowly, be integrated into our work.

We have experts who can prepare materials that will reflect these points,

and we have governments that are committed to provide a protective umbrella

to such work. It will take time, no doubt. But there is a Jewish saying that

you are not obliged to finish the work; but you are obliged to try.

Yehuda Bauer is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University.

Saving Jewish Children During the HolocaustHaaretz

A British man who saved hundreds of Jewish children from

Czechoslovakia from the Nazi concentration camps in the Holocaust, has

been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. Sir Nicholas Winton,

dubbed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as “the British Oskar

Schindler,” was a young stockbroker when he pressed the London

authorities into agreeing to take in the

children if he could find homes for them.

And he did. The 669 youngsters were sent

to foster parents—mostly in England, a small

number in Sweden. In all, eight trainloads

carried the mostly Jewish children from

Prague through Hitler’s Germany to Britain.

Winton kept his heroic deed to himself

for half a century. His pivotal role in the rescue

operation was revealed in the late 1980s after

his wife found a scrapbook documenting his

work in their attic. In October 2007, 98-year-

old Winton was awarded the Cross of Merit

of the 1st class by Czech Defense Minister

Vlasta Parkanova for saving the children. At

the ceremony, Foreign Minister Karel

Schwarzenberg said that the Czech diplomats

decided to back schoolchildren who had

collected more than 32,000 signatures in their bid to nominate Winton for

the Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded another top Czech decoration, the

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk Order, in 1998.

Previous Peace Prize laureates include former Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon

Peres, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and Elie Wiesel.

Jews saved by Schindler marchAP—KRAKOW, Poland: Hundreds of people joined some two dozen

Holocaust survivors, including several saved by German industrialist Oskar

Schindler, at a recent march marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation

of the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis. Family members, historians and Krakow

residents and officials gathered with survivors at a square in the heart of the

former ghetto to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

The group then set out to retrace the steps of Jews driven from the ghetto

during its 1943 liquidation to the forced labor camp in Plaszow about a mile

away where some 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish Poles were murdered during

the war.

The marchers left flowers at a preserved fragment of the ghetto wall.

Some of the survivors were making their first trip back to Poland since World

War II.

Jan Dresner, 85, a retired dentist from Tel Aviv, said he, his parents and

sister were spared when Schindler hired them from Plaszow to work in his

factory in what is now the Czech Republic.

“I will always remember that he saved my life and gave me the chance

to raise a family and have a career and...a good life,” Dresner told The

Associated Press on the eve of the march. “He did something that very

few people did: He saved 1,100 souls,” said Dresner, who joined the march

at Plaszow.

On March 13, 1943, German soldiers started a two-day action in which

they emptied the ghetto of its estimated 16,000 Jewish residents, shipping

them to Plaszow and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some 2,000

Jews were killed during that time.

Only 3,000 of the ghetto’s former inmates survived the war, and just 60

of the Jews that Schindler saved are still alive.

The Plaszow camp was the setting for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Oscar-

winning film Schindler’s List, which chronicled the German businessman’s

efforts to shield more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring

them to work in his factories in Krakow and Moravia in the present-day

Czech Republic.

Since the release of Spielberg’s film, tourists to Krakow have sought out

the place where Schindler kept the emaciated, frostbitten Jews, claiming

their work was essential to the survival of his metal works factory.

Schindler spent his fortune feeding the Jews he saved. After the war, he

emigrated to Argentina with his wife, Emilie, but returned to Germany in 1958,

dying there in 1974. He was buried in Jerusalem at his own request.


UN and Israeli Postal

Company Launch Holocaust

Memory Stamps

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 28—The United Nations

and Israel recently jointly launched stamps in

observance of the International Day of

Commemoration in memory of the victims of the

Holocaust.

The launch at the U.N. Headquarters was

attended by the head of the U.N. Department of

Communications and Public Information

(UNDPI), Kiyotaka Akasaka, Israel’s

Communications Ministers Ariel Atias and U.N.

Ambassador Dan Gillerman.

In a message delivered by Akasaka, U.N.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the

stamp “demonstrates the commitment of the

United Nations to pay tribute to all the victims of

the Holocaust, honor the survivors, and reaffirms

its efforts to help prevent future acts of genocide.

In this way, we can help inspire succeeding

generations to overcome hatred and bigotry.”

Atias said the joint issuance of the stamps

“represents an important step in worldwide efforts

to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten.”

The launch of the stamps, which incorporates

the award-winning logo of the UNDPI’s “Holocaust

and the United Nations Outreach Program,” marked

the f irst time that a U.N. stamp was launched

simultaneously with a national stamp.

The logo features a pair of barbed wires,

colored in grey and set against a black

background, run horizontally across the page and

f inally transform into a green-hued vine from

which a pair of flowers blossoms.

The U.N. stamp is available in denominations

of 41 cents, 0.85 Swiss francs and 0.65 euro at the

U.N. Headquarters in New York, and the U.N.

Offices in Geneva and Vienna, respectively. The

national stamp, issued by the Israel Postal Company

in Hebrew, is in a denomination of 4.6 shekels.

The U.N. Postal Administration has also made

available a joint silk first day coversheet featuring

all three U.N. stamps in English, French and German,

canceled with the first day of issue postmarks.

Today, important

officials and members

of the press gather to

witness the issuance of

a United Nations Postal

Stamp to commemorate

the Holocaust containing

the phrase “Remembrance

and Beyond.” But for

me, a prisoner in Auschwitz and a survivor of the

Holocaust, the word remembrance is entirely

superfluous.

It is impossible for me, even for a moment, to

forget the horrific experiences I endured in the

concentration camps. The barbed wire on the

stamp instantly conjures up and brings to my mind

the unbearable memories I associate with the gate

to hell known as Auschwitz. My recollection of

the horrific atrocities committed there is more than

enough to keep me awake at night until the end

of time. Regardless of how many years go by,

how can I ever forget?

The brutality and bestiality that occurred daily

in the camps is indelibly etched in my mind. The

look of pleasure and laughter on the faces of the

murderers as they tortured innocent men, women,

and children is beyond description and will always

linger in my consciousness. How can I erase thesight of the living skeletons, still alive just skin

and bones? How can I ever forget the smell ofburning flesh that constantly filled the air? The

heartbreaking sobbing of children, as they weretorn from their mother’s arms by the inhuman

actions of their captors, will ring in my ears until Iam laid to rest. I often wonder if the cries of these

youngsters penetrated heaven’s gate.Thus for me, and for all other Holocaust

survivors, the word “remembrance” is indeedredundant and superfluous. However, this does

not apply to the world at large. Even if the storyof the Holocaust was repeated forever, it would

still not be enough. As such, it is extremely fitting

REMARKSBY ROMAN KENT at the

UNITEDNATIONS

for the word “remembrance” to appear on the new

stamp.

However, the wording “and Beyond” engraved

on the commemorative stamp is of great

importance to me, as it should be to each one of

us. It has taken more than sixty years for the United

Nations to fully comprehend that today the fate

and destiny of mankind is closely connected and

intertwined with the Holocaust. It is therefore

crucial that future generations understand what

took place.

Hopefully, teaching future generations about

this brutal catastrophic occurrence in our history

will help prevent such a thing from ever

happening again. But just to remember is not

enough. In Hebrew it is said “Lo Haikkar

Hamachshavah Elah Hamaaseh”...it is the deed

rather than the thought that it critical.

Sadly, we did not accomplish this goal; we

have not as yet taught the world at large that wars

and killing do not achieve anything. They only

create fertile ground for another round of

bloodshed. Today, there is widespread violence,

not just in the Middle East, but in almost every

continent on this planet.

So what are my thoughts about “and

Beyond”? The United Nations, with the issuance

of this new stamp commemorating the Holocaust,

has seized the moment at a most opportune time.

The use of this stamp will be a continual reminder

of the destruction and evil of the Holocaust and

hopefully help to prevent such an occurrence in

the future.

As a survivor, I dare not forget the millions

who were murdered. For if I were to forget, then

the conscience of mankind would be buried

alongside the 6,000,000 victims. As a survivor, I

can truly understand the pain of a mother losing

her child in today’s violent world; for her pain is

the same, regardless of where and why her child

is being murdered.

I personally feel that if the words “and

Beyond” appearing on the stamp have any

possibility of succeeding, we must educate—and

educate properly—the new generations to come.

We must instill in our children what happens

when prejudice and hatred are allowed to

flourish. It is my conviction that only through

education can any calamity be prevented. We

must teach our children tolerance and

understanding both at home and in school; for

tolerance cannot be assumed, it must be taught.

We must stress to our children that hate is never

right and love is never wrong.

Finally, this innovative stamp “Remembrance

and Beyond” can have a tremendous positive

impact. It enters the world with the international

capability of transmitting our letters, documents

and written words to all corners of the globe.

Thus, when I or any one else sees this stamp on

a document, in effect it is a direct response to

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and

any other denier of the Holocaust. It asserts that

the United Nations, an international body of

governments, recognizes the fact that not only

did the Holocaust exist, it was an unprecedented

crime against humanity, and Jews in particular.

So let the stamp be widely used, and I

thank the Uni ted Nat ions for i ssuing i t .

Together with the proper commentary, this

wi l l sure ly be an impor tant s tep toward

collective understanding that we are all one

people, living on one planet.


By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER The Associated Press

BERLIN — Barbara Preusch vividly remembers the day the Nazis searched

her Berlin home for hidden Jews—and left without finding the mother and

daughter her family was sheltering.

Now 76 and still living in the same house, hidden behind tall hedges in

a leafy suburb, she leads a visitor to the claustrophobic, hidden space between

the hallway and a bedroom where Rachela and Jenny Schipper stayed from

1943 to 1945.

“The Nazis were suspicious of us but never found our hideout,” said

Preusch, a woman with a stern air, glasses and gray hair. “They took only

our apples and cigarettes.”

Sixty-two years after the end of World War II on May 8, 1945, people

like Preusch—a teenager when her grandmother began helping fugitive

Jews—are being honored with a museum in Berlin.

Israel recognized gentiles who helped Jews escape the Holocaust as early

as 1963, and honored 443 Germans at the Yad Vashem Memorial as

“Righteous among the Nations.” But similar honors have been long delayed

at home.

The “Silent Heroes” museum is to open in 2008 in an old tenement

building in the center of Berlin. It will be based in Otto Weidt’s former

workshop for the blind, where several Jews survived in a secret room, and

include two more floors that are vacant and still under renovation.

The new museum will focus on both rescuers and survivors with

multimedia presentations and witnesses’ documents that reveal the

motivations and dangers faced by the protectors.

About 1,700 Jews survived in Berlin, and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000

non-Jewish Germans actively hid them, according to historian Johannes

Tuchel, the head of the German Resistance Memorial Center which is in

charge of the museum.

The motivations of the rescuers were manifold, Tuchel said. “We can’t

come up with a typical profile: Some were workers, some academics or

devoted Christians; others helped spontaneously or for political reasons.”

There are no exact statistics for the numbers of hidden Jews and their

German helpers for all of Germany, Tuchel said. More than 350,000 German

Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

“The number of Berlin rescuers might sound impressive at first,” Tuchel

said. “But compared to the 4 million who lived in Berlin at the time and

didn’t help, 20,000 are not a lot at all.”

To recognize the rescuers would have come close to acknowledging

that there was an alternative to blindly following the Nazis, Tuchel said—

something many Germans in the postwar years were reluctant to acknowledge.

Today’s generation, untainted by their parents’ and grandparents’ crimes,

are in some ways more openly dealing with the country’s past and

acknowledging different individuals and groups who actively resisted the

Nazis.

The Schipper’s ordeal in hiding began after February 27, 1943, when

the Nazis started to deport the remaining Jews in Berlin to concentration

camps. Hiding was the only chance.

For Barbara Preusch, the Schippers became like family, hiding with them

on and off from February 1943 until the end of the World War II in May

1945.

“We shared everything with them: our beds, our food stamps, our joy

and our fears,” said Preusch.

“One of our neighbors was an ardent Nazi and he’d constantly watch

our home with his binoculars,” Preusch said. “But he never saw Rachela and

Jenny because we had our curtains drawn day and night.”

Preusch, whose grandfather was Jewish and deported to Auschwitz a

few months before her non-Jewish grandmother started helping other Jews,

said that even after the war it took her a long time until she felt she could

trust anybody in Germany.

“Even though I was young, I knew that I couldn’t tell anybody about it,”

Preusch said. “This is the first time I have ever told my story to the public.”

However reluctant she is in sharing her story with outsiders, Preusch often

talks about the past by phone with Jenny Schipper, who emigrated to the

U.S. after the war and now lives in Skokie, Ill.

Weidt’s workshop was turned into a small memorial center by a group of

university students a few years ago. In the former workshop visitors can see

a secret hiding room that was connected to the small factory and learn about

Weidt and his Jewish workers, who produced brooms and brushes. Weidt

helped his workers with forged papers, brought them food and even tried to

Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews

get one of them liberated from a concentration camp after she had been

deported.

Weidt hired mostly blind and deaf Jews assigned to him from the Jewish

Home for the Blind. But not all of Weidt’s employees were handicapped.

Some, like Inge Deutschkron, also worked in his workshop as secretaries.

The 82-year-old often gives tours of the workshop, telling visitors about her

non-Jewish German rescuers.

“Until a few years ago, nobody wanted to know anything about the

‘good Germans’ who helped Jews during the Holocaust,” Deutschkron said.

During the time she spent hiding from 1943-1945, she had about 20 different

rescuers who fed, hid and helped her with false identity papers.

Getting caught could mean execution or deportation to a concentration

camp, but that did not stop Sylvia Ebel and her family from hiding several

Jews at home. Ebel, an 80-year-old retiree who lives in the former East-

Berlin neighborhood of Hellersdorf, despised the Nazis, especially after her

father, a fervent communist, was imprisoned and later murdered at the

Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

“We sometimes had a whole group of Jews at our apartment, even though

we only had two rooms,” Ebel said. They moved frequently to avoid raising

suspicions among

neighbors.

One of the Jews

who temporarily hid

at Ebel’s place was

Larry Orbach.

The 82-year-old,

who emigrated to the

U.S. after the war in

1946, remembers

how he and Ebel

ventured out during

Allied bombing to

loot food stores.

“You really had

guts to go out at

night. I was not Anne

Frank, hiding in a

house. I had to

breathe. I had to eat. I

had nothing to eat. I

couldn’t buy water,”

Orbach said during an

interview at his home

in New York.

Orbach, who

worked in the jewelry

business in New York

and is retired now, is

still in touch with

Ebel.

“My mother always

said, they are part of the

family,” Ebel said. “It

wasn’t a question of

receiving awards or

feeling heroic, they

simply had to live and

survive.”

In 2004 the building at 39 Rosenthaler Straße was purchased with funds

from the German government and the Klassenlotterie Foundation Berlin. The

purchase was made with the specific purpose of expanding the Museum

Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind and establishing a central “Silent

Heroes” Memorial Center. In April 2005 the German Resistance Memorial

Center was given responsibility for planning the content and organization of

this new museum. The “Silent Heroes” Memorial Center will open in 2008.


Call for manuscriptsThe Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) is establishing a Worldwide Shoah

Memoirs Collection in electronic form of previously unpublished or unavailable memoirs written by survivors of the

Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is serving as Honorary Chairman for this program. As he has said previously on this topic, “I

repeat now what Dubnow said to his companions when they went to their death: “Write, write, write! And I’m saying it

to you now, to us. Please write. This is the last chance. Thirty years from now, who will still be here?”

The Claims Conference is rescuing old stories with new technology. With increasing numbers of elderly Holocaust survivors dying, it is crucial that

their memoirs be preserved so that future generations may learn of the Holocaust from those who survived. Each unique account of survival brings a new

perspective to the history of the Holocaust and broadens public knowledge of its scope.

Joining in this effort are Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Mémorial de la Shoah/Centre de Documentation Juive

Contemporaine, the Jewish Historical Institute and the Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Project.

At this time, WE ARE CONCENTRATING ON THE URGENT COLLECTION OF UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS IN ELECTRONIC FORM.

Our concern is for previously unpublished or unavailable memoirs to be identified, preserved, and made available for future generations who will not be able

to meet survivors first-hand. This is an international program, as Holocaust survivors live in 75 countries; submissions will be accepted in all languages.

Documents in this electronic collection will be made available to appropriate organizations and individuals to assist them in their critical work of

research and documentation of the Shoah. Ways in which memoirs may be made publicly accessible, after appropriate review, are under discussion.

Inclusion of manuscripts in the Worldwide Shoah Memoirs Collection will be determined by historians and other experts reviewing all submissions.

All submissions must be electronic or typed; handwritten documents cannot be included. Information about the Worldwide Shoah Memoirs Collection

and instructions for submission are at http://memoirs.claimscon.org.

Jewish Records Indexing - Poland is the only

organization with the mission to index the Jewish

vital (and other) records of Polish Jews. JRI-Poland

has indexed ALL the surviving Jewish vital

records of Bilgoraj. There are entries for more than

50 records for the family name SZAC in the

Bilgoraj database. If you have an interest in the

Jewish vital records of any town in Poland, check

the JRI-Poland website at www.jri-poland.org.

While there are indices to more than 3 million

records already online, please note that there an

additional 1/2 million entries that are not online

for one reason or another. Please contact me

directly regarding any town in which you may

have an interest.

Stanley Diamond (Montreal)

Executive Director, Jewish Records Indexing -

Poland

Jewish Records Indexing inPoland

The Songs of Life International Choir

Festival will be held in Bulgaria and Israel, from

November 21 – December 1, 2008. Songs of Life

is a festival of thanksgiving which will

commemorate the heroic rescue of all 50,000

Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust.

It has been 65 years since the people of

Bulgaria stood firm and saved their entire Jewish

population from Hitler’s grasp. Not one single

Jew was deported from Bulgaria during World

War II. The festival will serve as a celebration of

the preservation of life.

We are inviting cantors, choirs and auditors

from the USA, Canada and Israel to join the

Bulgarian host choir “Morski Zvutsi” for the

Bulgarian premiere performance of Ernest

Bloch’s major choral work, Sacred Service. This

monumental liturgical work will be performed

in four cities: Plovdiv and Sofia, Bulgaria and

Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel .

The 12-day itinerary also allows for

individual presentations, sightseeing, guided

tours and visits to historical and archeological

sites.

We will commemorate this unprecedented

heroic rescue by presenting 50,000 flowers to

the people of Bulgaria, one for every Jew that

was saved. Each group will represent its city and

county in Bulgaria and Israel and present a

bouquet of flowers to the Bulgarian people on

behalf of its community.

It is our hope that Songs of Life will transcend

cultural and religious lines and instead continue

to build bridges among all that it touches.

For additional information, we invite you to

visit our website at www.songsoflife.org. To

download a brochure please click on “Join the

Tour” page and then click on download a pdf

Brochure at the top of the page.

Kalin and Sharon Tchonev

113 Dupre Mill Court

Lexington, SC 29072

Tel: (803)358-2382

Fax: (803)358-6823

www.varnaworkshop.com

www.songsoflife.org

Songs of Life InternationalChoir Festival

Many of you have been reading in newspapers

around the world about a “newly” announced

Belgian compensation program of $170 million

for looted, lost or abandoned assets, and you’ve

been calling to ask us where and how to apply.

Please know that this money refers to the sum that

was allocated to the Buysse Commission some

years ago, and this latest press release was made

upon the recent issuance of the Buysse

Commission’s final report. (You can read all about

it at www.combuysse.fgov.be.) In short, there is

no new Belgian compensation. Jews who

survived the war in Belgium will not be getting

any new or additional money, and the decisions

of the Buysse Commission (now completed) or

of the ongoing Solidarity 3000 program (past

deadline for application) remain unchanged.

“New” BelgianCompensation

needs volunteers

I am currently working with Nick Doob and Shari Cookson on a

documentary about Alzheimer’s that is being produced by HBO in

association with the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s

Association. It is part of a series of films that will take a comprehensive

look at the disease. The film that Nick Doob and Shari Cookson are

making is about the experience of having Alzheimer’s; it is a personal

testimony that will tell the stories of people in an authentic way, that

shows the effect of Alzheimer’s from an inside point-of-view. The film will be shot in simple verite

style by the two filmmakers, without additional lighting, and in most cases, without formal interviews.

It will consist of ten to twelve personal stories, which will range from someone who has been recently

diagnosed with the disease to someone in the advanced stages of it.

As the community of Holocaust survivors age it seems unavoidable that Alzheimer’s disease is a

new challenge that many of them must face. I recently worked on a documentary about a group of

Holocaust survivors who summered together in the Catskill Mountains and three of our 15 main

characters had Alzheimer’s disease, two of whom have since passed away. I would very much like to

reach out to some of the survivors who are suffering with this disease and possibly feature them in this

documentary. My contact information is below.

Elyssa Hess

HBO Documentary Films

1114 Ave of Americas

G26-14B

New York, NY 10018

email: [email protected]

office: (212) 512 5506

mobile: (914) 645 3386

PLEASE SEND US YOUR

STORIES, ARTICLES, POEMS,

AND LETTERS FOR INCLUSION

IN TOGETHER AND OUR WEB

SITE.

[email protected]



Miles LermanMiles Lerman, who fought

against the Nazis in Poland

and helped found the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial

Museum in Washington,

D.C., died Jan. 22 in his

home in Philadelphia. He

was 88.

Lerman was from a

prosperous family whose

flour mills were seized by

the Nazis. He escaped from a slave labor camp and

fought the Nazis with other partisans for nearly two

years in the forests of Poland.

“Our job was to raise havoc, to raise hell with

them and survive,” he once told the Philadelphia

Inquirer.

Mr. Lerman and his wife, Rosalie, immigrated

to New York City in 1947. He worked as a grocery

warehouse clerk in Brooklyn, N.Y., then had a

chicken farm in Vineland, N.J. He later started a home

heating oil business that grew into a major

distributorship, and invested in real estate.

Mr. Lerman was involved in the Holocaust

Museum from the planning stages, through its

opening on the Mall in 1993 until he retired in 2000.

Appointed to its governing board by President Carter,

he was reappointed by the next three presidents.

As chairman of the Campaign to Remember,

he helped raise $190 million to build, equip, and

endow the museum. At the same time, he was

chairman of the museum’s International Relations

Committee, which negotiated with Eastern

European countries for the artifacts that became

the museum’s permanent exhibition. Among them

were a railroad boxcar of the type used to transport

Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination

camp; barracks from the Birkenau camp; suitcases,

combs, shaving kits and toothbrushes from

Auschwitz; 5,000 shoes from Majdanek; and

canisters that had held Zyklon B, the gas used to

kill Jews.

“He was indispensable,” Michael Berenbaum,

the project director for the creation of museum,

told The New York Times. “He spoke many

languages and knew how to deal with East

European officialdom at the time the Soviet Union

was collapsing.”

The museum’s current director, Sara J.

Bloomfield, said Mr. Lerman’s “breadth of vision”

extended beyond building the collections. As

museum chairman, Bloomfield said, Mr. Lerman

started the Committee on Conscience, which deals

with contemporary genocide.

After retiring, Mr. Lerman was the board’s

chairman emeritus.

He also led efforts to build a memorial at the

Belzec death camp in Poland, where his mother

died.

Thomas Peter LantosThomas Peter Lantos was a Democratic member

of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981

until his death.

An American by choice, Lantos was born in

Budapest, Hungary, on February 1, 1928. He was

16 when Nazi Germany occupied his native

country. As a teenager, he was placed in a

Hungarian fascist forced labor camp. He

succeeded in escaping and was able to survive in

a safe house in Budapest set up by Swedish

humanitarian Raoul

Wallenberg.

In 1947, Lantos

was awarded an

academic scholarship

to study in the United

States. In August of

that year, he arrived in

New York City. Just a

few weeks after he left

Hungary, the Communist

Party seized control of

the country.

Lantos attended the University of Washington

in Seattle, where he received a B.A. and M.A. in

economics. He moved to San Francisco in 1950

and began graduate studies at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he later received his

Ph.D. In the fall of 1950 he started teaching

economics at San Francisco State University.

In the summer of 1950, Lantos married his

childhood sweetheart, Annette Tillemann. For three

decades Lantos was a professor of economics, an

international affairs analyst for public television,

and an economic consultant to businesses. He also

served in senior advisory roles to members of the

United States Senate.

Lantos made his first run for office in 1980,

when he defeated one-term Republican

congressman Bill Royer by 5,700 votes. He never

faced another contest nearly that close, and was

reelected 13 times. He was the only Holocaust

survivor ever to serve in Congress.

Henri Zvi Deutschby Suzanna Deutsch

Henri Zvi Deutsch was born in Antwerp, Belgium.

He was 9 when he fled Belgium with his family

and 10 when they arrived in New York City. His

immediate family, which consisted of his father,

Bernard, his mother, Helen, his brother Simon and

his sister, Josette, survived. His extended family

all perished in the Holocaust.

Deutsch lived in Israel from 1963-1970 and

taught at Tel Aviv University. It was there that he

met his wife, Suzanna Deutsch, who came from

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The couple had three

children and returned from Israel to live in

Milwaukee.

Henri Zvi Deutsch devoted his life to

educating both Jews and non-Jews about the

Holocaust. He was a teacher and a writer. Many

of his plays were about the Holocaust and other

Jewish themes. They were presented locally and

also were produced and presented by the Eden

Theater. He also did a great deal of writing for

children. His plays for children were shown on

“The Open Door,” a Chicago television show,

presented in the 1980s. He also wrote for Shofar,

a magazine for Jewish children that is no longer

in publication.

In the 1980s he found out that his family had

been saved by a righteous diplomat, Aristides de

Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul in

Bordeaux, France who saved around 30,000 lives.

Deutsch devoted much of the rest of his life to

teaching people about the life of de Sousa Mendes

as well as other Holocaust related history.

Stephen FeinsteinStephen Feinstein, the

director of the Center for

Holocaust and Genocide

Studies (CHGS) and

adjunct professor of

history at the University

of Minnesota, died

suddenly on March 4. He

was 64.

Feinstein joined the

faculty at the University

of Minnesota in 1997,

serving f irst as the

acting director of the CHGS and then being named

director two years later.

Feinstein was known around the world as an

advocate for Holocaust survivors and genocide

education and, in particular, for his expertise on

artistic expression and genocide. He trained Polish

teachers on Holocaust education, spoke at Yad

Vashem in Jerusalem and frequently commented

in the media on anything Holocaust- and

genocide-related.

Feinstein received his doctoral degree in

Russian and European history from New York

University in 1971. He earned an undergraduate

degree in economics from Villanova University

in 1964.

Melvin HanbergBy Julian and Francine Hanberg

Lt. Col. Melvin Hanberg, whose loss of 17

family members in the Nazi Holocaust stirred him

to launch a new approach to Holocaust

remembrance as a pioneering Jewish family

historian, has died at age 84.

Born in Detroit on May 28, 1923, raised in

Chicago and graduated from Austin High School

in 1941, he settled in Los Angeles in 1947 after

service in World War II. In 1942, reported mass

atrocities against European Jews caused Hanberg

to ask the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)

about his father’s family in the Warsaw Ghetto.

HIAS’ response that all Jews were in extreme

danger led him to volunteer for duty in Europe.

Instead, he was sent to the Pacific where, as part

of the Army Air Corps Signal Corps, he broke

enemy codes and transmitted coded instructions

to troops for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s liberation

of the Philippines and New Guinea.

He returned to uniform in the Korean War and

eventually rose to lieutenant colonel in the Army

Reserves.

At World War II’s end, he learned that among

his many relatives in Europe, only one cousin had

survived the Holocaust. At this time, he made it

his task to remember the victims and honor a lost

civilization by activating the virtually unknown

pursuit of Jewish genealogy.

He discovered that although Jewish

communities were nearly wiped out, the Nazis had

carefully preserved vital records. After tracing his

family back to the late 1600s, he organized and

cont’d on p. 11


served as first president of the Jewish Genealogical

Society of Los Angeles (JGS-LA) in 1979.

A cofounder and first president of the Polish

Genealogical Society of California starting in July

1989, he also spoke at numerous family-history

conventions, conferences and seminars.

Halina Lasterby Rositta Kenigsberg

Halina Laster, who

passed away on March

22, 2008 (maiden name

Zemanska) was born on

June 4, 1921 in Tomaszow

Mazowiecki, Poland.

During the Holocaust,

she used the name

Halina Kronenberg. Halina lived in Lodz prior to

the war. She was arrested in February 1940 and

was imprisoned until November of that year. She

later lived in the Tomaszow Mazowieck Ghetto

and was then taken to several concentration camps

including Blizin, Auschwitz, Reichenbach,

Beindorf and then marched to Hamburg, Altona

where she was liberated on April 28, 1945 by the

Swedish Red Cross. She lived in Sweden until 1958

when she moved to New York.

Halina Laster resided in Pembroke Pines,

Florida, where she became president of the

Century Pines Holocaust Survivor Group, one of

the largest survivor groups in the country.

In addition, for over 15 years, Halina served

with distinction and honor as a member of the

Board of Directors of the Holocaust Documen-

tation and Education Center.

In tribute to Halina, the Survivors Club that

she was president of for many years, just renamed

the club “The Halina Laster Chapter, Pembroke

Pines Holocaust Survivor Group.”

Today Halina’s story, which is committed to

memory and hope, will forever bear witness within

the walls of the soon-to-be First South Florida

Holocaust Museum.

Leo LauferLeo Laufer, 85, beloved

husband, father and

grandfather, died in

Dallas, on July 21, 2007

and was buried, as was

his wish, in Jerusalem.

Laufer was born in

Lodz, Poland on March

15, 1922 into a large,

fervently Orthodox

family. Soon after the start of World War II, the

Nazis sent him to a series of work camps and

concentration camps throughout Poland and

Germany. Under the Nazis, every remaining

member of his direct family perished—his parents

and his six other siblings. He was liberated by the

American army from Ohrdruf in April 1945 and

worked for the United Nations Relief and Works

Agency (UNRWA) in the immediate post-war

years. He immigrated to the United States in 1948

and moved to Dallas soon afterwards.

In 1949 he began his career at K. Wolens,

where he remained for 31 years. He later opened

two clothing stores of his own. Laufer married

Shirley Somer, Dallas-born daughter of Katie and

Marcus Somer, in 1950. They had four daughters.

Leo was deeply involved in the campaign for

the release of Soviet Jews and, when the Iron

Curtain was finally raised, with the resettlement

of Soviet Jews who came to make their lives in

Dallas. He also lectured widely on the Holocaust.

William LoefflerEscaping from Nazi Germany in 1936—his

sisters being shipped off to England while he was

sent to the United States to an uncle in upstate

New Yor—William Loeffler lost 125 members of

his extended family during the war. He married

Erna Sophie Melchior and found work as a welder

at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine,

eventually becoming a foreman. After the shipyard

suffered economic decline and he was let go,

Loeffler moved on to various jobs eventually

retiring to take care of his wife who had suffered

a number of strokes. After her death in 1988, he

became a volunteer in the community and found

everlasting fulfillment as a foster grandparent in

the People’s Regional Opportunity Program. Each

day, he would go the the Carl J. Lamb School and

work with children as a surrogate grandfather. A

respected role model, in 2006 he received the

WCSH’s “6 WHo Care” Award. William Loeffler

was 92 when he passed away in January.

Boris LurieNew York art rebel and

Holocaust survivor

Boris Lurie died

recently. He was 83.

Born in Leningrad,

Lurie was an artist

and author who

survived several

c o n c e n t r a t i o n

camps.

He moved to

New York in 1946, where he and several artist

friends founded the Anti-Pop-Art movement

NO!art in 1959 which saw art as a motivator of

social action.

For most of his life he dealt aggres-sively with

the themes of war and the Jewish genocide. His most

famous—as well as most controversial—workis the

Railroad Collage of 1959—a photo collage of a

stripper disrobing on a flatbed rail car piled high

with corpses from the gas ovens.

In the ’60s and ’70s, Lurie aimed his NO!art

movement against the prevailing art direction of

abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol’s pop

art. Together with Stanley Fisher and Sam

Goodman, Lurie advocated using art to come to

grips with the themes of real life. For them, that

included war and violence, oppression and

colonialism, racism and sexism.

Lurie last exhibited in Germany in the 1990s.

In 1995, there was a two-part exhibit at the Neuen

Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kunst in Berlin. His

work was also shown at the memorial museum at

Buchenwald concentration camp from December

1998 to May 1999. His pieces are included in

permanent collections of the National Gallery of

Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of

Modern Art in New York.

Rema Nadelby Harry Langsam

The Nadel, the Langsam and the Friedberg families

in California, have had a terrible loss. Rema (Fruma

Ryvka) Nadel (nee Langsam) the daughter of Anna

(Chana) and Harry (Yechezkiel Chaim) Langsam

passed away the second of Elul after she lost her

fight with a cancerous brain tumor.

She was an Emesdige Yiddishe Mame and a

Yiddishe Tochter, a child of Gulag survivors after

her parents escaped from the Nazi hellishfire.

She was devoted to Judaism physically and

spiritually, always ready to give a helping hand

to a worthy cause, while working for the Board

of Jewish Education in Los Angeles, where a

scholarship was established in her name to help

the annual March of the Living. She was an

enthusiastic lover of Hebrew and Jewish folk

songs and music, Hasidic nigunim and chazanut.

Rema clung to her life until she embraced her

new granddaughter, Sheindl. At her request, the

baby was named after her mother’s sister, a victim

of the Shoah. Rema was proud of her ancestral

origin as a relative of the founder of the Dinov

rabbinic dynasty.

Paula OrensteinPaula Orenstein was a Holocaust survivor who

was born in Warsaw in 1913. Paula left the

Warsaw Ghetto with her husband Aron and

daughter Miriam before it was closed. A Polish

farmer in a small town hid Paula and Miriam

while Aron, who died in 1990, was in Treblinka

but escaped to live in the woods of Poland.

After the war, they were able to reunite and

the family was sent to a displaced persons camp

in Germany. Except for relatives who left before

the war, they were the only survivors of both

their families. In 1952 they immigrated to the

United States and settled in New York. Despite

their horrif ic experiences, their faith in the

Orthodox way of life never wavered. Both were

members of WAGRO, Shaare Zedek and Bet-El.

Paula also was a member of Emunah, Hadassah

and the Young Israel of Hillcrest.

Julius Paltielby Ernest Michel

My friend, Julius

Paltiel, whom I knew

in Auschwitz and met

again at the World

Gathering in 1981

died in February of

this year. He was

given a state funeral

attended by the King

of Norway, members

of the government, leaders of the city and civic

leaders from throughout the country. He became

a spokesman not only for Holocaust survivors but

for all people who are depressed. In this role, he

became well known throughout the country.

I had the pleasure of being at his 75th birthday

party in Trondheim, the most northern Jewish

community in the world. He was president of the

local synagogue, president of the survivors group

in the country and a very successful business man.

He is survived by his wife Vera, children and

grandchildren.

Julius was a unique individual. He was one

of a small number of Jews that were sent to

Auschwitz in 1943. That is where I got to know

him. I lost a close friend whose memory will

always be with me.

cont’d on p. 12


Jewish Champion of FaithBy Rafael Alvarez/Baltimore Examiner

The kids in the eighth

grade at Yeshivat

Rambam, a Jewish

school on Park

Heights Avenue at

Strathmore, have

been getting ready to

interview Holocaust

survivors. Their oral

history project is

several months too

late to include a

giant from those

days, a man raised

in a grocery store

not far from their school, down at the corner of

Smallwood and Pressbury streets.

Rabbi Judah Nadich, a World War II

Armychaplain with the rank of lieutenant colonel,

was General Eisenhower’s adviser on Jewish

affairs when refugees flooded Western Europe at

war’s end. He died at age 95 Aug. 26 in New York

City. In the class at Rambam, students questioned

the impact that atrocity, particularly the cruelty

that humans visit upon one another, has on faith.

When Nadich arrived at a Displaced Persons

camp outside Munich in August 1945—where up

to 40 hungry survivorswereshoved into rooms

designed for six, survivors held behind barbed

wire as if the war had never ended—the answer

was not academic.

“He struggled as a result of what he witnessed,”

said Shira Nadich Levin, a daughter. “But he

eventually realized that without faith . . . there

could be no explanation for so much in this world

—acts of great courage, feelings of love.”

Described at length by Nadich in his 1953

book, Eisenhower and the Jews, the post-

Holocaust experience was horrific enough for him

to avoid the pulpit after returning to the States.

“He didn’t feel ready to return immediately,”

said his daughter Leah Meir, as though recounting

a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. “It was difficult

for him to see the kind of ‘normal’ life that

American Jews wereleading, with the parties and

the spending of money.”

It was very important to Nadich that he had

served in the military during World War II, his

family said—he volunteered the day after Pearl

Harbor—almost as important as it was to serve

“his people, in whom he never lost faith” as a

rabbi.

“He spent the years after leaving the military

until 1947 raising funds for the care and

resettlement of the displaced Jews of Europe,” said

Meir. “It was the defining time of his life.” And

thus it is that doubt defines faith, for without doubt

there is no need of faith.

As Judah Nadich’s stepmother, Nettie Gifter,

had no doubt that without an education, her son

could expect little in this life, she asked him more

than once as she stocked the shelves: “Do you

want to grow up to be a truck driver?”

At 14, Judah left his father Isaac’s grocery

store at 1655 N. Smallwood St.—the pickles in

the barrel, the red wagon he used to

makedeliveries, his little sister Esther upon whom

he doted—and went to board at a yeshiva in New

York.

“I went back to see the family store six or eight

years ago and it had shrunk,” said Esther Nadich

Rosenberg, 85. “It was my mother who created

faith in Judah, like she created it in all of us.”

That faith led Judah Nadich to become a

cornerstone of the Conservative movement of

Judaism in the United States, to include women

in all aspects of the faith and to protest segregation

in the decade following World War II.

“Freedom is colorblind and the yearning for

it is God-implanted,” he said in a 1960 sermon

excerpted in his New York Times obituary. “To help

those . . . who have a right to it is our sacred

obligation.”

Shira Levin came across her father’s remarks

about faith in a video someone made while

interviewing him. The words were strong and

clear, but they didn’t tell the whole story.

“When he gave his answer, the intensity of

his belief and optimistic view of the world and its

beauty was apparent,” said Levin. “But he also

said there will always be darkness for which we

have no explanation.”

Violet (Ibi) Schwartzby Elly Berkovits Gross

Violet (Ibi) Schwartz, née

Farkas was born in

Marghita, Romania in

1926 and had a happy

childhood until the horrors

of the Nazi regime ruined

her young life. Violet was

taken to Auschwitz when

she was 18 and after that

to Zalzveden, where she worked as a slave laborer.

After liberation she returned to her hometown

to f ind only her sister Eva and a few cousins

having survived. Violet married Emeric and had a

son, Peter. Later, the family emigrated to the U.S.,

where Peter became a successful plastic surgeon.

Recently, Violet was diagnosed with brain

cancer and bravely subjected herself to surgery,

radiation and chemotherapy hoping to be able to

enjoy more of what life had to offer. On March

20, 2008, Violet succumbed to her disease. Her

family will always cherish her memory.

Jerry UngarA true lady of gentility and

class, Jerry worked clan-

destinely for the Haganah in

New York before and after the

birth of Israel. Among the

Institutions she and her

husband, entrepreneur and

philanthropist William Ungar,

supported were the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum

in Washington, D.C., the

Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, and

the Solomon Schechter Day School in Queens.

She was greatly admired by her children and

her 17 grandchildren.

Morris WaldBorn Moses Wloski in Wolkovysk, Poland in

1921, Delray Beach, Florida-resident Morris Wald

succombed to cancer on January 15, 2008.

He had five sisters, together with his mother and

stepfather, all of whom perished in concentration

camps. An Auschwitz survivor, he was later

relocated to Burgerhaven, outside the Polish harbor

of Danzig, where the Third Reich maintained a naval

base and he had to repair U-boats.

Escaping during a death march, Morris made

it to safety with the help of the Jewish Brigade.

Treated for tuberculosis in Italy and Sweden, he

eventually made it to the U.S., where he met and

married Ruth, his wife of 51 years. They raised

four children and were blessed with 11

grandchildren.

His testimony is part of Jeffrey Wolin’s Written

in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust.

Morris stretched every day to its fullest, loved

his family, Israel and life, and sang “Hava Negila”

with his last breath.

Leon L. WolfeLeon L. Wolfe, who survived the Plaszów, Gross-

Rosen and Langenbielau concentration camps and

went on to play a prominent role in Jewish

education and Shoah remembrance, died recently in

Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Born Löbel Wolf

in Kraków, Poland in

1916, his law studies

at the Jagiellonian

Uni-versity of Kraków

were inter rupted by

the war. In 1941,

Wolfe married Henia

Karmel. Together they

were interned in the

Kraków Ghetto and

the Plaszów concentration camp. After being

separated to different camps in 1943, Wolfe was

liberated by the Russian Army and returned to

Kraków to search for his family. There he learned

that his family had been killed. Though also

reported dead, he found Henia and her sister Ilona

alive in a Leipzig hospital. Wolfe brought the

sisters home and eventually gained entry to

Sweden before immigrating to New York in 1948.

Wolfe was a teacher and principal in

numerous New York City-area Hebrew schools

before working as the director of the Department

of Youth and Education at the Jewish National

Fund. Following his retirement from JNF, he

worked as curator at the Judaica Museum of the

Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale. He

supported Henia in resuming her writing, and

celebrated the publication of her short stories and

novels.

After Henia died, Wolfe married the artist and

sculptor Rita Rapaport. He was a co-founder of

the Westchester Holocaust Commission (now

known as the Westchester Holocaust and Human

Rights Education Commission) and was

instrumental in the creation of the Garden of

Remembrance in White Plains, New York.

Most recently, Wolfe saw a long-standing

dream come true when Henia and Ilona’s wartime

poems, translated into English by the American

poet Fanny Howe, were published as A Wall of

Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from

Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond.


Rabbi Herbert Friedman: AnAdvocate For His PeopleDr. Alex Grobman

Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, a former CEO,

executive vice-chairman and lay leader of the

United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and the founding

president of the Wexner Heritage Foundation died

on March 31 at age 89. Articles will be written

about his pioneering work in Jewish philanthropy

and Jewish education; few know the extent of his

critical role in assisting the survivors of the Shoah

in post-war Europe.

Friedman was a 27 year-old Reform rabbi

serving as an American chaplain in the American

Army stationed at Head-

quarters Berlin District when

Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, then

Advisor on Jewish Affairs

U.S. Zones, Europe, asked

him to serve as his assistant.

The Jewish Displaced Persons

(DP) required an advocate to

explain their needs to the

military, and Friedman was

recruited to help them.

The Allies assumed that

like the other refugees at the

end of the war, the Jews

wanted to return to their

former homes. They did not

appreciate that for a

signif icant number of them,

this was no longer a realistic option. Failure to

understand the need for Jews to be given legal

status as refugees, or to provide them with

adequate shelter, clothing, kosher food and a way

to re-institute contact with family and friends,

caused the military many problems. In July1946,

Friedman was assigned to visit the DP camps

throughout the American Zones of Occupation to

interpret the survivors needs to them.

As thousands of Jews fled Poland into the

American zone of Germany and Austria in the

wake of the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, when

47 people were killed and more than fifty injured,

the American Army decided to ease the crowding

in the camps by moving Jews to less crowded

facilities. On September 30, a trainload of survivors

arrived at Babenhausen, a former prisoner of war

camp near Frankfurt.

When the survivors saw the inferior condition

of the site with barbed wire still surrounding parts

of the installation, they refused to disembark. After

Lt. General Geoffrey Keyes, commanding general

of the Third Army came to assuage their fears,

most agreed to enter the camp. Friedman, who

was there when the survivors arrived, remained

to ensure they received the food, shelter and care

the general had promised.

Even before Friedman became Assistant

Advisor for Jewish Affairs under Bernstein, he

was intimately involved with helping the Jews.

He arrived in Berlin during the first week of April,

1946 and immediately began working with

Brichah, the organized and spontaneous illegal

movement to smuggle Jews out of Europe and

into Palestine. He furnished the Palestinian Jews,

who were members of the Jewish Brigade, with

trucks, gasoline, false papers, clothing, housing,

cigarettes, and a cover story to justify their

presence in the city. Established in September

1944, the Brigade worked with survivors in Italy

and later with those in Germany.

Cigarettes were especially important since

money had no value in post-war Europe. A carton

of American cigarettes was valued at 1,500 marks

or $150. Friedman and other Jewish chaplains

used cigarettes to bribe Russian

soldiers to smuggle Jews into the

American Zone of Berlin. With

one package, you could smuggle

one Jew into the city. Jewish

soldiers and other chaplains gave

Friedman cigarettes; his father

sent him 500 cartons every

couple of days.

Friedman’s illegal activities

almost resulted in him being

court-martialed. Only Bernstein’s

intervention saved him. At the

end of the war, the Allies found

huge amounts of books stolen

from Jews randomly strewn in

“makeshift depots.” To protect

and restore this enormous

collection, they established the Offenbach

Archival Depot in a vast f ive-story warehouse,

across the river from Frankfurt. Fearing that these

priceless books might not be properly cared for

or might disappear altogether, he arranged for

1100 of the most valuable books to be shipped to

the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

After the military discovered how Friedman

had appropriated these books without their

approval, his services were no longer required.

He left Germany in May 1947, ostensibly to be

discharged upon arrival in the States. When he

landed in the U.S., Henry Morgenthau, Jr., former

Secretary of the Treasury, asked that he speak at

an emergency UJA conference. His talk went so

well that Morgenthau, then national chair of the

UJA, had him speak around the country for the

next month.

When Friedman reported to be discharged, he

was arrested for being absent without leave. He

spent four days in military prison until

Morgenthau’s cable arrived explaining that

Freidman had been authorized to speak for the

UJA. After leaving the army on July 18, 1947, he

became executive director of the UJA.

Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame:

American Jewish Chaplains and the Remnants of

European Jewry, 1944-1948. His latest book is Nations

United: How The UN Undermines Israel and the West.

JTA—During a recent visit to Israel, President

Georgi Parvanov of Bulgaria took responsibility

for the deaths of 11,000 Jewish residents of Thrace

and Macedonia, areas that were annexed to

Bulgaria in April 1941, Israeli media reported.

Acting under Nazi orders, Bulgarian police

arrested Jews in those territories and deported them

to Treblinka in 1943. The history of those Jews

often has been played down in the face of the

saving of 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria proper by the

country’s religious and political leaders.

“When we express justif iable pride at what

we have done to save Jews, we do not forget that

at the same time there was an antisemitic regime

in Bulgaria and we do not shirk our responsibility

for the fate of more than 11,000 Jews who were

Bulgarian President apologizes for Jewish Deaths

by Sheldon P. Hersh

Crumbs have never had it easy. Remnants of

a once proud past, these hapless has-beens are

often viewed as useless, unappetizing fragments

that should be thrown out with the rest of the

garbage. Such was not the case, however, in my

mother’s kitchen. In her protected domain, great

respect was shown to the beleaguered crumb, for

how could a Holocaust survivor ever knowingly

permit food of any size to be so casually discarded.

Great value was placed on our family’s protected

crumbs and once detected, they were methodically

collected and saved from the pitiful fate that awaits

most other crumbs.

While gently cupping her hand, my mother

would conscientiously brush every visible crumb

into a waiting bag designated to be the sacred

repository for our collected crumbs. “How can I

throw away this food? It would have given us

nourishment and hope in the camps and ghettos

where there was so little to eat,” she would often

sigh. When it came to the subject of food, nothing

was ever to go to waste; it was simply unthinkable.

During the war, survivors quickly became the

masters of improvisation, deftly turning

undesirable edibles and scraps into presentable,

life-sustaining meals. If we children happened to

be present during the collection of crumbs, stories

related to food, or the lack thereof, would

accompany her hand’s softly sweeping motions—

all in the hope that we would appreciate and

understand why it was she gave such importance

to that which nearly all others find so unimportant.

“We scavenged for crumbs,” she tearfully related,

“crumbs meant life, crumbs meant survival.”

As days passed, the bag would slowly fill and

once it was decided that the right amount was

present, my mother would dutifully make her way

to a chosen site in the back yard and begin

sprinkling crumbs in circular motions upon the

empty, drab ground. Within seconds, birds,

accompanied by an occasional squirrel, would

suddenly appear and descend upon a feast of

tantalizing crumbs. The symphonic rhythm of the

birds’ frantic pecking interspersed with the

sporadic flapping of wings had become an

unforgettable melody that would bring a knowing

smile to her face.

This family custom was to quickly disappear

with my mother’s passing, as her children no

longer had any desire or inclination to gather

crumbs. There were presently more important

things to do with one’s time. Although many years

have since passed, I often find myself inexplicably

drawn to the window that overlooks my own yard

as birds begin their descent in search of

nourishment. At the very moment the newcomers

begin pecking at the barren, frozen ground, I sense

their disappointment as they glance in my direction

with a look that conveys a simple, yet urgent,

request: remember...remember.

deported from Thrace and Macedonia to death

camps.”

Parvanov, a member of the socialist—formerly

Communist—party, is the first Bulgarian leader

to accept responsibility for the deaths.


Picture of My PastBy BRENDA SMOLOVITZ

It was the day before my parents 50th wedding

anniversary. My brother and I were visiting them.

We’ve known since we were 16, when our mother

let slip one day that she was our father’s second

wife, that our father had lost his first wife and three

young children in Auschwitz. Long before that

revelation, we’d heard about our father’s other

relatives who were killed in Auschwitz.

Our father occasionally told us stories of these

people. The stories often ended with, “They were

taken to Auschwitz.” I can’t recall a time when I

felt a need for further explanations. Auschwitz was

a part of our family history that I inhaled as

naturally as many other far less remarkable facts.

It seemed as if it was always there—like air—not

really hidden, but usually invisible.

Though our father some-

times spoke of his parents,

brother and sisters who perished

in Auschwitz, he never

mentioned his f irst wife and

children. And while there were

pictures of his other relatives in

our family photo albums, we

never saw any pictures of his

wife and children. Our mother

did tell us once that shortly after

she and our father married, she’d

found a photo of them in his

wallet, had asked him about it

and had not seen it since.

It wasn’t until I was in my

late 40s that I f inally braved

talking with my father about

his first family. He did not seem

surprised then that I knew

about his wife and children. I

asked for stories about them, asked him to

describe what they looked like. And he did. Briefly,

haltingly, and with so much pain and sadness on

his face that, feeling guilty about opening old

wounds, I always dropped the topic after a few

minutes—only to f ind myself, days, weeks or

months later, feeling compelled to bring it up again.

But, I never asked about the picture of his first

family.

Finally, on this golden anniversary visit, I got

my father alone and asked him if he had a picture

of his f irst wife and children. (Not wanting to

create problems between my parents, I didn’t tell

him that I already knew of its existence from my

mother.) My father made a grimace, looked away,

and said, “No.” I wanted to spare him the pain,

but my longing to see these people had become

so strong that I persisted.

“Are you sure you don’t have any pictures of

them? Weren’t there any left when you returned

from the camps?”

Irritated, he snapped back, “You don’t

understand. There was nothing left in my house.

They were using it as a stable.”

In my best investigative reporter/prosecuting

attorney manner I continued. “But you have

pictures of your parents and brother and sisters.”

He went on the defensive, “I have no idea

where I got those from. Maybe from one of my

sisters who wasn’t taken to the camps.”

I was about to give up, but my mother,

overhearing our conversation from the kitchen,

called out now. “Herman, you used to carry one

in your wallet. I saw it. It was of your wife and

two of the children.”

My mother began setting the table for supper.

I joined her and we worked silently. I could hear

my father rummaging in his study. A few minutes

later he was back, carrying a small black prayer

book. Holding it open to the middle with one hand,

he was f ingering a small photo with the other.

Softly, in a tone of wonder, he said to my mother,

“You are right, Blanka, the children are here.”

I reached for the photo but he stopped me

and said, pointing to the page in the book opposite

where the picture had been secreted all these

years, “See, this is where I recorded your birth

dates.” I looked where he was pointing and there,

in my father’s beautiful Hebrew printing, was the

abbreviated heading “Boruch Hashem, Blessed

is the Lord.” Below that, my brother’s and my

Hebrew names, the date of our birth according to

the Jewish calendar and the

words, bonai hajkarim, my

dear children.

I stared silently at the

writing and the picture. I

stood frozen, numb. A myriad

of conflicting emotions

stormed through me. Many

of them I only recognized

and sorted out weeks and

months later.

Resentment and jealousy—

Lord help me—because I didn’t

have the page to myself; I need

share it, of course with my

brother, and also with these

other children. I’d always only

thought of them as my

father’s first children. But I

now realized—they are also

my half brothers and sister.

Rage. My f ists clenched, my jaw clamped.

What kind of monsters could order these people

into gas chambers?

Pain. Like the agony of someone whose

anesthesia has worn off after major surgery. For

the briefest moment, before I am overwhelmed by

the horror of it and need to push the emotions away,

I truly feel my father’s anguish. How he must have

ached when he looked at this picture. What was it

like to lose your wife and three children like that?

Next comes grief. For the first time in my life

I began to consciously grieve for my dead brothers

and sister and for the woman who might have been

my mother.

Hard on the heels of the grief came guilt—

recognition of my father’s and my own. I

understood that when he insisted on showing me

what he had written in his prayer book before

allowing me to see the picture, my father was

perhaps trying to reassure me that he loved me as

much as his other children. In my father’s prayer

book, and maybe in his silent prayers, all his

children were together. Did he ever feel guilty that

he was betraying their memories by loving us?

And there were my feelings of guilt, of shame;

the by now familiar guilt and shame of the child

of a survivor of the Holocaust; shame that I might

dare feel resentment and jealousy in the face of

the horrific losses my father has endured; guilt,

that my very existence mocks those losses. After

all, I might not have even been born were it not

for these people dying.

Finally, through the din of all these emotions, I

recognized gratitude. My father was giving me a

priceless gift. He was telling me, in the only way in

which he was capable, that I have been dear to

him; that he has loved me, loved us, though he

needed to keep his love secret, as he kept secret

his love and grief for his f irst family. Bonai

hajkarim, my dear children. He was letting me

know that, contrary to the way I’ve sometimes felt,

I’ve not been merely a replacement, a sad,

inadequate substitute, for all he has lost.

Finally, I admitted to myself that perhaps the

reason I hadn’t dared ask my father about his first

family was not only to spare him pain but because

it was too painful for me—too painful to

contemplate that my mother and brother and I

might not be first in his affections. I saw how we

conspired, colluded together to keep these secrets.

Perhaps I, like my father, also needed to pretend

all these years that these people have disappeared

from our lives.

And for the first time in my adult life I began

to think of him not as my hand-me-down father—

the father who first belonged to these other three

children—but as my own father; worn, torn,

patched and faded by all he experienced before I

was born, but still shielding me, protecting me, as

he was unable to shield and protect his first children.

I stared at the picture between the pages of

the book my father was holding. I could not look

at my father. Finally, I reached out and picked up

the picture. I held it gingerly, as though it was a

rare archeological artifact.

Taken sometime in the mid-’30s, it is a sepia

toned, informal, outdoor portrait of my father’s first

wife, Etta, his oldest son, Ernö, and his daughter,

Zelda. Etta, smiling faintly, clearly pregnant with

their third child Gyuri, is sitting on a simple wooden

chair, her hands folded in her lap, wearing the

traditional wig of orthodox Jewish women. Zelda,

blonde and plump, about four years old, wearing a

simple, short white dress and white knee socks, is

standing to her left, looking suspiciously into the

camera. Ernö, two years older, is standing next to

his sister, wearing a dark cap, white sailor outfit

with short pants, also with white knee socks, and

holds a small ball in front of him.

I pulled the picture close. I tried to see if there

is a resemblance between my half-brother and

sister and my brother and me but I was too stunned,

numbed to be able to make that judgment. To this

day I can’t tell. However, I noticed with some

amazement the strong resemblance between my

father’s first wife and my own mother.

I noticed something else. Three sides of the

photo are professionally trimmed, but the fourth,

the side where Ernö stands, is uneven and

rough. Suddenly, I recalled another photo, one

that I have seen before, in one of our family

albums. It is of my father, seated in a chair

identical to Etta’s. I realized with a start—this

was a family portrait that had been cut in half. I

was holding the picture of the family that was

torn away, destroyed in Auschwitz. My father

had been hiding them ever since, keeping them

safe, as he was not able to then.

I asked my father, “Why was this picture

cut?” I reminded him of the other half. Did he

cut it so he could fit this half into his wallet? Or

had someone else cut it?

My father looked at me incredulously, “This was

more than 50 years ago. Do you think I remember?”

cont’d on p. 21

Painting by Gabriele Alexander


By Jeanette Friedman

On March 26, 2008 Prof. Yaffa Eliach, the

Holocaust scholar and founder of the The Shtetl

Foundation and her beloved husband, Dr. Dovid

Eliach, the principal of Yeshiva Flatbush, were

honored with a lifetime achievement award by the

American Friends of Yeshivot Bnai Akiva in Israel.

In addition to being leading religious Zionists,

Yaffa Eliach has been a leader and founder of the

Holocaust education and commemoration

movement in the United States.

Dr. Yaffa Eliach, whose early childhood was

a recipe for personal disaster, has become one of

the pre-eminent Modern Orthodox Jewish female

scholars in the last 40 years. A pioneer in the field

of Holocaust Studies, author, professor and

lecturer, and founder of the Shtetl Foundation, she

is one of the best illustrations of how AMIT used

inspiration and perspiration to inject a passion for

Judaism in children and to help them heal from

the devastation they experienced under the Nazis

and the Bolsheviks. The people of AMIT gathered

them in youth villages like Tel Ranan and in

schools like Kfar Batya, where they were able to

heal and shape children’s lives by the way they

were taught and treated.

Yaffa Sonensohn-Ben-Shemesh arrived in

Kfar Batya after a tortured journey through the

hell that was the Holocaust. Liberated in July 1944,

her family returned home to Eishishok, near Vilna,

and were at dinner when Polish fascists, neighbors

known to the family, stormed the house and went

on a killing spree that took her mother and baby

brother. Yaffa survived because her mother’s body

shielded her from a hail of bullets.

The Communists brought the killers to justice,

and then her father was denounced by a Jewish

neighbor as a Zionist. He was imprisoned in the

local jail as the Soviets prepared to send him to

Siberia. Yaffa was brought to him by a Soviet police

officer to say good-bye. He did so, lovingly, in

three languages: in Russian, Yiddish and Ivrit.

“My child, I am Moshe and your mother was

Tzipporah, just like in the Chumash [Pentatuch].

God spoke to him in Ivrit, and I speak to you in

Ivrit.

“Yaffaleh, they are killing so many Jews now,

and you saw thousands killed, and your mother

and your two brothers. [Another brother was killed

before the attack on their home.] My child, you

must make sure that never again would Jews be

killed like this. You must do everything to make

sure it never happens again. The Torah says, ‘U

barchata chaim,’ choose life. Jewish life is the

center. My child, you must do everything for

Chaim Ha Yehudim [the life of the Jews]. Life is

our center. You must focus on life and you must

love good people, Ve ahavta le rayacha komocha

[You must love people as you love yourself, for

they are like you.]

“And my child, you must study and study and

study. You must study all the time because that is

how you learn to do what you need to do. We are

descendants of the Vilna Gaon, the eighth

generation. Do not forget who you are. They tried

to kill you in Radom and now they have me.

Therefore, focus on bacharta bechaim. Do not

cry. Study and study.”

This precocious 7-year-old was then sent on

her way, alone in the world, with her father’s words

burned into her soul. She knew she might never

see him again, and his words drove her to make

decisions and carry out acts other children her

age would never have been able to.

Yaffa left his cell and dug up money that had

been hidden in the yard of the house in which

they once lived. She made her way to Vilna to the

home of a woman her father thought would help

her. The woman took the money and threw the

child into the street. Yaffa immediately went to a

police officer who told her about a Communist

Jewish school. She got there, but when the

headmaster told her, “We know and respect your

father, and we want you to stay, but you cannot

speak Ivrit here and you cannot speak about loving

the land of Israel or they will send you to Siberia,

too,” she left.

Before the war, Yaffa’s uncle Shalom had lived

in Mandate Palestine and had official passports

for himself and his first wife and daughter. They

had been trapped in Europe during the Holocaust

and his wife and daughter were murdered. Now he

was somewhere in Vilna and Yaffa found him. His

second wife, Miriam, insisted on adopting Yaffa as

their own child and added two years to her age so

they could use his deceased daughter’s passport

for her. Miriam was also the name of Shalom’s first

wife, so the passports were useable. They could

now try to make their way to Eretz Yisrael.

When they arrived in the American sector,

Yaffa and Miriam were both very ill and taken to

different hospitals. Yaffa was near Munich, where

the staff told her they were going to baptize her.

She refused to allow it and screamed that Jesus

was a Jew and that Christianity could never exist

without Jews. One nun, Sister Henrietta, came to

her defense and said, “I love what you are saying,

I will help you run away. But when you get to

Jerusalem, you have to go the tree of Jesus in the

Old City and send me a branch so I know Jesus

saved me for saving you.” Yaffa promised.

One night, Sister Henrietta brought American

soldiers who took Yaffa from the hospital and

brought her to Shalom. It was miraculous, because

he and Miriam had given up on trying to find her

and were leaving the city the next morning. With

Yaffa and the baby in tow, they wandered Europe,

trying to get to a port city on the Mediterranean.

At last they found berths on a boat to Egypt and

months later made their way to Tel Aviv, finally

settling in Jerusalem. They were in a beautiful

apartment provided by the people from Eishishok

and Yaffa attended school where Shaul Barcali,

an Eishishoker, was the headmaster. Their great

hope was that her father and one surviving brother

would be released and come to Israel.

Almost immediately after arriving in

Jerusalem, Miriam and Yaffa went to look for the

Tree of Jesus, took a branch and sent it to Sister

Henrietta. With the branch as her personal sign

from her Saviour, the Sister helped the chief rabbi

of Israel gather 12,000 Jewish children who had

been hidden by Christian families and send them

to Israel.

Yaffa, now 10 years old, was told that Shalom

no longer had enough money to support her and

that she needed to go to Youth Aliyah offices,

where they handled war orphans. After an

interview, Yaffa was designated as nonreligious,

against her will, and assigned to Hashomer

Hatzair, the nonreligious socialist organization.

Yaffa ran to the Nazir of Jerusalem, one of

the religious leaders in the city, who was a family

friend and showed him the slip from Youth Aliyah.

He was furious and called his wife and her friend,

who both worked at AMIT’s Meshec Yiladim

Motzah, a children’s village for survivors of the

Holocaust. The women marched Yaffa back to the

Youth Aliyah office and confronted the director.

Her assignment was quickly changed.

Yaffa Ben-Shemesh was brought to Tel Ranan,

where a beautiful new village had been built.

“Every morning the boys and girls were taken to

the school in Bnai Brak. AMIT brought us beautiful

books and concentrated on teaching us more than

the superf icial. They made learning exciting,

allowed us to read what we wanted and allowed

us to make presentations about our independent

studies. They cared about us and made us feel

loved, whole and close.”

Yaffa graduated from elementary school in

1951 and went to Kfar Batya, where Rabbi Dovid

Eliach was the headmaster. When she attended her

first class with Eliach a few days later, Yaffa says,

“I realized he was the best teacher I ever had, and

became very active in the school. He inspired me,

and gave me the nerve to ask my teachers to teach

about the Jews of Europe in a positive way, because

they were stressing the negative.”

In 1951, Yaffa and her classmate, Shulamit

Mussler, through the efforts of AMIT, were the

first two Orthodox young women to study Talmud

in Israel.

“Yaffa was also an athlete, a track star, a

basketball player, a swimmer and one of the best

students in the drama club. This was because Kfar

Batya taught an open Orthodoxy. We woke our

children with classical music every morning; we

kept our minds open to new ideas.”

Soon after Yaffa Sonensohn graduated in

1953, she asked Dovid Eliach to marry her. To

the chagrin of many of his colleagues, he agreed,

and two months after they married, he came to

America to take up his career at the Yeshiva of

Flatbush. Yaffa followed nine months later.

By 1972, she had established the pioneering

Center for Holocaust Studies in Brooklyn that

became the core collection of artifacts for the

Museum of Jewish Heritage-Living Memorial to

the Holocaust in New York City. She designed

and taught the first Holocaust Studies course in

the City University of New York and sustained a

successful university career that spanned 30 years.

She conceived of and designed the powerful Tower

of Eishishok at the United State Holocaust

Memorial Museum. Today, she is the director and

founder of the Shtetl Foundation, an educational

center about the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust

being built in Rishon LeZion, Israel.

Yaffa Eliach: The Best and the Brightest


SURVIVOR MITZVAHPROJECTLOS ANGELES, CA.—It has been more than half

a century since the dust has settled from the

ravages of Word War II. The Survivor Mitzvah

Project recognizes that for many Holocaust

survivors living in Eastern Europe, the war

continues to haunt them every day. Throughout

the world, these forgotten heroes struggle to live

out their remaining years with incomes too meager

to pay for even their most basic needs: food,

medicine, heat and shelter.

Reaching out to these silent sufferers is Zane

Buzby, a Hollywood insider who has directed

countless hours of episodic television for classics

such as The Golden Girls, Newhart, Married...With

Children, and the upcoming new media comedy,

Stomp the Run.

Zane’s lifelong fascination for the Jewish

history that paved her family’s identity prompted

her 2001 trip to Lithuania and Belarus, where she

confronted the suffering that still existed there

among elderly Holocaust survivors who were

battling poverty and illness. Many were bedridden

and could not afford healthcare or medication.

She decided immediately that it was her mission

to care for these people. She asked herself, “If

not me, who?” reflecting on the Jewish tradition

of tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase that means

“repairing the world.”

Buzby is accomplishing her goal with the help

of philanthropist and fellow Angeleno S. Chic

Wolk, with whom she co-founded the Survivor

Mitzvah Project in 2004, and with Russian

translator Sonia Kovitz, who lives in Columbus,

Ohio, who joined them in 2005. All are volunteers.

The three malokhim fun Amerike (angels from

America), as the survivors call them, assist by

sending money and, even more critically, by

providing friendship and hope to people who are

among Eastern Europe’s poorest, loneliest and

most forsaken Jews.

Many of the survivors, currently ages 70 to

100, are ill with such ailments as heart disease,

diabetes, digestive disorders and thyroid cancer.

Many never married, others have outlived their

spouses and children and some are caring for

disabled or mentally ill offspring.

Additionally, many have limited or no vision,

and most have no teeth. And almost all experience

numbing loneliness, some because they are

immobile and confined to a walk-up apartment,

and some because they are the sole surviving Jew

in their family or village.

Since they are not off icially Holocaust

survivors—they were not imprisoned in ghettos

or concentration camps—they are not eligible for

reparations from the German government.

Nonetheless, they were forced to flee their homes

and lost everything.

Whatever pensions or savings accounts they

had accumulated were obliterated when the

communist regimes of the former Soviet Union

collapsed. Prior to that time, depending on their

ages, they also suffered through the Russian

Revolution, World War I, the famines of the 1930s,

World War II, Stalin and the Chernobyl nuclear

disaster.

“These people have not gotten one break since

the day they were born,” Buzby said.

What the Survivor Mitzvah Project does for

these survivors—and what other Jewish social

service organizations, such as the American

Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC),

cannot do because monetary gifts are taxable,

according to JDC CEO Steven Schwager—is

provide direct cash allotments, enabling them to

supplement their meager pensions, often as low

as $16 a month, to purchase essential and specific

foods, medications and services.

“A dollar or $1.50 a day can make a substantial

difference to these people,” said Buzby, who would

ideally like to provide each one with $50 to $100

per month. But with about 700 individuals needing

help, and with limited resources, this is not

possible.

While Buzby is always doing triage, making

critical decisions about how the funds are

distributed, she stresses that all the monies go

directly to the survivors, whose economic situation

has been carefully vetted beforehand. There is no

paid staff, and any expenses, such as postage, are

covered by her or Wolk.

Buzby disperses funds through a complicated

and secure network, either as checks or cash sent

through registered mail or money wired to local

couriers. Recently, she herself took an emotional

16-day whirlwind trip to Lithuania and Belarus,

distributing $25,000, as well as mezuzahs, Stars of

David and other small gifts such as magnifying

glasses and compact mirrors, to about 100 survivors,

whom she met in person for the first time.

But money is only one part of the mitzvah.

The other, equally valuable, is the friendship and

hope that Buzby, Wolk and translator Kovitz bring

the survivors.

“A letter from America is just as incredibly

golden today as it was in 1911,” Buzby said, noting

that each survivor, except those in Moldova where

the mail is unreliable, receives a personal letter,

written in Russian, every six to eight weeks, along

with an addressed return envelope for the reply.

Some have never previously received letters.

Buzby, Wolk and Kovitz send holiday greetings

and share their family histories. They also send

photos of themselves and their relatives, which

occupy places of honor in the survivors’ home.

The three become family for the survivors, who

read and reread their letters, admire the photographs

and worry when they don’t hear from them.

“I have been accustomed to hunger since

childhood. I wanted at least in old age to live in a

human way. Thank you very much that you do

not forget me,” Raisa K. wrote.

“Our organization is working to help these

individuals live out their f inal years in some

measure of comfort and dignity, with the

knowledge that they are no longer alone,” says

Zane.

Over the past several years, The Survivor

Mitzvah Project has reached out to hundreds of

Holocaust survivors in over seven countries in

Europe. Her organization is the only one of its

kind where 100% of the funds go directly into the

hands of those in need.

The Survivor Mitzvah Project is committed to

improving the lives of the world’s Holocaust

survivors by placing financial aid directly into their

hands. Beyond monetary aid, the organization

offers hope, love, friendship and comfort and is a

beacon of light for survivors.

For more information on the Survivor Mitzvah

Project, or to make a donation, please visit

www.survivormitzvah.org or call 800-905-6160.

REMEMBERING AUSTRIAby Renee Balaban

Four years ago with the backing of the Austrian

government, a small group of people organized

one of the largest school projects in the entire

country entitled, “A Letter to the Stars.” To date,

more than 40,000 high school students have

participated, many of them researching the

histories and experiences of Austrian victims and

survivors of the Holocaust. They participated in

inspiring memorial events and have shown

themselves capable of dealing with Austria’s past

in a touching and hopeful manner. The group has

compiled a unique list of 2,500 people from

Austria who survived the Nazi regime in

concentration camps, in hiding or in exile and now

live dispersed around the world. My mother as

well as many others were asked to be involved in

this wonderful and exciting program.

In 2003, 15,000 students released white

balloons attached to letters they had written to

Austrian citizens who died during the Holocaust,

80,000 in all, from Heldenplatz in Vienna.

In 2004, students helped plan and moderate

an event commemorating the liberation of

Mauthausen concentration camp, planting

100,000 sunflowers on a field outside the camp

and releasing hundreds of doves of peace above

a crowd of 20,000 people.

In May 2005, during the “Night of Silence,”

the students held a silent all-night vigil at the

Mauthausen concentration camp where 100,000

memorial candles were lit in memory of the

100,000 people killed there.

In 2006, “A Letter to the Stars” project

included “flowers of remembrance.” On May 5,

2006, more than 15,000 students placed 80,00

white roses in front of every house or apartment

in which an Austrian victim of the Nazi regime

lived before his or her deportation and murder—

a stark reminder to Austrians of how “visible” the

disappearance of their neighbors had been.

cont’d on p. 21


Being a child of survivors who were hidden

during the Holocaust, I have always felt a strong

sense of identification with Anne Frank. On Yom

Kippur of my 9th year, my parents told me about

the tragedy that befell our family and countless

others during the Shoah. By the Yizkor candles lit

for my dead grandparents, aunts, uncles, and

cousins, I was also told about the righteous gentiles

who hid my parents and saved their lives.

After reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I felt

inspired to keep a diary and write poems. My mother

told me that my father, Edmund Kessler, also kept

a diary during the war in which he wrote beautiful

poems. I understood some Polish and asked my

mother to read them to me. “When you are older,”

I was told. When I was 15 years old I translated a

poem my father wrote about the Lwow Ghetto. I

did not find this poem until after my mother’s death.

Toward the end of my father’s life, my parents

shared with me several more poems that my father

wrote while hiding in an underground bunker with

23 other people in Lwow. My father read the poems

out loud while my mother typed them. I translated

them into English. He became very emotional and

began experiencing chest pains, at which point we

had to stop. My mother then reassured my father,

“What you did not do, Renata will do,” knowing

that I had a way with words and an ability to write.

Though my father died in 1985, it was only

until after my mother’s death in 1996, while going

through everything in her apartment, that I found

the poems interspersed in a wartime diary that my

father kept from 1942-1944. The diary had been

hidden in a linen closet between sheets and towels

among various other personal papers. I wanted to

understand more about my parents’ lives during

the Shoah and decided to have the diary translated

into English.

One of the people hidden in the bunker, Leon

Wells, author of the Janowska Road, connected me

with a translator, Eugene Bergman, himself a

survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. I also contacted

the son of my parents’ rescuers, Kazimierz

Kalwinski, who as a teenager was a primary

caretaker for hidden Jews. He brought food, took

out waste, and informed the hidden Jews of news

from the outside world. He slept over the bunker

and kept vigil at night. He and his family were part

of the resistance movement in Poland and

distributed an underground newspaper for the

Home Army.

Kazimierz and I exchanged a series of letters

between 1997-1998. He invited me to come to

Poland and meet him. Our meeting was a joyous

occasion. The son of Wojciech and Katarzyna

Kalwinski helped me to become whole, as had

reading my father’s diary for the first time. The

shadows from the past that had haunted me all my

life came to light, bringing a new clarity and a new

purpose to my life. I realized that the story of the

Kalwinski family hiding the Jews in the bunker

during the Nazi reign of terror had great moral

value. We decided to share this story with others

and conceived the idea of writing a book, as a lesson

for future generations.

During my first visit to Poland, I was advised

not to visit the hiding place, because Lviv (the former

Lwow) was not considered safe. However, after the

diary had been translated, my desire to go there

overcame my fear. I knew it was necessary for me to

see my city of origin in order for me to write a

meaningful epilogue for my father’s book. My

epilogue, “The Search,” was an odyssey to find my

true identity.

In 2004, accompanied by my cousin Anna from

London, I visited Lviv, Ukraine, the former “City

of Lions,” our ancestral home. We also visited the

bunker where my parents were hidden for a period

of almost two years. A simple farmhouse had been

the place of my parents’ salvation, a place where

ordinary people did extraordinary things at great

risk to their own lives. My father wrote about the

Kalwinski family in his diary, “So in my life I have

met with both good and evil. Now I know that I

owe my life to the fact that admirable people still

live in this world.”

Visiting Lviv was a powerful experience. It was

indeed heartbreaking to see firsthand the historical

buildings owned by my family for generations now

in the hands of strangers. The architectural elegance

of the city was impressive, but it had been left

neglected since the war. Lwow had been reputed to

equal Krakow, Vienna, and Prague—having also been

the summer residence of the Polish King. During our

visit, we were protected and guided by the Jewish

Community of Lviv. These contacts were given to us

by the Jewish Historical Institue in Warsaw, which

also became became interested in publishing my

father’s diary along with the memoirs of Kazimierz

Kalwinski and my personal search for my past.

In December 2007, my parents’ dream came

true. The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler was

published in its original Polish language by the

Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw under the title

Przezyc Holokaust We Lwowie (Surviving The

Holocaust in Lwow).

The diary, an eyewitness account written in raw

documentary style by my father, a Jewish attorney,

describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the

Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an

underground bunker where he was hidden by a

Polish farmer and his family for a period of almost

two years until the Soviet liberation of Lwow in

July 1944.

After the liberation, my parents repatriated to

Poland. After experiencing two post-war pogroms

in Rzeszow and Krakow, they fled to Vienna, where

I was born. In Vienna, my father was associated

with the International Committee for Jewish

Refugees and Concentration Camp Internees. He

served in the capacity of secretary and later as

chairman from 1946-1952. This Committee

administered the refugee camps in Vienna, including

camp Rothchild through which were processed over

200,000 Jewish refugees. The Committee and

Edmund Kessler were recognized for their efforts

by the Austrian AJDC, the U.S. High Commission,

the Austrian Government, and the IRO.

My search for the story is documented in the

book’s epilogue. The search took me to Israel,

Poland, and the Ukraine. I have collected the

testimonies of the other survivors of the bunker,

Leon Weliczker Wells (who wrote the foreword)

and Lusia Sicher (now Lea Gera), who lives in

Israel. Kazimierz Kalwinski contributed a chapter

to the book as well. He describes his parents as

“Noble and big Poles,” people of rare bravery and

goodness who exposed themselves to mortal

danger by saving 24 lives Jewish lives during the

bloodthirsty German occupation.”

The Kalwinski family was honored by Yad

Vashem as Righteous Among The Nations. Their

brave deeds are a testament to the other types of

neighbors, who risked their lives to save Jews. In a

newspaper account which reported on reactions to

the NBC-TV Holocaust series, Mrs. Kalwinska

explained her bravery by saying, “If God had

wanted me to die because I saved Jews, I was ready

to go up on the cross, like Jesus.” The New School

for Social Research set up a fellowship in her honor.

This is a story of Christians who risked their

lives to save Jews and also the story of Jews who

prevailed against those who sought to wipe them

off the face of the earth. Edmund Kessler reflects

on the slaughter of the Jews as the world stood by.

In his diary he writes, “Regardless of victory or

defeat, the idea is to kill off all the Jews, no matter

the war’s outcome. Neither morality or law count.

We had believed that the world would be outraged

and aghast at such atrocities. Since then life has

become even more terrible and our sufferrings

redoubled. The world should sit on the bench of

the accused!”

The diary addresses collective responsibility

and the need for moral self-examination about the

Holocaust.

Close to my parents hiding place, a nearby

Christian family was found hiding Jews. They were

all hanged from trees in the marketplace with signs,

“hiding Jews,” and left there for several days for

all to see. Upon hearing the news, my parents and

the other Jews hidden in the farmer’s bunker wanted

to leave their hiding place, so as not to jepordize

the farmer and his family. The farmer realized that

they would be caught and tortured to reveal their

hiding place and he said, “If we die, we all die

together.” Fortunately, they lived to tell the story.

This story has become my legacy.

Przezyc Holokaust We Lwowie can be ordered by sending

an e-mail to the JHI Bookstore at [email protected]. An

educational seminar about the book is being planned at

the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The seminar is

aimed at historians, Holocaust educators, students, and lay

people interested in the Jews of Lwow.

Surviving The War in Lwow: The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler, 1942-1944by Renata Kessler


A Hidden Child FoundBy Helga M. Morrow

On Friday, January 19, 2007, the Executive

Director of our community association informed

me that her office had received an email from

someone who was looking for Helga Morrow.

Although she forwarded the email to me, she

wondered whether it was a hoax. It was not. The

episode referred to in the email happened 63 years

ago during the Second World War in the

Netherlands when I was a Jewish child in hiding.

The email started as follows:

“Dear Mrs Morrow,

I’m looking for Mrs Helga Morrow, the

daughter of Mr Felix & Eva Magnus. If you are so,

you’ll understand the reason of this mail. I’m Leo

Bielders, the youngest son of the Bielders family,

in Houthem St. Gerlach, the Netherlands. My family

is looking for contact with your family, as after so

many years we wish to remember an important

episode of both families during WWII.”

Here is my story: I am Jewish—a Holocaust

survivor—and was a hidden child during World

War II in the Netherlands.

In May 1940, when the Germans invaded and

quickly conquered Holland, we lived in Breda, a

small city in the southern part of Holland.

Restrictions on Jews in Breda, the city of my birth,

began in 1941. There were eleven of us in our

household—my parents and their five children,

my mother’s sister Paula and her daughter Ruth,

my grandfather and Jennie, the daughter of my

father’s sister. The first directive was that all Jewish

people in our town had to register with the local

authorities. The Jewish community was small, well-

organized and readily participated in the registration

process, not knowing at that time that this action

would greatly facilitate the round-up and

deportation of its members. The information that

was collected included the addresses, places of

work, gender and date and place of birth of every

Jewish person in the community. The efficient

registration system made it very easy for the Nazis

to find us. During the first seven to eight months

of 1941, other than the registration process, my

family was able to continue to lead relatively

ordinary lives. Although my parents became

increasingly aware of the attacks on Jews in

Holland, they did not yet feel the imminent danger

that would overwhelm us so completely and in such

a short time.

The dramatic changes began in late 1941, when

Jews were ordered to reregister and were issued

new identity cards imprinted with a large J. Those

cards were necessary to receive rationing coupons,

which allowed us to buy food and other necessities.

We were also ordered to put yellow and black

patches with the J on all our clothing. Other

restrictions followed rapidly: all radios, binoculars,

and cameras were confiscated, shopping hours were

restricted to one hour a day between 3-4 p.m., we

were not allowed to have servants or other non-

Jewish people living in our house, nor were Jewish

children allowed to attend school.

Deportations to the concentration camps started

in the spring of 1942. The first member of our

family to be “called up” was my cousin Jennie,

who was ordered to go to the Dutch transit/work

camp in Westerbork in the north of Holland, where

she was held a prisoner for several months before

she made a daring escape. She and her sister Hettie

were able to stay in hiding during the remaining

war years, but both her parents were transported to

Auschwitz, where they died. My aunt Paula and

her 15-year-old daughter Ruth were next to be

called up. They were told to report for work at

Westerbork as well, and although my aunt had been

offered a hiding place with a dentist for whom she

worked, they went as ordered. After a few days in

Westerbork, they were transported to Auschwitz,

where they were murdered a short time later.

The remaining members of our family stayed

in our house until one night in September 1942

when there was a knock on our door. My father

opened the door and found a gentleman standing

on our doorstep who asked to come in. My father

recognized him, as he was the brother of the woman

who owned a little grocery store just down street

from where we lived and where we shopped. His

name was Mr. Van Pinxteren and he turned out to

be one of our saviors. He told us that he had seen

my grandfather walking in the neighborhood with

his grandchildren in tow and that he also knew what

was happening to Jewish people. Of course on the

sleeve of my grandfather’s coat was the J. He

informed us that there was to be another round-up

(razia) of Jews and that we would likely to be among

them. He told my parents that, as he was an official

with the city government, he could help us get false

papers. He also informed us that we had to leave

Breda immediately and that he would help us to

get new names. We left a few days later, splitting

up the family. My sister Anita and my brother

Norman left first to live temporarily with a family

in another part of town. Their bed was a bathtub

and they were told not to make any noise. The family

was afraid that if the people living in the apartment

below them would find out that there were Jewish

children hiding there, they would report this to the

Nazis, and everyone’s life would be in danger. After

two weeks of living in the bathroom, they left on a

night train for Bilthoven, a small city in the middle

of the country, where the Boeke family voluntarily

took them in. Betty and Kees Boeke, devout

Quakers, founded the first true Montessori School

in Holland called the Werkplaats and they

welcomed Anita and Norman along with several

other Jewish children with open arms. My baby

sister Rita was placed with a wonderful Catholic

family in Lisse. She died of diphtheria a year later

because as a child in hiding she could not obtain

medical care. My parents, grandfather, one other

sister and I took a train to Maastricht—a city in the

South of Holland. My sister Ingrid and I did not

stay there long, rather we were sent to the center of

Holland and moved from stranger to stranger and

house to house throughout the remaining years of

the war. After some painful encounters with cruel

families, we finally also ended up in Bilthoven with

a daughter of the Boeke family. This was a

tremendous relief for us.

Meanwhile, my parents and grandfather

remained in soutern Holland, living as non-Jewish

refugees in a number of hotels and boarding homes

for two years. Finally, in early 1944, my mother

found a few rooms she could rent with the Bielders

family in Houthem, a small town near Maastricht

in the southernmost tip of Holland. The families

shared the kitchen but maintained separate

households. Later, in 1944, my mother, at great risk,

traveled to Bilthoven to visit her children and to

bring my sister Ingrid and me “home” to the

Bielders’ house. We stayed there until the end of

1944. It was a mixed blessing. Of course, we were

grateful to be back with our parents and to be in

Houthem. We were among the first Dutch to be

liberated on September 17, 1944. Had we stayed

in our hiding places further north, we would not

have been liberated until April/May 1945. Yet, it

was extremely difficult for all of us to live with

our unwilling hosts. It seems that due to the severe

housing shortage, people with spare rooms were

forced to take in refugees and our hostess was

angry that she was required to shelter us. The

Bielders had been told that my family was

Christian and had lived in Emden, Germany, but

had moved back to Holland when the war broke

out. Of course none of that was true. We were

Jewish refugees with false passports, false names

and false identity cards and our family was split up.

All families who voluntarily sheltered Jews

risked their own lives. The danger that Jews in

hiding faced daily became apparent to us after

liberation when we were told that someone known

to us in Houthem would have denounced us to the

Nazis if that person had known we were Jewish.

Whether this would have happened in actuality we

will never know.

It is surprising that among the many people

who voluntarily helped us survive the war years

that it is a member of the Bielders family, who made

so much effort to find us. He searched Google and

eventually found me listed as a member of the

Board of RRLRAIA in one of the newsletters now

readily available on the Web. He contacted the

office and the rest is now history.

Since that email from Leo Bielders, both my

sister Anita and I have had been corresponding with

him and his older brother. We are trying to

understand each side of the story, hoping to shed

some light on a period in history that was so

traumatic to so many.

There is much more to our Holocaust

experience than written here in this article. Most of

our large extended family died in concentration

camps. Anita made a tape of our Holocaust story,

which is available at the Holocaust Museum in

Washington. Anita and I have also told our story

to Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, so that

that period in history will never be forgotten.

Through our efforts, Mr. Van Pinxteren and

Kees and Betty Boeke were officially recognized

by the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem as

Righteous Gentiles. Trees were planted in their

honor and they will always be remembered for the

sacrifices they made.

It is generally not known that 95% of all Jews

in Holland perished during WWII—a larger

proportion than any country in Europe. My

immediate family was among the few fortunate

ones and we will always be extremely grateful to

those who put their own lives at risk so that we

could survive.


My name is Edmund “Eddie” Rosianu. I was

born in 1929 in Bucharest, Romania. This is the

story of my life—my struggles, determination and

perseverance, and ultimately of my success in

achieving my dreams.

The persecution of the Jews in Romania began

in 1941. Jews were randomly taken from their

homes to slaughterhouses and killed. It was

obvious to me that I had to leave Romania if I

was to survive.

In 1946, at the age of 16, I left Romania with

eight other boys and one girl. Each of us had a

different destination—mine the U.S.A., the others

destined for Canada and South America. As we

crossed the border into Hungary, a person who

pretended to be a border guard detained us. He

was armed and threatened to kill us if we didn’t

give him our money and possessions. In the dark

of night and obviously scared, we gave him

everything. Afterward, our journey to Budapest

took a few weeks. Along the way we were helped

by rabbis who provided us with shelter in their

synagogues. I had left Romania with $200 but

arrived in Budapest with nothing.

We were taken in by a Jewish refugee

organization that sent us to a vinyard to work.

After two months, I was able to correspond

with my family. I learned that one of my

brothers, Iona, after numerous attempts, had

finally escaped from Romania and was now

in Hungary. We were reunited at the vinyard.

One afternoon, we received word that we

were to leave at midnight for the Hamburg

shore, where we were to take a ship to Israel.

At midnight, a man from Palestine appeared

to guide us on our journey. Along the way

we were joined by other refugees. Over the

next few days, we made a few stops for food

and rest, f inally reaching Belgrade,

Yugoslavia at night. As we made our way to

the train station, we were surprised to see that

the train platform was filled with soldiers who

were there to prevent anyone from entering their

country. Our leader told us that if we were asked

from where we came that we were Jewish refugees

from Nazi camps and that we should speak only

in Yiddish.

Luckily, we had no problem boarding the train

and arrived in Trieste early in the morning on a

cold December day. We were joined by more

refugees and soon boarded the Rafiah, a boat

normally used to transport cattle. Now it was

occupied by 800 people from Romania, Hungary

and Bulgaria. We slept in bunks below deck in

conditions so terrible as to be beyond description.

There was very little food and water, however we

kept going by our motivation to reach Israel. After

sailing for three days in the Mediterranean, the

ship was greeted by thunderstorms. Adding to the

danger was the captain hearing through his

shortwave radio that British patrol boats were

nearby.

Because of the rough waves, the captain

decided to seek refuge in Greek waters. On

December 7, 1946 at 4 p.m., the Rafiah hit some

rocks and began to sink. This was definitely the

most terrifying event of my life. I thought that I

would never survive. There was chaos everywhere

as men, women, children panicked. There was

crying everywhere. With the help of some sailors

who supplied us with a cable, we were able to

temporarily attach the boat to the rocks and

prevent it from rapidly sinking. People began to

jump overboard in desperation. Some of these

people were able to jump onto the rocks to safety

but others were sent to their death as they were

crushed between the rocks and the boat. I, along

with another man, attempted to help an old man

who was in the water between the boat and the

rocks. We tried to get him to hold onto a pole,

however he was a few feet too short. My brother

and friends were able to get on top of the rocks

and they called out for me to jump to them. I had

planned to jump into the water from the other side

of the ship. I was a strong swimmer and could

have easily reached the shore. In the end, I listened

to my brother and jumped toward the rocks.

Unfortunately, the rocks were slippery and I sank

several feet. I was injured and tired but managed

somehow to hold on. My brother and his friends

saved me by taking their pants’ belts and attaching

them to form a long line and used it to reel me in

to safety.

After 25 minutes, the ship sank. Twenty people

were killed, their dead bodies floating around us.

We collected the bodies and buried them on the

Greek island. Following that tragedy, our real hell

began.

We were stranded on the island of Cyrene.

Among us were ten Israelis who were our

commanders. We were told not to divulge who

they were in the event we were rescued by anyone

from a foreign country. The island itself was

deserted with the exception of a family consisting

of a husband, wife, and their two children, ten

sheep and a few chickens. Despite our difficult

situation, before the ship sank an S.O.S had been

sent so knew it was just a matter of time before

we were rescued.

In the meantime, the Israelis were able to strike

a deal with the family for an undisclosed amount

of money in $20 gold coins to kill the sheep for

food. First the children, pregnant women, sick and

the elderly ate, then, the young people. That was

the only food. There was no water readily

available, but since it was raining, we were able to

save some rainwater. After several days of

searching the island, we found a cave where our

presumably helpful island family had hidden a

barrel of raw f ish. We were happy to f ind an

additional source of food and within an hour had

consumed all of it. We were suffering, but

determined to survive.

Our first priority of course was the women,

children and sick people. They slept in the chicken

house, the dog house or the cave. As time went

on we began to lose hope of being rescued before

dying of starvation or malaria or some other

disease. Some of us had already developed a fever.

Despite having no shortage of doctors among us,

there was no medicine.

In the meantime, when the S.O.S had been

received in Israel, Mrs. Golda Meir, the then leader

of the Labor Department (the Sachnut) spoke with

a high-level English official to search for us. On

the fifth day, British, Greek, and French planes

began flying above and spotted us. Within hours,

they returned and parachuted to us medicine,

blankets, water and milk chocolate.

However, on the sixth day, British soldiers

came on the island and took us to the British ship

Independence. Seven hundred and eighty people

were sent down to the bottom of the ship where,

during the war, tanks and soldiers had been

transported to the front. Before going below, some

of us were stopped and escorted to a cabin where

two officers and one evil person sat at the top of

the table. I was one of those selected for

questioning. They first wanted to know where I

was originally from and who was my leader? They

promised that if I cooperated they would provide

me with documents to immigrate to my country

of choice along with any members of my

family. They asked their questions in

English, Italian, German and Russian. I

knew some French from my school days

so I understood what was being asked of

me. The question was “Who is our leader?”

I answered with my finger pointed towards

my chest as I spoke in Romanian. Then,

they released me.

We were locked in below deck and

were told that we were being sent to

Cyprus where there was a British camp

for Jews who had tried to enter Palestine

illegally. Our Israeli leader told us that we

should go on a hunger strike if they didn’t

take us to Haifa. All 780 people on the

ship started chanting “Haifa, Haifa,

Haifa.” However, when we arrived in

Cyprus, they forced us out with tear gas.

After spending nine months in a camp, an

order was given that priority would be given to

sick people, pregnant women, and children under

the age of 16 and elderly over 60. I was 17 but

looked much younger so I could have gone.

Eventually, however, we finally arrived in Palestine

and were put directly into a quarantine camp for

three months. After I was liberated from the

quarantine camp, I was sent to the small town of

Kfar-Saba. I worked during the day and every

other night I worked with the Haganah helping to

secure the border against the Arabs. Six months

later, my brother and I had to choose one of us to

join the army. I decided to go since I was seven

years younger.

The English occupation of Palestine was in

its last days. Israel began to form its own army

and we started training. I fought for Israeli

independence from 1947 until I was discharged

in 1949. After 25 years, in 1971, a committee

was organized to bring to Israel the bones of our

fallen friends. With help from institutions, activist

groups and a politician survivor from the Rafiah,

our friends’ dream to live and die in Eretz Israel

will someday be fulfilled.

My Name is Edmund...by Edmund Rosianu


The Prince and the JewBy George Oscar Lee

There is an antisemitic (only if told by gentiles)

joke that goes like this: In a small Galician town

in Eastern Poland, there was a monument erected

to an Unknown Soldier of the first World War. If

one should come close enough to read the

inscription, he or she would see that it was

dedicated to the memory of Isidore Gottlieb. But

how could that be? Unknown soldier Isidore

Gottlieb? Yes, patiently the inhabitants of the town

would explain that Isidore Gottlieb was well known

as a furrier, but as a soldier he was indeed

unknown. The joke is even funnier when told by

Jews to other Jews.

But if a joke could be coined there would be

another side to this story. There was and still is a

Galician town in what is now Ukraine called

Drohobycz which, at the time of the first World

War, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The town was booming because from nearby

Boryslav petroleum was flowing via pipelines to

Drohobycz’s oil ref ineries and transported the

world over. Another nearby town, Truskawiec,

became a famous resort place, where fancy people

drank waters to help their kidneys.

The town of Drohobycz also had salt mines,

several high schools (Gymnasiums), army

regimental headquarters and three railroad

stations. Every Monday was a market day

(Yannark). Peasants from the surrounding areas

would bring their agricultural products and cattle

to sell to the town’s population and at the same

time buy other needed items from the mainly

Jewish merchants living in the town. There were

also Jewish tailors, shoemakers, cabinetmakers,

artisans, and a unique shop that manufactured

leather goods, such as pocketbooks, attache cases,

valises, and steamer trunks for people traveling

abroad. In that shop was a foreman known for the

quality of his workmanship. His leather goods

would last a lifetime.

At the age of 20, after working in the shop

seven years, Isidore was made the shop’s foremen.

To celebrate his promotion and his birthday, Joel

Einsiedler bought a bottle of schnapps. Even the

owner was so pleased with Joel that he insisted

on having a drink with him. As they drank a prosit

to each other, someone walked into the shop

waving a local newspaper with big black headlines:

“Archduke Ferdinand Assassinated in Sarajevo.

Austria Declares War.”

Hardly six months later Joel was conscripted

into the Austrian Army along with other young

Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians from the area. For

basic training he was sent to the larger town of

Przemysl. There he became an assistant medic

(stretcher bearer). The discipline was very harsh.

Having an antisemitic Slovak drill sergeant wasn’t

exactly a picnic, but a crocodile leather

pocketbook given to the Sergeant’s girlfriend

changed everything. Joel started to tolerate the

Army especially on the day of becoming a

Gefreiter (Private First Class) of the Austrian 77th

Infantry Regiment, better known as “Sim-Sim

KooKooRicoo” (7-7 Early Reveille). Joel was

given a week’s furlough to go home and straighten

out his civilian affairs, saying good-bye to his

parents living on Zupna Street, and saying good-

bye to his girlfriend, a Ms. Sellinger. Nothing in

life goes faster than a furlough. His whole family

accompanied Joel to the railroad station where,

after tearful good-byes, Joel boarded the train to

join his army unit.

As soon as he was issued all the components

that make a soldier a soldier he was shipped to

the Eastern front along with several other young

men from his hometown. Joel was basically a shy

person having left town only once at the age of

15 to see Vienna, otherwise he never left the town.

Of medium height he was of stocky build and

quite strong physically. As a result he could keep

his own against the gentile Jew haters. In the army

he tried to get along with everyone, but try as he

might he had constant arguments with a Czech

fellow by the name of Hans Malina, who was at

least a head taller than Joel. Only fists could solve

their differences. On one occasion, Hans brought

two other friends to teach Joel “good manners.”

The situation became rather grim for Joel. But help

came from totally unexpected quarters. Two

fellows from Joel’s hometown named Stanislaw

Tomaszewski, a half Pole and half Ukrainian, and

Miroslaw Pyc, all Ukrainian.

Both had been known in town

as Jew haters, but in this case

were rescuing a fellow

countryman.

With the odds evened out,

Joel and his new friends beat

the living daylights out of

Hans and his company.

Surprisingly, nobody reported

the f ight to the Sergeant

Major. Joel, Stanislaw, and

Miroslaw became very close

friends watching out for each

other. From that day on

nobody ever bothered Joel

again. No wonder they were

called the three Musketeers.

In the meantime, after initial successes, the

war started to turn against the combined Austro-

Hungarian-German forces. Joel’s company started

to spend more and more time in the trenches. Rain,

snow, rats, lice and hunger started to take its toll

on the men. Even the camp followers, the local

whores, stopped “servicing” the soldiers.

The frontal attacks, preceded by the artillery

barrages, produced zero results, just more and

more dead and wounded on both sides. The

Germans would yell,”Gott mit uns” (God with us)

and the Russians would yell “Hurrah” when

attacking. God was with no one in particular. The

Germans were deathly afraid of the Russian long

bayonet, which was triangular in shape with deep

grooves so that blood could flow more easily. The

Russians adhered to General Suvorov’s principle:

“Pula-dura, shtik molodets,” a bullet is blind, but

a bayonet never fails.

All kinds of rumors and stories were flying.

Joel heard about a Jewish soldier from Buczacz,

who captured single handedly nine Russian

soldiers all of whom were Jewish. It seems that

on a clear moonlit night he yelled out of his

trenches towards the Russians: “Yidn, I need nine

men for a minyan” (Jewish quorum needed for

prayer service), and nine men crawled over the

barbed wire towards the German lines. When they

reached this fellow from Buczacz he yelled

“Hande hoch” (“hands up”), and brought the nine

prisoners to the company’s headquarters. For this

he was decorated and promoted to Feldfebel

(Corporal) and given two weeks furlough.

In one of those ill-conceived attacks, the loss

of life was particularly heavy. The calls for medics

and stretchers were everywhere. Joel ran from

place to place trying to help and at the same time

watch out for his own behind.

Suddenly the cry of “Helfmir, helfmir, bitte”

(“Help me, help me, please”) came from a man

laying near a bush. Upon approaching, Joel

discovered a bloody mess. On a closer look Joel

noticed it was a staff off icer with a major’s

insignia. The major was bleeding profusely. Joel

immediately attended to his wounds and stopped

the bleeding. Later on he carried the major,

piggyback style all the way to the First Aid station.

An Army doctor noticing Joel carrying an officer

came over and called for medical orderlies.

Although the major was in much pain and had

lost a lot of blood, he still had the presence of

mind to ask Joel: “Wie heisst Du?” (“What is your

name?”). “Gefreiter Joel Einsiedler, Herr Major,

zum Befehl.” (“Private First Class Joel Einsiedler,

at your service, sir.”) Joel also mentioned his unit

and the name of his company C.O.,

Captain Dieter Jelenik.

“Danke” said the major, and

shook Joel’s hand. Then Joel went

back to his duties. About two to

three weeks later Joel was called to

the company’s headquarters to see

Captain Jelenik. This time Joel was

really scared. To see the captain?

The captain never bothered with

the likes ofa PFC Einsiedler. Joel

brushed clean his uniform,

polished his metal buttons, belt, and

boots and on the double ran to the

captain’s bunker. He was stopped

at the door by a sergeant who said

“Warten Sie ein Moment” (“Wait a

minute”). A couple of minutes later he was ushered

into the captain’s presence. Joel clicked his heels

and saluted smartly and said “Gefreiter Einsiedler,

meldete Gehorsam” (“PFC Einsiedler, reporting

as ordered”). The captain returned Joel’s salute

and said, “At ease soldier.” Joel glanced around.

In addition to Captain Jelenik,were other officers.

Sitting near the captain’s desk was no one else

but the major whom Joel carried from the

battlef ield. The only difference now was the

major’s rank. This time he was an Oberst (full

colonel). The colonel seemed to be a bit pale, but

looked fine nevertheless.

“Hapt ach” (“Attention”). Joel stood at

attention, scared even to breathe. “In der Name

den Kaiser Franz-Josef Und Vateriand, I decorate

you for your bravery under fire and saving the

life of Oberst-Count Kurt von Schuschnigg with

an Iron Cross II Class and promote you to the

rank of Feldfebel (Corporal).” Joel shook hands

with everybody in the room including the colonel

who quietly said, “Ich werde es Dier nie mahl

fergessen” (“I’ll never forget you”).

Joel returned back to his dugout where he was

quickly surrounded by his buddies who tossed

him in the air several times. As a bona fide hero

everyone treated him with respect. He was

excused from many menial duties. Eventually, the

“war to end all wars” finally ended.

Joel was one of the f irst soldiers to be

discharged. He made his way back to his home

town and after a few days of rest went back to his

shop. The owner had aged in those years beyond

Count Kurt von Schuschnigg

cont’d on p. 21


recognition. “Joel, the shop can be yours, just pay

me off with the profits of the next two years.”

Joel without any hesitation accepted the generous

offer. All they had to do was to shake hands on

the deal. Joel’s next step was to ask Ms. Sellinger’s

parents for her hand in marriage. Permission was

quickly granted, maybe a bit too fast. The times

were tough. Skyrocketing inflation, marauding

bands of Ukrainian Cossacks trying to establish

an independent Western Ukraine, the Polish

Legions of General Haller, fighting to carve out

Poland after many years of disappearance from

the map of Europe finally came to pass. A new

Polish government took over. Joel worked hard in

his new shop. His wife gave him a son and two

daughters. In the late ’20s and early ’30s he

received a couple of letters from Heir Schushnigg,

who eventually became the Premier of Austria.

Schushnigg lasted till Hitler’s Anschluss. That was

the last time that Joel ever again heard from Herr

Schushnigg.

The ’30s marked growing Polish antisemitism

and Ukrainian chauvinism. The diff icult years

became even more difficult on September 1, 1939

when Germany invaded Poland. By the end of

September of the same year the German troops

entered the town of Drohobycz to a jubilant

welcome from the Ukrainian population. Poles and

Jews hid in their homes. The Germans remained

in Drohobycz only a few days, but they managed

to give the Jewish community a taste of things to

come. In their place soon entered the Red Army,

which in turn was greeted with joy by the Jews of

the town.

Poles hated the Ukrainians and the Jews. They

could not understand why the Jews greeted the

Russians. The Jews didn’t have any options left.

The Germans wanted to kill them and the Poles

always discriminated against them, at least the

Soviets promised equal rights, work, and the

possibility of education. There was no contest. The

“honeymoon” lasted just a few months. Another

reality crept in: The Red Terror. Many people

disappeared in the middle of the night including

clergy of all kinds, intelligentsia, well-to-do

merchants and so on. Among those arrested was

a high percentage of Jews.

On June 22nd, 1941 the Germans, “for a

change,” invaded the Soviet Union. Joel found

out that the so- called propaganda was the bitter

truth. The Germans that came to Drohobycz were

not the same Germans he knew or admired. Soon

the killings, the pogroms, hunger and disease

began to diminish a once prosperous and vibrant

Jewish community.

Joel and his immediate family managed to stay

alive primarily due to his skill as an artisan. He

manufactured beautiful leather goods for the SS,

police and their families. What SS man couldn’t

use a new holster for his gun or a new pocketbook

for his mistress? His luck ended, however, when

his wife and both daughters were shipped to

Stuthoff and Bergen-Belsen. The oldest daughter

had a 4-year-old girl whom she gave to a friendly

gentile woman for safekeeping. The problem was

that nobody knew who that woman was.

And finally, his turn came when two young

Ukrainian militia men came after him. Joel

recognized them at once. They were the sons of

his friends from WWI, Tomaszewski and Pyc.

“Chloptsi boys, I am an old friend of your fathers,

we served together in the Austrian Army,” said Joel.

“That was then and this is now, you dirty Jew.

Let’s go!”

Resigned, Joel started to move when an order

in German came in: “Lass mahl.” Let him live

another few days because he has to finish a job

for me.” These words were spoken by an

Untersturmfuehrer Otto Liebmann. Noticing the

commotion, two other German off icers came

over to see what the ruckus was all about. “Was

gibt loss?” (“What’s going on?”) asked

Obersturmfuehrer Jelinek. “This Jew is going to

do something for me,” said Untersturmfuehrer

Liebmann. “I hope that the Obersturmfuehrer

doesn’t mind?”

“But I do,” answered the Obersturmfuehrer.

What does this Jew do?”

Joel answered in pure German about his skills

with leather goods and told the Obersturmfuehrer

that he served in the German Army in WWI under

a captain of the same name, Jelinek, and that he

was decorated for bravery with an Iron Cross.

“Schau mahl, der dreckicke Jude spricht

Deutch wie ein richtiger Oestreicher” (“Look,

this shitty Jew speaks like a real Austrian”). He

has a gall to say that he has the same decoration

as our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. Where did you steal

it? And he hit Joel, splitting his lower lip.

“Aber Herr Obersturmfuehrer...” Joel tried

to say. “Maul hatten” (“Shut up!”) and he hit

Joel again in the area of his left ear. Joel sank to

his knees as the Obersturmfuehrer kicked him

in the ribs for good measure. “Take that carcass

away,” ordered Jelinek.

Joel was shipped along with other remaining

Jews in a cattle wagon to the concentration camp

in Plazow near Cracow and a few days later to

Mathaussen, where he died a few weeks before

the liberation.

There is no monument or even a gravestone

for a hero like Joel Einsiedler or millions like

him. I thought that he deserved a monument.

After all, he was my mother’s older brother.

Picture of My Past

Was it my father who cut this photo? Was it

he who literally cut himself out of the picture,

cut himself off from his first wife and children,

as he was cut off from them by the Nazis? Was

it he who removed himself from them,

disappeared from the picture, as in a way he

also has from us, his second family?

In the next few days, I searched meticulously

through all my parents’ photo albums. I could not

find the other half of the picture anywhere. I began

to question whether I ever did see it.

But I knew I had. It was the only picture of

my father from that period of his life. Did he

hide that picture too? Did he throw it away? Has

it vanished as completely as the man he was

then?

More than a year went by before the other

half of the photo turned up. I moved a book

shelf my mother wanted to relocate and the

picture, along with a few inconsequential scraps

of paper, was underneath it. Neither of my

parents had any idea how it got there. I put the

jagged edges of the two pictures side by side.

They f it perfectly. Together, they formed a

picture of my past; a past I never saw, yet a past

I can never forget.

cont’d from p. 14

cont’d from p. 20

Another project in 2006 entitled,

“Ambassadors of Remembrance” was organized

so that Austrian high school students were able to

visit their “pen pals” in their homes all over the

world. The students traveled to the United States,

Israel, the United Kingdom and South America,

among others, as ambassadors of a new Austria

that wants to learn from its history. As ambassadors

of the heart, these young people want to bring

some reconciliation to these survivors. The

students lived with the families of the survivors

for a few days and learned more about their stories

and history. One of the survivors is my mother,

Suzanne Balaban.

And now, in 2008, it’s time for 250 survivors

to come home… A new project, entitled “1938/

2008” is bringing back to Vienna on May 1st, 250

victims of the Nazi Holocaust. On May 5, Austria’s

“National Commemoration Day Against Violence

& Racism in Remembrance of Victims of

NationalSocialism,” students from all over Austria

will be constructing an elaborate and moving

Holocaust memorial on Vienna’s Heldenplatz. It

will be dedicated to more than 80,000 people

persecuted by the Nazis.

The survivors will speak at their “pen pals’”

schools throughout the country. These meetings

will be documented on film by the students and

will be archived and stored in a video databank

entitled, “The Last Witness.” Then the survivors

will have an opportunity to visit places from their

youth. The trip will be from May 1 to 8, 2008.

The “A Letter to the Stars” committee is trying

to educate by participation about the history of

the Holocaust. The committee feels that this

generation and those that come after should be

aware of what the Holocaust did to Austria and

the world.

After the ceremonies on May 5th in Vienna,

we will be heading up to a town called Zwettl,

where my mother and aunt will speak at my

mother’s pen pal’s school. I understand that the

area is beautiful. We will be staying at a castle

converted to a hotel.

On May 8, we will be traveling to another place

to have a second family reunion in a town called

Weitra, near the Czech Republic.

My grandparents, aunt, and mother left Vienna

in 1938 to seek freedom and a new life. I’m

traveling with my mother and aunt, Ruth Ellinger,

on May 1st to Vienna. This will be the first time

that my mother and aunt will return there together

in 70 years. My younger sister and cousins will

join us on May 3rd. We will walk in the footsteps

of our family who have survived and those who

didn’t. We will rejoice with relatives we found alive

over the past few years and meet younger

generations who will join us this year at our family

reunion. My fondest hope is to find others still

alive from the Katz, Diamant, and Balaban

families.

Remembering Austria

[email protected]

cont’d from p. 16

PLEASE SEND YOURE-MAIL ADDRESS AND THOSE OF YOUR

FAMILY MEMBERS TO

[email protected] CAN ALSO SEND MATERIAL

FOR CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION


COMPILED COMPILED COMPILED COMPILED COMPILED AND EDITEDAND EDITEDAND EDITEDAND EDITEDAND EDITED

BY SERENBY SERENBY SERENBY SERENBY SERENA A A A A WWWWWOOLRICH,OOLRICH,OOLRICH,OOLRICH,OOLRICH,

PRESIDENT PRESIDENT PRESIDENT PRESIDENT PRESIDENT ANDANDANDANDAND

FOUNDER,FOUNDER,FOUNDER,FOUNDER,FOUNDER,

ALLGENERAALLGENERAALLGENERAALLGENERAALLGENERATIONS, inc.TIONS, inc.TIONS, inc.TIONS, inc.TIONS, inc.

PLEASE SEND ALL RESPONSES TO [email protected].

cont’d on p. 19

From Professor Fabrizio Lelli, an Italian scholar, is doing research on

Italian DP camps in the very south of Italy for the University of

Lecce: Seeking people connected with these camps. Professor Lelli was

extremely interested in our, ”DP Camps in Italy” e-mails and he would like

to hear from the members in that group and from any other individuals who

were there, born there, etc. Please contact Professor Lelli at: [email protected]

From Karen Lazar, B’nai Brith Canada’s Institute for International

Affairs in Toronto, Ontario: Seeking Survivors from Trawniki or Poniatowa:

B’nai Brith, Canada’s Institute for International Affairs is urgently seeking

Holocaust survivors from Trawniki or Poniatowa concentrations camps in

Poland, between April 1943 and January 1944. Please contact Karen Lazar

at: 416.633.6224, ext. 140 or at: 1.800.892.2624.

From Mark Litvak, in Miami, Florida (and Montreal, Canada): Seeking

Sugihara Survivors:

Filmmaker Diane Estelle Vicari, (Sugihara: Conspiracy of

Kindness) is interested in contracting, and possibly meeting

Sugihara survivors. If you or your list know of any, please

forward the information DIRECTLY TO: Diane Estelle Vicari

at [email protected] or Mark Litvak at: [email protected]

From Diana Lazar Gerzenstein, a 2g in Melbourne, Australia:

I try so hard for a long time to find out if any of so many

relatives survived the war; I made that promise to my father,

Arpad Lazar, born in Simleul Silvaniei in 1921. My

grandfather, Jakob Lazar, was the son of David Lazar and Roszi

Braun. It was David’s second marriage; his first wife Bella

Goldberg had two sons, Albert (born in Mocirla 1881;died

1933] and Ignac (born 1863 in Akos; died 1932). He was married three

times and had 10 children; he was a shoemaker. My grandfather Jakob’s

first marriage ended in divorce (they had a son). Later on he married my

grandmother, Helena Farkas (from Bacau), and they had my father, Arpad,

and a daughter, Adela. In 1924 they moved to Argentina (where I was born).

Except for an aunt and two cousins, all the rest of my mother’s family perished

in the Holocaust ( they were from Hungary).

From Sylvia Green, a 2g in Melbourne, Australia:

I am looking for members of the Welner family who originated from Bedzin,

Poland. The family descended from Joachim Welner and Uta Moren, and I

know that they hadsix sons: Sender, Yitzhak, Yidel, Aaron, Wolf and Joseph.

Possibly there were even more children that have not been identified. My

family connection is through Joseph, born 1883. I have good reason to

believe that a branch of that family (through Sender Welner) now lives in

South America. Can any of your readers point me in the right direction to

begin that search? I have no Spanish or Portuguese language skills and do

not have the faintest idea how or where to begin.

From Alice Gross, in Southbury, CT:

I’ve been doing for the last year. I have been trying to find whatever material

there is for a shtetl near Bialystok (when it was under the Russian or Polish

flag). The transliterated Yiddish name is TRESTYNYE. The Polish seems to

be GORIADZNE. What I’m really after is information re the GROSS/

KUSHNER family members who emigrated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

From Mary Jean Gunden, in Moraga, CA:

I am wondering if any of your members may remember my aunt, Lois

Gunden. She went to France in 1941 at the age of 26 under the auspices of

the American Mennonite Central Committee, but it is possible that she could

have served with Quakers as well. She was director of a children’s home

called “Villa St. Cristophe” (spelling may not be correct) The children

sheltered in the home were from the Rivesaltes refugee/detention camp.

She remained at Rivesalte through December 1942, when she was taken

prisoner. She was held in Baden-Baden until 1944 when she returned to the

US as part of a

prisoner exchange. As has happened to too many familes, we (her nieces

and nephews) knew of her experiences, but didn’t ask for details when she

would still have been able to tell them. If you have some mechanism for

asking your members if they might remember that children’s home and

perhaps even my aunt Lois, it would mean a great deal to me to know of such

memories.

From Esor Ben- Sorek, a 2g in New York, New York:

My father was born in Dereczyn and I am interested to know more of its

history. I have the Dereczyn Memorbuch and have met with landsmen in

Israel. Thank you for your help.

From Florin Klein, a 2g in Romania:

I would like to find information about my family but here in Romania it is

impossible. My father, Florian Klein, (born Oscar Klein) is the last descendant

of the big Klein family. My great grandfather, Samuel Klein (1863-1939)

was from Oradea Romania. Several members of our family were deported

from Oradea, Romania around 1944: Czili Klein; Rella Klein; Ernest Weiss;

Adler Miklos...and many others.

From Solange Lebovitz, a Survivor in Pittsburgh, PA:

I am a hidden child from Paris, France where my parents emigrated from

Sighet in the 1920s. My grandfather, Shimshon Herskovitz, came from Hust

or Retz in the Ukraine and lived in Sighet, Transylvania. He did not come

back from deportation. His mother’s name was Yetta

Davidovici. He also had a sister who I believe lived in Boston.

I am also seeking information about anyone named Dratler,

my maiden name. There is a Erica Dratler in Israel, but I do

not know where. Would anyone know if Marcel Dratler (who

died July 6, 2007 in Los Angeles), was married and had

children? His mother was deported. She was my cousin and I

just received an album of photos about his family. I would

appreciate any information. Thank you.

From Marcel Apel Lezer, a Survivor in Amsterdam, The

Netherlands:

I am seeking any information about Joka Meyer from The

Hague. I knew her when she was about 7 or 8 years old when she was hiding

in the village of Tzummarum, Friesland (province) in 1942/43, with the

Wetterauw family for about 6 months.

From Tobie Dimont, a 2g in Tucson, AZ:

Looking for survivors from Shirvint (or Servintos) or Kovna in Lithuania.

My mother is a survivor from there.

From Robert Fried, a 2g in Highland Park, NJ:

Seeking any information about my grandfather, Jeno Fried and the Fried

family from Berehovo (Bereczacz), Czechoslovakia and Nir Mada, Hungary.

My father’s siblings are Leo, Harry, Joseph, Martin, Ilonka and Sharika. My

grandparents had a coffee house/ bakery/ ice cream store. Please help us

find some link to our possible family.

From Esia Baran Friedman, a survivor in West Hartford, CT:

Looking for any information about Chaja Sczeranska, who lived on

Wilkomierska Street in Vilno. We attended school together. Her family owned

a bakery. It is possible that she may have moved to Israel.

From Fred (Fewel) Glassman, a survivor in Des Plaines, IL:

Fred (Fewel) Glassman was born in Nowy Dwor, Poland. At the time of the

occupation of Poland, Fred was ten years old and living in Warsaw. His father

was murdered immediately after the occupation. Fred, his mother, and two

sisters were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. His older brother, Yankel had a grocery/

farm store in another city (possibly Nowyblanca). His two youngest brothers,

Avram and Dovid, just vanished one night. Fred was sent out of the ghetto to

get food for his family. When he returned, his mother was dead. His sisters

were eventually taken away and he fled. He used a gentile friend’s name and

went to work on a Volksdeutch farm with a family with several children. One

of the older daughters on the farm found out he was Jewish, but kept that

information to herself. His mother’s family was from Nowy Dwor. His mother’s

brother had a farm and orchard there. This family also seems to have

disappeared from the face of the earth—they were Altzteinsdp (sp?). After

]


the war, and still using a friend’s name, he tried to find his family but could

not find anyone. He had been shot by the Germans in the closing days of the

war and was taken to Italy for medical care. Owing to his current age, all of

his memories are fragmented. I hope that this information will be sufficient

to at least get things going.

From Sarita Gocial, a 2g in Philadelphia, PA:

Many years ago there was a forum for Children of Holocaust Survivors.

This was held at NYU in New York. At the time I literally bumped into a

young woman whose name was Sara Flint. Unbelievably, my grandmother

was Sara Flint, and my name is Sara (Sarita) Flint Russ. We were both delighted

to meet each other. Over the years I have wondered where Sara is. I know

that she lived in Los Angeles, and then I believe Wisconsin, but I have lost

track. I would like to find her and see whether we can figure out whether we

are indeed related. Any information would be very much appreciated.

From George Torrey, a survivor in Longmeadow, MA:

Does anyone have any information about my uncles, Shmuel and Fischel

Frenkiel, and David and Marek Terkeltaub, all of Lodz? They went to Russia

early in the war and never returned.

From Roslyn Mazer:

I am looking for any guidance you may have about how to track down what

became after 1945 of my grandfather’s sister, Rachel Kleinman (nee’ Mazur

or Mazer), for whom I am named. She was married and had six children

Simcha, Lieb, Kreise, Oliia, Lea and Chaya). If any of the family

survived, I was hoping to track down any descendants. She

was originally from Wishnioweicz, Kremenets Uyezd, Wolynsoi

Guberni. Her parents’ names were Leib Mazur (or Mazer) and

Ronia (nee’ Goldenberg). She was last seen at age 54 in Pilzen

on Aug 26, 1945, when an American doctor convinced the

American military command to take her off a railroad car where

she was being loaded for transport back to Poland. There was

an article about the incident in the Daily Forward, which I have

in Yiddish and English. I would be deeply grateful for any

advice you may send my way. My father is 87 now and I

committed to him that I would try to solve this mystery so we

might one day have a grand reunion. Thank you.

From Mrs Emanuela (Lita) Nadel (nee Singer), a survivor in Sydney,

Australia:

I am a child Holocaust Survivor born in Lemberg (Lwow), Poland. I am 78

years old now and have been living in Sydney, Australia since December

1950. In 1948 and 1949 I lived in Paris until mother and I immigrated to

Australia. It occurred to me that your organization might have/find some

addresses of the nursing class I was a member of in Hopital Rotschild Paris

metro Picpus (Ecole d’ Infermiers). I only remember two names from my

nursing school: Janine (Janka) Gradstein, and Irena (Irka) Anikst. We were

20 girls housed in this hospital for a year. I presume that some of them

immigrated to Israel.

From Mordechai David Pelta, a 3g in San Francisco, CA:

I am seeking any information available from oral history to any photos of

any of the following family members: Jurkewicz family; Herszberg family;

Sawicki family and Korn family. My father’s family is from Sulejow, Tomaszow

Mazowieck, and Konskie, Poland. His parents are Lejbus (Leon) and Szyfra

(Shefka Jurkewicz) Pelta. Grandma is from Tomaszow Mazowiecki; her father

was from Sulejow, where she lived with her family til she was 3 years old,

then moved to Tomaszow. Grandpa was a master tailor and my grandmother

was a homemaker. Grandpa was born on June 12, 1907 and died July 20,

1984 and grandma was born March 18, 1916. They had a baby daughter,

Gitla Pelta, born in Samarkand c1943, died at approximately 7-8 mos. of

age from small pox and a son, Jakow Berisz Pelta, born January 1, 1945 in

Samarkand. My grandparents escaped from a labor camp in Novosibirsk to

Samarkand where they lived from 1942-45. My mother is from Turt, Halmeu

and Satu-Mare, Romania. Her parents are Nicholas (b. March 27, 1909) and

Helen (Elena Weisz) Farkas (b. Dec. 10, 1924). Helen lives in New York.

From Bela Rosenthal (Joanna Millan), a survivor, in London, England:

My grandfather, Benjamin Schallmach (1865-1932) was born in Posen and

lived in Berlin till his death. He had a daughter with his first wife called

Bella Schallmach who came to the USA through Ellis Island on the Reliance

from Hamburg arriving 9 November 1923. I believe that she was also born

in Posen. On arrival in Ellis Island she gave

an address of Manila Street in Cleveland,

Ohio. I know that she married and had a

son and a daughter Marion but it is not

listed in the next census so I must believe

that she married between arriving in the

USA and the subsequent census. I am also

trying to discover whether Benjamin had any brothers and sisters and if so

what happened to them. Benjamin’s second wife (my grandmother) was

Auguste (nee Breslauer) who was born in Posen on 19 October 1872 and

who died in Auschwitz 1943. Her father was Abraham Breslauer. I would

like to find out whether she had brothers and sisters and what happened to

them. My paternal grandmother was Minna Rosenthal nee Stensch born 24

November 1864 in Meseritz (Northern Germany) and who died in Berlin 21

June 1935 living in Grenadier Strasse 35. I know that she had several brothers

and sisters and would like to find out if any survived and what happened to

them.

From Salo and Ruth Sherer, survivors in Laguna Woods,CA:

Looking for any information about Itzhak Weis (Weiss) born in Munkacs

living somewhere in Israel (perhaps in a retirement home).

From Carol Shoemaker, a survivor in Copperas Cove, TX:

I believe I may have been born in a DP camp, outside of Augsberg, Germany.

I was told I was a German Jew, born June 12, 1946. I was adopted in 1949

and was raised in Maryland. My birth name is supposedly

Carolyn Spong (Carol Shoemaker is my adoptive name). I

do have memories of something similar to a orphanage.

From Christopher Stern, a 2g in Manchester, England:

I would be very interested to communicate with anyone from

Svalyava where my father Izhak Alexander Shtern was born.

He died in 2000 never telling anyone anything about his

past, or perhaps more accurately anyone at all with any link

to Svalyava however remote.

From Mrs. “U,” a survivor:

I was born in Ungvar in 1931. My father was Dr. Zoltan

Grossman; did anyone know my family? I had a friend named Agnes Klein

in Ungvar. As I recall her father worked or owned a dress shop on Fo utca. If

you knew them kindly respond.

From Mietek Weintraub, a Survivor in Arlington Heights, IL:

When I searched for my mother’s youngest sister, Hela Wester (nee

Riesenberg), born circa 1918, I got a note from Bad Arolsen, Germany, in

1958, that Hela was among the survivors of the Skarzysko (maybe

Kamienska, I don’t remember) camp in Poland. If she was indeed the one

for whom I was looking, she would have arrived there after the liquidation

of Lodz Ghetto in September 1944. Unfortunately my subsequent search

with the Polish authorities as well as with the German proved unsuccessful.

If any survivors of the Skarzysko camp knew Hela Wester (nee Riesenberg)

from Lodz, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

From Mordechai Wiesel:

Seeking children who were in Langenbilo Sportshule, near Reichenbach.

From Timothy Steger:

I am desperately looking to contact any Holocaust survivors who were

adopted by Christian/Catholic families during the wa. I am living in Israel

and especially want to connect with anyone here. I went to Yad Vashem but

they did not have much information. My father is Jewish, and I was adopted

as a baby, but I was adopted by antisemitic Catholics, so much so that my

adopted sister became a neo-Nazi. I was very involved in anti-neo-Nazi

movements and have since made aliyah. I am writing my story and want to

interview others. Can you help me? [email protected].

From Marlene Yoskowitz, a survivor in New Jersey:

I am searching for the following children born in Poland in the 1930s and

hoping that at least one of them survived (their parents were from Wyszkow,

Poland): Srulek Elman, Leah Elman, Sara Elman, Isaak Elman, Hanna

Grinberg, Leah Grinberg, Leah Gurman (?) and baby girl Gurman. They are

my first cousins and I have been looking for them since 1955.


An

Appeal

to Our

Readers

For years we have been disseminating our publication, Together, free of charge to

survivors, descendants, and the Jewish community at large. It has been our contribu-

tion to the clarion call to “never forget” and to offer our readers as much information

as we can gather to reflect the current state of affairs of Holocaust-related issues. But

as with all things, our resources dwindle. And so, we have come to ask for support

from our readers to help defray the costs of production and mailing. Please make a

meaningful, tax deductible contribution payable to the “American Gathering” and

forward it to the address below. Thank you.

send to: American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

122 West 30th Street, Suite 205

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Name:

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Address:

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Amount of contribution: $

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Our recordsconsist of175,000survivors,the only

database of itskind worldwide.

Special “Matzevah Marker”Available for Survivors’ Graves

Survival has placed upon us the

responsibility of making sure that the

Holocaust is remembered forever.

Each of us has the sacred obligation

to share this task while we still can.

However, with the passage of each year,

we realize that time is against us, and

we must make sure to utilize all means

for future remembrance.

A permanent step toward achieving

this important goal can be realized by

placing a unique and visible maker on

the gravestone of every survivor. The

most meaningful symbol for this

purpose is our Survivor logo, inscribed

with the words HOLOCAUST

SURVIVOR. This simple, yet dramatic,

maker will re-affirm our uniqueness and

our place in history for future generations.

Our impressive MATZEVAH marker is

now available for purchase. It is cast in

solid bronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and

can be attached to new or existing

tombstones. The cost of each marker is

$100.00. Additional donations are

gratefully appreciated.

Let us buy the marker now and leave

instructions in our wills for its use. This

will enable every one of us to leave on

this earth visible proof of our miraculous

survival and an everlasting legacy of the

Holocaust.

Name ____________________________________________________

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Number of Markers ___________________

Total Amount Enclosed ________________

The cost of each marker is US $100

including shipping & handling.

Make checks payable to:

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

and mail to:

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

122 West 30th Street

New York, NY 10001

Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.

FPO