IN THIS ISSUE“Wanted”: Nazi hunters track war criminals in Germany.............................2

70 years after liberation, Holocaust memorials continue to proliferate......3

Hollywood’s pact with Hitler...........................................................................4

Auschwitz through the eyes of a child...........................................................5

The story of Dr. Mengele’s delivery girl.........................................................6

Escape from Novogrudok...............................................................................7After decades, family unravels Holocaust mystery..........................................10

Bearing witness ever more...........................................................................12

Auschwitz Holocaust exhibition opened by Netanyahu.............................13

The Holocaust and “Hatikvah”.....................................................................16

Vol. 40-No.1 ISSN 0892-1571 September/October 2013-Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM

Michael R. Bloomberg is the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. He was firstelected in November 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a

time when many believed that crime would return, businesses would flee and NewYork might take decades to recover. Instead, through hundreds of innovative newpolicies and initiatives, Mayor Bloomberg has made New York City safer, strongerand greener than ever.

Today, compared to 2001, crime is down by more than 35 percent. The welfare rollsare down nearly 22 percent. High school graduation rates are up more than 40 per-cent since 2005. Ambulance response times are at record lows. Teen smoking isdown more than 50 percent. More than 755 acres of new parkland have been added.The Mayor's economic policies have helped New York City avoid the level of job loss-es that many other cities experienced during the national recession. Today, New YorkCity has more private-sector jobs than at any point in history.

Born on February 14, 1942, in Boston and raised in a middle-class home inMedford, Massachusetts, Michael Bloomberg attended Johns Hopkins University,

where he paid his tuition by taking loans and working as a parking lot attendant. After college, he went on to receivean MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1966 he was hired by a Wall Street firm, Salomon Brothers, for an entry-level job.

He quickly rose through the ranks at Salomon, overseeing equity trading and sales before heading up the firm'sinformation systems. When Salomon was acquired in 1981, he was let go from the firm. With a vision of an infor-mation technology company that would bring transparency and efficiency to the buying and selling of financial secu-rities, he launched a small startup company called Bloomberg LP. Today, Bloomberg LP is a global media compa-ny that has over 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service. Headquartered in New York City,the company has more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

As his company grew, Michael Bloomberg started directing more of his attention to philanthropy, donating his timeand resources to many different causes. He has sat on the boards of numerous charitable, cultural and educationalinstitutions, including The Johns Hopkins University, where, as chairman of the board, he helped build the BloombergSchool of Public Health into one of the world's leading institutions of public health research and training.

In 2001 he ran for mayor of the City of New York and, in a major upset, won the election. He was reelected in 2005and 2009. During his three terms, Mayor Bloomberg has turned around a broken public school system by raising stan-dards, promoting innovation and holding schools accountable for success. He has spurred economic growth and jobcreation by revitalizing old industrial areas and strengthening key industries, including new media, film and television,bio-science, technology and tourism. The Mayor's Five Borough Economic Opportunity Plan has helped bring the Citythrough the national recession as quickly as possible and helped avoid the level of job losses that many experts hadforecast and that other cities experienced. He has also launched new, cutting-edge programs that encourage entre-preneurship, combat poverty and help people acquire the skills they need to build careers.

His passion for public health has led to ambitious new health strategies that have become national models, includ-ing a ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces, as well as at parks and beaches. Today, life expectancy is 32 monthslonger than it was before Mayor Bloomberg took office. He has also created a far-reaching plan to fight climatechange and promote sustainable development. His belief that America's mayors and business leaders can helpeffect change in Washington led him to launch national bipartisan coalitions to combat illegal guns, reform immigra-tion and invest in infrastructure. And he has been a strong champion of the City's cultural community, expandingsupport for artists and arts organizations and helping to bring more than 100 permanent public art commissions toall five boroughs.

Mayor Bloomberg is the father of two daughters, Emma and Georgina.

HONORING MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG

Eli Zborowskiwas born in

Zarki, Poland.He joined theJewish under-ground, servingas a courier tothe ghettos ofwestern Poland.His father wasmurdered byPoles in 1943.Eli was then

forced to take on the responsibilities for thefamily as an adult. His remaining familysurvived the war in hiding. Following thewar, Eli met Diana Wilf in Feldafing, a dis-placed persons camp. She was a survivorfrom Drohobycz, Poland. They were mar-ried in Feldafing in December 1948. Dianastood by his side and was an equal partnerwith Eli for 57 years. She passed away in2004.

Eli Zborowski founded the American andInternational Societies for Yad Vashem in1981 and served as the organization’sChairman from its inception, guiding it toraise over $100 million for the benefit of YadVashem, Jerusalem. He established theDiana and Eli Zborowski InterdisciplinaryChair for Holocaust Studies and Research atYeshiva University. Eli also endowed theDiana Zborowski Center for the Study of theAftermath of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem,Jerusalem.

In 2006, he married Dr. ElizabethMundlak, and they worked together to con-tinue his dreams of Holocaust remem-brance and education.

Eli was the proud father of two childrenand seven grandchildren.

HONORING

THE MEMORY OF

ELI ZBOROWSKI, Z”L

The American & International Societies for Yad Vashem Annual Tribute Dinner

The American and International Societies for Yad Vashemcordially invite you to attend their

ANNUAL TRIBUTE DINNERANNUAL TRIBUTE DINNER

Sunday, November 10, 2013 8 Kislev, 5774

Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers

811 Seventh Avenue at 52nd StreetNew York City

See pages 8–9 for more info

Rabbi Eric M. Lankin, DMin. Executive Director/CEO of the American Society for Yad Vashem

For the family and friends of Eli Zborowski,

z”l, his passing at age 86 on September

10, 2013, was a tremendous loss. His love and

concern were a profound source of strength for

them throughout his life. For his second family,

the community and staff of the American Society

for Yad Vashem (ASYV), Eli’s death was also profoundly felt, as he was

the founder and volunteer chair of ASYV for over 31 years. The Society and

the Holocaust survivor community had an outstanding leader with vision,

courage and fortitude, and his death created a terrible void.

Our upcoming Annual Tribute Dinner on November 10, chaired by Barry

and Marilyn Rubenstein, will include an acknowledgement of Eli’s most

significant contributions to ASYV, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to

Holocaust remembrance. This will give us the opportunity to reflect on the

impact of his leadership over his many years of most dedicated service.

We are grateful that the outstanding leadership team of Leonard A. Wilf, our

Chair, and his Executive Committee and Board managed the process of transi-

tion with direction towards the future. The staff that had been nurtured by Eli’s

leadership, continued on a daily basis to keep the organization functioning at full

capacity, including organizing and conducting our Annual Tribute Dinner last

November and the myriad of other activities that define the ASYV year.

Personally, I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know Eli briefly the summer

before he died. In the hours we spent together in the office, he shared some of

his experiences during the Holocaust, and his thoughts about our Jewish future,

what ASYV and Yad Vashem had meant to him, and some of his concerns and

struggles faced by the organization. Although he said his body was tired, his

mind was sharp, his comments were incisive, and his legacy remains intact.

Today, I sit in his chair as Executive Director/CEO of ASYV. I do not pre-

tend to fill Eli’s shoes, but instead, I spiritually stand on his shoulders to

face the future. Eli’s imprint on every aspect of ASYV and its commitment

to Yad Vashem is a gift that he has left me. I inherited a strong and vision-

ary organization with devoted volunteer leaders and staff.

As the new professional leader, the future calls me to respond in my

own way, guided by my training and experience. I have dedicated my

professional career to a better Jewish future. For fourteen years, I served

as a congregational rabbi on the front lines, teaching and spiritually guid-

ing wonderful Jews and strengthening congregations and the communities

we served. And for fourteen more years, I have served on the national

scene in Jewish communal organizations, bringing people together to

address the challenges facing Jewish life, guiding national educational

programs and developing financial resources to insure our future. At ASYV,

I am using everything I have learned, as we review every aspect of how

we are functioning to face the challenges of the present and prepare for the

future, cognizant of Eli’s vision and effort.

We are at a time of great transition as many of our founders who were

Holocaust survivors are passing the torch to the second and third generations

of their families. At ASYV, we are quite sensitive to this transitional period and

are strategically working hard to strengthen our connection to survivor fami-

lies, the Jewish community and other supporters of our work. In partnership

with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, we are dedicated to providing the most signif-

icant leadership in promoting Holocaust education, remembrance and com-

memoration using the tools available to us in the 21st century.

Please save the date for our Annual Tribute Dinner on Sunday, November

10 in New York City. Not only will we be paying tribute to Eli’s memory, as

I discussed above, but also recalling the tenth anniversary of the tragic

voyage of the space shuttle Columbia that included Israeli astronaut Col.

Ilan Ramon, z”l. You may recall that on that voyage, Colonel Ramon car-

ried a copy of “Moon Landscape,” a view of Earth from the Moon, drawn by

Petr Ginz, z”l, during the Holocaust in Theresienstadt.We are fortunate that at the Annual Dinner we will have the opportunity to

pay tribute to the Honorable Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, at

the end of 12 years of outstanding service to our community, and present him

with the Yad Vashem Remembrance Award. Mayor Bloomberg has been a

supporter of our important work for many years as a major donor, and served

as the United States representative to the opening of the new Yad Vashem

Museum on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem in 2005.

I look forward to hearing from you with ideas about how you might like to

help us in our important work. Contact me at ELankin@yadvashemusa.org

or 212-220-4304 x-201.

Page 2 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

ON TRANSITIONSAbox of documents covered with

dust, which belonged to theIsraeli embassy in Prague and wasdiscovered accidentally after 46years, contains a historical memorywhich may allow the State of Israel tohonor Czech citizens who savedJews during the Holocaust and haveyet to be officially recognized.

Shahar Shelef, the deputy Israeliambassador to the Czech Republic,received a phone call from a diplomatserving at the Swedish embassy inPrague.

“You’re not going to believe this,”the Swedish diplomat told him. “Wewere organizing the embassy anddecided to clean up the cellars. Wefound an old cardboard box withpapers of the Israeli embassy from1967. You may come and take it.”

An inquiry revealed that in 1967,after Czechoslovakia severed itsdiplomatic relations with Israel, theIsraeli embassy staff placed some ofthe diplomatic paperwork inside acardboard box at the Swedishembassy. The box was placed in thebasement, only to be discoveredthere 46 years later.

Among the pile of administrative doc-uments were three Righteous Amongthe Nations certificates on behalf ofYad Vashem which were to be handedout along with medals, in an officialceremony, to three Czech citizens whosaved Jews during the Holocaust.

As they had to leave in a rush, theIsraeli embassy staff did not havetime to deliver the certificates, andthey were buried in the basement ofthe Swedish embassy.

Upon receiving the box of docu-ments, the Israeli embassy contactedYad Vashem and received verificationthat those three Czech citizens hadindeed been registered as RighteousGentiles.

The son of one of the three Czechs,who lives in Canada, had received acopy of the medal from the Israeliconsulate in Montreal many yearsago. The other two have yet to becontacted.

“We know that the three RighteousGentiles are no longer alive,” saysShelef. “We will do everything in ourpower to see their offspring receivethe official recognition of the State ofIsrael, even if 46 years too late.”

HISTORICAL PAPERS FOUND AFTER 46 YEARS

“Wanted” posters have beentacked up across Germany

by Nazi hunters who say there arewar criminals out there who continueto escape justice almost sevendecades after the end of World War II.

“The advanced old age of the perpe-trators should not be a reason to dis-continue prosecution, since the pas-sage of time in no way diminishestheir guilt and old age should not pro-tect murderers,” said Efraim Zuroff,the director of the Israel office of theSimon Wiesenthal Center, a humanrights group that tracks anti-Semitism.

“Every single prosecution is animportant reminder that justice canstill be achieved for the victims of theHolocaust,” he said.

The campaign, “Late. But not toolate! Operation Last Chance II,”kicked off in July and offers a $33,000reward for information leading to thearrest and conviction of Nazi crimi-nals, according to the center.

The posters have appeared in Berlin,Hamburg and Cologne and show ablack-and-white photograph of theAuschwitz-Birkenau death camp andstate: “Millions of innocents were mur-dered by Nazi war criminals. Some ofthe perpetrators are free and alive.Help us to bring them before a court.”

Zuroff estimates that about 60potential war criminals are still alive,including around 50 former guards atAuschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The campaign to seek out formerWorld War II–era Nazis in Germanywas launched by Zuroff following theconviction of John Demjanjuk inMunich. Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American convicted in 2011 by aGerman court as an accessory to themurder of 27,900 Jews while a guard

at a Nazi extermination camp. Hedied in a German nursing home inMarch 2012.

In a legal precedent in Germany, thecourt held that anyone who was an“overseer” of activity in the concentra-tion camp could be charged with com-plicity in the murders, even a personwho did not directly kill inmates.

A similar “Wanted” project that beganin 2002 in nine countries, includingGermany, turned up 605 suspects, 103of whom were submitted to prosecu-tors for trial. Zuroff said the latest proj-ect would have started sooner, but ittook a while to raise money.

“We approached 86 companies andfoundations, including all the giants ofGerman industry, but only three werewilling to help us,” Zuroff said. “Thehardest thing in connection to theHolocaust that a country has to do isto put its own nationals on trial.”

Zuroff said the subject is still a sen-sitive one here.

“No one is saying that Germanyhasn’t done a tremendous amount toatone for the crimes. But in recentyears when the problem has beenmore manageable, you can say thatthey’re doing a better job.”

“WANTED”: NAZI HUNTERS TRACK

WAR CRIMINALS IN GERMANY

Efraim Zuroff talks to journalists as he stands

in front of a placard promoting the campaign

“Late. But not too late! Operation Last

Chance II” in Berlin.

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 3

Aceremony in honor of Ms.Danuta Renk-Mikulska, who

was recognized as Righteous Amongthe Nations by Yad Vashem, tookplace on July 23 at the IllinoisHolocaust Museum and EducationCenter.

Ms. Renk-Mikulska received thecertificate and medal of the RighteousAmong the Nations from the IsraeliConsul General to the Midwest, RoiGilad, and the ASYV Director ofDevelopment, S. Isaac Mekel.

Danuta Renk-Mikulska is the fifthmember of the Mikulski family to berecognized by Yad Vashem.

Jan and Melania Mikulski lived onthe outskirts of Bilgoraj, in the Lublindistrict, with their children Jadwiga,Danuta and Jerzy. Mr. Mikulski, alocal forester, had enjoyed good rela-tions with the Jews of the town beforethe war. During one of the Aktionencarried out by the Germans, Rivka

Wajnberg and Lila Stern, two youngwomen from the town, fled to thehome of Jan and Melania Mikulski,

who willingly took them in, treatingthem with the same devotion theygave their own children. While work-

ing in the forest, Mikulski came acrossbrothers Bencjon and ChaimRozenbaum, past acquaintances, and

Pola Kenig. Mikulski helpedthem find a place to hide in theforest, and from time to timebrought them home to sleep.With the arrival of winter, after itbecame too cold to survive inthe forest, Mikulski moved theJewish fugitives into his home,and all five found refuge in aspecial hiding place theMikulskis prepared for them inone of the farm buildings. TheMikulski family treated theJewish fugitives with warmthand kindness, taking care of alltheir needs and doing whateverthey could to make their stay inthe hiding place as pleasant as

possible. Fearing that the hiding placewould be discovered, the Mikulskislived in constant terror, which reached

a climax when a group of German sol-diers established themselves in theirhome for eight days.

During this period, the Mikulskisgreatly feared that the Jews would bediscovered, and consequently gavethem poison pills, but fortunately, theGermans left without discovering thefugitives. The two young Jewishwomen and Bencjon and ChaimRozenbaum remained in hiding in theMikulski home for about a year, afterwhich they joined the partisans.Chaim Rozenbaum was killed in theranks of the Polish Army, his brotheremigrated to Israel together with PolaKenig, and the two young womenemigrated to the United States.Everything the Mikulski family did tosave Jews was motivated by purealtruism, for which they never askedfor or received anything in return.

Jan Mikulski, Melania Mikulska andall three of their children were recog-nized as Righteous Among theNations.

A POLISH WOMAN RECOGNIZED AS RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS

From left: Rick Hirschhaut, Executive Director of the

Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center; Roi

Gilad, Israeli Consul General to the Midwest; Danuta

Renk-Mikulska; S. Isaac Mekel, ASYV Director of

Development; Nitza Gilad, programs officer at the Israeli

Consulate to the Midwest; and Paulina Kapuscinska,

Poland’s Consul General in Chicago.

BY GIL SHEFLER, JTA

No earth was moved recently atthe groundbreaking of one of

the nation’s newest Holocaust memo-rials.

Instead, the gatherers stood silently,symbolic shovels in hand, on theimmaculate lawn where the privatelyfunded $400,000 monument will soonrise. A succession of speakers deliv-ered somber homilies rememberingone of the darkest chapters in humanhistory.

“It was an absolutely unbelievableworld that I lived in,” survivor FredLorber was quoted as saying by localmedia. “It’s hard for me to describe,but whatever time I think about it, it’sthere. It never left my memory.”

The construction of a new Holocaustmemorial is hardly unusual. But thiswas Des Moines, Iowa, home to asmall Jewish community and an evensmaller number of survivors.

Just 2,800 Jews live in the capital ofthe Hawkeye State, among them arapidly diminishing number of sur-vivors like Lorber. Yet local authori-ties, along with the Jewish Federationof Greater Des Moines and Jewishphilanthropists, nevertheless felt itimportant for the city to set asideprominent public space near the statecapitol to remember the victims ofNazi persecution and their liberators.

“As time went by and as the last sur-vivors passed away, the study of theHolocaust in the school districts beganto wane and the Jewish community feltthe memory of it needed to be perpet-uated,” said Mark Finkelstein, the headof the federation.

The Jews of Des Moines are hardlythe first to push for such a project.

Though precise numbers are diffi-cult to come by, Holocaust studiesexperts say museums and monu-

ments dedicated to the genocidehave proliferated across the UnitedStates over the past two decades.

Major American cities typically haveat least one Holocaust memorial, butnow many midsized ones do too, likeRichmond, Virginia, Charleston,South Carolina, and El Paso, Texas.Memorials are even found in relative-ly small cities, like Whitwell,Tennessee, and Palm Desert,California. And more are in the works,including a recently approved monu-ment designed by architect DanielLibeskind to be built on the state-house grounds in Columbus, Ohio.

The phenomenon is also not auniquely American one. Norway, acountry with only 1,300 Jews, has twoHolocaust memorials.

“There are probably more than 300Holocaust study centers and muse-ums around the country, and the num-ber of memorials would be hard totrack down because of all the smallones,” said James Young, a professorof English and Judaic studies at theUniversity of Massachusetts inAmherst and the author of a bookabout Holocaust remembrance.

“Just in Manhattan, there are 80.Multiply that and you probably havethousands.”

Young says the single most impor-tant factor driving the construction ofHolocaust memorials nearly 70 yearsafter the war is the initiative of elderlysurvivors. With the youngest of themnearing 80, survivors are eager toeducate future generations abouttheir suffering and, in so doing, givemeaning to their lives.

“It doesn’t take a big community,”Young said. “If someone is inspired tobuild a memorial site, it is possible todo so.”

One such person was Eva MozesKor, 79, who along with her twin sister

was subjected to savage medicalexperiments carried out by Nazi warcriminal Dr. Josef Mengele.

In 1995, Kor founded the CANDLESHolocaust Museum and EducationCenter in Terre Haute, a small city inwestern Indiana where she has livedsince the 1950s, with the aim of shar-ing her story with her neighbors.

Each year about 75,000 mostlynon-Jewish children visit the

center from nearby rural areas ofwestern and central Indiana. Kor andtwo other survivors, including her hus-band, present lectures to the youngvisitors.

“I want to teach children in theworld,” she said. “I think [theHolocaust] is not a Christian thing, nota Jewish thing, it’s a human thing.”

For Jewish leaders, Holocaustmemorializing is often a way to buildcommunity around a non-religiousissue.

“The creation of a Holocaust memo-rial is likely something everybody cancooperate on,” said Jonathan Sarna,a professor of Jewish studies atBrandeis University. “The minute youtouch Israel, it’s divisive. But for Jewsand Christians to get together to com-memorate the Holocaust, that canbring them together, especially in

smaller communities.”But Holocaust commemoration

also has been driven by Christianssuch as Michael Tudor, a Louisianalawyer and a Baptist. He came upwith the idea of building a Holocaustmemorial while jogging past a sculp-ture by the Israeli artist YaacovAgam in New Orleans dedicated tothe memory of the victims.

If everything goes according toplan, Tudor will break ground on aHolocaust memorial in his home-town of Alexandria (population:47,000) in November.

“I can think of many reasons weought to have one even though weare a small city,” Tudor said. “There’sa real historical tie to the liberation ofcamps. And we’ve always had avibrant Jewish community for a smalltown. They’ve been the foundationblocks of our community.”

The privately funded $80,000structure will feature an 18-footgranite obelisk — “because 18 is asymbolic number in the Hebrew tra-dition,” Tudor said — and beengraved with the famous poem“First they came” by the Germanpastor Martin Niemöler.

The memorial also will rememberlocal U.S. soldiers who participatedin the liberation of the camps, aswell as the victims and survivors.

“The greatest generation is dyingout and people’s memories are fad-ing,” Tudor said. “You realize, if notnow, when?”

Young expects that with theyoungest survivors becoming octo-genarians, the trend is unlikely tocontinue indefinitely. Once theypass, the money and motivation forsuch projects may disappear as well.

“The next generation,” Young said,“might be less likely to be doingthis.”

NEARLY 70 YEARS AFTER LIBERATION,

HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS CONTINUE TO PROLIFERATE

The CANDLES Holocaust museum in Terre

Haute, Indiana.

Page 4 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

B O O K R E V I E W SB O O K R E V I E W SNazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators

of the Holocaust Cheated Justice andTruth.

By Donald M. McKale. Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc.: Lanham,Md, 2012. 405 pp. $39.95.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

“It didn’t happen!” “I didn’t knowanything about it!” “It’s all an

exaggeration!” “The Jews made it up!”“The Jews caused it!” — these arejust some of the excuses Nazisdreamed up to defend themselveswhen it comes to acts they committedduring the war against the Jews. Thenthere are those who claimed they“were just following orders.” Thenthere is the greater number of Naziswho never paid for their monstrouscrimes. And then there is the story ofthe Cold War that encouraged theAllies to turn a blind eye to everything.Donald M. McKale delves into all ofthis in his well-researched book Nazisafter Hitler: How Perpetrators of theHolocaust Cheated Justice and Truth.Finally, and most interestingly, hehighlights just how these argumentsused by the Nazi murderers wouldbecome the arguments used bytoday’s Holocaust deniers.

Thus, for example, McKale tells usof the twenty-one-year-old, notorious-ly sadistic, “‘beautiful golden hair[ed]’”Nazi female guard Irma Grese. Sheworked at Ravensbruck, Birkenau,and Bergen-Belsen. “Grese beat pris-oners;” she shot them; “she set herviolent dog on them; she assisted

Mengele [the infamous doctor atAuschwitz-Birkenau] in the selectionsof victims for the gas chambers.”Arrested in 1945 by the British, sheblamed Mengele for everything; sheclaimed she only knew “from the pris-oners that there were gas chambers atAuschwitz and that prison-ers were gassed there;” shedenied “nearly all involve-ment in the mistreatment ofcamp inmates,” and indeedshe “claimed to have hiddenmothers and children” fromcertain death, and becauseof it “Jewish prisonerscaus[ed] her problems”[emphasis added by thisreviewer]. Finally, at her trialIrma bitterly proclaimed shewas the victim here ofeveryone else, even as sheand her defense team claimed “vindic-tive Jews” were out to get all Nazis,guilty or not! True, in the end, IrmaGrese was executed . . . but her lieswould live long after her, to be resusci-tated and “updated” by deniers.

More common, however, are thestories of those who barely paid fortheir crimes, like the SS general KarlWolff. “As Himmler’s right-hand manand Hitler’s close confidant” he trav-eled with Himmler to inspect the workof Einsatzgruppen A, B, and D — allprimarily charged with killing Jews.“Wolff participated in the Holocaust inYugoslavia.” In 1942 when there wasa shortage of trains to transport Jewsto the death camps at Treblinka,

Belzec and Sobibor — theWehrmacht claimed it couldn’t spareany — he made sure these trains keptrunning. By 1945, however, Wolff, apower in Italy, realizing Germany waslosing the war, cleverly contactedU.S. intelligence and “negotiated [the]

. . . surrender [of] allGerman forces in Italy.”Indeed, he would usethis last as a major “bar-gaining chip” to savehimself from postwarpunishment, even as hedenied any crimesagainst Jews, only latervolunteering that crimesthat were perpetratedwere highly exaggeratedand deserved! In sum,he almost got away,what with the Allies

increasingly concerned with theSoviets and using former Nazis asCold War spies. But then in 1961,Wolff actually published his memoirs(!) . . . and because of them spentsome little time in jail.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Dr.Josef Mengele, responsible for thedeaths of hundreds of thousands,often by way of his gruesome experi-ments at Auschwitz-Birkenau, gotaway scot-free. Those who helpedhim included SS men, sympatheticCatholic clergy and corrupt SouthAmerican governments. Just as“lucky” was Alois Brunner, AdolfEichmann’s “best tool,” personallyimplementing many of his superior’s

murderous plans. A rabid anti-Semite,he was responsible, among otherthings, for destroying the Jewish com-munity of Salonika, and for the deathof countless French and SlovakianJews. After the war he found refugein Syria, and a job there “as an advi-sor to the country’s Ministry of Interioron torture and repression tech-niques.”

Indeed, throughout his book,McKale notes again and again

how many Nazis got away — hun-dreds of thousands of them — neverbrought to justice! Nor did most ofthem leave Germany! Eventually theygot jobs. They even got governmentpositions. For that matter, Nazis afterHitler notes that “already in 1949, aU.S. report revealed that in Bavariaalone 752 of 924 judges and prosecu-tors were former Nazis — or 81 per-cent.” Additionally, many boldlyclaimed and received pensions. Thusthe Allies decided — with the currentworld situation as it was — rebuildingGermany and the good will of Germancitizenry was most important. Thus,the Russians, too, had other issuesmore important to them . . . Thustoday’s Holocaust deniers wouldlearn they could tell lies and even,gingerly, get away with it!

Needless to say, McKale’s bookleaves one thinking . . . about manythings . . .

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia, Communication, and VisualArts at Pace University.

NAZIS AFTER HITLER

The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pactwith Hitler.

By Ben Urwand. Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, Mass. 2013. 336pp. $26.95, hardcover.

REVIEWED BY J. SCHUESSLER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

The list of institutions and indus-tries that have been accused of

whitewashing their links to the ThirdReich is long, including various gov-ernments, the Vatican, Swiss banksand American corporations likeI.B.M., General Motors and DuPont.

Now a young historian wants to adda more glamorous name to that rollcall: Hollywood.

In The Collaboration: Hollywood’sPact with Hitler, Ben Urwand drawson a wealth of previously uncited doc-uments to argue that Hollywood stu-dios, in an effort to protect theGerman market for their movies, notonly acquiesced to Nazi censorshipbut also actively and enthusiasticallycooperated with that regime’s globalpropaganda effort.

In the 1930s “Hollywood is not just

collaborating with Nazi Germany,”said Mr. Urwand. “It’s also collaborat-ing with Adolf Hitler, the person andhuman being.”

“I think what this guy has foundcould be a blockbuster,” said DeborahLipstadt, a Holocausthistorian at EmoryUniversity. “I found itbreathtaking in theaudacity of the story itseems to be trying totell.”

Other scholars famil-iar with the period,however, question bothits claims to originalityand its insistently darkslant, starting with thetitle.

“The word ‘collabora-tion’ in this context is a slander,” saidThomas P. Doherty, a historian atBrandeis University and the author ofthe recent book Hollywood and Hitler:1933-1939, which covers some of thesame ground. “You use that word todescribe the Vichy government. LouisB. Mayer was a greed head, but he is

not the moral equivalent of VidkunQuisling.”

That the German government med-dled in the film industry duringHollywood’s so-called golden age haslong been known to film historians,

and such activity waschronicled in theAmerican press at thetime. (Long Arm of HitlerExtends to HollywoodStudio, read a 1937headline in Newsweek.)

But Mr. Urwand, 35,offers the most stingingtake by far, drawing onmaterial from Germanand American archives toargue that the relation-ship between Hollywoodand the Third Reich ran

much deeper — and went on muchlonger — than any scholar has so farsuggested.

On page after page, he shows stu-dio bosses, many of them Jewishimmigrants, cutting films scene byscene to suit Nazi officials; producingmaterial that could be seamlessly

repurposed in Nazi propaganda films;and, according to one document,helping to finance the manufacture ofGerman armaments.

Even Jack Warner, praised byGroucho Marx for running “the onlystudio with any guts” after green-light-ing the 1939 film Confessions of aNazi Spy, comes in for some revision-ist whacks.

It was Warner who personallyordered that the word “Jew” be

removed from all dialogue in the 1937film The Life of Emile Zola, Mr.Urwand writes, and his studio was thefirst to invite Nazi officials to its LosAngeles headquarters to screen filmsand suggest cuts.

“There’s a whole myth that WarnerBrothers were crusaders againstFascism,” Mr. Urwand said. “But theywere the first to try to appease theNazis in 1933.”

Mr. Urwand, an Australian-bornscholar whose Jewish Hungarianmaternal grandparents spent the waryears in hiding, said his project beganin 2004, when he was a graduate stu-

(Continued on page 13)

HOLLYWOOD’S PACT WITH HITLER

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 5

BY SUSANNE BEYER, SPIEGELONLINE

He was sent to Auschwitz as aboy, and never forgot the

images and dreams that defined thisperiod of his life. Now Jerusalem aca-demic Otto Dov Kulka has written anunusual book about his life in a Naziconcentration camp.

His office window looks out overJerusalem, where the light-coloredstone buildings contrast with the fad-ing late-afternoon light. But Otto DovKulka’s thoughts are far away. “Let’stake a virtual journey,” he says. On hiscomputer, he opens black-and-whitephotos that depict the ruins of the cre-matoriums at Auschwitz — a forest ofcrumbling chimneys amid tall grass.

Kulka moves the cursor across thechimneys and through the grass.“That’s the landscape of my child-hood,” he says quietly. He was inAuschwitz between the ages of 10and 11. There is a strange tone in hisvoice — not sadness, not rage, butsomething that sounds like longing. Itseems almost strange to ask thequestion: Is he homesick forAuschwitz?

“Well, yes!” he exclaims. “Auschwitzwas my childhood! I learned to becomea humanist at Auschwitz.”

Kulka doesn’t just say these kinds ofthings. He also writes them, and indoing so has managed to composeone of the most astonishing books everwritten about Auschwitz: Landscapesof the Metropolis of Death: Reflectionson Memory and Imagination.

It’s a cumbersome title in a genrethat already has many books andeyewitness accounts. Despite a fewglowing reviews, Kulka’s book has notattracted the attention it deserves.

AN ACT OF “EXTREME SARCASM”

In his book, Kulka doesn’tempathize with the pain of the vic-

tims or the motivation of the perpetra-tors. Like someone looking in from theoutside, he considers his childhooddays in Auschwitz from the observer’sperspective. He completes a self-psy-choanalysis of sorts, invoking imagesand scenes, wondering about their sig-nificance, though he knows the ques-tions will have to remain unanswered.

In one such passage, he describes

the scene in which he watched hismother walk away for the last time.She was pregnant and being taken toanother concentration camp, whereshe had hoped that she and the baby,conceived in Auschwitz, would sur-vive. But they wouldn’t make it; bothdied shortly before liberation.

“In my mind’s eye I see images: oneimage. These are actually seconds,only seconds, seconds of a hastyfarewell after which my mother turnedaround and started to walk into thedistance toward those grey structuresof the camp. She wore a thin dressthat rippled in the light breeze and Iwatched as she walked and recededinto the distance. I expected her toturn her head, expected a sign ofsome kind. She did not turn her head… I could not understand. … I thoughtabout it afterwards, and think about itto this day: why did she not turn herhead, at least once?”

In another scene, this time at thechildren’s camp at Auschwitz, aJewish man named Imre teaches thechildren the Ode to Joy fromBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “Whatwas his intention in choosing to per-

form that particular text, a text that isconsidered a universal manifesto ofeveryone who believes in human dig-nity, in humanistic values, in the future— facing those crematoria, in theplace where the nonexistence of thefuture was perhaps the only definitething? Was it a kind of protest demon-stration, absurd perhaps, perhapswithout any purpose, but an attemptnot to forsake and not to lose … thosevalues which ultimately only theflames could put an end to …?”

“That is one possibility, a very fineone, but there is a second possibility,which is apparently far more likely,”he goes on, suggesting that it was anact of “extreme sarcasm.”

PUBLICLY SILENT FOR DECADES

In this way, Kulka strings togetherimages and questions, mixing

poems into his collage of text, alongwith photos he took in 1978, duringhis last visit to Auschwitz. The book isa frenzy of scenes and thoughts, andin that sense a reflection of thesearching, associative and erraticway in which people actually experi-

ence memory.The book is all the more astonishing

when coupled with the knowledge ofwho the author is and what he hasdone until now. As a professor emeri-tus of Jewish history at the HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem, Kulka hasspent his entire professional life

searching for explanations for theNazis’ crimes.

He has split himself into two individu-als: the wide-eyed child from his book,who sees but doesn’t understandAuschwitz, and the academic who triesto understand and says: “We must notstop finding explanations for thecourse of history, because somethinglike the extermination of the Jews canhappen again.”

Kulka says that he is both the childand the academic, always. “But thetwo dimensions of thought belongtogether: That we have images, pri-mal experiences that we can’t explainto ourselves, but that we supplementthese images with exploration, so thatwe can come as close as possible tothe truth.”

He hardly ever showed his secondself, the wide-eyed child, in publicbefore Landscapes, which was pub-lished on his 80th birthday. Very fewof his colleagues knew that the pro-fessor was an Auschwitz survivor, andthat he had testified as a witness atthe first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in1964. He kept his child self hidden,only letting it come out at night, whenhe would sit in his office at the univer-sity and make recordings aboutAuschwitz. The book is based onthose tape recordings and his diaries.

It’s hard to believe that Kulka man-aged to remain publicly silent aboutAuschwitz for so long. Now, sitting inhis office, he sees the questioninglook on my face as I stare at the tattooon his forearm, where the concentra-tion camp number 148975 is clearlyrecognizable. He says: “I used tohave thicker, blacker hair, and it was-n’t as easy to see the number. Youknow, it was like this: I didn’t say any-thing, and hardly anyone asked.”

THE LAW OF THE “GREAT DEATH”

He was born on April 16 in whathe calls the “fateful year” of

1933, in the small Czech town ofNový Hrozenkov. The Nazis had

assumed power there in January ofthat year, and before long they hadpassed the first anti-Semitic laws.

His parents, Elly and Erich, spokeCzech and German with him, and hehad a German nanny. Otto completedthe first grade in a Czech school. Itwas “a happy year,” he says, but then

he was expelled. Jewish childrenwere no longer allowed to attendschool.

He was sent to the Theresienstadtghetto in 1942. “It was a salvation,” hesays today, in yet another of his idio-syncratic sentences. “As a child, I washappy to finally be with other childrenagain.”

His mother voluntarily signed her-self and Otto up for a transport toAuschwitz, not wanting to be separat-ed from other family members. Whenthey left, Otto promised his friendsthat he would write to them ifAuschwitz were better thanTheresienstadt.

When they arrived in Auschwitz, onSeptember 7, 1943, it was clear that itwould be the end. Only one lawapplied there, “the law of the GreatDeath,” as Kulka calls it.

A NEW LIFE

Sometimes he and other childrendid something as a dare, which

they called “trying out a little death.”They grabbed the electric fence,which was almost never live duringthe day. Once, when he handed hisuncle some food through the fence,the barbed wire was electrified, andhe still has the scars from the powersurge today.

He expected death to come anyday. He escaped once, when the mur-derers left him in the infirmarybecause he had diphtheria. It savedhis life. In January 1945, he and hisfather were sent on a death marchtoward the center of Nazi Germany.

On January 24, 1945, Otto Kulkaand his father managed to escapeduring the march. They returned toCzechoslovakia. His father remainedin Prague, and in 1949 Otto boardeda ship bound for Israel.

During the voyage, he added theHebrew name “Dov” (“Bear”) to hisGerman name Otto. He didn’t knowwhat it meant, but he liked the way it

(Continued on page 13)

AUSCHWITZ THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

This 1944 photo shows Nazis selecting prisoners at the entrance of the extermination camp.

An undated photo shows Auschwitz prisoners before transport for forced labor.

Page 6 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

S U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RS U R V I V O R S ’ C O R N E RBY CAMILLA SCHICK, THE JERUSALEM POST

At 85, Leah London Friedler stillhas a beautiful face and a

charming, almost cheeky smile. Herfamily had always known she sur-vived Auschwitz, but it was long tabooto mention it in her presence. But afamily trauma caused Leah to breakher silence, and she led her daughter,Adina Bernstein, to a locked drawerwhere she showed her a letter ofhope she’d written as a teenager,after the death camp was abandonedby the fleeing Nazis. From then on,she revealed more of her letters fromAuschwitz, and her story of survivalfinally unfolded after decades ofsecrecy.

Leah describes her childhood as avery happy one, being an only childalways in the company of a lot of fam-ily and friends. “Everything I remem-ber from then is beautiful. I had a veryloving mother and father. We were notvery rich, but for my grandparents Iwas the only grandchild, so theyalways bought me nice clothes. I wasa spoiled child,” she beams.

But by the age of 16 she had expe-rienced two invasions: the Hungarianoccupation of Northern Transylvaniaincluding her home city of Oradea in1940, followed a few years later bythe Nazis. The arrival of theHungarians saw the first organizeddiscrimination against Jews inemployment and schools. There wasalso the conscription of 18-year-oldsinto the army, including her cousins,forcing them into labor and sendingthem off to the front against Russia.“They didn’t come back,” she saysquietly.

Leah’s parents felt something waswrong when they stopped receivingletters from family living in formerCzechoslovakia and Poland, but, likeso many, they could not imagine whatwas to come. With the arrival of theNazis, schools closed, the curfewcame down, non-Jews were told toevacuate the Jewish quarter, theJews were forced to wear the yellowstar, and overnight a wooden fencecornering off the ghetto went up,enclosing, she says, 30,000 people.

Leah was living just outside theghetto with her parents, in a boysorphanage run by her father. Whenthe Nazis came to force the Jews intothe ghetto, the caretakers of the syn-agogue opposite implored her fatherto look after the Torah scrolls. “But wehad to leave too. So my fatherinstructed 12 older boys to each carrya scroll to the cart. One Hungarianofficer accused us of trying to make ascene. My father tried to reason.‘Please sir, this is very important for

us.’ When we arrived at the ghettoentrance they took my father to theSS police headquarters for threedays. He never told me what hap-pened there.”

She pauses in her narration. “I canonly tell what I see myself. What hap-pened to my father, I did not see. I canonly give you testimony, not history.Because everybody has heard aboutsuch things — in books, films. But Iprefer to speak only for myself.”

Her father was returned, but afterthey had just three weeks together inthe ghetto, a long train used for live-stock pulled up at the local station. “Inevery wagon they put 80 to 100 peo-ple. There were no places to sit. Twobuckets — one with water to drink, theother for a toilet. No food. For threedays.”

Leah pauses to take a sip of water.

“We did not know where wewere going; we just knew

we were heading north. They onlyopened the door once, for a half hour,to take out the bodies of those whodied along the way. My two grandfa-thers died on another train.”

It was dark when they arrived atAuschwitz-Birkenau. Leah remem-bers clearly the lamps, the shadowywords “Arbeit Macht Frei” loomingabove the entrance, and the flurry ofworn-down inmates in striped uni-forms directing them into lines. Hermother took two small children by thehand, but a woman who had beenthere for some time warned her inYiddish to stick with Leah rather thanthe orphans or else they would loseeach other — but to also avoid lettingon that Leah was her daughter, orthey would be deliberately separated.

“At the head stood the SS guards,and in between was a very elegantlydressed officer. Later I knew him to beDr. Josef Mengele.” Leah demon-strates how Auschwitz’s Angel ofDeath, as he came to be known, hadbeen holding a little stick daintilybetween his fingers, indicating leftand right with it: one way to the gas,the other way to stay alive. She andher mother entered the camp.

After being shaved from head to toe,the women were forced to undressand stand naked in a line, stripped of

all dignity and humanity, clutchingonly their shoes and small bars ofsoap. “There were a lot of soldierslaughing at us, making jokes. Fromthere we entered a great building withshowers.” Once outside again theywere left to rummage through a largepile of uniforms left behind by previ-ous inmates.

Every day Dr. Mengele then came totheir block C to make his “selections.”Leah and her mother survived for

longer when a Czechfriend in charge of theirblock secured themjobs in the camp’sdreaded revier (clinic),where Mengele con-ducted his “experi-ments” on inmates.While her mother wasturned into the numberA25401 and workedas a nurse, Leah,touching her shoulder,

explains she had worn a badge thatread lieferant — literally meaning“office boy.” Leah remained close tothe other female revier workers, everyday eating from shared bowls in a linelike animals.

“I was a delivery girl for Dr.Mengele,” she clarifies. “There weretwo of us.” She pulls up her leftsleeve, revealing the number A25402on her forearm. Three years ago, awoman from Kibbutz Neot Mordechaigot in touch after reading an articleabout Leah launching a book of mem-oirs, compiled by her daughter Adina.“Her number was A25403.”

The woman marked with the numberA25404 was Dr. Gisella Perl, theJewish gynecologist who saved thelives of hundreds of expectant mothersin the camp. While heavily pregnantwomen were sent straight to the gaschambers, those in the first few monthsof pregnancy were harder to spot.

“Dr. Mengele asked Dr. Perl for thewomen who were in the early stages,”Leah’s voice drops. “He wanted to doexperiments with the babies. But Dr.Perl, at the risk of her life, took thepregnant women out in the middle ofthe night with my mother to performabortions, so as not to put the moth-ers in the hands of Dr. Mengele, giv-ing them a chance to survive.” Leahhelped by holding up candles so Dr.Perl could operate in the darkness.

“I only remember one child beingborn there. Dr. Mengele cared for themother until the end of the pregnancy,and a healthy baby was born. Hegave it one month with the mother. Hebought it clothes and nappies. Thenhe realized this was no place for ababy, saying it’s better to take it to the‘children’s hospital.’”

“Because I was the lieferant, he

gave me the baby to take it to thegate. I heard him tell the mother that‘the ambulance will come to take thebaby.’ When I got to the gate, theguard told me to throw the baby onthe floor. I put the baby on the floor.When I came back the mother askedme frantically, ‘What happened to mybaby?’ And I told her the nurses cameto take it. But I knew the baby was nolonger alive.”

As a teenager Leah wrote in one ofher letters while at the camp: “Thedevil, whom people called ‘the doc-tor’…A man of rare beauty, who withsadistic pleasure made decisions oflife or death for the innocent. Usuallythe decision was death. To the illpatients, he said: ‘Why are you cry-ing? You’re all going to the healinghome!’ Those patients knew theywere going to the furnace while theywere still living.”

Leah had not been a delivery girl inany obstetric sense of the word.“When somebody died, it was our jobto take the body to the gate. Not onlythe dead, also the dying.” Asked ifMengele ever spoke to her, Leah ismatter of fact. “No, he did not speakwith me. But we had no name, wewere numbers.”

Toward the end of the war Leahrecalls a blur of shoeless

enforced marches and excruciatinglabor in the freezing Polish winter,which nearly killed her, as the Nazistried to push them all over the brink.By this point Mengele had fled, andthe gassing and furnaces had ceasedto exist.

“My heart was very weak. I didn’twant to swallow anymore. No coffee,soup, bread. I was at my end. Butthen my mother spoke to me veryangrily. I was ashamed, so I ate. Shesaved my life, again.”

By the time the Nazis tried to forcethem on a final march, Leah and sev-eral others were so ill that they weresent back to their block. “They wantedto make one last furnace. But thenGod sent us a snowstorm, so theycouldn’t make the fire. And then theyleft.”

She arrived back home on May 11,1945. “My daughter Adina was bornon May 11 some years later,” Leahsmiles. “I got off the train. It wasFriday afternoon before Shabbat, Iwas with my mother. There wasnobody at the train station. No family,no friends, only strangers. I was verysad. I thought I saw my father, but myfather had died in a camp.”

As their taxi stopped at a red light aboy rushed up to them, snatchedLeah into his arms and kissed her,exclaiming “Thank God you are alive,you came back! How are you?”

(Continued on page 15)

THE STORY OF DR. MENGELE’S DELIVERY GIRL

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 7

BY DOREEN RAPPAPORT

On February 4, 1943, a radiosmuggled into the Novogrudok

forced labor camp brought the glori-ous news to the 250 Jewish prisonersthat the Soviets had defeated theGermans at Stalingrad. But that sameday bought word that the remaining500 Jews in the ghetto had been mur-dered. The Jews in the camp knewthey too would soon be murdered,and began planning their escape.They decided on digging a tunnel outto the middle of a wheat field 328 feeton the other side of the barbed wire.From there they would try to find theirway to the family camp that theBielski brothers had set up in theNaliboki forest ten miles away.

They decided to start the tunnelunder the bunk beds in their livingquarters in a stable far away from theguards’ stations. The SS never camethere, fearful that they would get dis-eased from the appalling conditionsunder which they had forced the Jewsto live. Everyone in the camp, exceptfor one Austrian Jew, suspected ofbeing an informer, was told about theplan.

Berl Yoselevitz, an engineer, workedout the measurements: the tunnelwould be five feet below the ground,two feet across and thirty inches high,just big enough for one person tocrawl through at a time. He estimatedthat if they dug three feet a day, theycould reach the wheat field by Augustwhen the wheat would be four feet talland provide cover as they emergedfrom the tunnel.

A lower bunk bed was detached andre-hinged so it could be pulled up and

down quickly. The metalworkersmade funnels and small shovels fromscraps of metal and resharpened thetools every day. The joiners built atrolley track and a trolley with hingeson the sides so dirt could be pushedinto the open side. When the trolleywas full of dirt, the flapswere closed. Peoplegave up their blanketsand the tailors madesixty sacks for holdingthe dirt.

During the day, onlyone man dug at a timeso he would not be aslikely to be missed atwork. The diggerscrawled on their nakedbellies, scooping upearth. Every six feet,they pierced the tunnelroof with a stick tomake sure it would notcave in. Yoselevitz con-stantly checked to make sure theywere digging in a straight line. Atnight, the prisoners formed a livingconveyor belt, passing the dirt sacksout of the tunnel, in their living quar-ters, up a ladder to a loft.

As the men dug further, oxygengrew scarcer. There wasn’t enoughair to burn an oil lamp. The metal-workers made cone-shaped pipes tobring in air through the tunnel roof.They widened the tunnel for better air-flow, but the oil lamps still struggled tostay lit.

Avram Rukovski, a master elec-trician, scavenged old wires

and stole electric bulbs from his work-shop, and then jury-rigged a switch-board that controlled the camp’ssearchlights. To get light in the tunnel,

he diverted electricity from the mainswitchboard, causing a power failure.The Nazi commandant called uponAvram to figure out what was wrong.Avram insisted he couldn’t find any-thing wrong. A Polish electriciancalled in said he could not find the

source of the problemeither. The Naziscame to accept thefrequent, short powerfailures as normal.

Holes were made inthe ceiling to let thestale air out in thesummer. The dug-outearth was piled onboth sites of the loft.When the loft was full,double walls werebuilt. Dirt was alsoburied under floor-boards. Rain came.The tunnel roof beganto sink. Bunk beds

were taken apart to prop it up. Thetunnel walls began to crack. Morewood was stolen to brace them. Aworker caught smuggling wood fromhis workshop was hanged. But thesmuggling continued.

As they dug, they ran out of placesto hide the dirt. They mixed it with thegarbage and on Sundays, cleaningday, they dumped it into the well. Itclogged the well. The Germansordered them to clean the well. It gotclogged again. They cleaned it again.The Germans couldn’t understandwhy the well constantly clogged. Theygot permission to dig new toilets andfilled part of the trenches with tunneldirt.

In August the wheat was harvestedand they saw that the exit now ended

in an open field. They dug anotherfive hundred feet. More rain came.The tunnel roof began to sink. Bunkbeds were taken apart to prop it up.The tunnel walls began cracking.More wood was stolen to brace them.

By September the tunnel was ready.A hiding place was built in the attic forten people who were too weak to walkquickly. The hope was that after theescape, the Germans would abandonthe camp, thinking it empty, andallowing them to make their way tofreedom.

The escape was set forWednesday, September 26,

1943, at nine p.m., when the guardswere usually drunk. Idel Kagan, thenfourteen, described his goodbyes tothe other prisoners. Idel had tried toescape once before, but had to returnbecause he missed the rendezvoustime with the Bielski couriers. His toeshad become frostbitten during theescape and had to be amputated.

“Friends came to wish me a suc-cessful escape, as if I was the onlyone escaping. I understood what theymeant; they thought I didn’t stand achance. I could sense that they werefeeling sorry for me. My feet weresomewhat healed by this time, but Icould sense people were worriedabout me. All of them would go awaywith tears in their eyes. However, Iwas not afraid.

“We assembled in a long line, wait-ing our turn. It was very quiet and youcould just make out the faces in thesemi-darkness. I sat quietly andthought about my family and what hadhappened to us in such a short time.I was hoping my father, who had beensent to another labor camp, was still

(Continued on page 14)

ESCAPE FROM NOVOGRUDOK

Idel Kagan at twelve years old.

To mark the 75th anniversary of

the Kindertransport, which saw

10,000 children escape from Nazi

Germany to the UK, a new book

brings to light the heartbreaking

postcards sent by one Jewish

father in Berlin to his son in

Swansea.

BY DONALD MACINTYRE, THE INDEPENDENT

They are, if nothing else, a tangi-ble testament to a father’s love.

From February 3, 1939, when “littleHeini” arrived in Swansea after leav-ing Berlin for the last time, untilAugust 31, when war made suchcommunication impossible, MaxLichtwitz wrote a stream of postcardsto his young son. They have left aunique record of his determination tomaintain the parental bond with theboy whose life he had saved by send-ing him to a strange country and part-ing with him, as he feared, forever.

What can the journey have been likefor a bewildered six-year-old? Henry

Foner, as little Heini Lichtwitz wouldbecome, remembers the German bor-der guards searching the train pas-sengers and his one small suitcase,the Dutch women on the other side of

the crossing handing out “delicious”sausage rolls, a helmeted bobby onthe quay at Harwich, the large hallwhere he waited to be collected, butnothing of the painful departure fromBerlin. “It’s a strange thing; if you talkto people like me, the traumatic mem-ory is of parting with their parents, and

I can’t remember it at all. It must havebeen traumatic and I must have for-gotten because I remember the jour-ney very well, but I can’t remembersaying goodbye to my father and my

grandmother.” (His mother had diedtwo years earlier.)

The “people like me” to whom Fonerrefers were the 10,000 Jewish and“non-Aryan” children of theKindertransport who, betweenDecember 1938 — in the wake of theKristallnacht pogrom which had ter-

rorized Jews across Berlin — andSeptember 1939, escaped the com-ing Holocaust, leaving their families inNazi Europe by train and ferry forBritain, accompanied by youth work-ers and unemployed Jewish profes-sionals who risked their lives byreturning again and again to removeother groups of children to safety.

The young Heinz Lichtwitz, as hethen was, was destined for the

home of a Jewish couple in Swansea,Morris and Winnie Foner. Despite thecomforting postcard with “1,000 kiss-es” his father sent him as soon as heknew he was safely with the Foners,his arrival cannot have been easy. Hespoke only German, his new fosterfamily only English and Yiddish.

Yet after just a few months in a localSwansea school, when his father tele-phoned him on his birthday in June —Henry can remember the call stand-ing in the hall of the Foners’ home inthe Sketty area of Swansea — he hadforgotten his German. Which is why

(Continued on page 14)

GOODBYE TO BERLIN: POSTCARDS FROM NAZI GERMANY

TELL STORY OF THE KINDERTRANSPORT

A postcard from Max Lichtwitz to his son Heini dated February 5, 1939. The card reads: “Dear

Heini. I received your letter today and am glad that you received your Easter eggs and that you

enjoyed the Seder evening. The weather was very nice here today. Have you been out in the gar-

den? Many greetings and kisses. Your Vati.”

Page 8 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

THE AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIESTHE AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIESHONORARY CHAIRS

GENERAL CO-CHAIRS

DINNER CHAIRS

Marilyn & Barry Rubenstein

Dr. Miriam & Sheldon AdelsonDr. itzhak Arad

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FoundationRachel Landau Gottstein & Barnard

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The Nash FamLucy P

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The American and International Societies for Yad Vashemcordially invite you to attend their

ANNUAL TRIBUTE DINNER

Legacy and Gratitude

Yad Vashem Remembrance Award

The Honorable Michael R. BloombergMayor of the City of New York

Memorial Tribute to

Eli Zborowski, z”lFounding Chairman of the

American and International Societies for Yad Vashem

Marilyn & Barry RubensteinDinner Chairs

Sunday, November 10, 20138 Kislev, 5774

Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers

811 Seventh Avenue at 52nd StreetNew York City

Reception 5:00 PMDinner 6:30 PM

Kosher Dietary Laws Observed Black Tie Option

Leonard A. Wilf Rabbi Eric M. Lankin, DMChair Executive Director/CEO

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 9

S FOR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL TRIBUTE DINNERS FOR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL TRIBUTE DINNERTRIBUTE COMMITTEE

DINNER COMMITTEE (in formation)

YOUNG LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATES DINNER COMMITTEE

E CHAIRS

Skura Elizabeth & Joseph Wilf

k PomerancAxel Stawski ygmunt Wilf

Celina & Marvin ZborowskiElizabeth Zborowski

Murry Zborowski

d Distenfeldugen Gluckuce Goldman

der Horowitzesfeld HellerHolm

enry Jacobsathan JacobsonHarry Kartenra Kortakowski

Ludwig LiebsohnRose Moskowitz

Cecile & Edward MosbergDora & Jack Oltuski

Mark PalmerDeborah & Lawrence Pomeranc

M.K. & J.B. PritzkerIra Leon Rennert

Barbara & Lewis ShrenskyRosa StryglerFred Zeidman

CO-CHAIRS

ark Hastenry Heiman

Heinflingjamin Hellernatol Hiller

mon Konoverman KriegsteinMilton MaltzDavid Mannmily FoundationPantirer

Sari & Israel RoizmanBella B. Sekons

Jacqueline & David SimonLili Stawski

Sara & Moniek StawskiLillian & Milton SteinbergJoy & Benjamin Warren

Don WeinbergRose Zarucki

Millie & Abraham Zuckerman

Marilyn & Abe BesserLilly & Sam Bloch

Jen & Richard CohenJane & Alan CornellVera & Joseph Eden

Lewis L. FagenLynn & Erwin Fisch

Suellen & Gordon FreemanJoseph Goldberg

Menora & Ernst HackerMaria Herskovic

Shelly & William HimmelrichGustave Jacobs

Marilyn & Michael KassenSima Katz

Beth & Seth KlarmanPeter J. Klein

Brenda Weil Mandel & Lou Frock

Miriam & Louis RosenbaumNina & Jeffrey RubensteinArelene & Jerry Sanders

Rudolph TesslerErna Weil

Regina & David WeinbergHenry Wrobel

Lori & Alan ZeckelmanAmy & Brad Zelnick

Leslie & Michael AdlerBarbara & Harvey Arfa

Gail & Bruce BukietKaren & Michael Bukiet

Sherrye & David DentzkerCheri DesheSarah Eisner

Trudy & Sol Englander

Rochelle & Maks EtinginSusan Holtzman

Linda & Murray J. LaulichtDavid Mandelbaum

Ardith & Charles MederickSusan & Mark Nevins

Shelly & Joseph ParadisMr. & Mrs. Jerry Pollack

William Z. ReichLidia & Jimmy Resnick

Sigmund RolatBella & George Savran

Betty & Howard SchwartzElaine & Irwin ZamoreJulie & Scott ZelnickWayne Zuckerman

Abbi & Jeremy Halpern

Nadav BesnerLauren & Justin Brody

Jennifer Drukier & Matthew BirnbaumRebecca Hanus

Aviya & Alex HalpernYonina & Eric GombergJocelyn & Gregory KlarJulie & Reuben Kopel

Alexandra LebovitsNicole & Avi Lieberman

Barry Levine

Ilana LifshitzIris & Adam LindenbaumJessica & Andrew MaukNicole & Joseph Meyer

Sivan OchshornDara & David OrbachJaci & Gonen Paradis

Elliot PinesJustin Pines

Mindy & Alan Schall

Caroline & Morris Massel

Aliza & Elie SingerJennifer & Mark Smith

Brett TanzmanKeren Toledano

Ariel & Joshua WeinerMaeira & Michel Werthenschlag

Cori & Jason WilfOrin Wilf

Rachel & Jonathan WilfLolly & Boaz Zborowski

nal

MinO

Colonel Ilan Ramon was born in Tel Aviv on June 20, 1954.He was an Israel Air Force pilot and the first Israeli astro-naut to take part in a space mission. Col. Ramon (and hisfellow crew members) died when the space shuttleColumbia exploded upon re-entry on February 1, 2003.

Colonel Ramon graduated as a fighter pilot from the IsraelAir Force Flight School in 1974. He earned his bachelor’sdegree in electronics and computer engineering from TelAviv University in 1987. In 1994 he was promoted to therank of colonel and was assigned to head the Department ofOperational Requirement for Weapon Development andAcquisition.

In 1997 Colonel Ramon was selected by NASA to serve as apayload specialist on the space shuttle Columbia. He report-ed for training in 1998 and remained at the Space Center inHouston until 2003.

Ramon was posthumously awarded the NASA Space FlightMedal, the Distinguished Public Service Medal and the USCongressional Medal of Honor. He is the only non-American to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.Colonel Ramon was survived by his wife Rona and their fourchildren. Tragically, his son, Air Force pilot Captain AsafRamon, died in 2009 during a training mission.

Petr Ginz was born in Prague in 1928. A gifted youth,Petr was an artist and wrote essays, short stories andpoems. As a result of the German occupation ofCzechoslovakia, Petr Ginz was expelled from school in1940 for being a Jew, and, in 1942, he was deported toTerezin. Together with friends in the youth barracks,Ginz edited and published a newspaper called Vedem(We Are Leading), in which his drawings, stories andarticles appeared, reflecting the wide scope of his inter-ests, including science. His curiosity knew no bounds,helping him cope with life in the ghetto. In the fall of1944, at the age of 16, he was deported to Auschwitz,where he perished. Ginz’s works were given to his fatherby a friend from the youth barracks. Petr’s father donat-ed his works to Yad Vashem when he emigrated to Israel.

Petr Ginz, z”l

Col. Ilan Ramon, z”l

This year’s Annual Tribute Dinner commemorates the10th anniversary of the ill-fated shuttle mission whichtook the life of Col. Ilan Ramon, z"l, the first Israeliastronaut, and destroyed the copy of Petr Ginz’s“Moon Landscape” drawing. At the suggestion of S.Isaac Mekel, Director of Development at the AmericanSociety, Col. Ramon took “Moon Landscape” with himon this mission. We will be acknowledging IlanRamon’s brother, Gadi Ramon, and Petr Ginz’s sister,Chava Pressburger.

Page 10 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

REPORT FROM REPORT FROM YAD VASHEMYAD VASHEM

BY DONALD SNYDER, NBC NEWS

While Israel recently marked itsannual Holocaust Remembrance

Day dedicated to the 70th anniversary ofthe Warsaw ghetto uprising, it’s hard toimagine that anyone could still just belearning the fate of their loved onesfrom that tragic era.

But that’s exactly what happened toAmos Cohen, a shipbuilder living inHaifa, Israel. He only recently learnedthe fate of his long-lost relative RoseKobylinski, who died in a Germandeath march and was buried in aRoman Catholic cemetery in a smallvillage in Poland.

For decades Rose was only a namecircled in black on a family tree,meaning she had died in theHolocaust.

The genealogical chart had beendrawn up by Cohen’s mother, Rose’scousin. Other than Rose’s name onthe tree, all that Cohen, 64, knewabout her was that she had lived inBerlin before being deported to aGerman death camp.

Nothing else was known — therehad been no news about Rose sincethe Holocaust.

Then, one day, Cohen received acall from Yad Vashem.

“We think we found your relative,”the caller said. “And she is buried inthe cemetery of St. Anna’s RomanCatholic Church in Swierklany,Poland.”

The search for Rose began in 1990when Cohen’s mother made a formalinquiry, hoping that Yad Vashemmight have information about her fate.No information was available.

“It was sad that my mother diednever knowing what happened to her

cousin, Rose,” said Cohen.When Cohen went to Swierklany, a

small village in southwest Poland, inApril 2010, he pieced together whathad happened to her. He recitedKaddish, the Jewish mourner’sprayer, in the church cemetery whereRose is buried in a mass grave withnine others, all murdered by theGermans on January 18, 1945.

Konstanty Dolnik, the local under-taker, buried the victims in the ceme-tery in defiance of German orders tobury them in a forest to erase theirmemories. Dolnik also recorded thenumbers tattooed on their forearms.

In 1948, the town erected a monu-ment with a cross to mark the

mass grave. Only the numbersrecorded by Dolnik identified thegrave’s occupants. There were nonames.

The breakthrough in the search forRose came when Yaki Gantz, a for-mer member of Israel’s domesticsecurity force (the Israeli version ofthe FBI), became involved. Gantzheads a project called “For EveryNumber There Is a Name.”

“Their relatives now know that theirrelatives didn’t just become ashes atAuschwitz,” he said in a phone inter-view. “They know there is a placewhere they can come to sayKaddish.”

When Gantz learned about thegrave in Swierklany, he sent the num-bers to Yad Vashem with informationfrom the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau

museum.The museum had just

obtained documents thatthe Russian troopsseized when liberatingAuschwitz in 1945. ThisAuschwitz data recentlyobtained from Russiaproved critical in match-ing many numbers tonames.

Krystyna Manka, thenow-75-year-old daugh-ter of Dolnik, the under-taker, wept as sheremembered the sub-

zero January night when the prison-ers arrived from Auschwitz during anice storm.

“It’s hard for me to talk about thatnight,” she told NBC News through atranslator.

Manka was seven years old in 1945when the Germans, losing the war,began marching concentration campprisoners in Poland to Germany inwhat are known as death marches.

Wearing rags and clogs that blood-ied their feet, the prisoners were oftenshot to death when they could notwalk fast enough. They were guardedby German SS men and barkingdogs. The Germans spent the night inthe village of Swierklany. One of thefemale prisoners stayed in Manka’s

home that night — although shedoesn’t know if it was Rose.

“I still remember her beautiful blondcurly hair,” Manka said. “Her feet weretorn by the wooden shoes and the longwalk in the freezing cold.” They hadwalked 40 miles, the distance fromAuschwitz to Swierklany, according tothe U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museumin Washington, D.C.

Manka’s father applied ointment tothe woman’s feet and dressed thewounds. Manka’s mother, fluent inGerman, convinced an SS guard thattreating the wounds would make thewoman walk better and not slow themarch.

It didn’t really matter. The next day,10 prisoners were shot to death out-side the village, including the womanwho had stayed in Manka’s home.

The residents of Swierklany markthis massacre with an annual

remembrance service on January 18,and also during religious holidays.

“The fact that the Jews are buried ina Roman Catholic cemetery helps usto recognize that we are brothers,”said Father Jan Klyczka, a priest inthe village for the last 40 years, in aphone interview.

Local teenagers maintain the graveand learn about a massacre that’shard for them to imagine, said theirhistory teacher, Iwona Barchanska.

Gantz continues to scour the dirtroads and churches of rural Poland,seeking to restore the names of themurdered.

“When a person finishes life, he has aname. He is not a number,” said Gantz.

Now, beneath the 1948 monumentwhere there were once only numbers,there is a new memorial plaque withnames that include Rose Kobylinski.

AFTER DECADES, FAMILY UNRAVELS HOLOCAUST MYSTERY

Amos Cohen stands in front of the grave of his long-lost relative

Rose Kobylinski in Swierklany, Poland. Her fate at the end of

World War II was just recently discovered.

BY YORI YALON, ISRAEL HAYOM

Four books stamped with his

name, the only tan-

gible keepsake that

Moshe Hofstadter has of

his father Abraham, who

was murdered by the

Nazis, were returned to

him in a moving ceremony

at Yad Vashem.

The return of the books

marked the culmination of

an unusual sequence of

events. Three years ago,

Christoph Schlegel, the

grandson of a senior

Austrian Nazi officer,

found several books that

had been stamped with

the unfamiliar name Abraham

Hofstadter in the home of his grand-

mother. After making inquiries,

Schlegel learned that his Nazi

grandfather had been stationed in

Rzeszow, Poland, in 1941, and had

apparently acquired the books from

a Nazi storehouse containing stolen

Jewish property.

Schegel began to research the

name stamped in the stolen

books, and eventually found

it online in Yad Vashem’s

Central Database of Shoah

Victims’ Names. He learned

that Hofstadter, a Jew from

Rzeszow who was killed in

the Holocaust, had been

commemorated in a Page of

Testimony filled out by his

only son, Moshe, the sole

survivor in his family.

Schlegel contacted Yad

Vashem for help in locating

the family so he could return

the books. Yad Vashem con-

nected the grandson of the

Nazi officer with the survivor,

and the two began corresponding.

“It’s just a few books I’d like to

return to their rightful owner, but I

know the feeling of touching an

object that belonged to a loved one,”

Schlegel wrote. He sent the books to

Israel, and, 72 years after they were

taken, Moshe was presented with

them at Yad Vashem.

“This is the only thing I have left of

my father,” Moshe said at the cere-

mony. “I am very happy to have the

books.”

Yad Vashem chairman Avner

Shalev said: “Just recently the project

to memorialize the names of those

killed in the Holocaust on Pages of

Testimony was added to UNESCO’s

Memory of the World Register. This

incident testifies to the uniqueness of

the collection of Pages of Testimony,

which in addition to memorializing

those who perished is also a tool for

obtaining information about the fate of

many people.”

AFTER 70 YEARS, NAZI OFFICER’S GRANDSON RETURNS STOLEN BOOKS

Moshe Hofstadter at Yad Vashem.

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 11

BY LEA ZELTSERMAN, TABLET

Adoctor walks into an operatingroom and asks if the patient is

asleep yet. As he is about to operate,a group of Nazis in uniform marchesin — a round of “Heil Hitler” is fol-lowed by orders that the doctor puthis scalpel down and leave the hospi-tal. In the next scene, the doctor isparaded down a crowded street, stillwearing his white uniform but with theword Jude scrawled across his chestin thick letters.

We know the doctor is headed tocertain death, because that is whathappens in Holocaust films. But this isno ordinary Holocaust film. This is ascene from Professor Mamlock, aSoviet film released in 1938 that tellsthe story of a German Jewish doctorliving under the Nazis. Part of a smallbut significant wave of anti-FascistSoviet films, it was one of the firstfilms in the world to address the issueof Jewish persecution in NaziGermany and was seen by millions ofpeople in the USSR before it wasbanned in August 1939, when the

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed.Anecdotal evidence suggests that anot insignificant number of SovietJewish families took the warning ofthe film to heart and managed to fleeahead of the Nazi invasion.

This past April, a newly subtitledprint of Professor Mamlock wasscreened at the Toronto Jewish FilmFestival, followed by a Q&A sessionwith Olga Gershenson, a professor ofJudaic and Near Eastern studies atthe University of MassachusettsAmherst and the preeminent name inSoviet Holocaust film history.Wherever a Soviet Holocaust movieis screened, Gershenson is there,leading the discussion and translatingthe Soviet messaging for contempo-rary audiences. Her third book, ThePhantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinemaand Jewish Catastrophe, traces thestory of a shadow Soviet film industrythat only rarely managed to representthe tragedy that filmmakers, directors,and screenwriters sought to warnagainst or memorialize. While filmslike Schindler’s List are often the way

Westerners are first exposed to theHolocaust, there are no parallels inSoviet/Russian culture — ProfessorMamlock was shown briefly afterHitler invaded the USSR, but had dis-appeared from Soviet theaters by theend of the 1940s.

Gershenson’s work is a monumen-tal achievement in giving a voice tothe lost Soviet Holocaust films — tothe filmmakers, and to also the mil-lions whose fates they attempted tomemorialize. As the charges of cen-sorship pile up, and the list of silencedfilmmakers grows, the sense of loss isoverwhelming. The tragedy of whatmight have been is most poignant inthe details of Gershenson’s ownresearch — such as the moment shefound the screenplay for Gott mit Uns(God Is With Us), with a blank sign-out sheet signaling that no one hadtouched it in nearly 50 years. (“WhenI called scriptwriter Grigorii Kanovichin Israel, he nearly fainted. He’dthought it was lost,” she told me.)

Or writing about Boris Ermolaev,whose battle to bring his film OurFather to the screen cost him hiscareer. Ermolaev now lives in a

Montreal nursing home: “The sadirony is that this is a Jewish nursinghome,” Gershenson writes, “but noone around him is aware of what anamazing film about the Holocaust heattempted to make and what kind ofaudacity it required back in 1960sSoviet Union.”

Or her meeting with ValentinVinogradov, whose career wasdestroyed over his film EasternCorridor (one of his later films was lit-erally washed off the film stock byauthorities). A believer to the end (hedied in 2011), he saw the censorshipof his work as an aberration, orbetrayal, of the system, not a repre-sentation of the system. InGershenson’s judgement, “Up to thisday Vinogradov is one of the mostimportant Soviet filmmakers that noone has ever heard of.”

***

The Soviets had many ways tokill a film, whether it was

through subtle means such as self-censorship by the filmmakers them-selves and poor reviews in Pravda, or

outright rejection by Goskino, the cen-tral film governing body. Of course, itwas never a matter of the Jewishtopic being addressed. “Saying outloud that the screenplay’s problemlies with its representation of Jewswould itself be anti-S e m i t i c , ”G e r s h e n s o nwrites. “This is whythe SRK (a film stu-dio editorial board)was hard pressedto avoid any on-the-record discus-sion of Jewish top-ics, while effective-ly trying to sup-press it.” Modernfilmmakers willshudder to readthe details of allseven approvalstages each filmhad to undergo,from the initial idea through to the dis-tribution of the final film.

To understand Soviet Holocaustfilms, it is also important to under-stand the way that the Holocaustunfolded in Soviet territories. Therewere no concentration camps in theUSSR, and Soviet Jews were not sentwestward to the camps in Poland.The vast majority of Jews were round-ed up and shot in (or just outside)their towns by the Einsatzgruppen.For Russian Jews, Babi Yar, notAuschwitz, is the ultimate symbol ofthe Holocaust.

Jews also fought in the Red Army,often leaving their hometowns beforethe occupation and returning to noth-ing but deserted homes and massgraves. Others were evacuated east-ward into areas like Tashkent andUzbekistan. Most Russian Jewstoday can count being Holocaust vic-tims, Red Army veterans and evac-uees among their family wartimeexperiences.

The evacuation, and the failure ofthe Germans to fully occupy the coun-try, also meant that a Yiddish culture(newspapers, film, theater) continuedto exist throughout the war. As aresult, the Jewish response to theHolocaust was immediate — and itwas often supported by Soviet offi-cials. The Jewish Anti-FascistCommittee, formed by direct orderfrom Stalin, not only documentedJewish losses, but its archives alsoreveal plans for a number ofHolocaust films.

It’s often forgotten today, but theSoviets were the first witnesses tomany Nazi atrocities — a point alsomade by David Shneer in his 2011book on Soviet Jewish photojournal-ists (Through Soviet Jewish Eyes:Photography, War, and theHolocaust), many of whom capturedsome of the most iconic Holocaustimagery known today. The earliest

images of concentration camps weretaken by Soviet Jewish photogra-phers; similarly, Gershenson is cer-tain that the 1938 Peat Bog Soldiersis the first film in the world to show thecamps. Another film, the 1945 The

Unvanquished, directed by MarkDonskoi, became the first Holocaustfilm to show Jews explicitly as Nazivictims (the mass Jewish execution inthe film was actually filmed in BabiYar). The film slipped through beforethe state machinery had figured outits official stance on the Holocaust,but then it quickly disappeared fromscreens.

“What we know now is that ifnot for this severe censor-

ship,” Gershenson said, “the way wethink about Holocaust cinema todaywould have been dramatically differ-ent, because today when we thinkabout Holocaust cinema, we thinkabout Schindler’s List or Shoah. Butthere were all these incredible Sovietscreenplays.”

While the fates of individual filmsrose and fell with the vagaries ofSoviet policies over the decades —the post-Stalin thaw, the clampdownfollowing the Six-Day War and therise of the immigration movement —common themes emerge in all ofthem. When the Holocaust is shownat all, it’s externalized. This is partlybecause a Holocaust that happenedoutside the USSR made for a narra-tive in which the Soviets were blame-less. But other factors were at work —such as the lack of imagery for therapid Einsatzgruppen execution thatcame very quickly on the heels of theNazi arrival.

“There was no authentic languagefor representing the Holocaust there.How do you represent anEinsatzgruppen execution? It’s just sohorrible. It’s not even a camp. It’s just—” said Gershenson, her voice cut-ting off mid-sentence. “Imagine a filmwhere all your main characters comeout on stage and are executed, andthat’s it. End of film.”

So, Soviet filmmakers had to findways to code their films for a home

(Continued on page 14)

GHOSTS OF SOVIET HOLOCAUST CINEMA

FINALLY ESCAPE FROM THE CENSORS’ FILES

Still from Fate of a Man.

Still from the film Professor Mamlock (1938), directors Herbert

Rappaport and Adolf Minkin.

Page 12 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

The study of the Holocaust isexpanding worldwide — for differ-ing reasons.

Across the globe, schoolchildrenstudy the industrialized slaugh-

ter of Jews by the Nazis. Holocaustmuseums in America, Israel andPoland each draw more than a millionvisitors annually. The UN has passedtwo resolutions in the past decade toinstitutionalize memory of theHolocaust worldwide. Yad Vashem,an Israeli museum and remembranceauthority, trains 10,000 domestic andforeign teachers every year. “Interestis growing immensely,” says DoritNovak, the director-general.Membership of the Association ofHolocaust Organizations (AHO) hasincreased from 25 in the late 1980s toover 300. Commemorative museumshave opened from Germany andFrance to Brazil and Japan. Of the16,000 books on the Holocaust listedin America’s Library of Congress,more than two-thirds were publishedin the past two decades.

In its immediate aftermath, theHolocaust went largely unacknowl-edged. Perpetrators and bystanderspreferred to forget. Commemorationbegan in Israel, where many survivorshad gathered. But even there it wasdone quietly. A 1960 study showedthat barely a quarter of schools taughtchildren about the Holocaust. Onlywhen Israelis came to feel an existen-tial threat during successive wars withArab neighbors did that change.

In 1982, the education ministrymade teaching about the Holocaustcompulsory for all children. Coveragein history textbooks increased from 20pages in the 1960s to 450 in the1990s. Today, every Israeli school-child spends a semester studying thehistory of Shoah, along with furthercoursework in literature, music andart classes. Some 200,000 studentsand soldiers tour Yad Vashem annual-ly, the soldiers carrying their guns.The state has managed to draw greatstrength from keeping alive the mem-ory of the murdered.

Yet over time the depiction of massslaughter has changed. When Israelwas meek, it stressed the heroism ofthe Warsaw ghetto. Now, with reas-suringly powerful armed forces, thefocus is more on victimhood. Schoolsteach that “we need a strong armybecause the world hates us,” saysDan Porat, a professor of Jewish edu-cation in Jerusalem. Domestic criticshave called some Israeli historyteaching simplistic. The Holocaust isat times presented as evidence of alack of Jewish national spirit, they say,rather than an excess of Germany’s.Government offices exhibit photos ofIsraeli air-force jets flying over thedeath camps of Auschwitz. OnHolocaust Remembrance Day, inau-gurated five years after the foundingof Israel, politicians routinely presentthe country’s foes as would-be annihi-lators. “All our [current] dangers areviewed through the prism of

Auschwitz,” says Avihu Ronen, a lec-turer in Jewish history at HaifaUniversity.

In the West, it fell to the media tostimulate public discussion of the

Holocaust. Early works struck themesfamiliar to Israelis. Schindler’s List, a1993 Hollywood film about a Germanbusinessman who bribed Nazi offi-cials to shield his Jewish employees,turns from black and white to colorwhen the survivors arrive inJerusalem. More recent Westerndepictions have diverged from theIsraeli narrative. Europe’s young, nowthree generations removed from thekilling, flinch from guilt imposed byelders. According to Centropa, aneducational center in Vienna, stu-dents respond best to Holocaustteaching when first told about theJewish past they have lost. “If theyrelate through Franz Kafka’s‘Metamorphosis,’ the Jews of Pragueand Weimar culture, they will learnabout the Holocaust through the backdoor,” says Edward Serotta,

Centropa’s founder. Dutch schoolsdraw pupils in by holding commemo-rative walks to buildings that oncehoused Jews.

Unlike Yad Vashem, which portraysJews as outsiders in Europe who findredemption in Israel, new Jewishmuseums in Austria and Poland pres-ent Jews as an intrinsic part ofEuropean heritage and culture. “Itshocked me,” says Mr. Porat after avisit. “I never thought of Jews as beingPoles.” The exhibition at Yad Vashemends with a display of Israel’s declara-tion of independence and the playingof the national anthem, whereasEuropean equivalents emphasize aJewish rebirth in places where mas-sacres happened (Berlin has theworld’s fastest-growing Jewish com-munity — from a very low base).

America may have the world’s sec-ond-biggest Jewish population but,with no death camps to commemo-rate on its soil, it follows a surprising-ly universal path in Holocaust teach-ing. Museums and syllabuses areoften used as pathways to examinegenocides in general, focusing on thedangers of “racism, bigotry and intol-erance,” says Dan Napolitano, direc-tor of education at the HolocaustMemorial Museum in Washington, thelargest of America’s 30 museums and70 centers on the subject. An increas-ing number offer courses for soldiers,lawyers and policemen that warnagainst the abuse of power.

Discussing the Holocaust in thecontext of other human horrors is

popular in Latin America, Africa andAsia as well. Richard Freedman, whoruns the oldest of South Africa’s threeHolocaust centers, has used Nazirace laws to examine white rule.“There are very close parallelsbetween Germany’s establishment ofa racial state in 1933–39 and SouthAfrica’s apartheid state,” he says. InSenegal, a UN official in charge ofpromoting memories of the Holocaustin Africa has spoken of using it as away “to develop remembrance aboutslavery.” Argentine pupils examinethe Holocaust in the light of who wasresponsible for their own dictatorshipa little more than a generation ago.

Later this year AHO, the world’sbiggest Holocaust association, is tostage China’s first international con-ference on the topic in Harbin. Thenortheastern city once had a thrivingJewish community, but a more impor-tant stimulant for local interest in theconference will be parallels to bedrawn, rightly or wrongly, between theHolocaust and Japanese wartime

atrocities. The ImperialJapanese Army used thecity for experiments onhumans, including vivisec-tion and dropping anthraxfrom low-flying planes,killing an estimated 400,000people.

Methods developed byearly Holocaust centers havebecome guides for memori-

als to Asian tragedies. The Tuol SlengGenocide Museum in Cambodia and aChinese museum commemorating the“Rape of Nanking” by Japanese sol-diers in 1937 have drawn on YadVashem. “Israeli people did a great jobof teaching the past,” says Xiaowei Fu,director of the Judaic studies depart-ment at Sichuan University inChengdu. She has tried to drum upinterest in the Holocaust with an essaycompetition offering a cash prize.

In some places, the Holocaust nowovershadows the conflict that

fueled it. Indian history textbooksdevote much of their Second World-War coursework to the slaughter.“Imagine yourself to be a Jew or aPole in Nazi Germany. It isSeptember 1941, and you have beenasked to wear the Star of David,”instructs a tenth-grade textbookcalled India and the ContemporaryWorld. Here and in some otherplaces, the Holocaust is seen as thecore event of the twentieth century inEurope, and it thus draws millions oftourists to its memorials. Last year,46,500 South Koreans visitedAuschwitz, only a few less thanIsrael’s 68,000.

The main geographic exception tothe growing global interest in theHolocaust is the Muslim world, whereit is commonly viewed as a dramatiza-tion meant to win sympathy for Jewsbent on grabbing Arab land. None ofthe three main UN information cen-ters in the Middle East marksHolocaust Remembrance Day. “I can-

not really speak about the Holocaustin Iran,” says a UN official in Tehran.Iran’s recently retired president calledthe Holocaust a myth. In parts of Pariswith a lot of Muslims, some schoolshave reportedly removed mention ofthe Holocaust from the syllabus forfear of appearing pro-Israel. “I knowof cases in which the teacher men-tioned Auschwitz and Treblinka, andstudents clapped,” wrote GeorgesBensoussan, a French historian, in a2004 study of immigrant schools.

Nonetheless, Western Holocaustcenters are making inroads in theMuslim world. The Internet allows cir-cumvention of local censors. TheAladdin Project, a Paris-based initia-tive, has staged Holocaust lecturesfrom Beirut to Baghdad, praisingArabs who offered refuge to Jewsfleeing persecution in the fifteenthcentury. The UN’s Palestinian refugeeagency, which runs schools for thechildren of Arabs who fled Israel at itsfounding 65 years ago, repeatedlytried to teach Holocaust classes butwas thwarted by Hamas.

It is not only Westerners who want totalk about the Holocaust in Middle

Eastern schools. Morocco maybecome the first Arab country to putHolocaust teaching on its syllabus.King Mohammed VI has long soughtAmerican congressional support bywooing Jewish groups. Members of theBerber ethnic minority also champion itto win support for their struggle toreverse 1,400 years of Arabization;they have taken Holocaust courses atYad Vashem and translated teachingmaterial into their vernacular,Tamazight. “We’re trying to relate theJewish physical genocide to our cultur-al one,” says Massin Aaouid, aMarrakech travel agent who helped toorganize a Holocaust road show insouthern Morocco two years ago.

Perhaps the biggest threat toremembrance of the six million Jewskilled by the Nazis is trivialization.“The Holocaust has lost its specifici-ty,” says Eckhardt Fuchs, a Germanacademic preparing a study of text-book coverage worldwide. Politiciansin America and elsewhere routinelyemploy the Holocaust as a rhetoricaldevice to denote evil. The term hascropped up in comic books andheavy-metal music. Even in Israel,mentions are increasingly casual;farmers upset at diminishing returnsfrom tomato concentrate have calledketchup their Auschwitz. Israeli politi-cians flock to Holocaust survivorbeauty contests. A joke popularamong Israeli schoolchildren asks,why did Hitler kill himself? (Answer:he read his gas bill.) In Britain, someteachers use the Holocaust as a les-son against bullying, reducing Nazisto schoolyard thugs. Treating it as aneat moral issue, warns PaulSalmons, a British academic, coulddevalue study of the Holocaustregardless of its proliferation.

First published by The Economist.

BEARING WITNESS EVER MORE

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 13

(Continued from page 4)dent at the University of California,Berkeley. He came across an inter-view with the screenwriter BuddSchulberg vaguely mentioning thatLouis B. Mayer used to meet with aGerman consul in Los Angeles to dis-cuss cuts to his studio’s movies.Smelling a dissertation topic, hebegan digging around.

In the German state archives inBerlin, Mr. Urwand found a January

1938 letter from the German branch of20th Century-Fox asking whether Hitlerwould share his opinions on Americanmovies, and signed “Heil Hitler!”

Other discoveries followed, includ-ing notes by Hitler’s adjutants record-ing his reactions to the movies hewatched each night (he loved Laureland Hardy but hated Tarzan), and ascrapbook in which Jack Warner doc-umented a Rhine cruise that he andother studio executives took with anAllied escort on Hitler’s former yachtin July 1945 as part of a trip exploringpostwar business opportunities.

“That was the one time I actuallyshouted out in an archive,” Mr.Urwand recalled.

He also uncovered detailed recordsof regular studio visits by German offi-cials, including Georg Gyssling, thespecial consul assigned to monitor

Hollywood, who watched films, dictat-ed scene-by-scene requests for cutsand engaged in bizarre debates. (DidKing Kong, for example, constitute“an attack on the nerves of theGerman people?”) And Mr. Urwandfound records of a global network ofmonitors who made sure the cutswere made in all countries, includingthe United States.

Sometimes entire films werequashed. Previous historians havewritten about the battle over The MadDog of Europe, an anti-Nazi filmplanned in 1933 that some Jewishgroups opposed on the grounds that itwould stoke anti-Semitism. But Mr.Urwand, who uncovered the onlyknown script, argues that the studioswere concerned only with protectingtheir business with Germany.

“We have terrific income inGermany and, as far as I am con-cerned,” Louis B. Mayer was quotedin a legal case as saying, “this picturewill never be made.”

Hollywood’s “collaboration,” Mr.Urwand argues, began in 1930, whenCarl Laemmle Jr. of Universal Studiosagreed to significant cuts in All Quieton the Western Front after riots by theNazi Party, then rising in Germany.(Laemmle, Mr. Urwand acknowl-edges, would later help hundreds of

Jewish refugees secure visas to theUnited States.)

And it lasted, in his telling, well pastNovember 1938, when Kristallnachtbecame front-page news around theworld.

In June 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer treated 10 Nazi newspaper

editors to a “good-will tour” of its stu-dio in Los Angeles. Mr. Urwand alsofound a December 1938 report by anAmerican commercial attaché sug-gesting that MGM was financingGerman armaments production aspart of a deal to circumvent restric-tions on repatriating movie profits.

Mr. Urwand said that he found near-ly 20 films intended for Americanaudiences that German officials sig-nificantly altered or squelched.Perhaps more important, he added,Jewish characters were all but elimi-nated from Hollywood movies.

Some of the movies that were nevermade “would have done a great deal,”he said. “They really would havemobilized public opinion.”

Some scholars, like Mr. Doherty ofBrandeis, point out that many moviesof the time contained veiled anti-Nazislaps that any viewer would have rec-ognized. And in private, the studiobosses often went much further.

Steven J. Ross, a professor of histo-

ry at the University of SouthernCalifornia, is working on a book thatwill detail the little-known story of anextensive anti-Nazi spy ring thatbegan operating in Los Angeles in1934, financed by the very studiobosses who were cutting films to sat-isfy Nazi officials.

“The moguls who have been casti-gated for putting business ahead ofJewish identity and loyalty were infact working behind the scenes tohelp Jews,” Mr. Ross said.

But Mr. Urwand strongly defendedthe notion of “collaboration,” notingthat the word (and its German equiva-lent, Zusammenarbeit) occurs repeat-edly in documents on both sides.

And he bristled at the suggestion thatHollywood had a better record againstNazism than other major industries, tosay nothing of the State Department,which repeatedly blocked efforts toexpand visas for Jewish refugees.

“The State Department’s record isatrocious,” he said. “But the StateDepartment did not finance the pro-duction of Nazi armaments. It did notdistribute pro-Nazi newsreels inGermany. It did not meet with Naziofficials and do secret deals.”

“Collaboration,” he added, “is whatthe studios were doing, and how theydescribe it.”

HOLLYWOOD’S PACT WITH HITLER

(Continued from page 5)sounded. Today he finds his namechoice amusing. “I look nothing like abear,” he says. Kulka is short and hasa slight build.

Israel was the utopia of a newbeginning. “They tried to destroyJerusalem in Auschwitz, which is whywe wanted to build it up again,” hesays. He went to a kibbutz at first,where he worked in agriculture.Eventually he began his studies: firstearly, then medieval and finally con-temporary Jewish history.

His professor of early Jewish history,Menachem Stern of the HebrewUniversity, was murdered by aPalestinian on his way to work, whichhappened to be the Way of the Cross inJerusalem. The killer later testified thathe had wanted to kill a Jew, any Jew.

From then on, Kulka’s life wasshaped by the conflicts betweenPalestinians and Jews, like the Six-Day War and the opening and closingof various zones of the city.

RETURNING TO THE RUINS

Kulka married a Slovak Jew whohad been persecuted by the

Nazis and had fled from Europe, andthe couple had a daughter. They did-n’t discuss Auschwitz very much athome. His daughter is a clinical psy-chologist today. When she became amember of the IsraelPsychoanalytical Society, she askedher father for the tapes in which hehad talked to himself about

Auschwitz. Today his three grandchil-dren question him about Auschwitz.

In 1978, Kulka attended a confer-ence of religious scholars in Poland.On a free day, the other attendeeswent on various outings, but he toldthem that he wasn’t going with thembecause he wanted to go toAuschwitz instead. It made sense tothem, the idea of a Jew visitingAuschwitz, so they didn’t ask anyquestions.

Auschwitz was still a ruin at thetime. The tracks were overgrownwith grass. Kulka took the photosthat now appear in his book, and heasked the taxi driver to take a pictureof him, standing in front of theAuschwitz gate. The driver took thephoto, but when it was developed, itturned out that half of Kulka’s bodywas cut off in the image. “A dividedKulka, sliced once in half; it certainlyfits,” he says.

He never returned. I asked himwhether he would be willing to gothere again and point out all the siteshe remembered. In his lengthy reply,he wrote: “I have very seriously con-sidered your proposal. It was andremains clear to me that I want toforever preserve for myself the deso-late images of the landscape of themetropolis of death, in just the waythey had been imprinted on my mindwhen I returned in 1978. For me, thechanges to those images would sig-nify an estrangement from that land-scape.”

AUSCHWITZ THROUGH

THE EYES OF A CHILDBY WILLIAM BOOTH, THE WASHINGTON POST

For decades, the Communist-eramemorial to Jewish victims at

the barracks known as Block 27 in theAuschwitz-Birkenau complex of Nazideath camps stood dilapidated andmostly ignored.

“No one visited. They opened thedoors, that was it,” said Avner Shalev,chairman of Yad Vashem.

Key artifacts had gone missing. Thehistory presented in the signage wasinaccurate at best and was dominatedby Soviet propaganda.

The modest, two-story site was des-ignated the “Jewish pavilion” in mem-ory of the one million Jews who werekilled at the complex in Nazi-occupiedPoland. But, Shalev said, “there washardly any mention of the Jews.”

In 2005, then-Israeli Prime MinisterAriel Sharon tasked Yad Vashem withredesigning the memorial. In June,

Benjamin Netanyahu, the currentprime minister, joined Polish digni-taries and a handful of Holocaust sur-vivors to dedicate a new permanentexhibition in Block 27, called “Shoah,”part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau StateMuseum.

“I am standing here today with greatpain and great pride,” Netanyahusaid. “The leaders of the Allies knewfull well what was happening in thedeath camps. They could have acted,

but they didn’t. We, the Jews,know exactly what the lessonis.”

Israel, Netanyahu said,cannot rely on any othercountry to protect it or to pro-tect the world’s Jews.

He said the murderous anti-Semitism of the NaziGermany era has beenreplaced in modern times byreligious fanaticism, alludingto Iran, which Israel hasaccused of trying to create a

nuclear arsenal to threaten theJewish state.

“This is a regime that is buildingnuclear weapons with the expressedpurpose to annihilate Israel’s six mil-lion Jews,” Netanyahu said. “We willnot allow this to happen. We willnever allow another Holocaust.”

After the war, the Poles decided tokeep the extermination camps atAuschwitz II and Birkenau essentiallyuntouched. At Auschwitz I, they grant-

(Continued on page 15)

AUSCHWITZ HOLOCAUST

EXHIBITION OPENED BY NETANYAHU

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and Rabbi

Israel Meir Lau look at the displays in Oswiecim.

Page 14 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774

(Continued from page 7)alive and that we would both survivethis living nightmare. My only wish wasnot to be taken alive by the enemy.”

When the Jews emerged from thetunnel, many were met by machine-gun fire. They had no idea that theguards were shooting because theyhad seen the light from the tunnel, buthad mistaken it for the lamps of parti-sans who had come to free the Jews.

The next day the Germans and localcollaborators combed the woods.They caught and shot about seventypeople. Forty-four people found hid-ing in a barn were burned inside. Onehundred seventy Jews reached parti-san encampments. The Germansabandoned the labor camp and theten people in hiding found their way tothe Bielskis.

Idel (now Jack) Kagan eventuallysettled in London and raised a family.Determined that the story of theescape would not be lost to history he

wrote a book about his experiences.In 1999 he approached TamaraVershitskaya, the curator of theNovogrudok regional museum, aboutcreating a Museum of JewishResistance on the site of the formerlabor camp. He hired an artist to drawup plans and along with Vershitskayaand twenty local people, heapproached the mayor of Novogrudokfor his support. “I think he was sympa-thetic to the idea since I had alwayspraised the Belorussian people forwhere a partisan group of 1230 Jewscould have survived in.” The museumopened on July 24, 2007.

Jack Kagan continues his mission torescue history: “Last year I visitedCosta Rica and saw a smallHolocaust museum with a park andphotographs of Righteous Gentiles. Itook pictures and sent them toTamara. We now have permissionfrom the new mayor of Novogrudok toconstruct a similar park there.”

(Continued from page 7)from then on, his father wrote thecards as frequently as ever, but inEnglish. The cards his father senthave now been published, along withother letters and cards, in a book pro-duced by Yad Vashem, entitledPostcards to a Little Boy: AKindertransport Story.

They are a rich document of a pro-gram which, when finally approved,was a kind of compromise by a UK

government that was at the timeresisting demands for an increase inJewish immigration to British-runPalestine. Not all the children, billetedin homes and hostels across thecountry, had a happy time.

But Henry Foner, by his ownaccount, was “one of the ones whowas lucky. Morris and Winnie Fonerbrought me up as they would havebrought up their own child, and morethan that you can say of no one.”They made sure he knew them as“Uncle Morris and Auntie Winnie.”“They never tried to hide the fact thatI had a father and they would say,‘Henry, after the war we’ll have to

see…’” But Henry was never to seehis father again. The last direct com-munication he had from Max, a lawyerwho had worked hard to help otherJews escape from Germany, was aletter sent through the German RedCross in August 1942, saying: “I’mglad about your health and progress.Remain further healthy! Our destiny isuncertain. Write more frequently. Lotsof kisses, Daddy.”

Max Lichtwitz was deported toAuschwitz on December 9,

and killed a week later. But in 1961,shortly before his 30th birthday, Henryreceived from a second cousin in theUS what Max himself, by then expect-ing the worst, had called a “kind offarewell letter,” written in 1941: “I thinkmy Heini has found a good home andthat the Foners will look after him aswell as any parents could. Pleaseconvey to them, one day when it willbe possible, my deepest gratitude formaking it possible for my child toescape the fate that will soon over-take me… Please tell him one daythat it was only out of deep love andconcern for his future that I have lethim go, but that on the other hand Imiss him most painfully day by dayand that my life would lose all mean-ing if there were not at least the pos-sibility of seeing him again someday.”

Henry Foner went on to serve inEgypt in the RAF, graduate — andgain a doctorate from — LeedsUniversity, get married and finally set-tle in Israel with Judy, his beloved wifefor 52 years. There, he worked as aneminent analytical and environmentalchemist on the Geological Survey ofIsrael. He has eight grandchildren.The Yad Vashem book is dedicated —as well as to his wife — “to the mem-ory of my father and grandmotherwho had the foresight and courage tosend me away, and to Morris andWinifred Foner who saved my life andmade me part of their family.”

ESCAPE FROM NOVOGRUDOK

GOODBYE TO BERLIN...

Heinz Lichtwitz, who would become Henry

Foner, as he prepared to leave Berlin in

February 1939.

(Continued from page 11)audience. German and Polish Jewishcharacters were made to look morelike Soviet Jews. In ProfessorMamlock, the German JewishMamlock is mockingly called “Itzik,” atypical Russian reference to a shtetlJew. More often, films hinted atJewishness without including Jewishcharacters.

“I call it Holocaust without Jews. Youhave all these striped pajamas andconcentration camps and chimneys,”Gershenson explained. “If you knowthe actual history, you think ‘Wow,these people are all Jews.’ ”

Sometimes, she writes, nothingremained of the original Jewish

story — “On censors’ orders, screen-plays were changed and entire plotlines disappeared. Jews were writtenout of Soviet films. Nonetheless …these films remained obsessed withNazi genocide and retained a measureof ‘residual Jewishness.’ ” For example,a 1965 Belarus production called AllThese Years briefly shows a family ledto their deaths in a ravine, the scenebacked by a Yiddish soundtrack. In

Eastern Corridor, produced in 1965and one of the few films to explicitlyaddress the Holocaust, a Yiddish pleais uttered by a character during thedrowning execution scene. (Like TheUnvanquished 20 years earlier, it tooquickly disappeared from theaters.)

This all echoed the official Sovietresponse to the Holocaust, which wasto universalize suffering and thus con-veniently avoid mentioning the specif-ic group of Soviet citizens who weretargeted for being Jewish. Some 27million Soviets died in the war — “Soin Soviet discourse, those three mil-lion were just ‘peaceful Soviet citi-zens,’ ” Gershenson said. Why talkabout Jewish victims as a uniquegroup when every victim was another“peaceful Soviet citizen”?

This was the case in Steps in theNight, a 1962 Lithuanian film. It wasoriginally based on the true escape of64 prisoners — 60 of them Jewish —from a Nazi prison. Gershensonfound four versions of the screenplayin the archives. In the first, a singletoken Jewish prisoner was included.

The final film had no Jewish charac-ters — the heroes were all strong-jawed Soviets in the finest socialist-realism tradition.

Gershenson sums up this loss bestwhen she writes of the 1964Goodbye, Boys! (which was screenedin Toronto in 2012 for the first time indecades): “In an alternate reality, inwhich he had not been constrained bySoviet policies and restrictions,(director Mikhail Kalik) would haveincluded images representing theHolocaust on Soviet soil. … In the onlyreality we have, Goodbye, Boys! wasmade and even distributed, but in someways it remained a phantom, a phan-tom of a film that could have been.”

The story of this phantom filmindustry is not a redemptive

story — there’s no sudden, post-Soviet flourishing of Holocaust cine-ma. Decades of repression and prop-aganda had done their work too well,and Holocaust films continued to fol-low the existing formulas. Russia isone of the few countries in the worldwhere Schindler’s List was a box-office flop.

“If we start talking about theHolocaust in the Soviet Union, it’svery uncomfortable,” Gershensonexplained. “Because then everyone isimplicated. Maybe not in Moscow, butcertainly in places like Kiev andKharkov and all these other areas.The story of wartime collaboration ornonresistance is a very complicatedstory. The executions, the ghettos —it was impossible without local assis-tance. Today, even people with con-science don’t want to talk about itbecause it’s so uncomfortable.”

In the very act of writing ThePhantom Holocaust, Gershensonbrings the story full circle, writing, as itwere, the next chapter in SovietJewish Holocaust cinema. Two of thescripts she uncovered have found anew life — the 1965 Stalemate wastransformed into a Moscow theaterproduction in 2010, and a well-knownRussian filmmaker, Oleg Gaze, isnow seeking funding to produce Gottmit Uns. Generations of Soviet cen-sors are, one hopes, turning in theirgraves.

GHOSTS OF SOVIET HOLOCAUST

CINEMA FINALLY ESCAPE

FROM THE CENSORS’ FILES

Still from The Unvanquished (1945), director Marc Donskoi.

September/October 2013 - Tishri/Cheshvan 5774 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE Page 15

(Continued from page 6)“I did not know him!” Leah leans for-

ward like a child revealing a secret.“He said he was called Yossi, and thathe was related to one of my class-mates.” She flashes that mischievousgrin. “He’s now my husband.”

Leah and Yossi migrated to Brazil,where they lived happily for four

decades. But Dr. Mengele apparentlyhad the same idea. Leah heard thereports of the manhunt forAuschwitz’s most notorious doctor, asMossad tracked him throughoutSouth America. She feared bumpinginto him on the street or at the bankone day; feared that he would comeafter her. “Dr. Mengele had a verygood memory for faces, he remem-bered thousands of people.”

But he never came. He evaded cap-ture for more than 30 years, and isbelieved ultimately to have died inSouth America.

Leah remained silent throughout,until just a few years ago. She gen-uinely thought nobody would be inter-ested in her story. Her daughterexplains that for the first few yearsHolocaust survivors, even in Israel,remained silent. Nobody wanted totalk about it, she says, to burden peo-ple, to upset people. It’s only really inthe last two decades or so that sur-vivors have started opening up.

But those years of silence havebeen left behind in a life now beinglived through recollection and educa-tion. Profits from Leah’s book go

toward helping children with specialneeds, the antithesis of the crimesMengele committed on such children.She also lectures in high schools andto young Israeli soldiers. And, with 22grandchildren and 44 great-grandchil-dren, Leah London Friedler is the liv-ing embodiment of the survival of theJewish people.

Excerpts from Leah’s letters writ-

ten at Auschwitz:

Auschwitz — February 22, 1945

Dear Jori,Ten months passed, and this is my

first letter to you. Perhaps I will neverdeliver this letter to you, but first Imust know if, after these horrible 10months, I should even direct this firstletter to you at all.

Did you even know what it was likefor me in these 10 months of impris-onment? Nazi imprisonment? It’s notright for 17-year-old girls, becauseeven among the strongest, healthiestmen, only a few survived. But thesedevils, whom I was ready to chokewith my own hands, each and everyone of them, and never give them anymercy, they made up all of this for us.The bodily torments were horrible, yetthe torments of the mind were somuch more horrifying. When theintimidating SS man hit my arm with abaton until it was covered in blackstripes, dripping blood, the pain wasso bad, but my pain was so much

sharper when they hit a pole acrossmy mother’s back. So much moreshocking was to see the disgrace ofthe hunger than to experience thepain of hunger in tear-filled eyes.

You only think you know hunger, butyou don’t know it at all. Hungry werethose who set with great passionupon a piece of bread left on a truckfor moving dead bodies, just after itunloaded. A truck that only minutesbefore had led our best friends to thegas chambers and the crematoria.

But I don’t want to talk about what Iwent through now, I am still too closeto it. Now I am writing and writingbecause I’m struck with longing.

Maybe you know and understandwhat that means; I miss my city of birth,the city where I spent 17 beautifulyears, the place that was my home, myschool, my friends, and all the beautyof my youth and childhood years.

The place where I figured out myfirst book through slow reading.

The place where I was first joyful atthe awakening of spring...

The place where bread baked by mymother was waiting for me...

The place where my father blessedme with his hands on my head.

I miss that place where I knew you,where I hoped you would return, andthe place where maybe now you arethe one hoping for my return...

For my old home I am longing, andfrom here I crave to get away....

Far, far away, as fast as possible, tonever again see this cursed place, the

entrance hall to hell. ....

From the end of August until mid-October 1944, I experienced theworst atrocities ever. I saw one byone my friends from home and fromhere, girlfriends from my class, theirmothers or sisters, exterminated,ruined, or dragged to the gas and thefurnace. Then I was working in therevier, and these two words, “revierwork,” contain all the horrible atroci-ties. Because you had to know therewas nothing worse than this.

Auschwitz — February 27, 1945

My dear Mother!I am pondering what sort of gift I

would give you. I’m thinking hard but Ican’t think of any smart ideas, for thechoices aren’t many. You know... Idon’t have anything...

Yet in any case, now I notice thatthere is one treasure that I will have,that in the most meticulous searchwhile we were standing naked forwashing, they did not take away fromme. That is the single quality thatnever, no one and nothing would evertake away from me. Yet I have in mycapacity to give it to whoever I want, ifI feel the person is worthy of it. That ismy heart and the innocent love that isin it. This I managed to maintain allalong, and now I would like to holdyour hand and pass to you my purelove, so that you feel, know what youmean to me.

THE STORY OF DR. MENGELE’S DELIVERY GIRL

(Continued from page 13)ed to some of the nations of Europe abarracks building, for it to memorializewhat had happened to their citizenshere, and so there is an Austrianblock, a Hungarian block, and on and

on. Block 27 was designated the“Jewish block.”

When the Israelis decided toremake Block 27, they were facedwith several challenges. The barracksare small, only about 10,000 squarefeet, and the enormity of theHolocaust — in facts, figures, emotion— is huge.

“Our challenge was to create a new

language to explain to the visitor themore comprehensive idea of theHolocaust,” said Shalev, who servedas curator of the exhibit.

Or as the Holocaust survivor AharonAppelfeld put it: “to deconstruct the

horror — into images and sounds.”

One of the most moving ele-ments in the exhibit, said visi-

tors on this first day, is a room filledwith pencil tracings of children’s draw-ings, selected and etched by Israeliartist Michal Rovner.

The drawings were collected fromdiaries and other artifacts, all drawnby the children taken to the camps —

and presented at waist level, where achild might scrawl on the wall. In thespare white room, the drawings depictincreasingly disturbing images.

First, there are crude renderings ofhappy times — a girl with a flower ora family celebrating theSabbath. Then there is asoldier brandishing aweapon and taking a girlinto a forest, and the soldierreturning alone. Later,trains arriving at the camps,then gallows, graves.

The artist spent a yearstudying the archives ofchildren’s drawings, andtheir reproductions are veryspare, very simple. Thecurator of the exhibit spokeof their tenacity and fragili-ty, “like hovering souls.”

Another powerful image is creat-ed by the monumental “Book of

Names,” which stands about 6 feettall and measures 46 feet long andcontains the printed names, hometowns, and dates and places of birthand death of 4.2 million Jews whodied during the Holocaust, gatheredover the past 60 years by researchersat Yad Vashem.

There are empty pages yet to befilled, as Yad Vashem is still collectingnames from old census data, reportsby families and other research. In

three years, the center expects tohave documented five million names.The others might be lost to history.

The main exhibition at Auschwitz isthe state museum, which is nowapplauded by Jewish scholars as

being accurate and presenting the fullstory of the Holocaust in Poland.

The remaking of Block 27 is part ofthat revision. “It is remarkable in thesense that it represents the reasser-tion of the Jewish story, long ignored,even here,” said Marian Turski, chair-man of the council at the Museum ofthe History of Polish Jews.

When visitors exit the Block 27 bar-racks, they do so through a simpleside door. And there right in front ofthem are the rusting barbed-wirefences erected more than 60 yearsago.

AUSCHWITZ HOLOCAUST EXHIBITION OPENED BY NETANYAHU

A child’s drawing chosen by artist Michal Rovner for the “Shoah” exhibit. Rovner chose more than

100 of 6,000 collected images to be shown on the room’s white walls.

A child’s drawing chosen by artist Michal Rovner for the new

exhibit at the Auschwitz death camp devoted to 1.5 million

Jewish children who were killed in the Holocaust.

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Martyrdom & Resistance

Rabbi Eric M. Lankin, DMin.,

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the American Society

for Yad Vashem, Inc.500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd Floor

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli Zborowski**

Marvin Zborowski

Mark Palmer

Sam Skura**

Israel Krakowski**

William Mandell

Sam Halpern

Isidore Karten**Norman Belfer

Joseph Bukiet**

*1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, CampInmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased

BY RAPHAEL MEDOFF

A national anthem written morethan 50 years before the birth ofthe state for which it was com-posed, “Hatikvah” has served as asource of hope and inspiration forJews who have found themselvesin the most dire of circumstances.During the darkest hours of theHolocaust, Jews defied their tor-mentors by singing the song’spowerful lyrics.

“THE SS COULD NOT STOP

THEM”

Filip Muller was aSonderkommando in Auschwitz

— a Jewish slave laborer who waskept alive because he helped takecorpses from the gas chambers tothe crematoria. One of the very fewSonderkommandos to survive theHolocaust, Muller later describedthe remarkable behavior of onegroup of Czech Jews who werebeing marched toward the gaschambers and were told what wasabout to happen:

“Their voices grew subdued andtense, their movements forced,their eyes stared as though theyhad been hypnotized… Suddenly avoice began to sing. Others joinedin, and the sound swelled into amighty choir. They sang first theCzechoslovak national anthem andthen the Hebrew song ‘Hatikvah.’”

Enraged SS men tried to halt thesinging by beating the Jews intosubmission, Muller wrote. “It wasas if they regarded the singing as alast kind of protest which they weredetermined to stifle if they could.”But the SS was unable to stop them.“To be allowed to die together was theonly comfort left to these people…And when they sang ‘Hatikvah’, nowthe national anthem of the state ofIsrael, they were glancing into thefuture, but it was a future which theywould not be allowed to see. To methe bearing of my countrymenseemed an exemplary gesture ofnational honor and national pridewhich stirred my soul.”

Overwhelmed by feelings ofremorse, Muller tried to join the groupas they entered the gas chamber, butthey pushed him back out. A womanimplored him, “Your death won’t giveus back our lives. That’s no way. You

must get out of here alive, you mustbear witness to our suffering and tothe injustice done to us.”

“DESPITE IT ALL THEY SANG”

Jan Michaels was a 23-year-oldPolish Jewish pilot who was shot

down in 1944 and imprisoned nearwhat he called “a forced labor camp inSilesia” (German-occupied south-western Poland). Michaels managedto escape, and his eyewitness testi-mony about the mistreatment of theJews reached the West in Novemberof that year.

Michaels reported that 300 Jewsbetween the ages of 18 and 25 werebeing held in the slave labor camp.“The prisoners, who came fromFrance, Holland and other Europeancountries, were forced to work inhu-

man hours in the freezing cold,although they received little food andwere clothed in rags,” according tonews reports relaying his account.“Persons who became ill feared toreport to the camp infirmary becausethey knew that it meant death.”

“Despite their mistreatment, theyouths maintained their morale,”Michaels said, and he “could fre-quently hear the strains of ‘Hatikvah’coming from the camp.”

“AM YISRAEL CHAI”

BBC Radio reporter PatrickGordon Walker was on hand

when the British Second Army liberat-ed the Bergen-Belsen death camp in

April 1945. On the first Friday after theliberation, Walker broadcast anaccount of a British Jewish armychaplain, L. H. Hardman, leadingwhat Walker called “the first Jewishservice that many of the men andwomen present had taken part in, forsix years — probably the first Jewishservice held on German soil inabsolute security and without fear, fora decade.”

“Around us lay the corpses therehad not been time to clear away,”Walker reported. “People were stilllying down and dying, in broad day-light…. A few hundred people gath-ered together, sobbing openly in joyat their liberation and in sorrow at thememory of their parents, brothers andsisters that had been taken fromthem, gassed and burned.”

“These people knew they werebeing recorded, they wanted theworld to hear their voice. Theymade a tremendous effort, whichquite exhausted them. Listen.”

Walker evidently assumed thatwhat he heard was part of the tra-ditional Sabbath prayer service,but the survivors actually sang“Hatikvah.” At the conclusion ofthe song, a voice — perhaps thatof the chaplain, L. H. Hardman —declares: “Am Yisrael Chai, thechildren of Israel still liveth!” (Thebroadcast can be heard onYouTube.)

Mrs. Oran Aviv (formerly HelenEinhorn), an Israeli health carepractitioner originally from SanFrancisco, has identified hermother, Cesia Frommer Einhorn,among the survivors on Walker’srecording. Just days earlier, Mrs.

Frommer had “contemplated runningand killing herself on the electricfence of the camp,” Mrs. Aviv noteson her Web site.

But there she is on the BBCrecording, “belting out the song withher operatic voice, full of determina-tion, wanting the whole world toknow that despite all that she andothers had suffered though, theyhad not lost their hope and stilldreamed of returning one day toZion. Where did my mother’s amaz-ing strength come from? How didshe find this strength and hope,despite the atrocities she witnessedand suffered, despite the deathmarch from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen…?”

THE HOLOCAUST AND “HATIKVAH”:

A SONG OF HOPE IN A TIME OF DESPAIR

The liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in

April 1945, a day on which Holocaust survivors sang

“Hatikvah.”