Posts tagged Holocaust

Anti-Semitism in America

Share

On this day in 1951 Thomas Buergenthal first set foot on American soil.  He was 17 years-old.  During a good part of those 17 years Tom had successfully defeated the Nazis’ best efforts to murder him, whether through the liquidation of the Kielce Ghetto, internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau, or participation in the Auschwitz Death March.

But all that was now behind Tom, and he was eager to start a new life in America, his new home, a country that had been so instrumental in vanquishing the scourge of Nazism, and thus ending the suffering of so many.

One thing Tom most likely never imagined in his wildest dreams back in 1951 was that seventy-one years later anti-Semitism would be alive and well in America, and that a former president of the United States, who is also a current candidate for a future presidency, would be entertaining virulent anti-Semites in his home.

My purpose here is not to dwell on the manifold moral failings of The Former Guy, but to ask each of us to look in the mirror.  In doing so I would ask each of us to reflect on part of a blog I originally wrote five years ago:

In a fascinating, insightful and highly readable new book, Why: Explaining the Holocaust, author Peter Hayes concludes his inquiry with three “broad implications for all citizens.”  Second among these is that “the Holocaust illustrates the fundamental importance and difficulty of individual courage and imagination.”  Certainly, Odd Nansen possessed the requisite courage and imagination.  But Hayes goes on to remark that bravery alone is not enough: “wit, wiliness, shrewd judgment, persistence, and creativity in challenging evil are also indispensable.”  Again, Nansen’s diary is replete with examples of these traits as well.

Hayes’ book is broken into a series of chapters, each of which addresses one question central to the Holocaust: Why the Jews?  Why the Germans? Why murder? Etc.  One question Hayes does not tackle (probably because it would require its own book) is why some people became villains, and yet others, like Nansen, became heroes.

When we pontificate today that “we must never forget the Holocaust” or “we must never let it happen again,” implicit in our statement is the firm belief that we would never participate in such evil; we would never support a program like the Nazis.  And yet millions of Germans, Austrians, and Sudeten Czechs joined the Nazi Party, and millions more collaborated with them in occupied and allied countries.

Perhaps—perhaps—one can understand the allure which the Nazi ideology (and jobs) held for the down-and-out mechanic or the failed farmer (which is what Heinrich Himmler, the greatest mass murderer of all time, was before the war).

But how could educated German doctors, subject to the Hippocratic Oath (“do no harm”), willingly engage in the so-called T4, or Euthanasia Action, killing the disabled (71,000–80,000 murdered by August 1941, and many more after that as well)?  How could “many eager lawyers,” dedicated to the rule of law, willingly act “as middleman in the sale of Jews’ assets, and the numerous willing graspers for their medical and legal practices, their artwork, their houses and apartments, their furniture and carpets”? How could German professors, leading some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world, permit the Nazi minister of education to order them: “From now on, it is not up to you to decide whether something is true, but whether it is in the interests of the National Socialist Revolution”?

So, how could we have withstood the subtle coercion exercised by, and the enticing blandishments offered by, the Nazis had we lived in that time and place?

Hayes does provide a significant clue, when he writes, “Resistance is never easy and seldom comfortable, and compassion has to be practiced in order to hold up when challenged.” (emphasis mine).  The Odd Nansen depicted in his diary (1942–1945) is the same Odd Nansen who voluntarily put his career on hold in 1936 to form a relief organization for stateless Jewish refugees.  He undertook the task knowing it would be difficult, frustrating and often daunting, especially in the face of indifference and official governmental anti-Semitism.  Is it surprising, then, that Nansen managed to survive the crucible of World War II with his humanity intact?

If today we flatter ourselves that we can be indifferent to suffering in our midst, if we can ignore the plight of those less fortunate, or of powerless minorities (like the Jews of the 1930s), if we can turn our backs on the lessons of the beatitudes, will we really be ready, if and when we are ever tested in a conflict as horrible as the Holocaust? The lessons of history suggest otherwise.

 

 

Two Holocaust Survivors Reunite 79 Years Later

Share

It isn’t often that one gets to write the words “heart-warming” and “Sachsenhausen” in the same sentence, but here’s a rare occasion: a reunion by two 97-year-old Holocaust survivors who lost track of each other back in 1943, but reunited for the first time–by accident no less–recently.  Click here for the full story.

A heart-warming tale indeed.

The Many Agonies of Otto Frank

Share

Millions of people worldwide have read the diary of Anne Frank.  By now it has been translated into 70 languages, and regularly appears on many schools’ reading lists.  Millions more, without having ever read the book, know many of the basic facts of her life story.  How Anne received a diary on her 13th birthday, June 12, 1942, while living in Amsterdam, where her family had fled from Frankfurt, Germany to escape Hitler’s persecutions.  How Germany had earlier [May, 1940] overrun the Netherlands, effectively trapping refugee families like the Franks. How the Franks, fearing the worst, prepared a secret living space above the business owned by Anne’s father.  How the Frank family moved into the Secret Annex on July 6, 1942 in response to a summons delivered to Anne’s older sister to report to a labor camp.  How Anne recorded all of her secret thoughts and feelings in her diary for over two years, until August 4, 1944, when the family was betrayed (by whom remains a mystery).  How Anne eventually perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany in February or March 1945.  How her diary became an international bestseller.

But many of those millions would be hard pressed to remember the names of Anne’s sister (Margot), her mother (Edith) or father (Otto), let alone recall their fates.  And yet they, along with the van Pels family—Hermann, Auguste, and son Peter (given the pseudonym van Daan in the diary) and Fritz Pfeffer (given the name Albert Düssel by Anne) all lived together in the close quarters of the Secret Annex, and have their own stories.

Otto Frank and Family

The agony of all eight occupants of the Secret Annex began with their arrest in August 4.  [I have previously written how, once everyone was arrested, but before the Nazis could seize all the contents of the Annex, employee and family friend Miep Gies swept up Anne’s diary and the papers she found strewn on the floor for safekeeping until Anne returned.]  Within days all eight were moved to Westerbork, a nearby transit camp.  Similarly, all eight were put on the same transport to Auschwitz (it was in fact the last transport ever sent from Westerbork to Auschwitz), a three-day journey in sealed boxcars that arrived September 6, 1944.  Although all survived the selection at the ramp, the entire experience, coming so soon on the heels of their sudden arrest, must have been terrifying.  There Otto was separated from Anne and the rest of his family.

When Anne later discovered that those considered unfit for hard labor were sent directly to the gas chambers, she concluded that her father, whom she considered to be in less than the best of health, must have been killed.  Ironically, as we shall see, Otto was the only person of the eight occupants of the Secret Annex to ultimately survive.

But it took a took a great deal of luck (something Tom Buergenthal would fully understand) on Otto’s part to make it.  As he explained in a letter written June 8, 1945: “In November 44 I was so weak from work and lack of food that with the help of a Dutch doctor I was admitted to the hospital, and I regained my strength there until the Russians liberated us on January 27, 1945.”

In an earlier letter Otto, who stood 6’ 1’’ tall, provided additional detail: “If I hadn’t been taken to a hospital—I was weak and weighed [less than 115 lbs.]—there is no way I would still be alive.  I was lucky & had good friends.  Peter van Pels . . . was like a son to me and did everything to help me.  Every day he brought me extra food.”

As liberation approached, there was one further stroke of luck: “On the 26th [of January 1945] we were taken out [of the infirmary] by the S.S. to be killed, but someone called the S.S. away before they could do that—it was a miracle!”

Now, Otto’s next agony began.  Where was his family?

In his very first letter following liberation [February 23, 1945] and while still in Auschwitz, Otto wrote his mother, “I don’t know where Edith and the children are, we were separated on September 5, ’44.  I only heard that they were transported to Germany.  We have to hope that we’ll get them back healthy.”  [By this time Anne and Margot were likely victims of a typhus epidemic that was raging through the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions prevalent in Bergen-Belsen.  The actual date and cause of their deaths remains unknown.]

All the while Otto was trying to return home.  His circuitous journey—similar to many displaced persons—ran from Auschwitz to Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland) to Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to Odessa, then by steamship through the Dardanelles to Marseille, and then finally overland to Amsterdam.  While in Kattowitz he again wrote his mother: “You will understand how much it tortures me not to know where Edith and the children are.  But I still hope to see them all safe and sound.”

But soon the first shoe dropped.  In Otto’s second letter from Kattowitz he confided what he had learned from a woman he just met: “I just got the news of Edith’s death on 1/6/45, and it has hit me so hard that I am not entirely my old self.  Only the thought of the children keeps me going. . . . .  If she could have held out only two more weeks then the Russians would have liberated her too and it would have turned out differently.”

In a letter to his mother dated May 15, 1945, Otto continued: “All my hopes are for the children. I cling to the firm belief that they are still alive and that we will be together soon.”

Less than a month later [June 8] he lamented, “I don’t know where [the children] are and I never stop thinking about them.”

By July Otto had arrived in Amsterdam and quickly learned the worst: a Red Cross listing of the dead included “Annelies Marie Frank” and “Margot Betti Frank.”  He tracked down the name and address of Lien Brilleslijper, the woman who had filed the report of their deaths.  Brillesjper and her sister had been in Bergen-Belsen with Anne and Margot.  She described to him the charnel house conditions that prevailed there as the war drew to a close: more than 35,000 prisoners died of disease, sickness and malnutrition in the three and a half months between January 1945 and the camp’s liberation on April 15.

In his May 15, 1945 letter, Otto had also commiserated: “All our possessions are gone. There won’t be a pin left, the Germans stole everything—not a photo, letter or document remains.”  But this was not entirely true.  On August 19, 1945 (76 years ago today), Otto observed for the first time “I don’t have any pictures from the last few years of course, but Miep was somehow able to save an album and also Anne’s diary.  I still don’t have the strength to read it.”

Eventually Otto worked up the courage to read what his dead daughter had written while in the Secret Annex.  He was astounded:

“What I read is indescribably upsetting, but still I read it.  I can’t describe it to you, I’m not done reading it yet and want to finish reading through the whole thing before I make any excerpts or translations. Among other things she describes her feelings in puberty with unbelievable self-awareness and self-criticism.  Even if it wasn’t Anne who had written it, it would still be so moving.  What a terrible shame that this life was snuffed out!”

Now, instead of avoiding the diary, Otto couldn’t leave it alone.  In a later letter he wrote, “I can’t stay away from Anne’s diaries and they are so unbelievably moving. . . .  I can’t let the diaries out of my hands, there is too much in them that is not intended for anyone else.”   And again, in a subsequent letter:

“You can’t even imagine everything that is in it. . . .   It’s about everything that happens in a group of people while they are in hiding, all the fears and conflicts, all the arguments, the food, politics, the Jewish question, the weather, moods, education, birthdays, memories: everything.”

Ultimately, Otto overcame his initial reluctance, mindful of Anne’s expressed desire to become an author, and decided he needed to share Anne’s story—suitably edited—with the wider world.  The Dutch version appeared in 1947, followed by translations in Germany, where it sold moderately well, France, and Great Britain.  It finally appeared in the United States in 1952, published by Doubleday after approximately ten other publishers had passed on it.  Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Introduction, wrote that it was “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.”

However, it was only after the theatrical version (in 1955) and especially, the movie version (in 1959) that the diary became a permanent bestseller worldwide.  With acclaim, however, came a backlash, and Otto Frank spent much of the succeeding years seeking redress from the many Holocaust deniers and extremists who claimed that the diary was a fraud, a fake, a forgery.  [At a bookfair in central New Jersey a few years ago I even had someone approach me, asking me if Odd Nansen’s diary was anything like “the so-called diary of Anne Frank.”]

Although Otto Frank eventually remarried, and lived to see Anne’s diary become a worldwide phenomenon, with millions of visitors to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, he never really recovered from the trauma of the Holocaust.  How could he? The agony of uprooting to flee persecution; the agony of a life in hiding, fearing discovery; the agony of trying to survive in Auschwitz; the agony of losing his entire family; the agony of discovering Anne’s genius—posthumously; the agony of confronting naysayers.

In a very real sense Otto Frank’s agony only ended with his death, forty-five years ago today, on August 19, 1980. He was 91 years old.

Otto Frank in 1961

Postscript:  The fate of the remaining occupants of the Secret Annex:

Auguste van Pels was sent from Auschwitz to a subcamp of Buchenwald and later died in transit from Buchenwald to Theresienstadt in March or April, 1945, most likely of typhus.  She was 44 years old.

Hermann van Pels was murdered in Auschwitz’s gas chambers in October, 1944, age 46.

Peter van Pels took part in the Auschwitz Death March to Mauthausen, where he fell ill and died on May 5, 1945, five days after Mauthausen was liberated.  He was 18.

Fritz Pfeffer was sent from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen in late October 1944, and from there to Neuengamme, where he died on December 20, 1944, age 55, most likely of dysentery or cholera. 

Another Astonishing WWII Holocaust Diary Surfaces

Share

From the November 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/astonishing-holocaust-diary-hidden-world-70-years-resurfaced-america-180970534/?fbclid=IwAR0dSgjl9xk0oeJLVivob9K4hP1azB9iJeJ8psQg5ORxeoOwsvyR_ugWR94

The Holocaust and Historical Truth

Share

Today, one day following International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Washington Post published a news story about the Polish government’s passage of a law “making it a criminal offense to mention Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.”  According to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the law is intended, not to “whitewash history, but to safeguard it and safeguard the truth about the Holocaust and prevent its distortion.”  Poles particularly object to the use of the term “Polish death camps,” which are Polish only insofar as the Nazis established the so-called Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełźec), and Auschwitz-Birkenau, on Polish soil.  The full text of the article is here.

The law still needs final approval from Poland’s Senate and president to become effective, which is expected.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, said the law was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”

History, unfortunately, is never completely black and white.  Poland, as the epicenter of the Holocaust in many ways, has the largest number of individuals (6,706) recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”  This honor is bestowed only on those who, after rigorous investigation, are proven to have taken “great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

These 6,706 represent fully over 25% of all individuals recognized by Yad Vashem.  By comparison, the second highest is the Netherlands, with 5,595 (including Jan and Miep Gies—mentioned here and here—who helped Anne Frank).  Norway has 67, including Sigrid Hellisen-Lund, a friend of Odd Nansen’s who worked closely with him in Nansenhjelpen, the organization he established to help refugees during the interwar period.  The United States has 5.

On the other hand, as Laurence Rees points out in his latest work, The Holocaust: A New History (PublicAffairs 2017):

“Poland, Hungary and Romania all enacted anti-Semitic legislation during the 1930s. . . .   In August 1936, for example, all Polish shops were required to display the name of the owner on their signs.  As a consequence it was obvious which shops belonged to Jews.  The following year Jews were forbidden from entering the medical profession, and restrictions were placed on their ability to practise [sic] law. . ..

The Polish government was also contemplating removing Jews from Poland altogether.  In early 1937 the Poles opened discussions with the French about the possibility of sending large numbers of Polish Jews to the island of Madagascar off the south-east coast of Africa . . ..

The Polish Madagascar initiative acted as a powerful reminder . . . that anti-Semitic initiatives were not just the preserve of the government of the Third Reich.  The desire of other European countries in the 1930s to persecute and even remove their Jews has largely been forgotten in the public consciousness today—dwarfed by the scale and ferocity of the subsequent Nazi Holocaust.”

The final word goes to my old Georgetown professor, Jan Karski (mentioned here), who is described in the article as a “famed resistance fighter” and who nevertheless acknowledged that the Poles’ attitude toward fellow Polish Jews was “ruthless, often without pity.”

While references to “Polish death camps” should more accurately refer instead to “death camps located by the Nazis in Poland,” to outlaw any mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust is indeed to “whitewash history.”

Upcoming Events

Share

Book Signings

  • April 11, 2024: Our World, Kiawah, SC
  • May 5, 2024: Hadassah, Stonebridge, Monroe Twp, NJ
  • June 2, 2024: Yiddish Club, Monroe, NJ
  • June 3, 2024: Wilton, CT Public Library
  • September 28, 2024: Swedish American Museum of Chicago (Virtual)

People are talking


“A fantastic guest speaker and literary researcher.”

- Dirk Hansen, President
Sons of Norway Southern Star Lodge
Myrtle Beach, SC

For more posts please see our archives.

Archives

On This Date

< 2022 >
September 24
  • 24
    No events
Legend
  Previous/Upcoming Engagements
  This day in history