ndrosen | Entries tagged with remembrance

Several months ago, there was a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day; I was busy at the time, but a video is now available at https://interactive.state.gov/holocaust-remembrance/, featuring interviews with two aged survivors, Ruth Cohen and Allan Hall.

Never again!

November 25 is Holodomor Remembrance Day, a time to remember the several million Ukrainians killed by Stalin’s man-made famine. Forced collectivization resulted in the deaths of many other human beings so unfortunate as to be Soviet citizens, including Russians, but Stalin and his henchmen were especially determined to break the Ukrainians.

If there is steel in the spines of Ukraine’s defenders today, at least part of the reason is their knowledge of this history.

To continue with the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program on Tuesday, we heard from Peter Gorog, who said, as a child survivor, he doesn’t remember too much. His Hungarian Jewish parents had a relatively normal middle class life before World War Two. His father had wanted to become a lawyer, but the numerus clausus quotas on Jews in higher education kept him from becoming one, so he was an office manager, and his wife, Peter’s mother, was a hat maker.

The father, Arpad, was called up to serve in a labor camp in what is now Ukraine, where he died. The circumstances of his death are unknown; it may have been from cold, or a mercy killing, or it may have been from being sent to clear a minefield or something of the sort. Peter and his mother lived in relative comfort until March of 1944. His grandparents died of “natural causes” shortly after the war; they were in their fifties, not very old, but a minor illness could kill people who were already malnourished and otherwise greatly stressed.

Hungary was a democracy after the war, until the Communists took power in 1949. War criminals were hanged or imprisoned by the democratic government.

Peter Gorog grew up in Hungary and became an engineer, but he could not openly practice his Jewish faith, which would likely have resulted in his losing his job. He defected to the United States in 1980, worked at NASA, and returned to active Judaism.

Then the two survivors addressed questions submitted by students. Someone asked about people maintaining their faith, and Manny Mandel spoke about, among other things, maintaining something like ordinary human interactions in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. His mother had packed food in a tin can to preserve it, as had other people; in the camp, people made jewelry out of these tin cans to trade for a haircut or shoe repair. Peter Gorog said that his mother had kept her faith, and he had been circumcised on the eighth day. After the war, though, she turned away from religion, but when she visited him in the United States, and saw him light Shabbat candles, she resumed doing so at the age of eighty-two or so.

In answer to another question, Peter Gorog gave the advice: you cannot be a bystander. He gave the example of Jews being rounded up, and other Hungarians, who had been their neighbors and colleagues, smiling. Don’t be a bystander. Manny Mandel said: Go and learn.

On Tuesday, I viewed and heard the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program. We heard a few words from such worthies as Attorney General Merrill Garland, and, later in the presentation, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, but I was primarily interested in hearing the stories of two survivors, both Hungarian Jews, Manny Mandel and Peter Gorog.

Manny Mandel was seven years old in 1944, when Hungary was occupied by Nazi Germany; before that, Hungary was a German ally. In earlier times, there had been a good life for the Hungarian Jewish community, despite some discrimination against them, such as a quota for university admissions, the numerus clausus. He remembered, though, that his parents had taken him to visit relatives in Novi Sad, which was outside Hungary, and German-occupied. Two policemen showed up, conducting a census; there could be frequent censuses to keep close track of everyone. Manny, then five and a half years old, walked and was carried for two or three hours, along with his parents.

The town didn’t have an ocean beach, but made do with a beach resort on the Danube. People were being admitted through gates in a wall to go there. Some official told Manny’s parents, “The requirements of the census have been met,” and they could go back to the house where they were staying. This was fortunate, because the census was in fact a pogrom; holes had been chopped in the ice on the Danube, and people were being shot and dumped in the river. After that close call, the Mandels hastened back to Hungary, back to Budapest.

On March 17, 1944, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary, to slaughter Hungary’s Jews. Representatives of an International Rescue Committee showed up, managed to see Eichmann, and offered him ten thousand trucks in exchange for one million Jews. They didn’t have the trucks, but a smaller deal was reached: in exchange for gold and silver, 1700 Jews would be allowed to take a train to a neutral port. Everyone high up in Germany, excepting Hitler himself, knew that the war was lost, and Nazi bigshots were looking for valuables for themselves, to use for bribes, paying for new IDs, passage to Argentina, or whatever.

Manny’s family was among the 1700. They were on a train nine days, while there air raids, and then they ended in Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany. They were there for some weeks, and then 350 of them were sent to Switzerland, which is where Manny was on May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended.

To be continued.

Seventy-eight years ago, British, American, and Canadian troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, and began the liberation of Western Europe. It may be that a few of the men who landed and fought that day still live; living or dead, they should be remembered with all due honor.

Earlier today, I watched and listened to the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program, taking some annual leave, since watching it isn’t one of my job duties. The presentation was last week, but I had scheduling conflicts, so I instead went to https://holocaustremembrance.org, and went to the link near the bottom of the page to watch the video. There were interviews with two elderly Jewish women who as children were on the fringes of the Holocaust. They were on the fringes in the sense that neither was actually sent to an extermination camp, but one, a German, witnessed looting, vandalism, and violence by her family’s Gentile neighbors on Krystallnacht, and was afterward separated from her family. The other, a Pole, escaped the slaughter of her community, lived in a ghetto elsewhere in Poland for a time, and then, together with her mother, was with a band of partisans in the forests and marshes, where she nearly died of typhus. They both had harrowing stories to tell.

One of them referred to recent events in Ukraine. Man’s inhumanity to man has not come to an end.

To continue with the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program on Wednesday, April 7, we heard from Max Glauben; as I mentioned before, some young people watching and listening were able to ask questions, which the presenter, Esther Safran Foer, posed to Mr. Glauben.

Max Glauben was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1928. His father published a newspaper, and he (in later life) was able to view a copy of the Yiddishe Tagblatte for September 28, 1938, in a museum, describing Herr Hitler’s meeting with Mr. Chamberlain. He had a brother, two years younger than himself. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and, what is not as remembered (Mr. Glauben said), the Soviet Union then invaded Eastern Poland, in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

The Glaubens had an apartment in the area that became Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, which made them a little better off than other Jews, since they has their furniture and such; Jews outside the ghetto had to move there with what they could carry. The ghetto was about one square mile in area, and soon suffered a typhoid epidemic. The Germans created a Jewish Council, and there were 2000 Jewish policemen. There were half a million people in the ghetto, with 2400 apartments.

In 1943, with the battle of Stalingrad, the Final Solution began, and Jews were sent to Treblinka, Majdanek, and other camps.

Max Glauben was in five different camps. His mother and brother were murdered early. His father grabbed him and took him along to a section of the camp where the prisoners were for labor, not instant death; they made parts for Messerschmidt.

Two sisters of his father found Max in Dallas, forty-two years later.

There people were missing from a roll call, so the Germans murdered thirty hostages, one of them Max’s father. Only the victims’ shoes were left, and his father’s shoes were there.

There was a question from Connor, age 14: “Was there ever a time when you wanted to give up?” Mr. Glauben replied with the Jewish teaching that if someone saves one life, it is as if he saved the whole world, and said, “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.” He spoke of thinking of the souls of his parents watching, and of HaShem.

There was a question from Ben, age 15. “Some survivors talk, and others are not able to. What makes you willing to speak?” Mr. Glauben expressed the idea that babies are born robots, acting according to their programming. Through education, you can gain the wisdom to program yourself, and you can make choices. Some survivors say it was so bad, we can’t even speak of it. But we have a duty to educate.

Glauben has gone back fourteen times, and taught. There is a building in the camp containing seven tons of human ashes, including his family.

You can blame the bystanders, who could have done something, and didn’t.

He didn’t talk to his own kids about the Holocaust until they were old enough to understand.

He was liberated. Now, when his family goes to a restaurant, he has to make reservations for twenty-seven people, counting his wife, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, their spouses, and so on.

A last point: Esther Safran Foer has a book out, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here.

On Wednesday the seventh, I watched and heard the Federal Inter-Agency Holocaust Remembrance Program: A Chance to Survive. Esther Safran Foer spoke with two Holocaust survivors, Dr. Alfred Munzer and Mr. Max Glauben, and relayed to them questions asked by children and teenagers who were viewing the program.

Alfred Munzer’s parent were Polish Jews in the Netherlands, having come separately from what had been part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire before World War One. With the rise of anti-Semitism in independent Poland, they had each departed, and ended up married to each other in The Hague. They had their first child, Alfred’s older sister, in July of 1936, and another daughter in November of 1938, the time of Krystallnacht. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940. Later, Mrs. Munzer discovered that she was pregnant with Alfred, and her obstetrician advised her to get an abortion, but she read the Biblical story of Hannah, who longed for a child, and pledged to dedicate him to the Lord, and resolved to keep her baby. (Hannah’s baby became the prophet Samuel, as Dr. Munzer didn’t mention.)

Alfred Munzer was born in November of 1941, and his doctor (not the obstetrician mentioned, who refused to keep Mrs. Munzer as a patient) advised circumcision to correct a medical problem, and so his parents held a bris. Nine months later, Jewish men began getting notices to report for “labor duty” to camps, and the Munzer family decided to split up. Two Catholic women, sisters, took the two little girls, and Mr. Munzer posed as a patient in a psychiatric hospital; his wife went there as a nurse. Anni Madma (I’m spelling these names more or less as I heard them, which may not be correct) was a friend whose ex-husband Tola Madma took little Alfred; he had custody of three children from his marriage to Anni, and had a servant, Mima Sa’ina, who took care of the children, especially Alfred, with whom she shared a bed. These people were Indonesian, Indonesia then being a Dutch colony. They were also Muslim, which Dr. Munzer did not mention, but which I learned from the Internet. In a world where the rival children of Abraham do not always get along, let it be remembered that these Muslims risked their lives and shared their rations to save a Jewish baby.

Mima kept a knife under her pillow to defend against any threats. Years later, when Dr. Munzer visited Holland, a woman told him, “You drank my milk.” Each Dutch schoolchild received a small bottle of milk, and when she was seven or eight, this girl’s mother told her to save half her milk; this was given to baby Alfred. He was not officially present in the Madma household, and did not receive rations, but they, and at least one neighbor, shared what little they had.

As to his two sisters, the priest thought he could find a safer place for them than the two Catholic sisters mentioned, so he gave them to a woman with a rooming house, where they could be concealed among the other people there. The woman’s own husband denounced her and the Munzer girls to the Nazis. The woman survived Ravensbruck; Alfred’s two sisters, ages seven and five, were murdered on arrival at Auschwitz.

In March of 1944, Alfred Munzer’s father was sent to Auschwitz, and then to other camps, ending in Ebensee, where the starving prisoners worked to assemble V2 rockets. The camp was liberated in May of 1945, but he died two months later. Alfred’s mother was sent elsewhere, and managed to conceal two small photographs with her in the camps, believing that while she had and kept them, her baby Alfred would live (if I remember correctly, they were of the family gathering for the bris, the circumcision ceremony).

After the liberation, Count Folk Bernadotte got her to Sweden, from which she returned to the Netherlands. Alfred reminisced that at first he fussed and wouldn’t sit in her lap; Mima Sa’ina was a mother to him. Two months later, Mima Sa’ina died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Later, he (and I think his mother) went to the United States, trying to leave behind memories. The first time they turned on a television, they saw black demonstrators being beaten; the civil rights movement was in progress. So things weren’t perfect in America, either.

Dr. Munzer referred again to Hannah’s pledge. A parting word from him is this: Even in a world surrounded by hate, it is possible to stand up and do what is right.

There is a link for those who wish to read more, and to access the Fenves interview and other material: holocaustremembrance.org

To continue with what Dr. Steven Fenves said yesterday, in an online interview, he, a child during World War Two, was sent from Auschwitz to a smaller camp in Germany. The prisoners there made airplane wings for Messerschmidt, and did their best to sabotage them. Everything was punishable by death. There he remained from October of 1944 to March of 1945. In the mornings, he could see flights of American airplanes going forth to bomb Germany, and returning in the afternoons with holes in their formations. As the war continued, German capacity to shoot down aircraft was eroded, and there were fewer holes in the returning flights.

In April of 1945, he and other prisoners were sent on a death march to Buchenwald. He doesn’t know the numbers, but estimated that one third of those who set out were killed on route. People were killed if they collapsed on the march, and killed if they were caught trying to escape. Escapees were typically caught and returned by the locals, with pitchforks in their backs and their hands tied with barbed wire.

He was a member of a resistance group, which helped give him the motivation to continue, and not just fall down and be shot. He mentioned, I think in response to a question from the interviewer, Wendy Doernberg, that he had witnessed acts of humanity in Auschwitz, for example between fathers and sons, where one would go to his death to save the other; this could be parent for child or child for parent. When a German criminal Kapo was about to flog one boy, another interposed his body to be flogged as well.

But to return to the chronology, on the night of April 10th, 1945, the prisoners arrived at Buchenwald. He slept, and woke up in the afternoon, so he was not aware of the liberation of Buchenwald when it actually happened, but only later.

The U.S. Army nurses tending the freed prisoners were transferred elsewhere after the army brass decided that the work of tending such abused and malnourished people was too hard for them.

Steven Fenves got back to his home town in Yugoslavia, and his sister also got back, in her case from Bergen-Belsen. His father also returned, but died three months later.

He didn’t like life and high school under the Communists, and having to be a member of the Communist youth league. His sister and he escaped to Paris in 1950, from which they made their way to the United States, under the regular immigration quota; since the Fenves children had returned to Yugoslavia, they no longer qualified as Displaced Persons.

He is in his 64th year of marriage to his wife Norma.

In the 1970s, he first told his story to an adult education group at his temple, and then, at the rabbi’s urging, to the youth group. This was in Pittsburgh.

In the late 70s or 80s, he went to a gathering of Holocaust survivors in Israel; he was moderator of a discussion, which got him elected as first president of the survivors’ association.

He said that any bigotry, any discrimination, can lead to such horrors as he witnessed and endured. He mentioned that there have been two documented genocides in Yugoslavia.

He wanted to tell people: “Don’t be a bystander.” Echoing Dr. Martin Luther King, he said that the bystanders, the people who don’t speak or act against the hardcore haters, make their violence possible.

So don't be a bystander. Speak up. Do something.

Midday Thursday, I watched and listened to a an hour dedicated to Holocaust remembrance; after an introduction by Andrei Iancu, the director of the USPTO, we heard Wendy Doernberg, herself the granddaughter of a survivor, interview Dr. Steven Fenves, a survivor of the camps. He was born in Yugoslavia, to Hungarian-speaking Jewish parents; he spoke Serbian in school, and learned German from his German-speaking governess.

After the Hungarians (German allies) invaded, his father lost his job at a newspaper; his mother was an artist, doing both commercial and fine art. For a while, with no income, they lived by selling off possessions, including Steven’s prized stamp collection; then they were ordered out of their apartment and into the ghetto, and as they left, there was a person on each step of the staircase, spitting them as they went, and waiting to plunder their apartment. One of these was his mother’s former cook, who saved the cookbook, his mother’s diary, some prints, and a chest of drawers with his mother’s artwork; she returned these to the Fenves survivors in 1945, and they gave them to her in 1947, when they departed Yugoslavia again; in the 1960s, the loyal cook got them to the family in Chicago.

On July 27, 1944, the mother and children were packed into boxcars, and sent on a hellish train journey to Auschwitz, the father having been deported several weeks earlier. The people were packed in the train for days, and the latrine bucket soon overflowed.

An SS man sent Steven to one side; although he did not know it at the time, being sent to the other side would have been immediately fatal. The Germans used German criminals, sent from jails to Auschwitz, as Kapos to tyrannize over the prisoners. Later they set “politicals”, mostly Poles, over the Jews. Steven didn’t speak Polish, but he knew another Slavic language, as well as Hungarian and German, so he volunteered to be an interpreter, and lived. There was an underground, and Steven was part of it. He met his sister; his mother had died, and his sister was to be sent elsewhere, so he liquidated his assets (acquired by black market dealings), to buy her a sweater.

The underground smuggled him out by getting him sent on a train going elsewhere; first the adults drilled him on how to respond to questions he was likely to be asked. The train journey was not as bad as the trip to Auschwitz; at least the prisoners were allowed out once a day when the train stopped, to relieve themselves and stretch their legs. They arrived at a German village, where there was a subcamp of Buchenwald.

To be continued.