Category Archives: Holocaust in the news

[From BBC News Website]

A 95-year-old former SS member will go on trial in north-east Germany next month accused of assisting in the mass murder of Auschwitz death camp inmates.

The indictment says Hubert Zafke was an accessory to the murder of at least 3,681 people during one month in 1944. It says he was an SS medical orderly.

The trial is to start on 29 February in Neubrandenburg. Mr Zafke remains at home, a prosecution spokesman said.

The Nazis killed about 1.1m people in Auschwitz, most of them Jews.

During the month covered by the indictment – 15 August to 14 September, 1944 – the teenage Jewish girl Anne Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious Nazi camp complex.

Her diary, describing the ordeal of her family hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, remains a worldwide bestseller. She died in Bergen-Belsen, shortly before that camp’s liberation by the British Army in 1945.

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[From The Guardian]

A historian and vocal critic of the Austrian government’s irresolute attitude towards returning properties stolen from their Jewish owners by the Nazis will be jailed on Monday after being convicted of defrauding the state, in what leading Holocaust historians have condemned as a “deeply troubling overreaction”.

Stephan Templ, the author of Unser Wien (Our Vienna), a book that catalogued hundreds of prominent Jewish-owned properties seized by the Nazis that were never returned, received a one-year sentence as punishment for having omitted the name of an estranged aunt in an application on behalf of his mother for the return of property seized from his Jewish relatives in 1938.

Templ’s book, co-written by the historian Tina Walzer, created a huge stir when it was published in 2001. It included little-known accounts of Viennese landmarks – from the city’s famous ferris wheel to luxury hotels – that had been Aryanised and for which owners or heirs had been either never, or insufficiently, compensated.

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[From The Guardian]

Festival theatre, Edinburgh
You can feel the force of the anger in the flamenco dancer and choreographer’s fragmented show about the Gypsy victims of the Nazis.

Among the incalculable horrors of the Holocaust, one of the less well-known facts is that up to half a million Gypsies were among those persecuted and killed. It’s a tragedy that flamenco choreographer Israel Galván has long wanted to address on stage, but also one for which he feared dance might be inadequate. If Lo Real is partly about ethnic cleansing, it’s also partly about the artist’s despair of making sense of it.

On a starkly lit stage, Galván and his cast – two female dancers and a dozen singers and musicians – have the look of a displaced Gypsy community pitched between suffering and survival. Specific references to the work’s historical context are minimal: Galván raises his arm in a Nazi salute, then lets it fall into a flamenco curve; a woman dances between iron rails, as if tracing the train route to her death. There’s old movie footage of a Gypsy dancing for uniformed Nazis. And when the live dancers also perform traditional flamenco, the fact that they are accompanied by references to adverts for bleach and pest control underlines the point that even if the Nazis saw the Gypsies as exotic entertainment, they also considered them vermin.

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Contentious but interesting article:

[From The Guardian]

New finding is first example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children.

Genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children, the clearest sign yet that one person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations.

The conclusion from a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital led by Rachel Yehuda stems from the genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had either been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, witnessed or experienced torture or who had had to hide during the second world war.

They also analysed the genes of their children, who are known to have increased likelihood of stress disorders, and compared the results with Jewish families who were living outside of Europe during the war. “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents,” said Yehuda.

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[From The Guardian]

Project commemorating the killing of Jews reveals tensions between Soviet and modern Ukrainian historical narrative.

[From The Guardian]

It started with a letter, a brief reference to samples taken from the bodies of Holocaust victims used in Nazi medical research. Decades later, the jars and test tubes found behind a glass cupboard in a locked room testified to history’s horror.

Raphael Toledano, a researcher from Strasbourg who has spent more than a decade delving into the eastern French city’s Nazi past, stumbled upon the 1952 letter from Camille Simonin, the director of the forensic science school at the University of Strasbourg, detailing the storage of tissue samples taken from some of the 86 Jews gassed for the experiments of August Hirt, a notorious Nazi anatomy researcher.

The autopsy samples were intended to be used to prosecute Hirt, who directed the construction of a gas chamber built specifically to provide victims for experiments carried out at the facility. At the time, Germans had replaced the French staff, which largely decamped elsewhere.

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[From Forward]

“Yesterday we visited something that you might have already read about in the newspaper or heard about over the radio… Not very far from there is a concentration camp.”

These words, written by Private Hyman Schulman, to his wife, Sandy, in Brooklyn, while he was in Europe during World War II, are part of TK letter collection that has recently come to light, The New York Times reported this week .

Schulman, who was stationed in Europe as of 1942, worked as the aid to Rabbi Herschel Schacter, the first Jewish chaplain to enter Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany, in 1945.

On March 8, 1945 he wrote home about his recent promotion as the aid, saying, “Since I’ve been in the army I’ve always been hoping for a ‘break’ and I believe I finally got one… You won’t have to worry about your husband being hit by shells, living in muddy foxholes and generally roughing it in the E.T.O. for we are quite a ways back of the front lines.”

After the war, Sandy kept his letters, and stored them in boxes as they moved. They were recently rediscovered, the paper barely touched since she had received them nearly 70 years ago. The story was first reported by NJ.com

Read more: http://forward.com/the-assimilator/312021/gis-letters-of-buchwald-uncovered/#ixzz3fySgpGyq

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[From Forward]

“Moses Man,” a musical about a family’s 9-year-long World War II survival odyssey that took them on a sanctuary search from Vienna, to Cyprus, Palestine and Africa before finally landing in America, has enough “now you’re safe, now you’re not!” twists and turns to justify being dubbed a Holocaust musical thriller. With book and lyrics by Deborah Haber and music by Casey Filiaci it is based on Haber’s father Kalman (Opa) and now 96-year old Lily Haber ’s true escape saga.

With a talented young cast of fourteen — and several playing multiple roles — it stars Kevin McGuire as Opa, Evan Daves as his grandson Moshe, Tess DeFlyer as Lia and Joanne Borts — a Folksbiene alumna whose credentials include the recent Broadway hit “Once” — as a Gestapo guard, Austrian, refugee and taverna owner. Other multi-character portrayers— Ryan Speakman as an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann, Ship Captain, Cypriot, Sailor, British Major, and American Commander; Scott Scaffidi who plays a character Efra, Sailor, British Governor, refugee and super multi character actor T J Mannix who plays a police chief, Gestapo member, Italian Border Guard, British Officer and American Sailor. On stage there was an inanimate “cast” of large wooden crates—each with stenciled-in-black hoped-for destinations.

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[from The Guardian]

by David Cesarani

The death of Sir Nicholas Winton elicited eulogies from across British society. The prime minister tweeted: “The world has lost a great man. We must never forget his humanity in saving so many children from the Holocaust.” The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said Winton was “an outstanding role model for all”. The most heartfelt tributes came from survivors whose departure from Prague he helped to organise in the last months before the second world war.

Yet the chief rabbi at that time, Joseph Hertz, fulminated against evacuating Jewish children from Nazi-controlled lands only to place them in the homes of Christians. Winton arranged for at least 60 Jewish children, 10% of the total brought out of Prague, to be given into the care of the Barbican Mission, an organisation devoted to converting Jews to Christianity.

He saw nothing wrong with this and it may be germane to recall that he was a convert himself. He was born Nicholas Wertheim to German-Jewish parents who rejected Judaism. Decades later, when asked to comment on criticism from the Jewish community, he said: “I just confronted them and said in much politer terms, ‘Mind your own business … if you prefer a dead Jew to a Jew brought up in a Christian home it’s really not my problem’.” Today we would find it questionable to accept a change in religion in exchange for saving a life. But it was not self-evident that such a price was necessary even then.

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O escritor Martin Amis volta a Auschwitz num romance que é uma espécie de comédia/sátira do Holocausto. The Zone of Interest é sobre o quotidiano de uma vila habitada pelos familiares dos SS onde se exterminam judeus. Que linguagem para falar do absurdo? Ele explica numa conversa intimista com leitores sobre o romance que chega a Portugal na Primavera.

“Sabemos muito sobre como tudo foi feito, sobre como Hitler fez o que fez; mas parece que continuamos sem saber quase nada acerca do porquê. Porque é que ele fez aquilo?” A interrogação acerca das verdadeiras intenções que estiveram na origem do Holocausto, do que motiva alguém a empreender uma tarefa com aquela “dimensão de horror”, surge como uma das razões apontadas pelo escritor Martin Amis para, quase meio século depois, revisitar um território que já tinha explorado em Time’s Arrow, or the Nature of Offense (1991).

É o princípio de uma conversa sobre o seu mais recente romance, The Zone of Interest (Knopf), o seu 14º romance, uma espécie de comédia sobre o Holocausto que divide opiniões especializadas. Há quem o considere uma obra-prima, como o norte-americano Richard Ford, ou a crítica inglesa que o considerou o melhor livro de Amis em 25 anos, desde London Fields (1989); e também há quem, como Joyce Carol Oates nas páginas da New Yorker, o tenha achado superficial no modo como trata questões tão profundas como a desse “porquê”. A discussão sobre The Zone of Interest mantém-se viva meses antes do romance ser editado em Portugal, na próxima primavera, pela Quetzal.

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[From The Guardian]

Police say two 17-year-olds stole buttons, a comb, spoons and other items near where prisoners’ belongings were originally kept by Nazi guards.

Two British schoolboys arrested at Auschwitz have each received a year’s probation, suspended for three years, and a 1,000 zloty (£170) fine after admitting stealing artefacts from the former Nazi death camp.

The boys, both 17, were released by Polish authorities on Tuesday afternoon after spending the night in jail. They were arrested on Monday while on a history trip with the independent Perse school in Cambridge.

Polish police said they had tried to steal a comb, spoons, buttons and pieces of glass from block 5 where Nazi guards stored prisoners’ confiscated belongings during the second world war.

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[From the BBC New website]

The Queen is visiting the site of the World War Two concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, in Germany.

The camp, where teenage diarist Anne Frank was among thousands to die, was liberated by British soldiers in 1945.

The UK monarch, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, laid a wreath at a memorial there on the final day of her four-day state visit to Germany.

The Queen also viewed Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate before travelling to the site of the camp near Hanover.

Around 50,000 prisoners from all over Europe were killed at Bergen-Belsen or died later as a result of their treatment in the camp.

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[From The Wall Street Journal]

In 1944, a half-million Jews were deported from Hungary to Nazi concentration camps. Along with the lives that were lost, an entire tradition of folk music became obscured during the Holocaust.

Seven decades later, Frank London began his detective work. “I’d call my informants,” said the trumpeter and bandleader, a longtime mover on New York’s “ethno-folk” scene, as he dubbed it.

Mr. London talked to old friends, like the song collector Bob Cohen. He studied Israeli websites that cataloged the songs of immigrants, looking for the Hungarians among them. He came across the music of Budapest cabarets from the 1910s and ‘20s. He consulted the songs collected by Béla Bartók, and other ethnomusicologists, before the war. “I spread the net as wide as possible.”

The cultural gumshoe was working up a concert repertory for the Glass House Orchestra, which honors the Hungarian Jewish folk tradition and adds something of its own—new pieces inspired by century-old sources, including the Roma, or Gypsies, and Hasidic dynasties reaching back to the 18th century. The eight-piece band was formed last year to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the mass deportations, taking its name from the Glass House—one of 76 safe houses set up by Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz to shelter Jews around Budapest.

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[From the Jewish Daily Forward]

Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, the iconic African American company has branched into new territory. In fact, it’s unprecedented, explained its artistic director Robert Battle, who choreographed the piece. Its musical score was composed by Erwin Schulhoff, a Czech-born Jew, and one of many musical artists who were killed or otherwise silenced by the Nazis.

“No Longer Silent” was conceived by Battle in 2007 as part of a Juilliard project — and the brainchild of conductor James Conlon — to commemorate three such composers, who include Franz Schreker and Alexander Zemlinsky.

“I was immediately drawn to Schuloff’s music for its urgency, rhythms, grandness, and ritualistic sounds,” said Battle as he sat in his corner office in the company’s West 55th Street complex. “It has tension and friction and reminded me of Stravinsky whom I love. It also reminded me of Martha Graham‘s early modern dance motifs. And then I got cold feet. Everything I loved about the music also terrified me.”

What finally anchored it for Battle was discovering just how much he and Schulhoff had in common. They both studied the piano, shared an interest in the avant-garde and jazz, and explored non-traditional artistic expressions in their own work. But there was also the human connection.

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[From The Guardian]

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld have spent their lives tracking down war criminals so they can be brought to justice.

The Klarsfelds run one of the world’s more unusual family businesses. They are Nazi hunters. Seven decades after the end of the second world war, they are still as actively involved as ever in seeking justice for the victims and survivors of SS war crimes and the French Vichy collaborators.

In Paris today, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, perhaps most famous for unmasking Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, concede that their hunting days are over, but business is thriving as they busy themselves with the task of documenting the Holocaust in France.

“We are always working and always together,” says Serge Klarsfeld, 79, who can claim to have brought at least 10 war criminals and French collaborators to justice. As his wife, Beate, four years his junior, says: “It’s easy. We sit together. We work together, we play together.” To which Serge, a man not always known for his sense of humour, adds: “And we sleep together. But it’s like people having a small shop, you know, one is selling, one is buying. Yes, we are a family business.”

They have two children and their son, a lawyer, works with them. “Arno is very much involved,” Beate says.

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[From The Guardian]

David Toren remembers staring at Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on a Beach as his great-uncle signed over his estate to a Nazi general. Now his family has it back.

Most of David Toren’s family died in the Holocaust and he, then a teenager, only survived because his father got him to safety via the Kindertransport. Now Toren has spoken of the emotion of being reunited with a painting the Nazis seized more than 75 years ago.

“I felt the sense of victory – the second victory against the Nazis,” he told the Guardian.

Toren, now 90, was 13 when he last saw Two Riders on a Beach, an early 20th-century masterpiece by the German painter Max Liebermann, at the home of his great-uncle, David Friedmann, a passionate art collector, patron and prominent society figure in Breslau.

The painting was returned to Friedmann’s heirs this month. Toren, a retired lawyer, is now blind and family members have decided to sell the painting. It is a painful decision, but “there is no other solution”, he said. “You can’t cut up the painting [to share it].” An artist has created a braille version for him.

Two Riders on a Beach will be the first painting to be sold from the secret hoard of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Adolf Hitler’s art dealers, Sotheby’s has announced.

Painted in 1901, it was among more than 1,200 artworks found in Gurlitt’s dilapidated flat in Munich in 2012. They had been hidden from the world for decades and long ago assumed to have been destroyed in the war.

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