Shoah's women heroes

PAT JOHNSON

History has called the November pogrom that swept Germany and Austria in 1938 Kristallnacht, because the most evident and evocative imagery of those few catastrophic hours was the sight and sound of crashing glass as mobs destroyed Jewish assets. But for Jewish women at the time, the most evocative imagery may not have been glass, but feathers, says a scholar of women in the Holocaust who spoke here Sunday.

Though the shops and synagogues of the Jewish community were destroyed during Kristallnacht, so were the vestiges of what German Jews had managed to maintain in terms of private solace – the sanctity and refuge of the home.

Even in times of increasing anxiety and imminent calamity, said author and historian Marion Kaplan, the home had remained the refuge for increasingly imperiled Jews. But even this remaining refuge, this shalom bayit, was shattered during Kristallnacht, when mobs of civilians and Nazi officials entered homes and destroyed, among other things, down pillows, quilts and mattresses, filling homes with feathers as the streets were filling with glass.

Kaplan, the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History and professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, was speaking at Vancouver's annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture, at Beth Israel Synagogue. She has been studying contemporary women's accounts of Kristallnacht and noted the recurrent theme of feathers as a signal of the elimination of comfort, of a "domestic scene gravely disturbed," as Kaplan put it.

Kristallnacht took place across Germany and Austria on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. In just a few hours, hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed, 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 Jews were arrested and interned in concentration camps.

But women's heroism in the face of all misfortune was the theme of the lecture, as Kaplan described one woman who travelled directly to Dachau to plead for the release of her fiancé. Another strode into the Nazi headquarters in Munich seeking help in escaping the country.

"Women's calm, dry-eyed self-determination," Kaplan said, represented "human dignity in the face of barbarism."

In hindsight, Kaplan acknowledged, it is easy to wonder why more Jews did not flee in the years, or even the decades, before it was too late. But Kaplan said that, until Kristallnacht in 1938, it was a deliberate Nazi deception to leave a faint hope alive among the German Jewish population. After Kristallnacht, effectively every Jew remaining – about one in four had fled between the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 and November 1938 – immediately sought emigration, flooding foreign missions and the German department that issued exit visas. In less than a year, before war further complicated emigration, another one in four escaped. But most were unable to get out.

"Closed doors around the world impeded escape," Kaplan said. Though emigration from Germany was technically legal until October 1941, very few were able to find refuge, particularly as innumerable other refugees groups fleeing Nazism's march burdened Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and even Italy, which had continued receiving refugees for a time. For Europe's largest population of Jews – those in Poland – there was not even the remote hope of rescue. By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, fate was sealed.

It was not only the lack of countries willing to take Jews that dashed even the hope of escape, the Nazi regime worked at cross-purposes with its own policy, one branch seeking to extradite the largest number of Jews possible, while another tried to delay the process long enough to execute a near-complete fleecing of Jewish property and wealth. That a large proportion of Jewish assets was expended on bribery cannot have encouraged the benefiting minor officials to speed up the process of extradition.

A notable gender imbalance emerges, Kaplan said, when reviewing the emigration patterns of Jews from Germany. Fewer Jewish women than men fled Germany for a range of reasons. As Jewish men found themselves excluded from their professions, they may have been less inclined to remain. Women, meanwhile, were still able to find work – in the Jewish schools that were burgeoning as Jews were excluded from the public system and in the Jewish hospitals that took care of a population no longer welcome in the public health facilities. Unemployed men sometimes left ahead of their families, intending to send for them after claiming a beachhead in the free world. Families were also probably more likely to send a son into the unknown than they were a daughter.

The only way for a family to gain the release of a man from a concentration camp was to guarantee his immediate emigration. So two exit visas, Kaplan said, would best be used freeing two inmates, rather than providing emigration for one inmate and his comparatively free wife.

The statistical longevity of women over men – compounded by the gender imbalance caused across Europe by the First World War – meant that there were more German Jewish women than men, and that these were disproportionately elderly. Kaplan said elderly parents would likely have encouraged their children to flee, while assuming, Kaplan said, "no one will hurt me, I'm an old woman."

The exceptional courage and tenacity demonstrated by Jewish women under the Nazi regime was symptomatic of a pre-feminist awakening of women's self-determination, but it may have been indicative of a larger tendency to excel beyond contemporary expectations. In the Weimar Republic, the apparent liberal idyll that was Germany in the 1920s, Kaplan said, 30 per cent of the women in German universities were Jewish – though Jews made up just one per cent of the German population.

During a ceremony preceding Kaplan's lecture, six witnesses and survivors – Saul Cohn, David Ehrlich, Evelyn Kahn, Sarah Mandelbaum, Bronia Sonnenschein and Bluma Tischler – lit six candles with the assistance of six members of the second and third generations – Ed Lewin, Lisa Ehrlich, Alexander Kahn, Esther Caldes, Dan Sonnenschein and Ben Tischler.

As the community members prepared to light candles representing the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a University of British Columbia historian and last year's Kristallnacht keynote speaker, reminded the assembly that the number of people killed during the Second World War was not six million, but closer to 60 million.

"And most, though not all, of those 60 million victims of war were just as innocent as the six million Jews whose memory we honor this evening," Friedrichs said. "But still there was a difference in the manner of their deaths. Most of the 60 million human beings who died before their time during the six worst years of modern history, lost their lives as a result of the brutal randomness of war.... But the six million human beings who died in the Shoah were not victims of war's brutal accidents. Quite the contrary. They were victims of an organized, relentlessly planned and perpetrated process, the intent of which was to eliminate every single Jew in Europe from earthly existence."

Vancouver city councillor Suzanne Anton read the proclamation from the city, drawing a parallel of sorts between global warming and the Holocaust. She was introduced by Dr. Marty Braverman, president of Congregation Beth Israel. Prof. Richard Menkis introduced the guest speaker.

The Kristallnacht lecture is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society, Beth Israel, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver Endowment Fund and the Gottfried Family Kristallnacht Endowment Fund.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of development and communications for Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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