Speaking at Vancouver\u2019s annual Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 9 at Congregation Beth Israel, Prof. Robin Judd discussed an almost unknown subset of this phenomenon: Holocaust survivors who met Allied soldiers in displaced persons\u2019 camps after the war and went on to marry them.<\/p>\n
Judd is associate professor of history at Ohio State University and immediate past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest international society for scholars of Jewish studies. Her award-winning book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust <\/i>explores the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Many Jewish survivors, as well as community and religious leaders, viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way for the survivors to move forward after extraordinary trauma, said Judd, whose academic interest in the subject stems from family history.<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandmother was a war bride,\u201d Judd said. \u201cShe was a survivor. She and my father survived the war in hiding. My biological grandfather died at liberation, and my grandmother married an American soldier after the war, who then adopted my father.\u201d<\/p>\n Her grandmother spoke little about her experiences during or immediately after the war, though Judd knew the rough outline of her past. Only when Judd began research into the subject did she learn that her grandmother\u2019s experience was not as unique as Judd had assumed.<\/p>\n The individual stories of these war brides, and their efforts to integrate, offer lessons around survival in the aftermath of trauma, as well as larger issues concerning marriage, immigration and citizenship, she said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Judd focused on a few couples, including Isaac and Leesha (ne\u00e9 Leisje Bornstijn) Rose, and Sala (ne\u00e9 Solarcz) and Abe Bonder.<\/p>\n Sala survived in the Warsaw Ghetto for more than a year, before deportation to a ghetto outside Lublin, then to Majdanek and a series of other camps. She was liberated during a death march in April 1945.<\/p>\n At Rosh Hashanah services at a DP camp in Hanover, she met Abe, a mechanic in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Until then, Judd said, Sala had avoided the Canadian and British soldiers overseeing the DP camp because she said they made her feel like a monkey in the zoo.<\/p>\n \u201cBut Abe came to her and started to speak to her in a very quiet Yiddish,\u201d Judd recounted. \u201cIt was his questioning, his real interest in understanding who she was and what she had experienced that made her want to seek a second encounter with him.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the war brides found themselves at the whims of their new extended families, subsumed into existing structures that were foreign and unfamiliar. Often, they arrived in the new country and did not have homes of their own but lived with their husbands\u2019 families, sometimes with multiple generations in the same home.<\/p>\n Leesha arrived in Ottawa and moved in with fianc\u00e9 Isaac and her soon-to-be mother-in-law, with whom she had limited language skills to communicate. The groom\u2019s mother took it upon herself to plan the wedding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cLeesha and other war brides are often talking about how, in these moments, whether it was the marriage or it was having their first child, or it was their first child\u2019s bar or bat mitzvah, or their first child\u2019s wedding, how they so desperately missed those murdered family members at that time,\u201d Judd said.<\/p>\n Newcomers were sometimes judged unfairly, as if their healthy appearance diminished the perception of their suffering. A newspaper article described Leesha as \u201ca good-natured chubby little girl.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere was this notion that these women looked almost too healthy,\u201d said Judd, \u201cThat the trauma was almost not written sufficiently enough on her body.\u201d<\/p>\n Associations and networks existed for the newcomers to connect with others from similar backgrounds, including Jewish war bride clubs and synagogue-affiliated groups.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The war bride experiences Judd studies are diverse and include sad but also happy memories, she said, from the difficulties of reconstruction and recovery to stories of resilience and rebuilding.<\/p>\n Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a scholar of German history who taught at the University of British Columbia from 1973 until his retirement in 2018, contextualized Judd\u2019s presentation, as well as Kristallnacht and the larger history of the Holocaust.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Kristallnacht sent a message to the world, he said. But the world did not listen.<\/p>\n \u201cThis horrific Night of Broken Glass was front page news all over the world, but not for long,\u201d he recounted. \u201cMuch else was going on in the world at that time and, within a few days, Kristallnacht was forgotten. In fact, the world learned nothing from Kristallnacht. But the Nazis learned a lot. They realized that whatever they might do to the Jews, there would be no consequences. And thus, once Hitler\u2019s war started in 1939, within Germany itself and in every country the Germans conquered under cover of war, a relentless program to exterminate the Jews began to be carried out by beatings, by shootings, by starvation and by gas.\u201d<\/p>\n Hannah Marazzi, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), which presented the event in partnership with Beth Israel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, called Kristallnacht \u201ca defining moment in which the shadow of hatred quite literally burst into flame.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, associate director of programs and community relations for the VHEC, introduced Holocaust survivors, who lit candles of remembrance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTonight, as we are about to light candles \u2026 we vow never to forget the lives of the women, men and children who are symbolized by these flames,\u201d she said. \u201cMay the memory of their lives inspire us to live so that we may help to ensure that their memories live on.\u201d<\/p>\n Beth Israel\u2019s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker and reflected on his family\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n
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