Holocaust – Page 29

Survivor’s talk inspires

“There are as many Holocaust stories as there are Holocaust survivors,” said David Ehrlich, a survivor outreach speaker of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, to open his afternoon talk at Langara College. On Oct. 31, a class of 20 students and several faculty members and guests heard Ehrlich – a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz who immigrated to Canada via Paris in the late 1940s – tell his personal story.

This class is part of a program called Writing Lives: The Holocaust Survivor Memoir Project. In the first term, its students produce research papers on prewar European Jewish communities like the one that Ehrlich called home; in the second term, they will interview survivor-partners and together write memoirs of the survivors’ experiences.

Ehrlich is an evocative speaker. He spoke lovingly of his family home in Transylvania (now part of Romania). “We had a three-room home, and we were middle-class. But we had no running water and no electricity, not for another 20 years,” he said. “Kids don’t know any better. I thought that we had it well: chicken on Friday night, bread on the table, it was wonderful!”

But he also told of his experience with antisemitic violence, the hard choices made by families who tried to avoid a Nazi roundup, and life in Auschwitz. He silenced the room when he spoke of stepping off a train boxcar at Auschwitz: “I’ll never forget the view when the sliding doors opened, or the noise that the doors made,” he said.

The students – who in this term’s research papers attempt to imaginatively reconstruct Jewish life before the Second World War’s devastation – responded with questions about Ehrlich’s journey to Canada. He spoke of the family that he made in Canada: a wife and three sons. He made his story accessible to the audience of all ages.

The students admired Ehrlich and a bond was formed during his talk, which was about an hour long. When he finished speaking, there was a respectful silence, and no student seemed willing to be the first to break it. Teachers from Langara began the question-and-answer session and, once the ice was broken, the students filled the remaining time with questions. Ehrlich in turn shared relevant wisdom for Writing Lives’ participants.

“You are educated and smart,” he told them. “There comes a time where you’ve got to learn to put up with people who are different because you have to get along. Start practising by getting along with your fellow students.”

Indeed, Writing Lives features groups in which students collaborate on research and, ultimately, on memoirs with the course’s survivor-partners. These collaborations require empathy. Ehrlich conducted himself as an exemplar of empathy, stating, “I can’t hold the grandchildren of Nazi-era Germans accountable for the Holocaust,” and the students’ response to his talk suggests that they, too, understand empathy’s importance. The course thus offers an excellent venue for students’ development of collaborative skills and of compassion. It provides a space in which students can grow closer together.

The afternoon also contained humour and reference to contemporary subjects. Ehrlich joked that he was now willing to use various German-made appliances and recalled that the heavy rainfall during a roundup of Hungarian Jews paled in comparison to Vancouver’s weather. Ehrlich also demonstrated strong knowledge of news and politics by interspersing references to American and Canadian current events into his remarks. He shared his general optimism about the post-Holocaust situation, stating, “After three or four generations, the Germans are coming clean; they are behaving like good nations do. It’s the only country in the world where you cannot say that the Holocaust didn’t exist.” He added, “We in Canada are very lucky – multicultural – and there’s no way that one minority group could be persecuted as in the Holocaust.”

His audience appreciated his graceful, optimistic tone. One enthusiastic student baked dozens of cupcakes to celebrate Ehrlich’s recent birthday.

Ehrlich’s talk will guide Writing Lives’ students through the remainder of the program. They will respond to it in one of their weekly written submissions, and the experience of interacting with a Holocaust survivor foreshadows the interviews that they will conduct in early 2018. They could not have asked for a better guide.

William Chernoff is a student in the Writing Lives program. Coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines, the two-semester program is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation.

The Holocaust in literature

This academic year marks the second session of Writing Lives, a two-semester project at Langara College, coordinated by instructor Dr. Rachel Mines. Writing Lives is a partnership between Langara, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the Azrieli Foundation. This fall, students are learning about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. In January, students will begin interviewing local Holocaust survivors and will write their memoirs on the basis of the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. Many students used their most recent journal entry to reflect on the value of literature in transmitting Holocaust memory. Here are a few excerpts.

The role of literature in preserving history is controversial but important. Understandably, there are people who are reluctant or even vehemently opposed to recording the Holocaust through the lens of art, concerned that the act of rewriting events in a fictional context may undermine the significance of the tragedy. Others may worry that historical inaccuracies are inevitable in these artistic works, thus doing a disservice to the victims and betraying their memories.

I would argue otherwise: that literature and historical facts can and should build upon one another, used to educate and not obscure. For me, reading our history textbook this semester has not always been easy, but reading the short story A Ghetto Dog by Isaiah Spiegel took the experience to a different level. Such is the power of narrative. As Menachem Kaiser wrote in his article “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature” (The Atlantic, Dec. 28, 2010), “literature affects us in ways that even the most brutal history cannot.” Literature makes the event close, immediate and personal. It’s hard for me to imagine being a Jew in Second World War Europe, but personal accounts and narratives come close to letting us immerse ourselves in the tragedy.

– Athina Leung

In his article “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature,” Kaiser argues that Holocaust literature is an important part of history. It can provide the emotional connection that reading facts cannot. It is a window to understand what people felt without having to experience the ordeal that the characters or author went through. Literature has the power to move the human heart. Facts are important, but they do not give the reader the ability to connect with history in ways that a more emotional and personal experience can provide.

– Tina Macaspac

I found the assigned reading, “The Holocaust’s uneasy relationship with literature,” to be incredibly relevant and thought-provoking. This article discusses the various difficulties associated with Holocaust literature, including the opinion by some historians that the only valid way to recount the Holocaust is through historical facts and memoirs. I agree that acquiring factual knowledge about the Holocaust is integral, and that reading historical documents is essential. However, I find myself disagreeing with the perspective that Holocaust literature is distasteful or discrediting to the Holocaust. Rather, literature provides an alternative, more emotional perspective that one cannot acquire from reading a fact-based history textbook. This week, for example, we read the short story A Ghetto Dog, which narrates the tale of the Jewish widow Anna and her dog Nicky. While I was aware of the facts (in this case, Jews being rounded up by Nazi troops) from a historical perspective, the story emphasized the feelings of helplessness and exhaustion that Holocaust victims and survivors felt. It touched a part of me in a way that facts and statistics could not.

– Emma Proctor

In A Ghetto Dog, the widow Anna and her dog Nicky are persecuted under the Nazi regime and forced to move into a ghetto. It is very clear from the beginning that Nicky is extremely important to Anna, and that he is her last remaining tie, not only to her deceased husband, but to her home.

The Nazis took livestock and any useful animals away from the Jewish people in order to make a profit. The livestock had value, which is why they were kept alive. People’s dogs, however, were not valuable to the Nazis, and that is one reason the dogs were killed.

Another reason was psychological. To the Nazis, it was important to wound people emotionally in order to conquer them. In the story, there were Jewish children dragging their dogs on ropes and leashes, bringing their pets, beloved family members, to be put to death. Dogs were part of a support system and, as with Anna, were reminders of home. To kill these dogs was to kill hope of return. The deaths of dogs were a stern reminder that just as easily as they could kill animals, Nazis could kill humans.

– Yukiko Takahashi-Lai

Brave choice to stage Taken

A scene from United Players’ production of Taken at Midnight, which is at the Jericho Arts Centre until Nov. 26. Seen here are Brian Hinson as the Nazi Dr. Conrad and Suzanne Ristic as Irmgaard, Hans Litten’s mother. (photo by Nancy Caldwell)

As a Jew, a lawyer and a child of a Holocaust survivor, I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of Hans Litten until I saw United Players’ production of Taken at Midnight, which runs to Nov. 26 at Jericho Arts Centre.

Litten was a brilliant young Jewish-German lawyer, known for his defence of opponents of the Nazi movement. In 1931, he had the audacity to subpoena Adolf Hitler as a witness in the trial of four Nazis charged with murder, and subjected him to a grueling three-hour cross-examination, exposing the Nazi party for what it really was – a murderous bunch of thugs. Litten called Hitler “a cross between Baron Munchhausen and Attila the Hun.”

Unfortunately for Litten and the world, within two years Hitler was in power and he started to exact his revenge on his opponents. At midnight on Feb. 28, 1933, after the Reichstag (German parliament) fire, Litten, along with thousands of others, was arrested or, as the Nazis euphemistically called it, taken into “protective custody” at a series of concentration camps. Litten became known as “Hitler’s personal prisoner” – the cocky Jewish lawyer who had dared to expose the Fuhrer’s weaknesses – and, over the years, was subjected to brutal torture and unspeakable degradation as punishment. Despite the valiant efforts of his mother, Irmgaard, to obtain his release over the five years of his incarceration, Litten ultimately committed suicide in Dachau in 1938, which was a bit messy for the Nazis, as they wanted their political prisoners to die accidentally or naturally, not by taking their own lives.

The irony is that Litten was not technically Jewish. His mother was not Jewish and his father had converted to Christianity (to make things easier). As Litten says in the play, “I am an atheist Jew and, prior to that, I was an atheist Lutheran.” Of course, that made no difference to the Nazis, who went back three generations to ferret out Jewish blood.

Playwright and filmmaker Mark Hayhurst’s 2010 BBC films The Man Who Crossed Hitler and To Stop a Tyrant planted the seeds for this staged work. It had its West End (London, England) debut in 2014. Reviewers called it a “masterpiece of theatre not to be missed.” Now, United Players has taken on the formidable task of presenting this gripping story to Vancouver audiences. From the minute you walk into the theatre, the dark, shadowy, stark set – an elevated wooden platform fronted by barbed wire positioned between two floor-to-ceiling red banners emblazoned with black swastikas – is a harbinger of the grim things to come.

The entire cast, mostly comprised of veteran actors, is stellar and, as an ensemble, makes this a truly remarkable theatrical experience. Particular mention has to be made of the two main protagonists – Suzanne Ristic as Irmgaard and Sean Anthony as her son. Ristic is sublime in her portrayal of this strong, heroic woman who takes on the Gestapo establishment in a relentless battle to free her son. She often takes centre stage to talk directly to the audience, thereby breaking down the fourth wall, making for a very intimate encounter. And Anthony plays his difficult role with dignity, yet shows uncompromising defiance. We ache as we watch his physical and mental decline – his transformation from ordinary citizen to bloodied, head-shaven prisoner; a business suit to the striped concentration camp uniform, replete with the obligatory yellow Star of David.

Supporting, but not lesser, performances come from the rest of the cast.

photo - Irmgaard Litten (played by Suzanne Ristic) tries everything to save her son Hans (Sean Anthony) from the Nazis in Taken at Midnight — Irmgaard Litten (played by Suzanne Ristic) tries everything to save her son Hans (Sean Anthony) from the Nazis in Taken at Midnight. *(photo by Nancy Caldwell)*

Brian Hinson as Dr. Conrad, Irmgaard’s Gestapo contact, portrays a man of culture and intelligence who appreciates this feisty woman and appears to feel affection for her. The scene where they share an ice cream on a summer’s afternoon in a park seems incongruous, juxtaposed against the darkness of this play. Yet it speaks to some form of humanity even in the worst of times.

Litten’s cellmates – Erich Muhsam, an anarchist (played by Richard Hersley) who refers to Hitler as “the Austrian transvestite,” and Carl von Ossietzky, a newspaper editor and winner of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize (played by Jewish community member Michael Kahn) – show the camaraderie and trust that can evolve from difficult circumstances. The triumvirate produces an amusing reenactment of Hitler’s cross-examination, providing an island of levity in their sea of despair.

Douglas Abel plays Fritz Litten, Hans’ father, as a calm counterpoint to his wife’s intense persona. John Harris, with his posh English accent, is Lord Clifford Allen, an English diplomat, patrician and pacifist who Irmgaard seconds in her quest for her son’s freedom. Allen is able to secure a meeting with Hitler to discuss the matter, but to no avail. Allen’s political attitude highlights the European appeasement zeitgeist of the early 1930s – that Germany was just experiencing growing pains and Hitler was an effective statesman, not a threat to the world. If only it had been so.

The play provides an historical lesson in the rise to power of the fascist Nazi regime and the consequences of speaking truth to power, but, at its heart, it is the story of the love of a mother for her son and her fight, at great personal risk, to try and save him.

As director Michael Fera, states in his notes, this is “an informative and deeply engrossing play about the high price paid for resisting tyranny,” and is as relevant today as it was in 1933. “People are living it now, again. History is repeating itself in many ways.”

Taken at Midnight is a tough watch and an emotional ride but well worth a trip to the Jericho Arts Centre. Kudos to artistic director Andree Karas for having the courage to stage this work. The show runs to Nov. 26, Thursdays to Sundays, 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinées Nov. 12, 19 and 26. For more information, visit unitedplayers.com or call 604-224-8007, ext. 2.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

Retribution and restoration

Hidden in the spine of a 1947 edition of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, in its original Dutch, is a piece of paper with the German words, “Die Vergeltung,” or retribution. (photo by Shula Klinger)

I ran into Richard Smart in North Vancouver in early September. It was at Urban Repurpose, a nonprofit store that sells used building materials and an eclectic mix of donated household items. Many of these items are vintage and, if you’re interested in local history or looking for artistic inspiration, it’s also a treasure trove.

Employing skills handed down over three generations of his family in England, Smart restores and sells antique books using tools that have “barely changed for centuries.” And, since a homeschooling mom never misses an opportunity to educate the children, I asked him if we could come by the Old English Bindery to see him at work. In mid-October, he invited us to see how a broken book could be repaired.

Smart showed us book presses, tools for applying gold leaf to the bindings of books, piles of ancient, beautifully decorated papers and, of course, the books themselves – travel writing, fiction, nonfiction, massive tomes of human anatomy, bigger than any book you’d see in print nowadays. He also applied gold leaf to the kids’ index fingers, which delighted us all.

photo - Het Achterhuis. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl — *Het Achterhuis*. Anne Frank’s *The Diary of a Young Girl*. *(photo by Shula Klinger)*

Just before we left, Smart showed me a small, bubble-wrapped book. I looked down as he held it out. Its title: Het Achterhuis. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.

“It’s a first edition,” he said. There was a pause, to let this information seep in. He pointed to the front left edge. “I only did minor repairs on it, here.”

I stared at my hands, holding this 1947 edition of The Diary of a Young Girl, in its original Dutch. Looking down, just breathing. Thinking about how, a mere two years before this book was published, Anne and her sister Margot were still alive. In captivity, but alive. Anne was still writing, contemplating the nature of the human soul.

A moment later, Smart pointed to the inside of the spine, where it had separated from the contents. “Look at that,” he said, and pointed to some words in German: “Die Vergeltung.”

“I looked it up,” he said, and here he became animated. “It means retribution. Or payback.”

I was already choking back the emotion of holding this 70-year-old edition of The Diary, but now this?

I asked how the text had gotten there, when the book had come apart, if it had been placed there during the original binding.

“Bookbinders often used scraps of paper to pad the inside of a spine,” he explained. “But to choose this particular piece of paper? Just think about that.”

By then, my head was full of questions, all competing for my attention. Unfortunately, my two children were also competing for my attention. The little one was extremely curious about the book presses, but the big one was edging toward the door. Also, as interested as they are in world history, this wasn’t the time to tell them about the Holocaust, so we left.

Over the next few days, I learned more about the book’s earlier life and Smart’s plans for its future. “This book needs to go back to its community,” he said. When asked if it there had been any fanfare at the Dutch auction, he said, “It was just an ordinary estate sale.”

Since the original dust jacket was missing, Smart has made a case for it. Working to match it to the cover’s original colour, he chose a pale blue leather inlay for the lid and patterned, or “paste,” paper for the sides.

photo - In the spine of this 1947 edition of The Diary of a Young Girl is a piece of paper with the German words, “Die Vergeltung,” or retribution — In the spine of this 1947 edition of The Diary of a Young Girl is a piece of paper with the German words, “Die Vergeltung,” or retribution. *(photo by Shula Klinger)*

I also wrote to Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Gertjan Broek replied, saying, “There are still a few mysteries around the first edition of Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis.” He agreed that “randomly available” pages from other books were often used to pad spines – “paper was a scarce resource in those years,” he noted.

This was probably the case with the page used in Smart’s edition of Het Achterhuis. Die Vergeltung was published in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1941 and reprinted in 1944. In Broek’s view, the typefaces were a match. Broek didn’t know if this was true for all of the 3,000 books in this first run, but he said he’d ask his colleagues.

A few days – and a good deal of anxious email-checking – later, Broek wrote again. “Three experts in book restoration have told me they have never seen a first edition copy of Het Achterhuis with this kind of print.”

And that is where the story rests, for now. I would love to paint a more detailed picture of the bookbinder at a workbench in 1947. I picture hands cutting out a page of that German book, laying it into the backbone of Anne’s book. Was the bookbinder just doing a job, or taking a degree of satisfaction in leaving a deliberate, but hidden, commentary inside this now-iconic piece of work?

There’s another layer to the tale.

In an age where people are rushing around permanently plugged into an online world, bookbinders like Smart have an unusual job. Every day, instead of racing ever forwards, he steps into worlds that have passed, touches books first purchased by people who haven’t lived for centuries. As he preserves their books, it’s as if he offers a passage between their time and ours.

Amid all of these remarkable works, Anne’s stands out as a beacon. “Books like Anne’s make this work worthwhile,” said Smart, who is keen to sell his copy of Het Achterhuis, but to an organization, not a private individual. “I had an offer on it but I refused it,” he said. “I have my heart set on it going into an institution that will display the story.”

So, in preserving precious books, Smart is doing far more than simply offering a service, repairing material goods. He is acting as a guardian of history.

Smart also wonders about the binder of this copy of copy of Het Achterhuis, “the moment of looking for a spine liner and putting that particular one in. What was going through his mind, in 1947?” On reading this in Smart’s email, I replied that, really, the book was priceless.

Later that day, he emailed again. “This one copy is priceless, as you say. Not financially but historically. Just imagine the story told by everyone that sees this book in a museum. It would bring people in, just to see this, and talk about it. That is worth so much for everyone in this world.”

Responding to my expression of gratitude for his professional conscience, he said, “Faith is everything.”

Shula Klinger is an author, illustrator and journalist living in North Vancouver. Find out more at niftyscissors.com.

History is constantly new

Laurence Rees, former head of BBC TV History and author of the award-winning book Auschwitz, has written a very compelling and authoritative “new” history of the Holocaust, based on 25 years of research, and on many personal meetings with survivors and perpetrators – The Holocaust: A New History (Public Affairs, 2016).

The “new-ness” of Rees’ book is evidenced in the 100 pages of footnotes, which contain more than 100 references to “previously unpublished testimony,” plus new evidence from heretofore unrecorded diaries, speeches, stenographic reports, Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters, journals, private conversations and interviews. Add to this the results of “hundreds” of visits Rees made to exact killing locations, all of which have their first exposure here.

As with other great one-volume histories of the Holocaust, such as Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1986) and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), Rees’ history is difficult to read – not because of the writing (Rees’ prose is more engaging than either Gilbert’s or Hilberg’s) but because of what the reader has to face in reading about the Holocaust. The cold, impersonal, machine-efficient systematization of genocide; the brutality, the humiliation, the sadism and the ear-piercing silence of the church: all are offered here in unremitting detail. The silence of the world-at-large is also indicted here – as one survivor told Rees about her “liberation”: “What liberation? No one wanted us. There was no Israel, no England, no America and no Canada, with its wide open spaces.”

Rees lays his cards on the table in his prologue: “make no mistake about it – the Holocaust is the most infamous crime in the history of the world.” Rees’s words echo almost exactly the words of Winston Churchill in July of 1944.

To his credit, Rees sees through the usual “excuses” for the Judeocide – that is, need for “Lebensraum,” for “ridding of the world of a bacillus” or for the preventing of a Jewish plot for world domination. Rather, says Rees, the perversions which truly fueled the killing machinery were mad racism thoroughly laced with sadism and opportunity for profit.

On the usual controversial points: first, Rees agrees with Ian Kershaw that “No Hitler, No Holocaust”: no one who studies Holocaust history, he says, “can help but conclude that Hitler was primarily responsible for the Holocaust.” Second, Rees sides persuasively with the “functionalists” rather than the “intentionalists,” an old dilemma among historians of the period wrestling with the idea of whether the Judeocide was planned out in advance (“intentionalism”), or just came about piecemeal (“functionalism”). Third, as mentioned, Rees is adamant that the Holocaust was unique: “a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race.”

Rees is particularly, and rightly, harsh on the slavish complicity of the Dutch civil service (75% of the Dutch Jewish population perished) and the atrocious treatment of Jews in Vichy France, and bitterly condemns the hideously self-serving complicity of the Romanians in joining up with the German Nazis. But he saves his bitterest attack for the end of the book, vehemently accusing the Hungarians of a major crime for allowing what he rightly refers to as the “Hungarian Catastrophe.” (Nor does Canada escape indictment: Rees reminds us of Mackenzie King’s loud admiration of Hitler in the late ’30s, and of the antisemitic pronouncements of Canada’s Immigration Branch in 1938, preventing any Jewish immigration to Canada.)

Rees has some interesting insights on the “Danish Rescue” – the spiriting away to Sweden of almost all of Denmark’s Jewish citizens. Jews were thoroughly integrated into Danish society, and there had been a great number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews in Denmark. In never-before-published interviews, Rees offers heart-warming evidence of the bravery of Danish non-Jews in warning, hiding and planning passage for their Jewish neighbours. As a result, says Rees, when the Germans called, “most of the Danish Jews were not at home.” Rees offers “no simple explanation of why this happened in Denmark and nowhere else,” but he guesses that the Nazi functionary (Werner Best), known to have warned the Danish police about the upcoming “Action” in October of 1943, may have been motivated by the need to “avoid bad feeling” in a country that was supplying considerable food supplies to the Reich. No less of a motivating factor, Rees further conjectures, was the fact that Best, who had been appointed in his 20s to a judgeship, was intelligent enough to foresee the Nazis’ future defeat and subsequently “needed to start improving his CV as far as the Allies were concerned.”

Rees’ book reminds us, then, that history, ironically, is always “new” – and we are, therefore, reminded to constantly view it, and to re-view it, through ever-changing historical lenses.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Recalling a lost aunt

Rosetta van Dam, circa 1920. (photo from Louise Sorensen)

The Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names has provided the opportunity to write and have published a piece about a person named on the memorial. I contributed stories about six of my murdered relatives, and wrote one of those stories in English, about my Aunt Rosa.

Rosetta van Dam (1904-1942), or Ro, was my mother’s younger sister. She was the first in the family to be deported and murdered, on Aug. 3, 1942, in the first Auschwitz gas chamber, at the age of 38. She had responded to the Nazi call to report for “labour in Germany.”

Ro lived in Rotterdam at the family home on Bergweg 99, where I was born and where she had her own room on my grandparents’ floor. Ro was totally withdrawn and had virtually no social life. She always wore a girl scout uniform, with heavy wool knee-high socks and sandals. She likely would have preferred men’s clothing but it was totally taboo at the time for women to dress in that way.

Ro’s voice was very deep and I believe now that she may have been transsexual or, in any event, a lesbian. I was told that my grandparents had been dragging her to a number of doctors, of course with no result. She ended up a virtual hermit, usually disappearing to her room. I think she did some secretarial work, perhaps for my grandparents’ business.

From 1929 to 1936, we lived in the same Rotterdam house. As a toddler and preschooler, I was too young to understand my aunt, but was curious and eager to please her.

Several years ago, I visited Auschwitz and learned that Ro never reached the Birkenau gas chambers because they were not yet in operation on Aug. 3, 1942. I was informed of this while standing in that very gas chamber, the only one that had not been destroyed, feeling deeply sad about my aunt.

Louise Sorensen was born in the Netherlands in 1929, where she lived with her parents and older sister. In May 1940, when the Nazis occupied Holland, they lived in a suburb near Amsterdam. Two years later, the Nazis ejected them from their home and the family was forced into the Amsterdam ghetto. By January 1943, they were separated and hidden in various locations throughout the country until the Canadians liberated them on April 17, 1945. Sorensen immigrated to Vancouver in 1959; her Danish husband has passed away and she has two sons and three grandsons. She has been active with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre since its inception: she was a board member for 10 years and has been speaking in schools and to other audiences for about 30 years. This article also appeared in VHEC’s Zachor.

Netherlands builds memorial

A bird’s-eye view of the Holocaust Memorial of Names to be built in Amsterdam. (photo from holocaustnamenmonument.nl)

More than 70 years after the Second World War, a memorial in Amsterdam will be erected with the names of all the Dutch Holocaust victims. This will finally provide the Netherlands with a tangible memorial where the 102,000 Jewish victims and 220 Sinti and Roma victims can be commemorated individually and collectively.

Up to now, no memorial in the Netherlands has listed each individual Holocaust victim by name. For surviving relatives, a place to commemorate family members is invaluable. In addition, a memorial listing the more than 102,000 names serves as a reminder to current and future generations of the dangers of racism and discrimination.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered an estimated six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma. Of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands in 1940, 102,000 did not survive the war.

Not all Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of the extermination camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno and Sobibor. Many were murdered in mass executions or died as a result of sickness, hunger, exhaustion or slave labour. The Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names commemorates all these victims.

Designed by Polish-Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind, whose studio is headquartered in New York City, the Dutch Holocaust Memorial of Names will be located in the heart of the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam. The memorial consists of the four Hebrew letters that make up the word zachor, to remember. When visitors enter the memorial, they find themselves in a labyrinth of passageways flanked by two-metre-tall brick walls that convey the message, “In memory of.” Inscribed on each of the 102,000 bricks is a name, date of birth and age of death, in such a way that the name of each victim can be touched.

In combination with the highly reflective geometric forms of the steel letters, the brickwork connects Amsterdam’s past and present. A narrow void at the point where the brick walls meet the metal forms makes it appear that the steel letters float, symbolizing the interruption in the history and culture of the Dutch people.

Anyone can adopt a name on the memorial by donating 50 euros. For more information, visit holocaustnamenmonument.nl.

Goldman memoir is a must-read

Breakfast at Andrésy circa 1945. René Goldman is holding his bowl out for more food. The children peering through the windows are from another dining room, who had likely finished their meal but had not yet been given permission to leave. (photo from memoirs.azrielifoundation.org)

René Goldman’s account of his childhood – A Childhood Adrift (Azrieli Foundation) – is set in Belgium and France during the Second World War, when Hitler’s plan was to annihilate all European Jews. Each European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death. Only between six and 11% of European children survived the Holocaust. Ironically, this memoir describes both a heartbreaking and an uplifting story of one Jewish boy’s struggle to stay alive and sane despite all odds against him.

A Childhood Adrift is both personal and, at the same time, an important historical document. The story, written with a spatter of tongue-in-cheek humour, is a fascinating labyrinth of multiple narratives; stories within stories. It is not only about René the child, but also René the man, who revisits the past and examines the wounds left by war.

Goldman weaves his experiences throughout the periods of war and postwar, when he is a young man who travels back to the places that sheltered him and other children lost in the horror of war. The entire narrative is skilfully infused not only with historical and political facts but with the geography of various places so poignantly described one can feel and see them.

Goldman writes about the time when children lost parents, siblings and homes. These children had to depend on the kindness of strangers or were left alone to fend for themselves.

Goldman was 6 years old when the Nazis invaded his native Luxembourg, where he was born, and Belgium, where his family had taken refuge. In 1942, the family fled Belgium for France. From the last station before the French border, they walked on foot to the Demarcation Line between the German Occupied Zone and the Free Zone. No sooner did they cross the line than they were arrested by the French police, who were rounding up Jews escaping from the Occupied Zone, and the family was interned in Lons-le-Saunier. On Aug. 26, Goldman and his mother were taken to the city’s train station for deportation. His aunt appeared from nowhere and tried to take him away, but to no avail. Eventually, she found someone in authority to send two officers to rescue the young boy and save him from boarding the train. His mother was already in one of the cars waving goodbye as the train was pulling out of the station. This was the last time Goldman saw his mother. He was 8 years old.

His father disappeared that morning and it was only in 1944 that Goldman was reunited with him for a brief time, until his father was arrested and taken away. Only after the war did Goldman find out that his father died at the end of the death march from Auschwitz, in January 1945.

In 1942, Goldman was placed in the care of the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) and brought to Château du Masgelier. After two weeks, he was taken to the village of Vendoeuvres, where a young couple offered to take care of him. Soon afterward, the Free Zone was invaded by the Germans.

What followed for Goldman were moves to several homes due to the changing circumstances, which necessitated a constant search for safe places for children.

Left an orphan in 1945, Goldman was placed in the care of the CCE (Commission Centrale de l’Enfance), an organization inspired by communist ideology, which was instrumental in shaping his political beliefs. His faith in this system remained unshaken until he lived in Poland for three years, when he became disillusioned, even shocked, by it.

He writes, “I can now in all candidness recognize that I caught myself wondering whether communism was not the greatest lie of the century, if not of all time.”

Goldman’s narrative strength, among his many others, leans towards the lyrical.

One of the immediate postwar places to which Goldman was moved in France was the town of Andrésy and its Manoir de Denouval, which inspired poetic instincts in him. Here, he found the beauty of gardens and serenity, a “sanctuary” that shielded him for a time from his loneliness and the postwar chaotic reality. Interestingly, Marc Chagall, who donated funds for the children’s care, would occasionally visit the manor.

“I was enthralled with the Enchanted Manor,” writes Goldman. “It nourished in me a fascination with mystery as I explored it for hidden nooks and ventured up the narrow winding steps that led to the turret, sometimes even in the dark of night.” And, indeed, these were dark times in the young boy’s life for it was then that he realized he was an orphan.

Friendships played a huge part during the war and in the postwar period. In the boys and girls Goldman befriended along the way, and some of the kind teachers, he found a certain relief from the loneliness he felt, and from the lack of affection and support. One person who played an important role in his life was Sophie Micnic, who became his caregiver and friend. This woman, a founding leader of the MOI, the Jewish communist resistance movement in Paris and Lyon during the war, later became the director of CCE. It was she who took Goldman under her wing, and recommended that he live in the “Enchanted Manor.”

A Childhood Adrift – a must-read – is a powerful testimony of a child’s response to the calamities of war and their everlasting imprint on his life. It is also a statement of courage and survival in the face of adversity. Eventually, Goldman developed a tremendous hunger for knowledge, education and a desire for communication in as many as 10 languages.

In the last section of the book, the author reveals himself as a poet and a grown man still deeply immersed in his past.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz is a Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre outreach speaker, an award-winning author, an instructor at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Centre and the editor of the No Longer Alone section of VHEC’s Zachor, in which a longer version of this book review was originally published. René Goldman will be the keynote speaker at the community’s Kristallnacht commemoration on Nov. 5, 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel. Copies of his memoir will be distributed to those in attendance. Holocaust survivors are invited to light a memorial candle. The ceremony is presented by VHEC, Beth Israel and the Azrieli Foundation. For Pat Johnson’s review of Goldman’s book, which was initially called A Childhood on the Move, visit jewishindependent.ca/fragmented-childhood.

Writing Lives begins anew

This fall, students are learning about the Holocaust by studying literary and historical texts. They are using the resources of the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library to help them write detailed research projects on prewar Jewish communities in Europe. In January, students will begin interviewing local Holocaust survivors and then write the survivors’ memoirs on the basis of the interviews. Students are keeping journals of their personal reflections on their experiences as Writing Lives participants. Many students used their first journal entry to reflect on how the course material is changing their perceptions of current events. Here are some excerpts.

I have learned that a racist interaction between a person of colour and a white person is not only between those two specific people. In that interaction is embedded an entire history of racism. A racist society supports white and racist ideology in a way that has historically privileged white people and embeds power in a racist interaction. The social conditions in a racist society psychologically prime the person of colour to strategize in certain ways during interactions they may perceive as dangerous.

Similarly (I realize now), Jews were emotionally and psychologically primed by their history of using appeasement as a successful, non-violent form of survival-as-resistance. This history surely psychologically primed the German oppressors to see the Jews as appropriate targets for their unprecedented scapegoating and the ensuing genocide.

This is one of the few times so far that a concept I have learned as an undergrad is beginning to take hold in my mind, tangibly changing the way I think and interpret information. I am learning to more broadly apply what I have learned about oppression and resistance. My evolving thought process gives me hope that I will in my life have a greater understanding of such dynamics and that I will contribute to the effort to understand, influence and mitigate, or even transform, dynamics between people of power and vulnerable populations.

– April Curry

Learning about the origins of Nazi Germany, the slow and steady rise to power of Hitler and his party, and the various influences that led to the Holocaust has been enlightening, in a troubling way, of course. One of the scariest eye-openers about what I have learned recently is just how human this chain of events was. A hurt and angry nation was ready to find anything and anyone to take their frustrations out on. It’s scary how this chain of events makes sense in retrospect. Yet it’s also disturbing how little thought I gave to this chain of events; they were things that happened, so I left it at that. But there is so much insight to be gained from reading into this history. Learning the history of the Holocaust and the build-up to it has given me a sense of awareness. I feel much more enlightened thanks to learning this history.

– Clayton Dott

There has been much focus on Hitler’s personal pathology (his lack of self-esteem, sense of being an outsider, etc.) to explain his primal role in the Holocaust. Problematically, this view assumes that Hitler’s racist system of values and beliefs arose outside of the environment he lived in. It is clear, however, that antisemitism, a racist ideology, existed long before his time. Furthermore, restricting the discourse to individual pathology denies the connection between Nazi violence and antisemitism, as though “lone wolves,” driven by individual malice, had committed the crimes. For example, the claim that “without Hitler, no Holocaust” denies the incessant influence of historical antisemitism and other dominant ideologies, such as Aryan supremacy and nationalism. Moreover, placing an emphasis on personal characteristics fails to take into account structural oppression. Fascist and authoritarian leaders may be charismatic, but the popular support they garner relies heavily on their ability to create a sociopolitical framework that allows for organized and systematic coercion and manufacture of consent, achieved by subjecting people to and satiating them with dogmatic education and media propaganda.

– Marc Perez

As the class explored the factors that contributed to the prejudice and antisemitism that led to the Holocaust, I was confronted with the reality of the deep and painful cost that the fear of disconnection and abandonment has on our society. Research has shown that the human need for belonging, connection and community is in fact one of the precipitating causes of racism. It is strange and uncomfortable to step away from my generally positive understanding of connection and find that belonging can be built on the loyalty earned by excluding others. In fact, the act of ostracizing and dehumanizing others can help form a shared identity and sense of belonging.

In what ways do I meet my own needs for belonging when I fail to speak up after a racist joke is told or someone is scolded for not speaking English to their own peer group in the line at Starbucks? We have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when people like myself, with so much social privilege, fail to disrupt these sorts of racist attacks? In this way, am I not complicit in the propagation of intolerance and social isolation in my own community?

– L. Ann Thomas

Memorial inaugurated

An artist’s rendering of the newly inaugurated National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. (photo from holocaustmonument.ca)

On Sept. 27, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inaugurated the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. The monument serves to honour the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, and the important lessons it so painfully taught us.

The Holocaust was the mass extermination of more than six million Jews and millions of other victims, and one of the darkest chapters in human history. The National Holocaust Monument commemorates the millions of people who suffered such atrocities at the hands of the Nazi regime, and pays tribute to those whose stories must never be forgotten.

The monument also stands as a testament to the resilience and courage of Holocaust survivors. Many found a home in Canada, and profoundly shaped our country and society.

In honouring the victims of the Holocaust, we recognize their humanity, which no human act can erase. The National Holocaust Monument reminds us that it is our collective and vital responsibility to stand against antisemitism, racism and hatred, and to bring meaning to the solemn vow, “never again.”

The monument is located at the corner of Wellington and Booth streets in Ottawa, near the Canadian War Museum.

“This monument, so close to our Parliament and Supreme Court, is a reminder of the devastating cost of allowing hatred and tyranny to overcome openness, inclusion and freedom,” said Trudeau. “Today, we reaffirm our unshakeable commitment to fight antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and discrimination in all its forms, and we pay tribute to those who experienced the worst of humanity. We can honour them by fighting hatred with love, and seeking always to see ourselves in each other.”

“This monument is a powerful tribute to the millions of Jewish men, women and children and other victims whose lives were extinguished during one of the darkest chapters in human history,” added the Hon. Mélanie Joly, minister of Canadian Heritage. “As we reflect and honour their memory, we also pay tribute to the courage and strength of the survivors who came to Canada following the Holocaust. Their stories are a powerful reminder of our responsibility to stand against antisemitism and prejudice in all its forms and to never allow intolerance and hate to take root in our communities. We will never forget.”

The design of the monument, entitled “Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival,” was developed by Team Lord of Toronto and depicts a stylized star, created by the confluence of six triangular shapes, or “volumes,” that are organized around a large gathering space for ceremonies. The design uses architecture, landscaping, art and interpretation to communicate the hardship and suffering of victims, while conveying a powerful message of humanity’s enduring strength and survival. For more information, visit holocaustmonument.ca.