Holocaust – Page 33

Letters offer insights

Prof. Debórah Dwork (photo by Jonathan Edelman)

Nearly two decades ago – and a full half-century after the end of the Second World War – a man in Switzerland cleaning out the apartment of his deceased aunt came across a stash of more than 1,000 letters. The discovery disclosed the aunt’s comparatively simple but valiant acts during the Holocaust and provides new insights into the lives of Jewish children and parents separated during the Holocaust.

The aunt, Elisabeth Luz, was an unmarried Protestant woman living near Zurich who appears to have stumbled into a role as the sole connection between hundreds of divided Jewish families. Because postal service between belligerent nations was restricted during the war, neutral Switzerland provided a potential channel for communication. Through what appears to have been happenstance aided by the compassion of a single devoted individual, thousands of letters made it to their intended recipients – and the record they provide demonstrates what families chose to say, and not say, in furtive missives in times of crisis.

The nephew knew that he had stumbled upon something important. He was familiar with the book Children with a Star by Prof. Debórah Dwork, a definitive study of the experiences of Jewish children under Nazism and the adults who helped them. He contacted Dwork to ask if she would like the letters. Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and founding director of the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, in Massachusetts, now possesses the letters and has studied them for years. She will be in Vancouver in just over two weeks to speak at the community’s annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture about what they tell us about families during the Holocaust.

Dwork cannot be certain how Luz came to be the intermediary for hundreds of families.

“From what I can piece together – and this is what I believe is the case – there was a refugee camp, sort of an internment camp, not a concentration camp, for refugees that had been established by the Swiss government in that town,” Dwork said. Luz went to the camp to give voluntary aid, Dwork believes, “to show with her presence that she cared about their plight.”

One of the men in the camp asked Luz whether she would be so kind as to send a letter to his wife.

“From there, it snowballed,” said Dwork. “Some of the letters that I have from the children, for example, say, ‘you don’t know me but Susie told me that you are an auntie who is willing to write to our mothers,’ and so on.”

The parents were mostly in “Greater Germany” – Germany and the areas it occupied. The children had mostly been sent to places thought to be safe, including Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Remarkably, the letters do not end in 1945. In the course of being a conduit between hundreds of parents and their children, Luz became a confidant to many of them – “Tante Elisabeth” – and remained in contact with several who continued their correspondence. The fact that the collection of letters exists at all is due in part to the fact that Luz hand-copied each one, believing that this would be less likely to catch the attention of war-era postal censors. She maintained the originals.

“Parents sent their letter to her, she copied every letter and then sent it on to the children and the children did the same in reverse,” said Dwork.

Some of the children were on the Kindertransport, the effort to transfer Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe to the United Kingdom, while others were sent by their parents to places considered safer for Jewish children.

“There were a number of children who were sent to family members or to friends or to religious organizations by their parents independently, individually,” she said, adding that there is much to be learned from the letters. “It tells us an enormous amount about family, the importance of family and the way in which family members use letters as thread to bind the family together. I think also it tells us about how children absorbed, adjusted, adapted – or did not adjust or adapt – to their ever-changing lives.”

What the letters do not always indicate is the fate of the families who sent them.

“We know a lot about the children who went on the Kindertransport to Britain, because they survived,” said Dwork. Less is known about the children sent to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. “Many of them did not survive as the Germans conquered and occupied those countries,” she said.

Of those who continued corresponding with Luz long after the war, many had lost their parents.

“Because of the relationship that developed between the children and Elisabeth Luz, those who continued to write, by and large, were now young adults whose parents did not survive and she, Elisabeth Luz, was the last tie to their prewar and wartime life,” explained Dwork. “So, she had become their confidant and that’s very important, the way Elisabeth became a confidant to the parents and the children.”

Vancouverites should join her in November not only to hear specifics about the contents of the letters, but also to reflect on some of the broader issues raised by a collection of this sort, which is a focus of Dwork’s academic work.

“The larger question, I think, is how do people keep in contact?” she said. “What do parents in Greater Germany say to their children? And what do children tell their parents about their daily lives?”

While the letters represent voices from the past, they have much to say to people today. “This is a very human story,” said Dwork. “And, as we are looking at refugees today far-flung from one spot to another, it may help us to think about how each one is a member of a family.”

The Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture takes place Nov. 1, 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. This article first appeared in VHEC’s Zachor.

Demon renews dybbuk

(photo from krakowpost.com)

The first “character” we meet in Marcin Wrona’s coolly fascinating Demon is a yellow bulldozer, rolling menacingly through the empty streets of a Polish village. It’s a harbinger, as well as a metaphor, but of what?

Bulldozers dig, and they bury. Both tasks are central to the plot of Demon, which seizes on the disturbing idea of the dybbuk – a ghost who takes possession of a bridegroom on his wedding day – and reimagines it in the contemporary world. A world, that is, in which the Holocaust is part of our experience – even for those who have buried it in hopes of forgetting.

A Polish-Israeli co-production that is by turns deeply unsettling and absurdly funny, Demon follows the arrival of handsome architect Python (Israeli actor Itay Tiran of Lebanon) from England for the unambiguously happy occasion of his wedding. The groom is Polish, like his lovely bride Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska) and her family, but we have the disquieting feeling from the get-go that he is apart, on his own, an innocent outsider who has (in horror-film tradition) unknowingly ventured into a situation of unimaginable dangers.

Setting to work on the yard behind the decrepit farmhouse that Zaneta’s family owns and has bequeathed to the couple, Python hops on the ominous, aforementioned bulldozer. A noise makes him stop almost immediately, whence he discovers that he has unearthed bones.

So begins Python’s descent from a rational, regular guy to a tormented figure of unreachable despair. Unfortunately, but also comically, his transformation mostly takes place during the marathon rain- and vodka-soaked reception following the wedding ceremony.

Wrona and writer Pawel Maslona freely adapted the latter’s 2008 play, whose title translates as “Adherence” or “Clinging.” The director’s decision to shift the setting to a wedding was clearly inspired by the 1937 Polish-Yiddish film Der Dibek (The Dybbuk), itself adapted from a play by Shimon Ansky.

In the press notes, Demon producer Olga Szymanska says, “We wound up doing a lot of research into the history of the [dybbuk] story, not to mention Jewish-Polish history in general. If you read the studies on the dybbuk, those who became possessed by the spirit find themselves unable to speak. It originated in a very orthodox society of Jews, so it was the idea of this voice that could never have been heard which was longing to be heard.”

Given the clue or two I planted above, and this review’s appearance in a Jewish publication, you will have an idea of the general nature of the long-suppressed secret that the spirit who inhabits Python desperately wants uttered. The specific details are melancholy and enigmatic, and Wrona conveys them with chilling effectiveness. (The viewer is haunted also by the knowledge that Wrona died – reportedly of suicide – at 42, shortly after the film’s world première a year ago.)

It’s always of interest when Polish filmmakers choose to address their country’s past and the spectre of antisemitism, in part because they (and their fellow citizens) have historically been more reluctant to do so than their German and French counterparts. So, Demon provokes memories of Aftermath, the excellent Polish thriller from 2012 that likewise involved the physical excavation of the Jewish past (gravestones, in this case) and also invoked an otherworldly presence.

The kind of movie that lingers in the mind for days afterward, Demon contains any number of images that don’t just stick but demand to be puzzled over further. The more literal-minded viewer, meanwhile, will find plenty to mull in the movie’s slicing comments on present-day Poland.

Demon screens at Vancity Theatre Oct. 28-Nov. 1. In Polish, English and Yiddish with English subtitles, it is rated R for language and some sexuality/nudity.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Glimpses of happiness

Many people have read an enormous amount of Holocaust literature during their lifetime. The stories are tragic, horrifying, heartbreaking. No matter how many books you read, or films and documentaries you see, you can never come to terms with the fact that such evil exists in the world.

But Dr. Anthony D. Bellen’s book – After Auschwitz: The Unasked Question (Mazo Publishers, 2016) – is different. He is a clinical psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, moral resilience and restorative processes. He lives in Israel, is a husband, father and grandfather, and has retired from the Israel Prison Service, where he headed the department of treatment and rehabilitation. He now works with people who have suffered trauma.

The unasked question in the book’s title is: “Do you remember any positive experience from your time in the concentration camp? Was there ever a positive interaction – a brief moment of happiness in the midst of that evil abyss?”

Bellen has chosen six survivor interviews for this book from 56 he conducted with Holocaust survivors in 2004 for his doctoral research study in the department of criminology at Bar Ilan University. The six gave him permission to share their stories, although their names have been changed for privacy.

I don’t think I will ever forget any of these stories. Motti’s moment of happiness occurred on the day of liberation from Theresienstadt, when a Russian soldier stood on a wooden crate and called out in Yiddish: “Has anyone seen my mother?” For Ida, it was finding a friend from her village – Miryam. For Eva, it was finding her hairbrush from home that her brother managed to give her before he was gassed in Majdanek. Reuven’s moment of happiness came in a swimming pool with two friends. Ya’acov’s joy came from meeting the love of his life, Sonya, in a laundry in Brintz. Sarah’s positive memory came from a Christmas in Bromberg, where she and some friends “performed” a song for the SS and later for the inmates of the camp.

These were just miniscule moments of happiness, gone in a flash, but powerfully remembered decades later – and never shared before.

The book concludes with a bibliography and references, as well as the seven questions Bellen asked each interviewee. These remarkable stories may help other people with different traumas find the strength to overcome them. They may even change your perceptions and understanding of your own life.

Dvora Waysman is a Jerusalem-based author. She can be contacted at [email protected] or through her blog dvorawaysman.com.

PBS doc on the Sharps

Martha and Waitstill Sharp at home in Wellesley, Mass., in 1938. (photo from Sharp Family Archives via pbs.org)

At a time when many Americans embraced isolationism, the leaders of the American Unitarian Association were focused on the refugees clamoring to get out of Czechoslovakia. The AUA impelled Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp to go with his wife Martha to Europe in 1938, leaving their young children in the care of others, and get as many people out as possible with documents and cunning.

Yad Vashem posthumously acknowledged the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006. The couple’s saga, and that of several of the Jews they rescued, is recounted in Artemis Joukowsky and Ken Burns’ feature-length documentary Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, which aired earlier this month on PBS.

For those who have seen a film or three about the various efforts to extricate Jews from the deathtrap of Nazi-occupied Europe, Defying the Nazis breaks no new ground. But there are always new generations who aren’t familiar with the Holocaust or cognizant of the courage of ordinary people who saved friends and neighbors or, in the case of the Sharps, complete strangers.

Joukowsky is the Sharps’ grandson, and the curator and guardian of their legacy. Burns, of course, brings household-name recognition and brand-name confidence to a PBS audience, as well as a uniformly high standard of craft and polish. If his name attracts viewers who otherwise wouldn’t tune in, it’s all for the good.

Defying the Nazis arrives at an especially ugly time when refugees and immigrants are being demonized and conflated with terrorists. Not that xenophobia is a new phenomenon, as Jewish readers are especially aware. But I find the film more valuable and inspiring as a reminder that there are highly moral individuals who will put themselves in mortal danger to do the right thing – even if they have no personal stake or connection to the beneficiaries.

Waitstill Sharp was a trained lawyer while Martha had the self-confidence and determination to attend college in a day and age when some families – including hers – disavowed their daughters for not getting a job to augment the household income. That is to say, the Sharps were adept at thinking on their feet, delivering persuasive and succinct arguments and hiding their emotions. Whether counseling desperate applicants in Prague, raising money in London or Paris (like Waitstill did) or accompanying refugees by train across Germany to a safe border (like Martha and Waitstill did, separately), these were essential skills.

The couple was based in the Czech capital for six treacherous months beginning just before the Nazi invasion in March 1939. They were dispatched again the following summer, this time to Lisbon.

As compelling as the Sharps’ activities were, they were relatively brief in duration. There’s only so much to tell, so the filmmakers augment the rescuers’ point of view with context from Holocaust historian Debórah Dwork and the firsthand recollections of several survivors whom the Sharps aided.

Viewers who are fascinated by the ways in which parental choices affect children will enjoy watching and interpreting the passages with the Sharps’ daughter. Martha Jr. admits to being (understandably) upset when her parents took off for Europe, not once but twice, but she touts the remarkable results they achieved rather than channeling a petulant child.

The Sharps may have alienated their daughter, at least for brief periods of her adolescence. They definitely paid a price in their marriage, which didn’t last a decade after the war.

Defying the Nazis doesn’t address it, but I highly doubt the couple had any regrets about embarking on their life-saving refugee work. Consider Waitstill’s succinct reply when the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger asked why he was taking such an immense risk to help him: “I don’t like to see guys get pushed around,” Sharp said.

Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War is available for viewing (at no charge) at pbs.org/kenburns/defying-the-nazis-the-sharps-war/home until Oct. 6.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Help Passion to Israel

Dr. Peter Gary discusses A 20th Century Passion, which is set to première in Jerusalem Oct. 17, in a documentary-in-the-making by Hilary Pryor and David Malysheff. (screenshot from a20thcenturypassion.org/documentary)

For most of his life, Dr. Peter Gary never spoke of the three years he spent in Majdanek, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen from the ages of 17-21, or that he and his mother were shot and left for dead on Christmas Eve, 1941. Yet, in 1993, after immigrating to Canada and British Columbia, he founded the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Education Society and began to lecture in schools up and down Vancouver Island and in coastal British Columbia. Over the years, he has spoken to more than 65,000 children and youth, college and university students – imparting his message that you can’t live with hate, you can only die with hate.

A 20th Century Passion is an oratorio Gary has composed that depicts the story of the Holocaust and the years preceding and following it, from the end of the First World War through the Nuremburg trials. It is a huge piece – the score alone is 587 pages – that requires a full orchestra, an adult and a children’s choir as well as four soloists plus the conductor. That’s more than 100 people involved in the performance, which is set to première Oct. 17 in Jerusalem – if there is enough to finance the rehearsals, logistics and everything else needed to bring it to life.

Gary’s wife, Judy Estrin, talks about the fundraising project in a video at gofundme.com/20thcenturypassion. She and others involved in the project are asking that people give today. Instead of a latte, give to the music. Challenge your friends to give. If each of the 65,000-plus students who heard Gary’s message over the last 25 years gave $2 to $5, the concert would be funded, a documentary made – Hilary Pryor, executive producer, and David Malysheff, documentarian, have already more than 14 hours of film “in the can” – and there would be funds to donate to help the dwindling number of survivors left.

Gary, a classically trained composer, wrote both the score and the libretto of A 20th Century Passion in the 1970s as a remembrance of the children murdered by the Nazis. The piece has never been performed. (For more on the work and a planned concert in British Columbia that was canceled, see jewishindependent.ca/holocaust-survivor-peter-garys-oratorio.)

In his talks to high school students, Gary speaks about hate, about bullying, about the Holocaust. He leaves them with a message: stamp out hate. This message is more important than ever, as the horrors visited upon Gary and his family are being repeated.

Here is an excerpt from the libretto of A 20th Century Passion by Gary:

Why do you hate me so much?
What have I done to you? –
You really haven’t, but you are a Jew!
For this alone you have to hate….
Why don’t you see me as human, awake?
You must have some feeling,
So many of us, not knowing – just killing….
Whether it’s many that I kill or few
Matters so little, since you are a Jew!
Look at our women, they’re mothers like yours;
Our whimpering children, the frightened old….
Don’t you have young ones, or fathers who….
Oh yes we have them, but none of them Jew!
Our leader decided for all you to die!
We are the masters and do as told….
Being big, strong and hardened and bold….
Look how I’m smiling the same smile you have,
Whenever I’m bleeding my blood is the same red.
I’m speaking the same voice,
Our hands are the same….
I told you, you fool Jew, I told you in vain….
You are not worthy, not human, that’s that!
I pity you man –
When you finish killing – you too are dead.

For more details about the concert and documentary, visit a20thcenturypassion.org. To donate, visit gofundme.com/20thcenturypassion.

Moments with Elie Wiesel

Robert Krell, left, and Elie Wiesel. (photo from Robert Krell)

I met Prof. Elie Wiesel in 1978. I was 38 years old. He was 49. Elie, as he insisted I call him, came to Vancouver to speak at a commemorative event. It was for Yom Hashoah, the day of Holocaust Remembrance.

He arrived Friday afternoon and I fetched him at the airport and brought him to our home for a few moments pre-Shabbat and then to his hotel. He had agreed to a press conference on Saturday morning stipulating only that no microphone be used. Elie was observant.

I moderated that morning. He was engaging, handled difficult and peculiar questions equally graciously, and made a deep and lasting impression on the journalists and religious leaders who attended. I learned that morning that his book, Night, a slim 120 pages, had once been nearly a thousand pages written in Yiddish and published in Argentina. How had he reduced it to its present size? By eliminating every paragraph without which the book would not lose its essence, and then by eliminating every sentence in those paragraphs that was not needed to sustain its narrative. Ever since, I have tried to practise that in my talks and writings.

Elie asked me to visit at the hotel on Sunday for breakfast and we ended up talking all day. That evening, he spoke to an audience of 500. I had the honor of introducing him. I used two minutes. How long does one need to introduce Wiesel? He was known to all, even though he had not yet received the Nobel Peace Prize; that was to come in 1986. His lecture that evening was astonishing. One could listen to him forever, one of the few speakers in the world who commands attention and seldom, if ever, loses his audience.

We remained friends. He was the kindest, gentlest, wisest person in my life. And he always made time for me although he was also the busiest and most prevailed upon person imaginable.

So, I took it upon myself to do two things. One was to call him from time to time and briefly visit when I was in New York. Famous people sometimes have no one who inquires as to their own lives. I did not ask him for anything unless the idea began with him. No demands, requests, or favors. The other was to assist wherever I could with whatever little I could do. For example, he asked whether I could arrange for him to be in touch with Rudolf Vrba, one of only four or five escapees from Auschwitz and the author of the Vrba-Wetzler Report (Auschwitz Protocols) warning of the imminent deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944.

Vrba lived in Vancouver and I knew him well. Elie and Rudi subsequently corresponded for years and I can only guess that some of it concerned the fact that the Wiesel family was not informed by those who received the report in Hungary when there was still a chance to flee into the nearby Carpathian Mountains. Did they ever meet? I offered Elie the opportunity. His response, “I do not think I can look into his eyes.”

One time, when in New York, I received Elie’s return call. Yes, he had time for me to have a brief visit on Monday morning. I went to his home and we caught up for perhaps a half hour. During that time, he excused himself only once, to take a call from the White House. Presidents, secretaries of state, governors and senators, all sought his counsel. He often flew at short notice to speak, to warn, in the midst of various crises around the world.

It was close to Passover. He asked who was traveling with me and I told him, my wife Marilyn and our oldest daughter and granddaughter. Elie was upset not to greet them and he insisted we all visit the next Thursday so he could personally wish them a happy Pesach. How he made time in his wildly busy schedule, I will never understand.

I saw Elie speak in Israel at the 1981 World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors at Lohamei HaGeta’ot (the Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters) and at the closing ceremonies with then-prime minister Menachem Begin. While in Los

Angeles in 1982, I heard him speak at Cedars-Sinai Hospital on “the Holocaust patient” and on “talmudic tales” at UCLA Hillel House. Spellbinding.

For the very first International Conference of Child Survivors and Their Families – the 1991 Hidden Child Foundation/Anti-Defamation League conference – the New York-based committee asked if I could convince Elie to speak. Since Elie seldom said no if he was able to attend, wherever in the world he was needed, this request for my involvement was puzzling. After all, this was New York, his home and the site of the gathering. But he had declined. My guess is that the situation had become complicated by competing factions.

I called him and reminded him that this was “the gathering of the children.” Where else would he want to be? He graciously agreed to give the closing address. I introduced him on the closing night and wondered out loud how it was possible that I had heard him lecture at Yale, in Israel, New York and Los Angeles. Somehow, wherever he was, I found him. I must be his groupie! I certainly never missed an opportunity to hear him and to learn from him.

In 1998, in New York, Elie presented me with the Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Medal for my work in Holocaust education, my psychiatric contributions to the care of Holocaust survivors and the founding of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Elie had visited the VHEC and served on its international advisory council along with Irwin Cotler, Yaffa Eliach and Sir Martin Gilbert. My family was there and my children all came to know him better. His loving presence is seared into their memories. Children, for him, were like a magnet. All who wrote to him received a personal response. How he managed this, in between teaching at Boston University, speaking around the world and publishing at least one book every year, I do not understand. But that is what he did.

In 2008, I went to Boston to celebrate his 80th birthday, which consisted of a three-day Festschrift devoted to his scholarship and writings, as well as a tribute concert.

Although surrounded by his friends and fellow scholars, I found him sitting alone in the front row and joined him. At one point, I turned to him, “Elie, what is it like to hear all these scholars speak about your contributions all day long?” His response, “I am a good listener.” And, indeed, he was. He listened attentively, to individuals and to humanity.

I nominated Elie for an honorary doctorate from the University of British Columbia and, although he was still recovering from open heart surgery (and wrote a book Open Heart), he traveled to attend the 2012 ceremony and to participate in An Evening with Elie Wiesel, held at the Orpheum theatre, attended by some 3,000 people. Our cab driver said, “Oh, look, Elie Wiesel is speaking.”

As the interviewer for the evening’s proceedings, I asked questions, some “naïve,” as in “Why remember such awful events?” referring to the Shoah.

Elie’s response: “How can you not? Memory is part of who you are, your identity. I have so many wonderful memories of my family and being in shul and it’s all I have now of my family except my two surviving sisters, of whom one has since passed on. Without memory, who would I be? The moments are so important.”

“Elie,” I asked, “you were asked to be the president of Israel. Can you tell us about this?” He answered that the thought had tormented him. How could he turn down the highest honor that could ever be bestowed upon him? He felt he was letting down the state of Israel that wanted him and his leadership. But, he explained, he was without political experience and all he really has are words which, as a politician, would no longer be his. “And besides,” he joked, “my wife would have divorced me.”

“How do you choose the language in which you write?” (Elie speaks Hungarian, Romanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, French and English.) “I prefer the eloquence of French, which is the easiest for me. And, sometimes, my choice is determined by what I am writing about. And I like to write to classical music, preferably a quartet, as an orchestra is too distracting.”

“What message would you send to our young people here tonight?” His response, “Your life is not measured in time and years. It is a collection of moments. You will look back and have so many moments in time that remain fresh, memorable and meaningful. I would tell all of you young people in the audience to enjoy all these moments in time. Being here in Vancouver this weekend has been one of those moments for me.”

With his passing, I shall be without more such moments with him. His death leaves an enormous void, for his moral strength and inspiration will be missing from all who benefited. We must resolve to step up and commit to continuing to learn from and emulate this remarkable human being who returned from the depths of despair and loss to provide a measure of hope.

I urge you to read Night and Elie’s brilliant memoir in two parts All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full. Having absorbed at least these books, you may then reflect upon, and hopefully act upon, the lessons learned. They will last you a lifetime.

Dr. Robert Krell is professor emeritus, department of psychiatry, University of British Columbia, distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, in whose newsletter, Zachor, this article has also been published.

Jewish tourists in Romania

The Choral Temple in Bucharest. (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

We spent two weeks in Romania in the late summer of 2015, also visiting Bulgaria. We took this trip partly because it was an area of vibrant Jewish life from Roman days until the late 1930s. Romania also served as a commercial link between Europe and Asia, and was known for its café life. Its capital, Bucharest, was called the “Paris of the East.” Then came the Nazis and, after them, the Soviets. We wanted to see what remains in these two countries, primarily for Jews but also for the rest of the population.

We arranged a private tour with a knowledgeable guide that generally followed an itinerary designed as a Jewish heritage tour, supplemented by Ruth Ellen Gruber’s Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe (2007). Local information on Jewish sites is surprisingly scant, nothing like what one finds in Lithuania and Latvia. However, the tour company had prearranged talks with people in the larger synagogues, museums and cemeteries, which helped to augment our own observations. There is a monthly Jewish newspaper in Romania, Realistatea Evreiasca, with one page in English and one in Hebrew. As mentioned, our tour in Romania was followed by a visit to Bulgaria, but space limitations permit only scattered references to our time in that country.

Romania and Bulgaria form the southern and eastern parts of the Balkan peninsula in Europe. Romania lies immediately to the north of Bulgaria, with the Danube River forming much of the border between the two before flowing into the Black Sea. Northern and central Romania is dominated by the Carpathian chain of mountains, and southern Romania by the plain of the Danube. Further south lie Greece and Turkey; to the west, various countries that used to be Yugoslavia; and to the east, Ukraine and the always menacing Russia.

Romania was a monarchy until the end of the Second World War. Supported by local antisemites, it fit rather comfortably under Hitler’s leadership and, then, under Nicolae Ceausescu, became one of the most harsh of all Soviet satellites. Today, Romania is best described by a guide at one synagogue who cautiously called it a “developing democracy.” (More on politics later.)

In contrast to the rest of Eastern Europe, Romanians speak a Romance language, which helps make many signs understandable to Anglos. Despite some bumps along the way, the economy in this proto-capitalist country seems to be improving year by year and, in 2007, it became a member of the European Union.

Almost everywhere one looks in Romania, there is an Orthodox church at the street corner. There are some Roman Catholic churches and a few mosques. The Jewish population is now only a few percent and heavily concentrated in Bucharest. Before the Second World War, large numbers of Jews lived in the northern and western parts of the country.

Romanian synagogues tend to have the plain exteriors but elaborate interiors that are common elsewhere in Eastern Europe and in Muslim countries. Romania was more Sephardi than Ashkenazi, but most synagogues now have the bimah at the eastern end rather than in the middle. In some cases, markings on the floor indicate that the bimah had been moved forward in the recent past. With some exceptions, the old Jewish quarter has been destroyed to make way for large, monotonous apartment buildings that are dubbed “Soviet Gothic.”

Restaurant food and wine was great everywhere we went, and available at modest prices – in contrast to what one hears, the white wine is just as good as the red (well, almost as good). Pork is the main meat, but chicken and veal are widely available, as are dairy products. The country is slowly returning to the café culture that was once so famous. The spirit is enhanced by wide avenues for pedestrians complete with street performers.

Some synagogues and Jewish community centres serve kosher meals, but otherwise we saw no kosher restaurants. And then there is rakija, or plum brandy, typically 60% alcohol; our advice is to sip slowly. David was delighted to see a few moderate-sized wind farms and some large solar electric farms. Less happily, there is a lot of smoking by people of all ages and in almost all places.

Our time in Romania began with a couple of days in Bucharest and then went from city to city elsewhere in Romania. Bucharest has two active congregations, one Chabad and the other in a 160-year-old Orthodox synagogue known as the Choral Temple. The adjective “choral” means that there is, or was, a choir. As with other synagogues that we visited, services are generally limited to Shabbat and holidays, though Chabad meets daily. Because of the small Jewish populations and the effects of assimilation, services are typically held in prayer rooms rather than in the large sanctuary. Unhappily, from our perspective, they all retain traditional restrictions on participation by women who, if they appear at all, are kept behind nearly opaque curtains. Synagogues in many of the larger cities are today undergoing renovations, thanks to Romanian, Israeli and European Union money, plus contributions from the Romanian diaspora. In contrast, with scattered exceptions, smaller cities today show little more than deteriorating synagogue buildings and ill-kept cemeteries.

When we visited the Choral Temple, we found that the exterior renovations had been completed but the interior ones were ongoing. About half of the visitors were Romanian, and the rest mostly from the United States or from Israel. As we ended our visit, about six of us were making our way out of the gate, which faces onto a busy street, and saw two local men watching us. One greeted us in French. He wanted to know, in a friendly way, why tourists came to Bucharest. He and David spoke together for awhile in French. The other man was large, probably in his 50s, and stood stock still, forcing us to walk around him to exit the gate. Toby remembers that she had never seen such glaring eyes and such a set jaw. She was transfixed by the unrelenting contempt pouring from this man’s face. She had no language in which to greet or to question him. Was he contemptuous of tourists, of Western tourists, or of synagogues? Toby retains a memory of these two men as two faces of Romania: the one open and friendly; the other full of animosity that may have been antisemitic.

A high point in David’s trip was attending Shabbat services in the last wooden synagogue in Romania. It is located in Piatra Neamt in north-central Romania, and its sanctuary is built below street level to meet some old restriction about not being higher than any church. The building’s formerly wooden base has now been replaced by concrete to protect the wood from deterioration. Everything above the base is the original wood, as is most of the elaborately decorated interior, with many locally created crafts, carvings and paintings.

photo - The wooden synagogue in Piatra Neamt — The wooden synagogue in Piatra Neamt. *(photo from romania-insights.com)*

David entered the building on Shabbat when, clearly, tourists were not welcome. Even though wearing a kippah, he was eyed suspiciously. Was this just a Jewish tourist sneaking a look inside the building at a time when it was closed to tourism? The regulars relaxed a bit when he put on a tallit, and more when, out of a corner of their eyes, they saw him saying the brachah before putting it on. Later, the gabbai gave him an aliyah, and invited him to the kiddush, which was fun, not so much for the bun and wine as for the unlabeled bottle that emerged afterwards and, not surprisingly, turned out to be rakija.

Sighit is located in northwestern Romania, which is the part closest to Hungary, and perhaps for that reason has a long history of antisemitism. The large Jewish cemetery there is remarkable for the practice of adding the names of Jews who died in the Holocaust to the tombstones of family members who had died in the 1930s. The city is the birthplace of Elie Wiesel, and home to a museum dedicated to his works. This is also the area where the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of modern Chassidism, lived, and we heard half a dozen (conflicting) statements as to where he taught, studied or served as rabbi.

Tourists to rural Romania will also see a number of Orthodox churches that are densely painted on every surface, and also some monasteries built entirely of wood without the use of nails. And, of course, tourism entrepreneurs have built on the Dracula legend to encourage visits to castles within easy reach of Bucharest. They may be fun, and there is apparently a nugget of truth in the story of Vlad the Impaler. Instead, we wandered in the old city of Bucharest, which is just beyond the city’s modern centre, where one finds the presidential palace, the art museum and other sites of national importance. Within walking distance of the centre is the Peasant Museum, which not only has the usual displays of clothing and tools from different parts of the country, but also entire water mills (for grinding flour) and pressing mills (to make felt) with their roofs removed so they can be viewed from an elevated platform. The museum shop was the best place we found to purchase gifts.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic acts are now at a low level in Romania, but the country has not yet emerged from quiet denial of what happened to Jews during first the Nazi era and then the communist era. (For more information, see the recently translated book entitled The Jews of Timisoara by Tibor Schatteles, which details Jewish life in one western Romanian city from Roman times through the present.) We found occasional plaques to commemorate the loss of Jews during the Holocaust, but they were erected by local Jewish groups, not by civil authorities.

Romania did send a lot of its Jewish citizens to their deaths in concentration camps. In some Romanian cities, pogroms were initiated by local antisemites. Statistics from Maramuresh province in the north, which at one time had 52 synagogues, are telling: 35,000 Jews in 1930, 3,100 in 1948 and 48 in 1992. On the other hand, during both Nazi and communist periods, the Romanian government allowed Jews to buy their freedom on ships that would dock at Black Sea ports and pass through the Bosporus en route to Israel or other safe havens.

During the communist era, Jewish communities and institutions suffered mainly from near-total neglect. A 7.2-level earthquake in March 1977 took a heavy toll on Jewish buildings, but only the most serious repairs were undertaken.

What about the future for Romanian Jewish communities? Almost everywhere we were told that most marriages today are mixed, and only a few involve conversion of the non-Jewish partner. The large and relatively active synagogue in Sibiu had only one bar mitzvah child that year. Adjacent to some synagogues are buildings that were formerly Jewish schools, but today most teaching takes place in extra rooms in the synagogue.

While the future for Romania – and for individual Jews who live there – seems distinctly positive, the future for Romania’s Jewish population as a viable minority seems much less assured.

David Brooks is environmental economist who works with a number of organizations in Canada and Toby Brooks works with organizations fighting abuse of women. They live in Ottawa.

Saga of hunting Nazis

Andrew Nagorski will talk at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre on Nov. 29, as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. (photo by Andrew Rudakov)

The night before the legendary operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the small cadre of men set to accomplish one of the most storied espionage missions ever: “For the first time in history, the Jews would judge their assassins.”

Harel articulated the historical momentousness of what was, in reality, a surprisingly mundane capture. Eichmann, one of the foremost masterminds of the Holocaust, had been living in Argentina under an assumed name but, apparently confident of his security, had sloppily left breadcrumbs that allowed professional and avocational Nazi hunters to track him down. Eichmann was also a creature of habit, descending from the bus each evening near his suburban home reliably around the same time. For an action with such monumental consequences, the capture was barely more dramatic than a typical mugging.

The story of Eichmann’s capture, extra-judicial extradition to Israel, trial and execution is retold in The Nazi Hunters, a book by author and former Newsweek journalist Andrew Nagroski, who will be in Vancouver this fall as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Harel’s words to the agents who captured the SS leader apply not solely to the Nazi hunters’ greatest catch, but to the larger phenomenon of the quest to bring the perpetrators of the Shoah to justice. The concept of the Jewish people being in a position to judge those who perpetrate antisemitic terror is a uniquely post-Holocaust phenomenon, made possible because of the existence of the state of Israel and its judicial and intelligence mechanisms.

At the same time, hunting down Nazi war criminals was not a priority of the young state of Israel, as a senior Israeli official told Nagroski. Israel’s early governments had plenty on their plates coaxing a country from the desert and looking to the future without devoting resources to tracking down the Hamans of the recent past.

As a result, as Nagorski illustrates engagingly, pursuing the perpetrators fell to an assortment of figures, some official, others self-appointed, who made up a curious collection of personalities.

There were the government investigators and prosecutors, like Fritz Bauer, a German jurist whose attention to Nazi war crimes helped the German people confront and address their past. But others among the most famous Nazi hunters, including Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman, were lone wolves (or, at least, started out that way before recruiting their teams) to do the job that governments did not.

The Nuremberg trials, Nagorski notes, were crucial not only for bringing Nazis to justice but in helping create the initial repository of eyewitness testimony and the first draft of what would become Holocaust history. Even so, after that major initiative, which captured the attention of the world and set the Holocaust apart as an event concurrent to but separate from the broader carnage of the Second World War, official interest in the subject waned.

Europe was rebuilding, Israel had plenty of challenges, the countries of the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc were happy to distance themselves from the events of the Shoah by imagining their socialism as the diametrical ideological opposite of the fascism that had nearly erased Jewish civilization in Europe. Canada, the United States and other Allied countries began looking ahead to a cold peace and the economic prosperity of the 1950s, the sad past being something best left behind.

Thus, it fell to some self-appointed individuals to do the work. This book shares their often gripping, diverse and idiosyncratic stories.

A rise in Holocaust denial during the 1970s spurred a renewed attention to the facts of the Holocaust. A new urgency was driven both by the need to remind the world of the truth but also the reality that time was running out to bring the perpetrators to justice.

From cardboard to folktales

Books can take you to the most captivating places. Not always happy places, but places worth exploring, places where the people, environment, challenges and culture are different. A place you can have adventures, learn from what has happened to others or just escape from your daily routine, all for the relatively low price of a book. Oh, and maybe a cardboard box.

The beautifully and creatively illustrated What to do with a Box (Creative Editions, 2016) features the rhythmic writing of Jane Yolen and the inspired art of Chris Sheban. The book is a tribute to the power of the imagination – a way to impart to the younger set that fun doesn’t necessarily need batteries. It’s also a reminder to parents that expensive toys aren’t at the root of what makes playtime enjoyable, and they may even be enticed to join their kids in a cardboard box adventure – if they’re invited to come along, that is.

The writing is simple, as it is for most picture books. That box, “can be a library, palace, or nook,” or a place you can “invite your dolls to come in for tea”; it can be a racecar, a ship, and so much more. And the art by Sheban looks as if he took Yolen’s advice: “You can paint a landscape with sun, sand and sky or crayon an egret that’s flying right by.” It is described as cardboardesque and, indeed, it looks as if he drew the illustrations on different types of boxes.

For slightly older readers (or listeners), Richard Unger has written and illustrated a more traditional story with Chagallesque art, Yitzi and the Giant Menorah (Penguin Random House, 2016). It is a picture book, but with a substantive amount of text on each page. It, too, is beautifully and creatively put together, with most of the text printed on a plain page that includes a black-and-white sketch that doesn’t overlap it in any way, making the reading easier. More importantly, it leaves most of the colorful, vibrant and expressive artwork on the opposite page free from writing. At the end of the book is the brief story of Chanukah.

While set on the eve of Chanukah in the shtetl of Chelm, this tale bears a similar message to What to do with a Box: money isn’t everything. It adds to that the lesson of gratitude.

In the story, the mayor of Lublin gives the people of the Chelm “the biggest menorah” Yitzi has ever seen and the villagers are so grateful, they want to thank the mayor in a way that matches the grandeur of his gift. This being Chelm, the solution doesn’t come easily but, after a few failed efforts, they succeed in a heartwarming way.

* * *

For young adult readers, the stories are much more serious in both subject matter and tone.

Eva Wiseman’s Another Me (Tundra Books, 2016) is set in the mid-1300s in Strasbourg, France. It starts with the main character’s death at the hands of the men poisoning the town’s water – an act the Jews were accused of committing not only in Strasbourg, but other cities in Europe, as well. It was thought that poisoned water was causing the plague and, since fewer Jews were dying, the rumors began that they were causing the illness. In reality, Jews were also dying, but in fewer numbers because Jewish law required much more handwashing than was customary in medieval times.

Wiseman also elaborates upon less tangible Jewish beliefs in Another Me. When Natan, 17, dies, his story doesn’t end. He becomes an ibbur – his soul enters the body of another man; in this instance, that of Hans the draper.

Hans works for Wilhelm, with whose daughter, Elena, Natan has fallen in love. Natan has come to know all of these non-Jews from helping his father in the shmatte business. Wilhelm is one of the very few Strasbourgians who is not antisemitic. Hans is also a good person, though he is jealous of Elena’s affection for Natan. When Natan – to whom she’s attracted – becomes Hans – who she finds ugly – Elena struggles to see beyond the exterior.

While mostly told from Natan’s perspective, Wiseman also allows Elena to tell a substantial part of the story. It is sometimes hard as a reader to change gears, but the dual voices offer a deeper understanding of the situation of the Jews in the city (and beyond), and those who would help them. Being historical fiction, while Wiseman can play with magic, there is, sadly, no chance for a happy ending.

Magic – or, at least, ghosts – also informs the storytelling in Eugene Yelchin’s The Haunting of Falcon House (Henry Holt and Co., 2016).

Ostensibly, this book is a translation Yelchin has made from a bundle of decaying pages bound with twine that he came across as a schoolboy in Russia. He brought them with him when he immigrated to the United States, but let them sit for years. Apparently written and illustrated by “a young Russian nobleman, Prince Lev Lvov,” who was born in 1879, there were many pages missing or unreadable.

“I managed to establish a chronological order of the events and then divided them into chapters, matched the drawings to the chapters, and discarded those I could not match,” writes Yelchin in the translator’s note that begins the book. So “inwardly connected to the young prince” did Yelchin become, he writes, “I can’t be certain, but as I typed Prince Lev’s inner thoughts, I felt cool fingers firmly guiding mine across the keys.”

In the story, 12-year-old Lev’s hands are similarly guided by a mysterious force when he is drawing. Arriving at Falcon House from St. Petersburg to take his place as heir to his family’s estate, Lev – who bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather – dreams of being a hero and nobleman like his grandfather and preceding ancestors. But, with some mystical guidance from Falcon House’s resident ghost, Lev begins to understand that being nobility doesn’t necessarily mean being noble, and his family’s secrets, which are slowly revealed, make him rethink his aspirations.

The ghost, a scary aunt and the disturbing illustrations combine to good effect in The Haunting of Falcon House, even though the story takes a little too long to unfold. The detailed notes at the book’s end provide valuable historical context and add greatly to the reading experience.

Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose: A Novel of the Holocaust (Tor Teen, 2016) is also a retelling – an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty. And, it is a reissue, having originally been published almost 15 years ago in a series created by Terri Windling, which comprised novels by various authors that reinterpreted classic fairy tales.

In Yolen’s reimagining, Briar Rose (aka Sleeping Beauty) is Gemma, Rebecca’s grandmother. Unlike her cynical and competitive older sisters, Rebecca never tires of listening to Gemma’s version of the tale, which doesn’t quite match up with the traditional folktale. When Gemma dies, leaving behind a box containing a few documents and photos that don’t quite match up with what she has told her family about her history, Becca sets off to find the truth.

Her search – done in the days before Google – starts slowly, with the help of her editor, Stan, on whom she has a crush. It takes them from their hometown of Holyoke, Mass., to Oswego, N.Y., where refugees were sheltered at Fort Oswego: “Roosevelt made it a camp and, in August 1944, some 1,000 people were brought over and interned [there]. From Naples, Italy. Mostly Jews and about 100 Christians,” explains the reporter at the Palladium Times to Becca.

What she learns at Oswego leads her on a journey to Poland and to Chelmno. Of the more than 152,000 killed by gas (or shooting) at the Nazi extermination camp that was there, only seven Jewish men are known to have escaped. This allows Yolen to imagine that one woman survived the killing centre, which was established on an old estate in a forest clearing that had a schloss (castle, or manor house).

In Gemma’s cryptic telling of her survival, she is saved from the castle by a “prince,” who we find out was himself saved by partisans after his escape from Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then joined the resistance; in her story, briars take the place of barbed wire, the wicked fairy the Nazis. As Becca discovers the reality of her grandmother’s past and finds her own voice and identity through the journey, we also witness Poles’ difficulties in dealing with what took place during the Holocaust and we meet others – including Gemma’s prince – who are still trying to heal from the destruction the Nazis’ wrought.

Interweaving the “real” story with Gemma’s fairy tale is very effective at building the anticipation and, once Becca arrives in Poland, Briar Rose is a page-turner. One almost doesn’t realize how much they’re learning while they’re reading. Almost.

Quirky fiction meets history

Two quirky books. Both historically based, both written with humor, both dark and light. But there the similarities end.

The quiet and quirky Fever at Dawn by Péter Gárdos is based on letters his parents sent to each other immediately following the Holocaust, as they recovered from their physical ailments in Sweden. The raucous and quirky Two-Gun & Sun by June Hutton takes its inspiration from Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen and Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who actually did know each other, and Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, to tell the story of a young woman who heads to a northern B.C. mining town in 1922 to revitalize her uncle’s newspaper, which he left her in his will.

Fever at Dawn (House of Anansi Press, 2016) begins with a note from Gárdos about the letters his parents – Miklós and Lili – sent to each other from September 1945 to February 1946. Until his father died, Gárdos had no idea of their existence, though his mother had told him, “Your father swept me off my feet with his letters.”

The main quirky thing about this story (there are others) is that Miklós tried to sweep no fewer than 117 women off their feet with his letters. Told by his doctor that he would not survive his tuberculosis, Miklós defiantly decides he wants to get married. He inquires for the names and addresses of all the women survivors being treated in Sweden, and sends all of them the exact same letter. He determines pretty quickly that Lili is “the one,” though 18 women respond.

The secondary characters are well-conceived and play important parts in Miklós and Lili’s developing relationship. It is a beautiful and uplifting story – love and hope from hatred and tragedy. It brings up many issues, in Lili’s wanting to renounce her faith and in how the survivors are treated, for example. The translation into English from Hungarian by Elizabeth Szász is a bit awkward in parts, but otherwise does justice to the work. And some of the awkwardness might be due to the fact that Gárdos, who is a filmmaker and theatre director, originally envisioned the story as a film – which was released last year – but also wrote it as a novel.

Two-Gun & Sun (Caitlin Press Inc., 2015) might also make a good film. It brings to mind Joss Whedon’s Firefly, mixing science fiction (specifically steampunk) with opera’s larger-than-life and often unbelievable drama with history. It’s a very stylized novel, which, more than other books, means that it will be loved by some readers, and not so much by others.

While loosely historical, it does strongly evoke the era and how hard it must have been to survive back then, especially in a remote town, especially if you were a minority, and very especially if you were a woman. The central character, Lila Sinclair, arrives in Black Mountain from Nelson, given by her uncle’s death a more adventuresome, “manly” economic opportunity than marriage, teaching or prostitution, which seem to have been women’s main choices at the time.

Some of the more fascinating aspects of this novel are the daily-life moments, what people ate, how they earned a living, the excitement a traveling troupe generated, the dangers posed by a lack of law. Anyone in the publishing industry will also appreciate Lila’s struggle to get the printing press up and running, and how newspapers once operated. As well, while her relationship with Vincent, a Chinese printer, runs a predictable course, it offers a chance for Hutton to address the racism of the day.

Two-Gun & Sun is a unique twist on the traditional western and, while the ending wasn’t quite satisfactory for this reader, its originality and oddness were entertaining and energizing.