resistance

Recipes a form of resistance

As part of its celebration of BC Heritage Week, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation held the online event Recipes of Resistance: Rebecca Teitelbaum and the Ravensbrück Recipe Book, presented by Lise Kirchner and Ellie Lawson of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Kirchner is the VHEC’s director of education, Lawson its education manager.

The theme of this year’s Heritage Week is “Stir the Pot,” explained VHF director of education Sarah Carlson. She encouraged viewers to “think about the ways that food brings us together, how it holds memory, and how it has contributed to the rich cultural tapestry of your community and beyond.”

Teitelbaum’s recipe book was donated to the VHEC by Teitelbaum’s nephew, Alex Buckman, also a Holocaust survivor, who died in 2023.

“He was Rebecca’s nephew, but he actually was raised as Rebecca’s son…. Rebecca was the only mother that Alex ever knew,” said Kirchner. “His parents perished in Auschwitz, and Rebecca made a promise to God that she would raise Alex as her own son, which she did.

“In the 1990s, Alex discovered this recipe book in the drawer of Rebecca’s home, and he asked her about it. He had never heard the story before. Apparently, she had never told anybody, but she explained to Alex the incredible story of this recipe book, how it was created and how it survived.”

Kirchner showed many archival photographs, including of Teitelbaum and one of Teitelbaum with her younger brother, Isaac Buckman, in the 1930s.

“Isaac is Alex’s father,” explained Kirchner. “These two siblings, Rebecca and Isaac, were very close. They also had a younger brother, Jacques.”

screenshot - Herman and Rebecca Teitelbaum, 1938 — Herman and Rebecca Teitelbaum, 1938. *(screenshot from VHEC presentation)*

Rebecca and her husband Herman were married in 1938. “They had a daughter, Anny, in 1939, and they lived … near Brussels, before the Second World War. Rebecca worked in the accounting department of a department store in the city of Brussels.”

Kirchner also shared a photo of Isaac and Dworja Buckman, who married around the same time as the Teitelbaums.

“The same year that Rebecca’s daughter, Anny, was born, Isaac and Dworja had a son, Alex, in October 1939.”

In May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium and the Nazis set up a military occupation government. “Unlike many other countries where the civil administrations cooperated with Nazi deportations, the situation in Belgium was much different and, as a result, the survival rate of Belgian Jews was higher than many of the Western European countries,” said Kirchner.

Nonetheless, restrictions were placed on Jews and Kirchner went through the progression of anti-Jewish laws in Belgium. There were pogroms, as well, and, in May 1942, all Jews over the age of 6 had to wear the yellow star to identify them as Jewish.

From 1941 to mid-1942, Anny and Alex were placed into hiding, which worked until their families ran out of money, said Kirchner. When the woman hiding the kids denounced them to the Nazi authorities, the families were in grave danger.

“Between 1942 and 1944, the German occupying forces deported around 25,000 Jews from Belgium to concentration and death camps in the east, primarily to Auschwitz, and only 2,000 of these survived – 43% of the Jewish population in Belgium was murdered,” said Kirchner.

Once the Belgian resistance became more organized, there were resistance networks focused on hiding Jewish children. The largest was the Committee for the Defence of Jews, she said, and it successfully hid some 2,400 Jewish children from the Nazis, including Anny and Alex.

Isaac and Dworja Buckman were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 and murdered. Rebecca and Herman Teitelbaum were deported to forced labour camps in Germany: Herman to Buchenwald, and Rebecca to Ravensbrück.

“Rebecca spent 17 months in Ravensbrück concentration camp as a slave labourer,” said Kirchner. “She was first assigned to work hard labour, hauling wood and stone and heavy carts in very harsh outdoor conditions, but, because she had worked in that department store in Belgium and she had experience with accounting work, she was able to secure a much better work assignment in the office of the Siemens factory.”

Siemens was one of the private companies that used Jewish slave labour, explained Kirchner, before turning the floor over to Lawson to talk about Ravensbrück.

“It was originally built for a little over a thousand prisoners, but, at its peak in 1945, there were over 50,000 prisoners,” said Lawson, who went into some detail about the factory and Siemens’ cooperation with the Nazis.

Despite the unimaginable circumstances, resistance was evident. Lawson shared a quote from Lidia Beccia Rolfi, an Italian prisoner: “Even the theft of a piece of wire, a sheet of paper, of a cloth rag was seen as sabotage, but everyone committed that. Any form of friendship between inmates was seen as sabotage.”

Lawson played a clip from Alex Buckman’s video-recorded survivor testimony. He explained how Rebecca noticed there weren’t that many supervisors at night.

“And then she stole a piece of brown paper, and she put it in her dress,” he said. “And then she stole a little pencil and a pair of scissors. And, at night, she ran towards her barrack, very nervous because she knew that, if somebody would stop her with all these stolen goods, she would be in trouble and they probably would make an example of her, maybe either shoot her or hang her. But she did it.”

screenshot - A page from Rebecca Teitelbaum’s cookbook, which she compiled at great risk during her incarceration at Ravensbrück concentration camp — A page from Rebecca Teitelbaum’s cookbook, which she compiled at great risk during her incarceration at Ravensbrück concentration camp. *(screenshot from VHEC presentation)*

In the barrack, she cut the paper into smaller pieces and started to write recipes “of meals that she did for her husband and her daughter before the war…. With the help of other women, who gave her some of their own recipes, and many of hers, she wrote 110 recipes,” he said. “Even though food was very important to stay alive in the concentration camp, she actually traded some of her food for needles and thread, and she made a book so she could keep it.”

The recipes weren’t necessarily accurate, said Kirchner. “You’ll notice most of the recipes are very heavy on butter and sugar and luxury items like raisins and rum or cream. On the other hand, some of the recipes reflect wartime scarcity…. But the dominant theme of these recipes is one of abundance.”

The recipes reflect the cultural diversity of the women imprisoned in the camp, said Kirchner. “These were women from all over Europe … about half of them were Jewish, but many of them were not, and so the recipes reflect a cultural diversity that’s Jewish, Belgian, French, Spanish, Mediterranean.”

Teitelbaum completed three recipe books, giving two to other women in the camp.

“Rebecca also created another thin volume that contains poems and resistance songs,” said Kirchner, adding, “She also made two sets of playing cards, which the Roma women in the camp would use to tell the fortune of other prisoners. So, again, building community between not just the Jewish women in the camp, but across cultures. And this was an essential form of hope and community-building and resistance by the camp inmates.”

Teitelbaum was one of 2,000 women saved in a Red Cross mission that saw 36 buses take the women from Ravensbrück to safety in Denmark and Sweden. However, the area was still a war zone and one fleet was hit by friendly fire.

“This convoy carrying 706 women, including Rebecca, was attacked multiple times by fighter planes and, as a result, there were about 25 fatalities and numerous injuries among the rescued prisoners,” said Kirchner. “Rebecca herself survived the attack, but was hit by shrapnel and badly injured her left arm. And, in the scuffle and the mayhem that followed … she lost her bundle of belongings: a sack that contained her recipe book.”

Herman, Anny, Jacques and Alex also survived.

screenshot - Anny Teitelbaum and Alex Buckman, 1945 — Anny Teitelbaum and Alex Buckman, 1945. (screenshot from VHEC presentation)

“Anny and Alex were raised as siblings,” said Kirchner, and Rebecca and Herman had another child after the war. “Rebecca named this baby Christian, in honour of King Christian … who had visited her in the hospital, and who had become a bit of a folk hero in the Jewish community in Denmark.

“In 1951, the family left Europe and they arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax in September of 1951 before making their way to Montreal, where they settled permanently,” continued Kirchner. “They had one last child, named Shirley, who was born in Montreal in 1953, and Rebecca Teitelbaum became a Canadian citizen in 1957. She lived the rest of her life in Montreal, and she died there in 1999.”

The sack Teitelbaum had lost was found near the site of the bombing and, because it contained letters that identified her, the person that found the bag tracked her down.

“Rebecca’s recipe book is one of six Holocaust recipe books that we’re aware of in museums around the world,” said Kirchner. “These artifacts have given historians greater understanding about the unique responses of women to their persecution…. Unlike traditional cookbooks, they’re not about cooking, in practice, they’re about maintaining identity, resisting dehumanization, transmitting a culture that the Nazis were attempting to destroy, and they also functioned as a psychological coping mechanism that forged group cohesion and a spirit of communal care.

“The creation of these recipe books all came at great risk and sacrifice, and they’re important not only because they demonstrate the agency of female prisoners who were trying to assert control over their hunger by eating with words, but they also provide an archive of women’s communal responses to their persecution, which elevates women’s domestic expertise to the level of historical record.”

In his talks as an outreach speaker, Buckman would give students the Gâteau à l’orange recipe from Teitelbaum’s book.

“This was a cake,” said Kirchner, “that Rebecca would make for Alex every birthday, and he would encourage the children to make it at home with their own parents, to give their parents a hug, to make this orange cake in honour of his Aunt Rebecca, and also in memory of all of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, including his own parents, Isaac and Dworja.”

The recipe is on the VHEC’s website, vhec.org.

Legacy of the “Ghetto girls”

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, left, interviews author and historian Dr. Judy Batalion at this year’s Kristallnacht commemorative event on Nov. 4. (screenshot)

Jewish girls and young women in Poland were uniquely positioned to play major roles in the resistance to Nazism – and the stories of countless young heroines have been too long overlooked.

This was a key message at the Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 4. Held virtually for the second year in a row, it featured Canadian historian Judy Batalion. Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, program and development manager of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the author and posed questions.

Jewish girls and women were not subject to the irrefutable proof of Jewishness that Jewish men were, said Batalion.

“Women were not circumcised, so they didn’t risk being found out in a pants-drop test,” she said. “If a man on the outside [of the ghettos] was suspected of being Jewish, he would be told at gunpoint to drop his pants, and women didn’t have that physical marker of their Jewishness on their body.”

A secondary reason women could play such an important role in the resistance was that, at that time in Poland, education was mandatory to Grade 8. Many Jewish families sent their sons to Jewish schools or yeshivot. “But, to save on tuition, they sent girls to Polish public schools,” Batalion explained. “In these public schools, girls became more acculturated and … more assimilated women. They were girls and teenagers who had Catholic friends. They were aware of Christian rituals, habits, nuances, behaviour.”

Resistance fighters and underground operatives might have dyed their hair blonde or otherwise altered their outward appearance to pass as Christians. But there was more to it, the author said.

“Gesticulation was very Jewish,” she said. “So one woman had to wear a muff when she went undercover, to control her hands.”

Batalion’s book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos is the culmination of 12 years of research, which had its beginnings in another project.

Batalion was in the British Library doing research for a performance piece she was working on about Hannah Senesh, a young female hero of the resistance whose story is perhaps among the more well known. Senesh was born in Hungary and had made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in the 1930s, but she returned from that comparatively safe haven to join the fight against the Nazis.

“She joined the Allied forces, became a paratrooper and volunteered to return to Nazi-occupied Europe,” Batalion said of Senesh, who the author first learned about in Grade 5 in Montreal. “She was caught quite early on but legend has it she looked her executioners in the eye when they shot her.

“I grew up with Hannah Senesh as a symbol of Jewish courage,” she said. There were not many books on Senesh at the renowned London library, however. “So, I simply ordered whatever they had. I picked up my stack of books and noticed that one of them was a bit unusual. It was an old book with yellowing pages bound in a worn blue fabric with gold letters and it was in Yiddish.”

Batalion speaks Yiddish, in addition to English, French and Hebrew.

“I flipped through these 200 pages looking for Hannah Senesh, but she was only in the last 10. In front of her [were] dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, mainly from the ghettos in Poland.”

The stories featured guns, grenades, espionage. “This was a Yiddish thriller,” she said.

As Batalion soon discovered, it was young Jewish women who were disproportionately represented in some of the most daring acts of resistance of the time.

“These ghetto girls hid revolvers in teddy bears, built elaborate underground bunkers, flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine and whiskey and shot them,” she said. “They planned uprisings, carried out intelligence missions and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children, they organized soup kitchens, underground schools and printing presses. They flung Molotov cocktails in ghetto uprisings and blew up Nazi supply trains.

“I had never read anything like this,” said Batalion. “I was astonished and equally baffled. Who were these women? What made them act as they did? Aside from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which I’d heard of, what was the story of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust?… And why had I, who grew up in a survivor family and community, who was so involved in Jewish arts and culture – I even have a PhD in women’s history – how had I never heard this story?”

Thus began a dozen years of research in Poland, Israel, England and across North America, in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos, she said. “I trod through testimonies, letters, photographs, obscure documentaries and the towns where these heroines were born and raised,” she said.

“Reading through all this material, I was astonished to learn of the scope of the underground,” she said. “Over 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units … 30,000 Jews enlisted in the partisans. Rescue networks supported 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. Uprisings occurred in ghettos, in labour camps and death camps, all this alongside daily acts of resilience – smuggling food, making art, hiding, hugging a barrack-mate to keep her warm, even telling jokes during transports to relieve fear. Women were at the helm of so many of these personal and organized efforts, women aged 16 to 25. Hundreds of them, possibly even thousands of them.”

The ability to do such things, under unimaginably dangerous conditions, was aided by a social phenomenon that predated the Nazi occupation.

The early 20th century in Poland was a time of extraordinary Jewish intellectual ferment. Making up about 10% of the country’s population, Jews had a profound social infrastructure, including 180 Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw alone. Jewish political movements proliferated – left, right, religious, secular, Zionist and non-Zionist – creating a vibrant discourse and networks of interrelated groups across the country. By the 1930s, almost all Polish Jews were wondering if this was a country where they could continue to thrive, whether they belonged to the country where their ancestors had lived for 1,000 years.

“As part of this identity struggle, 100,000 young Jews were members of Jewish youth movements – that’s a huge proportion,” said Batalion. “These were values-driven groups that were affiliated with these varying political parties and stances.”

For example, when war broke out, Frumka Plotnicka was 24 years old. Her youth movement urged their members to flee east – “That’s also how my grandparents survived,” noted Batalion – but fleeing a crisis did not suit Plotnicka.

“Stunning her comrades in her movement, she was the first to smuggle herself back into Nazi-occupied Poland,” she said. “She went to Warsaw and became a leader in the Warsaw Ghetto. She ran soup kitchens for hundreds of Jews, she organized classes, discussions and performances. She negotiated with German, Polish and Jewish councils, she helped extract Jews from forced labour.

“She covered her Jewish features with a kerchief and makeup and left the ghetto, traveling across Poland, keeping communities connected. She brought with her information, inspiration and books,” Batalion said. “They had a secret printing press. She ran seminars across Nazi-occupied Poland.

“In late 1941, the youth movements acknowledged the truth of the Nazis’ genocidal plans and they transformed from education hubs into these underground militias. Frumka still traveled to disseminate information. Now, it was about mass executions. She was one of the first to smuggle weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto. She had two guns in a sack of potatoes.”

She was killed while firing at Nazis from a bunker in 1943.

While disguised as non-Jews, some of the woman warriors were able to exploit the prejudices of their tormentors.

“Nazi culture was classically sexist,” said Batalion. “They never suspected that a sweet-looking girl had a pocket full of ammunition. Jewish women played to this underestimation. One courier … was once carrying a valise full of contraband material and she was getting on a train and noticed they were checking bags. She was very beautiful and bashed her eyelashes and went up to the Gestapo man and said, ‘My bag is so heavy, can you carry it for me?’ He was being chivalrous, ‘Of course, I’ll carry it for you,’ and he took it on the train for her and, of course, they didn’t check the bag.”

These young Jewish fighters had lost everything and still soldiered on, the author said.

“They knew they wouldn’t topple the German army, yet risked their lives time and time again to fight for justice and liberty,” she said. “Small victories are achievable and necessary for great change. It is through these young women that I learned that not only is trauma passed through generations of Jewish women but so is courage and daring, strength and resilience, passion and compassion.”

Batalion’s book won the 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Holocaust category and has been optioned for a Steven Spielberg film, for which Batalion is working on the screenplay.

The annual Kristallnacht commemorative lecture is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel, with support from the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment of the VHEC, and funded through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.

Prior to the keynote address, Holocaust survivors lit candles in their homes. Kennedy Stewart, mayor of Vancouver, offered reflections and Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, read a proclamation from the city. Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker.

Using past to improve future

Without interpretation, the world’s greatest art is little more than a lot of pretty pictures. Similarly, absent interpretation and thoughtful reflection, history is not much more than a litany of names and dates.

This month, we are marking many anniversaries. The end of the Second World War in Europe. The liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps. The beginning of Soviet-versus-Western tensions and proxy wars that lasted decades.

In some ways, we cannot begin to comprehend the Holocaust, or the world’s reaction to it, without reflecting on a different anniversary we mark this month. It was 60 years ago this week – May 11, 1960 – that Mossad operatives captured Adolf Eichmann, a prime architect of the Holocaust. The astonishing operation, which amazes observers even today with its bizarre twists and chutzpah on an international scale, stands out as a turning point in the way the world – Jews especially – view Holocaust history.

Holocaust survivors themselves understood the particularity of the Holocaust, while much of the world perceived the millions of Jewish lives lost as a part of the larger war casualties, not qualitatively different from the deaths of citizens of Dresden or Coventry or Stalingrad. It should need not be said that every human life lost is a tragedy. But, from the perspective of historical meaning, the murder of Jews, Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals and others targeted for identities unrelated to the national conflicts, must be understood apart from the tragic consequences of war.

This is the consensus position today – that the Holocaust paralleled the Second World War but was substantively and morally different from broader contemporary events. This consensus emerged to a great extent from the Eichmann capture and trial.

Eichmann was living in Argentina, so confident in his security that, in retrospect, his subterfuge was minimal. Once tipped off, the Mossad had little trouble locating him.

Eichmann’s legendary defence, that he was merely following orders, was dismissed by the Israeli court. Whatever moral or military defence that argument posited was defied by the facts. Eichmann, according to eyewitnesses and documentary evidence, did far more than follow orders. He enthusiastically fulfilled directives beyond the letter or spirit of the command.

When the trial began, in 1961, it was said that one could walk through Tel Aviv and hear the proceedings on radio through every open window. The implications of the Eichmann trial for the world’s understanding of this history, and for Israeli and Jewish consciousness, was revolutionary.

Even among families that included survivors, or who had lost entire branches of the family tree, the historical context of the Holocaust was nebulous until this time. The small amount of survivor testimony that had emerged immediately after the war had largely dissipated, in part because the public did not want to face the most grotesque evidence of human depravity and because, in many cases, the survivors chose to sublimate their experiences and attempt to rebuild and move on with their lives.

It was only in the minutiae of the evidence at trial, the mind-boggling precision, industrial-style execution of diabolical plans and indescribable sadism of the Nazi war against Jews that people began to understand both the quantitative and the qualitative nature of the Shoah.

In addition to gaining insights into what their parents or other survivors might have experienced, younger Jews and Israelis intuited from the evidence a larger realization about their people. According to some historians, an idea persisted in the years after 1945 that the Jews of Europe had gone silently – “like sheep,” in the dehumanizing terminology too often employed – to their deaths.

Gaining an understanding of the inescapable precision and indefatigable determination of the Nazis to identify and murder every single Jew in their realm, younger Jews and Israelis came to know that their lost civilization did not go willingly. Indeed, among the earliest memorializations of the Holocaust – including here in Vancouver – were commemorations of the bravery and resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The nuances of the historical record were enriched by this knowledge, with implications for the self-identity of Jews everywhere. The extent of the cataclysm was a result of the homicidal tenacity of the Nazis and their collaborators, not of the responses of their victims.

The Eichmann trial opened a floodgate. The contemporary era of Holocaust history, including survivor memoirs and public discussion of that time, really began then. A decade later, this new understanding led to a backlash of Holocaust denial and revisionism which, in turn, inspired yet more survivors to speak out to correct and add to the record.

Today, we struggle to keep this history alive and to challenge its diminishment and misuse. Even among well-intentioned people who would never mean to belittle this history, there is a tendency to invoke it in situations that by no measure are comparable.

Additionally, especially in Europe, public opinion polls reveal that there is a fatigue around the subject. In many countries, pluralities or even majorities say that too much attention is paid to the Holocaust. Incongruously, the same polls indicate that it is in countries where ignorance of this history is most pronounced that citizens contend there is too much focus on it. Try to square those results.

We always view the past through the changing lens of the present. We have seen transformations in the understanding of and responses to Holocaust history for 75 years now. One of the challenges of our generation and successive ones is to be active in addressing these changing perceptions and interpretations. Our desire to continue to delve into this difficult experience and our people’s enduring trauma cannot depend on other people’s ignorance or assessment of what’s considered “too much” or “too in the past.” Our obligation, as carriers of this knowledge and witnesses to the survivors, is to glean the lessons of the past that improve the future and help strengthen our community and our societies. We will continue to do this work and to honour our ancestors. And we will continue to share what we know to be true, as we search for ways to make “Never again” a reality.