Jan 17
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, Holocaust, israel, people, politics
Printed in the Jewish Standard 10/16/09
Until a few years ago, when people asked me about my Holocaust survivor parents, I would say that my mother, Peska Friedman, survived as a footnote in history. She was a Polish escapee from the Warsaw Ghetto who managed to get on a Hungarian train known as the Kasztner Transport. Named for Reszó/Rudolph/Israel Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist leader and liaison to the Jewish Agency (the Sachnut), the train left Nazi territory — Budapest — in June 1944 for freedom in Palestine, via Switzerland. It was hardly an uneventful trip. Most of the passengers were held hostage in Bergen-Belsen for six months before they were released near St. Gallen, Switzerland. In the end, 1,684 people were saved, and most historians agree that the negotiations landed approximately 18,000 others in labor camps in Austria — where they were held as potential bargaining chips with the Allies instead of being deported to Auschwitz.
The arrangement was part of much broader Nazi negotiations that began in Slovakia with haredi Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl and his cousin, Slovakian Zionist leader Gisi Fleischmann. The pair worked with the Zionists and the Vaad Hatzolah, an association of Orthodox Jews in New York, Nazi-occupied territory, and Switzerland, seeking to rescue Jews in Hitler’s Europe.
But millions had to be raised from individuals and Jewish organizations for ransom. Not everyone could climb aboard that train, and there was a backlash of rage and resentment.
First Person
In 1953, Kasztner, then living in Israel, was publicly accused by Malchiel Gruenwald, a Holocaust survivor, of a host of charges — collaborating with the Nazis, stealing ransom money, and essentially causing the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The Israeli government, on behalf of Kasztner, a spokesman for the ministry of trade and industry, sued Gruenwald for libel. During a trial replete with political overtones, the judge, Benjamin Halevi, accused Kasztner of having sold his soul to the devil for making a deal with the Nazis. Gruenwald was acquitted of libel on several counts and fined the equivalent of one Israeli pound (a symbolic figure). After Kasztner was assassinated in front of his Tel Aviv house on the night of March 3-4, 1957, the High Court overturned the Gruenwald decision. But it was too late. Kasztner’s name was besmirched. People even spat on his young daughter, ZsuZsi, and threw rocks at her.
With the U.S. opening next week of the new documentary “Killing Kasztner” by Gaylen Ross, the controversy surrounding the negotiations for Jewish lives with Hitler’s deputies (Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny, and Kurt Becher) is back on the front burner. For some, this is a very personal story involving Kasztner’s family and the families of the Kasztner survivors. For others, it is the story of political terrorism, described in full in the film by Kasztner’s murderer himself, Ze’ev Eckstein, a member of a radical-fringe right-wing group, who was recruited by Shin Bet to spy on the group and then joined them. He became part of a cabal to destroy Kasztner and perhaps, as a result, bring down the Israeli government.
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Above, Kasztner survivors in Switzerland. Irene Grossman
Eckstein, the film’s major focus, was sentenced to life and served approximately seven years. His accomplices, Joseph Menkes and Dan Shemer, received the same sentence and also served seven years. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked the Kasztner family to give their approval to their release. His wife, Bogyo Kasztner, said no. His daughter, ZsuZsi, said yes, to spare the families of all involved more pain and anguish; she sensed he was going to let them go anyway, according to Ross.
According to the film, Shmuel Tamir, the defense attorney for Gruenwald, had been a member of the Irgun, while Kasztner, covering for the Sachnut, did not want to admit that he wrote affidavits on its behalf for Kurt Becher and his cronies — the Nazi officials who looted Hungarian Jewry. The Sachnut and later the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion sought to recover Jewish goods and funds looted by the Nazis and didn’t want people to know they were in direct negotiations with war criminals. When asked about the Becher affidavit, Kasztner lied on the stand to protect the Sachnut, and thus became politically expendable. The Zionists didn’t want anyone to know that everything Kasztner did was done at their behest, and Ross shows documents in the film, discovered since the assassination, that bear this out. They had not been released during the libel trial.
The Israelis also didn’t want to label “Jewish negotiators” as heroes. The Israeli idea of a hero, especially when training soldiers, was someone who would die, without talking, for the cause. Kasztner, who saved almost 20,000 Jews, more than anyone else during the Holocaust, was labeled a Nazi collaborator because he talked to Nazis. Even worse, said his enemies, he became one of them.
As the film unfolds, as you listen and watch the face of Kasztner’s murderer, you cannot help concluding that in the Israeli mind at the time, Holocaust survivors were viewed as having been merely passive victims, told to keep quiet about their experiences, and expected to pick up arms and fight for the State.
Until the early 1980s, when I joined the Arthur Goldberg Commission to examine the role of American Jews during the Holocaust (empowered by survivors and the City University of New York), I didn’t understand why some people hated Kasztner so much. Since not everyone could get on the train, the rumors that Gruenwald repeated as facts were spread everywhere: Kasztner kept the money; he should have stopped the deportations; he is responsible for the deaths of every Hungarian Jew not on the train. It was as if Hungarian Jewry never heard about Einzatsgruppen, Treblinka, Auschwitz, or the deportations from Slovakia next door.
I asked my mother if that was true — that Hungarian Jewry didn’t know. And she told me that when she tried telling people what was happening just across their borders, they accused her of lying and trying to start a panic. Last summer, I interviewed Estie Blier, who was on the Kasztner Transport. She remembered an Auschwitz escapee who two years earlier described the Sonderkommando units in Auschwitz to Blier’s father, head of the bet din in Budapest. The man was dismissed as a lunatic. Others who tried to tell the truth were beaten in the synagogues. Hungarian Jewry didn’t want to know. My mother’s recollections are confirmed by a Hungarian survivor in “Killing Kasztner.”
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Peska Friedman, the author’s mother, who was on the Kasztner train.
My own father, a Jew from Munkacs — which was in Hungary at the time — was involved in rescue efforts for the Vaad Hatzolah throughout the war, and didn’t believe it himself. He even turned down the chance to move his first wife and son to a safe house in Budapest. Instead they were all deported to Auschwitz. He suffered the penalty for not believing the unbelievable. His wife and son did not survive. After the war, he married my mother, one of the people smuggled into Hungary from Poland in 1941.
In mid-1944, my mother was sent to Budapest by her brother, the Munkascer rebbe, Baruch Rabinowicz, who was working on rescue with Jewish, Zionist, and Hungarian leaders. She was put in the care of Philip Freudiger, head of the Orthodox Jewish community in Budapest, who added 80 people — rabbis and their families — to the passengers on the train. That included my mother’s first cousin, the Satmar rebbe, Yoeli Teitelbaum, a rabid anti-Zionist. Reb Yoeli would later betray Kasztner when approached to be a character witness. He said that God had saved him, not Kasztner.
My father, a vice president of the World Agudath Israel (the Agudah), told me before he died in 1982 that the Agudah had been deeply involved in the Vaad Hatzolah and helped arrange the ransom. So when I was on the Goldberg Commission, I approached Rabbi Moshe Kolodny, the Agudah archivist, who sent me to Prof. David Kranzler, a contributor to the commission’s report and an expert on the negotiations surrounding the train and other Orthodox rescue efforts.
I learned that the Kasztner Transport was not something Kasztner did alone. The Sachnut, the Agudah, the international Vaads, Hungarian Jews, the U.S. government, American Jewish community leaders (who concentrated on creating a “homeland,” not rescuing European Jews), the Allies — dozens of high-powered people were involved in or knew about the “Blood for Trucks” deal, as Eichmann phrased it, that culminated in the Kasztner Transport.
Kranzler’s commission document, “Orthodox Ends, Unorthodox Means: The Role of Agudath Israel and Vaad Hatzalah during the Holocaust,” shows how Slovakians Weissmandl and Fleischmann tried to save as many Jews as they could. The rabbi paid $50,000 to the Nazis in 1942 for 20,000 lives. Then he negotiated “The Europa Plan” with Himmler: $2 million for most of European Jewry. He enlisted Kasztner and the Hungarian Zionists to help.
The Sachnut and most American-Jewish organizations turned down the deal. Then, in mid-1944, Weissmandl’s ad-hoc group spent six weeks pursuing Eichmann’s offer of a million Jews for 10,000 trucks, a deal “done in by circumstances,” according to Kranzler. Joel Brand, Kasztner’s negotiating partner and a Sachnut representative, left Hungary to find money for 10,000 trucks. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, represented by Saly Mayer, refused to provide the needed funds because the trucks would be useful to the enemy. As ordered by the Sachnut, Brand went to Istanbul and ran into trouble when his Sachnut bosses did not provide backup. Then they ordered him to Aleppo, Syria, where the British arrested him because they did not want him to make deals with the Germans.
That same spring, according to Kranzler, two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, warned everyone that Auschwitz was being expanded in anticipation of Hungarian Jewry’s arrival and murder. They wrote a 36-page report, the “Auschwitz Protocols,” condensed by Weissmandl and sent to Jewish groups in Hungary and Switzerland. Kasztner received a copy while negotiating the truck deal with the Nazis.
The day after deportations began on May 16, Weissmandl sent out a plea to bomb the tracks to Auschwitz, since record numbers of Hungarian Jews were being taken to their deaths. On June 14, Kasztner wrote to his contacts in Switzerland confirming Weissmandl’s message: 400,000 Jews had already been deported. He wrote about “hopeless hopes”: how 12,000 Jews a day were being deported and it couldn’t be stopped; from that point on, only small numbers of Jewish lives could be negotiated, and that there were no Jews left in the provinces. Protests from the Red Cross and others “found no willing ears” and those were the “bitter and stark facts.” His colleagues, who wrote to U.S. government representatives in Switzerland, confirmed his observations.
Another “Protocols” recipient was George Mantello, the Salvadoran consul-general in Switzerland who worked with British intelligence to condense the “Protocols” and get them to the media. Five days later, everyone knew what was happening to Hungarian Jewry. Even Pope Pius XII protested. Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg was sent to Budapest to open safe houses, as was Carl Lutz of Switzerland, and, at last, the International Red Cross got involved. Months later, despite the Nazis, the regent, Miklòs Horthy, finally stopped the deportations on July 7, 1944.
In the meantime, because of the publicity, the Nazis wanted to break off negotiations to release a half million Jews, but Kasztner convinced them to let a train leave carrying 750 people holding Palestine certificates (provided by the Sachnut). Among them were some members of Kasztner’s family, but not all — more than 100 were deported to Auschwitz. Kasztner also put other friends and relatives from his hometown of Kluj on the train. But money was needed and 150 very rich passengers (out of 1,684) paid huge sums to defray the cost of the cattle train, and the money went directly to the Gestapo. The rest paid nothing. In addition to Kasztner’s people and Freudiger’s people, as many as 450 inmates from a nearby labor camp climbed on board, and my mother remembers people getting off and on whenever the train stopped.
But once the train was organized, according to Kranzler, Kasztner heard nothing from Switzerland. The Nazis refused to let the train leave Budapest until Weissmandl wrote them a note under a fictitious name informing them that 250 equally fictitious trucks were available in Switzerland.
The Gestapo believed it. Only then was the Kasztner Transport allowed to leave Budapest on June 30, 1944, eventually arriving in Bergen-Belsen.
Once the Jews arrived, according to Kranzler, the Gestapo demanded 40 tractors in exchange for 40,000 Jews. Freudiger approached Isaac and Recha Sternbuch, the Agudah representatives of the Vaad Hatzolah in Switzerland, and asked them to come up with 750,000 Swiss francs as a down payment. They had only SF 150,000 and went to Saly Mayer at the JDC, asking him to make up the difference. Mayer refused, and complained to the Americans that Jews were negotiating with Nazis. He mistakenly assumed, as did others, that there were 1,200 rabbis on the train. Roswell McClelland, the American envoy to Switzerland, later said that Mayer told him, “Rabbis, like ship captains, have no right to save themselves.”
The Americans warned the Sternbuchs they would be charged under the Trading With the Enemy Act, but they continued to plead and negotiate. As a result of their efforts, the first 315 hostages from the Kasztner Transport were released from Bergen-Belsen on August 21, 1944. Then McClelland insisted that Mayer replace Isaac Sternbuch in the negotiations. Small payments were then made to the Gestapo as Mayer stalled and Kasztner tried to ransom the rest of European Jewry. Kasztner convinced Mayer to fake a cable to the Gestapo that said SF 5,000,000 was available. As a result, in December 1944, the remaining 1,366 passengers, including my mother, were released, and according to Leland Harrison, an American diplomat in Switzerland, more than 17,000 others were held “on ice,” as Kranzler put it, in Austrian labor camps.
When I saw “Killing Kasztner,” I knew about the negotiations. As a child, I don’t remember discussions of the devastating Kasztner trial in Israel or his assassination. I do remember hearing that he was murdered, supposedly by a crazed Hungarian survivor, and that when I told people my mother had been a passenger on the train, they made nasty cracks and derided Kasztner, as if he had been a one-man show.
Last week, I met Kasztner’s granddaughter, Merav Michaeli, and it was like meeting a long-lost family member — there was a deep connection. After all, if not for her grandfather, I would not exist.
Merav, a journalist, says it wasn’t the family’s idea to pursue the story. Gaylen Ross, the filmmaker, was fascinated by the story and shot her first footage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, during a Kasztner symposium. It shows the museum’s director, David Marwell, trying to control an unruly crowd. The result was “Killing Kasztner,” a film that tells the story of a murderer who comes face-to-face with the daughter and granddaughters of his victim.
It is a heart-stopping, infuriating film, but Merav doesn’t seem to carry any of the rage that lies at the heart of the story. To her, the whole thing is a mystery. “The most amazing thing I realized from the movie,” she says, “was how Tamir [Gruenwald’s defense attorney] got hold of [the] Becher affidavit. It was in a box of papers given to him by the attorney general who brought the case in the first place. Why would the attorney general include such a damning piece of paper? I am sure that many things are waiting to be revealed.”
Merav adds, “Humanity has a lot of different faces. It is a human thing to blame. Frustration and envy bring guilt. You feel survivor guilt, or you feel guilty for not doing what you wanted to do. Some people think Kasztner took advantage of their pain and hurt, and that’s why they condemn him. Others took cynical advantage of those emotions to promote their own agenda, like the Jews for ‘greater’ Israel who wanted to cut off Ben-Gurion’s head for giving back the Sinai. It’s what politicians do. It was easier for them to blame Kasztner instead of blaming the Nazis, while the Sachnut was negotiating for restitution from the Germans.”
I wonder out loud how it must have felt to meet Eckstein, as arranged for the film by Ross. How impossible it must have been for Merav, her sisters, and her mother to confront him. Merav says, “My mother wanted to meet with him at least 15 years ago, and he always refused. I felt as if my obligation was to be detached and angry at him. But I was in a coma as I sat there on the couch in my journalist mode, trying to be objective. He seems very intelligent and self-protective, and what happened and how he tells it seems to have been deeply thought through and processed. My ultimate impression is that he is not a bad person, but he ended up doing a terrible thing, and now seems trapped by it.
“But I think my mother, who has a clean soul, connected with him. She really had good intentions, and wanted to meet him when he did not [want to meet her]. And when you ask about anger, I realize I was born into a situation where my mother carried the guilt forced on her by society. That guilt was passed on to me, and I had to prove what they said about Kasztner was a lie — for now he is guilty until proven innocent. They are angry because he did what they said could not be done. Our family’s victimization came from Israelis and perhaps, as women, our anger is inner-directed. I guess you can say in that way my mother is not a typical 2G [Second Generation].”
“Killing Kasztner” took seven years to make, and when it started the family did not know Ross was going to focus on Eckstein. Then, when the movie came out, it was as if history had been rewritten. Most Israeli viewers were amazed and sympathetic to the family. During the course of the film, even Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem, “transformed himself,” as Merav describes it. At first a rejectionist, he later accepted the Kasztner archives and reintroduced his story to the public. Says Merav: “The family was truly grateful when Yad Vashem had an official showing this past Yom HaShoah. It means things are finally starting to change.”
Feb 26
Jeanette Friedmanhistory
Paul Shapiro: Mission Impossible, Accomplished
By working to make the ITS files at Bad Arolsen public, Paul Shapiro is midwife to history.
By Jeanette Friedman
Holocaust survivors and their descendants went to Washington in October 2007 to learn about the International Tracing Service (ITS), a long-closed archive housed in Bad Arolsen, Germany, that is finally being made available to Holocaust survivors, their families and researchers. Since 1945, Holocaust documentation has been gathered from around the world and stored at ITS, which is overseen today by an 11-nation governing board—the ITS International Commission. Placed under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1955, the files include Nazi war records and displaced persons camp records that contain information on the fates of at least 17 million people victimized or displaced by the Nazis. The records have been tapped to implement postwar restitution and forced labor compensation settlements between survivors and the governments of perpetrator states, but the full extent of the archives was never made public.
For decades, survivors and their descendants requested information from the ITS in order to determine what happened to family members during the war. They often waited years for a response and when they did receive something, in many instances the information was incorrect or incomplete. Survivors were left wondering if they had been told the whole story, and had no way to find out. The backlog of inquiries grew until by 2001/2002 there were over 400,000 of them. All attempts to gain direct access to the files were rebuffed. Protests grew, and with restitution and reparation application deadlines running out, with survivors dying in ever increasing numbers, access to the files became critical.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, joined later by the U.S. Department of State, began a campaign to secure agreement from the 11 countries on the ITS governing board—the ITS International Commission—to make the files public. The final steps in what became a complicated and heated diplomatic process were completed in November 2007. As part of the agreement, digital copies of the entire archive are being delivered to the museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The first installment of 17.8 million digital document images was received in August 2007. A 50-million-card name file followed in November. The remainder will come through a series of shipments over the next three years, and by 2010, with well over 100 million digital pages in hand, the museum will have a complete copy of the archive. The museum’s mission now is to transform tens of millions of digital images (.tif and .jpg files) into searchable files (.txt, .doc or .pdf files), so that people can easily find the information they want. It’s a complicated process, it may take years, it involves new developing technologies, but it is happening at last.
The man who was a prime mover in getting those digitized files to Holocaust repositories was Paul Shapiro, a quiet fellow, who never really imagined himself in the role of Holocaust activist. But history has a way of shaping people and imbuing them with passion.
**Shapiro was born in Framingham, Mass, the town that put cholesterol testing on the map. Local schools were so overcrowded with baby boomers, that when his parents offered him the chance to attend Phillips Exeter Academy he grabbed it—and built a Jewish congregation there for Jewish students, who until then were required to attend church services as part of their academic training. Shapiro eventually earned Jewish students the right to attend synagogue off campus during Jewish holidays—the result of a public and sometimes vehement confrontation with school authorities.
Exeter led to Harvard.
There, Shapiro studied government and international affairs, particularly the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were the main international focus of the day, as America’s opponents in the Cold War. His graduate work was in Eastern Europe history. What he learned above all else is that we need to understand the history of the countries we deal with or we won’t ever understand them diplomatically. There was also a side-effect.
As Shapiro put it: “Once you delve into Eastern Europe, you have to delve into Jewish history, life and culture. It is inescapable. And that brings you to the Holocaust.” And once you confront the Holocaust, as a Jew in America at that time, you had to confront the critical issue of civil rights in America. In 1964, at age 18, he gave a commencement address in the aftermath of the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers, the NAACP’s field representative in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot dead in his driveway in June 1963. “I spoke about the Holocaust and how Jews were murdered with few hands raised to help them. I described the catastrophic consequences. Then I told the Medgar Evers story and asked students to consider what their responsibility is when such actions take place in our country and the response is silence,” Shapiro recalled.
There was dead silence in the auditorium—from parents and students. That was followed by a huge struggle between the headmaster and the board of trustees, about whether or not to publish his remarks. “That told me that there was something powerful and necessary about telling the story of the Holocaust, and that it was essential for people to understand the importance of acting when they witness discrimination, no matter if it is based on religion, race, creed or other prejudice. If we are true to our tradition as Jews, and if we are true to our traditions as Americans, we have an obligation to teach Holocaust history so people can learn from it and gain some enlightenment in the way we treat people—especially people who are different—today. What you learn is that silence empowers those perpetrating the injustice. You can extrapolate this from that: if you stand by when something has to be done, that is simply not good enough.”
When he was finished at Harvard, Columbia University sent him to Romania as a Fulbright scholar—and when his schooling was done, he went to work for the U.S. government as a researcher at United States Information Agency journal, Problems of Communism, the most important publication of its kind in its day.
There he was also asked to do some research for the Department of Justice, to bring evidence in the first successful case brought against a fascist who lied to American immigration authorities to gain entry into the United States. The man in question had unleashed a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941. In America he had risen to become the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of the United States, chairman of the National Council of Churches, and had even opened a session of Congress.
This took place at the time Elizabeth Holtzman, a congresswoman from Flatbush Brooklyn, was arguing for the creation of the Office of Special Investigations, now headed by Eli Rosenbaum. The case against the Romanian cleric was handled in a tiny office at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however, because some politicians, including in the White House, were reluctant to address the issue.
Having gained experience working in classified Romanian Holocaust archives for the Trifa case, Shapiro began to do research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—as a volunteer and a part-time researcher on assignment from USIA—in 1989, a few years before the museum opened its doors. It soon became clear to him that this was his passion and that he had found his true métier. In 1997, USIA loaned him to the museum for two years to help develop its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. When the two years were up, the Museum asked him to stay. He did. The rest is history. Literally.
**Shapiro was appointed director of the Center and designed a program around a large number of research fellowships, programs for faculty who teach the Holocaust at college and universities, publications, research workshops and symposia on difficult subjects in Holocaust studies. One of the most important aspects of the Center’s work was to collect archival material relating to the Holocaust—the basis of all Holocaust research.
“In the roughly 20 years that the museum has been involved in archival collection, we’ve assembled about 40 millions pages of documents from 40 countries, forming the basis of a new generation of Holocaust research and teaching,” he told Lifestyles.
Imagine his reaction when he learned that there were more than 50 million original documents, and 50 million index cards relating to victims of Nazism at Bad Arolsen in Germany and that none of it was available for research.
“As a research scholar, that absolutely grabbed me. There’s no question. But as a human being I was overwhelmed by the tragic fact that much of the Holocaust survivor generation has passed away without knowing what happened to the loved ones they lost and fearing that once they are all gone no one will remember their names, or the names of the loved ones they lost, or the fate they suffered. I felt a moral obligation to bring into the open this massive documentation that tells the stories of millions of people who were lost, degraded or displaced. Success could offer closure to survivors who were there, and for those of us who were not, and all who come after us, the documentation would be a powerful insurance policy against forgetting. Everyone warned me that this would be a fruitless effort. But succeed or fail, I knew that I could not simply walk away from the issue.”
The ITS archives contain millions of pages of documentation covering four huge areas:
1. The concentration camp system, deportations, transports, Gestapo arrests and other forms of incarceration.
2. The forced/slave labor of millions of people, both Jews and non-Jews, who were treated not as human beings, but as assets to be used until they dropped—Arbeit macht frei —literally worked to death.
3. The fate of Holocaust survivors and other displaced persons, and how they were treated by the Nazis and the post-war victors.
4. The manner in which, since the end of the Holocaust, people who needed the information in the documents at Bad Arolsen were served by the 11 governments on the ITS International Commission and ITS’s ICRC administrators.
These ITS archives will literally double the amount of archival material at the museum, and some of the information in those 17 miles of documents will provide answers to questions we have only wondered about up to now: What did the forced and slave labor system look like at the ground level? What factors could affect the decisions made regarding concentration camp prisoners that determined their death or survival? How differentiated was the treatment of DPs by Allied authorities? How did perpetrators and war criminals obtain DP status, allowing them to avoid punishment and come to the United States? Moreover, because the documents were created at the same time and relate to all categories of victims, Jewish and not, the collection offers a powerful opportunity to make comparisons among all the persecuted groups and to learn from that.
The bottom line, says Paul, “is that the documents have multiple levels of importance. They perform a huge memorial function—to know the names and fates of those who disappeared. A memorial function that is so central in Judaism, to remember and speak the names of the departed, can then be fulfilled. But it is just as important for the families of non-Jewish victims to know what happened to those they lost.”
Shapiro also points to the moral obligation that we have to people perceived to be powerless, and that the survivors of genocide are perceived as powerless. That obligation is to tell their story, reassure them it will not be forgotten, and provide them with the information they need to come to some form of closure. Like other scholars, he sees the material as tremendously important from a scholarly research and teaching perspective as well.
Shapiro relates the archive to major problems of our own day as well. “With Holocaust denial on the rise, we have had the blessing of survivors to attest to the reality of the Holocaust. In the future, the original documents, of which there are millions at ITS, will be the truest testimonial and the most authentic witnesses. This collection also demonstrates in the most dramatic way the danger of anti-Semitism, not only for Jews, but for everyone. It is a warning of the need to confront resurgent antisemitism in our own times.”
About 25 percent of the documentation in the Bad Arolsen archives relates to Jews; the rest, to non-Jewish victims of the racial and religious hatred that is unleashed when antisemitism is allowed to become the operating principle of a society. They suffered and died as a result of antisemitism, too. The museum is committed to telling the story of all of the groups victimized by the Nazis and their collaborators. This collection will be of interest and of service to many ethnic communities in the United States that have an interest in this history, including Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, French, Belgians, and all the countries affected by World War II.
**Shapiro first became aware of the Bad Arolsen files when he went to work at the Museum. The leadership of ITS wouldn’t talk to the museum about making the resources available to scholars or anyone else. That intrigued him, and in 2001 he attended the annual meeting of the 11 governments that oversee the ITS.
Despite his plea on behalf of the dwindling survivor population, it became clear to him that neither the governments nor the ICRC had any intention to act seriously on opening the archives. Though survivors and scholars had asked for access to the files, they were repeatedly rebuffed. When the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors wrote them in 2000 and again in 2004, they didn’t bother to respond. Benjamin Meed, President of the American Gathering, threatened to rally 10,000 survivors to protest, but they ignored him and anyone else attempting to change their policies or even obtain information about the holdings. Meed, who passed away last year, never received a response to his letters.
Shapiro traveled to ITS and made repeated requests for lists of its archival holdings, all of which were rejected. But he believed that if he could show people what was in the archives, he could win them over. It had become clear that the systematic withholding of information was part of a strategy to make it impossible for the governments on the ITS board to act. ITS’s on-site leadership, the ICRC, and some members of the board itself maintained a stranglehold on the situation.
Working at the museum gave Shapiro the ability to do things others might not be able to do. Among them was assigning researchers from the museum staff to gather all the information they could possibly find about what was actually in the Bad Arolsen files—by checking the archives in the participating countries that had inventoried what they had sent, and locating in the National Archives an untouched crumbling list of the collections that had been turned over to the Red Cross by the Allied High Command in Germany in 1955. Through the great work done by the museum scholars, they also assembled information on two-thirds of the thousands of collections that had been deposited in Bad Arolsen after 1955.
Shapiro knew that making this information public and describing the situation at ITS to a community of individuals and organizations dedicated to working on the Holocaust would have a dramatic impact. He prepared a “white paper” for the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research when it met in Rome in June 2004. The Task Force is an organization of government and non-governmental organizations from 24 countries, all with a Holocaust focus.
The effect was immediate. The Task Force passed three successive unanimous resolutions over a 12-month period—the first such public resolutions in its history—demanding the immediate opening of the files. The resolutions and associated press releases impacted the governments on the ITS board. All were associated with the Task Force, and Shapiro challenged them publicly to explain a situation in one forum they were calling for the immediate opening of the files, while in another they were keeping them locked up tight.
When media attention focused on the story and diplomatic tempers began to rise, the U.S. State Department finally joined the museum’s effort to force action to open the files. Over the following 24 months, the museum was able, in partnership with the State Department, to convince all 11 governments and the ICRC to sign agreements not only to open the archives, but at the museum’s initiative, to allow each country on the ITS board to have a complete digital copy. Agreement came in 2006, and by November 2007 every country had ratified it. The transfer of digital actually began in advance of ratification, in August 2007!
**What is being transferred? Years ago, worried that the paper files that fill six buildings in Bad Arolsen might go up in smoke, ITS began scanning the documents into computer images. The resulting files are not “searchable” for key words or names because they are essentially photographs of the documents, and cannot be “read” by the computer when it is looking for specific words. Normally, software programs called optical character recognition programs can read these photographs of words, and turn them into text files automatically, but only if they have a certain uniformity of language and are clearly typed, not handwritten. Even then, even with the best software, the system isn’t foolproof. Much of the Bad Arolsen documentation is handwritten, in multiple languages, on pieces of paper of dramatically different format, quality, size and color. Many of the words even on typed documents are obscured by stamps, stains and other interference. That means that every .jpg and .tif file will have to be individually looked at, typed in and verified before it can become a searchable file. When you are dealing with tens of millions of documents, that transformation can take years.
Says Shapiro, “Time is of the essence, and survivors have already waited too long. Because software development and digitization will take time, we are reassigning staff members and bringing in new staff and volunteers to help survivors seek out the documents that relate to their families.” The museum hopes to begin responding to survivor requests for information in early January. Initially, searching the archive will require specially trained archivists using custom software to get clues about where to look for information in the actual documents. The museum will send survivors and their families copies of the documents they find. Under new leadership, ITS also is now committed to providing improved service and has agreed to provide copies of documents when it responds to inquiries.
“Finally!” Shapiro concludes. Summing up the museum’s plans, he explains, “This is a two track process. The moral drive to take care of the survivors and their families—which is an immediate need—is track one, and the train is already moving pretty fast. But we are working on improved access tools at the same time, recognizing that they will take time to develop. Over the long term, the research, teaching and memorial uses of the Bad Arolsen archives will contribute to the fulfillment of the mission of the museum, which owes so much—its very existence in fact—to the inspiration and dedication of the survivors themselves.”
Feb 01
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, israel
By Jeanette Friedman
If Jews around the world do not want Holocaust history distorted, then perhaps we should examine how we create our own myths—and lay those distorting myths to rest, once and for all. One such myth is particularly egregious, since it deals with Israel and the Holocaust.
A day after the UN Holocaust Commemoration on January 28, 2008, an e-blitz from Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Center of the UJCNJ (the Metro-West Federation) contained the following statement:
“ Amb. Dan Gillerman spoke eloquently, saying that if Israel had existed[,] the Holocaust would have been averted. (This will be the theme of our “One School Remembers” exhibit that will be on view Apr 6-May 3.)”
The Israeli diplomatic corps has been promulgating this myth for years—a luxury they can afford with 20-20 hindsight. Shimon Peres made a similar statement when he became the President of Israel a few months ago. These statements fly in the face of reality and don’t help Israeli credibility one iota.
Who can compare the Yishuv with today’s Israel? Eighty years ago, there were approximately 350,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, living in Mandate Palestine, surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs. The Jews bought the land they lived on—until the British stopped them. Many of those Jews, who came in the first wave of pioneers, returned to Europe between the wars because they had nothing to eat. For those who remained, the economy was a disaster, and there were virtually no guns, no army and certainly no planes or tanks to use for self-defense.
There were 17,000,000 Jews in the world when World War II began, most of them in Central and Eastern Europe, and many in Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. In that war, the Nazis and their collaborators (including the Italians under Mussolini) caused the deaths of almost 60,000,000 people, including our own 6,000,000 Jews.
Could little Israel have stopped the Holocaust? Could she have absorbed 17,000,000 refugees or even 6,000,000? Today’s Israel has capacity, reach and scope that she didn’t have then—and couldn’t imagine having during the days of her birth.
The State of Israel wasn’t even an idea until the late 19th century—so how could its 350,000 Jews have managed to defend themselves against the Axis assault on Mandate Palestine? They couldn’t. Even the British Empire was at serious risk when confronted with the German war machine, and all of Europe practically collapsed like a house of cards within months of the Nazi onslaught. Poland fell in less than a month, Denmark, France, Belgium, Holland and other countries far more powerful than Palestine fell even more swiftly.
When Ben Gurion proposed that the British recruit thousands of Jews in special units in the war against the Nazis, the British rejected the request. Only after the situation deteriorated, and the Germans gained ground, did the British agree to establish the Jewish Brigade [5,000 troops]. And even then, many Zionists refused to fight the Nazis and their collaborators because it meant helping the British.
When France fell in 1940 and the Italians aligned with the Germans, Syria and Lebanon came under the control of Vichy France. The 30,000 Jews in Syria became victims of the same Nazi laws promulgated in Europe. Businesses were Aryanized and Jews were interned in camps. Henri Dentz, the Syrian high commissioner, planned to open concentration camps. Thankfully, in 1941, the British and Free French forces seized control before he could do so. Members of the Palmach—Moshe Dayan [who lost an eye in the campaign], Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon among them, participated in the Allied invasion against Vichy Syria, thus preventing the deportation of the Syrian Jews. (But success still did not allow Jewish entry to Palestine.)
In 1940, Italian planes were stationed in Rhodes. On July 15, they bombed Haifa. Nine days later, another bombing left 50 dead. In September, the Italians invaded Egypt and also bombed Tel Aviv, leaving more than 100 dead and many wounded, with extensive property damage. The Yishuv was already a German target. As an official Jewish state, “Israel” would have attracted a much larger invasion. (For the record, the Jews of Rhodes were deported in 1944.)
In April 1941, the Germans invaded Libya, causing British fear of an impending invasion of Palestine. By the end of May, German General Erwin Rommel reached the Egyptian border and the mighty British Empire retreated. During that same week, the Balkans, Yugoslavia and Greece fell to the Germans. Among the POWS were 1500 British soldiers from the Yishuv. That same month, a Palmach sabotage mission to Vichy Lebanon failed.
On June 10-12, 1941, the Italians returned and bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv. A year later, Rommel crossed Egypt to El Alamein, 60 miles from Alexandria. People were terrified the British would abandon Palestine, leaving it to the Germans—who had already made their deals with the Mufti of Jerusalem to deport the Jews.
When the Germans invaded Russia and headed for the Caucasus, there were fears of an invasion from the north. A state of emergency was declared and plans were made to fortify the Carmel, just in case. Palmach units were sent south toward the border with Egypt and to the sea, to prevent Axis attacks—the equivalent of sending a little Dutch boy to stick his finger in a dyke to stop a flood.
It wasn’t until October 1943, when British General Bernard Montgomery attacked Rommel’s army, that the German threat to Egypt and Palestine ended. That month, the Russian victory at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the fall of Nazi Germany. And that, and only that, stopped the German juggernaut.
So even if there would have been an official state of Israel (which would have been even tinier than it was in 1948, since Trans-Jordan was not an option if the West wanted Arab oil) how would it have possibly absorbed millions upon millions of impoverished Jews who would have flooded the area? With no infrastructure or space or even enough potable water, who would have been able to care for those millions of displaced Jews?
And when all the established countries of Europe, including Russia, couldn’t stop Germany until it self-destructed, do we really believe tiny Israel would have saved six million Jews and prevented the slavery of millions more?
NOT.
Jeanette Friedman is a freelance journalist and editor who founded Second Generation North Jersey in 1979.
Dec 05
Jeanette Friedmanhistory, orthodoxy
David Kranzler, who passed away last week, was a religiously observant Jew who was immersed in the historical role of the Orthodox Jewish community during the Holocaust. While the countries of the world closed their hearts and minds to the destruction of European Jewish life, David was a flee case, a child survivor, who discovered during his extensive research that one group, the Orthodox community, was actively engaged in rescue. It would be an illuminating revelation that would direct his research for the rest of his life.
I first met David when I sought to learn more about the Kastner Transport, the train that transported 1,684 passengers—most of them were held hostage in Bergen-Belsen and released to freedom in Switzerland in December 1944. My mother, a Polish woman, was on that Hungarian train, and so was David’s wife, Judy. Agudath Israel archivist, Rabbi Moishe Kolodny, introduced us, and David and I worked together on some projects, notably The Goldberg Commission Report that reported on the inactivity of the American Jewish community during the Holocaust era. He became a trusted friend, a reliable source and someone who appreciated a good, solid, knock-down, drag-out intellectual battle.
Although David was a diligent and exact researcher, he was nevertheless stubborn, cantankerous and exacting. His long-winded writing style often got in the way of the incredible facts he managed to dig up from archives and interviews, driving a humble editor to distraction and despair. But he admitted when you were right—usually after yelling himself hoarse. On the day of his funeral his wife told me: “There were days he wanted to kill you.” The feeling was entirely mutual—and then she reminded me of his gentle, generous side, like the day he helped me cross Lexington and 68th right after my knee operation, and invited my daughter to his home for Shabbat. David was a special soul.
David’s seminal work was Japanese, Nazis and Jews, a massive work about the refugee community in Shanghai from 1938-1945 and the rescue efforts of Jan Zwartendyk and Chiune Sugihara. Published in 1978 by Yeshiva Univerity Press, it was one of many books that he wrote about the Holocaust that focused on the actions of the Orthodox.
In the early ’80s, as a member of the “Goldberg Commission to Examine the Role of American Jews During the Holocaust,” I read the rough draft of a document he submitted called “Orthodox Ends, UnOrthodox Means.” In painstaking detail, it described the rescue efforts of Rabbi Michael Ber Wiessmandl and Gisi Flieschmann in Slovakia and the Sternbuchs and others in Switzerland, as well as many other attempts to save Jewish lives during the war—along with the constant attempts of the American and Zionist Jewish establishment to thwart those efforts. Like Japanese, Nazis and Jews, the document was a tough read, but buried in the text were nuggets of pure historical gold—
and an indisputable damnation of the American Jewish establishment.
As an editor, I couldn’t help but pull out my blue pencil and start cleaning it up, so I called him and asked him if I could officially work on the document. That’s how we began working together. I contacted a personal friend, Tim Noble, one of the finest editors I have ever known and then the op-ed page editor of The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, who agreed to do the final vetting. It was tumultuous and noisy work, but we were determined to make this document air-tight, with little wiggle-room.
One reason for this was that David’s degree was in library science, not history, so many mainstream historians treated him with contempt while they “borrowed” his material without giving him due credit. This naturally put him on the defensive and sometimes made things tough. But when the editing of “Orthodox Ends” was done, David gave me a copy of Henry Feingold’s Midrash on American Jewish History. He inscribed it in his own illuminated way and I had it with me when I ran into Feingold at a meeting.
I also had the final draft of “Orthodox Ends” and asked Feingold to read it. He said Kranzler couldn’t write. I said Kranzler could dig and that this document was edited, so he did me a favor and read it. When he was done reading, I handed him Midrash to autograph and under Kranzler’s dedication to me he wrote, “Litvaks never succumb,” and then admitted, though not in writing, that “Orthodox Ends” may well be one of the best documents in the report.
David, you will be missed. You were, indeed, one of the best.
May 12
Jeanette Friedmaneducation, history, Holocaust, israel, middle east
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Ali Shahata-author of “Demystifying Islam”, Jeanette Friedman & Chuck Dicaro
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