Holocaust History

Eichmann claimed he was bureaucrat following orders. Recently released transcripts of conversations he had with a Nazi journalist show Eichmann boasting of his significant role in executing the Final Solution.

These are the bone chilling words of Adolf Eichmann, the driving force behind the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” and architect of the murder of millions of Jews: “Every fiber in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, ‘Good, we exterminated an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission.”

 
Exactly 80 years ago, a group of starving Jewish scientists and doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting data on their starving patients. They hoped their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, and they wanted the world to know of Nazi atrocities to prevent something similar from ever happening again. They recorded the grim effects of an almost complete lack of food on the human body in a rare book titled “Maladie de Famine” (in English, “The Disease of Starvation: Clinical Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942”) that we recently rediscovered in the Tufts University library.

As scientists who study starvation, its biological effects and its use as a weapon of mass destruction, we believe the story of how and why Jewish scientists conducted this research in such extreme conditions is as important and compelling as its results.

The clandestine project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote the book’s foreword. In it, he explains:

 

One of the Hungarian capital’s best-kept open secrets is Giero Pub, a small but charming basement venue with top-notch music – and a tragic family history marred by the Holocaust​


(full article online)

 
The Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp was the first major camp to be liberated, when, on the night of July 22-23, 1944, the Soviet army encountered it on their westward push towards Germany. Captured virtually intact, the camp provided early evidence of the full extent of Nazi crimes.

Established in 1941, Majdanek was one of the largest concentration camps to exist. Conditions in the camp were brutal—many prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, exposure, and overwork. Others were murdered in mass shooting operations or in gas chambers. "Sometimes they took you out to work and a half of them never came back," remembered Holocaust survivor Abraham Lewent.

Majdanek also served as a storage facility for clothing and other personal items stolen from murdered Jews. Pictured here are victims' shoes found after liberation.

When the Soviet army arrived, few prisoners remained. Most had already been evacuated by the SS to other camps. Between 1941 and 1944, tens of thousands of people were killed at Majdanek.

Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.


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Although only 150 Iranian Jews lived in Paris at the time of the Nazi invasion, the city’s Jewish population also included Jews from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Partnering with Ibrahim Morady and Dr. Asaf Atchildi, a Central Asian Jew and president of the Bukharian community, the Iranian consul in Paris, Abdol-Hussein Sardari, submitted documents to Nazi officials testifying that Jews from Bukhara were actually Jugutis, a made-up term that described Persians who practised the “Mosaic” faith. At the outset of the war, Dr Atchildi and his wife never declared themselves Jews.

Eve Weinberg’s grandfather Aron (Arcadie) and his brothers Albert and Daniel together with Aron’s son David were taken to the Drancy Camp. Dr Atchildi pleaded with the Drancy camp commandant that the detainees were Afghans, not Jews. He managed to obtain the release of Aron and his brothers. But David was being held in a Suspects’ Camp. The only way to obtain his release ( as he was advised by Mr Kedia of the Georgian Jews, who had similarly been exempted from the Nazi race laws), was for Dr Atchildi to go to Gestapo Headquarters at 86 Avenue Foch in Paris.

Taking his courage in both hands, Dr Atchildi went to 86 Avenue Foch to plead David’s innocence, terrified if he would ever get out of the building alive. The young man had been accused of ‘opposition to the German army’. But the doctor managed to prove that he had been framed by a vengeful policeman. The SS officer checked his story, found it to be the truth, and ordered David’s release.

Dr Atchildi’s account was submitted in 1967 to Yad Vashem. But his bravery remained unacknowledged during his lifetime. However, B’nai Brith World Centre bestowed the Jewish Rescuers’ Citation to his daughter Dora Aftergood, 94, in honour of her father. Dr. Atchildi, they said, had put his own life at risk to ensure the survival of over 300 Jews in Nazi-occupied France. While Yad Vashem recognises ‘Righteous Gentiles’, B’nai Brith initiated the Citation project in 2011 to recognise those Jews who endangered themselves to rescue and protect others in Nazi Germany. Aftergood accepted the award on behalf of Dr. Atchildi in a small private ceremony in Vancouver.

Eve Weinberg was astonished to learn that her cousin, David’s daughter, had never been told by him about this episode in her father’s life. Eve herself is determined to publicise these stories. She has published her mother’s memoir of her grandparents’ turbulent lives, ‘From Tashkent to Paris’.

You can hear Eve telling how Dr Atchildi rescued her family at 31:40 into this video.




 
Argentina agreed to share archival records about Jews who fled the Holocaust to the country this week in a new agreement signed between the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center and the Archivo General de la Nación (General Archive of the Nation) in Buenos Aires.

In addition, the countries agreed to increase Holocaust-education programs in the Latin American country.

"Holocaust remembrance, education and research are the keys to fighting intolerance, hatred and anti-Semitism," said Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan, who signed the agreements on behalf of Israel. "Argentina took an additional step in the right direction to bringing meaningful and historically accurate knowledge about the Holocaust to its youth and future generations, as well as to allow for the expansion of our repositories of documentation of the events of this dark chapter of our not-so-distant past."

He added that "with the opening of Argentinian National Archives, Yad Vashem will be able to delve deeper into the multifaceted elements – and meanings – of the Holocaust."

(full article Online )


 
Orlev was born in 1931 in Warsaw as Jerzy Henryk Orlowski. His mother was killed by the Nazis and his father taken captive by the Russians.

Together with his brother, Orlev was hidden by a family member in the Warsaw Ghetto but was eventually caught by the Germans and sent to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Two years later the camp was liberated by the British. Orlev and his brother made their way to Israel, where he worked in a cowshed in Kibbutz Ginegar. His father, who survived the war, arrived in Israel in 1954.

Orlev began writing children’s literature in the 1970s and published over 30 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.

(full article online)

 
Occasionally, a name or a phrase such as “Remember the Maine,” or “Watergate” enters the national lexicon. One such name has been burned into the collective memory of American Jewry: the St. Louis, a German luxury cruise ship which on May 27, 1939, steamed into Havana harbor with more than 900 German Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression, each with the letter “J” stamped in red on their passport. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana, its Jewish passengers were forbidden to come ashore. Despite the efforts of the American and Cuban Jewish communities to persuade the Cuban government to let the Jews land, on June 6th the vessel departed to return to Germany–and certain death for the refugees.

(full article online)

 
This September, PBS International will air “The US and the Holocaust,” a three-part series directed by Ken Burns. Voice actors in the documentary include Hope Davis, Werner Herzog and Meryl Streep. In addition to then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the series will depict broadcaster Dorothy Thompson, a notable exception to the rule regarding American media coverage of Nazi Germany.

“Few American journalists ever questioned president Roosevelt or his senior aides about their no-rescue policy during the Holocaust,” said Medoff. “That was both an abdication of their responsibility as journalists and a moral tragedy.”

News of what historians now call the “Holocaust by Bullets” — the genocide’s initial, open-air massacre phase — was first covered by The New York Times on October 26, 1941. A short article on page six reported that “tens of thousands” of Jews were massacred by German units in what was then the Polish region of Kamenets-Podolsk.

Between that New York Times article in October 1941 and the end of 1943, the Holocaust was framed as a series of disconnected massacres, said Medoff, as opposed to Germany’s long-channeled plan to “exterminate” the world’s Jews under cover of war.

During that same two-year period, Germany and its collaborators murdered most of the Holocaust’s 6 million Jewish victims.

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In contrast to American dailies covering the genocide, Jewish media put reports of the slaughter on their covers regularly. Unfortunately, however, most Jewish communal leaders did not act decisively based on those reports, said Medoff.

On June 17, 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on “a mass slaughter which has no equal in Jewish history.” An eye-witness from Lithuania’s Ponary Forest, outside Vilnius, observed a “continuous stream of trucks plied back and forth carrying more than 60,000 Jews of all ages to the execution place.”

Under the headline, “60,000 Jews executed in Vilna last month in continuous two-week pogrom,” the witness recounted how Jews were machine-gunned down after being stripped of their clothing. (Vilna was once the common English spelling of Vilnius.)

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The Holocaust in Skede, Latvia, 1941 (Yad Vashem)
According to the JTA article, “it was obvious that the order to kill all the Jews came from Berlin.”

The massacres of Ponary — a suburb of Lithuania’s Vilnius — lasted for more than three years, leaving 7,000 Jews alive from a pre-war community of 80,000. During the last phase of the genocide, Jewish prisoners were forced to exhume and burn the corpses of victims.

(full article online )

 
Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Ida, at left, and Louise Cook at the Israeli Embassy in London, after receiving an award in recognition for their efforts, undatedDAILY MAIL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Isabel Vincent, the author of a recent book, revisits a rather operatic story about how two British “spinster sisters,” Ida and Louise Cook, rescued 29 Jews from Hitler’s ovens.

The book is titled Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan that Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars From the Third Reich, and it is based on prodigious research into the lives of the two “ordinary/extraordinary” sisters. She draws from Ida Cook’s own writing (Ida became a successful writer of romance novels, which helped fund their rescue work), specifically her 1950 memoir. The book was titled We Followed Our Stars, though it was republished in 2008 under the title Safe Passage, which in my view is not quite as romantic.

On that note, I would retitle Vincent’s excellent book: Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan that Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars From the Third Reich. While the Cook sisters, frugal, modest, civil servants, neither worldly nor political, did save Jewish stars from Hitler—the great majority of these refugees were not great opera stars, but simply civilians.

 
Ahuva Jakober’s family fled east as the Nazis advanced across Poland, and was lucky enough to make it into the Soviet Union. Luck, in this case, meant getting sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, and then to Kazakhstan, where there were enough deported Jews to sustain a Polish-language school. She made it back to Poland in 1946, but “they were beating Jews and we didn’t stay.” Next came a displaced persons camp, then a stint in Israel, then most of a lifetime in Brooklyn, where the Polish accent and Yiddish cadences never disappeared.

(full article online)

 
Is Nancy Pelosi’s courageous decision to visit Taiwan connected to her father’s actions during the Holocaust?

Page, USA Today’s Washington D.C. bureau chief, told CNN on August 2 that Pelosi’s willingness to stand up to China’s threats over her Taiwan visit likely was inspired by the actions of her late father, Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., in the 1940s, “who was a loyal Democrat, but stood up to FDR on the issue of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.”

Some years ago, while researching the activities of the Holocaust rescue advocates known as the Bergson Group, I discovered that D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democratic congressman from Maryland, had been a supporter of the group.


Rep. D’Alesandro was a loyal backer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He even named his first son—Nancy’s eldest brother—Franklin Roosevelt D’Alesandro. But he broke ranks with FDR over the Holocaust. While the president was insisting that nothing could be done to rescue Jewish refugees, D’Alesandro was signing on to full-page newspaper advertisements by the Bergson Group urging America to grant haven to Jews fleeing Hitler.


Those ads—more than 200 of which appeared in newspapers around the country in the 1940s—were a crucial part of the Bergson Group’s rescue campaign. Signed by celebrities, prominent intellectuals and members of Congress, they demonstrated that a wide cross-section of Americans supported rescue.

Having the names of loyal Democrats such as D’Alesandro was particularly powerful, because it showed the president that the issue of rescuing the Jews was not some partisan jab by his opponents, but a vital cause that was close to the hearts of his own allies.


It was politically risky for D’Alesandro and other Democratic congressmen to publicly diverge from the president’s harsh policy toward Jewish refugees. It is testimony to their humanitarianism that they were prepared to alienate the president whose support they needed for their personal political success.

The pressure from congressional Democrats helped influence President Roosevelt to belatedly establish the War Refugee Board in early 1944. Despite its small staff and meager funding from the Roosevelt administration, the Board played a key role in the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust. Its many accomplishments included sponsoring the heroic life-saving activities of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

(full article online)

 
“With this sequel, we’ve answered the questions of many young people about what happened to Anne after her arrest, the period she couldn’t describe in her diary,” Leopold added.

Frank and her family hid in the annex from July 1942 until they were arrested in August 1944 and deported to concentration camps. She survived the Auschwitz concentration camp but died a year later at the age of 15 with her older sister Margot, both of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before it was liberated. Their father, Otto Frank, was the only family member to survive the Holocaust.

Otto had Anne’s diary published after World War II. The building with the secret annex that the Frank family hid in was turned into the Anne Frank House museum in 1960.

The English version of “Anne Frank – After the Arrest” will be available to view on the museum’s YouTube channel and will be accompanied by a live chat session. Watch the trailer below.

(full article online)

 

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