Feb. 4


USA----book review


"A penetrating account of an unknown, fascinating tale of intrigue-the
near impossible rescue of a great spiritual leader from Nazi-controlled
PolandSuspenseful, authoritative and well written."
David Kranzler, author of Thy Brother's Blood: The Orthodox Jewish
Response During the Holocaust

For release: November 2004

YALE BOOK UNCOVERS THE STORY OF A JEWISH LEADER'S ASTONISHING RESCUE BY A
NAZI SOLDIER

When Hitler invaded Warsaw, the Rebbe Joseph Schneersohn, leader of the
Lubavitcher Jews, was among the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped
in the besieged city. Surrounded by death, fire, starvation, and
brutality, plagued by ill health, and a target for the SS, the Rebbe
seemed unlikely to survive. But Schneersohn did escape from Europe, even
as millions perished, thanks to one of the most amazing rescues of World
War II.

"Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher
Rebbe," to be published in November by Yale University Press, uncovers the
true story of the rescue and of the secret collaboration between American
officials and German military intelligence that made it possible. Bryan
Mark Rigg, author of the seminal book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, makes
vivid the treacherous journey to safety, the heroism and the moral
weaknesses of the participants, and the impact of the rescue on the
Lubavitchers, on Jews in America and abroad, and on the course of the war.

With nuance and power, Rigg introduces the reader to Ernst Bloch, the Nazi
officer who tracked down the hidden Rebbe in Warsaw and risked all to lead
him and his followers to safety. Disfigured by battle wounds suffered in
World War I, Bloch was a decorated career soldier and brilliant spy whose
service to the German military earned him Aryan status, despite his Jewish
father. Fiercely loyal to Germany but privately skeptical of Hitler, Bloch
intimidated SS guards, concealed his human cargo from the Gestapo, and
even played the role of Nazi brutalizer during the perilous escape through
occupied Poland and Nazi Germany to Latvia. Rigg's heart-stopping account
of near catastrophe makes real the peril both Bloch and Schneersohn faced.

Drawing on interviews and documentary research, Rigg also gives the reader
a powerful sense of the Rebbe himself-his faith, his ideas, his terrifying
experiences before and during the war, and his priorities for the
Lubavitchers after his rescue. Rigg's portrait reveals a man of unshakable
dedication to the practice of his faith and to the survival of his
movement. Although he initially worked hard to rescue Jews in Europe,
efforts that were largely unsuccessful, he ultimately focused on
convincing all Jews that the Holocaust was God's punishment for their sins
and that they should change their ways and become more observant. He
emphasized that in this cruel time of history, God was giving them the
signs of Redemption and that Jews should prepare themselves for the
Messiah.

A number of influential Americans-Senators, administration officials,
Justice Louis Brandeis-used their power to make the almost unthinkable
rescue of the Lubavitcher Rebbe possible. And the Lubavitchers in America
lobbied tirelessly for their leader's rescue. Rigg examines the
complicated reasons why so much effort was expended by American officials
to save a few individuals while the administration ignored the plight of
ordinary Jews trapped in Europe and failed to hear the pleas of their
American loved ones. He explores the reasons the rescued Rebbe focused
most of his energies on the spiritual well-being of his flock in America
rather than taking radical political action to push the government toward
more liberal immigration policies. (In the Rebbe's view, only God could
change a situation for the better and Jews needed to keep this in mind.)
And Rigg shows how very difficult each and every rescue was in a world of
anti-semitic immigration bureaucrats, reluctant politicians, and detached
citizens.

The harrowing story this book tells is a reflection of the complexity of
history, of human identity, and of morality. Rescued from the Reich shows
us that individuals often defy the monolithic categories of good and evil.
As we strive to understand and learn from the great disaster of the
Holocaust, this book reminds us of the ambiguity and unpredictability of
all human interactions, and of the importance of individual action in
human history.

For more information or to arrange an interview with the author, please
contact Liz Pelton, 410-467-0989, lizpelton@....

Bryan Mark Rigg teaches history at American Military University and
Southern Methodist University. His previous book, Hitler's Jewish
Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent
in the German Military won the prestigious Colby Award from the William E.
Colby Military Writers Symposium. His work has been featured in the New
York Times and on programs including NBC Dateline and Fox News. Rigg has
served as a volunteer in the Israeli Army and as an officer in the U.S.
Marine Corps. He currently lives in Dallas, Texas.

**********************


IOWA:

Museum of Religious Arts to feature Holocaust display


With grim determination that it never happen again, survivors of the
Nazi-led Holocaust in Europe during World War II are celebrating the
60th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz, the most infamous
of the death camps that were responsible for killing more than 6 million
Jews.

One can get a perspective on these death camps from a special display at
the Museum of Religious Arts near Logan.

The exhibit, "The Concentration Camps of Germany," features the charcoal
drawings of artist George Zielezinski, who himself was an inmate of
another death camp, Dachau. Zielezinski's works are a series of drawings
printed as rotogravures that depict the heart-breaking living - and dying
- conditions in the concentration camp system.

Jews and other "undesirables" were shipped to Auschwitz and the other
camps by the freight car-load, and the trains continued to arrive
constantly from Poland and other Nazi overrun nations for years, while
smoke belched from the chimneys of the crematories that rendered the
emaciated bodies of the victims when they no longer had any slave value to
the regime.

Zielezinski immigrated to the U.S. from a displaced persons camp in Poland
in the 1950s.

His depictions of concentration camp life, suffering and death include the
tribulations of men, women and children, battered at the hands of the Nazi
abusers.

The works were first presented at a DP camp outside Dachau in
approximately 1946. They have been donated to the Polish Institute of Arts
and Sciences in New York where the haunting images are displayed.

The set of images at the Museum of Religious Arts is located in the main
exhibit hall and provide a disturbing, yet somehow comforting witness to
the horrors of war and the madness of rampant dictatorship.

The collection at the MRA was donated in 2001 by Robert and the late
Barbara Dappen of Logan. The couple purchased the set at an estate sale,
and a former curator at the museum was able to trace their background and
provide interesting facts to accompany the viewer's study of the works.

Zielezinski created the images on the sly, using small scraps of paper
smuggled into the camp, and then he smuggled the completed drawings out
inside odd pieces of burnt wood.

Visitors to the Museum of Religious Arts can view these extraordinary
works, along with the thousands of other artifacts and art works, and the
famed King of Kings exhibit, Tuesday through Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 5
p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. There is an admission fee, but
visitors can use the Museum's gift shop without paying an entrance fee.

(source: The Daily Nonpareil)



*********************

CALIFORNIA:

In World War II, Jewish emigres helped undermine the Nazis. A new film
tells their tale.


It was October 1944, and Staff Sgt. Rudy Michaels, part of the American
Fifth Armored Division, was about to cross the River Sauer. Behind him was
liberated Luxembourg. Ahead, the first German soil he'd set foot on since
leaving his homeland six years before as a Jewish refugee.

"There I was -- in the American Army, with a pistol in my hand, two
grenades in my belt and a sergeant with a machine gun at my side,"
Michaels says. "I bet they didn't think I'd come back like this."

Now, the 88-year-old retired lawyer and administrative law judge lives
quietly with his wife, Ann, in a lovingly preserved Eichler home in
Sacramento. But of late, the Michaels household has been atwitter with
excitement, thanks to a recent film about his World War II exploits as
part of a little-known group of German-speaking, mostly Jewish emigres who
served as U.S. interrogators and psychological warfare experts.

The German-made documentary "The Ritchie Boys" was short-listed for an
Oscar nomination. It recently opened Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian
International Documentary Festival and drew sellout crowds on its
pre-Oscar nomination rounds from Palm Springs to New York's Tribeca. The
German-Canadian production will screen in San Jose and Sacramento in
March.

Despite the passage of nearly 60 years since the war ended, little-known
tales of that conflict continue to surface, and "The Ritchie Boys" is one
of the more poignant. What makes this movie unusual is that it was
conceived by 57-year-old German filmmaker Christian Bauer.

"For my generation, the war was ever present," Bauer says in a phone
interview from Munich, where he lives. "I tried to reconnect with those
who had to leave Germany during the war, because I felt an invaluable part
of Germany was killed or driven out of our country."

Bauer had a devil of a time uncovering training records, because archival
information on Camp Ritchie had been destroyed years ago in a fire. But it
was mostly the lack of funding that stretched Bauer's project into a
15-year odyssey. He'd nearly given up when a colleague came across
long-buried papers about it and told him, "You've got to make this film."

Mostly German or Austrian Jews who fled Hitler's Europe, the Ritchie boys
got their name because they were among the estimated 20,000 GIs who
trained in bucolic Camp Ritchie, Md., near the Blue Ridge Mountains
between 1942 and 1945. The exact numbers will never be known because of
the records fire. Isolated in a remote area, yet fairly close to
Washington, D.C., Ritchie was well- suited for its mission. Although many
recruits were classified as enemy aliens, the Army had decided that they
had language skills and cultural knowledge that might be useful in the
war.

The tale of the Ritchie boys recalls the secret military intelligence
training of Japanese American soldiers at San Francisco's Presidio.

But the Ritchies' focus was clearly Nazi-overrun Europe. Many had only
recently left Germany or arrived via England and France. They were in
their teens or early 20s -- far younger than the first wave of famous
German refugees such as Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann.

Morris Parloff, one of the few Ritchie boys born in the United States, was
already a sergeant when he was ordered to Ritchie.

"I was stunned," recalls Parloff, 86, who talked by phone from his home in
Bethesda, Md. "This was a bunch of accented characters. What is this, I
thought?"

Like Parloff, Michaels was already in the Army -- he was drafted in 1941
-- when he got orders for Ritchie, where, as one Ritchie boy put it, "the
strangest collection of people" awaited him.

"Compared to all the other units I was in, it was a circus ... but a good
circus," Michaels says. "The rumor was that you couldn't get promoted as
an enlisted man unless you had a German accent."

Some of the recruits were decidedly unusual. Si Lewen was an artist; Klaus
Mann, Thomas Mann's son, was a writer, as was Stefan Heym and publicist
Hans Habe. Often, barracks discussions swirled around politics, Europe and
philosophy.

Klaus Mann, writing to his mother, said, "Italian, German, French, Polish,
Czech, Norwegian are spoken all over the place. And there are so many
familiar faces! The place is jumping with old friends. You might think you
were in a club or a cafe in Berlin, Vienna, Paris or Budapest."

Once, Michaels peered at a bunk, only to have a childhood friend from
Leipzig pop his head from underneath the blanket.

"This happened all the time at Ritchie," Michaels recalls. "It was like a
family."

The camaraderie among the refugees, many of whom left families behind,
went deep.

"We were committed to this war, for personal reasons as well as
ideological ones," Guy Stern says in the film. "A spirit of messianic zeal
pulsed through that outfit."

Classes were intense, with recruits learning how to interpret aerial maps
and use Morse code. They also had to memorize the entire history of German
military units, including the names of officers and German equipment and
tactics. They were taught interrogation techniques, as well as how to kill
quickly.

There were even U.S. soldiers impersonating German troops, complete with
German uniforms, cardboard German tanks and even a Nazi rally at a camp
hall. War games startled more than one Maryland farmer who thought the
invasion had already taken place.

By D-Day in 1944, Ritchie boys, Michaels among them, were among the
thousands of GIs who hit Omaha Beach in the Normandy invasion and muscled
through France, interrogating captured German POWs. Others, like Werner
Angress, parachuted behind enemy lines. Parloff first went to England, to
be trained in psychological warfare; he ended up in Aachen, the first
German town to fall to Allied forces, where his team conducted the first
survey of German citizens. The study became a model for the Allied
"denazification" program.

Attached in teams of six to combat divisions at or near front lines, the
Ritchie boys were armed. Michaels' team had a 30-caliber machine gun
mounted to their jeep.

But their real weapons were typewriters, on which they drafted swift
reports of enemy activities. Even then, it was dangerous.

Lewen, who broadcast appeals to surrender in German, he dodged blasts
aimed at his loudspeakers.

If war was hell, the Ritchie boys did their jobs, sometimes with humor.

Stern and fellow interrogator Fred Howard played cat and mouse with German
POWs, who were terrified of Russians. Stern would disguise himself as
"Kommissar Krukov," cursing in broken German. Howard played the role of
the good cop and "rescued" the prisoner from "Krukov."

Their creativity, however, always adhered to the Geneva Convention. When
hearing of the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Michaels
and other Ritchie boys were shocked.

"People have forgotten basic truths," he says.

At least once, their information was ignored, allowing Germans to break
through Allied lines in the Battle of the Bulge, disguised as Americans.

Speaking English with German accents proved dangerous. One Ritchie boy was
fatally shot by a guard when he responded with the password in a German
accent.

There were other dangers -- such as of capture by German troops,
especially since dog tags indicated religious faith.

At times, being Jewish in their situation, Parloff says, was just
"different."

At Nordhausen, a slave labor camp he helped liberate, Parloff found
inmates so completely brutalized that he could not identify with them as
human beings, let alone fellow Jews.

"One of them climbed up on a huge pile of ashes to show me, saying, 'I am
standing on a pile of Jewish ashes.' I shouted at him to get off. When I
got up to speak to them, I started speaking in German. Then I stopped and
decided I would speak in Yiddish. But to my utter astonishment, I had
completely forgotten the words. ... I'd blanked it out. I was no longer
Jewish, not like that."

After the war, the Ritchie boys picked up their lives, just as millions of
GIs did. But they did it with their own flair.

Lewen became a noted painter, though the war forever changed his art.
Parloff became chief of the psychotherapy research at the National
Institute of Mental Health. Stern became a distinguished professor of
German literature at Wayne State University. Howard became a businessman
in New York City and the inventor of L'eggs pantyhose. Another Ritchie
boy, Richard Schifter, represented the United States on the U.N. Security
Council.

Michaels had a distinguished law career, first as an Alameda County public
defender and then as an administrative law judge and chief counsel for the
California Department of Social Services.

With his Stuttgart, Germany-born linguist wife, he raised two sons and
they now have two grandchildren.

Michaels' once lush head of dark brown hair is thin and graying. But he
still has a gleam in his eye and a way of peering at you, as if to make a
point.

"Ninety percent of these refugees were Jewish," he says. "Yet most of them
didn't view this as an intellectual vengeance against the Third Reich.
Instead, they served effectively and went home, and no one talked about
it. But we did do something that made a tiny bit of difference."

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)