August 12




USA:

Claude Lanzmann's tribute to historian and Shoah specialist Raul Hilberg,
who died Monday.

For a long time, Raul Hilberg's great book, "The Destruction of the
European Jews," was known only to a few specialists. The time was probably
not yet ripe. The historiography of the Holocaust, which we now call the
Shoah, is complicated, and a certain number of elements were required in
order for the Nazi extermination of European Jews to appear in all its
scope and specificity. When I began my work on what was to become the film
"Shoah" in 1973, I had never heard of Raul Hilberg. A small group of
Israeli academics working at the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, where I
began my research, were the first to talk to me about his work. Only one
of them had read the entire book and the two others had incomplete
knowledge of it. So I went and got a copy of the book, which then existed
in an American edition only. The text was in very tight print, published
in two columns, and there was an almost physical difficulty to read it. I
began to plunge into it as though seized by a holy terror.

At that time, there were only a very few works on the subject apart
from the one written slightly earlier by Gerhard Reitlinger, and, in
France, Lon Poliakov's "The Breviary of Hatred," neither of which boast
the scale of research conducted by Raul Hilberg. Most amazing, perhaps,
was the way he proceeded by [detailing] vertical geological sections of
that process of annihilation that stretched from 1933 to 1945. They don't
observe the chronology, but show how the destruction of people is always
accompanied by that of their assets: the confiscation or "Aryanization" of
the latter, right up to the ripping out of gold teeth after the gassings.
He showed the branding, segregation, ghettoization, etc. He laid bare the
implacable mechanism of what he held to be a bureaucratic process of
destruction. From the moment the German bureaucracy made it its object, it
could only go all the way, as though carried by its own logic.

Raul Hilberg's work was based solely on German sources. He had spent
years and years pulling apart Third Reich archives, and there were a lot
of them. There were those, for example, of Himmler's statistician, a
certain Koherr, who noted everything: the number of gold teeth ripped out,
the number of rings, jewels, etc. taken from all the people exterminated
in the death camps in Poland, but he didn't have their names. From that
point of view, Auschwitz was a special case. Written German sources were
extremely rich, also showing the internal struggles between the Wehrmacht
and the Nazi party. Thus, the Army's General Inspectorate complained
bitterly because they needed Jewish labor, which was often the most
qualified - furriers, boot-makers, helmet-makers, etc. - in the Soviet
Union, but Himmler and the Nazis had ordered its systematic liquidation.
In Vilna, all the dentists were Jewish and all had been killed, but later,
when German soldiery had raging toothaches, that posed terrible problems.

Raul Hilberg searched through all that, related it with precision,
and, moreover, he was very hard, even violent, on the role of the "Jewish
Councils" (Judenrat) the Nazis set up in the ghettos. As far as he was
concerned, those men, especially the Councils' presidents, were nothing
other than collaborators.

It took me months to get through this formidable, magnificent,
monstrous book. Hilberg was a man of details and that's what I especially
liked. The first time that he appears in "Shoah," after almost three hours
of film, he says, "All along, during my work, I never began with the big
questions because I feared inadequate answers." That has always been my
own attitude also. I only met him for the first time two years later, in
1975, during a historians' colloquium in New York. There were many other
excellent people, eminent historians from Israel, the United States, and
one or two Germans, but he got to the bottom of everything: he was dry in
his analysis, often ironic or even sardonic, while all the others had
these somewhat lyric flights or gave over to pathos. He had a magnificent
voice, a little metallic, like that of Jean-Paul Sartre. He didn't know
anything about me, obviously. I had just completed my first film, "Why
Israel?" but he didn't know it and I told him what I wanted to do: not a
film about the Shoah, but a film that would be the Shoah itself. I asked
him to be one of the protagonists. He didn't tell me yes or no. Even I
didn't know when I would be able to begin to shoot it. In the end, I went
to see him several times in Burlington, Vermont, where he lived. We became
very close. Finally we signed a contract for his participation in the
film. And with that film, I made him change very much also.

In "Shoah," there are witnesses, and that's another way to make what
happened tangible. One may dispute what, for example, the Treblinka
hairdresser relates. That experience deeply modified his way of working
afterwards, and even his outlook. Thus, in the United States, along with
another historian and with a very long introduction, he published the
journal of the president of the Warsaw Judenrat, Adam Czerniakov, who
committed suicide in July 1942 when the first mass deportations to the
Treblinka extermination camp began. Already in "Shoah," where he appears
three times, at the end, he in some way assumes Czerniakov's role,
re-embodying him, understanding him from within. At that point, he
realized all the injustice of his too-categoric first judgment of the
Judenrat representatives. In the successive versions of his book, he
nuances his analysis - all the more so as, in the interval, Isaiah Trunk's
basic work on the Jewish councils had been published on the other side of
the Atlantic.

A work now unanimously recognized, "The Destruction of the European
Jews" has still not been translated into Hebrew. Partly that is due to
rivalry from Israeli historians. They don't appreciate Hilberg, especially
because he had worked exclusively on German documents, but also because he
coldly analyzed an implacable process in which acts of resistance and
heroism were only marginal. Moreover, there was no Jewish witness in his
book and the victims weighed in there very little. That was the great
historic change the film "Shoah" brought to the historiography of the
subject. Finally, the victims spoke - and they weren't just any victims:
deportees from the sonderkommandos ("special commandos") working in the
gas chambers or the crematoria who were present at the final stage of the
process of annihilation and who were direct witnesses of the murder of a
whole people. The only ones with the Nazis. These people were condemned
from the outset, and only a handful of them succeeded in surviving. These
are the people who never say "I" in the film, but only "we." They are the
spokesmen for the dead.

For Raul Hilberg, that was a great shock. He came to see the film when
it came out in Paris in 1985. He saw flesh and blood people. And I believe
that the second part of his work, certain books, such as "Perpetrators,
Victims, Bystanders ..." are a consequence of that film. And it was also
the film that introduced him to the wider public, especially in France.
Afterwards, his book was translated into French, then into many other
languages. That was the time of a swing in public opinion. When he began
working on the Shoah, he was practically alone. Even when I began to make
the film, it was still a subject about which people spoke little. After
the war and for over a quarter of a century, it was also a subject that
interested almost no one in France. I remember a magnificent statement by
Pierre Vidal-Naquet stigmatizing French historiography, which neglected
the subject. We had to wait for a colloquium organized by Franois Furet in
1983 in order for the Shoah's specificity to begin to appear.

For a long time, we spoke only of the suffering of the people in
concentration camps in general, but the now-well-established difference
between the concentration camps and the extermination camps did not
appear. Time is necessary for the unveiling of the truth. The further
distant an event of this scope becomes in time, the more we succeed in
taking its measure and understanding it in all its intensity and
strangeness. That was impossible in 1945. At that time, there were no
instruments for understanding what the escapees reported, and they
themselves could only speak of what they had experienced. There was a very
long process of discovery and description in which Raul Hilberg played a
foundational and essential role.

(source: Claude Lanzmann is a film director, notably of "Shoah," and is
director of the journal "Les Temps modernes."-----Truthout.org)



USA//TEXAS:

WILLIAM & ROSALIE: PART I

The love story of a Dallas couple who survived the Holocaust embodies an
important lesson about hate



They met at a dance in Krakow, the ancient cultural heart of Poland.
Rosalie Baum was 17, the daughter of a successful businessman who supplied
firewood to restaurants and candy factories. William Schiff was 21. His
father owned a barber/beauty shop.

Rosalie loved dances and the powdered-sugar Napoleons sold by
confectioners. William was absorbed by bicycle races and that newfangled
device, the radio. They were two Jewish kids who had the whole world ahead
of them.

Suddenly, the streets of Krakow were filled with German soldiers. They
bottled up the city's Jews in the ghetto and began harassing, beating and
starving those they did not kill or ship off to the forced labor camps.

Rosalie's father fled eastward better the Russians than the Nazis and
William's retreated into a private world of anguish. When Rosalie and
William married, he became, de-facto, the man of both families.

Eventually, their families were sent to death camps. Later, the couple
were sent to the Plaszow forced labor camp. They were soon separated.
Rosalie was packed into a boxcar and sent to a camp near Czestochowa.
Frantic and unable to learn the whereabouts of his wife, William smuggled
himself aboard a prisoners' train bound for Auschwitz. Neither knew if the
other was alive.

Years later, when William and Rosalie's son, Michael, searched for someone
to tell his parents' story, he turned to Dallas writer Craig Hanley.

The resulting book, William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony, won first
place in a manuscript competition last year at the Mayborn Literary
Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest. It will be published this
month by the University of North Texas Press. William Schiff calls it "a
love story." It is that, but it is also a moral parable that, in these
times of heightened racial tension, says Mr. Hanley, "we would be foolish
to ignore."

This, the first of two excerpts, begins in the death camps. The second
excerpt will be published next Sunday.

Outside the front gate at Auschwitz, a dead man is bound to a post with
ropes around his chest, thighs and throat. He wears dull gray pajamas with
fat navy stripes. Over his heart, an upside-down yellow triangle points to
a hole in his pajama top that matches the hole in his back. From these
holes, a gallon of dark stain has drained into the uniform. While rows of
bald prisoners file past the dead man, a live orchestra on a bandstand
plays an upbeat march.

On a sparkling fall day in 1943, William stumbles into this regimented
system, jumping down from a boxcar into gummy ankle-deep mud and a crowd
of barking guards. Seven thousand Death Head soldiers work at Auschwitz,
and half of them seem to be on duty this day.

"The guards beat us through the fence into a compound and made us strip in
a shower facility," he says.

"I was standing there naked with an envelope folded up in my hand. There
were three little photos in it one of Rose, one of my mom, one of my
sister Dorothy. A guard told me to give it to him. I hesitated for half a
second and he punched me in the mouth and took it away.

"We got our tattoos in another room from prisoners sitting behind tables.
A little guy dipped his needle in ink and branded me like an animal.
Number 774248. The barbers shaved our heads and bodies and we had our
pictures taken and went into the showers where they made us get into tubs
of strong-smelling chemicals. This dip killed lice."

Cloth badges on every prisoner's jacket and right pant leg help the guards
figure out how much violence to dish out. Common criminals who can pretend
to be of Aryan ancestry get a green badge and generally suffer the least
abuse. William gets the yellow badge that marks him as a Jew, an eminently
expendable creature, a punching bag at every guard's disposal. Another
prisoner tells him they are considered political prisoners because Hitler
has spun his recent invasion of Russia as a crusade against
"Judeo-Bolshevism."

"The guards took us to Block 1," William says. "This was the temporary
housing block run by a German criminal. The SS shipped this guy out of a
prison in their country where he was doing hard time and brought him to
Poland to supervise foreign prisoners.

"The guards woke us up with shouting very early every morning. Prisoners
would go outside for roll call, and we were counted over and over to make
sure nobody had escaped. We'd get a slice of bread and a cup of dark water
they called coffee.

"On the fifth morning we were standing outside, and they called my number.
It's hard for your brain to get used to the fact that it's really you they
want when they shout out 'Seven-seven-four-two-four-eight!'

"They called some more numbers and we formed lines five across and marched
to Block 4. This was our permanent assignment. Our new boss was inside,
another German gangster with a barrel chest and the same kind of wooden
bat. Right away, he clubbed a skinny old guy unconscious and said, 'That's
how it works around here when I'm in a good mood.' "

One hundred prisoners live in Block 4. The occupancy limit is enforced by
selections every morning. For every hardy new arrival, a worn-out worker
must go.

"A guy told me there was another camp close by where they burned people in
ovens," William says. "That's where the smoke came from that stank up the
whole countryside. The abundance of this smoke scared me to death. At
Plaszow you knew your odds weren't good, but at Auschwitz they sorted out
so many people you had no chance at all. The gangster could only keep a
hundred men, but new trains came in every day and new faces kept showing
up at the door. So if he didn't like you or you got too skinny you went to
the ovens or he beat you to death. After you saw him beat a few people to
death you got smart. Smart people avoided attention at all cost."

At roll call one morning the new men get their first duty assignments.
William and four others are pulled out of the ranks to join a waiting
column of 15.

The prisoners proceed south to the small village of Raisko and the
Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute, where different medical corps departments
study serums, bacteria and war chemistry. The first thing William notices
is that the Hygiene Institute has no windows.

"They led us to a super-clean room and told us to sit in a row of chairs
against the wall. After half an hour, a doctor wearing glasses and a white
coat came in with an assistant to take our temperature and heart rate.

"Dr. Meisel said he was Jewish, too. He told me how he had been taken
prisoner and assigned to his job to create serums that could some day help
a lot of people.

"Then he gave everybody a shot.

"We marched back to Block 4, and the next morning one of the guys who took
a shot was too sick to get out of his bunk. The rest of us marched back to
Raisko and lined up in the same room for another round of shots. When Dr.
Meisel came out he told the guard that his assistant was sick and he
wanted me as a replacement. The Russian kid who was sitting in the chair
next to me got my shot and died half an hour later from violent seizures.
A boy not older than 16."

The hospital job keeps William warm while men on construction, road and
farm crews falter in the snow. In his third month, he starts to see men
sorted out for the ovens who look arguably healthier than he does. One
morning the guards make the prisoners stand in the rain for three hours,
and William picks up the kind of sore throat that can get a man turned
into smoke. He keeps losing weight and his chest muscles have all but
melted away. Nobody is getting their allotted calories because kitchen
workers and deliverymen steal the prisoners' meat and vegetables.

Late one overcast afternoon, William walks past the motor pool adjacent to
the Hygiene Institute. A truck pulls up, and the driver and his helper
start unloading their goods. From a safe distance, as inconspicuously as
possible, William sees the two men carry six sides of beef into a meat
locker in the garage bay.

"This meat was for SS guards and officers. I knew right away that if I
could get a job in the garage I'd have a chance to make it through the
war.

"Dr. Meisel recommended me to the garage administrator. When I was sure
this job was stable I went and knocked on the big gangster's bedroom door.
He gave me a hard look. I took my cap off and said, 'Excuse me, Herr Room
Senior. I hope you don't mind, but I think I have a way to provide you
with real meat on a regular basis.'

"I said I thought his tailor could make me a pair of tight underpants with
a pocket on the bottom between the legs. This idea sold him. The tailor
measured me and made a perfect garment out of a sheet that night.

"That afternoon I snuck into the locker and used a screwdriver to hack off
a flap of meat, almost a pound. I smuggled it back and the gangster had
his cook fry it in his bedroom and let me eat some with him. When he was
done he said, 'Okay, Jew, what do you want?'

"The next morning he walked me over to the soldier who was in charge of
the roll call. He said, 'This is my Jew and I need him for chores in the
block. Can we excuse him from the counts?' The soldier said, sure, no
problem.

"And that was it. For 13 months I stole meat from the locker and fed this
murderer. Once he needed me my life changed. Getting exempted from
selections is the main reason I survived Auschwitz."

William leaves the garage one afternoon and enters the Hygiene Institute
to sneak in a quick visit with Dr. Meisel. He can't find his protector in
the deserted halls or laboratories and assumes the entire staff has been
called up to the main camp. He hears an abrupt high-pitched scream.

"The door was cracked and I looked in. Two doctors were cutting on a
Russian girl with a saw, taking off her forearm with no anesthesia. They
already had her hand off. It was on a tray. The girl was tied to the table
and struggled until she fainted. She may have been 12 years old and her
blood was all over their smocks and the table. As soon as they sawed the
forearm off they started to stitch the hand to the stump of her elbow. I
went outside and threw up.

"That afternoon I hacked meat off a side of beef and smuggled it back to
the block as usual. I wish I could say I had no appetite but after five
years of being treated worse than animals we stayed pretty focused on soup
and bread, soup and bread. Survival was our obsession. It's an awful,
awful feeling."

For 15 months, this black hole is William's home. Every day, the bell
wakes the men and the work details form their ranks of five. Every day,
the orchestra plays a sprightly march from a short song list that never
changes.

At 10:30 one morning there's an intense drone overhead. Soon, flak
barrages start breaking in the clouds. Gun stations in Krakow and Katowice
are trying to knock down the Fifth Bomb Wing of the U.S. 15th Air Force.
The Flying Fortresses pass through relatively unmolested and dump 300 tons
of bombs on the I.G. Farben synthetic oil plant just a few miles east of
the main camp.

In Block 4 that night, the prisoners debate the significance of the raid.
One says he hopes the Allies will return and bomb every inch of the camp.
It will mean death, he admits, but a fast, clean death and justice.

The gangster has never been much of a talker, but around Hanukkah he
announces, "Hitler is going to be in New York soon. The Fuhrer has a new
weapon. He's taking the battle right to Roosevelt's door."

Stretched in his bunk that night, William is depressed.

"I thought, well, it's all over now. The madman is going to take over the
whole world. That's the kind of information vacuum we lived in. I believed
the Block Elder. And I was crushed. We were all counting on America. It
was our ace in the hole."


Rosalie's started her mantra. "This had a beginning, so it has to have an
end. This had a beginning, so it has to have an end."

Incantation doesn't defuse the stress. Today may really be the end. Rumors
about death camps have gone around. The soldiers cram people into the cars
and slam the door. The engine lurches, the couplings rattle and the wheels
start clacking on the tracks.

Two days, two nights. No water or food. After an eternity in limbo, the
doors fly open and the drill begins with the standard harangue. Out,
damned Jews, stinking Jews, filthy Jews. More big dogs, more fists
cracking whips outside another barbed wire fort. The women blink in the
sun while a new name circulates. It sounds like CHOM-sta-ho. The barracks
at the main bullet factory in the Polish town of Czestochowa are jammed to
the rafters with new arrivals.

"We were so skinny and hungry and demolished we started to believe it
didn't make any difference if we lived or died," she says. "The weaker we
got, the more abuse they gave us. That winter the guards would make you
stand outside all day barefoot in buckets of ice water.

"After we settled into the routine we got a morning bread ration. Somebody
said, 'Today is Yom Kippur,' so I decided to fast. I was hoping that if I
didn't eat, maybe there would be a miracle. Help would come from above and
this hell would suddenly disappear.

"I didn't want anybody to steal my piece of bread so I tucked it inside my
blouse. By the time the fast ended at sundown I thought I might as well
save it a little longer. That way I'd have a big feast for breakfast, two
whole pieces of bread for breakfast. When I pulled it out the next morning
the lice on my precious treasure look like cake frosting. I brushed them
off as best I could and ate it anyway."

Rosalie's supervisor is more vindictive than ever when the workers are
assigned duties at the new factory. Her punches to the back focus on the
kidneys and lungs so much Rosalie wonders if these cause the blood she now
spits up abundantly.

Coming back from the latrine one night, she rounds the corner of a
barrack. A cluster of flames on the ground catches her eyes, a small fire
built close to a barrack wall. Beside it, four women kneel over a body
stretched out facedown in the snow.

"One of them had a sharp piece of metal she must have smuggled out of the
factory. She used this to cut meat off the dead girl's bottom. I saw her
hand the pieces of meat to the others and they put it on twigs and cooked
it over the fire. The strangest thing was the silence. Nobody said a word.
I stood there watching them from around the corner and thought to myself,
well, it can't get worse than this. I was wrong."

A few weeks later she walks past a fence by the men's barracks. One of the
men on the other side calls her by name, a childhood friend from Krakow.

"His name was Jonathan, and his mother was one of my mom's best friends.
He and his brother played kickball in the park with me and my sister Lucy.
He said, 'Come by here tomorrow. A friend of mine has bread and I think I
can get you a piece.'

"That was great news because I was getting weaker and starting to spit
blood every day. I went to bed happy that night. When I came back the next
day, he looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he tossed a
huge piece of bread and half a carrot over the fence. I picked these up
out of the snow. I said, 'Thank you, Jonathan! Thank you!'

"We didn't know an SS man had heard us talking the day before. He was
waiting behind a barrack with some guards. They grabbed Jonathan and
hanged him at roll call the next morning. After this I had a complete
nervous breakdown and got very sick with dysentery.

"All night every night I had to run back and forth to the latrine. On the
way back from one trip I stopped and leaned against a wall. An older man
came walking by, a new prisoner. He stopped and stared at me. I felt
ashamed to be making such a spectacle but I couldn't stop crying.

"He took his cap off and said, 'My God, what can become of a human being!
I knew your father. I know what kind of home you come from. You had
everything. Now you have to stand in this place like this. Wait here.'

"He went away and came back with a whole apple. He gave it to me and said,
'Your father was a great man.'

"Then he went away, and I never saw him again.

"The apple stabilized my system a little and that night I started thinking
about my dad. He used his money to help people, especially the poor. He
always brought strangers home and fed them and he supported a synagogue
and several rabbis and scholars. When he walked to the synagogue to pray
he ignored the Polish children and adults who threw rocks at him.

"The day the war started he came into my room for one last lecture. He
squeezed my hands and said, 'Remember how I lived my life, Rose. Remember
how important good deeds were to me.'

"I would not be here today if I didn't meet the man who brought me the
apple and the memories of my father."

Next Sunday: As the war ends, William searches for his beloved Rosalie.


Excerpted from William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony, by William and
Rosalie Schiff and Craig Hanley. Published in August 2007 by the
University of North Texas Press. Copyright 2007 W-R Schiff Literary Works
LLC and Craig Hanley. For more, visit www.unt.edu/untpress.

(source: Dallas Morning News)



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


USA//CONNECTICUT:

Learning of new Holocaust victims


Martin Meyer, who fled his hometown of Bibra, Germany, in 1940 to escape
the Holocaust, never knew what happened to his grandfather, who stayed
behind.

Meyer said he assumed his grandfather, who was 74 when Martin and his
parents fled to Holland, died of natural causes, joining his wife who
predeceased him.

But Martin Meyer, now his grandfather's age when they parted 67 years ago,
recently learned his grandfather, Josef Meyer, met a more gruesome fate.
Martin Meyer returned to Bibra in May for the dedication of a memorial to
Bibra residents who were killed in the Holocaust.

Meyer said he expected to find his uncle Oskar's name on the monument, but
was surprised to find Josef Meyer's name etched into the stone as well.

"It was a shock, it really was I never realized he was taken away to a
concentration camp," Meyer said in a recent interview in his Fieldcrest
Drive home. "To find out my grandfather was taken away by the Nazis, I'm
telling you.

"I thought he had passed away after we left, but apparently not, because,
according to this, they took him away," Meyer said.

Rabbi Daniel Satlow, from Congregation Beth El, said it's not unusual for
people to discover decades later that their relatives died in the
Holocaust.

"More often than not, people don't know what happened," Satlow said. "When
people left Germany or Poland or wherever, it was often in great haste.
Second of all, people often were scattered and left at different times,
whenever they could."

"People were hidden with families, assumed new identities. Sometimes,
you're trying to find someone and wouldn't even know where to start,"
Satlow said.

Jews swept up in the Nazi reign of terror didn't survive, and knowledge of
their fates often died with them, Satlow said. "Older people might have
been difficult to travel, too rooted to leave. Then every Jewish person is
gone. Who do you ask?" Satlow said.

Meyer said he only vaguely remembers his grandfather because he was a
young boy when he and his parents, Else and Nathan Meyer, fled to Holland
and, eventually, New York City.

Meyer said he mostly remembers having to leave his school when he was 8
years old to go to a Jewish school in an adjacent town.

Meyer first learned that his uncle was killed in the Holocaust about 15
years ago. Oskar Meyer had hidden in a neighbor's house until someone
turned him in and Nazis came to get him in 1943, Meyer said.

But Bibra is trying to make amends, something Satlow said is not uncommon
in Germany today.

The town square in Bibra was renamed after Meyer's uncle 15 years ago, and
Meyer proudly points to a photograph that shows a street sign identifying
the square as "Oskar Meyer Platz."

"Platz" is the German word for "Place," Meyer said.

In May, Meyer was selected to help Heidrun Kellermann, a Bibra government
official, unveil his hometown's monument to Holocaust victims because he
was the only one born in the town.

Nearly the whole town turned out for the ceremony, Meyer said. "I was
shocked when I saw so many people, and they wined us and dined us," he
said.

The monument lists the names of 16 Bibra residents killed in the Holocaust
and includes the inscription, "Thy blessing is upon they people. For the
hortative commemoration of our Jewish fellow citizens, who have been
expelled, displaced and murdered during the years 1933-1945."

A gravestone for Meyer's grandmother is in a cemetery near his boyhood
home, but the monument serves as the gravestone for Meyer's uncle and
grandfather.

(source: Connecticut Post)