Change of Air Urgently Recommended

FROM THE PRESIDENT'S DESK

“Change of air urgently recommended.”  Those were the words my great-uncle Rudi Kolisch sent by telegram from Florence to my grandparents Arnold and Trude Schoenberg in Berlin on May 16, 1933.   They packed a suitcase, boarded a train to Paris, and never returned. 

In a way, by being early targets of the Nazis, my grandparents turned out to be some of the lucky ones.  They escaped while escape was still possible.  But for those who stayed behind, the routes of departure soon closed.  My grandfather’s brother Heinrich, an opera singer, died in Salzburg from injuries suffered in the custody of the Gestapo.  His sister Ottilie managed to survive the war in Berlin, protected by a non-Jewish partner, but her daughter Inge and her husband were shot by SS as they fled their hiding places during the fire-bombing of Dresden near the end of the war.  My grandfather’s first cousin Arthur, an engineer who directed the Munich electric company, and his wife Eva died in Theresienstadt.  Their daughter was killed in Jasenovac, the Croatian concentration camp.  This was the sad fate of those who were left behind.  

Arnold, Trude, and Nuria Schoenberg
arrive in New York in 1933

When my grandfather fled from Berlin to Paris in 1933, he immediately met with Zionist leaders, including the visiting Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of American Jewry, to alert them to the perils facing Jews in Germany.  In large part his appeals fell on deaf ears.  Foregoing an invitation to attend the Zionist Congress in Prague, my grandfather came to America in the fall of 1933, and gave speeches at Jewish organizations about the situation in Germany.  For the next five years, he drafted numerous letters, essays and speeches warning of the calamity that was about to befall the Jews of Europe.  This culminated in a lengthy essay he entitled “ A Four Point Program for Jewry,” completed in Los Angeles in October 1938, just days before the infamous Kristallnacht.

“Is there room in the world for almost 7,000,000 people?” he asked.  “Are they condemned to doom?  Will they become extinct? Famished? Butchered?” With a call on Jewish leaders to unify towards the goal of rescuing the Jews of Europe, he pleaded “What have they done to rescue the first 500,000 people who must migrate or die?”  Sadly, he could not get the essay published.  Even the author Thomas Mann rejected it for his magazine in Switzerland.

Arnold Schoenberg

There are many remarkable things about my grandfather’s essay, not the least of which is that this earliest known prediction of the Holocaust was written in Los Angeles, by someone who had fled Nazi Germany five years earlier.  Many people still describe the Holocaust as “unimaginable.”  Yet the Nazis themselves not only imagined it, but then carried it out.  The extermination of the Jews was in fact not unimaginable.  It should not be surprising then that there were those with foresight and fantasy who saw what was coming, who understood where the Nazi ideology would lead.

The future will always pose challenges.  Learning how to recognize them in advance is one of the reasons we study history.  How was it that someone like my grandfather could see what was coming while so many others did not?  Can we learn from his example how to recognize the signs of an impending catastrophe, and, more importantly, how to try to prevent one?  With awareness and quick action, my grandfather managed to save himself, but he could not stop the tragedy.  He could not even persuade some of his own family to escape in time.  There is still much that we need to learn before we can say with confidence that we know how to avoid and prevent the “unimaginable” from ever occurring again.

 

 

 

 

The Czech Torah

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which begins Tuesday May 14th at sundown, marks the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai.  

The Torah pictured here, which is on view in Room One of the Museum,  is from the town of Kostelec nad Orlici, a small town east of Prague, in the Czech Republic.  The scroll was inscribed in 1830.  None of the people who used it could ever imagine it would play two important historical roles:  together with other objects from Bohemia and Moravia, it helps disprove the myth that the Nazis preserved Jewish objects in order to create a museum of them once they had obliterated Jewish people from the Earth.  And it stands as an example of the efforts individuals made to save their heritage even when they could not save themselves. 

Although the Nazi regime intended to create the 'Museum of the Extinct Race', they never attempted to salvage the thousands of scrolls from Bohemia and Moravia that some people think they salvaged.  On the contrary, a group of Prague Jews recovered thousands of Jewish religious texts and ritual objects in an unprecedented effort. 

These people recognized the Nazis would likely loot and desecrate many religious objects of great historical value.  They developed a plan to persuade the Nazis to allow them to collect and transfer the contents of the deserted provincial synagogues and congregations to the Jewish central museum in Prague.  There was perhaps no better location in Central Europe to execute the plan.  The first Jewish Museum in Prague was founded in 1906.  When the Germans occupied Prague in March 1939, the Museum held 800 objects in its collection.  For whatever reason, the Nazis accepted the Jewish plan.

In June 1942, scrolls from 136 Jewish communities began arriving along with many other artifacts.  The museum staff faced the tremendous task of cataloging over 200,000 items.  The Prague Jewish community appointed Dr. Josef Polak, a professional musicologist and former director of a museum in Kosice, the capital of eastern Slovakia, to direct this ambitious cataloging project.  Dr. Polack and his staff of fifty experts worked twelve hours a day in an oppressive and grim reality.  While they raced to save Jewish holy objects, the Jews themselves were disappearing.  Dr. Polak and his staff continually lost curators to ongoing deportations.

They created 101,000 cataloging cards.  Those cards are now the core source of information in the modern Jewish Museum in Prague.  We can regard their work as an act of defiance, not only for themselves but for posterity.  These individuals used any means available to prolong their own existence; not only for their own good but so they would better preserve and protect Jewish religious and cultural artifacts.

The Torah scroll on display here has been loaned to our Museum by the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, located in London.  The Trust rescued 1564 Torah scrolls and 400 Torah binders, many of which were preserved by the Jewish Central Museum, in Prague.

As for Dr. Polak, he joined the resistance movement.  The Gestapo arrested him in August, 1944.  In 1945, he disappeared in Auschwitz without a trace.

 

Mother’s Day Memento

Ela Weissberger performed as a child in Brundibár, a children's opera originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. 

While in the camp, Ela created the crest pictured here from a scrap of wood she found.  She burned out the illustrations with a small magnifying glass. She gave the crest to her mother on Mother’s Day in Terezin.  We were honored to welcome Ela to the Museum this week.

80 Years Ago: Remembering the Nazi Book Burnings

The Nazis made book burning an
ideological ritual.

The nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet and author Heinrich Heine wrote: “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned.” In Nazi Germany, his prophecy came true.

On the night of May 10, 1933, thousands of Nazi university students and many professors stormed universities, libraries and bookstores in twenty German cities. They removed hundreds of thousands of books and cast them onto bonfires. In Berlin, where 20,000 books were burned, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels shouted to the crowd “The age of hairsplitting Jewish intellectualism is dead. . . . The past lies in flames.”

Books by German Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Max Brod, Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig were thrown on the pyre. Also burned were books by non-Jewish authors considered hostile to the Nazi regime, such as Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann, his brother Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque and Berthold Brecht.   

German youth participate in book burning.

American authors were included too: Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis - even Helen Keller, who had overcome deafness and blindness to become a best-selling author. When told of the book burnings, Keller said “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.”

Members of the SA and supporters of the
National Socialist regime burn books.

Book Your Summer Museum Tour Today!

Bring your camp, church or synagogue group to LAMOTH this summer. Tours are available daily from 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM.

Participants will learn about the Holocaust by touring the Museum's galleries and meeting a first-hand witness of history: Holocaust survivors.

Please click here to make your reservation or call (323) 456-5085. We look forward to seeing your group at the Museum!

 

 

Jewish Resistance In World War II

The following was written by Holocaust survivor and LAMOTH speaker Zenon Neumark.  He presented it to the ADL Holocaust Education Institute Workshop in  Los Angeles in February 2013.

Zenon Neumark

The Jewish Resistance to the Shoah in WWII is a controversial subject. It was - and still is - widely perceived that the Jews went passively to their death.  Some historians, most notably Hanna Arendt and Raul Hilberg (in works published in the 60s) have described this resistance as “pitifully small… incredibly weak… and essentially ineffective.” Some said that the Jews went to their death like sheep...

These conclusions were premature and misperceived. They were reached at a time when the world was overwhelmed with the tragedy of the Holocaust and when little was known about Nazi oppression and Jewish Resistance or the lack of it. But today, there is ample evidence that the Jews did fight back, and in far more places and in more ways than the world will ever know!

There are reasons why the evidence came slowly, and why some will remain forever unknown. First, most of those who fought back did not survive. The few that did, thought little of their heroism or the need to record it. Second, although the Nazis meticulously reported their triumphs and defeats – they almost totally omitted cases of Jewish resistance. There was also a lack of a full understanding of the nature of the diabolical German oppression and the subhuman conditions of the Jews. How do you start an armed revolt without arms? How do you escape from a Ghetto or a camp when you are told that the remaining members of your family will be killed? What do you do when you are told that you are going to a place with better working conditions and more food when in reality you’re being sent to your death?

Resistance to any Occupying Power by unarmed civilians was always difficult. For the Jews under the Nazis, it was especially so. Jews were confined and isolated from the outside world and forced to hard work on a starvation diet. They had no leadership; Jewish leaders were the first to be killed. In Poland, the only potential source for weapons for the Jews was the Polish Underground, but it was reluctant to help, often hostile.

And yet, the Jews DID fight back! Did sabotage on a large scale! Tens and hundreds of thousands did escape!

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Jews in front of German soldiers.

Besides the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 when a mere few hundred of young Jews defied the German war machine and withstood them for weeks, there were over 100 other armed rebellions: in Ghettos like Bialystok, Lachwa and Wilno and in concentration camps like Sobibor and Treblinka. In practically every Ghetto and every Camp, including Auschwitz, there was a Jewish underground that carried out acts of resistance. There were thousands of Jewish partisans in the forests of Eastern Europe.

There were acts of sabotage at places of work, like mismatching guns and bullets or sawing up sleeves of uniform jackets. Jews also disobeyed Nazi laws on a massive scale, from not wearing the armbands to clandestine schooling to illegal presses and home-made radios. Hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped to the Soviet Union and by hiding on the Aryan Side. Most of these actions were punishable by death.  On the Aryan Side, in Poland, Jews also participated in non-Jewish resistance movements under false Polish identities. In Warsaw, I was a courier for the Jewish ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) delivering arms and ammunition for Jewish partisans, and money, medicines and clothing to Jews in hideouts. At the same time I was also  working for two Polish Groups: Miecz i Plug and Gwardia Ludowa.

To this day, new and important acts of Resistance are still coming to light.                                                                                                                         

An example of such a case is a Jewish resistance cell in the center of Berlin. Right under the noses of the Gestapo, a Jewish underground, called the Baum Gruppe, was active as late as 1942-43. Then, 27 of their members were caught, convicted and executed. Because the trial took place in what later became East Berlin, details about the group came to light only after the fall of East Germany.                                                                                                              

Here is another case in point. In 1941-42, in the Tomaszow Ghetto, 12 youngsters, 16 to 18 years old, formed a resistance group, AKIVA. I was one of them. After examining our options we decided that to oppose the Nazis we must first escape. Two girls, Tusia Fuchs and Halina Rubinek, were sent to Krakow to make contact with the underground there and to prepare for our escape. After a few initial returns, the two girls did not come back. We concluded that they had perished - a most likely occurrence in those days. The war ended and decades passed. But then, one day in 2009, I was contacted, via Skype, by a Polish historian at Lodz University who knew what had happened to the two girls. In Krakow, they joined the local ZOB and on Dec. 23, 1942, participated in a joint Polish-Jewish armed attack on a Nazi hang-out, the Cyganeria Café, where they killed 7 and wounded 13 Nazi officers.  A few days later, both girls were apprehended and thrown into the Montelupich jail. Tusia was tried and executed in the backyard of the jail; Halina was send to Auschwitz where she perished.

Their fate is known only because another woman in their cell, Justyna (Gusta Draenger), made notes on scraps of paper and smuggled them to the outside. Justyna died but her diary survived. It was published as Justina’s Diary. Without her smuggled scraps of paper, this act of resistance would not be known.

A Jewish fighter

In another act of passive resistance, I took part. In December 1943, two young fugitives from the Blizyn concentration camp, Ignaz and Stanley, came to Warsaw to hide on the Aryan Side as Catholic Poles. But there was a problem. Ignaz, had a stereotypically Jewish appearance and Stanley, spoke Polish with a Yiddish accent. In Warsaw, fugitives like them struggled to survive. The Gestapo, Polish Police, and gangs of blackmailers– all hunted them down: some to return them to the Camps; others to rob them of means needed for survival. There were many problems with hiding on the Aryan side but one that was particularly difficult was finding lodging; Poles who were discovered knowingly renting to a Jew would be shot for it.

After struggling for several weeks trying to find lodging and food for them, we found a solution: sending them to Riga, Latvia. The German company I worked for had a branch there and needed workers. Stanley went first, as a scout, to explore if a medical exam –a practice for those sent to work in Germany - was required for Riga. Such an exam was risky and critical because in Europe, only Jews were circumcised. After receiving letters from Stanley that all was OK, we sent others, and then several more. In total, we sent 13 Jews to Riga. In Warsaw they had almost zero chance of survival. In Riga all of them survived!

These are but a few examples of Jewish Resistance and Defiance that are largely unknown.

Elie Wiesel, a writer, an Auschwitz survivor, and a Nobel peace prize winner, observed: The question is not WHY the Jews did not fight but HOW so many did! Tortured, starved, forced into hard labor... how did they find the strength to resist?

70 Years Later: Thoughts On The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

 

From The President's Desk

 

Some Thoughts on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

 

Several years ago I was introduced to Leon Weinstein (who died in 2012 at age 101).  I had just been reading about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in several books while preparing materials for our Museum’s permanent exhibition.  When I heard that it began on April 19, 1943 (and lasted until May 16, 1943), I had to ask him a question. 

 “Was it true,” I asked, “that only sixteen German soldiers were killed?”  It seemed inconceivable to me that an uprising so renowned and revered as a source of Jewish pride could have had so little impact.  After all, thirteen thousand Jews were killed in the final liquidation of the ghetto during the same time and another fifty thousand were captured and deported to extermination camps.  Several hundred thousand ghetto residents had been deported and murdered in the previous year.  In that context, an uprising that killed just sixteen German soldiers didn’t seem worth mentioning.  Without missing a beat, Leon answered me “Well, we killed lots of Jews too.”  He explained that the uprising was as much against the Jewish ghetto police, whose terrible assignment it was to assist the Germans with round-ups, as against the German taskmasters themselves.

 As with all things related to the Holocaust, it gets complicated.  The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was one of the few events after Pearl Harbor that made the front pages of U.S. newspapers.  (The June 4, 1943 headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times read: “Epic Battle of Last Jews of Warsaw Told.”) No doubt there were good reasons for Jews and others to lionize the heroes of the uprising at that time, if only as a way to encourage other revolts inside German territory.  After the war, the uprising was used as evidence of Jewish strength and resolve at a time when Jews in Israel needed it.  In the sea of unending misery that was the Holocaust, the uprising served as an island of respite, a place where Jews could tell a slightly different narrative.
 

 But as we have learned in so many instances, the facts of history often do not fit into a nice narrative.  The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was one of many acts of resistance at a time when resistance was largely futile and often counterproductive.  In some respect, we lose the larger picture when we focus on “heroic” forms of resistance, as if we were spectators to a gladiator match admiring the struggle of those who are condemned to fight to the death.   To be sure, there are lessons to be learned from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, especially from the failure of the world to notice or rescue the Jews as they struggled against their murderous captors.  But I wonder whether it is right to take heart in the heroism of that “epic battle,” whether that really honors the victims (apparently on both sides) who were desperately fighting the Nazis and each other in a battle for survival that none of them could escape.