The Holocaust History – A People's and Survivor History

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A personal depiction of life in Poland set against the Nazi and Soviet takeovers of Europe and their cataclysmic aftermaths. It is the compelling memoir of Alexander Kimel, taking him from a shtetl in the Polish Ukraine to a Nazi ghetto to liberation.It is also the harrowing story of his wife, Eva, whose father is murdered in the “Holocaust by Bullets.” A dialog across generations with narrative written by their son, the book is a rare portrayal of Jewish survivors who remained in Communist Poland after the war.

It is a story of the many challenges they faced and the life they built together after quitting Poland in 1956 for Israel, ultimately emigrating to America. By including the stories of other family members, the book also provides a panoramic view of Polish Jewry before, during, and after the war.

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Use the Code KIMEL20 and get 20% off the book until the end of 2025. Kindle version coming soon!The following excerpt from The Pessimist’s Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope by Alexander Kimel and Martin Kimel shared only with Remember.org. Copyright 2025 Martin Kimel. All Rights Reserved. For questions please contact the author here.

CHAPTER 1

The ShtetlPodhajce was a town forgotten by time, tucked between a high mountain and a large lake, with a horse-drawn fire engine, a half-blind town crier, and one automobile. The huge market square—rynek, in Polish—was the soul of the town.

Here, every Thursday, hundreds of peasants sold their eggs, chickens, and butter and bought their dry goods. At the same time, their horses deposited in the market a huge supply of manure, the sole source of pollution in town.

The only car in the shtetl—when it ran—was a reason for excitement and the pride of the town. When it appeared running at a top speed of fifteen miles per hour, children tried to outrun it and touch this huffing and puffing symbol of modernity.

A mix of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, living in a hateful harmony, inhabited the town; they needed and hated each other. They lived in dilapidated, whitewashed clay huts with flickering kerosene lamps.

The few rich people lived in high, two-story stucco buildings with electric lights and hand-cranked telephones.

The town had an assortment of “celebrities” from all walks of life: B., the half-witted town fool, master of profanity; E., the town’s crazy man; W., the one-handed invalid peddling an antisemitic newspaper; the Burstiner Rebbe, the religious leader, and his gabbai, or business manager, Joel.1

What did the town’s people live on? The Poles owned the land; the Ukrainians toiled on their small lots and on the big estates of the Polish land- owners; and the Jews traded.They traded everything and with everybody and even among themselves. A bushel of wheat worth ten zlotys went through many hands, increasing the price by a whole fifty groshen (half a zloty).

The Jews lived in a close-knit, diverse society. It was comprised of the gevirim—the rich men; the balabatim—the well-to-do citizens; the balmelochis—the tradesmen, the butchers, the shoemakers, the tailors; the shnorrers (“beggars,” in Yiddish)—the market women and the middlemen living from day to day.

Most of the Jews were poor. Even the successful merchants were not millionaires. How much money can you make selling five cents worth of sugar?

Despite the general poverty, life was passable. Entertainment was plentiful, and food was cheap. For fifty groshen, you could buy a pail of fresh cherries; a sack of potatoes was seventy-five groshen; and a live chicken also cost seventy-five groshen.

The only problem was how to earn the needed money. People were known by their trades, which were passed down from generation to generation: “Velve the katzif”—Velve the butcher; “Meir the schnader”—Meir the tailor; “Shloyme the balagule”—Shloyme the coach- man.

There also was no generation gap. There is less room for generations not to understand each other when each generation has the same livelihood.

Martin’s Note: Many people had nicknames unrelated to their professions. Nicknames in shtetls could be brutal,2 and Podhajce was no exception. It seems that many people there got nicknames relating to their worst personal traits. For example, writing in Sefer Podhajce, the yizkor book of Podhajce, Baruch Milch mentions Yehuda the Lo (Judah the “no”), who was referred to as such because he always expressed a negative opinion and stressed the vowel in lo (“no,” in Hebrew).

Milch also tells the story of a shoe wholesaler from Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) who was dunning a Mr. Leon Weiss, a leather and shoe merchant, for late payments. He asked many people in Podhajce where Leon Weiss lived, but nobody recognized the name.

Eventually, he discovered that Weiss was known in the town by his nickname, Leibele Trask—“Leibele the Smack,” because he got upset easily and threatened to “smack” people.3

Apparently, my dad got off easy: he had a nickname related to his Hebrew name, “Shiko” (derived from Joshua). I believe that my grandfather, who was born Leib Hersh, was referred to in Podhajce as Hersh.

There was no television to isolate people from one other, to make them lonely. At six o’clock, the youth of the town provided the shtetl with an unstaged show. The “Corso,” as the sidewalk area around the rynek was called, was full of young couples walking hand in hand.

It was a colorful pageant. The Corso served many purposes. It was a mating place for young people. Here, the town beauties would select their boyfriends.

It was a non-stop fashion show, too; here, a girl named Dziunia would show off her mother’s creative talent in copying the latest fashion journals. Because of this show, some people called Podhajce “the Paris of Galicia.”4

The Jews in the town lived from week to week, and the most important days in the week were Thursdays and Saturdays. Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath, known as Shabbat) was the holy day. Thursday was the day that you earned the money needed to celebrate the Sabbath.

Each Jew, regardless how poor he was, had to observe the Sabbath with a good meal. So, Thursday was a hustling day; the poor men ran around the horse-driven peasant’s carts, trying to trade, buy, or sell while the merchant stood in front of the meager stores hawking brown leather shoes or colorful cottons for dresses.The women had a field day. They were doing the shopping for Saturday’s treats, bargaining with the peasant women selling loaves of yellow butter wrapped in green leaves, or buying noisy chickens, geese, or ducks.

Buying a chicken was a ritual, an art passed down from mother to daughter. First, you had to weigh the chicken, holding it with your right hand, trying to guess its weight.

Then you had to turn the chicken around, take it under your arm, blow off the feathers around the rear and see how much fat the chicken had. After determining that the chicken had a fat rear end, the bargaining process started in earnest.

The trick was to offer a low price and never let the chicken out of your hand. It was a loud ritual: the peasant woman cursing, trying to get the chicken back, the buyer arguing loudly that the chicken had not even one ounce of fat—and the surprised chicken cackling loudly.

My SchoolingLike other Jewish boys, I started my schooling at the age of three. I attended a cheder—a one-room school in which children got religious training. The cheder was really a combination religious school and nursery.

Our teacher, Nusen the Melamed (Nusen the Teacher), taught groups of children, ages three to twelve. When one group of children was taught, the other group played outside, in the small yard.

The melamed used proven, ancient meth- ods of instruction. We repeated in unison the Hebrew words and the Yiddish translation. For example: “Vaydaber Adonai l’Moishe” (“And God spoke to Moses”).5

END OF EXCERPT: For more visit The Pessimist’s Son.

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Use the Code KIMEL20 and get 20% off the book until the end of 2025.Alexander KimelPRAISE“The Pessimist’s Son: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope is a moving chronicle of Polish Jewry that belongs in every archive, in every library, indeed, in every home. But it is much more than that.

In this powerful volume Martin Kimel brings together two extraordinary tales woven into a third inspiring testimony. The stories of his father and mother are told in the aftermath of the radical assault on the soul that defined the Holocaust.

And they are tales of a kind of healing that each soul offers to the other. The Pessimist’s Son is a memorial and a testimony not only to what happened during those days of destruction but, above all, to why it matters—something that is often forgotten.That is what makes this book a memoir of hope, a remembrance for the sake of the future. That is what makes it so urgent to the world we live in today.”

— David Patterson , Hillel A. Feinberg Distinguished Chair in Holocaust Studies , University of Texas at Dallas

“A compelling memoir of Jewish life in Russian occupied Poland in World War 2, the German invasion of Russia and life underground during the ensuing Holocaust of bullets.

Alexander Kimel’s story is interwoven at every step with his son Martin’s magnificent work of narrative nonfiction to provide a wide-angle view with other first-hand accounts and the larger historical context, including the parallel survivor journey of Alexander’s wife, Eva.Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Pessimist’s Son is a riveting testament to the ingenuity and resilience of the human spirit when faced with impossible circumstances. Everyone should read it.”

— Scott Lenga, Author of The Watchmakers

Alexander Kimel was born in Podhajce, Poland (now Pidhaitsi, Ukraine) in 1926. After the war, he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering at the Wrocław Polytechnic University in Poland. In the U.S., he started and ran his own consulting engineering firm. Poems from his award-winning website on the Holocaust have been used in schools, universities and exhibits, widely reprinted, and recited on YouTube. He also contributed a chapter to the anthology, Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust. He died in 2018.

Martin Kimel, the son of Alexander and Eva Kimel, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Law School. He is a securities lawyer in Washington, D.C. and lives in Maryland. He has written on the Holocaust and other topics for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Times of Israel, Forward, Chicago Tribune and many other publications.

“I Cannot Forget”, two poems by Alexander Kimel

Alexander Kimel – Prayer

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We’re releasing this video interview with Richard Lowy, author of “Kalman & Leopold – Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz” and son of Leopold Lowy, on Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – for a reason.

While the January liberation of Auschwitz has become widely recognized internationally, Yom HaShoah remains a distinctly Jewish day of remembrance with deep historical significance.

It is also our 30th anniversary of Remember.org, preserving and sharing the stories of survivors and their children.

Today, on this solemn day of memory and reflection, we remember the extraordinary journey of Kalman and Leopold – two individuals who exemplify what surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz truly meant.When I first encountered their story, narrated to Richard K. Lowy, I was struck by its understated power.

Get “Kalman & Leopold” on AmazonUnlike many Holocaust narratives that have entered our collective consciousness through dramatized films and emotional retellings, this account offers something different – a quiet, clear-eyed testimony of two individuals whose paths crossed in one of history’s darkest corners.

Two Hungarian Boys, Two Sets of TwinsKalman and Leopold were both Hungarian Jews, each born as part of a twin pair. When the Nazi occupation of Hungary began in March 1944, neither knew that their status as twins would both endanger and save them.

The Hungarian deportations happened with stunning efficiency – within weeks, entire communities that had existed for centuries were emptied.

Their residents were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most deportees faced immediate selection upon arrival.

Those deemed unfit for labor – the elderly, young children, pregnant women, the visibly ill – were sent directly to the gas chambers.

But twins were set aside for a different purpose, one that would bring Kalman and Leopold together.

Excerpt from the book shared hereSurviving Mengele’s “Scientific” InterestDr. Josef Mengele had secured for himself a unique position at Auschwitz. While functioning as a camp doctor who participated in selections, he also ran what amounted to a personal research laboratory focused primarily on twins.

What’s often overlooked in discussions of Mengele is that he wasn’t a scientific outlier, but rather the product of a respected academic lineage.

The eugenics movement that shaped his research began in earnest in the 1880s with Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, who coined the term “eugenics” and advocated for “improving” human populations through selective breeding.

By the early 20th century, eugenics had gained scientific legitimacy across Europe and the United States, with research institutes, academic journals, and even laws supporting its principles.

Mengele studied under Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, who in turn had studied under Eugen Fischer, one of Germany’s leading racial anthropologists.

Fischer’s 1913 studies on mixed-race populations in German Southwest Africa provided a scientific veneer for theories of racial hierarchy decades before the Third Reich.

This academic pedigree gave Mengele’s work at Auschwitz a façade of scientific legitimacy that was recognized within German scientific circles of the time.

Far from being a lone madman, Mengele represented the logical, horrific endpoint of ideas that had been developing in respected academic settings for decades.

In our conversations with Holocaust educators, we’ve found that surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz remains one of the less thoroughly documented aspects of the Holocaust.

This makes firsthand accounts like that of Kalman and Leopold particularly valuable to our historical understanding.

As Leopold matter-of-factly noted in his conversations with his son Richard, he sometimes called Mengele the “Angel of Auschwitz” – not out of any reverence, but because being selected for Mengele’s experiments meant not being sent immediately to the gas chambers.The reality of these experiments was far from angelic. Twins in Mengele’s program endured regular blood draws, injections of unknown substances, measurements of every physical feature, and comparative studies of their reactions to diseases.

Finding Each OtherWhat makes the story of Kalman and Leopold unique is that they weren’t related to each other – they each had their own twin siblings.

They were strangers who met through the cruel circumstance of Mengele’s twin program.

In the dehumanizing environment of Auschwitz, where prisoners were reduced to numbers and every aspect of life was designed to break human connection, they formed a bond that would endure for decades.

Their day-to-day survival wasn’t marked by dramatic acts of resistance.

Instead, it consisted of small, consistent gestures of mutual support – sharing food, warning of dangers, providing a moment of distraction through conversation or humor.

When students ask what helped people survive the camps, often these ordinary but crucial human connections provided reasons to continue when all logical reasons were stripped away.

Separation and RediscoveryWhen liberation came in January 1945, Kalman and Leopold lost track of each other amid the chaos of the war’s end.

The postwar years presented their own challenges – displacement, immigration restrictions, the struggle to rebuild lives from nothing, and the often impossible task of locating lost family and friends across a transformed Europe.

For 56 years, they lived separate lives, each carrying memories of their time in Auschwitz and of each other. The odds against their ever reconnecting seemed insurmountable.

Yet through an almost impossible series of coincidences – the airing of a documentary called “Leo’s Journey” about Leopold Lowy’s life – they found each other again after more than half a century.

Their reunion bridges not just physical distance but the psychological expanse of decades lived in the aftermath of trauma.

Why This Account of Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz Matters NowWhen teaching the Holocaust to today’s students, we often struggle with how to present the enormity of the event without overwhelming.

Individual stories like that of Kalman and Leopold offer a way in – they allow us to understand the broader historical context through the experiences of real people who lived through it.

Their account of surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz is particularly valuable because so few of his twin subjects have shared their stories.

Most of Mengele’s subjects did not survive the war, and many who did found it difficult to speak about their experiences.

The matter-of-fact way that Kalman and Leopold describe what happened to them – without sensationalism or melodrama – makes their testimony all the more powerful as a teaching tool.

For educators working with middle and high school students, “Kalman & Leopold – Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz” provides an entry point to discuss not only the historical facts of the Holocaust but also more universal themes.

The story also offers a counterpoint to the more commonly taught narrative of Anne Frank.

While her diary ends with arrest, Kalman and Leopold’s story continues through liberation, separation, and eventual reunion.

Beyond VictimhoodPerhaps most importantly, this book presents Kalman and Leopold not simply as victims, but as complete human beings who experienced one of history’s greatest atrocities and somehow maintained their humanity. Their story isn’t told with the swelling music and dramatic close-ups of a Hollywood film, but with the quiet dignity of lived experience.

In my conversations with Holocaust survivors over the years, I’ve often been struck by their pragmatism and lack of self-dramatization when discussing their experiences. The horrors they witnessed need no embellishment, and their survival required a focus on the practical rather than the emotional.

“Kalman & Leopold – Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz” captures this quality, making it an authentic and valuable addition to Holocaust literature. For educators, researchers, students, and anyone seeking to understand this chapter of history through the lens of personal experience, this book offers a rare glimpse into an aspect of the Holocaust that few survivors have documented.

It stands as testimony not only to what happened, but to the enduring connections that helped two young men survive – and reconnect against all odds many decades later.

“Kalman & Leopold – Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz” is available for educational institutions and can be incorporated into Holocaust studies curricula for high school and university-level courses. This rare testimony of surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz provides educators with a valuable primary source that brings history to life through authentic personal experience.

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History lives in silence, so much so that a Mengele Auschwitz firsthand account is rare, and precious.

For decades, Holocaust survivors like Richard Lowy’s father kept their experiences locked away, carrying unimaginable trauma without burdening their children with the horrors they had witnessed.

As Richard recounts,

“Father had the numbers on his arms, and we all knew that he survived World War Two, but we had no idea.”

It wasn’t until after his twin sister Miriam’s death in 1999 that Leopold Lowy finally agreed to share his story—the story of being a Mengele twin at Auschwitz, where he and Kalman witnessed and survived one of history’s darkest chapters.

Get “Kalman & Leopold” on Amazon

In this powerful excerpt, we witness October 7, 1944, through the eyes of two teenage boys who survived Dr. Josef Mengele’s cruel experiments.

Remember.org is proud to present this exclusive chapter from “Kalman and Leopold: Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz,” a testament to human resilience, with a Mengele Auschwitz firsthand account bearing witness. As fewer survivors remain with us each year, these firsthand accounts become ever more precious in our commitment to remember—and to ensure such atrocities are never repeated.

The following excerpt is printed with permission from Richard K. Lowy.

Find more learning tools at their site, where you can reach the author.

KalmanSaturday, October 7, 1944: The uprisingThe day grow worse, and so do our physical conditions. The weather is deteriorating. In this first week of October, people are dying faster. Our lives mean less. Selections are more frequent. Instead of twice a month, they’re now once a week. The machine is speeding up.

We continue on with another miserable routine workday in the guard shack. I’m busy with a pair of army boots and Lipa is wiping the floor around the coal stove in the duty room. He’s at the front and I’m in the last bedroom at the end of the shack.

In the middle of our workday there is a tremendous explosion. The whole guard shack shudders.

I run into the corridor and Lipa is running towards me. We hunch together in the corridor.

We look at each other and realize the explosion came from behind the guard shack, the crematorium. A few moments later we hear the rapid rat-tat-tat of small-arms fire. Jawohl, Fritz, Müeller, and the other guards understand immediately, grabbing their guns and running out the door.

On his way out, Red-Nose yells, “Verschwinde! Verschwinde von hier! [Get the hell out of here!]” and they’re gone.We’re left alone.

Lipa grabs me by the collar, says, “Come,” and pulls me outside around to the back, cautioning me, “Be careful of the fence.” We stand between the electrified fence and the guard shack in awe and watch.

It’s total mayhem.

Crematorium IV is on fire, smoke is billowing out, the whole thing is an enormous heap of rubble. Small flames sprout out, there is a lot of gunfire, people are running everywhere, machine guns fire from the distant guard tower, it’s madness. We watch as a group of pajamas rush out of the building, overtaking several guards.

This is an uprising.

The Germans are surprised.

Someone in the crematorium must’ve had the wherewithal to say, Look, we’re going to die very soon. Let’s do something against these people.

Whoever arrives to Auschwitz is already a psychologically dismantled person. Their worlds are disrupted and churned up during the several stages of arrival: the ordinances, ghettos, starvation, dehumanization, and the insufferable transports. Uprisings may have occurred in the minds of a few indomitable souls, but the other 99.9 percent are the majority, and they are submissive souls.

Uncle Lajos told me of this group, the Sonderkommandos, a special unit of some comparatively better-fed Jews whose job it is to drag the bodies out of the gas chambers and put them into the ovens. Some had to do this to their own parents, their own children.Then they had to clean the ash created by the bodies out of the ovens. I’ve heard rumours the Sonderkommandos are liquidated every quarter—they know too much. The Germans call them Geheimnisträger, the bearers of secrets. They work in the heart of the machine and are separated from the main population, the rumours insist. From their point of view, and wisely so, the German command cannot afford any of these groups to remain in the job more than a few months, lest the secrets of Birkenau get out to the world.

Several minutes later a host of military trucks comes tearing up the road and stops right in front of us. Soldiers jump down and line up. One yells orders and then, firearms drawn, they set off toward Crematorium IV. Within minutes the large group of soldiers is shooting back, trying to quell this resistance. Lipa and I—two little mice, forgotten by everyone— stand between the electrified fence and the guard shack and watch.

No one is looking at us. They have more urgent things to worry about. Another explosion tears an opening in the electrified fence. Sparks fly and pajamas race out, running toward the woods.Soldiers chase after them, machine guns in hand, firing left, right and center. It looks completely mad. Undirected. Guards from the distant tower continue raining down fire with their machine guns, shooting at anything that moves.

A fair amount of time later, when the place is full of guards and soldiers, the firing stops and everybody who could be caught is killed.

There’s no stopping and asking questions; any running pajama is shot. Bodies lie everywhere. It looks like they all died, but not before they blew up Crematorium IV and forced the killing machine to stop.91 It is a small dent in this seemingly unstoppable machine.

After the uproar winds down, we walk back into our workplace. Shortly thereafter our six hosts return, all very serious, and Jawohl directs them, “Resume your positions.”

He looks at us and says, “No more work. Get lost.” We stand at attention. “Jawohl!”Collecting our bits and pieces from the storage room, Lipa and I leave and walk back to our barrack. It’s rare we return in the middle of the day. As soon as we enter, everybody descends on us. Now we are the source of information.We’re bombarded with questions in seven languages—Hungarian, Czech, Greek, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and German. “Here, talk to me. What happened? What did you see?”

Everyone wants to know. They could hear but not see what was going on outside the barrack. We can’t report much, but what we do is infinitely more than what anyone else saw. We tell them the Sonderkommandos rebelled and blew up the crematorium, there was a gun fight, and most of them died. Those who understand and speak multiple languages start translating to others. Fear rips through the barrack. We all know someone will pay the price for the Sonderkommandos’ actions.

FootnoteOn October 7, 1944, Jews in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau organized the biggest and most spectacular mutiny and escape attempt of the camp’s history. They set fire to one of the crematoria, causing serious damage, and attacked SS men in the vicinity.

Some of the prisoners escaped through the fence and reached the outside, but the SS managed to pursue and surround them, murdering all. A total of approximately two hundred fifty Jews died fighting. A few SS were killed and a number more wounded.

After several minutes, the kapo barks, “That’s it, back to your bunks!” I look around and Lipa’s already gone.

Returning to my bunk, Uncle Lajos is waiting for me and quietly says, “Sit. Now tell me what happened. What did you see?”

I report to him in as much detail as I can. We’re anxious about what will come as a result. By late afternoon the barrack returns to its normal affairs. Uncle Lajos and I sit on the bunk and nibble yesterday’s rations.

LeopoldSaturday, October 7, 1944: The uprisingI’m working in the guard shack when there’s a huge explosion outside, followed by shooting and hollering. The guards run out; I follow to see what’s happening.

Fighting has broken out between the prisoners and the guards. About a hundred and eighty young men called Sonderkommandos are assigned to the crematoria. I understand they do the gassing and load the ovens. They knew when they were assigned this detail that it was a death sentence. They know too much, see too much. Rumours say the Germans burn these guys every four months so there are no eyewitnesses to the internal workings of the crematoria. The Germans can’t take a chance of even one of them escaping.

The Sonderkommandos have overpowered their guards. It’s an uprising. A few guards are killed and some Sonderkommandos take their uniforms. Truckloads of soldiers start arriving with machine guns. The Sonderkommandos don’t have a chance. There’s no point of even considering a win—it’s a losing situation.

After the uprising, our guards come back. There’s no more work for us today, and they send us back to our barrack.Later in the afternoon, I hear the kapo call out, “A1295,” which is unusual. If I’m going for a medical check, it’s always been in the morning. I’m taken by a Red Cross van to Crematorium II and into a big medical room with two large stone tables with drains for blood. I remember the rumour of the dissections.

There’s no discussion, no notice.

I’m cleaned up and laid out on one of the tables.

On the other, already lying down, is an SS guard.

He must have been injured in the uprising, brought here for medical treatment.

A doctor takes my arm and puts a needle with a tube in me. The other end of this tube also has a needle and is put into the SS. They start transferring my blood. Lying here I’m scared, not batting an eyelash, getting weaker, shaking, so frightened. Nothing is said to me.

For over an hour they drain me dry to save his life. I don’t see the SS guard’s face. He doesn’t see mine. Just two tables, side by side with two tubes, me to him.When there’s no more to give, they take the tubes out. I am so weak I can’t get off the table. I’m picked up and carried out to the van then literally dropped in front of my barrack with an extra piece of bread. I wonder if I’m going to die right here.

Barely alive, I crawl into the barrack. Some of the other twins help me to my bunk.

I never know what the day will bring, if I will be returned. If I’ll be brought back with a limb missing, with something done to me. I don’t know when a real experiment will happen, when I’ll be harmed physically, and that will be it.

The following excerpt is printed with permission from Richard K. Lowy.

Find more learning tools at their site, where you can reach the author.

Get “Kalman & Leopold” on AmazonIn this powerful excerpt, we witness October 7, 1944, through the eyes of two teenage boys – Mengele Auschwitz firsthand accounts – who survived Mengele’s cruel experiments.

Remember.org is proud to present this exclusive chapter from “Kalman and Leopold: Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz,” a testament to human resilience and the vital importance of bearing witness. As fewer survivors remain with us each year, these firsthand accounts become ever more precious in our commitment to remember—and to ensure such atrocities are never repeated.

Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz: The Story of Kalman and Leopold

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Welcome to a deep dive into a story about the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, a story that’s heartbreaking, but also really inspiring.

We’re diving into My Name is Alice, a memoir by Holocaust survivor Alice Muller.

So we’re really trying to get inside Alice’s world, right?

See it through her eyes.

A Message from Alice Muller

When I was six, my teacher wore a Hlinka Garda pin on his lapel. I wondered how he would be to me, it gave me a bad feeling, so I was always on the alert and I made sure not to sit in front. He was nice to the children during class, but I made sure to do the homework well so that he should not start up with me.

But at that time, I came home to my father and in the morning I was sent off by my father, and I felt ok. But this situation did not last. You can read more about me in MY NAME IS ALICE, a book I recommend to adults and older high school children.

I hope that I will hear from other survivors here, as well as from anyone else who has a question on the Holocaust, like children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and American students of history.

I am writing an update now on my book, but in the meantime, I have written AL TISHKACH VAL TISLACH: A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S STUDY GUIDE TO THE HOLOCAUST AS RELAYED BY THE JEWISH CALENDAR, and two books for children, My Name is Yisroel Yosef, about my husband Joseph, and Malka and the Holocaust Survivors, about the importance of offering help to living survivors.

I thank you for your interest about what I went through. I wish a Happy New Year to those who read my words who are Jewish, and good wishes for all.

My Name is Alice Paperback – Chapters One and Two along with photos of Alice Mullerby Alice Muller (Author), Dr. Tzipporah Bat-Ami (Author)

Get “My Name is Alice” bookSee on AmazonGetting the historical context is important, but those little personal details, that’s what makes it real.

So Alice’s story, it starts in the 1930s, Czechoslovakia, in this town, Michalovce.She describes it as pretty charming, you know, cobblestone streets, that kind of thing.

But before we get too far, her name, Alice, has a whole story behind it.Oh, is this about those rules they had in Czechoslovakia then?

Like the restrictions on Jewish names?

See, her dad, Herman, he wanted to name her Rachel.

Totally normal, right?

But biblical names. Not allowed for Jewish families.

From Wikimedia CommonsLike, can you imagine having that choice taken away?
Even something as basic as your child’s name.

Search and Unite | Czech Property and Looted Art in Austria

It’s just shows how deep the anti-Semitism ran, you know.It was in everything.

Makes you think about all the other compromises people had to make just to exist.

So the clerk, he suggests Rosalie because it starts with R, you see.

But Alice’s mom, she puts her foot down.

My daughter, she says, her name is Alica.

Alica. It’s a fashionable name then.

Maybe a little act of defiance, but also, a mother’s love,
wanting the best for her kid, even with all that’s going on.

And speaking of her childhood, Alice’s memoir really goes into detail about her home, like describing the rooms, the furniture.

She even mentioned this one thing that struck me, a vanity mirror.
Her father bought it for her mother.

A vanity mirror seems like such a, everyday object, especially with everything else going on.

Why do you think that detail stands out?

On the surface, it seems almost insignificant, you know.

But I think it speaks to this desire for normalcy, wanting to hold on to beauty even when everything’s getting darker.Imagine that.Fear, uncertainty everywhere, and this mirror, it’s a symbol of their love, of their life.

And it still means something.

It reminds us that even in the darkest times, those little joys, those connections, they offer hope.

And, well, that hope, it becomes even more important as Alice’s story goes on.

And before we get to those tougher times, you mentioned how Czechoslovakia in the 1930s had all these rules about Jewish names.

Can you tell us a bit more about that?Like, what was it actually like to be a Jewish family living there then?Before we jump into those tougher times with the Nazi occupation and all,
it’s important to understand what life was like before.

You mentioned timelines, maps, that kind of thing from the Amazon page.

Can you paint us a picture of Jewish life in 1930s Czechoslovakia?So Czechoslovakia back then, it was considered more tolerant than a lot of Europe, but anti-Semitism was there, definitely growing.

And it showed up in different ways, you know, social stuff, economic restrictions.

It all cast a shadow over these communities.

Imagine that constant pressure, feeling like an outsider in your own country just because of your faith.

SOURCE: Wikimedia CommonsAnd those name restrictions, that was part of it, right?

A very real example of how it was seeping into every part of life.

Source: Wikimedia Commons Yeah, like this slow erosion of freedom.

A slow tightening of the noose.

But even with all that, you see families like Alice’s trying to live their lives, to create that loving home for their kids.

Remember that vanity mirror?

It’s not just a mirror, right?It’s the symbol of resilience.Like even when things are falling apart around you, the human spirit, it looks for beauty, looks for hope.

You know, that’s what gets me.

It wasn’t some big grand gesture, just this ordinary thing.

But because of what’s happening around them, it takes on this whole other meaning.

It’s like even small acts of kindness.

Interior of the Olomouc Synagogue, burned in March 1939They have so much power, especially in times of turmoil.

You cling to those little bits of light.

And that’s something you see a lot in Holocaust stories.

It’s not always the big heroic acts.

It’s those everyday moments, the human connection that helps people get through those horrors.And as Alice’s story goes on, I’m sure we’ll see more of that.Now, you mentioned that excerpt from Remember.org.

It kind of ends abruptly.

What does the full book tell us based on that Amazon page?

So the Amazon page, it mentions My Name is Alice, includes those timelines you like, historical context.

But it also like hints at things getting worse, you know, as the Nazis take over.

Erstes Originalbild vom Einmarsch der deutschen Truppen in Brünn,
“Fort die Tschechei, Brünn ist frei!” so hallten die Sprechchöre durch die Stadt Brünn als die Soldaten Grossdeutschlands ihren Einzug in diese alte Stadt hielten. Zu beiden Seiten des Weges standen gedrängt die Menschenmassen und grüssten die Retter.
UBz: die deutschen Truppen in Brünn.
Scherl Bilderdienst, Berlin, 16.3.39, 3462-39That’s where those reviews you sent come in, reading them.
It’s like we’re getting all these different takes on Alice’s story.

Everyone’s coming to it with their own experiences.

Some people, they were focused on the history.

Others, it was Alice’s strength that got to them.

There’s this one review, though. By Declan Dunn.

Amazon ReviewHe’s the founder of Remember.org, right?

He’s dedicated his life to sharing these stories.

He called Alice’s book a special work.

Said it touched his heart.

And coming from him, someone who’s heard so many survivor stories.

It carries weight, definitely.

It makes you realize that even within all the Holocaust literature out there,
each story, it’s unique.

It really is.

And it’s through those personal stories that we start to grasp what prejudice, what hate really does, how it destroys individuals, families, whole communities.It’s easy to forget that sometimes when you’re looking at the bigger picture.

You mentioned a review that praised the historical detail, how those timelines, those maps, they help make it real.

For someone like you who values that accuracy.

It makes all the difference.

I mean, reading about history in a textbook, it’s one thing.

But experiencing it, even indirectly, through someone who lived it, those little details, those glimpses into daily life when everything’s falling apart, that’s how we understand the human cost.

And speaking of those human experiences, another review, it focused on Alice’s resilience.

Even with all that darkness, her spirit, it shines through.

It’s incredible, isn’t it, that even in those moments, the will to survive,
to hold on to hope, it can endure.

Resilience.

It’s a common thread in these stories.

But it never fails to amaze me, that strength, that hope, in the face of such horror.

It reminds you of what we’re capable of.

And that’s what makes Alice’s story and all these stories so important to hear, right?

They remind us of the terrible things we can do to each other, but also the strength we have, the importance of empathy, of understanding.It makes you think about your own life, how you face your challenges, how you learn, how you treat other people.

It’d be easy to despair after hearing a story like Alice’s, but I think there’s a call to action in there, too.

Holocaust Study Guide by Alice Muller on AmazonTo be better, kinder, to see the humanity in everyone, no matter what.

Alice’s story, it comes from a dark place in history, sure.

Memories of My Childhood in the Holocaust by Judith Jagermann | Theresienstadt ghetto

But ultimately, it’s about resilience, about hope, about understanding different perspectives.

So as you go about your day, let Alice’s story stay with you, not just as a memory, but as a reminder of that strength we all have, the importance of empathy and building a better world together.All materials, words, and photos from:

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Discover the inspiring and heartbreaking journey of Abram Korn, a Holocaust survivor whose story is brought to life through the Abram Korn: A Holocaust Survivor website.

This digital memorial offers a comprehensive look into the life of a man who endured unimaginable suffering yet emerged with unwavering resilience.

Go to Abe’s Story

Get “Abe’s Story” book

Uncover a Holocaust Survivor’s JourneyThe story of Abram Korn is a harrowing testament to the horrors of the Holocaust and the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Korn, born in 1918 in Grodno, Poland, was a young man when his life was uprooted by the Nazi invasion of his home country. In the years that followed, Korn would endure unimaginable suffering, witnessing the brutality of the Nazis firsthand.

However, Korn’s story is not one of despair. It is also a story of resilience and hope. After surviving the Holocaust, Korn immigrated to the United States and rebuilt his life.

He became a successful businessman and a loving father. Korn’s son, Joey, eventually compiled his father’s memoirs into a book titled “Abe’s Story: A Holocaust Memoir.”

The Abram Korn: A Holocaust Survivor website is a powerful resource that tells the story of Abram Korn’s life.

The website includes an interactive map that traces Korn’s journey from his hometown in Poland to the concentration camps where he was imprisoned.

The website also features excerpts from Korn’s memoirs, providing readers with a firsthand account of his experiences.

In addition to the interactive map and excerpts, the website also includes a section on the teaching the background of the Holocaust.

This section provides essential context for understanding Korn’s story. It discusses the rise of the Nazi Party, the invasion of Poland, and the establishment of the ghettos and concentration camps.

The Abe’s Story website is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the Holocaust. The website’s interactive map, excerpts from Korn’s memoirs, and background section comprehensively examine Korn’s life and experiences.

Here is a more detailed look at the key features of the website: Interactive Map:* The website’s interactive map allows users to trace Korn’s journey from his hometown in Poland to the concentration camps where he was imprisoned. The map includes stops in Grodno, Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Users can learn more about Korn’s experiences at that location by clicking on each stop.

The interactive map on the Abram Korn website is a powerful tool for understanding Korn’s journey during the Holocaust.

The map includes markers for crucial locations in Korn’s life, including his hometown of Grodno, Poland, and the concentration camps where he was imprisoned.

Grodno, Poland: Korn’s hometown, Grodno, was a vibrant Jewish community before the war. The map provides information about Jewish life in Grodno before the Nazi invasion.
Warsaw Ghetto: After the German invasion of Poland, Jews were forced into ghettos. The map includes information about the Warsaw Ghetto, where Korn lived.
Auschwitz: One of the most notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz was a place of unimaginable horror. The map provides information about the conditions at Auschwitz and Korn’s experiences there.
Buchenwald: Another concentration camp, Buchenwald was also a place of great suffering. The map provides information about the conditions at Buchenwald and Korn’s experiences there.

The interactive map is a valuable resource for students and teachers alike. It can be used to teach about the geography of the Holocaust and the different stages of Korn’s journey.

Excerpts from Korn’s Memoirs: The website features excerpts from Korn’s memoirs, “Abe’s Story: A Holocaust Memoir.” These excerpts provide readers with a firsthand account of Korn’s experiences during the Holocaust. The excerpts are a powerful reminder of the brutality of the Nazis and the resilience of the human spirit.

The excerpts from Abram Korn’s memoirs provide a powerful firsthand account of his experiences during the Holocaust. The excerpts are arranged chronologically and cover various topics, from life in the ghetto to survival in the concentration camps.

Life in the Ghetto: The excerpts describe the harsh conditions of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. Korn describes the hunger, disease, and fear that were constant companions for ghetto residents.
Deportation to Auschwitz: Korn’s memoir describes the horrific experience of being deported to Auschwitz. He describes the selection process and the separation of families.
Life in the Concentration Camp: Korn’s memoir provides a detailed account of life in the concentration camps. He describes the grueling work, the lack of food, and the constant threat of violence.
Liberation: Korn’s memoir describes the liberation from the concentration camp and the complicated process of rebuilding his life after the war.

The excerpts from Korn’s memoirs are powerful teaching tools about the Holocaust. They can help students understand the human cost of the war and the resilience of the human spirit.

Abram Korn’s Family: The website also includes a section on the the family. This section provides essential context for understanding Korn’s story.

The Abram Korn: A Holocaust Survivor website is a moving and vital resource. It tells the story of one man’s survival during the Holocaust and serves as a reminder of the importance of remembering this dark chapter in human history.

This blog post is a starting point for learning more about Abram Korn and the Holocaust.

Here are some additional resources:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem: https://www.yadvashem.org/
Anne Frank House: https://www.annefrank.org/en/

By learning about the Holocaust, we can help to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again.

Background on Remember.org

The background section of the Abram Korn website provides essential context for understanding Korn’s story.

Other sections of Remember.org explore the rise of the Nazi Party, the invasion of Poland, and the establishment of the ghettos and concentration camps.

The Rise of the Nazi Party: The section discusses the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and the party’s ideology of anti-Semitism.
The Invasion of Poland: Jan Karski’s paintings show a personal view and experience of the Polish Invasion.
The Ghettos: Courage Under Siege is a book about the Warsaw Ghetton, showing the establishment of ghettos in Poland and other occupied territories.
The Concentration Camps: The section discusses the establishment of concentration camps and the conditions that prisoners face.

The background section is a valuable resource for students who are new to the study of the Holocaust. It helps students understand the historical context of Korn’s story.

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I’m Declan Dunn, founder of Remember.org, exploring how Holocaust poetry humanizes history. With The Song Remains sharing this because I was inspired 42 years ago by a poem by Charlotte Delbo, a Holocaust survivor.

The Song Remains is an online anthology of over 160 Yiddish poems by 36 authors with English translations. The poems were written in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War, compiled by Binem Heller, and published in Warsaw in 1951.The collection holds the treasure of creative poetry written by people who were imprisoned, starved, and ultimately murdered. The poems cover a wide range of themes, from the light-hearted love of nature, to the trials of coming of age in the Ghetto, and ultimately trying to come to terms with hatred, destruction, and death.The English translations are by Dr Sarah Traister Moskovitz, a 96-year-old native Yiddish speaker and professor emerita from California State University, Northridge.

We will be publishing one poem per week on the site, starting at the launch on 20 May.My Remember.org work began in a class where history at the surface was a summary told by the victors, a perception telling what happened always the what and the facts debated and refined, often by intellects judging the past.

How does Holocaust Poetry humanize history – Annotations

United States Holocaust Museum on Poetry
“Whether written for publication or for private reflection, poetry and literature can express ideas and emotions in unique ways. During the years of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, poetry and literature became important means of self-expression, documentation, activism, and propaganda. “

Facing History and Ourselves on Poetry: Sonia Weitz Poem

But let me take you back to that moment, sitting in that classroom, when I first encountered Delbo’s Holocaust poem.

Auschwitz and After by Charlotte DelboIt was as if a veil had been lifted, revealing the raw human experience beneath the cold facts of history.

Her words didn’t just tell me what happened; it made me feel it and understand it in a way no textbook ever could.

Poetry is perspective, showing the human, the individual, beneath the experience of history, bringing it beyond facts to connect us to what actually happened during the Holocaust.

And as Leonard Cohen once sang,

there is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Poetry is the light that cracks history open. It shows the light, the experience, and the humanity of what people went through during the Holocaust.

Imagine standing in the shoes of a Holocaust survivor. The facts might tell you about dates, numbers, and locations.

But poetry? Poetry tells you about the weight of fear in their chest, the sound of footsteps that meant danger, and the small acts of kindness that kept hope alive.

It’s through these poetic glimpses that we truly begin to understand the humanity of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Poetry gives us what’s beneath the surface of history, a three-dimensional experience. Instead of trying to narrow it down.

The Song Remains gave us permission to share one poem, in English then in its original Yiddish, to get an idea of how Holocaust poetry humanizes history:

What Does This Old Gray Jew Want From Meby Kalman Lis
What does this old gray Jew want from me
Who comes to me to visit every night
And weighs me down with sadness and dark fears
With eyes black holes with tears
Can I return to him the shine of his eyes
The darkness – two black nights
And do I want to be the judge
That tells him, yes, you’re right.
A thousand times yes, Grandpa… and then believe me
The worst punishment yet will come to them
But I, who am no more than a poet
Can do no more than comfort with a verse
And give you comfort for your sorrow
With song that will serve as stem
For a blessed dove who carries in her beak
A green leaf of hope, over a dark sea
But the old man stays dumb and blind
In late fall a barren tree
And blood is running from his eyes
And stains deep red my blue dream

Yiddish Version of the Holocaust Poemװאַס װיל פון מיר דער אַלטער גרױער ײד…
קלמן לים

װאָס װיל פון מיר דער גרױער, אלטער ײד,
װאָס קומט מיט יעדער נאַכט צו מיר צוגײן
און לײגט זיך אזױ שװער אױף מײן געמיט
מיט אױגן — שװארצע לעכער פול געװײן?

צי קען איך דען אים אומקערן די שײן
פון אױגן זײנע — פינצטערע צװײ נעכט,
און זאָל איך יאָ דער ריכטער װעלן זײן,
װאָס קאָן איך מער װי זאָגן, ביסט גערעכט.

טױזנט מאָל יאָ זײדע… גלױב מיר ס’װעט
און ס’מוז נאָך קומען װען פאר זײ די שטראָף;
נאָר איך, װאָס בין נישט מער, װי א פּאָעט,
װאָס קאָן איך נאָך, װי טרײסטן מיט מײן סטראָף.

און געבן דיר א תיקון צו דײן גרױל
מיט ליד, װאָס דאַרף איצט דינען פאר מײן שטאַם,
װי נחס טױב מיט גרינער בלאַט אין מױל,
— א האָפענונג אין ברױנעם, שװאַרצן ים.

נאָר ס’בלײבט דער אַלטער װײטער שטום און בלינד —
אין שפּעטן האַרבסט אן אָפּגעפליקטער בױם,
און ס’בלוט פון זײנע אױגן־לעכער רינט
און פלעקט אױף רױט מיר אױס מײן בלױען טרױם…

Like the Yiddish poem The Ring, written by Miriam Ulinover, who was one of the only Orthodox female poets of her time.“Parted from this ring.

I will never choose.

My heart could not survive.

Tighter, smaller grows.

My life in the ring has now grown loose.”

In words like these, the poetry becomes a bridge to Holocaust history. Other examples include the works of Paul Celan [1], Nelly Sachs [2], and Primo Levi [3], each offering a unique perspective on the Holocaust.

Consider Ulinover’s words for a moment. In just a few lines, she captures not just the loss of a physical object but the shrinking of a whole world, a culture under threat during the Holocaust.

This ring isn’t just jewelry; it’s identity, tradition, and resistance. Through her Holocaust poem, we’re not just learning about history – we’re feeling it, living it.

Beneath the battles and what we’ve read in history classes. It’s the struggle, the experience, the Yiddish culture. Fragile.In the case of these poems, a statement that I am alive, I was here.

Holocaust Poetry also fills in the gaps because a great poem, when you read it, you want to go deeper. There are gaps in there.

What’s missing? How can I learn more?

These gaps and questions are the heartbeats of proper historical understanding. They push us to dig deeper, to seek out more voices and more perspectives on the Holocaust.

It’s not about memorizing dates and names but about understanding the tapestry of human experience that makes up our past.

“I Cannot Forget”, two poems by Alexander Kimel

Like Alexander Kimel, who shared his poem “I cannot forget,” which echoes “Never Shall I Forget” by Elie Wiesel.

It is a poem that talks about his experience during the Holocaust at Rohatyn, and what that does is invite the students not to study who was there, what the battle was, and who the generals were.

Rohatyn Wartime Jewish Ghetto 1941-1943. Source: Rohatyn Jewish HeritageBut from a people’s perspective, a people’s history of the Holocaust is not a history written to persuade, a history written to be remembered and to be shared.

Read Kimel’s powerful words about the Holocaust:

“Do I want to remember?

The peaceful ghetto, before the raid:

Children shaking like leaves in the wind.

Mothers searching for a piece of bread.

Shadows, on swollen legs, moving with fear.

No, I don’t want to remember, but how can I forget?”

In these lines, Kimel doesn’t just tell us about the Holocaust ghetto – he shows us.We see the children and feel their fear. We understand the desperation of mothers and the weakness of the starving. This isn’t just history; it is humanity laid bare during the Holocaust.

History gives us answers. Poetry keeps us asking questions, going deeper, and remembering the Holocaust.

Poetry doesn’t just complement our understanding of history – it completes it. It gives voice to the voiceless, brings light to the darkest corners of human experience, and ensures that we do more than just know our history – we feel it, live it, and carry it forward.

Yad Vashem Museum shares the importance of Holocaust poetry in education:

Understanding what and empathizing with whom? If one teaches a poem called “Testimony”,1 written by a Holocaust survivor, Dan Pagis, pupils will confront the subject of personal identity in a context where its erasure was sought as an ideological imperative. The poem juxtaposes the identities of three protagonists; the perpetrators, the poet as a representative of the victims, and the creator. In short shrift, eleven lines of his poem, Pagis succeeds in turning the identities upside-down. The student will likely “feel” the pain of the victim and better understand the relationship between the perpetrators and the victims.

What can a Sixth Grade Student’s Poem in 1993 tell us about the Holocaust?

Imagine Art Gallery: Room 1 – Children’s Art about the Holocaust

That urge to go deeper leads us to expressions like the poem Birdsong. This was written by a sixth grader in 1993 with no connection to the Holocaust, but with study, poetry and art. Inspired by teacher said, now you show me what you said, what your poetry is.

This is the power of poetry in understanding history. It doesn’t just inform future generations; it inspires them to connect, to empathize, to create.

This sixth grader, decades removed from the events, still found a way to channel that pain, that hope, into something beautiful and profound.And in Birdsong, what she writes is

“He doesn’t know the world at all, nor what to sing about.

I do, but does it matter?

I feel trapped here. My love for all things vanish.

Trapped beyond reality in a nightmare.

I know I’d open my heart to beauty and

go into the woods

Someday. I hope that one day

I will realize how wonderful

it is to be alive.”

These words, from a child in 1993, echo the sentiments of those who lived through the darkest times of human history.

They speak to the universal human experience of suffering, hope, and resilience. This is how poetry bridges time, connecting us across generations to the essence of what it means to be human.

The Power of Holocaust Poetry in RemembranceHolocaust poetry offers a unique and powerful lens through which to understand this dark chapter in human history. It bypasses the sterility of facts and figures, instead bringing us face-to-face with the emotions, experiences, and losses endured by those who lived through it.

Through these poems, we encounter the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable horror.

We witness courage, kindness, and defiance that defy the depths of human cruelty.

Holocaust poetry compels us to not only remember the atrocities but also to celebrate the strength and dignity of those who persevered.

It fosters empathy and understanding, ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten.

Let us continue to honor the victims of the Holocaust by remembering their stories, their struggles, and their enduring humanity.

Let Holocaust poetry be a constant reminder of the importance of tolerance, compassion, and the fight against oppression in all its forms.

CITATIONS[1] Paul Celan Poetry

[2] Nelly Sachs poem – Flight and Metamorphosis

[3] “The Pain of Remembering”: Primo Levi’s Poetry and the Function of Memory

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My Name is Alice is a first-person Alice Muller memoir, an indomitable courageous spirit, told by her as she views things in the voice of her age at the time of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia.

My Name is Alice Paperback – Chapters One and Two along with photos of Alice Mullerby Alice Muller (Author), Dr. Tzipporah Bat-Ami (Author)

Get “My Name is Alice” bookSee on AmazonAlice will move you, make you want to finish the book in one reading. You will learn about places and times no longer here, about heroism, about acts of kindness remembered for three quarters of a century and now passed on to you, with her diagrams of places and streets, and also a lesson plan for tolerance.

Timelines included for those who want to understand the context. The book is best read and shared with family members, including those who were alive at or near that time.We recommend parental guidance for younger children. You will treasure this keepsake, its cheerful inside and out despite the horrors that Alice endures.

The book is for all people of all faiths. Descriptions of Jewish customs are all explained, and any Yiddish or Hebrew words are translated.

This book is easy to read because of large print and cream pages, and it is easy to read because you will be captured by Alice’s voice. We hope you will find it moving and life altering. And a little child shall lead them!

Holocaust in Czechoslovakia Book By Survivor

Memories of My Childhood in the Holocaust by Judith Jagermann | Theresienstadt ghetto

Alice Muller – My Name is Alice Cover photo enhanced.Alice Muller Memoir –Forward to My Name is AliceIt is my privilege to comment on this history of a young child in the Holocaust. This work portrays, through early memories in the town of Michalovce, what life was like for Jews in pre-war Slovakia.

It provides factual information on the Slovakian Holocaust by first person testimony, which makes this book a critical historic document at a time when such testimony is harder to obtain.

This work is an inspirational narrative of one little girl who survived against all odds; though 83 percent of the Jewish citizens of Slovakia were murdered, 95 percent of children under fourteen were annihilated.

But Alice’s book also serves to illustrate the effects of the Holocaust on its child survivors.

It illustrates the effect of an early childhood perspective on life that remains to inform an entire lifetime. It documents the massive trauma at early developmental stages that can
only be mastered by being passed to each successive generation in retelling, naming, and in testimony and here, in this publication.

Loss of parental figures can never be fully resolved because throughout much of their lives, children survivors last saw their parents alive and well and did not know the actual mechanisms of mass killing of the Third Reich, so it is easy to understand why such survivors spent decades still hoping for their parents’ return.

Child survivors and their new families wait in limbo, and time becomes malleable, where once the return of these loved ones happens, childhood life can magically restart as if there was no catastrophic interruption.Once the knowledge of the likely mechanism of murder has been received, there is no gravesite to visit and no headstone to make, just missing ones, or unidentified parts in mass graves, or tons of ash.

The knowledge that human beings can be branded as animals, and that their parts can be used in manufacture, set a new low for humanity, and a sense of peril for their safety imbues such survivors’ beliefs.

What we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder is nearly universal among Holocaust survivors because of the degree of trauma and the bizarre nature of the trauma.

Though children may be resilient to a greater extent, early malnutrition and loss of parental figures increase the degree of these symptoms. So, such children in adult life carry fear of low flying planes, fear of registration in any form, fear of showers in case they are gas, and all these fears are adaptive in that they serve as protection.

However, we can understand that the vigilance that once was adaptive can interfere in peacetime with adaptation to ‘normal’ life.What you will also see here is the tremendous courage and strength such children have displayed in youth, becoming adults as children. And it also has given survivors an edge on calamities, knowing how to adapt, paying attention to, and warning others of, pending calamities, as has been seen with COVID when many just chose instead to use the defense of denial.

Because of the lack of early milestones of educational achievement, many survivors feel insecure about themselves, yet they mastered what most of us in America could not:

they left their previous homes and communities, often without any finances, possessions, and
navigated paperwork and interviews,
traveled by ship to new countries they have blessed with lawful contributions to their new homelands,
where they learned new languages and new cultures and studied to become proud and thankful citizens.

In schema compensatory action, they often became leaders of their fields, or they raised homes and gave children the names of the murdered to renew life.

And their progeny uniquely went into fields of service in overwhelming majority, to try to heal the horror. Many became physicians, many entered the mental health field, many worked with survivors and dedicated their lives to advocacy for survivors.

So it appears that despite lack of formalities of education, these survivors managed some level of success despite inner trauma.As survivors age, disabilities and limitations recreate the sense of helplessness of the Holocaust, and cause fear because the need to be on guard is so valued for survival.

Limited social access by disability or by pandemic further enhances the loneliness of having an experience that with Gods help, few will ever be able to comprehend.

To that end, Alice has written down this Holocaust memoir in the hope that her experiences will kindle a desire for more knowledge of what happened to so many millions, and for our youth to be able to connect to what she experienced with all the details that are provided by Alice in this remarkable work.

Her book is divided into sections, and early chapters can be read to a four-year-old. It is designed as something that can be read intergenerationally, and to advance in the book as development proceeds.Of course, the irony is that Alice at age six had no way to opt out of the current events, of seeing teachers who wore insignia of those people who wished to kill her. And of course, the later sections are suitable for adults, but you will be able to hear Alice’s voice as she goes through all of this as a child.

It has been an honor to help bring this testimony to the written page and we hope it will help increase understanding among peoples and make Never Again a reality.

Dr Tzipporah Bat-Ami – 2023
Copyrighted Material 2024

Alice Muller Memoir – Beginners (Chapter One)My name is Alice. Well, I guess you already know that from the title! But this is the story of how I got my name, and who I became once I had it.

I was born on a summer’s day a long time ago. The year was 1932. I was born in a country 4000 miles away, on a continent called Europe.

Its name was Czechoslovakia. It had a different language and customs from us. I was born in a town called Michalovce, which has a guttural sound in the first c, and the second c is pronounced like the sound tse in tse-tse fly.

It is in the eastern part of the country, and you can see my town circled in red in the map on the next page. I am also adding a postcard picture of the railroad station. It’s very pretty, but it will seem different later.

Michalovce circled in Red on the Map of Czechoslovakia 1933In those days, babies were often born at home, so I was born at 24 Slobodna Ulice. That means 24 Liberty Street. And of course, there was sunshine when I was born!

My father was named Herman Muller, and I called him Opu. My mother was named Esther Klein Muller, and I called her Onyu. I had an older brother Norbert, and I called him Norbert.

Pictures of me and my family. From left to right, are my mother, father, my brother Norbert, and me.

So just like there are rules here, there were rules in my country, but it was not the same.In my country, Jews were not permitted to carry names in the Bible, so when my father rushed to register my birth and said I was to be called Rachel, the town clerk said that was not allowed, and he decided that my name should be Rosalie because it started with the same letter, and filled out the documents with that name.

When my father came home to tell my mother that my name was now Rosalie, she said in no way was her baby going to be called Rosalie.

She said that Alica, pronounced with a soft c, was a popular stylish name, and that would be my name, though my Hebrew name remained Rachel, pronounced with a guttural c. and just so you know, my brother had a Hebrew name too, Nachum, and my father’s Hebrew name was Tzvi, or Herschel and my mother’s Hebrew name was Esther.

We were a wonderful family living in a Jewish home.

Michalovce train station SOURCE: https://www.dolnyzemplin.sk/CHAPTER TWOAlice Muller Memoir – My Name is AliceFirst, I would like to tell you how my home looked from the outside.

When my parents first got married in 1930, and moved to Michalovce, they moved into a large apartment in the fancier section of the ell of 24 Slobodna Ulice that faced the Slobodna street.

There was a fence separating the two sections, and at that time, my parents worked in a small tavern adjacent to their apartment.

After my brother was born in 1931, my mother was unable to continue working in the tavern due to child care, so they moved to a smaller apartment to save money.

This was where I was born, but because my mother was known far and wide as a beauty, and my father was so in love with her, he schlepped the vanity mirror he had bought her to the new apartment so she could adorn herself as befits a woman with such regal bearing!

Because of the ell structure, our new apartment faced the courtyard, which you will see later made all the difference in the world to us. My apartment was on the first floor above a short stoop and I could play in the grass when I came outside.

My neighbors adjacent to us were also a Jewish family, and they also had kids.

There was no apartment above us. The only time I ever saw the original apartment where my parents first resided, was when my mother needed a seamstress, and I went to bring clothes to tailor to the woman living there. More on her later.I drew you a diagram so you could see the layout, on the next page. I also have an aerial view of a similar space in more modern times, so you can appreciate the layout that way too.” (Drawing not available for this free excerpt.

END ALICE MULLER MEMOIR – MY NAME IS ALICE EXCERPTAll materials, words, and photos from:

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“A moving and powerful portrait of a Polish Jew who returned from the camps disconsolate and mute, Forget Adam Weinberger is an unforgettable novel” —La Libre Belgique

A story that explores the difficulty of speaking about the Holocaust.

First there is Adam Weinberger’s long childhood, in a world that has no idea yet what is in store for it. The childhood of a lover of illusions, who dreams of changing the world and of freeing his family from the burden of a tradition that he finds unbearable.

The adolescence of a young boy who is unable to express his love for Esther, his admiration for his uncle, his tenderness toward his mother. The helplessness of a young man who sees that dreams and fiction are unable to halt the destruction of this world and of its inhabitants.

Later there are fragments of narrations, the broken mirror that, through more or less well-meaning intermediaries, reflects the flight of this child who has become a man, who no longer believes in dreams, who no longer believes in words -who has taken refuge in gestures, those of his profession, medicine, and those of his great passion, the construction of ships in bottles.

And who flees words and other people to the point of losing his identity. Between the two is there, of which one dares not speak.

And then, in the end, after forgetting, at the end of all the flights, there is a return of childhood from beyond death, the single truth of fiction – of the narration of life.

PART I

BEFORE

ADAM

Midjourney AI Image inspired by Forget Adam WeinbergerOnce I was a child. At least I think so, which in itself is not such a bad thing, since the past, regardless of what people say, is unverifiable. I already had the same name, and the awkward features were taking shape that would later become my adult face, which today is in a state of decomposition.

I shared my name, like it or not, with the beings who formed the fairly large entity of a family, my family, whom I appreciated in different ways.

Closest to me was my sister Rachel, seven years older than I. As soon as I was old enough to grasp what was happening and what people around me were saying, I understood that she was perpetually preoccupied by the search for a husband: before meeting one because she feared never finding one, and, once she did, because he spent all his time in the town cafés, sometimes for days on end. Rachel … you weren’t a great beauty, but you were my sister, and I would have preferred another brother-in-law instead of that idle Moishe—belated regrets, you’ll excuse me. In any case, I did what I could …

Along with Rachel and me, the Weinberger family had two other heirs, both male. I never had much to say to Samuel, five years my senior. He was devoted body and soul—especially body—to sports.

When he wasn’t kayaking on the river, he was running, wrestling—anything to work up a sweat and impose his tyranny over me.The only words I spoke to him, to the despair of my parents, were those of pleading, when he caught me in his iron grip, and curses when I felt I was at a safe distance—often followed by pleading when I had underestimated the distance.

Avner was different. Although ten years older than I, he was kind to me, at least when he noticed my presence. He was “our” rabbi, who, to maintain this distinction, spent all his days immersed in books or prayers.

Samuel, though younger, had quickly exceeded him in size—horizontally and vertically—but he never dared lay a hand on him. To each his privileges: Samuel didn’t hit Avner, but Avner spoke to him even less than he did to me.

So, to surround me with the affection I needed, I had a brother with a mind lost in visions, who tried to instill wisdom in me; another who persecuted me for my own physical well-being; and a sister who either comforted or cared for me, all the time whining about her hypothetical or phantom husband, depending on the time period.

Ruling over us all were my parents, the inseparable couple, Sarah and Avram Weinberger—inseparable because there is nothing like time to twist and tighten the ties that bind.

As our family name indicates, my father’s father was a Hungarian wine merchant like his ancestors before him. But my own father had broken with tradition, since only one brother was needed to carry on the family business and since no one else was there to take up his father-in-law’s lumber company.

Avram Weinberger was a reasonably successful businessman but a worried father. He knew that his elder son wouldn’t take up the trade, but he couldn’t complain because Avner had devoted himself instead to the Eternal One, blessed be His name, and no one was ever against having a rabbi in the family.

However, he had doubts about Samuel’s future. Since he was stronger and more outspoken than most boys his age—I can bear witness to this from having been on the receiving end of his outspokenness more often than I deserved—what adventure wouldn’t tempt him?My father feared most of all that Samuel might frequent the young Zionists, since he was so well endowed with the physical and mental qualities they required.

As for me … but let’s not go into my father’s suffering just yet.

At this point in the story, the rules of the genre require me to speak of the other half of the parental couple. My mother.

She was … what should I say, other than that she was my mother and everything that follows naturally from that? Beautiful, of course.

She took care of the house and her children. She busied herself all week but even more on Friday, in preparation for Shabbat, our day of rest.

I often watched her work so hard that I began to doubt the true holiness of this day. There’s something rotten in this earthly realm that violates the spirit of the Commandments and prevents people from observing them perfectly unless money is involved— which is not really orthodox.

Even if my father’s income was enough to support a woman and four children—one of them a sports lover—it didn’t allow him to hire someone to help my mother. My parents should have had one less child, but since I was the youngest, I preferred not to think about this solution.

Rachel helped my mother, but she sighed constantly and wasn’t all that useful. As for me, I tried sometimes, but, over and above the Commandments, there is Tradition, and I was a man.For that matter, during childhood, which often lasts a long time, one doesn’t have that much concern for other people, and it’s only later that one feels remorse.

My father and mother, then, constituted what is called a couple. The reality of the situation depends on the meaning one gives this word.

They lived and slept together, had married because they were supposed to, and for the same reason had procreated—there was no required number of offspring as long as it was large.

Maybe you’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof? I know fools with university degrees today who assert that that kind of situation couldn’t have existed because they were born in the age of Coca Cola and the Apollo spacecraft.

I had fewer sisters than Tevye had daughters, my father wasn’t a Rothschild and sang off key, but my parents spoke to each other even less than Tevye and Golde.

Certain questions never even entered their minds—too bad for us and for the rest of the world, because it wouldn’t have hurt anyone if they did. There are silences that kill. I say so even if it’s a cliché, because when you know the victim, nothing is a cliché.

When I consider the sum total of the fatigue, the problems, the pain that four children represented for my mother, right from the moment of their conception, I can’t understand how anyone can seriously claim that children are a blessing.Maybe we brought her a few joys—in our sleep or when we weren’t around—and she had managed to avoid having to live alone, alone with a husband who had nothing to say to her and didn’t even hide that fact with small talk, which sometimes allows others to believe that happiness can exist (although that would require some imagination …).

Midjourney AI Image inspired by the book Forget Adam WeinbergerAs for yours truly, he was born smack in the middle of a war, in the month of June. The fact that he was the youngest didn’t prevent his parents from naming him Adam.

It was as if, lacking any inspiration, they had returned to Biblical sources in search of a name and had stopped fairly quickly, although without having to resort to calling him Tovu v’Bohu or Bereshit, which would be difficult names to have to carry around.

I like my name. It smells of the earth, even if Poland is no paradise.

Oh yes, I forgot to tell you: as if life wasn’t difficult enough, we lived in a small, drab Polish village inhabited one-third by Jews and two-thirds by tranquil, dull anti-Semites, able to suppress their sentiments toward their neighbors of my religion out of Christian charity and good business sense.

I’m exaggerating—they weren’t all anti-Semitic. We even had Christian friends. I’m saying that so you’re aware in advance …I don’t think I was a difficult child—I caught up later, though—and I was a good student. My relative calm was closely related to a feeling of profound, general indifference for the universe around me, which should have interested me more.

I didn’t confide in my family or seek their confidences. When my sister started to moan, I fled—unless she was busy caring for me.

I had no friends and a total lack of interest in my religion, which would have worried my mother if she had had the time to think about it and only slightly vexed my father.

If God exists, I said to him with the mature wisdom of a ten-year-old, He doesn’t need me to go to the synagogue to pray to Him.

Moreover, I added, I found most of the Ten Commandments inappropriate and, what’s more, fairly useless. The others, like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not steal,” were so self-evident that it seemed pointless to connect them to any single religion.

I have always been naïve, and I believed for a long time that any person with a minimum of common sense would follow the axiom that one should do unto others as one would want others to do unto him.

I should point out again that I lived in an environment that was rather unusual in Polish Jewish society between the two World Wars.

My father was neither rich nor poor, at least before 1935, and paid little attention to religion. I don’t think he was leaning toward assimilation, though. He was not unhappy that one of his sons wanted to become a rabbi, and he no doubt took this fact as an embrace of Judaism sufficient to reassure his family.

No more was necessary. As for Avner, there were no choices and no worries: first heder, then yeshiva. But my father was not eager for his other two sons to follow this path.He found the classrooms squalid and the teachers too violent. He had no doubt kept in his heart the memory of some unjust punishment he had received, and he wasn’t the type to find relief from his own unhappiness in imposing it on others.

But where should he send Samuel and me? The schools financed and run by the Bund seemed too leftist to him. Communism represented a greater threat to him than Zionism.

The Tarbut schools were a direct extension of the latter. The Agudath Israel schools were too orthodox, and private schools cost an arm and a leg.

That’s why he sent us both to a free Polish public school, where classes were held only in the morning. In the afternoon, Avner was supposed to inculcate in us the values necessary to make us good Jews, which he did in as perfunctory manner as possible, since he was too absorbed in working for his own future.

This choice brought criticism upon my father. Not only was he offering his children up for conversion, but, even worse, he hadn’t even enrolled them in a Jewish school for the afternoon.

He held fast to his position for a long time, because he didn’t have a lot of time to spend with us, because it was the most economical solution, and because, as I mentioned, he was quite liberal. I admit that I never had any reason to complain about his decision.

Nor about refusing to have any friends, since I lived in a milieu where no one would be tempted to have a relationship with a Jew anyway.

Furthermore, these free afternoons were a blessing. Lost in reverie or just lazy, I read a lot. Weather permitting, I took off deep into the woods with a book and didn’t return until nightfall.

Samuel also took advantage of this freedom, but in a different way. He spent all his time involved in sports. Later he used it to perfect his knowledge of Zionism. Nevertheless, as you will see, I wasn’t able to enjoy this freedom for long.So, I was a lonely, dreamy child who spent his spare time wandering through the beech trees along the river—scenery so typical of Poland.

When I heard the particular cries upstream that announced that my brother Samuel was about to burst into view with his friends, paddling like a bunch of maniacs in small boats that the rushing water seemed to want to get rid of by forcing them toward the river bank, I hid behind a barrel and let them pass.

If I had few things in common with my brother, I had even fewer with his friends. I shared my father’s dislike of the Zionists—which most of them were—but for different reasons.

I didn’t take satisfaction in the image of the Jew as martyr, fearful and weak, always afraid of some pogrom. I was a child, and above all I was myself.

I frequented a few non-Jews, the occasional classmate, and I wasn’t religious. Therefore I saw no reason to flaunt my Judaism, which would only end up causing me problems.

I wanted to continue living peacefully where I was, because moving somewhere else seemed to me to be the worst possible curse. From my point of view, the Zionist adventure and the call for a Jewish state in Palestine—with the requirement to go live there and fight—seemed like implausible and absurd aspirations.

Maybe a Jewish state in Poland … but what would we do with the Poles? I was afraid of the Zionists, because I imagined our government demanding that all Jews living comfortably in the Diaspora should emigrate to the desert, with every other nation following their example to get rid of us once and for all.

Therefore, since I couldn’t climb in the hierarchy of the movement, I must confess that as soon as I was old enough, I used my own pitiful means to attempt to sabotage my brother’s Palestine plans.Without meaning to, I ended up in this way being a considerable support to my father, which had the unpleasant effect of depriving me of the joys of success and of everyone-for-himself.

Not to mention that this didn’t help make me more likable in my brother’s eyes, even if he wasn’t always aware of my activities and of my responsibility for his setbacks. I have to say that, even if I had good reasons to resent Samuel, he had no lack of detractors for his involvement in the Zionist movement.

My father was against it in principle and because he thought you had to be crazy to go live in a country filled with Brits and Arabs—worse than the Christian Poles, whom at least we were familiar with—and start over from square one.

The fact that Jews had been forbidden for centuries from owning land didn’t help to develop much of a taste for the joys of agriculture in him:

“So, Shmuel” (he thought this Hebrew name was endearing), can you imagine yourself behind a plow?!”And he tapped his forehead while making an “oy” of consternation.

My mother, too, was against the idea in principle but also because of tradition: her husband was opposed to it, and it was the custom for a Jewish mother to do everything possible to keep her sons close to her.

As for Rachel, she didn’t care, at first because Zionism wouldn’t provide her with a husband and, once she was married, because her husband had lots of faults, but not that one.

Avner, who never thought about anything but the Torah and the Talmud, was violently opposed for religious reasons that I found completely incomprehensible, and that today seem tragic and preposterous: it wasn’t right to found a Jewish state until the coming of the Messiah.

The Messiah didn’t come, but Hitler did in His place, and you have to admit that, in spite of my antipathy toward Zionism, if it had gained steam earlier, the Nazis would have had to go farther to find us, and we would have given them a proper welcome.

But let’s not be unrealistic: even “if”, I can assure you that 80 percent of the Jews would have stayed in Europe for fear of investing their future and their past in such a ridiculous plan. And it’s not by means of “ifs” that we could have beaten the Germans.

I also had measles when I was three, and other normal childhood diseases—normal but painful when you’re the victim—and the Messiah never came out of his hiding place to save me. So?

The Messiah—now there’s a story … On our street lived a boy named Moishe, whose father was very rich—as a joke we called him Pharaoh, because of his son—and who had the incredible good fortune to take a trip to Rome to visit distant cousins.Everyone in the community was talking about it: imagine, a Jew from our town in the city of the Pope! And there was a legend that claimed that the Messiah was waiting at the gates of Rome.

Before Moishe left—at that time the question interested me because of all the others, especially my rabbi brother’s—I had asked him to do a discreet investigation.

At his return, I was triumphant: I had been right. The Messiah wasn’t there. I told Avner that he could eliminate one place from his research—I didn’t say it maliciously but rather to help him and save him time.

But he just ran his hand through my hair with a very sad or very religious look, according to your point of view, telling me that Moishe didn’t have good eyes.

I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but I believed the Messianic legends even less.

Anyway, I’m digressing. I introduced you to my family. I’ve set the scene, as they say, because one must respect the reader and never suppose that he’s clever enough to understand everything on his own.

However, I’m far from having mentioned the important things.

RACHELMidjourney AI Image inspired by Rachel in Forget Adam WeinbergerTo be sure, there is still a lot to say about the members of my family and about my childhood, a period that it’s a pleasure to speak of since one knows for sure that he can’t relive it.

I grew, since I couldn’t do otherwise, and everyone around me got older. Avner was more and more the rabbi—he finally became one altogether—and Samuel confirmed our father’s fears by becoming more and more of a Zionist.

Rachel, searching endlessly for a husband, despaired more and more of ever finding one.

As for my parents, they didn’t work more—that wouldn’t have been possible—but they seemed more and more tired. My father even began to consider Shabbat a blessing, and my mother exhausted herself more and more to observe the day when even Adonai, blessed be He, rests.

If He knew how much my mother did to prepare for this day of rest, I’m sure He would have provided us with two of them. But he didn’t know or didn’t want another day, and now He wouldn’t accept that His Jews be just the slightest bit Christian one day a week.

Too bad, because Sunday is a great idea, right after Shabbat. Luckily for those born after my mother, the British invented the weekend, without asking Him His opinion—but my mother didn’t know anything about the British.

And besides, she would have probably exhausted herself twice as much.

So time passed, and not only in the glorious Polish Third Republic. But when it doesn’t bring any big changes, besides a few gray hairs at your parents’ temples, you can treat it lightly, even with almost total indifference.I grew stronger and could escape more easily when Samuel chased me. Avner’s lectures began to get on my nerves, but I still listened to him to make him happy, and I even let Samuel beat me up once in a while so that he didn’t lose confidence in himself.

I was still comforted by my sister, but her tears grew more abundant. I think she must have fallen in love with a young Jew who was passing through. Of course, they never were able to speak to each other, and he left ignorant of the passion that he had ignited—or rather incarnated—for a few weeks.

My parents were also worried that Rachel wouldn’t find a husband. I was approaching my bar mitzvah, and she was almost twenty: two pressing concerns for Jewish parents.

I would have liked to help them by telling them that as far as I was concerned, I could have easily done without this ceremony, but I don’t think that would have given them any solace.

And what right did I have anyway to deprive my family of a celebration? So they sent me to the rabbi, and Avner spent more time teaching me.

As for my sister, my father finally resolved to ask for help from a matchmaker, to the great displeasure of my mother, who knew better than anyone else the results one could expect from such a move.Although the matchmaker had been creeping around our house for several years and was furious at us for not taking advantage of her services, she got strangely friendly, took her time, and ended up presenting us with what was left at the bottom of the barrel.

When she arrived, I would hide behind the door to spy on her, as she triumphantly proposed an aged alcoholic or some neurotic widower. Rachel found good reasons to despair, as did my parents.

Fearing that the quality of her care for me would decline, or even that I’d end up in turn having to take care of her, I decided to hunt for a brother-in-law myself.

Where could I hope to dig up this rare phenomenon when I was barely twelve years old and the entire male Jewish population had already been approached, or almost?

And there was my mother’s example, which gave me pause. I refused to allow Rachel to ruin her health preparing for Shabbat and appreciated less and less the lethargy that fell over our community every weekend while I wanted to get out and have a good time.

Even Samuel, whose main characteristic was the inability to sit still—even less to reflect on anything—sacrificed himself to the laws of Shabbat. What could I do to help Rachel escape this curse?I saw only one solution and resolved to befriend the first classmate who had a brother old enough to marry. A goyish classmate, of course. It was the only way to escape the drudgery of preparing for Shabbat and be able to enjoy Sundays.

You need to understand what a sacrifice this represented for me at that time. Not because of frequenting non-Jews (I already explained about that) nor of turning over my sister body and soul to one of them, but to have to—even for a limited amount of time—conduct a friendship, with everything that involved!

A lot was at stake.

For a few days, I asked around discreetly. I was quickly able to choose three families that fulfilled the conditions of having two sons and being Christian. I had a wealth of choices, so to speak, and was already overjoyed: my sister had waited almost twenty years, and me? Two weeks …

The first family, the Majarskis, had a lot going for them. The father was rich—he owned a store and a house and had a servant so strong that he could have prepared Shabbat every day.

Their older son was twenty-five and didn’t seem to be thinking of marriage. The problem was that, like all good Poles, they were very Catholic. Every Sunday, the family marched off to church dressed to the nines—the mother several times a week.What good would it do to change from one form of religious drudgery to another? Especially since, when I tried to enter into a conversation with the younger son, who was in my class, he turned his back to me with disdain, whispering that he didn’t associate with us.

I understood clearly whom he meant. I wasn’t going to put myself out to cultivate a brother-in-law who wouldn’t talk to his wife or his mother-in-law. As my parents’ case proved, it wasn’t necessary to look to a goyish family to match up a couple who didn’t speak to each other!

The second family gave me more hope. The von Statts were Germans who had been in Poland for three generations. If they were crazy enough to come live here, they could certainly consider marrying down.

Furthermore, they were Protestant, not Catholic. That seemed to be an acceptable religious compromise. There would just have to be an arrangement to maintain the best parts of both traditions.

I was easily able to befriend Hans, a short, husky blond boy who spoke little. We were made to get along, since neither one of us liked to talk.

But, in order not to waste time or limit my options, I also decided to form a relationship with the third family I had selected, the Dobjinskis, completely atheist Poles—which isn’t common—and whose father was a tremendous drinker—which definitely is. Janek, their younger son, had the unfortunate flaw of being a chatterbox—so much so that at school no one went near him.

So it wasn’t hard for me to become his friend. The difficult part was to stay that way for the necessary amount of time.I spent all my free time with either Hans or Janek. I was received equally well in both their homes, but I have to admit a clear preference for Hans because he was quiet and his family’s cook baked wonderful cakes.

Let’s not forget, though, that my real targets were not my friends: it was their brothers.

I liked Hans’s brother, Johann. He was the same age as Avner, but he wasn’t planning on becoming a pastor—which, for that matter, wouldn’t have thwarted my plans.

Janek’s brother, Pavel, was more like my brother Samuel: he was in constant motion and hardly spoke a word to me. All I needed now was an opportunity for my sister to meet them.

Strangely enough, it was simpler with Pavel. I noticed that he often came to get his brother when school was over. I had only to go home with a new whim: demand that my sister also come to school to wait for me.

Since she was often bored and annoyed my mother with her continual lamentations, my parents willingly gave in to my request.From that day on, the last few minutes of class were very trying for me. I imagined Rachel and Pavel both waiting outside the gate. When the bell finally rang and we could leave, the first thing I did was look to see if I could distinguish them among those who had come to collect their little darlings.

After a while, I realized that this wasn’t going to be enough: they had the habit of waiting at opposite ends of the long iron fence, so they couldn’t see each other.

I had to act again. One afternoon I announced to Janek that I wanted to introduce him to my beautiful sister. I took her by the hand so she could shake hands with my friend.

And with his brother. I said to her,

“Rachel, this is Janek, my friend, and his brother, Pavel.”

Then I explained that, since they both came to wait for us, Janek and me, they might as well meet each other. But I didn’t elicit wild enthusiasm, and Rachel dragged me away, barely saying hello.

She wasn’t really putting her all into this. How would she ever find a husband? On the way home I spoke about Janek but mostly about Pavel.

Since I knew so little about the latter, I had no trouble inventing all kinds of positive qualities for him. But Rachel was hardly listening to me, or at least she didn’t show she was.

I was so mad at her that I thought I’d drop the whole idea and return to my beloved solitude, which I had sacrificed for so long. What was my poor sister hoping for?Of course, she was far from being ugly, but she was even farther from being rich. And there’s something I haven’t mentioned so as not to make her situation sound even worse: she spent all her time, when she wasn’t crying, reading French novels, which, unfortunately for her, were translated into Polish or Yiddish, if that language means anything to you.

Obviously, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Balzac tried desperately to give her ideas and raise her hopes. It’s easy for a writer to promise happiness to his readers when he knows he doesn’t have to wipe away their tears.

Rachel was often seated on a bench alone, a book in her lap, eyes staring into space, dreaming about the happiness before her in paper and ink and waiting for those sweet romantic lies to become reality.

When my mother called her, she would stand up sighing, wondering where the handsome, rich young man who would love her passionately would appear from.

Before going inside, she would gaze one last time at the road and the horizon.

Often, rather than the longed-for lover, she would see the matchmaker spring up suddenly with her evil smile and loathsome suggestions.

Sometimes I thought that it was weakness on my father’s part to be so liberal that he wouldn’t marry his daughter against her will. At this rate, if she didn’t abandon her reading and her Madame Bovary dreams, she would end up an old maid.

Getting a grip on herself to accept a husband wouldn’t make her unhappier than that. Sometimes you have to do things to make others happy in spite of themselves. In any case, that was my plan, even if it was beginning to become a burden.

Fortunately, when I was leaving school the next day, I found Rachel and Pavel talking to each other. I jumped for joy, seeing myself already relieved of my responsibility.On the way home, I spoke some more about Pavel. I was so happy, that I had no problem finding all kinds of new things in his favor, and it appeared to me that my sister was finally listening to me.

However, for the sake of caution (and because I liked their cook’s cakes), I kept up my friendship with Hans and Johann. And it was thanks to their mother that I had the opportunity to introduce Rachel to them.

This fine woman, who had taken a shine to me, had the idea of inviting me to spend a day in the country with her husband and children. I pretended to hesitate, arguing that my parents would never allow me to leave home for a whole day with people they didn’t know.

But there was perhaps a way: if my sister could join us …

As for Rachel, I didn’t have much trouble convincing her. A ride in a carriage, a picnic on the grass—she had read about that so often! And since nothing in particular seemed to be going on between her and Pavel, we might as well play several cards at once …

It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday. Mr. von Statt had rented an old carriage drawn by two horses. My sister was overjoyed.

She had put on a simple, pretty dress that made a good impression. Mrs. von Statt knew how to win her over and asked her to sit beside her for the ride.The women were seated opposite the three of us, while Mr. von Statt, transformed into a poet or a workman by the leisure of a Sunday excursion, held the reins.

I was delighted: it wasn’t only for Rachel that this outing was a first. I immediately decided that I preferred Johann to Pavel as a brother-in-law, and I felt satisfaction in thinking that my sister, even though she saw the latter every day, didn’t seem to have developed an undying passion for him.

The weather was glorious. Hans was as calm as usual, and Mrs. von Statt chatted happily with my sister, whom—miracle of miracles—Johann couldn’t stop looking at.

Rachel, completely absorbed in the conversation with her future mother-in-law, didn’t notice anything. Of course, the day had barely begun …

Seeing how everything turned out, even today I don’t know whether I should congratulate myself for having offered my sister the opportunity of living for a whole day, plus a few more afterward, as if she were in a French novel.

Of course, such an experience must make the rest of one’s life seem sad and insipid, even after a very brief moment of happiness.

I don’t think my mother ever experienced even a tiny fraction of this joy—although she was the one who put the finishing touches on my efforts.

We stopped at the edge of a river in a patch of thick grass warmed by the sun. Everything was perfect. I was sure I wasn’t going to risk the sudden appearance of my brother Samuel and his friends in their boats: this river was too calm and too narrow.It was made for peace and quiet, not for Samuel. We unfolded the tablecloth for our picnic. Rachel was trembling slightly and gave me a look every once in a while as if asking me to reassure her that she wasn’t dreaming.

Johann couldn’t keep his eyes off her, his parents were smiling, and his brother was laughing. I was in heaven.

I almost felt like taking an oath of unending friendship with Hans, sealed with a drop of blood.

It’s amazing how strong an illusion can be.

The lunch almost caused a few problems when Mrs. von Statt took out the sausages that were supposed to accompany the salads and the bread. Rachel grew pale.

She had never thought about this. Me neither, because it had been a long time since my mind was on such things. Pork!

I’ve already said that we weren’t a particularly religious Jewish family—with the exception of Avner. But ancestral customs survive the loss of the faith of which they were the foundation.And they probably compensate for actual belief in order to ensure that one remains part of the fold. So, except for Avner, whose whole existence it constituted, the deepest religiosity didn’t inspire the day-to-day life of the Weinberger family, even though my father still went to the synagogue with my mother—but seated apart, as you might know—and we all went for big occasions.

Given the times and the region where we lived, we were taking considerable liberties with the Eternal One and His laws! Except for me, no one even thought about easing the rigors of Shabbat or the laws of kashrut for his own purposes.

It was the way we lived: we bought from Jewish merchants, and we would never have looked for any other kind of food. For that matter, we weren’t any worse off eating this way.

With the von Statts, however, in order to manifest my opposition to tradition—though I admit that I didn’t risk those concerned even noticing this expression of my independence—and also to avoid compromising my plans, I accepted all kinds of food, explaining that in our home we didn’t pay much attention to these archaic rules.

We were good Jews who didn’t want to attract attention. So, when Mrs. von Statt invited my sister, she didn’t think it was necessary to prepare anything in particular.

Rachel gave me a troubled look. She wasn’t going to ruin everything for a slice of ham, was she?

If she were going to meet Stendhal, she had to give it her best, and her future happiness was well worth a bite of sausage!I already said that she wasn’t ugly—I’m taking the risk of creating doubt by repeating it—but what replaced physical beauty in her wasn’t enough to excuse everything. Johann seemed to find her to his liking—let her do as much for the pork!

Rachel had lowered her head and was busy torturing a few poor blades of grass that had nothing to do with this kashrut business.

Fortunately, even though I’ve been speaking about it for a while, no one had yet noticed her malaise. It was up to me …

Pointing to the ham and giving my sister a sharp jab with my elbow, I exclaimed,

“Look, Rachel! Your favorite ham!”

Then, to our hosts, who were already smiling as my sister turned the color of the forbidden meat, I said,

“If you don’t hurry up, she’s going to eat the whole thing. Just think: we have centuries of abstinence to make up for!”I have no idea what Rachel was thinking at that moment, but I had succeeded in preserving our chances. The von Statts were laughing heartily, and my sister, red as a beet, grabbed the first slice of ham she had ever touched in her life.

She muttered, “My brother always exaggerates …”

“What she hasn’t told you,” I added to outdo myself, “is that our uncle brought us a ham like this one last week, and Rachel ate so much she got indigestion! But I think it will be OK for us to have just a little.”

I couldn’t very well abandon my sister altogether … Mrs. von Statt, who perhaps suspected something, affirmed that, in any case, there were enough bread and salads so that Rachel wouldn’t die of hunger.

My sister, who had never seen so many people smile at her in such a short amount of time, performed the first act of her life in contradiction not of a law that she was hardly acquainted with and didn’t understand, but of her customary way of doing things, or that of her entourage, which meant about the same thing.

It still warms my heart to think that this trap I set for her allowed her to perform the first freely chosen act of her existence.

Rachel bit into the forbidden meat, not without suppressing a slight look of disgust. None of the von Statts began a discussion on the miracle of a Jew eating pork.

Dreading that my sister might spit everything out, I swallowed my portion. I didn’t calm down until I noticed that she actually seemed to be enjoying the forbidden fruit.

She was also looking more often at Johann. She had probably finally noticed how much the young man was paying attention to her, which must have helped her to forget the exact nature of what was in her mouth.She even reached out to take some more, but she thought better of the idea and concentrated on the salads and the bread.

They asked her about her activities, her tastes, her plans—things that she had never thought about. She responded in monosyllables, blushing, which the von Statts seemed to appreciate.

Most of the time, I tried to elaborate on her reticence by supplying more information, longer if not exactly true.

I became bolder when I noticed that Rachel didn’t contradict me. Was she beginning to realize exactly how lucky she was? She embellished each and every one of my lies.

The plates were emptied, and the conversation ebbed. Mr. and Mrs. von Statt were slow digesters and thus silent by necessity.

Johann seemed intimidated by Rachel. My friendship hadn’t made Hans any more talkative, and my sister remained mute, staring at the grass.

She raised her eyes once in a while toward Johann and then lowered them as soon as their gazes met each other’s. Encouraged by his parents’ winks, Johann tried to talk enthusiastically about his studies and his future career as a lawyer.

He planned to move to Warsaw, which must have made my sister’s heart beat faster, since, after all her reading, any capital city for her was Paris.But even Johann stopped talking. There were a few moments of silence during which I was wracking my brains trying to find a way to bring “my” couple together.

Finally, Mr. von Statt stood up heavily, stretched as much as his sluggish digestion allowed, and announced that he was going to take a nap in the shade. His wife followed him, while I suggested to my friends and my sister that we take a walk along the river.

We started out. I went ahead with Hans, determined to leave behind the ones I already called “the two lovebirds.”

But every time the distance became too great, my sister would call me back. So, she didn’t understand anything! Me, she could see all the time.

A young, handsome, intelligent man was waiting impatiently to speak to her of love; the weather was splendid, and the landscape would have made the surliest civil servant dream of poetry; and she didn’t want me to leave the two of them alone …

Once again, I had to invent something! I was the only one who didn’t have the right to the calm necessary for digestion. I took a look at the river and suggested to Hans that we go for a swim.

I was sure that my sister would refuse to appear in only her slip before people she barely knew, and Johann would therefore be happy to keep her company.

Hans accepted enthusiastically: he found the walk and the heat unpleasant. But my plan wasn’t to my sister’s liking: “No, Adam, it’s too dangerous to swim just after a meal.”“Oy, oy, oy,” my father would have said, and with him all the Jewish characters that appear in literature.

What was the matter with her? Was she incapable of understanding that the purpose of this day wasn’t to make her appreciate ham so she could become a nun?

Fortunately, Johann showed some initiative:

“Let’s let them enjoy themselves. The water’s not deep, and we’ll stay on the bank to keep an eye on them. Unless you want to swim, too …”

She refused, blushing, and Hans and I didn’t wait for her permission to undress and dive into the cold water.

I hate water. Cold water even more. For half an hour I endured this sacrifice to ensure Rachel’s happiness.

Hans enjoyed the experience much more than I did, probably because of his generations of distant ancestors who had sailed the Baltic, whom he had spoken to me about one day.

They were the source of his family’s relative prosperity. I did my best to look as though I was having a good time and tried hard to resist my growing disgust for the water and for all the questionable things it might be carrying along.

I held back my cries when a lascivious water plant brushed against me, making me imagine billions of microbes and viruses attacking my skin and endangering my health.

I found a little more courage when I finally saw Rachel and Johann alone on the bank, talking quietly. There were long moments of silence, to be sure, but they no doubt had their secret necessity.

Finally, my resistance gave out, and I pulled Hans away in a race to the sunny meadow, where, as quickly as possible, we could get rid of the freezing drops that were clinging to us. I heard my sister shouting that she wanted to follow us. But Johann must have found a new argument, no less convincing. I liked this guy …

I lay on the grass next to Hans, out of breath but delighted, confident in the future, which would provide me with a brother-in-law and free my sister from anguish and a joyless life.For the first time I imagined what my parents would think if their daughter married Johann or Pavel, a goy … but they had to understand! It was that or nothing.

In our community, there had already been a case of a girl who had married a Christian. Her father chased her from his house, disinherited her, and considered her dead.

Even though she hadn’t left the town, she was never able to see her parents again. The mother despaired but didn’t dare go secretly to visit her daughter, who, people said, cried every day thinking of her parents.

Nevertheless, her husband’s family was charming, not too Catholic, and almost tolerant. The father-in-law even reached out a few times, but in vain. Everyone attributed the death of the young girl’s first baby to her sorrow.

She herself remained between life and death for a long time, but her father never came to see her. Her mother fell ill, etc. The whole nine yards, which didn’t do much to strengthen the Catholics’ love for us.

Our whole community talked about it. They tried to reason with the father, to no avail. My own father often went to speak to him. He condemned his reaction, which gave me hope. But I wasn’t completely reassured.

And in this case it wasn’t just some Jewish girl marrying some young German Protestant or Polish atheist, but his own daughter marrying a goy….The sun was going down. Rachel and Johann brought us our clothes. We walked back to the meadow, where the parents were still asleep.

We were silent: Hans and I from the sun and fatigue, Rachel and Johann for reasons that transcended words.

Rachel didn’t say another word on the way home. Thank God Hans and I were there. We had had such a good time, we affirmed, that we ought to do the same thing the following week.

Mr. and Mrs. von Statt accepted with pleasure, and Rachel—my going depended on her—complied without batting an eyelid.

After having thanked and taken leave of our friends, Rachel and I made our way back to our neighborhood. I didn’t dare say a word, and she seemed to share my sudden awkward discomfort.

She had become very pale again—she certainly had turned every possible color today! Suddenly, she took a step toward the ditch at the side of the road, leaned her hand against a birch tree, and threw up what her religion couldn’t swallow.

I thought she was going to make a terrible scene, that she resented me intensely for having led her into this trap, and I prepared myself selflessly for the cries and tears that I was so accustomed to.

But she walked back toward me, whiter than ever in spite of having been out in the sun all day.

Her eyes were drowned in tears, but she wasn’t actually crying. In a soft, trembling voice, she asked me, “You won’t say anything to Mama and Papa, right?”

I took her hand with all the tenderness I could muster at that moment, and we walked home, bound together by a great, heavy secret.

The next day, after school, I saw from afar that she was standing next to Pavel. He was speaking freely, but she was barely listening and wasn’t looking at him or answering him.I thought I would tell her that she needn’t come to wait for me anymore, but I decided in the end that it was premature to sacrifice one of “our” opportunities.

On the way home, I took a risk and made a few references to the previous day’s outing, but most of all to the next one, and I could see that my sister was impatient for the weekend to arrive.

We couldn’t let things drag on. Hannah, the matchmaker, would end up completing her job one day, when she felt her pride was avenged.

The following Sunday was as idyllic as the previous one, especially for Rachel and Johann—even though I had to dive into the cold, repugnant water again.

We continued these expeditions, which became a habit throughout the springtime, and the weekly swim was transformed into a ritual imposed on only those who enjoyed it, namely everyone else but me.

I was annoyed at myself for not having been able to find something else to do the first time, especially since, on our way home from our second Sunday in the country, Rachel remembered that I hated the water.

I can’t help thinking that, from that day on, she took a certain pleasure in forcing this weekly burden on me, in revenge for the ham.

I was going to end up hating Sundays as much as Shabbat, but exams were approaching, and we had to put an end to our outings until summer vacation.Meanwhile, from time to time I continued to frequent the Dobjinskis. Since he had begun to spend a few minutes every day talking with my sister, Pavel had become more cordial toward me.

This, combined with Janek’s nonstop yakking, made each of my visits to their house extremely trying. I sensed that the family talked about us.

The insinuations and allusions became more and more numerous, and the father, between glasses of wine, began to ask me questions.

A NOVEL THAT EXPLORES THE DIFFICULTY OF SPEAKING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST.First there is Adam Weinberger’s long childhood, in a world that has no idea yet what is in store for it. The childhood of a lover of illusions, who dreams of changing the world and of freeing his family from the burden of a tradition that he finds unbearable.

And who flees words and other people to the point of losing his identity. Between the two is there, of which one dares not speak.

And then, in the end, after forgetting, at the end of all the flights, there is a return of childhood from beyond death, the single truth of fiction – of the narration of life.

About the author of Forget Adam WeinbergerVincent Engel – author of Forget Adam WeinbergerVincent Engel was born in Brussels in 1963. When he was five years old, he began to invent stories (the poor, deprived child had no television), and at age nine, he started to try to write them. School for him was clearly a waste of time. When he got home, he wouldn’t waste any of his energies on lessons and homework, either, preferring to devote his time to his passions.

This resulted in a somewhat complicated academic trajectory until he finally went to university, thanks to the tenacious will of his father, for whom a son without a university education was not his son.

Although he hated school and the teachers who didn’t predict much of a future for him, he definitely enjoyed earning a doctorate in literature and becoming a university professor specializing in contemporary French literature. He had a particular interest in issues of memory, especially concerning the Holocaust and what he calls the “desire to remember” (2020).

At the same time, he continued to pursue his writing and chanced upon a crazy publisher couple from Quebec, who would put out his first collections of novellas and become his good friends.

In 2000, he completed Retour à Montechiarro (Fayard, 2001), Volume I of the “World of Asmodée Edern,” which met with great commercial success.

Today Vincent wears many hats: professor at the University of Louvain, novelist, playwright – in particular as friend and right-hand man (although he is left-handed) to the late Franco Dragone for a decade – and screenwriter, not to mention his many collaborations with the press and the media as a columnist and literary critic.

– Translated by Richard Kutner. Richard Kutner is an independent translator of fiction and non-fiction. His translations include After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann, and Cast Away on the Letter A, by Fred, for which he was awarded a Hemingway Translation Grant from the Book Office of the French Embassy in the United States.

Follow me on Instagram : @vincent_engel_officiel

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After the Roundup is the true memoir of eleven-year-old French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris by the French police along with 13,000 other Jews (4,000 of whom were children) in July 1942 and held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium.

From there, he and his family were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande.

Extensive After the Roundup excerpts:

Escape

Chapter 3 of After the Roundup book

Separation from After the Roundup Book

After the Roundup on Amazon1. ARRESTING “FOREIGN” JEWSThe French police will arrest the 22,000 foreign Jewsin Greater Paris. They’ll be taken to Drancy,Compiegne, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande. p. 172. THE VELODROME d’HIVERA storm is starting. We’ll sit here.I don’t know how longwe’ll be staying. p. 273. DEPARTUREATTENTION, ATTENTION! THE FOLLOWING FAMILIES GATHERIN THE COURTYARD. IF YOU HEAR YOUR NAME, YOU MUSTCOME AT DAWN TO SIGN UP FOR TOMORROW’S DEPARTURE.AARON, ABRAHAM, ABRAMOVICZ P. 434. DEPORTATIONWhat does he mean, “deported”? p. 475. TEARING APART P.486. SEPARATIONMama….Mama….MAMA!!! P. 4WE’LL MEET AGAIN7. Pitchi Poi…Pitchi Poi….We’ll meet again in Pitchi Poi… P. 508. Summer 1942. Detention camp ofBeaune-la-Rolande, France P. 19. FREEDOM!! P. 68ESCAPEI made it! Joe, I…..I MADE IT!!I MADE IT!!Really? Really truly? What do you see, Joseph? What do you see?There’s….an open space and then a grove of trees. About20 yards I’d say. Joe, do you think your legs will hold up?LIBERATION10 THE AMERICANS! THE AMERICANS!! p. 89RESOLVE – p 9511. I couldn’t understand how good, honest people like my parents or innocent little girls could be murdered only because they were Jewish…..I kept hearing names…..names of places, all of them in Poland.On the radio, in newspapers, they spoke of….of millions.But I didn’t want to hear.Not yet.12. Remember – Never to accept the unacceptable p 120 After the Roundup on AmazonFrench Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s After the Roundup Graphic NovelPREFACEI was born in Paris in 1931. In 1942, I was eleven years old, and I wore the yellow star.

My parents, my two sisters, and I were arrested on July 16, 1942, during the big Vél’ d’Hiv’ Roundup, before being taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium. We stayed there five days and five nights, without food, water, or sanitation.

Then we were transferred to the internment camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, in the Loiret region of France. After being held for about two weeks, the rest of my family was sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp, in Poland.

As soon as they arrived, they were gassed and burned in the crematory ovens.

Even with the gendarmes, watchtowers, and barbed wire, I managed to escape from Beaune-la-Rolande with my friend Joe, who was as bold as I was.

Despite the collaboration of the Vichy government, the entire French population cannot be considered guilty. Of all the occupied countries, France had the smallest percentage of French and foreign Jews sent to the camps.

We should also remember that 75 percent of the Jews of France survived. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac finally acknowledged the participation of the French state in the fate of its Jews: the government had indeed abandoned to the occupier a segment of its population that it should have protected. This admission was an immense comfort to me.

Urged on by Simone Veil well before this, I began to reflect on an obligation that was mine as well after such a long silence: the duty to bear witness, the necessity to be willing to tell others about what I had lived through.

For more than forty years, I have visited countless middle and high schools in France and abroad, a commitment that led to my being named Officier de la Légion d’Honneur and to my receiving the Palmes Académiques (for distinguished contributions to education).In Le Mans, where I have lived for decades, the Villaret Middle School became the Joseph Weismann Middle School in 2019, a source of great pride for me.

The narrative that you are about to discover inspired Rose Bosch’s film La Rafle (The Roundup), which was released in 2010. It was essential, though, to tell the rest of the story: in collaboration with Caroline Andrieu and the publisher Michel Lafon, I wrote the memoir After the Roundup, which came out in 2011.

Then a lucky coincidence put me in contact with the artist Laurent Bidot, who, along with the author and scriptwriter Arnaud Delalande, created the graphic novel that you have in your hands. After the film and the book, it was of the greatest importance that it be realized.

This book has a specific goal: the unceasing transmission, to the young as well as the old, of the memory of one of the darkest pages of the history of humanity, the Holocaust (“Shoah” in Hebrew, meaning “catastrophe”), a word that designates the murder of nearly six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.I am one of its last survivors.

By means of this testimony, I wish to continue to inform people so that this tragedy never occurs again.

For my entire life, I have borne the terrible pain caused by the loss of my loved ones. But I have also developed a determination and an optimism that have succeeded in bringing down mountains, no doubt molding myself into an “example of psychological resilience,” as the psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik would say.

I am now ninety years old.

But I can still convey one last message: never accept the unacceptable. See on AmazonAfter the Roundup – EscapeFrench Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s Story from the Original BookWe begin a methodical exploration of the camp. Only the entrance gate isn’t protected by tight rows of barbed wire, but it immediately appears impassable to us. It’s guarded by several teams of gendarmes, inside and out.

So we’ll have to deal with the barbed wire, no matter how sharp and thick it is. Going over the top of it is out of the question: First of all, it’s too high—more than two yards from the looks of it.

And it seems to extend over a long distance, so we could be seen too easily. We consider digging, but the soil, dried up by the summer heat, is too hard.

One last option presents itself to us, the one that will work: separate the metal wires to create a passage.

The camp is shaped like a rectangle, and there’s a watchtower at each corner.

At night, the police sweep the open area and the edges with spotlights, ready to fire at anything that moves. We might as well try to escape in the daytime.

“We need to choose the moment when there’s the most activity,” Joe suggests.Together we exclaim, “Lunchtime!”At noon, everyone assembles in front of the food shed for the only meal of the day.

Of course, no one wants to run the risk of missing lunch, so it’s there that all the guards’ eyes are focused while the food is being given out—about two hours in total.

Joe is worried. “The barbed wire is really thick … We’re gonna be skinned alive.”

“You’re right, but we don’t have any choice. We’re going to have to equip ourselves … Do you know where to find some sturdy clothes?”

He knows. The clothes left behind by everyone who’s passed through the camp have all been put in one of the barracks.

We sneak inside unnoticed. Sweaters, pants, and shirts are piled up on the bedsteads, with no regard for size or shape. No problem—we do the sorting ourselves …

Toward the end of the morning, with the August sun shooting out its hottest rays, here we are, dressed for wintertime: two pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, two shirts, and a thick wool beret on our shaved heads, everything in the darkest colors we can find, brown and dark green.

We stay far from the others and pretend to be sleeping, leaning against the wall of one of the barracks the way so many other kids do …I imagine that thoughts like mine are racing through Joe’s head. It’s been two days since our parents were taken away.

We haven’t even taken the time to tell each other about our lives. All I know about him is that he lives in the twentieth arrondissement and that he has no brothers or sisters.

We adopted each other spontaneously because we share the same taste for freedom and also maybe a certain clear headedness.

We don’t formulate a plan—we’re barely conscious of what we’re about to do, but we sense that we have to do it.

Something deep inside of us sets off an alarm: We have to get out of here; it’s a question of life or death.

There are no smiles on our faces at the thought of our flight. On the contrary, we’re serious, worried, and filled with emotion.We look at the other children. Some of them aren’t even three years old, and few are as old as we are. Many are sick from what they’ve been eating for weeks, and perhaps even more from the privation they’ve endured for years now.

Some play, oblivious. The rage to live that compels Joe and me to want to escape drives them only to go running through the dust of the camp as they wait to rush into their parents’ arms.

Hope or some kind of reckless unawareness keeps them going, I don’t know. Just like Joe and me in the end, except we’re going in another direction.

They’re all like the two of us: the same yellow star sewn on their chests, the same imprisonment, the same nightmares, the same hunger gnawing at their stomachs—and, in all our hearts, the same boundless love for our fathers and mothers.

The lunch bell rings at the other end of the camp. We watch the children pop out of every corner to go get their piece of bread.The two of us take off.

Joe goes first. Flat on his stomach, nose in the dust, he begins to separate the barbed wire to create a kind of tunnel through it on the ground.

But it takes him many minutes to disentangle even one inch because the wires are so tightly enmeshed. It’s nothing like the open wire fences surrounding fields of cows!

The wall before us seems to be made of an impossible tangle of rolls of metal wire. I heard from the grown-ups, when they were still here, that the camp was originally built to keep German soldiers prisoner.

If the security fence around the camp was judged sufficient for solid, well-nourished soldiers, it’s reasonable to conclude that two skinny runts like Joe and me have no chance of escape. Only we’re absolutely not reasonable.

Fortunately, Joe is big … After an hour of effort and perseverance, he’s succeeded in creating a passage just wide enough for someone his size, and now that it’s long enough, I slide in behind him.We advance at the pace of a sickly snail through the mass of metallic brambles so thick that the sunlight can barely penetrate it, but we’re still moving forward. And we have plenty of time: it’s not like in school.

No one’s taking attendance, and no one’s waiting for us. And if we’re not there tonight in our dormitory for lights out, no one’s going to notice.

Even if a guard making his rounds passes by the hole we made in the barbed wire, he’ll have to bend down to see it. I wouldn’t say we were calm, but our adventure seems to be off to a pretty good start.

Joe is breathing hard in front of me. My nose is on his heels. There’s no real reason to be this close except to encourage him.

All of his precautions are in vain: protecting his hands with the sleeves of his shirt to separate the wires one by one, he still tears up his fingers.

“Ow! These damned things really hurt!”

“Joe, be quiet! You’re going to attract attention!”

“Easy for you to say. I’m bleeding everywhere.”

“It’s all right. It’s all right. We’re moving ahead.”“Well, I can’t keep doing this. It’s your turn.”There’s one problem: the passageway he’s made isn’t wide enough for us to pass each other, even though I’ve enlarged it a little. We crawl backward toward the camp. I get out, Joe follows me, and I creep back into the tunnel, with Joe right behind me.

We hold our breath for a few seconds. Nothing happens. There’s still the same noise, the same sobs, the same shouts of children who have lost all control of themselves.

No one saw us, no gendarme on his rounds, no policeman from his watchtower, probably because of the thickness of the barbed wire.

My index fingers and thumbs form pliers precise enough to grab hold of the wires and separate them one by one. I’m panting and cursing like my friend before me, but soon I clear a four-inch-long passage wide enough for our shoulders.

I suddenly move my head, and my beret gets stuck on the barbs. Is it lice, fleas, scabies, or scratches from the wires? I’m not sure what’s itching.Besides, pretty soon I don’t feel anything. Neither the blood flowing down my hands, elbows, and neck nor the skin being peeled off my knees from rubbing against the ground. I hear Joe breathing behind me, but we don’t speak.

We have no need to urge each other on. And we have to conserve our strength, because this is a long–a very long–procedure.

How long has it been since we started to make our way through this mass of barbed wire? It seems like hours.

In fact, it has been hours, but we’re unaware. Once again, we’ve lost the notion of time. We have only one idea in our minds: pass under this wall of metal, make it out, and stand in the fresh air of freedom.

We have no choice: it’s not hard to imagine what would happen to us if we were to go back. We have no knowledge that elsewhere members of the Resistance are joining forces and singing “Freedom guides our footsteps.”But it’s the idea of this same freedom that helps us to endure our painful crawl. We’re exhausted, but in no way discouraged, firmly convinced that we’re going to succeed.

We’re right. After many hours, I catch a glimpse of brighter light. I redouble my effort. Anesthetized by the pain, my hands no longer feel anything.

I pick up the pace, helped by luck: the network of metal wires is a little less dense near the outside of the enclosure. Suddenly, right in front of me, I see a hole about eight inches in diameter already formed in the wires.

Could some villager secretly have tried to create a passage into the camp to see what was going on there? Or to help prisoners escape? Who knows? In any case, he didn’t finish the job. Joe and I, on the other hand, have almost completed our work.

With my last remaining strength, I create a tunnel to the hole I just discovered. I take off my beret, and, in a gesture of rage, I throw it outside.

“Joe, my beret is free!”

“Dickhead! I don’t believe it! You still need it!”“I don’t care. Maybe I’m not out yet, but my beret is, and I’m planning to join it!”I hear my friend grumbling behind me. “What a moron! He’s going to cut his head open at the last minute … Whatever got into me to try this with such a halfwit?”

“Joe, keep your insults to yourself. We made it!”

“We made it? I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true, I swear.”

“What do you see?”

There’s an open space. We’re going to have to run a little to reach the trees. I’d say … about twenty yards. Are your legs still working?”

“Don’t worry—they’re fine … Get a move on, and wave to me when you’re there, OK?”

“OK!”

I pick up my beret and launch myself like a rocket. My shoes race forward, and my little sparrow’s feet follow them as best they can.I squeeze my fists with all my remaining strength. It’s the most beautiful run of my life—I fly, I slide, I skid, and finally I throw myself into the ditch! I feel like shouting with joy, like dancing, like swinging from the branches like a monkey.

In a fraction of second, however, the little voice in my head brings me back to reality: Calm down, Joseph, calm down. You’re only halfway there. There’s still Joe …

No chance that I’ll forget him. I’m fully aware of the fact that I couldn’t have succeeded without him. This little, slightly chubby guy, hardly any heftier than me really, has earned his freedom as much as I have.

I lie flat on my stomach in the grass and study the space separating us. About as long as a school yard. If a gendarme, up in his watchtower, catches sight of Joe, it’s all over.

I can see only shapes up there: I can’t make out which way the guards are facing. We’ll have to take our chances. Joe is watching me, on the lookout for the slightest sign. I wave him over.

He springs up like a goat. In less time than it takes to tell about it, he’s already on the ground next to me, sweating, panting, really in bad shape but alive and free!No troubling sounds come from the camp. The gendarmes didn’t see us, or they didn’t want to see us—we don’t care which. Joe catches his breath and extends his hand.

“We did it, Joseph! We did it!”

“We did it, but you’re a mess!”

He bursts out laughing. “Look who’s talking!”

What time must it be? We started to inch our way through the barbed wire when the lunch bell sounded. Now the sun is much lower in the sky, and it’s not as hot.

It must be late in the afternoon. So it took us at least five hours to make our way through that briar patch of metal. How many yards did we go? Fifteen, I’m sure, maybe more.

“Joseph, we can’t hang around here too long.”

“I know. But I’m exhausted.”

“Come, let’s get away from here.”

The post French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s After the Roundup – Graphic Novel appeared first on The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org.

After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France

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Members of the Royal 22e Regiment in audience with Pope Pius XIIThe legacy of Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, is fraught with controversy due to his role—or lack thereof—during World War II and the Holocaust.

The extent of his knowledge about the Holocaust remains a topic of intense debate among historians, theologians, and scholars. This expanded discussion aims to delve deeper into historical references that can shed light on what the Pope knew.

This blog post examines historical evidence, including correspondence and diplomatic communications, to better understand what Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust.

With the recent release of another letter showing the Vatican had information about the Holocaust has recently been released:

“The letter, dated Dec. 14, 1942, was written by Father Lother Koenig, a Jesuit who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany and addressed to the pope’s personal secretary at the Vatican, Father Robert Leiber, also a German.

Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco told the Corriere that the importance of the letter was “enormous, a unique case” because it showed the Vatican had information that labor camps were actually death factories.

In the letter, Koenig tells Leiber that sources had confirmed that about 6,000 Poles and Jews a day were being killed in “SS-furnaces” at the Belzec camp in southeastern Poland.

The camp was about 20 km (12 miles) northwest of the town of Rava-Ruska, a railway center that was then also part of German-occupied Poland but is now in western Ukraine.”

Letter shows Pope Pius XII probably knew about Holocaust early on By Philip Pullella

Early Warnings to Pope Pius XII about the HolocaustPope Pius XII ascended to the papacy in March 1939, just months before World War II began—his earlier role as the Papal Nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.

He developed an intricate network of contacts, offering him a ringside view of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. This diplomatic experience set the stage for how Pius XII would interact with the Nazis during the war.

In the early years of World War II, the Pope received multiple warnings about the mass killings of Jews. Notably, in 1941, reports from the bishops in Poland highlighted large-scale deportations and killings.

Similarly, Jan Karski, a Polish underground operative, met with American and British officials and religious authorities, including members of the Vatican, to provide eyewitness accounts of mass killings.

In 1942, the Allies issued the “Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations,” which specifically mentioned the mass extermination of European Jews. The information was so alarming that it was broadcast globally, including on Vatican Radio.

“From all the occupied countries, Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe.

In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries.

None of those taken away are ever heard of again.” – Excerpt from the Joint Declaration shared on Vatican Radio Broadcast, 1942.

“Pius XII had already prepared the text of a public protest against the persecution of the Jews.

Shortly before this text was sent to L’Osservatore Romano, news reached him of the disastrous consequences of the Dutch bishops’ initiative.

He concluded that public protests, far from alleviating the fate of the Jews, aggravated their persecution and he decided that he could not take the responsibility of his own intervention having similar and probably even much more serious consequences.

Therefore he burnt the text he had prepared. .” Pius XII as he really was, 13/02/1999 by Peter Gumpel in The Tablet

Vatican Diplomatic Channels: A Balancing Act RevisitedPope Pius XII kept diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany, primarily through the Apostolic Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo in Berlin, who held his position from before the war started until its conclusion.

The Papal Nuncio was in a precarious position; his role was to maintain lines of communication with a regime that was antithetical to the teachings of the Church.

New Year’s reception for Hitler in Berlin. – In the foreground: Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop in conversation with Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo. In the background: Leader and Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H26878 / CC-BY-SA 3.0Historically, Papal Nuncios acted as diplomatic mediators. Their task is to maintain relationships with host countries while upholding the tenets of the Catholic faith.

Orsenigo had reported as early as 1940 that there were rumblings about a “final solution” within Nazi circles. While the document did not outline specifics, it indicated that the Vatican was not entirely in the dark about the extreme actions the Nazis were planning.

The Vatican’s open channels with Nazi Germany present a particularly complex dimension to Pope Pius XII’s role during World War II.

Communication with the Nazis was a double-edged sword. They offered the Pope some leverage and vital intelligence. They also made the Vatican susceptible to accusations of complicity through silence.

Perspective of Other Countries: The Media LandscapeComparing the Vatican’s knowledge to what was publicly available at the time offers an additional layer of complexity. Newspapers and media outlets in other countries reported Nazi atrocities by 1941, albeit often in a piecemeal fashion.

The New York Times, for instance, published articles on mass killings of Jews as early as 1941. Similarly, the BBC was broadcasting reports about the killings, and the information even made its way to neutral countries like Sweden.

However, what sets the Vatican apart is its extensive network of clergy and nuncios in various countries, which could have acted as additional intelligence sources.

The Catholic Church was present in nearly every country involved in the war, from the Axis Powers to the Allies and neutral states.

In this context, it’s reasonable to assume that the Pope’s knowledge wasn’t solely based on diplomatic communiqués but also church networks.

A Balancing Act: Diplomacy and Ethical ResponsibilityMaintaining diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany was like walking a tightrope. On the one hand, the Vatican needed to keep these channels open to gather intelligence and exert influence where possible.

On the other hand, by maintaining diplomatic relations without public condemnation, the Vatican risked appearing complicit or, at the very least, complacent.

Imagine a doctor who has a patient with a highly contagious disease. The doctor must maintain contact to provide treatment but risks spreading the disease to other patients.

Similarly, the Vatican had to balance its moral duty to intervene with the diplomatic repercussions that could result from any such intervention.

Complexity in RetrospectWhen examined through history, the Vatican’s diplomatic balancing act with Nazi Germany remains intensely scrutinized.

While the Pope had several avenues of knowledge—from Orsenigo’s reports to Church networks and public media—how he acted on that knowledge is still debatable.

The decision to opt for quiet diplomacy over public condemnation is not black and white, and scholars continue to dissect the nuances of this complex issue.

Public Silence, Private Actions?Pope Pius XII’s public silence about the Holocaust is perhaps the most criticized aspect of his wartime conduct.

The Pope’s defenders argue that he opted for quiet diplomacy, working behind the scenes to save Jews by facilitating visas and helping them escape.

“…the Catholic Church, under the pontificate of Pius XII, was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000, Jews from certain death at Nazi hands….

These figures, small as they are in comparison with our six million martyrs whose fate is beyond consolation, exceed by far those saved by all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.” Three Popes and the Jews, Pinchas Lapide, Hawthorn, 1967, pps. 214-15. Lapide was a Jewish historian and diplomat.

The Pope addressed the issues of racial persecution in the following terms in his 1942 Christmas address:

“Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline [also translated: “marked down for death or gradual extinction”]. Ritner, Carol and Roth, John K. (eds.). 2002, p. 3. Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Pope Pius XII reportedly used diplomatic backchannels to save Jews.

For instance, he provided visas and facilitated passage to safe countries. However, the real scale and effectiveness of these quiet efforts remain hotly debated topics.

Ethical and Moral QuandariesThe Pope’s silence raises complex ethical questions. A public condemnation might have endangered Catholics and Jews in occupied territories.

Some argue that a more vocal condemnation from the Pope could have swayed Catholic nations allied with Germany or at least mobilized public opinion.

A school of thought suggests that a vocal papal intervention might have pushed Hitler to expedite his genocidal plans as an act of defiance.

It could have led to severe repercussions for the Church and the Jews in occupied territories.

Unpacking the Vatican Archives: A Deeper DiveThe Vatican Secret Archives, now more accessibly known as the Vatican Apostolic Archives, has long been a source of mystery and speculation.

The recent opening of these archives has offered scholars a treasure trove of documents that provide new perspectives on Pope Pius XII’s role during World War II.

While some documents corroborate the Pope’s knowledge of the Holocaust, others reveal diplomatic communications where the Pope prioritized the preservation of the Church.

One controversial document is a 1942 letter from the U.S. representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, stating that the Pope was “convinced that he had done all in his power.”

But the Pope and the Nuncio were not the only figures involved; several other key players within the Vatican also had significant roles.

Domenico Tardini and Giovanni MontiniTwo individuals who frequently appear in these archives are Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI.

Both were close advisors to Pope Pius XII. Tardini was the head of the Vatican Secretariat of State, while Montini was his Undersecretary.

Their roles were vital in shaping Vatican policy and crafting secret diplomatic missions.

Documents show that both were involved in internal discussions regarding how to respond to reports about the Holocaust.

These advisors helped the Pope strategize the Vatican’s next moves like a chess game with high stakes.

The Jewish Delegation to the VaticanAnother fascinating aspect of the archives is the details about a Jewish delegation that sought an audience with Pope Pius XII.

The delegation presented evidence of the ongoing Holocaust to secure a public papal denouncement.

While no public denouncement came, documents suggest that the Pope took the delegation’s information seriously.

Some scholars argue that the Pope’s subsequent actions, including the extension of aid and shelter to Jews in Rome, were influenced by this meeting.

Consider it a consultation with a subject-matter expert that subtly but significantly changes your course of action.

Correspondence with Other Religious FiguresThe archives also unveil correspondence between Pope Pius XII and other religious figures, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

Leaders of Protestant churches in Germany, for instance, communicated their dilemmas and actions concerning the Nazis. Additionally, letters from Catholic bishops in Eastern Europe detail the atrocities they witnessed.

Such letters corroborated what the Pope was hearing through other channels and likely weighed on his moral calculus.

The U.S. and the VaticanAnother revealing piece of the puzzle is the correspondence between Myron Taylor, the U.S. representative to the Vatican, and Pope Pius XII.

In these documents, Taylor expresses that the U.S. government would appreciate a more assertive stance from the Vatican against the Nazis.

The Pope’s replies give an insight into his thought process as he navigated the diplomatic intricacies between condemning evil and protecting the Church.

Nuanced ComplexityThe documents in the Vatican archives add a layer of nuanced complexity to Pope Pius XII’s wartime role. They illustrate the agonizing decisions that must be made and reveal that the Pope did not make them in a vacuum.

Advisors, delegations, foreign diplomats, and other religious figures all shaped the Vatican’s policy during this dark period.

Conclusion – Pope Pius XII and the HolocaustThe question of what Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust is entangled in a web of diplomacy, ethical considerations, and historical contexts.

Evidence suggests that he had early warnings and detailed information about Nazi atrocities.

Whether his public silence or quiet diplomacy approach was the best course of action remains a topic of ongoing debate.

Key Takeaways:

Pope Pius XII had early warnings about the Holocaust.
The Vatican’s diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany were both informative and problematic.
Early reports from bishops and operatives indicated mass exterminations.
The Vatican’s diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany offered a unique vantage point, but they also posed ethical dilemmas.
This complexity is magnified compared to public information in other countries, revealing a highly nuanced picture of what Pope Pius XII knew and how he chose to act.
Pope Pius XII chose a “quiet diplomacy” path but faced criticism for his public silence.
The Vatican Archives reveal that the decisions made during the Holocaust were not unilateral actions the Pope took alone.
A host of other players, both within and outside the Vatican, shaped the course of the Church’s actions, thereby painting a picture of intricate moral and diplomatic complexity.
The scale of the Pope’s efforts to save Jews is disputed.
Ethical quandaries surround the Pope’s silence.
New findings from the Vatican archives add complexity but must resolve the controversy definitively.

References:1. “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe” by David I. Kertzer 2. Vatican Secret Archives 3. “Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII” by John Cornwell 4. Correspondence between the Holy See and the German Reich 5. New York Times Archives detailing Holocaust reports during World War II 6. BBC Historical Archives on World War II broadcasts 7. Vatican Apostolic Archives, Records Relating to World War II and Pope Pius XII

The post Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: What Did He Know? appeared first on The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org.

Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII

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Lani Silver – Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project founder and friend of Remember.orgIn the early days of Remember.org, I went out seeking content to share on this new thing called the Internet. That’s where I met Lani Silver (1948-2009).

Since most of the organizations housing the essential interviews and content about the Holocaust were run by Jewish organizations, trying something new and not knowing me or my background was a big challenge.

Not for Lani Silver. She welcomed me to the Oral History Project, and upon hearing the story of what I was beginning in 1993, she introduced me to her project.

She told me about rock impresario Bill Graham founded it. However, I later learned while he did help it out immensely, the founder was Lani.

And she was generous as she was gracious. She immediately shared videos with me and gained permission from the survivors to share it on Remember.org:

Lucille Eichengreen
Walter Frank
Helen Lazar

Those transcriptions I did and shared with her formed the early foundation of this site. I am not only grateful; Lani’s example was one that I’ve found time and again in sharing stories of survival.

People are willing to help and share so students and teachers can gain access to these critical experiences. Her generosity is hopefully extended here as well, as we’ve never charged anyone to share their content and share it worldwide with people so that we all remember.

Remembering Lani SilverLani Silver was a professor of political science and women’s studies at San Francisco State University. She was also a social activist for many years and many causes.

In 1981, she founded the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, which collected and preserved the stories of Holocaust survivors. The project eventually grew to include over 1,700 interviews.

Silver’s work with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project was groundbreaking. It was one of the first projects to collect and preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors.

Scholars, educators, and filmmakers have used the project’s work to learn more about the Holocaust.

Here’s some background for all who haven’t had the privilege to meet Ms. Silver, a guiding force in collecting firsthand stories of survival and hardship.

Her journey began in 1985 when she told The Chronicle that these recordings were more than just historical accounts; they were deeply emotional reunions.

“Sometimes the survivors haven’t even told their own children. And when they do, the whole room breaks down. And yes, that includes me,” she said.

For over a decade, Ms. Silver cultivated her solo venture into an army of passionate individuals—interviewers, photographers, and transcribers alike. She was the project’s beating heart until 1997.

Her expertise didn’t go unnoticed. Spielberg consulted her for his oral history mission, the Shoah Foundation. She trained 500 interviewers for Spielberg’s initiative, which now holds tens of thousands of irreplaceable interviews.

But her work didn’t stop at collecting stories; she unearthed heroes lost to time, like Chiune Sugihara, Japan’s consul general in Lithuania during WWII, who saved thousands by handwriting visas.

He died quietly in Japan, but not before Ms. Silver breathed new life into his story. She not only memorialized him in Tokyo but coined him “the Japanese Schindler.” She cemented his legacy through workshops, exhibits, and even an opera.

In 2000, Ms. Silver shifted her focus, not her passion—directing the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project. Interviewing 2,500 Americans, she peeled back the layers of everyday racism and its painful scars left on ordinary lives.

“Most of us have a standard job or freelance career. Silver’s “job” was working as a passionate activist with a breathtaking list of passionate and important causes.

She even listed her occupation on Facebook as an activist. Her range was from the political battles of the day (women’s issues, liberal politics and campaigns, gay rights and gay marriage, Media Alliance and Jeff Perlman, Obama, Jeff Adachi) to the unconventional (founding the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History project and later a racism project growing out of the case of James Byrd Jr., who in 1998 was chained to a truck by three white supremacists and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas.) …

Two of Silver’s latest and last passions were the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (where she was an ever passionate board member) and the Chauncey Bailey Investigative Project (where she was a founding member and ever passionate participant).

The Chauncey project was a media coalition that has had much success and fame in investigating the 2007 murder of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey while investigating the finances of Your Black Muslim Bakery.”

LANI SILVER Teacher, Oral Historian, Activist 1948 – 2009 by Bruce Bruggman

Ms. Silver’s origins are traced back to Lynn, Mass., but her family moved to San Francisco when she was two months old.

“She was the dinner table philosopher, always provoking thought,” her sister Lynne Jacobs noted.

And a trip to Soweto at 19 sparked the activist in her. From then on, she was not just an observer but a participant—taking her nieces and nephews to political rallies and attending protests even when her own life was hanging by a thread.

She was a lifetime learner—earning degrees from the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the University of Chicago. She lent her voice as a freelance writer and producer for over 30 years.

Lynne said it best,

“From that moment in Soweto, she was an activist.”

An activist, an educator, but most of all, a friend to countless survivors and a beacon for stories that needed to be told.

In addition to her work with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project and the Shoah Foundation, Silver also worked with several other organizations dedicated to Holocaust education and remembrance.

She was a founding member of the Racism Project and the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project. She also served on the board of directors of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Silver’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the American Jewish Committee’s Human Relations Award and the National Women’s History Month Award. She was also named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the Bay Area” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lani Silver was a remarkable woman who significantly impacted the world. Her work to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors has helped to ensure that their experiences will never be forgotten.

She was a tireless advocate for tolerance and understanding, and her legacy will continue to inspire others for many years.

Here are some additional details about Lani Silver’s work:

She worked with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project for over 20 years.
She trained over 500 interviewers for the project.
She helped to develop the project’s curriculum and educational materials.
She spoke at schools and conferences around the world about the Holocaust.

Her work to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors has helped to ensure that their experiences will never be forgotten.

Her presence vibrates through her extensive work, challenging us to confront uncomfortable truths. While she may not be here, her vision for a just world endures.

Thank you, Ms. Silver, for your relentless curiosity, activism, and invaluable friendships formed through your work.

Your legacy isn’t just in the stories collected but in the hearts and minds touched and opened.

The post Lani Silver – Remembering the Holocaust Oral History Project and Her Contributions appeared first on The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org.

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I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

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On this week's training call we have Michael Koenigs. As a marketing consultant and Digital Entrepreneur for Fortune 500 companies including 220th Century Fox, Sony, Mazda, General Mills, Dominos Pizza, Carlson Companies, Northwest Airlines and 3M, Michael Koenigs is best known as the marketing genius who brought Internet Infomercials to the web and co-creator of Traffic Geyser, a Web 2.0 Service that distributes internet videos to over 35 top search engines with the click of a button to drive traffic and leads to any web site.

Michael has also served as a producer, marketer and consultant for bestselling authors, entrepreneurs and television personalities including Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford and Tony Robbins and has built over 250 web sites and created over 30 products.

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How a complete "nobody" can become recognized and famous almost overnight with YouTube
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The one thing most online video producers forget that makes a video 500% less effective

You will learn things on this call that you can use immediately to make substantial changes - before you even get to the Summit!

Look at this call as your orientation day at entrepreneurial business school. To get your masters degree you need to attend Women's Business Empowerment Summit. It's the first step in connecting with the tools, strategies and strong network of entrepreneurial women to build your millionaire team!

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On this week's training call we have Brendon Burchard. Brendon is the author of the life-changing book from HarperCollins entitled Life’s Golden Ticket. He is also a business consultant who is revolutionizing the way entrepreneurs do business by teaching them how to partner with nonprofits and major corporations.

By creating and leveraging innovative nonprofit and corporate partnerships, Brendon has sold three major books, quadrupled his speaking engagements, launched a half-million-dollar seminar series, won corporate sponsorships, and appeared on ABC World News, CBS, NPR, and over 65 major radio stations across the country—all this by the age of 30!

Learn how you can do what Brendon has done in his business.

By working with nonprofits and corporations, Brendon has achieved these remarkable results:

His first book, The Student Leadership Guide, has sold 20,000 copies in an unexplored niche and allowed him to speak and consult with any university in the world he chooses to

His second book was used as an e-book by a Fortune 500 company and downloaded over 100,000 times, establishing him as a leading authority with major corporations

His third book was sold to HarperCollins and broke 12 foreign rights sales records worldwide before its release, amassing over $350,000 in advances. The book, called Life's Golden Ticket, has just been released and is in bookstores now. www.LifesGoldenTicket.com.

He has also grown his client list, subscriber database, and product sales by exponential, record-breaking levels

His clients, promotional partners and benefactors have included Sony Pictures, Wachovia Bank, Best Buy, Accenture, Junior Achievement, Kiwanis International, Military.com, and many others.

You will learn things on this call that you can use immediately to make substantial changes - before you even get to the Summit!

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On this week's training call we have Joe Polish. For over a decade Joe Polish has empowered thousands of small service businesses the robotic tools, proven strategies, and marketing wisdom to create their own no-maintenance money machines.

Consulting clients pay up to $20,000 a day for his insight, and he has been a hired consultant in multiple industries providing marketing guidance to many best-selling authors and experts, such as Bill Phillips, Brian Tracy, David Bach, Michael Gerber, Mark Victor Hansen, David Allen and more.

Learn how to double your revenue in six months or less... without doubling your workload... through the use of robotic selling systems and strategies that make business ELF™ - Easy, Lucrative, and Fun.

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The practically FREE thing you're probably not doing that is costing you HALF your profits.
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You will learn things on this call that you can use immediately to make substantial changes - before you even get to the Summit!

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On this week's training call we have Dr. Jeanette Cates. Jeanette is an Internet strategist known as who helps business owners create Online Success. Her insightful,

information-packed presentations to audiences here and abroad have earned her the title of The Technology Tamer.

Here's a preview of what else you'll learn when you listen to this podcast:

Strategic errors people make with their website and how you can avoid them
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How many websites you need - and why

...and a whole lot more!

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WBES Weekly Podcast:

"Dr. Fern Kazlow: Shattering Financial Limitations"

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On this week's training call we have Dr. Fern Kazlow. Dr. Kazlow revealed the number one reason that you struggle to succeed - and it's not fear of failure, fear of success, lack of capitalization, or lack of education.

Here's a preview of what else you'll learn when you listen to this podcast:

The 5 things you need to break free of financial limitations - fast.

The problem with changing your mindset and positive thinking and how affirmations and visualizations can actually make things worse.

What is missing in the debate about The Secret and how it affects your ability to attract wealth.

With Dr. Kazlow's approach, you get your money and your life!You will learn things on this call that you can use immediately to make substantial changes - before you even

get to the Summit!

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On this week's training call we have James Malinchak. James is the master at using public speaking to attract customers and clients. He quickly built an investment management business, where he managed the investments of famous celebrities and professional athletes…and he did it WITHOUT cold-calling. How did he do it? Though speaking for free at various events!

James then went on to become one of America's Most In-Demand Motivational Speakers making millions of dollars getting paid checks to speak for corporations, associations, colleges and youth groups.

When he got started he delivered over 70+ talks before he even figured out he can get paid for doing it. Now he teaches one of the most effective "BIG-MONEY SPEAKER" training programs available!

Here's a preview of what you'll learn when you listen to this podcast:

How to Attract Tons of New Clients by Speaking-Even for FREE!
4 Lies About What It Takes to Make BIG Money As a Public Speaker
The keys to a Fast-Start Making BIG Money in Public Speaking

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WBES Weekly Podcast:

"James Malinchak: Attracting Tons of New Customers With Public Speaking"

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On this week's training call we have Barbara De Angelis Ph. D., author of 14 best-selling books.

She has hosted her own daily television show for CBS TV, and her own popular radio talk show in Los Angeles. She has been a frequent guest on OPRAH, THE TODAY SHOW, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, and THE VIEW, as well as a regular contributor to E Entertainment.

Here's a preview of what you'll learn when you listen to this podcast:

Find out how you can use the insights Barbara shared on why after achieving tremendous success and fame as a one of the most renowned and respected relationships experts in the world, she has shifted her focus to helping individuals achieve personal and professional mastery.
What is the concept of Mastering Your Life From The Inside Out and how can it be applied to creating success in business?
What is a Success Barrier, how do you find yours and break through it?

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WBES Weekly Podcast:

"Barbara De Angelis: Breaking Your Success Barrier"

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( length 60:00 minutes)

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The Holocaust History – A People's and Survivor History – Remember.org: Recent Episodes

Lynn Pierce