Forced to Be Hitler’s Food Taster

Hitler’s food taster, Margot Woelk. Photo: Markus Schreiber, AP.

Margot Woelk, the sole survivor of Hitler’s 15 food tasters, has recently come forward about her wartime experience. She is 95 years old and never told a soul until recently.

The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta,” she recalled. “But this constant fear — we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.”

What a paradox. Indulging in gourmet fare at every meal when the rest of the world is scrounging for scraps, yet knowing any forkful could be the last. And yet, it was all to protect a megalomaniacal mass murderer. At first it seems difficult to reconcile, but after reading this important part of the story that was left out (!!!) by nearly every news outlet that reported on this in the last couple of days, I realized she too was a victim. According to an article in Spiegel, April 2, 2013,

…[the] young woman who had refused to join the League of German Girls (BDM), the girl’s version of Hitler Youth, and whose father had been hauled off for refusing to join the Nazi party, became Hitler’s helper. Each day, her life was on the line for a man she deeply despised.”

Why did she come forward now, 68 years after the war ended? “For decades, I tried to shake off those memories,” she said. “But they always came back to haunt me at night.” Well into her twilight years, frail and home-bound (there’s no elevator in her Berlin apartment building), she feels compelled to share her story and try to make peace with what she did. According to Spiegel,

It wasn’t until this winter, when a local journalist paid her a visit for her 95th birthday and began asking questions, that she spoke about what she calls the worst years of her life. At that moment, she suddenly decided to break her silence. ‘I just wanted to say what happened there,’ she says. ‘That Hitler was a really repugnant man. And a pig.’

The other 14 tasters—all young women in their early 20s like Ms. Woelk—were shot by the Russians. Only Ms. Woelk survived because she heeded the advice of an SS friend, and fled Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in the nick of time and took a train to Berlin. But her deeds did not go unpunished.

“The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too,” Woelk said. “They took me to a doctor’s apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days. That’s why I could never have children. They destroyed everything.”

It’s a very sad story and something I never really thought about, even though I vaguely knew there were food tasters for Hitler. It’s amazing that she kept the story to herself; she never even told her  husband. What a burden to carry for an entire life, especially one that’s lasted as long as hers. I know some people won’t feel compassion for her, and I agree on some level it’s not easy, but she suffered too at the hands of the Russians. Read more of her story here and let me know what you think.

Holocaust Hero: This Japanese Diplomat Saved 6,000 Jews

The Sugihara family headed for Berlin, Sept. 4, 1940. Courtesy of USHMM & Hiroki Sugihara.

I can’t get this image out of my head: Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara leaning out the window of his departing train, illegally signing off on visas to help thousands of Jews escape Hitler’s deathly grasp.

The Huffington Post captures the scene well: “The Japanese government closed the consulate, located in Kovno [aka Kaunas]. But even as Sugihara’s train was about to leave the city, he kept writing visas from his open window. When the train began moving, he gave the visa stamp to a refugee to continue the job.”

In Conspiracy of Kindness, a PBS film documenting Mr. Sugihara’s remarkable story, his wife, Yukiko Sugihara described their last days in Lithuania:

He was so exhausted, like a sick person. Even though he was ordered to go to Berlin, he said he couldn’t make it to Berlin and suggested we go to a hotel and rest before leaving. When we got to the hotel, the Jewish people came looking for us there. So he wrote some more visas in the hotel.

The next day when we got to the train station, they were there too. So he wrote more visas on the platform until the train left. Once we were on board, they were hanging on the windows and he wrote some more. When the train started moving, he couldn’t write any more. Everyone was waving their hands. One of them called out, ‘Thank you Mr. Sugihara, we will come to see you again,’ and he came running after the train. I couldn’t stop crying. When I think about it even now I can’t help crying.

From July 31 through August 28, 1940, Mr. Sugihara issued at least 2,139 visas; in many cases entire families were able to escape on a single visa.

Chiune Sugihara, Kaunas, Lithuania, 1940
Credit: USHMM, courtesy of Hiroki Sugihara

There is so much more to his story, much of it heartbreaking, but certainly worth knowing. PBS produced a timeline of his life with just the right amount of details to give us a sense of who this courageous man was. When he was sent to Prague in 1941 after Berlin, he boldly issued another 69 visas.

None of this was without consequence. Upon his return to Japan in 1947 (he and his family were interned in Russia for 18 months after the war ended), he was forced to resign and lived the next 25 years in obscurity, taking on  menial odd jobs including selling light bulbs door to door.

All this time Mr. Sugihara wondered if his visas actually worked. Although many survivors attempted to locate him, no one succeeded until 1968, when visa recipient Joshua Nishri, by then an Israeli diplomat, got in touch with him.

It wasn’t until 1985 though, after amassing hundreds of survivor testimonies attesting to Mr. Sugihara’s brave acts of kindness, that Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, declared him “Righteous Among Nations,” and planted a tree in his name. A park in Jerusalem was also named for him.

The timeline concludes with his death in 1986 at the age of 86, “…having proved beyond doubt that one person can make a difference. By some estimates, more than 40,000 people alive today have him to thank for their very existence. Sugihara once said, recalling his decision in Lithuania in 1940, ‘I may have disobeyed my government, but if I didn’t I would be disobeying God.’ ‘In life,” he said, ‘do what’s right because it’s right, and leave it alone.’”

In 2000, on the 100th anniversary of his death, Japan formally acknowledged his courageous deeds. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Foreign Minister Yohei Kono apologized to Sugihara’s widow, Yukiko, for any ‘troubles’ that Sugihara had suffered and unveiled a plaque at the ministry’s diplomatic record office, where Sugihara’s picture, his story and the list of people to whom he issued visas are now prominently displayed.”

The New York Times referred to him as the “Japanese Schindler.” No disrespect to Mr. Schindler, but Mr. Sugihara saved more lives. (I know that sounds petty and somewhat callous, but hey, it’s true.) Perhaps Mr. Schindler should be called the German Sugihara?

If you’re interested in learning more, have at it:

• Visas for Life, his memoir
• The Gift of Life, a biography
• What Responsibility Comes with Being Saved?,” a lovely essay written by Rachel Kadish, a woman whose grandparents were issued a visa from Mr. Sugihara.
• In addition to Conspiracy of Kindness there is also Visas and Virtue, a short film based on his life.

Tattoo You

2nd and 3rd generation Holocaust survivors display their honorary tattoos.  Photo: Uriel Sinai for The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rolling Stones reference aside, many children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are getting replica tattoos of their relatives’ prisoner identification numbers, permanently etching history — a very personal one at that — onto their arms.

New York Times reporter Jodi Rudoren writes in today’s paper how the kin of Auschwitz survivors “are memorializing the darkest days of history on their own bodies.”

Rudoren writes, “Only those deemed fit for work were tattooed, so despite the degradation, the numbers were in some cases worn with pride, particularly lower ones, which indicated having survived several brutal winters in the camp.”

I never knew that. My mother-in-law’s mother was deemed fit to work and did so at a slave labor camp in Freiberg, Germany. She also had a number, but it was never tattooed on her body. I’m not sure why but when I inquired my mother-in-law told me she believes it was because it was the very end of the war and the Nazis were just trying to process the prisoners as quickly as possible. Tattooing, apparently, slowed them down.

I learned a few other things in Rudoren’s article: Auschwitz was the only camp to employ this method of identification. Also, they started out branding chests but eventually moved to the left forearm.

“After the war, some Auschwitz survivors rushed to remove the tattoos through surgery or hid them under long sleeves,” writes Rudoren. “But over the decades, others played their numbers in the lottery or used them as passwords.”

Some Jews find the act of tattooing a relative’s number on one’s forearm offensive and disrespectful.

Rudoren writes, “The 10 tattooed descendants interviewed for this article echoed one another’s motivations: they wanted to be intimately, eternally bonded to their survivor-relative. And they wanted to live the mantra ‘Never forget’ with something that would constantly provoke questions and conversation.”

In July 2011 I wrote about a grandson who has his grandfather’s number inked on his bicep, a gesture I am just now realizing shows strength rather than subservience. In the accompanying photo he is flexing his tattooed bicep, proving his point.

Thanks to my friend Liv Nilsson Stutz for bringing this article to my attention.

Brad Pitt takes on IBM

As if we needed another reason to heart Mr. Jolie.

IndieWire reports the still-hot actor/producer (Moneyball, The Tree of Life) is going to produce and possibly star in the movie adaptation of Edwin Black‘s, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation.

Claude Brodesseur-Akner reports in Vulture, New York Magazine’s culture portal,

“While the Holocaust obviously predates the personal computer, it did not precede the information age, and Black’s book answers one of the Holocaust’s most obvious questions: How did the Nazis identify and round up so many Jews with such precision and speed?”

Courtesy of Wallace Graphic Design

Of course there are other companies complicit in helping the Nazis implement their master plan that are still around today: Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen,  Ford (see Ford and the Führer). Other household names including Krupp, Kellogg and Bayer also profited from forced labor of Holocaust victims.

I remember learning about some of these companies’ involvement when I was younger and swearing I would never purchase or use any of their products. Well, to date I’ve never owned a Ford, Mercedes or VW but I’ve certainly ridden in all three. And I’ve taken Bayer aspirin on more than one occasion and although not a coffee drinker, my husband (the son of two Holocaust survivors) uses a Krupps coffee grinder to get his beans just right. Oh, and Kellogg’s? Please. Like Seinfeld, I could eat cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I’m getting off track here. The purpose of this post is that I’m excited for this movie to be made. And in a weird way I’m glad Brad Pitt is the force behind it, if only for the fact that he’ll be able to attract the right people and backers to get it done.

It’s interesting because you’d think this is a movie Steven Spielberg, with his Shoah Foundation and Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, would make. But I’m glad that it’s being made by a gentile — a smart, sexy, talented gentile, at that. I like when nonmembers of the tribe take up our cause.

“Legitimate Rape” Theory Has Roots in Nazi Germany

Why am I not surprised? (And, really, how much uglier could Todd Akin‘s story get?)

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Akin’s source about the rarity of pregnancy resulting in rape is from a 1972 study by Dr. Fred Mecklenburg, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School at the time. The Post-Dispatch writes:

In supporting his claim about trauma and ovulation, Mecklenburg cited experiments conducted in Nazi death camps.

The Nazis tested this hypothesis ‘by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock-killing, to see what the effect this had on their ovulatory patterns. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate.’”

I’m shocked to silence. Luckily, this commenter, who goes by the name of DriveBy, isn’t:

It would appear that the links between the Republican brain and the Nazi brain are even deeper than the obvious.”

Introducing the Neo-Nazi Flash Mob

 

What’s scarier than an angry flash mob? An angry flash mob of Neo-Nazis carrying torches.

As shown in the CNN video above, hundreds of Neo-Nazis wearing black robes and white masks take to the streets at night spreading their hateful rhetoric. They organize themselves entirely online and via text message, which reminds me of that famed New Yorker cartoon where one dog says to another, “Online, no one knows you’re a dog,” but in this case it’s with a perverse twist: “Online, no one knows you’re a Neo-Nazi.” Actually, they do. Because the Internet provides false anonymity, they feel emboldened to spew their hatred as a group. And offline, of course, they feel the need to disguise themselves. (Honestly, to me, they come across as scarier versions of the Phantom of the Opera.)

“It is a frightening scene that resembles the Nazi torch marches of the 1930s,” reports CNN’s International correspondent Isha Sesay. German officials say this group, which goes by the self-appointed moniker, The Immortals, is a serious and growing concern.

Professor Hajo Funke of the Free University of Berlin, who appears on the CNN clip above, The Immortals have already attacked people and institutions and are a group “not without violence.”

And of course, they are using modern technology to its full advantage by recording video of their marches and then uploading them to YouTube. Before they do that, though, they head to the editing room and manipulate their footage to full effect and add haunting music to the audio track.

I don’t want to link to it (I watched 10 seconds of it and almost vomited on my keyboard) but if you want to find it, type “The Immortals. Bautzen, Germany, May 2011″ into YouTube’s search bar. Forewarned though, you’ll want to have a barf bag at the ready.

Culling as Fast as She Can…

USHMM curator Kyra Schuster, right.
Photo credit: Bruce R. Bennett/The Palm Beach Post

Every few  weeks Kyra Schuster flies down to Palm Beach County in Florida to meet with Holocaust survivors. Yeah, so what, you may ask. Well, here’s what:

Ms. Schuster is a curator for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and makes these trips as often as she can to retrieve the precious artifacts and remnants that many survivors have carried with them all these years: diaries and suitcases and photos and postcards. All tangible reminders and in some instances testimony to their experiences.

Reminds me a bit of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien‘s book about what soldiers carried with them in Vietnam. [I'm aware it's a bit anachronistic to refer to an earlier war using a literary catchphrase from a later war, but please give me some slack, or at least some poetic license.]

“Kyra Schuster is a treasure hunter who measures her victories in tattered scraps of paper and suitcases that outlived their owners,” is how Lona O’Connor described her in last Sunday’s Palm Beach Post.

Ms. Schuster says she loves her job and from my vantage point, what’s not to love? Sure, the subject of the Holocaust is inherently a downer but I kind of have a bit of job envy here. What an endlessly fascinating project to be working on. Well, not endlessly, obviously, and that’s kind of the point.

Per stats mentioned in the article, the median age of survivors in Palm Beach County (which has the second largest community of survivors in the country, estimated to be between 12,000 and 18,000) is 85. That means Ms. Schuster has to cull these artifacts as fast as she can, before they are lost to history by death and default.

A lot of people work best under pressure; deadlines impose a ticking clock and death is the ultimate deadline. Schuster seems to handle it with grace.

Her retrieval and acquisition of these items is not really about the objects themselves, but about the people who donate them. She hears their stories and weaves them into the exhibition for historical context.

The USHMM receives more than 800 calls a year from people with artifacts from Jews living during the Nazi era and the post-war displaced persons camps. My mother-in-law Hana Berger Moran, who was born in German concentration camp, was one of those callers. A baby born in a camp seems unfathomable, but it happened and Hana is living proof. A few years ago she donated her newborn clothes to the museum. They were made by women in her mother’s camp who managed to scrounge up scraps of cloth to make her a shirt and hat. They even found a bit of colored thread to stitch both a pink and a blue flower,  not sure if the baby would be a girl or a boy.

A Non-Apology Apology

The Nuremberg Trials

Puhleeze.

Doctors in Germany are sorry. So very, very sorry. Except their apology (if you can call it that) is six decades too late.

According to an MSNBC editorial by Art Caplan, PhD, “The German Medical Association has issued a remarkably blunt and straightforward apology, more than six decades after the end of World War II, for the role it played during the Holocaust in the mass murder, sterilization and barbaric medical experiments done on Jews and many other groups.”

“The declaration says that contrary to popular belief doctors were not forced by political authorities to kill and experiment on prisoners but rather engaged in the Holocaust as leaders and enthusiastic Nazi supporters,” writes Caplan, adding that this statement was “unanimously adopted by the delegates of the Physician’s Congress.”

Pardon my acronym but WTF? And seriously, did it take them 60+ years to craft that statement?

And now I have a cyber-commenter-crush on someone named Eric C who responded to the news with this:

I feel no satisfaction from this apology of the German Physicians Congress. An apology issued for acts committed by others is just so much moral preening. This apology is akin to the congressional apologies for slavery and abuse of native Americans issued in 2009. They are jejune blatherings, a corruption of language. It would have been better for these German doctors to simply condemn their predecessors, rather than to strut through this mummery of apologizing for them.”

Amen Eric C., you took the words I didn’t have right out of my mouth. Thanks for so eloquently stating exactly how I feel.

I Was Born in a Concentration Camp Too!

(Mad Men Spoiler Alert!)

Mad Men, that perennially hot TV show that kept fans waiting 16 months between fixes, now has a Jewish copywriter. His name is Michael Ginsberg. Being a Jewish copywriter myself (or, more accurately, a copywriter who happens to be Jewish), I was initially intrigued by this new character. But last night’s episode threw me for a loop. Michael told fellow copywriter Peggy Olson that he was born in a concentration camp. (For those less familiar with Mad Men, it’s a period-based show set in late 1960s New York City). Peggy, obviously disturbed by this pronouncement, later told her boyfriend that it just couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Michael feels it can’t be true either, and feels his stepfather must have lied to him. His stepfather also “conveniently” told him that his real mother died in the camp.

I’m interested to see where this particular storyline goes since it’s eerily like the basis of my book about my mother-in-law who really was born in a concentration camp. In 2001 when my then-boyfriend — now husband — first told me his mom was born in a camp, I was shocked. I didn’t believe it was even possible, as I assumed all pregnant women were killed and if one was lucky enough to slip by Mengele, I figured that child would instantly be killed at birth. Apparently, that isn’t necessarily so.

My very much alive-and-kicking mother-in-law, Hana Berger Moran (age 67), was indeed born in a concentration camp. In fact, there are at least three babies who were born in concentration camps that I’m aware of, which leads me to believe there must be others. Each of these babies and their mothers defied the odds to survive, which I believe was due much in part to circumstance and luck. But of course, that’s only part of the story.

Can’t wait to see where the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, goes with this subplot. He best not disappoint.

Hard-Rocking the Holocaust

David Draiman, lead singer of Disturbed

Rich Cohen is going to have to add this guy to his list of Tough Jews.

No, he’s not a 1930s Jewish gangster, he’s 21st century rock star David Draiman, the gravel-voiced lead singer of popular heavy-metal band Disturbed. And he comes by his musical talent honestly:

The person that they say I get my voice from was my great-grandfather who was the head cantor of the Gerrer Hasidische bes medresh in Jerusalem. I basically spent 17 years studying the Talmud and the Tanach, and Judaism in general, and was probably about, I would say, two or three years away from smicha, from being ordained.”

A piece in The Jerusalem Post last year describes him as, “one of the few high-profile hard rock singers who are defiantly Jewish – imagine a young Ozzy Osbourne as the spokesman for the Jewish Defense League.”

When asked how he deals with the inevitable skinhead fans of Disturbed, he replies,

I’m incredibly defiant against neo-Nazis and skinheads…I’ve always been very proud of my heritage and where I come from, and I’ve defended it to the extent of being bloodied on many occasions. In fact, most of the fights I’ve [had] in my life – and there have been many – have been because I was defending my family or my faith. And I don’t apologize for it.”

All I can say is this guy is one bad-ass Jew. Glad he’s on my side.

Let me leave you with this little gem from his podcast with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

I think I do enough good as an individual in terms of setting tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people free and making them feel stronger than they did when they came in the building, on a relatively nightly basis. So, there you go. That’s God’s work.”