Denial Is a River in Egypt

Love the sign but even more so that it's a little girl holding it.

83-year-old Holocaust survivor, Irving Roth, has something to say.

Sent(enced) to Buchenwald at age 14, Roth is one of the youngest survivors who is actually old enough to remember what happened. An eyewitness to the Holocaust, he is an internationally known educator and highly sought-after speaker.

A reporter from  The Anniston Star, a local paper in Alabama, asked him if he ever encountered a Holocaust denier. He responded:

They come to my lectures and ask questions, very benignly usually. I was talking to a group of high school students in Hungary, and one of them asked, “How do you know that this actually happened? You’re not an eyewitness. After all, if you had been inside the gas chamber when they squeezed the gas, you wouldn’t be here speaking.”

I explained to him how I know in detail what happened. Because I arrived in Auschwitz with my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and my cousins on a May evening, they were separated from me and they disappeared. I saw these chimneys and I saw out of the chimneys coming flames. They were herded into these buildings. They went in and no one came out. What happened? The earth didn’t swallow them.

Well, we know that hundreds of thousands of kilograms of poisonous gases were shipped to Auschwitz. What was it used for? There were people who worked inside the gas chamber who took the bodies to the crematorium, usually prisoners, and a number of them survived so we have eyewitnesses. He was not satisfied with the answer but he accepted it.

Thank God for people like Irving Roth. Cool as a cucumber in the face of ignorance and hate. I heart Irving Roth. Thinking of interviewing him for my book, Googling the Holocaust, but not quite sure what the angle will be, although I’m sure there’s something in here…oh, I know, he has a Facebook page! Bingo! I’m all over that.

Spotlight on Women in the Holocaust

Captain Fanny Solomian, chief physician of a partisan brigade.

Spots of Light: To be a woman in the Holocaust is the first-ever exhibit to focus exclusively on women’s experiences in the Holocaust. The Jewish United Fund News reports,

“More than two million women were murdered during the Holocaust. Jewish women inhabited a society that was largely conservative and patriarchal, with males as heads of households and women fulfilling traditional roles at home or helping to make a living. Jewish women assumed the main family role best described as the ‘affirmation of life’—the attempt to survive in any situation.”

Spots of Light, a video-art based exhibit, comes to the U.S. from Israel’s Yad Vashem Museum Division. It will be at the Illinois Holocaust Museum through September.

Alice, 107, Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor

"I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion."

Alice Herz-Sommer seems to have defied all the odds.

At 107, she’s the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world. Her whole family, including her parents and her husband, were killed in the camps.

By her mid-teens, Alice was one of the best-known concert pianists in Prague. Without a doubt, her musical talent was her saving grace. She performed more than 100 concerts for the Nazis while imprisoned in Terezin, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic.

“Music saved my life and music saves me still,” says Alice, who continues to play chamber music every night in her North London home. (You can watch her deftly tickle the ivories here.)

The title subject of a new documentary,  Alice Dancing Under the Gallows, by Nick Reed, tells her remarkable story. While growing up, Alice sat at the knee of Gustav Klimt. She was close friends with Franz Kafka and studied under Conrad Ansorge, a student of Liszt.

She says she has never hated the Nazis, and never will, citing that “hatred eats the soul of the hater, not the hated.” I envy the place she has reached to not feel such hatred for them. I myself am not that enlightened.

Brilliant idea! Pre-War European Jewish Recipes

Avid cook and first-time author, June Feiss Hersh, compiled a book of Holocaust survivors who share their cherished family recipes. Stories and dishes come from all over Europe — Poland, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Greece. The survivors she interviewed offered such measurements as a “bisel” of sugar and an “eggshell” of matzoh meal. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of trial and error before the book went to press. And yes, all the recipes are kosher.