WWII General Talks to Tweens

Holocaust trunk by Crabapple Middle School students in Roswell, Ga.

For years Holocaust survivors have been visiting schools telling wide-eyed students about their days spent in camps and ghettos or hiding in the forest or someone’s attic. But it’s not often that a retired Army General from World War II visits schools, telling the same story from a different vantage point.

Middle school students in Georgia are lucky. They get to meet Brigadier General Russel Weiskircher in person. And he’s quite the storyteller, channeling the gravely voice of George C. Scott as General Patton.

Gen. Weiskircher; Photo: Tom Reed

He tells 50 rapt sixth graders at South Hall Middle School: “We asked the people in Dachau, ‘Where’s the prison camp?’ They didn’t know. Shook their heads.”

Gen. Weiskircher, WWII-era

He pauses for a moment and deepens his voice: “One old man!” he booms, “held his nose and pointed. In sign language he said, ‘Follow your nose, you’ll find it.’

There’s an inaudible gasp in the room. “I don’t mean to be vulgar,” says the retired General. “But the stench, I cannot describe to you.”

Although the 5:44 video is rough-shod, the General also had my rapt attention. (I recommend stopping at 4:34, though, as it’s mostly background noise after that).

South Hall Middle School sixth grader, 11-year-old Mason Barnes, said he could have listened all day to the General, says Access North Georgia.

As vice chairman of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, a state agency that uses the lessons of the Holocaust to teach about injustice, stereotyping, discrimination and bigotry, 88-year-old Weiskircher’s goal is to help today’s students cultivate an open mind. To do this, he goes from school to school as part of the Commission’s Holocaust Learning Trunk Project.

If the video wasn’t of such poor quality, I might have felt the same way. It’s a short video and I would love to know more of what the general spoke about. (Do I sound like Woody Allen when he complained about how terrible the food was but in such small portions?).

One thing that caught my attention, because I’ve heard about it before but never from someone first-hand, was IBM’s role in the war. Here’s what he told the students:

“[When] we pried the gate open [at Dachau], the first thing we found was a room with IBM key-punch cards. With a card for every prisoner in the German political system. It was being maintained by former IBM employees, Germans who had been trained to do it. There was a key-punch card for over 11 million people. That covered all over Europe, all of the prisoners, many of whom were dead.”

 

“I Grew Up with Dead Relatives”

Hall of Names at Yad Vashem; photo: David Shankbone

That sentence stopped me in my tracks.

At last week’s 10th Biennial International Holocaust Studies Conference at Middle Tennessee State University, Steven Leonard Jacobs, uttered those words.

The Jewish studies professor from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa also said: 

“There were 150 members of my family murdered between 1939 and 1945. My father was one of seven survivors. All seven are now deceased. But growing up, I knew my family was different somehow. We weren’t like other families. I grew up with dead relatives. When I would tell stories about playing with friends, my father would say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my cousin who was killed by the Nazis.’”

Imagine your own mother or father doing that? I’m sure it would become tiresome, if not downright depressing. I’ve spoken with other offspring of survivors who tell similar stories. Perhaps some children would be inclined to stop sharing playground anecdotes with their survivor parents simply to avoid hearing about dead relatives, but Prof. Jacobs seems to have gone in the opposite direction by becoming a professor who specializes in Holocaust studies. He seems to have come to it with great passion and vigor, and I applaud that.

“All of us,” he said, “the second and third and fourth generations of parents who survived this terrible thing, represent a bridge over Hitler. When I was born, my dad said I was the victory. The Nazis didn’t defeat us.”

Indeed, every child and grandchild and great-grandchild and so on down the line is a triumph over Hitler. My husband and children included.

One of the goal’s of this biennial conference is to give middle- and high-school educators the tools they need to teach Holocaust curriculum.

According to the article in The Tennessean, Prof. Jacobs told the teachers that it is not their job to provide answers but to “have a solid knowledge base about the subject and to wrestle with the question: Are there lessons we can learn from it today?”

I, for one, appreciated that question he posed because I can only hear, “We must keep it from happening again,” so many times. Of course, we don’t want mass genocide to ever happen again, but it’s said so often that it’s become trite and I feel almost deaf to it now. Hopefully these new educators will bring some new thoughts and words, and in turn, their students will also breathe new life into Holocaust studies.

A Child’s View of 9/11

Manhattan skyline at night. Photo: davidcmc58

Driving home from New Jersey last Saturday night, my six-year-old son Jack looked toward the twinkling Manhattan skyline ahead and asked what those blinking red lights were, you know, “the ones way up high, close to the spire of the Empire State building.”

“Those are lights that let planes know they’re flying too close to a building,” my husband Tom said. “They help pilots avoid crashing into skyscrapers.”

“Oh,” Jack said, reveling in this new bit of trivia. “I guess they didn’t have those during 9/11. If they did, those pilots wouldn’t have crashed into the World Trade Center, right?”

My husband and I turned toward each other in the front seat, and I’m pretty sure we had the exact same expression on our faces—that of shock and delight at our child’s innocence. Basking in that warm and rosy glow of a child who can’t even comprehend why anyone would ever purposely fly a plane filled with people into a building filled with people, my husband softly responded, “Yeah. Something like that.”

Satisfied with that answer, Jack went back to poking his sister in her car seat.

“Wow,” Tom whispered. “He can’t yet comprehend that a person would actually do something that terrible.”

“I know,” I said. “But neither could we until it actually happened.”

After that exchange it occurred to me that in our lifetimes, we lose our innocence many times over. Even as adults. Evil comes at us in new and awful ways that are as startling as they are incomprehensible. And that’s what it’s been like for me writing about the Holocaust. Even though I know so much about it from years of reading and research, I continue to discover new and different ways in which the Nazis committed their dastardly deeds. It shouldn’t continue to amaze me, but it does. And I don’t want to lose that innocence. I want to still believe that there is good in this world. For now, I have my children to help me savor that innocence.

Parallel Fixations on the Holocaust

Jenna Blum's novel, "Those Who Save Us"

I just finished Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us, a novel that toggles between one woman’s shameful past in Nazi Germany and her daughter’s attempt to uncover the truth in present-day Minnesota. I’m impressed by how real it feels, especially as a novel about the Holocaust.

Apparently it was her first book, which impresses me even more. Curious about why she wrote it as fiction and wondering if it was based on personal family history, I checked out her site. I soon discovered I wasn’t the only reader who wanted to know the book’s back story. She explains:

“Readers assume Those Who Save Us is autobiographical—they often look surprised when they meet me and see I’m not an eighty-something German woman or embittered fifty-something German history professor. I take it as the highest compliment when my readers think my characters and their situations must be real. But in fact, I invented their stories.”

Wow. I knew it was fiction but assumed it was founded on some semblance of fact. I often wonder why people choose to write novels about the Holocaust when the real-life stories are endless and endlessly fascinating.

Like me, Ms. Blum is interested in the enduring impact of the Holocaust some 65+ years later. I got excited about how well she was able to impress upon the reader the transfer of trauma from one generation to the next, both through her main characters and even some peripheral ones like a man who witnessed the murder of his mother and younger brother at the hands of a Nazi. He spent the remainder of his life haunted by the fact that he did nothing to help save them.

As I read more about Ms. Blum, I noticed other similarities between us. She was introduced to the Holocaust at the age of five through a book called, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. My interest began at a young age too, when I met and spoke with real Holocaust survivors at my synagogue. We grew up in neighboring New Jersey towns during the 1970s and 1980s (am pretty sure we’re the exact same age, too) and although both intrigued by the Holocaust and its effects on subsequent generations, we’re both only tangentially connected to it. Haven’t gotten around to it but am thinking of contacting her and inviting her to lunch or coffee or some such if she lives in the tri-state area.

Anyway, if you like a page-turner and are as interested in character-driven Holocaust stories, you should consider picking up this book. It’s a fast read and it’s really well done. Let me know what you think of it too!

Chalk Another One Up for the Ritchie Boys

Eric F. Ross

 

My heart is bursting!

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum just received a record gift of $17.2 million from Eric F. Ross, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 91. The first article I saw didn’t mention his Ritchie Boy status, but I connected the dots when I read he’d fled Germany in 1938 and enlisted in the U.S. army in 1942. (ed., learn more about the Ritchie Boys from my earlier post.)

Well, it was confirmed that he was, indeed, a Ritchie Boy! These men are my newest most favorite heroes. Is it weird to have a crush on a bunch of octo- and nonagenarians? If you watch the documentary, you might develop one too.

Sara J. Bloomfeld, the museum’s director, said, “Having experienced firsthand Nazi antisemitism and hatred, Eric and [wife] Lore Ross became determined and generous investors in Holocaust education. Their loss and suffering inspired remarkable generosity.”

Lore and Eric F. Ross

According to a Museum press release, the donation will go toward the Museum’s endowment fund, which provides permanent resources to secure the Museum’s future. Even from his grave Ross is telling Hitler and his henchmen that the world will never forget. Thanks to Ross’s generous donation, my kids, both of whom are third-generation survivors, will be able to know their history.

Google Did it Again! (and I mean that in a good way)

James H. Keeffe II in 1942 (age 19)

Now this is what I’m talking about: Google bringing Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans together. This story is reminiscent of my mother-in-law’s, but not as cool or interesting, in my humble opinion. [Keep up with my blog and you’ll soon discover more about my mother-in-law’s incredible story…]

James H. Keeffe II was an American B-24 bomber pilot whose plane was shot down over southern Holland during WWII. He was rescued by the Dutch Underground and spent five months eluding capture by going from safe house to safe house in Rotterdam. One of the homes also hid a Jewish family, a mother, a father and their eight-year-old daughter.

Keeffe’s son, James H. Keeffe III, recently wrote Two Gold Coins and a Prayer: The Epic Journey of a World War II Bomber Pilot and POW, an as-told-to memoir about his father’s war adventures. He also posted excerpts on Google Reader, which were discovered by 76-year-old Israeli Helen Cohen-Berman, who recognized herself as the little girl in the story.

James and Helen in Seattle, September 13, 2011

Helen and her family had been captured by the Nazis and that was the last Keeffe had seen or heard of them. He could only assume they’d been taken to a concentration camp and killed. Imagine his surprise and delight when Helen wrote to let them know she was alive and well and had been living in Israel since 1978.

On September 13, 2011 — 67 years later — Helen flew to Seattle to reunite with 88-year-old Keeffe. The power of good that is Google. Amazing. I have a feeling there are more of these Google reunion stories and I can only hope people write about them and share them with the rest of us.

Watch this quick clip of their reunion.

How Many Yellow Stars Are Too Many?

Wolfgang Haney is obsessed.

Born in Berlin to a Jewish mother and gentile father, 87-year-old Haney scavenges flea markets all over Europe in search of Holocaust artifacts. To date he has amassed an impressive collection of yellow Stars of David that Jews were forced to wear during World War II. But those yellow badges aren’t all that he seeks.

Other Holocaust-era relics include telegrams from concentration camps, drawings by prisoners, anti-Semitic postcards, personal letters and other documents of identification.

How do we know he is obsessed?

His collection is taking a toll on his health. He doesn’t sleep well and he gets rashes that cause the pads of his fingers to burst open. “It has almost broken me down,” he says. When his wife complains he’s running himself ragged, he tells her, “You are absolutely right.”

Yet, he cannot stop.

But he knows his work is important, vital to the memory of those who died, physical proof that these atrocities happened to real people. To individuals. To people like you and me.

Apparently his collection fills his entire house. The article didn’t include any pictures so I have no idea if this is of Collyer brothers proportions (which I certainly hope it isn’t), but it does include this description:

“Books are stacked to the ceiling, posters cover the tables, and mountains of documents are everywhere. Three enormous iron safes in the cellar are filled to the brim with red and black folders. Thousands of pages, letters, food stamps, arm cuffs and drawings document the discrimination and elimination of Jews.”

This article also doesn’t say how many stars he has in his collection and a cursory search on Google yielded results almost entirely in German (which I can’t read), so I will have to ask my husband or mother-in-law to interpret for me. I’d also love to see photographs of his house-filled collection, just to get a sense of the variety and the volume of it.

Luckily Haney doesn’t keep it to himself; he  organizes exhibits, gives lectures and publishes books.

I can only hope he wills his collection to a major Holocaust museum in Europe, Israel or the United States. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing it.

If anyone reading this knows anything about this man’s collection, please share in the comments section below.

Holocaust: Big H or Little h?

What do the words ‘booty’ and ‘holocaust’ have in common? Both have been replaced in the bible to better reflect their meanings.

According to an article in the Huffington Post, the word ‘booty’ today has sexual connotations (as in ‘booty call’) and has thus been changed in the bible to ‘spoils of war,’ which was its original meaning.

The Post explains: “The word ‘holocaust,’ which for most people refers to the World War II genocide of Jews, was changed to ‘burned offerings,’ which clarifies the original, positive idea of making offerings to God.”

There are many words whose meanings change over time, and booty and holocaust are just two recent examples. Holocaust, however, is one of those words that seems like it can never go back to beginning with a lower case ‘h’. Over the past 60 or so years it’s gone from noun to proper noun and it’s difficult to imagine it otherwise.

An article on JewishMag.com says, “The word holocaust was not created to specifically describe the death of Jews in World War II, but within forty years of that event taking place, the word holocaust has become synonymous with the evil deeds of the Nazis . . . Because our society has molded such a horrific event with the word holocaust, we are now compelled to react strongly to said word. We would not react at all to that same word if it did not have these implications and meanings.”

The word holocaust comes from the Greek holocaustros, which means ‘burnt whole’.

Here’s the definition as it appears in Webster’s:

1: a sacrifice consumed by fire

2: a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire <a nuclear holocaust>

3a often capitalized: the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II — usually used with the

b: a mass slaughter of people; especially : GENOCIDE

For those of you who dig root words, it comes from Late Latin holocaustum and the Greek word holokauston. It’s first known use is from the 13th century.

Holocaust Music Gets Its Own Hub

Leeds College of Music in West Yorkshire, England, is launching a Terezin Music Hub in February 2012. According to a press release from Leeds, “The Hub will aim to provide a focal point in the UK for the study of music and musicians interned at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp during WWII, through creative practice, research and collaboration. It will also encompass related disciplines, including music during the Holocaust in particular and creativity in adversity in general.”

When I first heard about this I was a little disturbed. Something about it sounded off to me but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I realized it was the wording of it in the Yorkshire Evening Post:

“The college is aiming to become a world centre for the study and promotion of music during the Holocaust, as well as creativity in adversity in general.”

Seeing the word ‘promotion’ coupled with ‘Holocaust’ was a bit too crass for me. But I wanted to know more so I looked in other places, most importantly straight from the source—Leeds College—and discovered it’s actually a wonderful idea that is going to enhance the future of the study of music. Especially studying the idea of creativity during adversity.

The Hub will kick off at an international conference at Leeds on February 26 and 27, 2012. The Ambassador to the Czech Republic (where Terezin was located) has agreed to be the Hub’s Honorary Patron (whatever that means). The conference will commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of Eliska Kleinova, sister of composer and pianist Gideon Klein, who played a seminal role in Terezin’s cultural life. Gideon was murdered in Auschwitz; his sister survived Terezin and Auschwitz and died in 1999. Professor Eliska Kleinova was a highly respected musician based in Prague.

The focus of the conference will be on musical performance and composition in Terezin. Klein’s Piano Sonata, which he wrote and dedicated to his sister, will be performed.

I’ve written before about a woman who survived by playing piano in the orchestra at Terezin. Her name is Alice Herz-Sommer and at 107 she’s the oldest living Holocaust survivor today.

9/11 Inspires WWII Documentary

Financial executive turned documentary filmmaker Mary Skinner says 9/11 inspired her to do something more meaningful with her life. It took several years and lots of obstacles, but she did it and the fruits of her labor are wholly apparent.

In the Name of Their Mothers is Skinner’s documentary film about Polish war hero Irena Sendler, who was little known until four Kansas teenagers wrote a play about her for a school project.

Sendler, a Catholic social worker in Poland, organized an underground rescue network in the Warsaw Ghetto, ultimately smuggling 2,500 Jewish children to safety. Sendler says she knocked on doors and “talked Jewish mothers out of their children.”

As reported by Helen Zelon in the September issue of More magazine, “During nearly eight years of film-making and multiple trips to Poland, [Skinner] fought bureaucratic snafus and language barriers,” to bring this project to light. Despite a snafu that disqualified her from entering American film festivals, her documentary was picked up by PBS and debuted in the U.S. on Holocaust Remembrance Day, May 11, 2011.

And this just skims the surface of inspirational stories Skinner wants to share with viewers. According to the article in More, “Skinner has a trove of World War II stories, and is now branching out into educational film projects.”

Cool. Can’t wait to see more.