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Jewish Journal

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April 13, 2007

Fortunoff Archive preserves Holocaust testimonies

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Until his 50th birthday, Geoffrey Hartman had little Jewish involvement after fleeing Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport to England. Instead, this Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Yale University devoted time to establishing his reputation as a scholar of Wordsworth, Keats and the romantic poets.

It took a non-Jewish colleague, Bart Giammati, Yale’s president at the time, to re-direct Hartman’s energies to the task of elevating and expanding the Jewish studies curriculum at the university and simultaneously preserving memories of the Holocaust. In the 1980s, Hartman helped establish the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a Yale-based collection of videotaped Holocaust testimonies he continues to head. The archive preceded Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation by more than a decade.

“I have always thought of literature as dealing with extreme situations. It wasn’t just a sense of duty that motivated me. Rather because it is a part of the human condition, the Holocaust is what the humanities should be studying. While it was a change in my direction, I felt no discontinuity,” said Hartman, who is now in his late 70s.

During a recent stay in Los Angeles as a Getty scholar, Hartman met with students of the UCLA Jewish studies program and addressed an audience comprised largely of Holocaust survivors and their families at the American Jewish University (AJU), formerly the University of Judaism.

In his talk at the AJU, given under the auspices of the Sigi Ziering Institute and titled, “Holocaust Testimony in a Genocidal Era,” Hartman touched on a number of salient contemporary issues, among them what he described as “the globalization of grief.”

“The Shoah was not the end of all genocide. Each collective trauma has its own unique character, and as long as eyewitnesses are able to testify, we must preserve their memories,” he said, adding that no one has a monopoly on suffering.

“We surely have no intention to show that Jewish suffering is special,” he said.

As Hartman began his efforts to expand teaching resources for Yale’s Judaic studies program, his wife was volunteering to help a grass-roots group in New Haven that had begun videotaping Holocaust witnesses. Founded by television journalist Laurel Vlock and Holocaust survivor Dr. Dori Laub, a psychiatrist, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was having trouble reaching a national audience, let alone an international one.

“I was struck by the project’s relevance for education in an audiovisual age, and convinced the university to adopt the project and lend it its name and prestige,” he said.

Hartman joined with Vlock, Laub and William Rosenberg, president of the New Haven Farband and the New Haven survivors fellowship group, to expand its scope to Europe, Israel and wherever survivors could be found. Their efforts resulted in an initial collection of almost 200 videotaped testimonies, as well as the 1981 Emmy Award-winning documentary, “Forever Yesterday,” produced by New York’s WNEW.

Hartman emphasized that when gathering the testimonies, trained volunteer interviewers use no prepared set of questions and allow the survivors to speak freely for as long as they wish.

“We’re interested in their memories, not history, and we strive to cover the survivor’s life before, during and after the Holocaust. This has resulted in deeply emotional responses and adds an important sociological dimension,” he said.

With support from the Revson Foundation, Yale provided space for the testimonies, as well as technical assistance in 1981. The project received a major grant from the Fortunoff Family Foundation in 1987, and became known thereafter as the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. While the Fortunoff grant is adequate to support the archive’s ongoing operations and maintenance, Hartman said that some $800,000 is now needed to digitize the testimonies, which were recorded more than a quarter century ago using technology that has become obsolete.

The archive currently holds more than 4,300 testimonies, comprising more than 10,000 hours of videotape. The tapes are housed at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and are available to the general public.

In addition to the testimonies available through the Fortunoff archive, as well as USC’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, Hartman believes the proliferation of genocide documentaries and docudramas have value in educating people about the Holocaust and other examples of genocide. But he cautioned that there is also the danger that showing so much violence tends to create a sanitizing effect.

He said that some survivors who reacted to those depictions have said, “First we were killed and now they’re taking our stories away.”

For more information call (203) 432-1879 or visit Fortunoff Archive preserves Holocaust testimonies Read More »

Diary writer Hillman says sharing story is ‘my duty’

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Like Anne Frank, Laura Hillman received a diary as a gift on her 13th birthday in Nazi Germany. In it, she scribbled her girlish poems and observations, including her love of the lilac tree that stood in front of her house in Aurich.

“The tree bloomed every May, around the time of Mama’s birthday, and Papa would sing songs of love and lilacs to her,” the survivor said in a conversation in her Los Alamitos home, where a vase of the flowers graced a table.

Hillman (neé Hannelore Wolff) left the tree behind, along with her diary, when she was deported to the Lublin ghetto on her mother’s birthday, May 8, 1942. It was not until several years ago that she completed her Holocaust memoir, “I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree” (Atheneum, 2005), which reads like a teenager’s journal of life in eight labor and concentration camps. The lyrical, brutally honest book recreates her youthful musings — echoing the most famous of the Holocaust diarists, Anne Frank.

Next week, 83-year-old Hillman will read excerpts from her memoir and poetry during a newly re-imagined staging of Grigori Frid’s “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Long Beach Opera (see main story.) She will personify “what Anne might have become if she had survived,” said Andreas Mitisek, the opera’s artistic and general director.

In the two-person piece, the survivor will sit at a desk and, in her speaking voice, engage in a kind of parallel dialogue with the soprano portraying Anne. After the opera’s Anne sings about her father’s dread of life in hiding, Hillman will describe the harsher fate that befell her own father (her family received an urn containing his ashes in a box postmarked, “Buchenwald”).

Hillman later was made to rake dirt over rotting corpses in mass graves, shovel salt in Polish mines, witness her 15-year-old brother succumb to a vicious beating and endure a brutal rape by an SS officer. She also met and fell in love with her future husband, Bernhard Hillman, a fellow prisoner in the Budzyn camp, and was saved from Birkenau by Oskar Schindler, who had placed her on his famous “list.” Throughout the nightmare, she was sustained by a promise — essentially a marriage proposal — from Hillman: If she survived, he would plant her a lilac tree to remind her of her childhood home.

In the opera, Hillman will recount how, like Anne, she discerned possibilities for love and hope during unimaginable times. Yet she found it too painful to document her own Holocaust experiences — except in poems — for decades after the war. Only when her husband lay dying of heart disease in the mid-1980s did she begin to write down memories en masse: “I wondered why Dick had to suffer so much, after all he had been through, and the details came flooding back.”

A division of Simon & Schuster eventually bought her book, which was featured in a Newsweek story about the plethora of such memoirs being published to meet the needs of Holocaust curricula in 25 states. While Anne’s 1947 “Diary of a Young Girl” remains an icon of the genre, newer books like Hillman’s appeal because they are “genuinely good” and “don’t sugarcoat the truth,” Newsweek said.

The survivor gave many readings, but was initially hesitant when Mitisek called about the opera several months ago.

“When I speak too often, I become very anxious, breathing is difficult, and my blood pressure rises,” she explained. Although she said she is ordinarily optimistic, “after each appearance, I’m so completely drained that I sleep — then I take my car and drive somewhere, anywhere, to get away from the memories.”

Even so, she said she agreed to appear in the opera because “it’s my duty. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, because I was lucky enough to survive, while so many others perished.”

Diary writer Hillman says sharing story is ‘my duty’ Read More »

Dual concerts embrace the best of ‘banished music’

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Almost seven decades after the Nazis murdered and banished many of Europe’s most renowned composers, a group of German artists will honor the musicians’ work and lives at two local concerts.

The first performance will be on Sunday evening, April 15, at the Museum of Tolerance, and the second on Monday evening, April 16, at the UCLA Hillel Center. The names on the programs read like a roll call of famous Jewish composers of the 20th century from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Among them are Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Zeisl, Alexander Zemlinsky, Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullman and Wladyslaw Szpilman (memorably dramatized in Roman Polanski’s film “The Pianist”).

Less familiar may be the name of Izzy (Jack) Furman, but it is largely due to the devotion of his daughter that the music of Furman and his contemporaries, revived in Germany last year, is coming to Los Angeles.

The idea of memorializing not only the works, but also the lives and fates, of the Jewish composers originated in 2001 off the beaten track in the northern German city of Schwerin.

There Volker Ahmels, director of the Schwerin Conservatory, organized an international festival titled, “Verfemte Musik,” which can be translated as ostracized or silenced or banished music.

Last fall, the festival encored, with young musicians throughout Europe competing to perform at the five-day event.

As a key feature, the competitors not only had to master the complex repertoire, but study the struggles of the persecuted composers, and were given the chance to meet with Holocaust survivors.

Among the latter was Brigitte Medvin of Los Angeles, who was deeply moved by an exhibit on her father’s life, conceived and created by Schwerin high school students.

Her father, Furman, was an accomplished and popular violinist, bandleader, composer and jazz pioneer on the swinging Berlin scene of the 1920s and throughout Europe.

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the same year Furman’s daughter was born, the life of the Polish-born musician worsened steadily, and he returned to Poland.

During the war years, father, mother and daughter were separated, each surviving on their own.

Furman fought with the partisans; his wife, Annemarie, lived under false papers in Warsaw; and their daughter was hidden as a “Catholic” child.

After the war, Furman went back to his music in Berlin, entertaining the reviving Jewish community and Allied soldiers, and composing some of his best-known tunes.

In 1949, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in Minneapolis, where “Izzy,” now “Jack,” worked in a factory, but still managed to form his own band.

A business card of that time offers “Music for All Occasions — Jewish, Russian, Polish, Gypsie — and all kinds of folk and dance music.”

Eventually, Furman and his wife followed their now-married daughter to Los Angeles, where he died in 1971 at the age of 67.

Among the artists at the two Los Angeles concerts are duo pianists Volker Ahmels and Friederike Haufe and soprano Katrin Burghardt, all from Germany, and Polish pianist Milena Piszczorowicz.

Sponsors include the German Foreign Ministry, consulates general of Germany and Israel in Los Angeles, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Hillel at UCLA, Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland and the Goethe Institut.

Sunday’s event at the Museum of Tolerance, 9786 W. Pico Blvd., will start at 6:30 p.m. with an exhibit on Furman’s life, followed by the concert at 7:30 p.m. For reservations, phone (310) 772-2529. Earlier that day, the Schwerin musicians will participate in Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Holocaust Remembrance ceremonies at 10 a.m.

Monday’s concert at Hillel at UCLA, 574 Hilgard Ave., begins at 7 p.m. For reservations, call (310) 208-3081, ext. 108.

Admission is free for both concerts, but reservations are required.

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Desperate times forged painter’s creative legacy

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Charlotte Salomon perished in Auschwitz at the age of 26, but the astonishing legacy she left behind will be celebrated this month in an exhibition and on stage.

In her short life, Salomon was a prolific painter, but her style and sensibility were so unique that critics still have difficulty describing her artistry.

“An enormous and breathtaking visual instrument … a great work of European, Jewish and women’s culture … one of the most important art works of the 20th century,” writes art historian Archie Rand.

Her method varies, from single images to storyboard-like sequencing. Her early work, depicting childhood memories, is very colorful, but the work became increasingly abstract as she explored her internal musings, including painful images of her mother’s and grandmother’s suicides.

Both the exhibition, which opened April 12 at the Goethe Institut, and the stage production, opening in previews Thursday, April 19, at the Met Theater, go under the identical title of “Charlotte: Life? Or Theater?”

The title is taken from Salomon’s visual autobiography of more than 1,300 watercolor gouaches, which she painted in southern France between 1940 and 1942, before she was seized by the Nazis.

Salomon was born in Berlin, the daughter of a prominent physician and academic, and, in a rare exception for a Jew, she was admitted to the Berlin Fine Arts Academy in 1935, during Hitler’s regime. She was expelled three years later and found refuge with her grandparents in Villefranche, near Nice.

There she learned of her tragic family history of five suicides, all women, including her mother and grandmother. This awareness brought her to “the question,” as she put it, whether to take her own life or “undertake something crazy and unheard of” — an autobiography in art.

Just before she was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, married and pregnant with her first child, she gave her massive collection to a friend, telling her, “Keep this safe, it is my whole life.”

Salomon’s father and stepmother, who survived the Holocaust by going underground in Holland, discovered the hidden treasure and gave it to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.
The exhibition is made up of digital reproductions of 26 of Salomon’s paintings.

The stage production of “Life? Or Theater?” subtitled, “A Three Color Play with Music,” was created by Elise Thoron and Gary Fagin, and has been performed at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, London, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.

Director Louis Fantasia commented that “Charlotte Salomon created vibrant, original art as a ringing affirmation of life in the face of impossible odds.”

The stage production, he added, is “a brilliant piece of musical theater, emotionally charged, politically astute and filled with remarkable tunes. It is perhaps as close as we can come to a three-dimensional staging of the theater of the mind, of paint, water and paper, that she strove so brilliantly to create in the last two years of her life.”

Exhibit hours through July 30 at the Goethe Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100, are Mondays 9 a.m.-7 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Fridays 9 a.m.-3 p.m. For additional information, call (323) 525-3388.

Following previews beginning April 19, the play will continue with regular performances at The Met Theater, 1089 N. Oxford St., April 26-May 27. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. For reservations, phone (323) 957-1152. The play is presented in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity.

For more information, visit www.CharlotteSalomon-la.com.

Charlotte Salomon art

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Books: Part history, part mystery — the passengers of the S. S. St. Louis

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“Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust” by Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller set a difficult task for themselves. Writing their book was easy. So, too, was researching what happened on the voyage of the St. Louis, the Hamburg-American line ship that traveled from Germany to Cuba in May 1939, carrying 937 passengers who were escaping Nazi Germany. The authors’ greater challenge was to uncover the fate of the passengers after the ship had been turned away from numerous ports. Their dogged pursuit of all leads yielded some surprising results.

Some of the passengers had come from concentration camps to the ship’s dock, because in 1939 if Jews could provide evidence that they would leave Germany, they could be freed from the camps.

They were men, women and children of privilege and initiative. Some traveled first class; others had used their last marks to escape. They had secured passage on a luxury liner that would transport them to freedom. When they departed from Germany, they carried what they assumed were valid visas to enter Cuba. Their departure was without melancholy; they knew they had to leave, and they must have felt privileged to escape. Their voyage was actually joyous: For the first time in years they were treated by the German staff — under the leadership of a most decent captain — as guests, not as Jews.

After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, no Jew could feel secure in Germany. None could imagine that things would get better under the current regime, and it took little foresight to leave Germany then. But opportunity was scarce. The British had limited immigration to Palestine because of the White Paper; the United States had instituted quotas, based on the census of 1890, designed to preserve the original racial stock; and immigration from Central and Eastern Europe was tightly restricted, inadequate for the number of German Jews fleeing for their life. Money could buy entry into Cuba; thus, for the well-heeled, Cuba presented an opportunity — or so it seemed.

As many readers know before they even begin the book, the visas were declared invalid before they passengers departed. This fact was known to the shipping company, but not to the passengers, who arrived in Havana and only then learned that they could not disembark. Then the diplomatic game began. Cuban officials were notoriously corrupt, so the question was not whether they would accept a bribe, but what price would be appropriate. The greater the attention paid to the ship’s passengers and the more prominent the voyage, the higher the price.

Would Jewish organizations, most specifically the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), consent to offer a bribe? If so, what precedent would this set regarding Jews who were fleeing by the tens of thousands, not just by the hundreds? Could illicit means accomplish the goal? Would Jewish organizations then be held hostage by corrupt and corruptible regimes? Could they afford the sums requested? Would the American government succumb to public pressure and accept these refugees rather than force the ship to return to Germany?

As anyone who has studied the American response to the Holocaust knows, the ship saw the lights of Miami, but was not permitted to enter its harbor. The U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the waters of the Atlantic — some say to prevent the ship from entering, others say merely to make sure that its whereabouts were known. The German captain Gustav Shroder was a quiet hero, doing all within his power to bring the passengers to safety and to pervert their descent into the abyss. Hopelessness was their companion; each rumor gave them a moment of respite and then was crushed by reality.

In the end, the ship was unable to find a place to discharge its passengers in the New World, but passengers did not have to return to Germany. The “great diplomatic triumph” was that the passengers would disembark in other European countries. France, Belgium and Holland accepted 628 of the passengers. More than 280 were sent to England, 21 had valid entry permits to Cuba, one attempted suicide and was hospitalized in Havana. Within a year, only those passengers who found haven in England were safe, as Nazi Germany invaded the other countries of refuge.

Almost everyone who has written about this sad chapter in history assumed that the fate of the passengers who disembarked in Europe was similar to that of the Jews of Europe — deportation to death, to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor. Ogilvie and Miller painstakingly traced each of the 937 passengers. The fate of some was found in records of the death camps; others in the National Archives, for they had emigrated after the war. The archives of the JDC also yielded important results, since they kept track of the passengers even in the lands of their haven. The authors then began the hard task of tracking the remaining passengers, person by person, story by story.

They received anonymous tips and unsolicited calls, each of which they tracked down. Important conversations followed. The authors divided the work: Ogilvie was the researcher, Miller was the networker. She worked in archives, he by telephone or e-mail.

(Here the reader should know that I mentored the careers of the book’s authors for almost a decade, more than a decade ago. Had they written a bad book, I would have been reticent to criticize them, for we must assume responsibility for those whose careers we have influenced. But since they have written a fascinating book, permit me to reveal my subjective prejudices and let the reader compensate accordingly.)

Visits to people yielded further contacts with other people. The authors employed the vast resources of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and its worldwide reaches. The list of unknown passengers grew shorter month by month.

Books: Part history, part mystery — the passengers of the S. S. St. Louis Read More »

Call to ‘write and record’ brings new books on Shoah

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“Write and record,” historian Simon Dubnow urged his fellow Jews, as he was taken to his death in Riga. Over the decades since Dubnow’s murder in 1941, many have taken his words to heart, and scholars, survivors, novelists, poets, members of the second and third generations continue to publish new work on the Holocaust. This season, in time for the commemoration of Yom HaShoah, there are impressive historical works, memoirs of lost childhoods, personal testimonies and artful works of fiction; many written by those who feel an obligation to those whose voices were stilled.

History

Archivist Bonnie Gureswitsch quotes historian Simon Dubnow in the opening of her essay, “Documenting the Unimaginable: Recording the Truth, Telling the World,” in a companion book to a new exhibition opening April 16 in New York City at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, titled “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust” (Museum of Jewish Heritage).

Edited by curator Yitzchak Mais, with essays by Holocaust scholar David Engel, psychologist Eva Fogelman, Gureswitsch and Mais, the book documents individual and group acts of resistance through excerpts of diaries, oral histories and letters — some never before published — illustrated with photographs and artwork produced clandestinely in ghettos and camps.

As Mais writes, he and his colleagues have “sought to change the widely held perception that Jews, by and large, failed to resist. The question is not, as some would pose it, why did Jews fail to mount cohesive and effective resistance to the Nazis, but rather, how was it possible that so many Jews resisted at all?”

“The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust,” by Mordecai Paldiel, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel (Collins), includes about 150 well-written profiles of ordinary citizens who risked their lives — who wouldn’t apply the word hero to themselves, but indeed personify that word. They were selected from among the more than 21,000 people who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. The author, who was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and was helped during the war years by a French priest profiled in the book, serves as director of the Department for the Righteous at Yad Vashem.

Mordecai Paldiel’s “Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust” (Ktav) details the lives of diplomats around the world during World War II, often on routine assignments, who, as Ambassador Richard Holbrooke explains in an introduction, found themselves “in an unexpected moral dilemma of historic dimensions.” Often using unorthodox methods, these diplomats risked their own lives to try to save others, motivated by their sense that official policies were wrong.

Some of the diplomatic heroes are familiar names, like Chiume Sugihara of Japan and Giorgio Perlasca of Italy. Paldiel also includes many others from China, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil,Yugoslavia and the Vatican.

In the book’s epigraph, Paldiel quotes German writer Lion Feuchtwanger: “Who has not gone through a country shaken by internal troubles, by war or foreign occupation, who does not know the significant role that an identity card or an administrative rubber stamp can play in a person’s life?”

“The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945,” by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins), is a follow-up to his earlier work, “The Years of Persecution,” which together provide a remarkable comprehensive history. The author, who was born in Prague and spent his childhood in Nazi-occupied France, is a distinguished professor of history at UCLA and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University. The work is based on letters, diaries and memories, as well as archival documents.

Fiction

A post-Holocaust story, “The Polish Woman,” by Eva Mekler (Bridge Works), opens when a 29-year-old woman arrives at the law offices of a man who — as she informs him — is the nephew of her late father. At first, the lawyer doesn’t believe that this woman is the long-lost child, who had been hidden by a Catholic family in Poland. A powerful story unfolds, as the lawyer and young woman try to verify her account and her identity.

Born in Poland immediately after the war, the author spent her first few years of life in a displaced persons camp in Germany and now lives in New York.

Aharon Appelfeld is a storyteller who spins his craft with delicacy and compassion. When his first book was published, a critic wrote, “Appelfeld doesn’t write on the Holocaust, but about its margins.” Some 20 books later, he’s still writing in the margins, creating stories drawn, in part, from his life.

In his latest novel, “All Whom I Have Loved” (Schocken), a young son of divorced parents moves back and forth between their homes and lives. The book is set in Europe in the ’30s, and the story prefigures what is to come for the Jews. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Appelfeld lives in Israel.

Memoir

“Dark Clouds Don’t Stay Forever: Memories of a Jewish German Boy in the 1930s and 1940s,” by Werner Neuberger (Publish America), is a personal story that also conveys a larger perspective on prewar life in Germany. The author left Germany on a Kindertransport, came to the United States at the age of 13 and later served in the U.S. Army. As the title implies, he has managed to sustain his positive, life-embracing attitude. He writes with humility and insight.

“Bread, Butter, and Sugar: A Boy’s Journey Through the Holocaust and Postwar Europe,” by Martin Schiller (Hamilton Books), is told in the third person. It’s the story of young Menek, who would later become Martin, now a 73-year-old electrical engineer specializing in pollution control.

The author captures the child’s point of view: Schiller was 6 when the Nazis invaded Poland and 9 when he and his family were interned as slave laborers. He survived Buchenwald with the help of a German political prisoner.

“My Dog Lala: The Touching True Story of a Young Boy and His Dog During the Holocaust,” by Roman R. Kent (Teacher’s Discover), is, as the author describes, a love letter to his pet, also a casualty of the Holocaust. When Kent’s family was taken from their Lodz home to the Ghetto, Lala — whose name means doll in Polish — would find the way to the family at night, sneaking in and out of the Ghetto. Kent, a businessman who is active in Jewish organizational life related to the Holocaust, has used the story of Lala in speaking with young people as a way to promote tolerance.

Call to ‘write and record’ brings new books on Shoah Read More »

Wiesenthal Center honors one of Shoah’s righteous Arabs

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After Hitler conquered France, the French colonies of Algeria and Morocco remained under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime. While the Jews of these countries suffered under the anti-Semitic Vichy-imposed laws, their lives were not at risk.

Tunisia was the exception. In November 1942, German troops and their Italian ally occupied the small country, forced its 100,000 Jews to wear yellow stars and confiscated their properties.

Before British troops liberated Tunisia six months later, the Nazis sent 5,000 Jews to forced labor camps, where at least 46 died, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority. About 160 Tunisian Jews living in France were deported to death camps.

Odette and Jacob BoukrisThe Nazi takeover immediately affected Jacob Boukris (wedding photo, right), an affluent household appliances manufacturer, as well as his wife, Odette, and their 11-year-old daughter, Anny. German troops gave the family one hour to evacuate their spacious house in the coastal town of Mahdia, then the soldiers turned it into a barrack and took all the valuables. The family and two dozen Jews found shelter in a nearby olive oil factory, but a few days later, another visitor appeared at midnight.

He was Khaled Abdelwahab (the transliterated Arab name is also spelled Abdelwahhab), a notably handsome man of 32, whose father was Tunisia’s most eminent historian. The visitor told the startled Jews that they must leave immediately and explained why.Young Abdelwahab served as liaison between the local population and the Nazi occupiers. He used the position to ingratiate himself with the Germans and, like Oskar Schindler in Poland, frequently treated the officers to meals and endless rounds of wine.

The Germans had set up a brothel and impressed a number of local women, among them Jewish girls. One evening, a drunken officer confided that he had his eye on a particularly beautiful Jewish woman and planned to take her to the brothel and rape her the next night. The intended victim, Abdelwahab quickly realized, was Odette Boukris.

Between midnight and morning, Abdelwahab drove the Boukris family and the other Jews in the olive oil factory to his secluded farm. He hid and fed the large group until the Germans were chased out by the British four months later.

On Monday morning, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center observes Yom HaShoah, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, a place of honor will be reserved for the daughter of the late Khaled Abdelwahab.

Abdelwahab is the first Arab to be nominated for official recognition by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, and his story adds a new dimension to the 6 million stories of horror — and occasionally nobility — rising from the ashes of the Holocaust. His acts also shed light on the little-known fates of Jews in the Arab countries of North Africa during World War II.

But while Abdelwahab and Boukris maintained their friendship for some years after the war, the story would surely have been forgotten after their deaths but for the curiosity and persistence of one American scholar.

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an expert on Arab and Islamic politics, moved with his family to Morocco shortly after Sept. 11 to research the attitudes and behavior of North African Arabs toward the resident Jews during World War II. He posted a message on a Web site popular with Tunisian Jews, now scattered across the world. Within a week, he received a response from Anny Boukris, the 11-year-old girl hidden with her parents on Abdelwahab’s farm who was then a 71-year-old woman living in Palm Desert.

Boukris wrote, “The Arabs saved many Jews, hurt also other Jews. I don’t know very well these stories. I remember very well only our story.”

That message launched Satloff on a four-year investigative trip, with numerous stops in North Africa, Israel, Britain, France and the United States.

Initially, Satloff had his doubts about the Boukris story, and two experts on Tunisian Jewish history assured him that her tale was sheer fantasy. But as Satloff dug deeper and discovered more and more corroborating facts and witnesses, he became convinced of the story’s veracity.

He also found additional instances of “noble, selfless” deeds by Arabs. Thus, when the Vichy regime offered Algerian Arabs huge profits if they took over Jewish property, not a single Arab responded. In 1941, prayer leaders in mosques throughout Algiers, the capital city, delivered sermons warning the faithful not to participate in a similar scheme to strip Jews of their property.

As one result of his findings, Satloff recently published a detailed account in his book, “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories From the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands.” For another, he formally petitioned Yad Vashem to recognize Abdelwahab as the first Arab to be designated as a Righteous Among the Nations and a rescuer of Jews during the Shoah.

The Yad Vashem investigation, now under way, tends to be long and exacting, but Satloff is convinced Abdelwahab will meet the required criteria.

Yad Vashem has so far honored 21,700 men and women with the Righteous designation. Among them are 60 Muslims, all from the Balkans, but none are Arab. As a follow-up to his research, Satloff is working with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to organize a conference in Morocco on the Shoah’s impact on North African nations.

Abdelwahab died in 1997 at the age of 86. Standing in for him at the Memorial Plaza of the Wiesenthal Center will be one of his two daughters, Faiza Abdul-Wahab. A long-time resident of Paris and active in the French film industry, Abdul-Wahab said her father rarely spoke of his wartime experiences, but she was not surprised that he had aided Jews. “My father was a shy person,” recalled Abdul-Wahab, speaking from Madrid. “He mentioned occasionally that some Jews had lived on his farm.” More vividly, she said, he recalled that a young German fighter pilot had been killed when his plane crashed near her Tunisian hometown.

“All the Jewish women cried because he was such a young boy,” her father recounted.

Wiesenthal Center honors one of Shoah’s righteous Arabs Read More »

Crossroads School thanks its courageous music man

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Music /

Crossroads School in Santa Monica might not be where one would expect to find the archived works of a celebrated composer who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, especially when one considers that the Vienna-born Herbert Zipper worked as an educator at a variety of institutions of higher learning, including USC and the New School for Social Research in New York. But when Zipper died at the age of 93 in 1997, he left his papers to the K-12 school where he taught musical composition and theory in his retirement years. His relationship with the school was such that co-founder and former headmaster Paul Cummins wrote Zipper’s biography.

“[Zipper] helped steer Crossroads into arts education” and had an “impact on the curriculum” that is still felt to this day, said David Martino, Crossroads archivist and curator of the April 22 exhibition, “Herbert Zipper: Courage Teacher,” which marks the official opening of the archive to the public.

Among the items to be found in the permanent collection are a German-language letter sent by Zipper on Buchenwald Konzentrationslager letterhead and the original manuscript of “Dachau Song,” Zipper’s stirring anti-Nazi anthem,which was initially titled, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” the ironic words hanging above the Dachau gate, which translate roughly as “Work will set you free.”

On April 22, six tall panels — collages of musical notations, photos and other artifacts — will be displayed in the high-ceilinged, first-floor lobby of the school’s Paul Cummins Library. The panels document Zipper’s long life and career: his days in Vienna before the war; his time in the concentration camps in 1938 and 1939; his wartime work in the underground in Manila, radioing Gen. Douglas MacArthur about the movements of the Japanese; and his postwar career in the United States.

Despite all the inhumanity he witnessed and endured, Zipper never battled depression nor lacked for style. One characteristic picture of him at the archive shows Zipper wearing a bow tie and gray suit, sporting a smile on his face.

“I’ve seen pictures of him from the 1900s to the end of his life, and he went through the Holocaust and World War II, and I think I’ve only seen one picture where he looked unkempt,” Martino said.

Zipper hailed from a well-to-do family and was exposed to classical music at a young age, studying with well-known composers like Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss. Later he became a composer and teacher himself, leading orchestras in Manila, Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Perhaps his greatest achievement, though, was when he convinced an SS guard in Dachau to get him violin string. Zipper and his fellow inmates then stole wood wherever they could find it, cobbled together makeshift instruments and performed compositions such as “Dachau Song,” whose lyrics were written by poet Jura Soyfer, another prisoner. Known in German as “Dachau Lied,” the piece was first performed in an abandoned Dachau building filled with latrines.

Of the secret concerts in the Dachau outhouse, Martino added, “It helped keep people’s sanity and dignity.” Yet even before Zipper came up with this scheme, he began reciting Goethe to others in the concentration camp, refelcting his belief that the arts gave people their humanity.

In addition to the Holocaust-related items, the archive’s permanent collection also includes a telegram signed by General MacArthur expressing his gratefulness for the “splendid contribution” of the Manila Symphony Orchestra, which, conducted by Zipper, performed for American servicemen after the city was liberated.

Zipper might never have led that orchestra or many others were it not for his father, a successful inventor, who was able to secure his release from Buchenwald in 1939, before the Final Solution became official Nazi policy. But Zipper’s time in Dachau was marked by all the indignities and torture that were characteristic of the Holocaust. Zipper saw many fellow inmates murdered. He himself suffered several broken ribs on the way to Dachau when an SS guard leveled him with a rifle butt, which also closed his left eye.

After he got out of Buchenwald, Zipper showed great insight into the Nazi psyche in a letter to his friend Eric Simon, in which he noted that the SS guards “were replaced every half hour” because otherwise they might begin to identify with their captives. “Nazi ideology does not permit free reign of the raw instincts of brutalized monsters. That would be a mistake, because eventually the worst brute after a while will have spent his sadistic impulses and for at least a time may become tame.”

Zipper might not be as famous as Ravel, Strauss or Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a friend who became a film composer in Hollywood. But Zipper was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, “Never Give Up.” And his work lives on in myriad students whom he taught around the world, from China and the Philippines to Germany and the United States. He infused them all with the possibilities opened up by the imaginative realm.

As he once said, “We have to see the world as it is, but we must think about what the world could be.”

“Herbert Zipper: Courage Teacher” will be on display Sunday, April 22, 2-5 p.m., at Crossroads School, Paul Cummins Library, 1714 21st St., Santa Monica. For more information, call (310) 829-7391 ext. 259 or visit Crossroads School thanks its courageous music man Read More »

Stark locations make perfect sets for ‘Anne Frank’ opera production

Leave a Comment / Anne Frank, Entertainment, Music /

Few subjects resonate like the story of Anne Frank and her diary. The tale is familiar to many, yet even those who know little about the young writer’s life equate her name with courage in the face of grim reality. Beyond the much-translated diary, published in various incarnations (original, unexpurgated, revised critical), Anne’s story lives on in Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s Tony Award-winning play, first mounted on Broadway in 1955 and then revived in 1997, as well as the Oscar-winning 1959 movie derived from it.

Anne’s diary also inspired an opera composed in 1969 by Grigori Frid (sometimes credited as Fried because of the vagaries of transliteration), that had its premiere in Moscow in 1972 and was later performed in the Netherlands. It was first seen in the United States in 1978, and it has continued to be mounted in this country, albeit rarely.

Now Long Beach Opera, a company known for its daring repertory and unconventional interpretations, is presenting the West Coast premiere of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” with three performances, from April 17 to 21 at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and at Lincoln Park in Long Beach. (Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood will also present a semistaged performance on Yom HaShoah, April 15.)

Conducted and directed by Andreas Mitisek, Long Beach Opera’s artistic and administrative head, this production takes a daring new turn. He is staging the opera — really an hourlong monodrama for soprano — in parking structures at Sinai Temple and Lincoln Park.

Mitisek has also augmented Frid’s work, both by interpolating some material by Anne not set by the composer and by adding Stark locations make perfect sets for ‘Anne Frank’ opera production Read More »

Building a matzah pyramid for fun and Pesach

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Up Front, Video /

By the sixth day of Passover, some devoted matzah eaters might look at the bread of affliction as just that — an affliction of their taste buds and digestion.

Members of the Moveable Minyan, a Westside lay-led, egalitarian congregation, freed themselves from enslavement to matzah on Sunday by answering the seder’s “fifth” question: What can you do with matzah aside from eating it?

Their idea: Build a matzah pyramid.

“People at the seder say matzah tastes like cardboard anyway,” said Edmon Rodman, the pyramid visionary and head taskmaster. “Here’s an appropriate way to see if it acts like cardboard.”

Rodman, a developer of children’s toys and pop-up books, put together a method to transform matzahs into building materials. (He figures the patent is probably worth about “three jars of gefilte fish.”) An M-shaped steel clip (“M” for matzah) fastens two matzah pieces at the top edges so they form stackable triangular blocks that can be layered atop one another, like a house of cards.

The idea for the edible pyramid, which is likely the first of its kind, dawned on him while his mind wandered during a seder last year. A search revealed no previous attempts to build a matzah pyramid.

It’s highly questionable whether or not Jews actually built the Egyptian pyramids, but Rodman sees the construction as fulfilling the mitzvah of retelling the Exodus.

“You say at the seder you’re supposed to be b’nai chorin [free men]. Here you have an activity to do it,” he said.

About a dozen Moveable Minyan members exerted their flour power at the parking lot of the Jewish Institute of Education on Third Street, home of the Minyan, to put Rodman’s engineering plan to the test. They encountered a few structural difficulties, which Rodman attributes to “matzah irregularities.” Next time they might consider using charoset as an extra sealant.

The pyramid design called for eight tiers using 100 standard pieces of matzah, with eight triangular blocks on the bottom, seven above it, then six, and so on. After about an hour of trial and error, during which the second layer of matzahs kept falling down like dominoes, the congregants readjusted the plan to create a pyramid standing 4-feet high that consisted of seven layers of 80 matzahs.

Moveable Minyan member Herb Hecht, an electrical engineer, happened to be on hand to offer advice: “You first have to maintain balance between the two uprights and the clip and, of course, to prevent outward forces from pushing the matzah in. This is the same principle that goes into the construction of European cathedrals.”

The debate arose as to whether or not the pyramid violated the prohibition of ba’al tashchit, or wasting food. Someone suggested the matzah debris be donated to the homeless, to which Minyan member Pini Herman offered, “They’d use it for shelter.”

Someone suggested eating the pyramid layer by layer. For Rodman, the educational and artistic value of the pyramid justifies a few discarded matzahs.

When the pyramid was finished, Rodman simply flicked the bottom layer until it all came tumbling down.

So what happened to the matzah?

“Some people ate some of the matzah, they threw broken pieces away, and people took the rest home,” Rodman said.



Click the BIG ARROW to see Rodman build the pyramid

Building a matzah pyramid for fun and Pesach Read More »