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April 27, 2016

Poem: Auschwitz this evening

Leave a Comment / Culture, Poetry /

— for Primo Levi

As the dusk breaks upon Auschwitz,
crows still perch on weather vanes.
Clouds fly in and out of view. Down the road,
a new green bike faintly rolls, a fine white wine
uncorks, a radio boasts of tomorrow’s great weather,
a warm bed finds itself full of young, early lovers.
Even if the grounds once bulged
with so many unripe souls,
even if the moon’s light was once taken
by heavy braids of cinder and ash,
dusk still lowers pink-purple light here
before every night, as it does over
the promised land — with Heaven
in silence overhead.

A version of this poem appeared in Poetica Magazine, The 2014 Holocaust Edition.

Baruch November is the author of “Dry Nectars of Plenty,” which co-won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest. He founded Jewish Advocacy for Culture & Knowledge and teaches creative writing and literature at Touro College in New York.

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Probing the minds of Nazi war criminals

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture /

Dr. Joel E. Dimsdale is a psychiatrist who has long specialized in the “coping behavior” of concentration camp survivors. One day, a man knocked on his office door and introduced himself as the official hangman who carried out the death sentences of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. “I was the Nuremberg executioner,” the stranger said. “They were scum, Dimsdale, and you need to be studying them, not the survivors.”

Thus begins “Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals” (Yale University Press), an extraordinary book that seeks to understand and explain the perpetrators of the Holocaust by revisiting the clinical notes of two doctors, psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who examined the Nazi defendants in order to assess their competency to stand trial.

“Were they criminally insane, delusional, psychopaths, sadists?” Dimsdale wonders aloud. “The Nuremberg doctors left cryptic and contradictory notes about their observations of the Nazi leaders. I have tried to decipher their records and to examine them anew from the vantage point for the 21st century.”

Dimsdale selected four of the Nuremberg defendants for psychiatric study: Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor until very near the end of the Third Reich; Rudolf Hess, a confidant of Hitler who forfeited the trust of his boss by stealing a fighter plane and flying to England in a demented attempt to broker a separate peace; Julius Streicher, Nazi propagandist and “Jew Baiter Number One”; and Robert Ley, who started as a Nazi street hooligan and rose to serve as chief of the so-called German Labor Front.

The book is full of fascinating lore. Göring, for example, surrendered himself in the expectation that he would be treated as a head of state, showing up at the prison gate with 16 pieces of matched and monogrammed luggage, a red hatbox, a valet and 20,000 paracodeine pills to feed his lifelong drug habit. Ley was an alcoholic whose excesses disgusted even his fellow defendants. Streicher boasted of his sexual prowess and told his jailers that “if [they] wanted to see how strong he was, they should make a woman available to him in prison.” Hess was convinced that a kitchen worker, “acting for international Jewry,” was trying to poison him, and he sometimes insisted on swapping plates with his guards or demanded that “the psychiatrist tasted his food first.”

Dimsdale is plainly uncomfortable with the conflicted role the doctors played. They administered intelligence tests — Streicher ranked the lowest — and Rorschach tests, which “enchanted” several of the defendants, including Göring. But they also reported on their conversations with the defendants to the prison authorities and the prosecution, and Kelley was suspected of leaking information to the reporters covering the trial. Some of the advice they dispensed to the defendants raises a question about what they were really trying to accomplish; Göring weighed 280 pounds when he was arrested and dropped 80 pounds before trial, and Kelley “claimed that he had helped Göring lose weight by appealing to his narcissism, telling him that he ‘would make a better appearance in court should he lose some weight.’ ”

Dimsdale, above all, seeks to revisit and revise the diagnoses the doctors reached at the time of the Nuremberg trial. He points out that the tools, techniques and even the vocabulary of psychiatry and psychology have changed fundamentally since then, and he is mindful of the dangers of trying to psychoanalyze a dead man across the distance of seven decades. Still, he holds Gilbert and Kelley to account, as when he describes how Gilbert interpreted a gesture that Göring made during the Rorschach test: Göring, according to Gilbert, thought a red spot on one of the cards was blood and tried to wipe it away. “Lady Macbeth’s night was hardly more obvious in betraying her anxiety to rub out the ‘damned spot,’ ” Gilbert insisted.

“This was quite an interpretation, but I think it reveals Gilbert’s difficulties in navigating his various roles at the trial,” Dimsdale argues. “Gilbert, no longer the interpreter nor the prison psychologist, could now be come the avenger.” Yet Dimsdale seems to approve of Gilbert’s final diagnosis of Göring as an “aggressive psychopath with an insatiable lust for power, titles, wealth, food and ostentatious display, ready to murder, steal or stage frame-ups to gain his ends.”

The subtext of “Anatomy of Malice” is a basic but consequential question — were these four Nazi war criminals suffering from some kind of mental illness, or were they merely evil?  Dimsdale concludes that Ley and Göring were not “demons, but very complicated amalgams of vision and malice.” Of the sex-obsessed Streicher, he concludes: “Repugnant beliefs and actions reflect moral failings but not necessarily psychiatric disorders.” Hess, whom Göring himself dismissed as “completely crazy,” baffled the psychiatric experts who examined him, and Dimsdale concludes that “I’m not so sure that today’s clinicians and researchers would do much better at diagnosing Hess than our colleagues who saw him from 1941 to 1946.”

Which leaves us with the most perplexing question of all. “Kelley and Gilbert agreed that the defendants, perhaps with the exception of Hess, were neither legally insane, nor psychotic,” Dimsdale writes. “If the defendants weren’t psychotic, what were they?”

His answer is deeply well informed, drawing expertly on both science and the arts, but it is neither simple nor assured. Dimsdale aspires only to reach “the general vicinity of historical truth,” and he embraces a kind of moral and psychiatric uncertainty principle. “Kelley found some darkness in every person. Gilbert found a unique darkness in some. They were both right.”

JONATHAN KIRSCH, book editor of the Jewish Journal, is an author whose most recent book is “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris.”

Probing the minds of Nazi war criminals Read More »

A soldier speaks of war, 70 years later

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

One would have thought that all direct testimonies of World War II had already been recorded. Well, not so. Roger Boas, one of the first American soldiers to enter a German concentration camp, Ohrdruf, remained silent for 70 years before recently publishing his memoir at age 94. The book, “Battle Rattle” (Stinson Publishing), is aptly subtitled “A Last Memoir of World War II.”

Returning home from the war, Boas suffered from what he calls “battle rattle,” the name for what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. He suffered from it for several years after returning to San Francisco in 1945.

Boas eventually went into the family car business, while also having a parallel civic-oriented career. He served as a producer and moderator for KQED Public Television, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a state chairman of the California Democratic Party and a chief administrative officer of the City of San Francisco.

In his book, Boas describes the war, its abominations, his camaraderie with fellow soldiers and the constant fear he experienced. He earned a Bronze Star on the battlefield in 1944 and a Silver Star in 1945. But what makes this book uniquely candid is that he looks at the young warrior he once was with the eyes of the elderly and peaceful San Franciscan he has become, with his four children and his six grandchildren. 

Jewish Journal: You are of somewhat Jewish descent, but your family raised you as a Christian Scientist?

Roger Boas: My great-grandmother Rachel Goldberg immigrated to the United States in 1855, and in her 50s, she became a Christian Scientist. My grandmother Annie and my mother, Larie, were raised as Christian Scientists. When Larie married my father, Benjamin, he, too, became a Christian Scientist and no longer attended Jewish services.

JJ: Your mother was very political?

RB: She would talk about the German aggression and expansionism at the dinner table. In 1916, she had participated in the Woodrow Wilson campaign to go to war when the president needed to rally the American public. In 1935, my mother took me on a trip to Europe with my great-aunt and my grandmother. We visited Russia under Stalin, where we could sense the fear of the population. We also went to Warsaw. We visited the city in a taxi, and at one point my mother asked the driver to take us to the ghetto. He took us there, but as my mother paid him, he threw the money on the ground and spat on it. My mother refused to set foot in Germany.

JJ: Do you think she was right or should you have seen Germany?

RB:  My mother had been to Germany as a child and staying out of Hitler’s Germany made perfect sense. But this was before the Anschluss, and we did go to Austria. We had a letter of introduction to meet with an Austrian Jewish couple who were very concerned about their future. When Hitler took over Austria in 1939, they disappeared. 

JJ: You studied political science at Stanford. Was your Jewish descent an issue?

RB: Students recognized it, and I was not invited to join a fraternity. 

JJ: Why did you join ROTC while at Stanford?

RB: I was an avid horseback rider and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. I graduated as second lieutenant of field artillery. I then joined the Army, not knowing if I would be sent to Europe or to the Pacific. I was relieved to be sent to Europe over someplace in the South Pacific. When I landed in France, I remember seeing lots of wounded Americans on stretchers on the beach.

JJ: What happened on your second day in Europe?

RB: We were in Normandy orchard country, which meant hedgerows everywhere that were impassible. Sgt. Plas and I were ordered to reconnoiter, and as we walked down a dirt road in a beautiful French orchard, we saw approaching us two young German soldiers. They were armed, but their arms were not being carried belligerently. Upon seeing them, we pointed our guns at them and ordered them to stop. But instead, they kept on walking toward us. We then aimed our guns at them and shot them. The terrible experience has haunted me ever since.

JJ: Did you write to your family?

RB: Yes, I wrote, although there were occasional lapses. But whereas my letters from the United States and England were simply updates on what was going on, the anti-German tone increased the closer I got to Germany. 

JJ: Isn’t such a feeling normal in such a situation?

RB: I don’t think it was normal. I wrote things like “A good German is a dead German.” That is grievously murderous.

I remained negative about Germany after the war. In the ’50s, I was a member and moderator of a group called World Press on KQED public television. The German Consul General of San Francisco heard my negative remarks and invited me to visit his country to see the changes that had taken place. I met numerous young Germans and they impressed me favorably. Their parents had been in the war; they had not. They took me to opera, museums, buildings that had been bombed and were being replaced; they were wonderful hosts. I never spoke negatively toward Germany as a country after that. 

JJ: You accomplished many actions of huge courage, you won a Bronze Star and then a Silver Star and you saved several of your fellow soldiers under enemy fire. You say that fear hit all the time, except during the action. Please elaborate. 

RB: Fear enveloped me all of the time, except when I went into action — when the danger was the greatest — and when I was with my buddies playing poker or telling jokes. We played poker every night as long as we were protected from shellfire.  

JJ:  On April 4, 1945, three weeks before Hitler’s suicide, you stumbled into the concentration camp of Ohrdruf. 

RB:  We knew absolutely nothing of the Final Solution. Walking into the gated compound, we saw scores upon scores of gaunt, skeletal bodies, [people] recently murdered by shots to the head or beaten to death; they were stacked one on top of the other. Many corpses were identified by Jewish stars. There were a few survivors who had hidden themselves. Any prisoner able to walk had been marched to Buchenwald, 47 miles away, of which Ohrdruf was a satellite camp. Seeing the horror up close, feeling the shock, it suddenly concretized the most diabolical extreme of what humans are capable [of].

JJ: Did you meet any Nazi soldiers?

RB: Six of the SS camp guards were captured. Some of our men, among [them some] Jews, requested permission to “take care” of the guards while escorting them to the POW camp. In other words, kill them. But our Col. Parker, a man of firm character, denied the request and saw to it that the Nazi murderers became proper POWs.

JJ: Was your military hierarchy alerted?

RB: Col. Parker had immediately sent word up the chain of command. I was told that Gen. Patton vomited when he eventually saw the scene. He ordered the bürgermeister of the town of Ohrdruf and his wife to come and inspect the camp personally. They denied knowing what had been happening, but both committed suicide shortly after.

JJ: At the very end of the war, on April 23, you are identified as a Jew by a group of women inmates.

RB: It was in the ruins of Waldenburg, a Nazi forced-labor camp, where women were an overwhelming majority, wearing filthy striped pajamas, with their heads shaved, a big yellow star on their back. One woman looked at me in the eye as I got out of my jeep and said, “Judisch?” I was stunned that she spotted me. And she, for the first time in her life, was seeing a Jew as a free man, with a uniform that indicated his rank as an officer.

JJ: April 24, days before the end of the war, you arrive in Bayreuth.

RB: My unit was expecting to go toward the east to join up with the Russian forces, but we arrived in Bayreuth with little to do. So we decided to visit its famous opera house and [composer Richard] Wagner’s villa. Lt. Les Davis and I were joined by three servant girls, who turned out to have been Polish slave laborers, with numbers tattooed on their forearms. They showed us to a bedroom and explained that it had been built by Frau Wagner, the composer’s widow, to put up Hitler when he came to visit. Our exhaustion took over and we spent the night in what had been Hitler’s bed.

JJ: Do you think it’s possible to live in a world without war?

RB: The last war that we had a right to fight is WWII. I’m not sure about anything else. I think we should spend a lot more time negotiating with the other power, rather than trying to shoot our way out. I assume that the right, visionary leaders in strong institutions could bring this about. But it seems highly improbable in a foreseeable future.

FRANCOISE SKURMAN is a French-Jewish journalist who lived and worked in Paris until 15 years ago, when she moved to San Francisco.

A soldier speaks of war, 70 years later Read More »

A French survivor becomes a legendary photojournalist

Leave a Comment / Danielle Berrin, Opinion /

“The one thing that is very clear in my mind is that day in 1942, when the French police knocked on our door to come and take us,” Henri Dauman, 83, said, moments after taking his seat at a Beverly Hills café. The French-born Holocaust survivor paused to order a decaf cappuccino and make an approving comment on Badoit, the French sparkling water offered by the restaurant. “That’s a very good French water — the best,” he said. He wouldn’t compliment France again.

Seated across from Dauman was his granddaughter, Nicole Suerez, and her boyfriend, Peter Jones, who were trailing him to log every crumb of his story for the documentary they hope to make about his life. Suerez, 23, had never heard her grandfather’s Holocaust story until she discovered his testimony by accident during a Birthright visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Growing up, she had known him only as a prolific photojournalist, a hard-working immigrant whose lens captured some of the most iconic figures of the 20th century, including Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy. By now, Suerez knew Dauman’s story well, sometimes finishing her grandfather’s sentences as he recounted that vivid day in 1942. 

Mostly, he remembers the pounding. Dauman was 9 when the French police tried to break into the Paris apartment where he and his mother lived, the door of which she had dead-bolted twice over in the days following her husband’s arrest. This act may have saved them, but the images of visiting his father at the Pithiviers internment camp in north central France flashed before Dauman’s eyes as the banging became louder. “My mother implored my father to escape,” Dauman recalled of their visit. “The French police were not that disciplined. But my father said, ‘No, they’re going to release us.’ ” Dauman lowered his eyes. “At that time in Europe, people had their heads in the sand.” 

Dauman would never again see his father, who perished in a concentration camp, though Dauman wouldn’t discover that he’d died at Auschwitz until the 1980s. That day in the apartment, trapped and terror-stricken, they listened as a neighbor offered the police an ax with which to bash in their door. 

Dauman still finds humor in the fact that the police quit their pursuit because they were, after all, French, and it was lunchtime. “Lunch is sacred,” he said wryly. It was also the perfect moment for Dauman and his mother to escape.

They fled to the French countryside, where they would remain, albeit separately, for the next couple of years. Dauman lived with a family and attended school. Careful not to arouse suspicion, he saw his mother only once before the Allied invasion. When they finally reunited and returned to their Paris apartment after the war, Dauman’s mother fell ill. She purchased a remedy from the local pharmacy, but the medicine had been contaminated on the black market, probably with rat poison, and promptly killed her. Dauman returned from school one day to find an ambulance outside their apartment. “I just knew it was my mother,” he said. At the hospital, “I kissed her and she was cold.” 

At 13, Dauman had survived the Holocaust but was left an orphan. An aunt placed him in what he described as a “Zionist orphanage” near Versailles, run by a Conservative Jewish organization whose goal it was to encourage aliyah to Israel. Dauman was very unhappy there; he knew almost nothing about Judaism, having grown up at a time when “you couldn’t talk about being a Jew or you’d lose your life.” 

He soon became a ward of the state and was transferred to another children’s home in a suburb of Paris. His fate changed dramatically when, as a young teen, he helped organize a fundraising gala for the home at a local cinema. He became addicted to movies and soon picked up a camera, finding work processing film at a local photo shop. “I loved film,” Dauman recalled. “When I was young and alone, film took me to another world. It took me out of my misery. I looked at these American pictures and dreamed about [America]. I thought, ‘My God, what a place this must be!’ Film created a world I could not imagine; it was an escape.”

Eventually, he earned enough money to rent his own room in the Saint Paul neighborhood and began assisting two professional photographers — one in fashion, one in journalism — before purchasing his own camera. “I saw that my eyes could be used to gain my independence,” Dauman said. “I used my eyes to defend myself from all the things that had come to stop me.”

An uncle who had immigrated to the United States before the war reached out to him to ask if he wanted to come to America. Dauman was 17 when he arrived in New York on Dec. 14, 1950. “I couldn’t wait to get to Manhattan,” he said.

With one solid skill to rely on, he began photographing his way into a new life. “I would read the newspaper [in the morning] and go to shoot what [news] I saw was forthcoming,” he said. “I would make three or four sets of prints in my darkroom at night and send [them] to major publications in France, Italy, Germany and England. I became a one-man agency; I worked 24 hours a day.”

He eventually landed a lucrative contract with Life magazine and made a name for himself photographing the world’s biggest stars — Brigitte Bardot, Marlene Dietrich, Jane Fonda, Federico Fellini, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few. At President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, he snapped a photo of the mourning Jacqueline Kennedy, which Andy Warhol later appropriated for a famous silkscreen and other works, though without attribution. (Dauman and Time Inc. sued the Warhol estate, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount.) 

Italian film director Federico Fellini

Film star Marilyn Monroe and her husband, playwright Arthur Miller

Dauman estimates he has amassed more than 1 million prints over his 60-year-career. “It turns out that I photographed … 

“The cultural landscape of America,” Suerez interjected. 

But until 2014, when he exhibited his work at a Paris gallery for the first time, Dauman had never thought of himself as an artist. “I was just realizing my dream,” he said. Still, he described the experience of showing his work to the public and observing their reception as “a window opening.” 

“I saw so many people reacting to the work emotionally,” he said. “People know my pictures, but they don’t know the man behind the camera.”

That may change, if Suerez gets her way. 

“She’s making me ‘Cary Grant the Second,’ ” Dauman joked of his potential film debut.

Jones will direct the documentary. “Don’t encourage him,” he said.

Distribution likely won’t be a problem, since Dauman’s son, Philippe, is president, CEO and chairman at Viacom, heir apparent to the media empire long helmed by Sumner Redstone. Henri Dauman also has a daughter, Suerez’s mother, and another son from a second marriage.

Of his six grandchildren, some are rediscovering their Jewish roots. A week before we met, Dauman had visited Arizona for his grandson Eric’s bar mitzvah. “When I handed him the tallit, I told him, what a privilege it is to give you this tallit, which I didn’t have the privilege to know anything about when I was your age. I could not afford to know what my background was. This is some of the damage that war causes.”

“The real miracle of this story,” Dauman added, “is I find myself in Paris in November 2014, and I’ve got more than 35 people sitting at a restaurant after the opening of the show, and these are all family members that were created since World War II.”  

I ask Dauman what he thinks his parents would have said if they could see how his life turned out. 

“I wish they would have seen …” he began, but then his voice broke. 

“My children,” Dauman continued. “Because, you know — from nothing came a pretty good family and big success.”

A French survivor becomes a legendary photojournalist Read More »

Czech Torahs reunite at Holocaust Museum

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Los Angeles /

One day in 1965, Ruth Shaffer opened the front door of the Westminster Synagogue in London to find David Grand, an Orthodox Jew with a long beard and a tenuous grasp on the English language.

“Es gibt Torot?” he asked in Yiddish. “Do you have Torahs?”

Grand was a soffer, a biblical scribe, lately arrived from Jerusalem in search of employment repairing Torah scrolls — and he was in luck. On a morning not long before, in February 1964, a pair of trucks had pulled up to the synagogue while members waited anxiously in the damp to unload more than 1,000 scrolls, a collection believed to be the largest ever gathered under one roof.

“One by one they were carried into the synagogue and placed on the chequered marble floor of the hall,” congregation trustee Philippa Bernard wrote in a 2005 book on the scrolls. “Higher and higher the pile rose, spreading out across the floor like shrouded bodies, treated with the reverence that such bodies deserved.”

The lot of 1,564 Torahs had lately been discovered in a rundown warehouse in Prague. In the early 1940s, the Nazi occupiers of former Czechoslovakia had forced Jewish archivists to bring together the scrolls from the districts of Bohemia and Moravia and catalogue them. At one point, they demanded a showing curated for SS officers. The Zentralmuseum der Juden was planned as an exhibit on an extinct race.

Many of the scrolls were partially burned or bloodstained and most were in dire need of care. The soffer spent much of the next 30 years repairing the scrolls, readying them to be shipped for ritual use or memorial display around the world, according to Bernard’s book, “Out of the Midst of the Fire.”

The majority of the Torahs followed European-Jewish émigrés across the Atlantic, finding new homes in the United States. Several scrolls ended up in Southern California, and in an exhibition continuing through May 9, dozens of those scrolls will be on display at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH).

The scrolls began to gather in the museum’s lobby area on April 15, the same Sunday morning more than 3,000 Angelenos marched through neighboring streets for the annual Walk to End Genocide. Several groups who came in to drop off their Torahs were still wearing team T-shirts from the walk.

Despite never before having seen one of the scrolls, or even hearing of them, museum volunteer Edith Umugiraneza, a devout Christian, regarded them with a sense of familiarity.

In common with the scrolls, she too had been through a holocaust: A Tutsi, she is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, having lost most of her family when she was just 17, she immigrated to Los Angeles. She now worships at the West Angeles Church on Jefferson Boulevard

For Umugiraneza, the Torahs tell of “how God created us and what suffering the people of God went through when they were in Egypt and the roads they were given to follow.”

She is all too familiar with woe and redemption. Tutsis, she said, were seen by Hutu genocidaires as ethnically Ethiopian and, therefore, Israelites.

“They said they were going to exterminate all Tutsis like they did the Jews,” she said. “That was idea.”

Adam Siegel arrived at the museum that recent Sunday in shorts and a baseball cap; he came with a group of housemates from Beit T’Shuvah, the Jewish addiction treatment center where he serves as a chaplain. They came to drop off a Torah the house uses weekly for services. For this community, the scrolls speak to the many different ways of attaining holiness, Siegel said.

“As much as each Torah is identical with the same words and the same text, each one is also individual — it has an individual sacredness to it,” he said.

The Torahs are indeed a motley mix. The text in each is identical down to the proportions: Lines are no longer than three times the length of the longest word, l’mishpachotechem [to your family], according to Bernard’s book. Ten letters are written larger than the rest. But much like the members of Siegel’s community, each scroll has a perfectly unique set of blemishes and imperfections.

“We all share common struggles as humans,” he said, shortly before hopping into the driver’s seat of a large white van full of Beit T’Shuvah residents. “We each have an individualized sense of our holiness.”

The Torah housed at Beit T’Shuvah is logged as “Scroll No. 773” in the records of the Memorial Scrolls Trust, an organization that grew out of the Westminster Synagogue to care for and distribute the scrolls. It comes from the Strašnice area of Prague and was written in 1850. That information is recorded on audio guides available for public use while viewing the scrolls, which are displayed on stands in the museum lobby.

Not many other details exist about the Strašnice Torah, though the trust is raising funds to digitize its records and make available what information it has.

Although the scrolls were saved, miraculously and ironically, by the Czech Nazi administration, they were collected under fraught circumstances from the Czech countryside and Prague’s many synagogues while the war raged around them. Sorted and logged by a Jewish staff subject to close Nazi supervision and continually being thinned out by deportation, they were sometimes labeled haphazardly or in bulk, which means identifying information is hard to come by. In some cases, the ID tag fell off entirely, rendering those Torahs anonymous, or so-called “orphan” scrolls.

One of these orphans ended up in the care Rabbi Stan Levy, founding rabbi of the B’nai Horin congregation in Los Angeles. In 1991, Shaffer sent a Torah from London to Southern California aboard Air New Zealand, shipping it express freight in response to Levy’s request on behalf of his young congregation. He said Shaffer, who died in 2006, told him it was the first scroll she’d sent out knowing it was meant for regular ritual use.

The scroll arrived the morning of the last day of the Jewish year.

“We had it at High Holy Days that evening,” Levy said. “And of course the congregation went ballistic that we got it for erev Rosh Hashanah.”

B’nai Horin’s orphan scroll is among those on display at LAMOTH.

Rabbi Stan Levy of B’nai Horin with his congregation’s Torah scroll rescued from Czechoslovakia during World War II.

When the soffer showed up at Westminster Synagogue, the idea that one day someone would be gathering tattered scrolls for a museum exhibition must have seemed inconceivable.

In the early 1960s, the synagogue had gotten wind of the scrolls via a member who collected art in Europe. Congregation elders sent a biblical scholar, Chimen Abramsky, to Prague to investigate. Arriving at the dank and broken hull of the Michle Synagogue in a Prague suburb, he found a “heartrending” sight, Bernard wrote in her book.

“On wooden shelves from floor to ceiling were hundreds upon hundreds of Sifre Torah, untouched for twenty years, still in their wrappings as the Jewish workers had tenderly laid them. He was not ashamed to weep.”

The scrolls, she wrote, were in various states of disarray. Some were tied shut with prayer shawls, and two were secured with women’s corsets. Seven had been buried at some point. When the soffers who initially worked on the project began examining the Torahs back in London, a note fell out of one that read, “Please God help us in these troubled times.”

The synagogue took ownership of the entire lot of them from the cash-strapped government of the Czech Republic in exchange for just $30,000. As the massive restoration effort got underway, it turned out that acquiring the scrolls had been the easy part.

In London, the multiple soffers didn’t seem to be able to get along, and the repairs went along haltingly until Grand arrived. Shaffer later called him “the answer to all our prayers,” according to the book.

But in the meantime, the demand for Torahs was dizzying from congregations of European Jews who had settled around the world.

“They needed scrolls — they didn’t have them,” said Jeffrey Ohrenstein, chairman of the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Since 1964, all but 130 scrolls have found new homes with congregations, schools, museums and other Jewish organizations, most of them in the United States, with the balance being housed in a small museum in London.

One is in the care of Queen Elizabeth II in the Royal Library. Others have been sent to Mexico, the Channel Islands, Brazil, Crete and Ireland. Fifty went to Israel. Trust records show that California received 103 scrolls, 81 of them in Southern California.

The spiritual practice around the Torah varies as widely as the congregations where they are housed.

University Synagogue in Los Angeles uses a 19th-century scroll from Boskovice for a traditional Reform service called confirmation, wherein teenagers receive the legacy of the Five Books, according to its rabbi, Morley Feinstein. Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills only uses its scroll during bar and bat mitzvahs of those descended from Holocaust survivors; the Torah sits on rollers still tagged with an archive number from the Zentralmuseum. The congregation hired local soffer Ron Siegel for a repair job that finished in 1996.

Even after years of restoration, the Torahs remain in varying conditions. Some were sent by the trust more or less ready for ritual use, while others are meant only for memorial purposes. Others, though technically possul, or non-kosher, are nevertheless used by less-observant congregations.

Unrolling a scroll he was lending to LAMOTH for the show — Scroll No. 1255, from the village of Dobris — Cantor Richard Bessman of Beth Shir Shalom in Santa Monica, a Reform congregation, unrolled the Torah and scrutinized the intricate letters, turned reddish-brown by years of oxidation.

He remarked on the clarity of the writing, but pointed to a letter that was unintelligible, rendering the entire Torah technically unfit for ritual use.

“It doesn’t negate any of the wonderfulness of it,” he quickly added.

Some local synagogues have undertaken projects to restore the scrolls on their own, hiring soffers and involving the community in their efforts.

Levy oversaw the restoration of the B’nai Horin Torah. Some of the bindings where individual pieces of parchment are woven together had come loose, so the congregation hired a scribe who “carefully brushed it and tightened all the pages.”

The congregation fashioned a yad, or pointer, using quartz crystals found on top of Mount Sinai by a member on a camping trip, and built a portable Holy Ark — the B’nai Horin congregation eschews a permanent facility to save on dues for members. Now, the scroll is used only for bar and bat mitzvahs for which the reading is in or near Deuteronomy to prevent wear and tear on the 225-year-old scroll.

“Think of all the lives they’re impacting,” LAMOTH Director Samara Hutman said, standing in front of the museum’s own Czech Torah, rolled open and encased in glass.

Like human survivors of the Holocaust, the scrolls represent for her “all the people who came before them and all the people who come from them.”

Inspired originally by her daughter’s bat mitzvah, in which she chanted using B’nai Horin’s orphan Torah, Hutman conceived of the idea for the exhibition and contacted Ohrenstein, who helped put her in touch with the Torahs’ current homes.

In honor of its 24th annual Yom HaShoah celebration, the museum is using videos and “the visual stories and oral stories of the people and communities who steward these scrolls and their mournful and remarkable histories,” she said.

Following the exhibition of 18 scrolls this year — the Jewish number representing life — Hutman intends for the museum to gather an additional 18 scrolls every year from California and the neighboring area, and to illuminate each of their histories.

For his part, Ohrenstein, Westminster Synagogue’s chairman, spends a lot of time these days getting in touch with “scroll-holders” who may not be familiar with their Torah’s history.

In addition, he’s become “a bit of a detective,” tracking down scrolls that go missing when a synagogue shuts its doors or merges with another one. He’s also encouraging synagogues that have Czech Torahs to create webpages with information about them so that he can assemble the links into a single, centralized database to keep from losing track of any more scrolls.

When he visits the United States, Ohrenstein, a bald man with a white beard who is also Westminster Synagogue’s trust chairman, looks out for displaced Torahs and sometimes gives them a ride home.

Recently, while in St. Louis for a bar mitzvah, he found a rabbi who had come into possession of a scroll but didn’t need it. Ohrenstein agreed to bring it back to London in a metal golf case provided by the rabbi.

“It fit in perfectly,” he said. “I’ve got the golf case in the museum — we need to use it again.”

After carefully packing the Torah and wrapping the package in duct tape, he put it in the underbelly of a plane. When it arrived on the luggage conveyer belt in the United Kingdom, it was covered in stickers where American customs officers had cut it open.

Ohrenstein chuckled, “They must have had a shock when they looked inside.”

Czech Torahs reunite at Holocaust Museum Read More »

Paris attacks suspect Abdeslam extradited to France, under formal investigation

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam was placed under formal investigation on terrorism and murder charges in France on Wednesday after his extradition from Belgium, and he promised to talk to judges during his next hearing, his French lawyer said.

A Belgium-born Frenchman, Abdeslam is believed by investigators to be the sole survivor among a group of Islamist militants who killed 130 people in a spate of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris on Nov. 13.

“The investigation will determine to what degree he was involved in the acts … for which he has been put under investigation,” lawyer Frank Berton said after an initial hour-long hearing.

“He stayed silent today but said he would talk at a later stage,” Berton said, adding that the next hearing was set for May 20. Abdeslam did not speak on Wednesday because he was tired after a “quite rough” extradition, Berton said.

Abdeslam was placed under investigation on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization, murder, kidnapping and holding weapons and explosives, the public prosecutor said in a statement. The kidnap charges relate to the hours-long attack on the Bataclan concert hall in which 90 people were killed.

Abdeslam, 26, was Europe's most wanted fugitive until his capture in Brussels on March 18 after a four-month manhunt. He was taken by helicopter to Paris under armed guard and then driven to the capital's main law courts.

French Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said Abdeslam would be held in solitary confinement in a high-security prison in the Paris region, with his cell under CCTV surveillance.

“PETTY CRIMINALS”

Four days after Abdeslam's capture, other Islamist militants blew themselves up at Brussels international airport and on a metro train, killing 32 people.

Investigators have said Abdeslam told them he arranged logistics for the multiple suicide bombings and shooting attacks in Paris and had planned to blow himself up at the Stade de France sports stadium before backing out at the last minute.

He is suspected of having rented two cars used to transport the attackers to, and around, the French capital.

Abdeslam's elder brother Brahim, with whom he used to run a bar in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, blew himself up in a suicide bomb attack on one of several Paris cafes targeted by a group of assailants armed with AK-47 rifles and suicide vests.

Salah Abdeslam's confession to investigators suggested he may have been the 10th man referred to in an Islamic State claim of responsibility for the multi-pronged attack on the stadium, bars and the Bataclan concert hall.

Police found an abandoned suicide vest in a rubbish bin in a Paris suburb following the attacks, stirring speculation that it might have belonged to Abdeslam, who escaped by car back to Belgium a few hours later.

Belgian police have arrested a number of his associates, including Mohamed Abrini, who was wanted in connection with both the Paris and Brussels attacks.

Sven Mary, Abdeslam's main defense lawyer in Belgium, distanced himself from his client, telling France's Liberation newspaper: “He's a little jerk from Molenbeek, from a world of petty criminals – more of a follower than a leader, with the brains of an empty ash-tray.”

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The enduring relevance of Hannah Arendt

Leave a Comment / Culture /

She was a Holocaust survivor, a German-born Jewish intellectual and one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the past century. Hannah Arendt shocked the world with her New Yorker magazine dispatches from the infamous trial in Israel of high-ranking Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann. Her portrayal of Eichmann as a mundane, rule-following bureaucrat (rather than a monstrous psychopath) led to widespread disapproval in the Jewish world. 

The new documentary “Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt” provides a more comprehensive portrait of Arendt’s life and legacy, though its focus is the much-repeated and often misunderstood concept of the “banality of evil.”

In her 1963 book about the trial, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” Arendt describes Eichmann as unable, or unwilling, to think for himself, saying he spoke in “stock phrases and self-invented clichés,” and claimed to be just following Adolf Hitler’s orders.

“The idea of the ‘banality of evil’ is popping up everywhere,” the film’s Israeli director, Ada Ushpiz, said in a phone interview. “It’s not only in the political scene, it’s also in the personal. You always see the same dynamics of evil penetrate into the world. The same tactics: ‘I must do it.’ ‘It’s a necessity.’ ‘I don’t have any other choice.’ You saw it in the last war, when I was editing this movie and heard the television telling me that we don’t have any other choice but to fight against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s the same rationalization for ‘banality of evil.’ You can find it everywhere.”

Passages from her letters, journals and books are read aloud over rarely seen footage of the Third Reich, revealing European society’s shift toward a totalitarian mindset. The banality of evil is seen in how German citizens joyfully hoist the Nazi flag or salute a passing convoy of S.S. officers. The film also includes conversations with Arendt’s assistant and student, as well as present-day scholars and interview footage of Arendt herself.

Arendt was born in 1906 and raised in a secular, assimilated Jewish household. In a 1964 television interview, she recalled, “Whenever my teachers made anti-Semitic remarks … the instructions from home were to get up at once, leave the classroom, come home and report in detail what had happened. My mother then wrote one of her many registered letters, and for me that was the end of the matter. I had a day off of school, and I thought that was great.”

Arendt studied under philosophers Martin Heidegger (who was also her lover, and later became a Nazi supporter) and Karl Jaspers. Her writing explored the nature of democracy and freedom, power, ideology and the rise of authoritarian thinking. She decried the lack of independent thought that leads people to follow orders rather than think for themselves, and in which, Arendt wrote, every person becomes “a cog small or big” in the machinery of terror.

Director Ushpiz was born in Israel, a child of Holocaust survivors from Lithuania. She was too young to observe the Eichmann trials when they took place, but she remembers watching rebroadcasts of the trial every year on its anniversary. 

“I was very preoccupied by these subjects as a child. I always asked my parents questions,” Ushpiz said. Even today, she said, the Eichmann trial “is very present in our culture.”

Arendt’s account of the trial was banned in Israel, and she was excommunicated from the Jewish community. She was accused of trying to apologize for Eichmann or exonerate him. She also condemned the Judenrat as Nazi collaborators and therefore complicit in the genocide. Her writings turned her into a pariah. 

“She definitely came up with ideas that are very threatening to national myths,” professor Steven Aschheim of Hebrew University says in the film. “She has an anti-mythological way of thinking … that is hard to fathom when a nation is being built.”

Ushpiz said Arendt never anticipated the backlash the book received.

“I think she was shocked, actually. She didn’t understand where it’s coming from and she didn’t mean most of the things that were said of her,” Ushpiz said. 

To this day, the central argument laid out in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is considered problematic in Israel, Ushpiz said. While Arendt took anti-Semitism seriously, devoting the first part of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” to the problem, she wasn’t content to explain the Holocaust as simply a product of anti-Semitism. She argued that the participants of the Eichmann trial viewed the Holocaust “as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. What they missed is that the supreme crime they were confronted with was a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people.”

Arendt argued that Eichmann’s role as a principal organizer of the Holocaust was driven more by his desire for a sense of meaning and belonging, and his willingness to believe in Nazi propaganda without critical thought, than by anti-Semitism alone.

“This is something that’s difficult for people to understand even today in Israel,” Ushpiz said. “They want to believe that you can explain even the criticism against Israel” as a result of anti-Semitism.

Arendt was a Zionist activist and hero in the 1930s but broke from the movement in the 1940s, concerned that it had become too focused on national sovereignty. Her criticism of Zionism mirrored that of totalitarianism, saying it failed to see the world from another’s perspective.

“Zionism in the mid-1940s and later on becomes very self-centered and concentrated on Jewish interests and doesn’t take into consideration the Arab problem anymore. And this is something that seemed to her to be really tragic,” Ushpiz said. “And she was right. It led her to look for a more comprehensive solution that did include the Arabs.”

As Europe faces another refugee crisis, Arendt’s writings on the fate of stateless people are even more relevant today.

“She was able to universalize her experience as a Jewish exile and draw conclusions about being a refugee anywhere,” Ushpiz said. “She really understood what it means to be a refugee. It really means, according to her, to be rejected out of history and out of humanity. Every person needs to have a state that will guarantee its human rights as a citizen.”

Arendt demanded that her readers think critically. By allowing oneself to follow the rules and not question authority, one can get caught up in the “automatic processes of evil,” Ushpiz said.

“Undermine norms and conventions, always try to think from the other point of view and to include the world in your thinking, to include experience, to include different levels of reality,” Ushpiz said. “Never stop thinking. This is the main idea.”

Even today, four decades after her death, Arendt’s complex portrayal of the Eichmann trial and the ideological manifestation of totalitarianism continues to shape our perception of genocide, its perpetrators and the nature of evil itself. 

“Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt” opens April 29 at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in L.A.

The enduring relevance of Hannah Arendt Read More »

The insecure narcissist

Leave a Comment / Culture, Entertainment /

Joshua Silverstein wants your validation.

No, he’s not seeking political office. The 35-year-old actor/comedian/performance artist wants the world to tell him — and tell him often — that he’s funny and talented, that he’s not an outsider, that women find him attractive, that his brand of entertainment isn’t awful.

“I grew up not liking myself for most of my childhood,” Silverstein, an L.A. native, said during a recent interview. “It’s a work in progress. Liking myself has been something that I’ve definitely struggled with.”

Take pause before you break out the violins or dismiss Silverstein as heir to Woody Allen’s neurosis-laden throne. In his solo show, “Tell Me I’m Pretty,” playing through May 7 at the Bootleg Theater, Silverstein examines his insecurities through the skewed lens of satire, humor, self-deprecation and beat boxing. So if you don’t tell the man he’s pretty, by God, he’ll give you chapter and verse why you should. 

Accompanied by three musicians, Silverstein sings, dances and waxes poetic. A segment of his quite eclectic show celebrates the milestone of achieving 5,000 Facebook likes. In a comic performance piece titled “Yellow,” he considers the dichotomy of having light skin within the African-American community, and he later gets his audience members to join hands in prayer. 

The son of a Jewish father and an African-American mother, Silverstein embraces both cultures, even though those cultures haven’t always embraced him back. For Silverstein, finding one’s way as a biracial, clothes-loving, heterosexual male in present-day L.A. is a work in progress, as well. 

It starts with the physical. As a young man, the light-skinned, ponytail-wearing Silverstein carried the nickname “Pretty J.” Yet as many times as he has heard his personal appearance praised, Silverstein said the satisfaction is fleeting.

“My appearance and my shell were so important to me growing up, that [the notion of] ‘Tell Me I’m Pretty’ stems from, ‘If you don’t tell me what I am, then I don’t know what I am,’ ” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure that I would have been an artist if a cute girl hadn’t walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, you’re good at this.’  

“I think the world makes us who we are through the various experiences we’ve had, bouncing off cultures and our parents’ ideas,” he continued. “We digest all that stuff, and that spits out this personality that we take on. ‘Tell me I’m pretty’ has been like the mantra I’ve walked around with.” 

Silverstein is an only child whose mother, Beverly, was an educator, and father, David, works for Walters Wholesale. Both parents were politically active — David directs the community activism division of the transdenominational spiritual center, Agape. The quest for approval may be a universal one, but David believes his son’s upbringing may have played a particularly strong role in his need for validation.

“He questions himself and his value in the world,” David Silverstein said. “Both his mother and I supported him in being sure of who he really is so that he can step into that confidence and get out of [the] blindness of looking for people’s approval so much. At least I hope so.” 

For nearly 14 years, Joshua Silverstein has co-hosted Downbeat 720, a high school open-mic night. He has also performed the two-person show “So Fresh, So Clean” with his creative partner, Joe Hernandez-Kolski, in Los Angeles and New York. Toward the end of 2014, Silverstein was invited to create a solo show at the Greenway Court Theatre.

He started with a lot of material related to race and the economy. He intended to create a show that examined feelings of vulnerability, but his director at the time, Benjamin Davis, felt that he was taking the wrong approach. 

“The story was about me essentially complaining onstage for two hours,” Silverstein said. “In the solo show world, you have to figure out why your show is relevant. Why does an audience want to see you perform? I had essentially created a therapy session for myself. Once I got past my narcissism, my director said, ‘Go back and make this about us.’ ”

When Davis became busy with other projects, Silverstein sought out veteran director-choreographer Diana Wyenn, who had worked with many solo artists. As the daughter of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, Wyenn was interested in Silverstein’s investigation of his multicultural heritage. The restructured show played brief runs at the Greenway Court Theatre and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) before arriving at the Bootleg. 

“When Joshua came to me with this piece and shared his similar background of coming from a household that practiced more than one religion, I was interested in helping him share that story,” said Wyenn, whose late grandfather, Than Wyenn, was an actor and a drama consultant with the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education. “Both of us are very proud and interested in our Jewish heritage.”

Silverstein grew up in a largely secular household, and the camps he attended and holidays he observed often fed into the pursuit of social justice. Silverstein declined to become a bar mitzvah in large part because he was afraid that if he’d had a large party, nobody would attend.

“It all played into that self-esteem factor,” he said. “I didn’t like temple. I loved Jewish girls. Still do. Being biracial or multiracial, I can see the correlation that I’ve experienced. Both Jews and African-Americans are very prideful of their history. Both are filled with the importance of education and the importance of literacy and art and culture. I find that I am a beautiful mix of two worlds, and I get to celebrate that.” 

In person, Silverstein is as cerebral and introspective as he is forthright. Not one to hold things back, he’ll confess to being a slave to fashion. (He says he’s spent more on clothing than on food.) Seemingly no event from his childhood is off limits, no matter how embarrassing. Silverstein has battled severe asthma for most of his life, and being the kid at school with the bag full of medical supplies often subjected him to bullying by his classmates.

His father maintains that the extensive amount of time his son spent around pediatricians contributed to young Joshua’s early desire to become a pediatrician. Before he turned 5, he would tell anyone who asked that when he grew up, he wanted to be a doctor and a clown. 

At one family occasion, in front of a living room full of people, David Silverstein prompted Joshua about his life’s ambitions. When Joshua replied simply, “a doctor,” his father asked, “What about being a clown?”

“He put his little hands on his hips, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Daddy, I’m already funny,’ ” he said. 

As anecdotes go, that one is positively tame compared to some of the content Silverstein reveals in “Tell Me I’m Pretty.”

“I learn more about myself and about the process if I can find my most vulnerable pieces,” Silverstein said. “If I’m writing about something that has little to do with me, I feel like it’s a cop-out, especially if I have an audience. I feel like, ‘How dare I waste their time?’ ”

“Tell Me I’m Pretty” 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through May 7 at the Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A. The insecure narcissist Read More »

Learning to err on the side of compassion

Leave a Comment / Holidays, Judaism /

This was rage — I had no doubt about that. The fire exploding upward from my chest, consuming me from the inner reaches of my core was pure, unbridled fury, the sort that I hadn’t encountered in some time.

Silence choked the operating room as every eye fixed upon me. My own attention was locked on the naked torso prominently displayed in the center of the room. There, permanently etched in the skin of the young man lying motionless on the table, was an unassuming tattoo of a swastika. 

Immediately reminded of my setting, the paralysis imposed by my initial response quickly relented, and I instinctively resolved to quell the tension in the room. 

“Hmmm,” I snorted through a forced smile.  I turned to my scrub tech. “I wonder if he knows?”

The truth is, while still in my first year of private practice as a general surgeon, my elective schedule has been rapidly expanding for a variety of reasons, and I am not altogether certain where these patients all come from. In the era of Google, Healthgrades and myriad other public rating sites, it is a common occurrence that folks show up in my clinic with uncanny detail in their knowledge of my personal life.  In 2016, the majority of people research their health care providers long before passing through the door of the examination room.  Among the most readily discoverable details regarding my personal life is the fact that I am Jewish and active in a number of local Jewish organizations. 

The operating room staff let out a nervous, collective giggle at my response. Then the circulating nurse, who had removed the patient’s gown in preparation for the operation, gasped. She was standing on the opposite side of the patient. I stepped forward and turned my attention to the flank that had previously been hidden from me. I was confronted with the instantly recognizable portrait of Adolf Hitler. 

A few moments of silence passed. “What are you going to do?” the surgical assistant asked me.

“I’m going to fix his hernia,” I said. 

The gentleman had presented to my office a few weeks prior to this moment, fresh from a visit to the emergency room of a crosstown hospital, seeking relief from the unforgiving discomfort that had evolved with the expansion of a weakness in the wall of his groin. He had patiently suffered for a few weeks as we awaited authorization from his insurance company to pursue definitive correction of this affliction. He was in pain, nearly debilitated physically at this point, yet he had continued to work through the discomfort, primarily out of necessity. There was no doubt in my mind that I was morally obligated to help him.

“It’s not my fault he didn’t adequately research his surgeon,” I said.

As I started the ritual of cleansing my hands and arms in preparation for the surgery, I began to manufacture a detailed personal history for this young man. The tattoos were clearly faded, suggesting that they were acquired some time ago. I imagined a disillusioned soul in his late teens or early 20s, burdened with the new responsibilities and expectations of adulthood, seeking a target for the angst and animosity these pressures so commonly foment. I have often hoped that, as I approach my fifth decade of life, I will not be held to account for the unending parade of bad decisions I made as a young man. In my mind, I fashioned an individual who was truly contrite for his past prejudices, though branded with evidence of those ideals for perpetuity. 

I suddenly found myself in admiration of his courage. Here he lay, willingly assuming the most vulnerable position imaginable, utterly dependent upon others for the most basic of human needs, down to the breath, without which life ceases to exist. In just a few moments, I would be placing sharpened steel to his belly, encountering the vital structures of the human organism on my journey to the source of his malady. Had he known of my Jewish faith when we met in clinic? Surely he would have informed me of the existence of the tattoos prior to the surgery if he had. If he hadn’t known, would he want to be made aware after the operation? I briefly contemplated awakening him from the anesthesia to offer the information, in case he would prefer to seek a new surgeon if he knew this personal detail about me.

All of these thoughts proved to be fleeting. As I have done thousands of times before, I finished washing my arms and hands, gowned up, and applied the skill I had gained in over a decade of surgical experience to mend the defect in his abdominal wall. The procedure was uneventful, and when I met the young man in the post-anesthesia care unit after his recovery from the cocktail of medications he was given over the course of operation, I described my findings, gave him a few postsurgical instructions and smiled as I left, promising that we would see each other in clinic in a few days.

Over the ensuing weeks, I thought frequently of this event, wondering mostly if I had handled it skillfully. As I considered what my alternatives might have been, I recalled one of the first patients I encountered in my practice as a freshly minted, attending surgeon. I had performed no more than 50 operations since completing my training and felt as green as I must have seemed to most of my patients to that point. I had occasion to consult on a 92-year-old man in my clinic, who had come to me to ask about correction of longstanding — and very large — hernias in both groins. For a nonagenarian, he was remarkably healthy, and I was beyond surprised to learn from the medical history forms he had provided that his sole previous surgery had been on his lung, done more than 70 years prior at the age of 20. A rough calculation indicated that this would have occurred in the 1940s, predating our modern understanding of mechanical ventilation by at least a decade. This, naturally, led me to question why he underwent such a risky procedure by the standards of the time. Following a brief pause, he smiled and said, “I suffered a gunshot during the war.” 

I have no doubts that he had encountered this conversation many times over his lifetime. I also have no illusions about the challenges generated by such conversations. After all, the gentleman had an undeniably German name, and his impeccable English was highlighted by an accent unmistakably Deutsch. He immediately followed this first statement with, “Yes, I fought for the wrong side.” 

In that moment, I became painfully aware of just how inexperienced I was. He went on to explain that he had been a 16-year-old boy growing up unimaginably poor, but with the intelligence, ambition and drive to be an engineer. In his reality, the only path to fulfillment of his dream was through the army. When he entered the military, Hitler had not been in power long, and the unspeakable atrocities he would ultimately bear responsibility for most likely had not yet begun, although this had offered my patient little consolation over the course of what turned out to be an extraordinary lifetime. No doubt shaken visibly, I wanted no more details, however.

“Sir,” I said, “I have to tell you: I’m Jewish.”

He again smiled and said, “I know. I can see your necklace.” 

I glanced down at the Star of David nestled in the “V’”of my blue scrub top. 

“I was hoping that you would fix my hernias, anyway.”

I repaired his hernias a couple of weeks later, and he presented to clinic to receive my congratulations for a flawless outcome two weeks after that. He was exceptionally gracious in showing his appreciation, and I last heard from him upon receipt of a brief “thank you” note through the mail some time later.

The human condition bears no prejudice. I happen to possess the training required to address the physical ailments that invariably affect all people, but human needs take on many different forms beyond the purely physical: emotional, psychological and spiritual, to name just a few. Regardless of race, creed, gender, politics or pedigree, maintaining health in each facet of the whole human being requires a constant vigilance in the battle against forces — both external and internal — that ultimately work toward their degradation. These forces act without concern for any variable that we may construct or artificially use to define ourselves as individuals or communities. I have the conviction that it is my moral obligation to use my abilities — both innate and acquired — to alleviate the suffering caused by this degradation without discrimination. In short, I seek to allow myself to be governed by the fundamental principle of kindness. If I have it within my power to lessen suffering, I will.

What did I learn from the patient with the Hitler tattoo?  That in such moments, it is imperative that we have a clear, unwavering sense of our values and that we act in a manner consistent with those values. I resolved that day that, when in doubt, I would always err on the side of acting compassionately. Kindness, it turns out, is sometimes the bold path forward. 

James Wiseman is a graduate of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and the Residency in General Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital. He currently lives in Tucson, Ariz., where he is an associate in a multidisciplinary surgical practice.

Learning to err on the side of compassion Read More »

The last voice from the French internment camps

Leave a Comment / Holidays, Judaism /

In 1942 on the eve of Passover, Dora Werzberg, a 21-year-old French Jew, walked through the gates of the Rivesaltes internment camp in Vichy, France.  She arrived at the camp not by force but by choice, as a volunteer social worker sent by the Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants, (OSE), a French-Jewish welfare organization.

Today, at 95, Dora Werzberg Amelan, who still lives independently at her Paris home, has outlived all her OSE supervisors and co-workers. When I learned about Amelan last November, I immediately wanted to interview her. I had read about and interviewed camp internees, but here was a different side of the story, and one that has received little attention — the relief worker’s experience.

Not wanting to let the opportunity slip by, I traveled to Paris in December, booking a room close to her apartment building. As I stepped off the elevator, a booming “allo,” directed me to her home. Gray-haired, dressed in gray and leaning against the door, she appeared to be like any grandmother, except for her trendy, fluorescent blue glasses and the vigorous voice.

Over coffee and slices of fruit stolen, she told her story. 

Dora Amelan. Photo by Charlotte Bonelli

At the war’s outbreak, her family, French nationals living in Belgium, fled to unoccupied France, where she met the charismatic OSE supervisor Andrée Salomon. At their very first meeting, Amelan decided to help her imprisoned coreligionists at Rivesaltes.

On Oct. 4, 1940, the Vichy French government had authorized the internment of foreign Jews. It was a mixed population composed of East European Jews, some of whom had lived in France for decades without becoming nationalized, German-Jewish refugees as well as German Jews whom the Nazis had dumped into unoccupied France, and Jews from the Low Countries who had fled the Nazi blitzkrieg of May 1940.

Eventually, it was hoped, these foreign Jews would leave France. Until that time, it was best, so thought the Vichy government, to place them in holding centers along with political dissidents, Gypsies and Spanish Civil War refugees. By the end of 1940, of the roughly 45,000 imprisoned at these camps, an estimated 70 percent were Jewish.

Little thought had gone into Amelan’s decision to answer Salomon’s call for volunteers. But in her first day at Rivesaltes, she had ample time for reflection. The OSE staff had left for the Passover holiday, leaving Amelan on her own to explore this massive camp located on a plain between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean.  

Row after row of dismal concrete housing units, unheated and poorly lit, stretched out into the barren landscape. “Ah, the smell of the barracks,” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “Day and night they were in the same dirty clothes. There were no pajamas.”  Nor were there beds. Inmates slept on wooden frames topped with straw. 

Stepping into the “so-called hospital,” she was assaulted by the stench of urine, saved in large bedpans and later used to study the effects of a lack of protein in the diet.

Asked about her first impression of the internees, she replied, “They had no real thought or reaction, just the look of just giving up. I had never experienced such misery. I was young with no life experience. I wondered if I could support this work.”

A full seven-day work week quickly erased her early doubts.  She assisted internees with correspondence, distributed donated clothing and delivered extra rations, supplied by the Secour Suisse, to those in the infirmary, who were on the verge or already suffering from starvation.    

Amelan described one experience that, in her opinion, summed up life at Rivesaltes. One day, she and her colleague Simone Lipman had just lugged an industrial-size pot, filled with rice, milk and cheese, to the hospital’s doorway, when suddenly a handle snapped off. The pot crashed to the ground, its contents spreading across the floor. 

The hospitalized inmates had lost their supplementary meal. But the spilled food was not wasted. Internees who had been trailing Amelan and Lipman, hoping to snatch a few scraps, dived to the floor, spoons in hand. “They always had a little spoon in their pocket. You never know where you could find food,” Amelan remembered. “They were on all fours eating from the floor.” 

The children were the other group designated for extra rations. Every afternoon, the Secour Suisse relief agency prepared hot chocolate and bread for them. This well-intentioned and seemingly simple act was often thwarted by the camp’s logistics and the weather. To partake in this treat, the children had to march more than a kilometer from their residences to the Secour Suisse barrack. “In this climate, with the wind,” Amelan said, “they very often couldn’t do it. Even I couldn’t ride my bike sometimes because of the wind.”  For roughly 100 days a year, the Tramonte, a fierce wind, barreled through the camp, at times reaching a speed of 75 miles per hour.

All struggled in the camp, particularly the children. OSE made their liberation and relocation to OSE children’s residences in villages and towns outside of the camp its top priority. “We had an office where we received the parents,” Amelan recalled. “And all whose parents agreed, and we could get permits for, were taken out.” The cut-off age, as Amelan remembers, was 13 or 14. “Whenever we could, we lied about the age of the child and made false papers.” 

Vichy authorities were amenable to the children’s relocation because it relieved the camp commandant of a responsibility. Five hundred Jewish children were released from Rivesaltes. Most of these children, unlike their parents, escaped the impending deportations east.

Historian Robert Paxton notes, “When the Vichy government learned in the spring of 42 that the Germans were going to run trainloads of Jews back off to the East; they volunteered 10,000 foreign Jews from the unoccupied Zone. They wanted to empty those camps.”

From Aug. 11, 1942 until Oct. 20, 1942, 2,289 foreign Jews were deported from Rivesaltes, first to Drancy, a transit camp outside of Paris, and then to Auschwitz. During this period, Amelan was startled to encounter the parents of friends from Belgium. “They came to me and begged me to help them. But if we freed one person, another one was immediately put on the list … the Germans asked for so many people per day or per week. ” 

Aware that the couple was planning an escape, Salomon, the OSE supervisor, instructed Amelan not to get involved.

Salomon had relieved Amelan of the burden of decision making, but she could not free the 21-year-old from the ensuing guilt. For the first time, Amelan came close to the breaking point. “It was a heavy load,” she said. “I could not endure it.” And so, Salomon transferred Amelon to Camp Gurs. 

Well to the west of Rivesaltes, Gurs sat at the foot of the Pyrenees, near the Spanish border. “The landscape was friendlier at Gurs,” Amelan recalled. “It was green, and there were woods.”

Yet Gurs had the same problems as other Vichy internment camps: inadequate food and medicine, horrid sanitation and poor housing. “If Auschwitz was hell,” recalled one survivor, “Gurs was purgatory.” 

Occasionally, Amelan and a friend, Ms. Resh, a Quaker volunteer, would leave “purgatory” behind, riding their bikes to a village restaurant. Relishing this chance to relax, before drinking her wine, Resh would hoist her glass and declare, “‘It’s as if an angel flies down my back.’”

I asked if Resh ever felt guilty about dining at a restaurant when those back at Gurs barely had enough to eat. “Guilty, no, I don’t think she ever talked about being guilty,” Amelan replied. “And she was a very solid person.” Neither did Amelan have guilt about these brief respites.

Probably no aspect of camp life created more anxiety or pain than the deportations.  As the decades have passed, Amelan’s recollections of individual inmates, their faces, voices and pleas, have slipped away. A young Jew from North Africa is the exception.

“There in the darkness of the night he asked me, ‘Mademoiselle Dora, what do you think will happen to us?’ ” She responded, “For the very young and the elderly it will certainly be the end. But you are young and maybe can work.”

But the young man was uncertain there would be work for him stating, “If I am to be killed or tortured, I would rather fight and die here.” Amelan answered, “I can’t advise you.” She took his watch and other personal items to forward to relatives.

Between Aug. 6, 1942 to March 3, 1943, 3,903 Jewish inmates were deported from Gurs. The majority was sent to extermination camps. “Certainly we knew that they were not going to a camp for fun,” Amelan said. “But did we know about the gassings?  No.”

Initially, the Vichy French had, in the summer of ’42, turned to foreign Jews to fill Nazi quotas, giving some French Jews a false sense of security.  Yet, by the time Gurs closed in November 1943, there was no longer a distinction between foreign Jews and French Jewish citizens. Amelan, now herself a target for arrest and deportation, left for Limoges with false identity papers.

For the first two months, she was a courier delivering payments from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to families hiding Jewish children. It is estimated that the OSE, either on its own or in cooperation with other organizations, saved more than 5,000 Jewish children.

At the suggestion of and with the help of George Garel, the head of OSE’s underground network, Amelan spent the remainder of the war studying at a nursing school in Toulouse. 

During her year and a half at Rivesaltes and Gurs, Amelan had been a camp “social worker.” In truth, she had no formal training. After the war, she earned a degree in social work in Paris. In 1948, she married and left for Israel, where she was a social worker for more than three decades before returning to Paris in the 1980s.

Amelan was not the only one in her family associated with OSE. Her teenage cousin, Marcel Mangel, had given drama lessons to the children at OSE residences. Millions around the world would come to know him as the famous French actor and mime, Marcel Marceau.

At the conclusion of our meeting, I asked how a young woman, from an assimilated middle-class French family, withstood work and life at Rivesaltes and Gurs. She shredded my question. “I did not get up every day and think, ‘How do I feel? What do I want?’  My person ceased to exist. I was there to do a job.” 

Asked if this attitude strengthened her, Amelan countered, “I would put it differently. Let’s say it didn’t weaken me. And it is easier to be the one giving help than the one waiting to receive it.” 

Charlotte Bonelli is the author of “Exit Berlin” (Yale University Press, 2014).

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