Only a precious remnant of Holocaust survivors is alive today, and many of them were just children when they went into hiding or ended up behind barbed wire.
Doubts have surfaced about the veracity of a book in which the author said he smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the atrocities.
The man who arrested the family of Anne Frank in their Amsterdam hiding place 67 years ago worked for the West German intelligence agency for years, a new book has revealed. SS Oberscharfuhrer Karl Josef Silberbauer, an Austrian-born Nazi, worked for the West German secret service, or BND, according to author Peter-Ferdinand Koch, whose new book, \”Unmasked,\” documents the biographies of Nazi soldiers and SS members who ended up working as spies for the democratic state.
Reading \”Mein Kampf\” was no simple task for me. Growing up in Tel Aviv, I learned from a young age that the book was taboo. More than that, it felt like forbidden fruit; as if bringing it home would have contaminated my apartment. Even checking out the book from the library was no simple task. However, as a scholar, a philosopher of humanistic education and a curious human being, an urge grew inside me over the years to read Hitler\’s own words — to learn his view of the Jews and why he was consumed with hatred that resulted in the destruction of so many people.
Ginz was a Czech Jew, born in 1928, who died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz at the age of 16. His diary had been lost for 60 years but resurfaced in 2003.
Kristallnacht marked the end of Jewish life in Germany; a pivotal turning point in what later became known as the Holocaust. A generation is passing, but it is a generation that has left behind voluminous records, testimonies and memoirs, video recordings and diaries, letters and notes.
In 1979, comedian Al Franken wrote a skit for \”Saturday Night Live\” called \”What if: Überman,\” featuring Dan Aykroyd as Klaus Kent, a clerk in Hitler\’s Ministry of Propaganda. Klaus dashes into phone booths to become Überman, uses his X-ray vision to detect bombs and to reveal Jews by looking through their pants, and ultimately leads his country to victory.
The authors propose a new map with \”multiple homelands\” that displaces Israel from \”the center of the Jewish universe.\” They point out that since the mid-19th century, most Jewish religious innovation has originated in the United States, rather than in Europe or Israel. As of 2003, more people emigrated from Israel to Russia than vice versa, and New York is the communal and philanthropic center of Jewish life. Ultimately, the authors find, contemporary Jews are at home wherever they live. \”New Jews,\” they argue, \”connect emotionally and culturally with multiple places and traverse routes across national boundaries but are nonetheless rooted in a specific place they call home.\”
Raul Hilberg was not encouraged when he approached his professor, Franz Neumann, about writing his doctoral dissertation on the role of the German civil service in the Holocaust. Neumann assented, but warned: “It’s your funeral.”
There is a fierce anger at the core of Ruth Linn\’s work, the anger of a woman who suddenly and irrefutably discovers that the story she has been told by her Israeli teachers, Israeli society and Israeli culture from childhood onward regarding the Holocaust is but a partial narrative.
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