By Jeffrey Berger
Seventy-two years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz. On this anniversary, we commemorate innocent victims of persecution whose life possibilities were cut mercilessly short. We remember missing persons of a family tree whose fates may never be known. On this day, I honor a forebear whom I never met.
The exact death toll at Auschwitz remains elusive. Many inmates were undocumented, and large amounts of incriminating evidence were destroyed in the final weeks of war. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum sets the official record: 1.1 million total victims including 960,000 Jews, 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 15,000 disabled persons, among others.
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Only 7,500 emaciated inmates were found alive among 600 corpses, 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 8.5 tons of human hair. Among the survivors who recovered and resumed full and productive lives:
Elie Wiesel (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986), Simone Veil (served as President of the European Parliament), Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler (escapees who saved an estimated 120,000 to 200,000 inmates), Imre Kertesz (writer and Nobel Laureate in Literature), and the parents of American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, as examples.
Little is known of my great grandfather. He was an author, philosopher, and college professor living in Prague when the Nazi army occupied Czechoslovakia. No letters or literary works survive apart from anecdotal accounts handed down by word of mouth – until the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 revealed his fate.
In 1961, I recall my mother and grandmother watching the trial on national television, and their stunned silence when the fate of our forbear was finally was revealed. According to trial testimony, Eichmann ordered the SS to stop a deportation train headed for Auschwitz and execute by firing squad a prominent human rights dissident onboard. The condemned man was my maternal great-grandfather.
Are some people more predisposed to obedience than others and willing to follow even the most heinous orders? Yale University research psychologist Stanley Milgram tested this hypothesis with disturbing results:
The percentage of test subjects willing to inflict pain on command was constant across all population groups – ranging from 61 to 66 percent regardless of ethnicity, gender, nationality, or circumstance.
Milgram’s experiment reveals a grim truth about human nature: Everywhere in the world are people innately capable of unspeakable savagery. Genocide did not end with World War II. It happened again in Tibet (1959-1966), in Cambodia (1975-1979), in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), and in Rwanda (1994). Even today, atrocities continue unabated in Syria and Yemen. The record of human history is grim:
Vainglorious wars of aggression and oppression. Centuries of persecutions and pogroms. True believers torment and condemn infidels. Whites enslave blacks. Nazis murder Jews. Hutus slaughter Tutsis. Butchery and bloodshed begin with dehumanizing words.
Yet, there are deniers and historical revisionists who still dispute the indisputable, and madmen who still target innocent civilians. Are some atrocities worse than others? Does the tormented history of one people overshadow the tragic history of another? Every account is deserving of validation and remembrance.
Arbeit macht frei. Work sets you free. Perversely cynical words meant to exterminate, not liberate. Words more aptly inscribed above the Gates of Hell: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’
Consider the diversity of life on Earth evolving over eons of time. Here is a single species united in time but divided in culture, language, customs, and tribe. ‘Ecce homo.’ Behold the human condition.
Will humanity ever find peace? Shall we forget the tragic voyage of the MS St. Louis whose 900 passengers were refused sanctuary and condemned to death? Shall we separate people behind borders and walls and stop the free exchange of commerce, creativity and invention? Or shall we learn how to tolerate, integrate, and appreciate the rich cultural heritage of all humankind?
There will be no peace, no hope, no freedom from tyranny and war until people come to terms with their darkest impulses.
Thank you for this timely reminder of a truth which must not be forgotten. When I think of your great-grandfather, I usually remember the amazing film, The Pianist from 2002, which detailed the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in which 400,000 Jews were confined to a district only about 3.4 km2. I thought I would look into whatever parallels I could find between what occurred in Warsaw and Prague. Similarities abounded with stark differentiation. The Jewish quarter in Prague had been called a ghetto for hundreds of years, but the Jews had lived there in relative harmony with the other citizens of Prague. The Warsaw ghetto was created in 1940 and even walled off with a crude brick wall topped with barbed wire. Sections of the wall still stand. See the Wikipedia entries about this ghetto for photographs to chill the heart. Both cities saw the same hardship, confiscation, forced emigration and mass extermination. Ultimately Jews were loaded on trains to be taken to the concentration camps. This article from the holocaust research project sheds some light on the conditions in Prague at that time. Excerpted here:
ReplyDeleteIn March 1939 Konstantin von Neurath was appointed Reichsprotektor of the Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren (Bohemia and Moravia). He instituted German laws controlling the press and abolished political parties and trade unions, ordered a harsh crack-down on protesting students in October and November 1939, but he was regarded as insufficiently rigorous in controlling Czech resistance. In September 1941 relieved from day-to-day powers and later replaced by Reinhard Heydrich.
On 21 June 1939 Neurath issued a decree excluding Jews from economic life of the Protectorate and forcing them to register their assets. Jewish companies were to be taken over by German Treuhander who would supervise their sale or “aryanisation”. The day after the publication of Neurath’s decree, the SS Jewish expert, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Prague, establishing himself in a confiscated Jewish villa in Stresovice.
Eichmann headed “The Central Office for Jewish Emigration” ( Zentralstelle fur Judische Auswanderung), an SS bureaucracy for robbing and expelling Jews which had first been established in Vienna. Eichmann’s permanent representative in Prague was SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Gunther. Although a decree by the Reichsprotektor of 21 July 1939 subordinated Gunther to the Security Police Commander of the Protectorate SS- Brigadefuhrer Walter Stahlecker, he was solely answerable to Eichmann.
A central Jewish authority was promoted to facilitate the operations of the Central Emigration Office. In March 1940 the Jewish Communities of the Protectorate were subordinated to the Jewish Religious Council of Prague, headed by Dr. Emil Kafka and his deputy Jakub Edelstein, which had been created in the wake of the Nazi occupation.
This organization was now expected to register the Jewish population of Bohemia / Moravia and raise funds for emigration. At a meeting with Dr. Kafka in the summer of 1939 Eichmann demanded the expulsion of 70,000 Jews within a year. When Kafka protested there was no money for such a massive undertaking, Eichmann threatened to clear Prague street by street, sending 300 a day to the concentration camp at Dachau where “they would be very keen on emigration.”
In August 1939 Jews were segregated in Prague restaurants and prohibited from using public baths and swimming pools. The outbreak of the Second World War brought an avalanche of new decrees aimed against Jews. A dawn to dusk curfew was imposed on all Jewish households and their radios were confiscated.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of 1940 Jews were forbidden to withdraw more than 1,500 crowns a week from their bank accounts, which were not allowed to earn interest. Gold, silver platinum and jewellery were to be sold at a discount to Hadega, a special company dealing in Jewish property established at 32 Hibernergasse.
Jews were excluded from the movie and theatre industries, they were restricted to the back of the second car on Prague trams and excluded from all hotels except the Fiser and the Star. In April 1940 the Protectorate government issued a comprehensive law banning Jews from public service and all social, cultural and economic organizations, Jewish doctors could still practice but only in Jewish community.
Jews were ordered to report to the local police and have their identity papers stamped with a distinctive J. In August 1940 Jewish children were excluded from Czech schools and in October 1940 Jews were denied access to a wide range of rationed goods and banned from certain areas of Prague, including the Vltava embankment.
In January 1941 their driving licences were confiscated and Jews were forced out of their apartments in the best areas of Prague, and moved into old tenements in the First, Second and Fifth districts of the city. Their flats were taken over by Nazi officials.
Discrimination against the Jewish community culminated with the decree of 1 September 1941 ordering all Jews to wear the Yellow Star of David.
On 27 September 1941 SS- Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich the head of the Nazi security police, was named acting Reichsprotektor, replacing Neurath, and one of his first acts in Prague was to close the remaining synagogues and all other Jewish centres of worship.
On 10 October 1941 Heydrich, Karl Hermann Frank and Eichmann met to plan deportations from the Protectorate to Lodz, Minsk and Riga, and the establishment of the ghetto in Theresienstadt.
Six days later the first train containing 1,000 Jews from Prague for Lodz in Poland, between 16 October and 3 November five transports containing nearly 5,000 men, women and children were dispatched to the Lodz ghetto.
It is not in the least surprising, yet incredibly brave that your ancestor was willing to stand up for what he believed by joining with the resistance and unwilling to simply stand idly by as his countrymen who had peaceably allowed the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia to simply be annexed by Nazi Germany.
Is the forced deportation of undocumented Americans a baby step in the same direction? Will ICE detention centers resemble camps more and more? Will we too build a wall like the one around the Warsaw Ghetto? Or the wall that cut Berlin in half? Not if we resist with our every resource.
Theresienstadt operated as a concentration camp to house the so-called "Jewish Elite" of Prague, which included authors, scholars, and other prominent persons. From what little is known within family circles, my great grandfather was presumably an inmate of Theresienstadt. During the Eichmann trial in 1961, the rest of the story was revealed. On orders from Eichmann, all detainees of Theresienstadt were loaded onto trains bound for Auschwitz. How my great grandfather came to be a spokesperson for the detainees is unknown. Nevertheless, he lead a protest on onboard while in transit. Somewhere en route, Eichmannn ordered his execution by firing squad. It was witnessed by the entire trainload of detainees, according to trial testimony.
DeleteMy grandmother was actually born in the United States, which is how she escaped the Holocaust. Sometime during the turn of the century (late 1890s), my great grandfather was on sabbatical and visited Philadelphia where my grandmother was born. At the end of his sabbatical, he returned to Europe. When my grandmother reached the age of majority (around 1920 approx.), he sent her back to the U.S. with specific instructions to never return to Europe. In due course, she met my grandfather, and the rest is history.
Yes, my great grandfather presaged events that would later unfold. Without his foresight, I would not be here today. Perhaps I should revise this post and add these details.
I get you're an inky fellow (O)CT(O)PUS. But damn if I can read your post on my smart phone where I do a lot of my browsing and commenting. I comment infrequently because I can't read your posts. They're just to inky (dark) on the screen.
ReplyDeleteJust thought you might like to know.
A glitch, now fixed (hopefully). Here is what happened. Last year, I purchased a new Apple laptop computer but could not install my old word processor (MS Word); so I have been using Apple's word processor instead. Unfortunately, the default setting is text set against a gray background (resulting in an "inky" screen appearance). To remedy the problem, I unformatted all text in Blogger to remove the gray background. Try your smart phone again. I'd like to know if this remedies the problem.
DeleteYes (O)CT(O)PUS, it is remedied. Thank you. And thank you for your most excellent post. Well said!
DeleteMy ancesters immigrated a long time ago. Half of them in the 1840s and the other half around 1900, but all in response to upheavals in Europe that usually had an anti-Semitic component. an unknown number were lost in the pogroms in teh late 19th century. But like so many, I'm the product of a hundred generations who somehow know when it was time to get the hell out.
ReplyDeleteI'm not quite sure, but I think I'm getting that old feeling again.
I visited Dachau in the summer of 1965. A gray, damp and cool day, but it would have felt so I think under a blazing sun. It's a museum now. You can walk through the large crematorium and you can walk through the gas chamber and see the fingernail scratches in the green paint. Coincidentally, years later when I was studying Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University, there was a professor named Butz who had flown over Dachau in an airplane and proclaimed that it couldn't have been a death camp. Early in 1965, before leaving for Europe, I met a man called Herbert Zipper, an orchestra conductor who had actually escaped that place. A couple years later back in Europe on a program for German majors I learned that the University of Vienna, that I was attending obtained the land for it's "new" campus by murdering the Jews who lived there by drowning them in the Danube. I remember the Dachau museum's large display of photographs of medical experiments in progress. I remember the ashes and the iron crematory doors.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to tell your stories of international Jewish conspiracies and the elders of Zion or any of the rest. I might not kill you just then, but I will be thinking of a way.