Holocaust Remembered 2023

Memory is for Us, History is for Others

The idea of this edition was to write about the many Survivors and Liberators that have been taken by Father Time, but need to be remembered. With the help of the entire SC Council on the Holocaust, ten Survivor stories, three Liberator stories, and one story of a Nazi youth who found a home in SC was written about. Additionally, fabulous articles were written by Scholars and Academics about Memory. It is my pleasure to have the foremost US Holocaust Educator, Author, Rabbi, and Scholar write an autobiographical story of his Memories in the centerfold: Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

In 1991, in collaboration with SC ETV, the SC Council on the Holocaust sought out all SC Survivors, Liberators and Witnesses and conducted audio/visual testimonies of those that made SC their home. The entire collection can be seen through the SC Council on the Holocaust web site under ‘Education’ Survivor Testimony. A total of 57 hours of audio/visual testimony can be seen. The USHMM and the Shoah Foundation have used our testimonies on their web

ON THE COVER

Our tenth edition theme, “Memory” stands on the pages of the nine previous editions, pictured on the cover.

This is the 10th edition of Holocaust Remembered (online at freetimes.com/holocaust) which is sponsored by the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust (SCCH), scholocaustcouncil.org.

SCCH is committed to providing factual information to the community, to teachers, and to students.

Holocaust Remembered is printed and distributed by Free Times / Post and Courier in major South Carolina publishing markets on Wednesday, April 12, 2023.

We welcome your comments at education@scholocaustcouncil.org.

sites as well. Please access them all at scholocaustcouncil.org.

All contributors felt that they had accomplished a wonderful “mitzvah” (good deed) by writing about someone they did not necessarily know, but who told an amazing story of life and death, loss, resilience and success. Most of the contributors are members of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust (SCCH). Almost all commented how powerful each story was and how difficult it was to put it succinctly on paper. Don Sloan, a member of the Council wrote: “We are in a crucial period of transition in our understanding and teaching about the Holocaust. Given the difficulties of comprehending the sheer numbers of victims, the testimony of witnesses helps personalize the Holocaust. There are few survivors left to see, hear, and speak to; soon, even these people will pass away. As with similar organizations, the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust posts an archive of video interviews with survivors, liberators, and witnesses to preserve this testimony. Contributor Dr. Lauren Granite, Director of Centropa in North American said, “We need both the staggering statistics to realize the facts of the horrors and Jewish memories of what it was like to live before and after the atrocities. Numbers show the breadth of what was lost; memories reveal the depth.” We encourage our educators in the state to access these invaluable testimonies, and we know that many teachers like to have a story which they can utilize for their lesson plans. So, to help our teachers, we are placing alongside the entire 24-page Holocaust Remembered supplement, a PDF of each

story that can be downloaded separately and copied for class usage. I would love to hear from teachers other suggestions that would help them in the classroom.

This publication in part, is possible through the generosity of grants from the SKS Holocaust Education Foundation and the Columbia Jewish Federation. The SC Council on the Holocaust underwrites the remaining expense and we are proud that our three major newspaper organizations in SC include this supplement in almost all of their markets and thus this publication is easily accessible to all of our SC citizens. The entire publication can be accessed online at free-times.com/Holocaust .

I am pleased to present the publication of this edition “Memory” on April 12, 2023. Do not hesitate to let us know if there is a personal or family story about the Holocaust that you would wish to share with all South Carolinians through this publication. Noble Peace Laureate and Survivor Elie Wiesel said, “We will accomplish a mission that the victims have assigned to us: to collect memories and tears, fragments of fire and sorrow, tales of despair and defiance and names, above all, names. What we all have in common is an obsession not to betray the dead we left or who left us behind. They were killed once. They must not be killed again through forgetfulness.”

For more information about this supplement or the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, please email education@ scholocaustcouncil.org. ■

What is the Holocaust?

As defined in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust:

“The Holocaust was the systematic bureaucratic annihilation of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War. It was a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence—the sheer numbers killed—but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenseless civilian populations. The decision to kill every Jew everywhere in Europe: the definition of Jew as target for death transcended all boundaries …

The concept of annihilation of an entire people, as distinguished from their subjugation, was unprecedented; never before in human history had genocide been an all-pervasive government

policy unaffected by territorial or economic advantage and unchecked by moral or religious constraints …

The Holocaust was not simply a throwback to medieval torture or archaic barbarism, but a thoroughly modern expression of bureaucratic organization, industrial management, scientific achievement, and technological sophistication. The entire apparatus of the German bureaucracy was marshalled in the service of the extermination process …

The Holocaust stands as a tragedy for Europe, for Western Civilization, and for all the world. We must remember the facts of the Holocaust, and work to understand these facts.“

Welcome to the 10th edition of Holocaust Remembered —“Memory.” It is hard to believe that this publication is now 10 years old and totals 244 pages. Each edition has a theme and each edition features Holocaust Survivors, Liberators, Witnesses and scholarly articles about the designated theme. This year, in honor of the 10th anniversary, the theme is “Memory,” the basis of all previous editions. Memory is for us, history is for others.

Lilly S. Filler, MD, Chair of the South Council on the Holocaust, Editor of Holocaust Remembered, daughter of Holocaust survivors

Preserving Jewish Memory One Story at a Time

In 2004, staff members of Centropa, a historical institute based in Vienna, Austria, interviewed Katarina Lofflerova, a Slovakian Jewish Holocaust survivor. Katarina had lived through World War I, the rise of Communism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the fall of Communism, and the founding of the independent state of Slovakia. In her interview, when she was asked about her childhood, she happily shared stories of the sports she loved playing and memories of vacations she took with family and friends. These were highlighted in the short film Centropa made of her life.

When I asked 10th graders in a Maryland high school what they thought of the film, one student said, “There’s too much about her good times. Holocaust survivors would only want to talk about the Holocaust.”

That student was accustomed to hearing survivors speak solely about their worst experiences, and his comment raises questions worth contemplating: Do the memories of anguish we request from survivors, even implicitly, serve our needs more than theirs? And consider: How can we fully honor their humanity if we teach only how they suffered and not how they lived before and after the war? And what meaning will the historical narrative of the Holocaust have if we don’t include the joyous, funny, poignant, and dayto-day memories, along with the tragic ones?

In the early 2000s, Centropa addressed these questions by asking 1230 elderly Jews in 15 Central and Eastern European countries to share their entire life stories as they looked at the old family photographs that meant the most to them. Centropa digitized over 23,000 photos, creating a record of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe spanning the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the first decade of the 21st century.

The old photos elicited stories revealing the rich complexity of daily life: a father in Sofia who sold his wedding ring to buy his daughter a violin; a girl in Krakow whose classmate’s family was so wealthy their chauffeur drove him to school, brought the boy’s book bag into the classroom, took off his master’s coat, and hung it on the back of his chair—and did the reverse at the end of the day; a chess-playing

father in Kielce whose addiction to the game regularly lost him money; a young man in Berlin who fell in love with the woman working in the factory across the courtyard and sent her a box of candies to ask her on a date; a girl in Prein, Austria, whose friend simply stopped coming by to walk with her to school after the Anschluss … and on and on.

These details humanize the dehumanized, momentarily bringing them back to life on their terms and helping future generations glimpse and reflect on who and what was lost. As Susana Hacker, a survivor in Novi Sad, Serbia, told Centropa: “You are the fourth group who has come to our community to interview us. But you are the first to ask how we lived, not just how we died.”

In addition, taken together, the lives of Jews from multiple cultures and circumstances—rich, poor, and in between; rural and urban; traditionally religious and modern; Ashkenazi and Sephardi—enrich and complicate our understanding of who we mean when we refer to “the Jews.” Take these two boyhood memories:

Hillel Kempler, from Berlin:

“We were a real Berlin family. We often drove around and were always out and about. My father would come, too, since his pastry shop was closed on Saturdays. On Sundays we’d drive down to Wannsee or Grunewald. We’d go to Alexanderplatz, which was really close by…I often went to the Babylon [cinema] to see comedies—they were still silent. In winter, I would ice skate on the

square in front of the Volksbühne with other kids. And we had good relationships with gentiles. It didn’t matter if someone was Jewish or not. You were accepted. I never heard “Jew” associated with anything negative from the people on our street. If Hitler hadn’t come, we definitely would have stayed in Berlin.”

Joszef Faludi, from an Orthodox community in Hungary:

“There was a movie theater in Kiskőros, where we didn’t really go because movies weren’t for Jewish kids. My parents didn’t forbid it, it was just normal that it wasn’t entertainment for us. Somehow that’s how they raised us. There was a movie theater in the Szarvas building where every sort of cultural event would happen…. Then there was a house with a stage, and they would hold theater performances just with Jews…. Afterwards there was music, and then the young people would dance with each other. They were Yiddish plays but presented in Hungarian.”

What was considered typical for Jews varied, and while we can relate to much in these stories of prewar Jewish life, some experienced brutality as horrifying as what

would follow. Take, for example, Sarah Kaplan from Berdichev, Ukraine:

Our enormous family gathered every night after synagogue in our dining room and nearly two dozen of us sat around the table for those wonderful dinners. Then came the famine of 1932. Food became scarce. It disappeared. And I began to see dead people just lying on the streets.

My mother’s friend’s son, Shunia Gershman, arrived from Moscow. When he saw that we were starving he cried, ‘Let Sonia [Sarah] come with me, otherwise she’ll die here.’ Mother refused, but Shunia kept…begging her... On his last day, Mother blurted out, ‘You want to take her with you, then marry her!’ He instantly agreed. I…was horrified…. I mean, I was sixteen and Shunia was an old man of twenty-one.

We were married by our rabbi. I sobbed and we left for Moscow…. When Shunia told his mother, she was aghast, but quickly understood he had saved me. She tried to make me feel at home and she absolutely did not let Shunia sleep in my bedroom.

After eight weeks, Shunia’s Uncle Gedaliy visited from Odesa. He asked why I looked so sad. I told him and…the next morning we went to the train station. Shunia came running, begging me to stay, but I wouldn’t hear of it. When I reached Berdichev…my mother was practically a walking skeleton and my younger sister had starved to death.

Sarah and Shunia eventually reunited and had a son. When the Germans invaded, Sarah and the baby fled to Central Asia. Shunia was killed at the front. Almost all of Sarah’s family were murdered.

The further we get from the Holocaust the easier it will be for the diversity of Jewish life that existed in prewar Europe to fade from memory. We need both the staggering statistics to realize the facts of the horrors and the Jewish memories of what it was like to live before and after the atrocities. Numbers show the breadth of what was lost; memories reveal the depth.

Personal memories play an important role in enhancing the historical narratives we teach and we elicit them by the questions we ask. Without Katarina Lofflerova’s stories of playing tennis, going to the beach, and rebuilding her life after the war, we would understand her through a limited lens: our own interest in her solely as a survivor of the Holocaust. Listening carefully to her whole life story, however, we hear what her life meant to her. Don’t we owe her — and other survivors — that? ■

Lauren Granite, PhD, Centropa Director of Education, North America

Katarina Loffloerova with her girlfriend Frida Vertes on the Lido. Bratislava, Slovakia, 1929.

Hillel Kempler on his first day of school. Berlin, 1932.

Jozsef Faludi, his siblings (Rozsi on the left, Magda on the right, brother Imre to left of Jozsef), and their parents Emanuel and Jolan. Kiskorös, Hungary, 1939.

Sarah Kaplan and first husband Shunia Gershman, back row. Berdichev, Ukraine, 1936.

“Numbers show the breadth of what was lost; memories reveal the depth”

In Search of Remembrance

So, I will tell you the story of a young 7-year-old Jewish lad. I take you back to the year 1930, to the small coastal town of Beaufort, South Carolina, where he lived with his parents, Sam and Helen Lipton and his 3-year-old brother, Morey. His father was born in Baisogola, Lithuania and his mother in Kielce, Poland. He had grandparents , but not the pleasure of their proximity of company and enjoyment of their companionship. His grandparents lived far away in a mysterious place that his parents referred to as the “Old Country.” What he remembers are the dozens and dozens of letters written in Yiddish that traveled over the wide Atlantic between his mother and his grandparents and her siblings, nephews and nieces. At her knee he would sit as she unfolded the envelope, and in a flood of tears she read the precious words that evoked memories of her distant family.

His mother had been in America for 11 years when she decided to return to Poland to see her parents, Manachem Mendel and Rivka Machale Sterenzys and other members of the family. She borrowed the necessary money from a friend, gathered her two boys, packed the steamer trunk, bade farewell to her husband, Sam, and set out for New York City where they would board the American liner, The SS George Washington. Passport and other documents were in order as they set sail for Hamburg, Germany in May 1930. Thus began the great adventure.

her progeny to her parents and the rest of the family.

This is an edited version of a piece that was originally published in Holocaust Remembered, Vol. 1 in 2014. Today Joe Lipton is 100 years old.

Without the burden of care and responsibility, he was free to roam the great ship. Amusements included deck tennis and shuffleboard. The older passengers occupied themselves with the latter. Apparently it was an activity that accommodated their arthritis. When he strolled into view, they always invited him to participate. His age and size , they thought, was not a threat. His mother’s time was consumed with keeping track of his whereabouts, seeing that the boys were in decent repair and separating them when the 7-year-old got to teasing his younger brother.

Upon arrival in Hamburg, they boarded a train for Kielce where they fell into the arms of a flood of relatives. There was much kissing and hugging and a profuse amount of tearing—tears of happiness and joy. His mother proudly displayed

As a result of the incessant flow of correspondence between the two continents that his mother shared with him, he had learned the names of his Polish relatives. Now he could attach name to reality. When the relatives descended upon them, all speaking Yiddish at the same time, he imagined that he was again in Beaufort at the synagogue hearing the old immigrants discussing business in the mother-tongue during High Holiday service with intermittent “shushes” from the Rabbi. The young lad was quite adept in that tongue.

They stayed with his mother’s brother, Chaim Sterenzys, his wife Hugie and their children, Zosia, Yoel, Fella and Ben. When he first gazed upon them, he thought they were the handsomest family he had ever seen. The residence was modest, located in a tenement building and the plumbing, compared to American standard, seemed primitive. It was a different world. Although Hitler was next door, there was, in a child’s eye no noticeable sign that Jews were in the grip of anxiety. Life pursued its regular pattern. The daily routine was disrupted by the appear-

It has been 83 years since the three of us were in Kielce, Poland, so long, long ago. I am 90 years old and old enough to put dreams asleep and resurrect the uncertainty and capriciousness of memory. After all, what do old people have to talk about? What do they have to write about—the past? The past, and what is it?—a mixture of happiness and sadness, of expectations and disappointments, of life and death.

Helen with Joe on her left and Morey on her right in a 1931 passport photo. Helen Lipton, 1956.

Joe Lipton, retired attorney, nephew of Holocaust Survivors

ance of the American cousins. They would be trotted from Uncle Chiam’s home to Aunt Sura’s home to Aunt Chiyas home. Aunt Sura prepared them lunch. As he was about to partake, his Grandmother Rivka came dashing in with the entree’. Pushing her daughter’s serving aside, she put her boiled potatoes with sour cream and hardboiled eggs in its place. It was special attention to which he was unaccustomed.

Yoel, his cousin, asked if he would like to go to the football game. He was delighted and then disappointed. Football, unbeknownst to him, is the European name for soccer—a game of which he knew nothing. Ben, his contemporary, and he indulged in 7-year-old talk—school, games, and likes/dislikes. Little did either of them realize that in a mere nine years, Ben and his family would be victims of a grotesque German ideology , conceived and implemented by Adolph Hitler. But for now, an uncertain and tenuous normalcy prevailed. One may describe the interlude as a “Fiddler on the Roof” kind of period, a relative calmness before the tempest.

It seems they were forever going from one relatives’ house to another. They wanted to see what American boys looked like. All that attention could spoil a less vulnerable child, but he stood his ground and was determined not to be more spoiled than necessary. His mother was set upon the notion that her sons should have tailor-made clothing. Of course it was off to the tailor who naturally was Jewish. God forbid a non-Jew would be in such an ignominious trade. The name of the tailor has long been forgotten by the 7-year-old, however, to this day, 83 years later, he can hear him singing a haunting Yiddish song. Oddly or magically he still remembers the words and melody. The lyrics describe a mischievous young Hebrew school lad named Motel, who was always annoying the Rabbi. The opening line is imbedded in his mind and on occasion he releases it from its entombment and sings it to himself. In that moment of nostalgia, 83 years past, he sees the place, the time and the images. The lyrics translate, “Oh tell me Motel, what will become of you; you are worse than before….” Indeed he hears it still when overcome with sadness

of remembrance. Those haunting words from the mouth of a humble tailor bent over his machine, the cloth flying under the needle and his foot on the peddle rapidly in motion, will soon be silenced.

What does a 7-year-old know of the threats and anxieties that his relatives felt? It was 1930 and if there was apprehension he did not see it, feel it , or understand it. He was aware that his relatives lived, for the most part, from hand to mouth. His mother and her brother Gabriel Stern who lived in Columbia had always enclosed money in their replies. To this day, he hears the echo of his Grandfather’s admonishment, “Die velt is a bikele un der iker iz nisht moira tsu haben”. (The world is a narrow bridge and the main thing is not to be afraid.)

A glance at the Visa revealed that it was time to prepare to depart Kielce. Three months had simply evaporated. He remembers as though yesterday, the hugs, the kisses and the tears that went round and round, and then again and again. All knew that this was the last time they would see their daughter, their sister, their aunt and her two boys. He

has since come to realize that the last time is not only a long, long time but forever. Seemingly as an afterthought, Uncle Chiam, mother’s brother, motioned her aside. Holding her 7-year-old by the hand and carrying her 3-year-old, he heard his Uncle in a low, guarded voice caution his sister. “Henchile,” he said, “when you cross the border into Germany, be very careful, es tutsach dorten” (things are stirring there). As that young boy looks back and relives that moment, questions arise that would not occur to a 7-yearold. In the short span of 9 years, September 1, 1939, the conflagration would commence.

On September 10, 1930, Helen Lipton and her two sons arrived in New York City. Eight years later, November 9, 1938, the assault on the Jewish population of Germany commenced with Kristalnacht. And on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the systematic annihilation of European Jewry began. Shortly after the occupation of Poland, the Germans took over the operation of government services. Helen Lipton received mail bearing the Nazi seal of censorship and stamped “Geoffnet ” (opened). The enclosed notes were brief, restricted and absent of detail. When the last letter arrived about September 1940, a cloud descended upon the Lipton household. His parents knew that the killing machine was in Poland and all their relatives were at risk.

It was not until after the war that the remnant that survived would surface. His cousin Ben Stern, his wife Jadzia, and their daughter 18-month-daughter Lilly managed to outlive the ordeal. With the intervention and assistance of his Uncle Gabriel Stern and his Aunt Helen Lipton, the Ben Stern family came to America. Once again the two, once 7-year-old cousins, would embrace. It was one of those indescribable, unforgettable moments that lives in the mind, the heart and in his memory. ■

The family of Joe and Morey Lipton, who perished in the Holocaust. Only Ben Stern and his sister Zosia Stern Nowak (circled) survived. Photo circa 1925.

Born Martha Mondschein in Kassel, Germany, Bauer was the youngest of three children. She spent her first three years in Brussels, Belgium. At age eight, she moved to Cologne, Germany to live with relatives, but moved back to Kassel when she was twelve.

In 1933 while working at a department store in Kassel, Bauer had her first experience with the Nazis. She was very conscious that things were going to change. Many of the Jewish young people were trying to prepare themselves for a potential escape.

In 1935, Bauer realized that things were not normal in Germany. She knew that many people had to move everything out of their

“I Never Learned to Hate” Survivor Martha Bauer

With the support of her family, she was able to retain some of her possessions.

Approximately six hours before the start of World War II, she was able to speak to her aunt, Mathilde Mondschein, and uncle, Adolf, for the last time via the telephone. Bauer stayed in Margate for a year and was there as evacuees from Dunkirk arrived.

At this time, Bauer learned about a settlement to be established in the Dominican Republic that did not have a registered nurse. She applied and was accepted. She was among 13 young people and some pregnant women from England who were going to the same settlement. She sailed from Glasgow, Scotland to Ellis Island, where she stayed for a week. Then, she sailed to Sosúa, Dominican Republic in October 1940.

Bauer attempted to get her family out of Germany and was successful in getting her mother to the Dominican Republic. On the day her aunt and uncle were supposed to leave, Jewish people under 65 were prohibited from leaving because they could be used for work. Her uncle was over the age of 65, but he did not want to leave his wife. Her brother, Rene Mondschein attempted to leave but was shot in Yugoslavia in 1941.

In 1943, Bauer was nursing malaria patients, when she met Felix Bauer, who eventually became her husband. Since he played the piano and she conducted calisthenics classes for pregnant women and provided lessons for the schoolchildren, she convinced him to play for her classes. They were married later that year.

Working 12 to 14 hours daily, Bauer helped establish a medical department in Sosúa, which eventually became a regular small hospital. She provided care for the young women throughout their pregnancies, immunized the children, and cared for the sick children who lived in the barracks.

While living in Sosúa, the Bauers had their first child, Boris, in 1945. After her husband received his artist’s visa, they sold their possessions to fly from Santo Domingo to Miami in 1946. They boarded a train to Columbia, South Carolina then rode a bus to Due West, South Carolina, where she lived with her husband, son, and daughter, Linda (born in 1949). In 1991, she was invited by the city of Cologne as part of their restitution service. She was able to visit the street where her aunt and uncle lived.

Martha Mondschein Bauer passed away May 20, 2011. ■

attics in preparation for war. Since radio was forbidden to get information from the outside, she sat in front of a small radio with the curtains drawn and the volume low to learn from neighboring countries. They were able to gather information because her uncle, Adolf Mondschein spoke fluent German and French plus some English.

Since the age of four, Bauer wanted to be a nurse. In 1935, despite the Nuremberg laws, Bauer pursued becoming a nurse. After graduating in 1937 and passing the state board, she was one of six nurses that earned a certificate from a Jewish hospital.

During Kristallnacht, Bauer was working at the hospital in Cologne. While Nazis were trying to gain access to the hospital, the hospital workers were able to hide about 200 people in the cellars. Even though they were spared, they had to determine how to feed everyone without drawing attention. There was sufficient medicine to help patients sleep when threatened by Nazis who entered and tried to remove patients from their beds.

In April 1939, Bauer was able to leave for Margate, England because England needed a thousand midwives and registered nurses.

“I

never learned to hate,” said Holocaust survivor, Martha Bauer, when asked about her return trip to Cologne, Germany. On April 30, 1992, Martha Bauer provided a detailed Holocaust survivor testimony that started in Kassel, Germany and ended in Due West, South Carolina.

Felix and Martha Bauer / Sosúa Virtual Museum, sosuamuseum.org

Still of Martha Bauer from a 1992 interview. The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive / The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org.

Brian Day, member of SCCH, Director of Learning Experiences and Innovation at SCETV

The Remarkable Journey from Vienna to Due West: Survivor Felix Bauer

“To get out of Europe, half the possibility, was great,” said Holocaust survivor, Felix Bauer, when learning about a chance to move to the Dominican Republic in 1940. On April 30th, 1992, Bauer provided his survivor testimony starting in Vienna, Austria and concluding in Due West, South Carolina via Diepoldsau, Switzerland and Sosúa, Dominican Republic.

Born January 2, 1914, to parents Rudolf and Risa Bauer, Felix Bauer was raised in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in a Jewish middle class family. His father, who was a World War I veteran, worked as a cashier for a bank. His mother stayed home to care for him. While in Vienna, Bauer was very aware of the antisemitism prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler. He studied architecture at the College of Technology and earned a degree from the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in 1935. Bauer struggled to find work as a graphic artist in Vienna. He attempted to sell his graphic works to movie theaters but could not find steady work.

In 1938, Bauer noted a large membership of illegal Nazis in Austria during this time of a widespread economic depression. He knew that people were expecting Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. After learning about Anschluss, he persistently attempted to get a passport to leave Austria but without success.

After two weeks, Bauer escaped to Switzerland by walking across a small part

of the Rhine River called the Alter Rhein over an old bridge. He was met by Swiss border police who took him to a Swiss refugee camp. His parents stayed behind in Vienna.

For two years, Bauer stayed at the camp in Diepoldsau, Switzerland which housed about 150 people from Austria, Germany, Italy, and Poland who fled from Hitler. They had food and a cot in the camp, but they were unable to work in Switzerland or to make money.

While in camp, Bauer wrote letters and sent packages to his starving parents plus coded messages to his father. He discovered that his father was in a forced labor camp in Austria. Then, his parents were forcibly transported to a labor camp in Poland and then to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. Sadly, they did not survive.

In 1940, Bauer learned that through the Evian Conference the Dominican Republic was accepting refugees. Despite never hearing of the Dominican Republic, he was eager to leave Europe. His application was accepted, and he was on his way.

The trip to the Dominican Republic was truly unforgettable. Felix Bauer went from Zürich, Switzerland to Geneva, Switzerland, then by bus into France and over the Pyrenees to Barcelona, Spain, which was in the middle of a Civil War. Next, he boarded a train to Madrid, Spain followed by another train to Lisbon, Portugal. After a week in Lisbon, he boarded a boat to New York City. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, he cried. After a week

at Ellis Island, he sailed to San Juan, Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic. He later learned the entire trip was funded by a Jewish-American relief organization.

The settlement was in the northern part of the Dominican Republic in Sosúa. Bauer was the chief architect (wooden structures only) and helped to make maps. There were approximately 150 people from China, Luxembourg, France, and Germany. In 1943, Bauer met and married his wife Martha Mondschein, who was a nurse on the settlement. They had their first child, Boris, in 1945.

While in Sosúa, Bauer organized an amateur choir that performed publicly. After a performance, he met American author, Ira Morris, who inquired about the possibility of Bauer teaching in the United States. Bauer informed him that he did not have anyone who could sponsor him in the United States. Coincidentally, Morris’ neighbor in Los An-

geles was Dr. Ernest Kanitz, Bauer’s teacher in Vienna and former head of the music department at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. Dr. Kanitz contacted Dr. R.C. Grier, then Erskine president, to determine if he could assist Bauer. Dr. Grier offered Bauer a professor position at Erskine. In 1946, after receiving his visa, Felix Bauer and his family moved to Due West. In 1949, their daughter Linda was born.

For 33 years, Bauer taught music and art at Erskine College and started the Erskine Exhibition Center. His volumes of musical works, which he started creating before he fled Austria, can be found at the University of South Carolina Music Library. In 1996, Erskine awarded Felix Bauer with an honorary doctorate and two scholarships in Music and Art. In 2006, Felix Bauer passed away. ■

Felix Bauer in the Art Exhibition Center at Erskine College that he founded. He directed the center from 1957-79 and again from 1982-83.

Still of Felix Bauer from a 1992 interview. The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive / The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org.

Martha and Felix Bauer / Sosúa Virtual Museum, sosuamuseum.org

Herz was born in Stommeln (near Cologne), Germany on August 23, 1925 to Ernst and Karoline Herz, from a Jewish family that had lived in that area for at least several hundred years. His father was in the grain business, then when that was taken from him, he worked sending telegraphs and transporting items. Herz had an uneventful childhood until the Nazis took power in the early 1930s. On Kristallnacht, his grandmother was pushed down the stairs to her basement. The pipes were smashed, flooding the basement, and the neighbor who saved her was punished by the Nazis for her kind act. In his own home, SS officers warned his father that they needed to leave. Unfortu-

“While I Breathe, I Hope” Survivor Rudy Herz

nately, the borders were closed by then. When they were taken by the authorities in 1942, they were sent to Theresienstadt. The rest of his father’s family were sent to other places within the Nazi sphere of influence. By Herz’s count, 64 family members were eventually killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Only he and a brother survived.

Herz gave graphic descriptions of his experiences in the camps. From Theresienstadt the immediate family was sent to Auschwitz. He survived there because he could work. Everything about the way they were treated was designed to systematically take away their humanity, from shaving all their hair to the beatings to the brutal work detail. Describing seeing this brutality to fellow prisoners, Herz said, “I cannot tell you whether I feel pity—by that time ‘pity’ was a word that was expunged from our dictionaries. We no longer had pity, except for ourselves.”

Surviving Auschwitz was hardly the end of Herz’s suffering. He was taken to Lieberose to recover his health. From there, they were sent on a death march to Sachsenhausen near Berlin, then Mauthausen, in Austria. They had a work detail making munitions.

By April of 1945, Herz noticed that the Nazis were destroying documents. Suddenly, Red Cross packages started to arrive and the dreaded SS officers had just folded their tents and disappeared, leaving Austrian police in charge. Weeks later, an American tank came up to the gates and told them to stay where they were, they were being liberated. Later, he found out he had a surviving brother who was in New York and joined him.

His life in the US was not without difficulties. He was drafted and sent to Korea with US forces to fight the Chinese. He returned and then went to France where he met his wife Ursula Syré, who was also German, taking her back to the US. He learned skills as a watchmaker, getting a job first in Chicago, then Atlanta. When the watch business dried up in the 1960s, they moved to Myrtle Beach, where his wife’s skills as a landscape architect allowed them to open a garden and nursery business. They had three children, Carolyn,

Herz did speak to students in the area, and at one point was invited by high school students in Stommeln to return to speak to them about the Holocaust. The German author Josef Wisskirchen wrote a book detailing Herz’s life and experiences. ■

His daughter, Chantal Herz Fryer, works for the SC Department of Commerce. She remembers him as extroverted and optimistic, qualities that got him through his ordeals. Rudy Herz related to the South Carolina motto, “While I breathe, I hope.” He would sometimes relate isolated episodes of his experiences to them, but did not tell them everything that happened, as he didn’t want to leave then scarred as he was. For example, he told them that the tattoo on his arm was something he picked up in the army.

One of the most extensive and graphic ETV interviews is with Rudy Herz, a survivor who eventually settled in Myrtle Beach, where he lived until his death in 2011 at the age of 86. The interview was conducted in 1991, ranging from his childhood to his harrowing experiences in the Nazi death camps, his subsequent liberation at age 19 and his life as a US Army veteran and long-time resident of South Carolina.

Chantal, and Raphael.

Rudy in the Army, Ft. Sill Oklahoma, 1950s

Rudy, Raphael (son), Chantal Herz Fryer, and Carolyn Herz Thomas in 1995 at Chantal’s USC Masters of Public Administration graduation.

Lily Herz with her children Karl Otto, Rudy, Alfred and Walter in 1934.

Don Sloan, PhD, Professor of Music at Coastal Carolina, member of SCCH, son of Holocaust Survivor/Liberator

Survivor Gerald Jablon From Capture to Freedom

After finishing his formal education in 1924, Jablon worked as an apprentice in businesses related to a wholesale grocery owned by his grandfather. His grandfather had directed in this will that his grandson would be a partner in that business when he reached the age of 27. The opportunity to be a partner in his grandfather’s grocery business never materialized and he later became a partner with a Frenchman in a coffee import house in Hamburg. Jablon was also an accomplished oboe player who performed with orchestras and played at weddings and other events throughout Germany.

Following the appointment of Adolph Hitler as German Chancellor in January 1933, Germany became a Nazi state. Between 1933 and the outbreak of WWII in 1939, a large number of antisemitic incidents took place in Germany and antisemitic laws and regulations were enacted: such as boycotts of Jewish businesses, ethnic cleansing, banning Jews in all public places, etc. In late 1937, Jablon personally experienced antisemitism when an official with a bank came into his import business and told his French partner that the bank could not do business with him as long as he had a Jewish partner. His involvement in that business then ended.

As a result of what was happening in Germany during the 1930’s, Gerald Jablon determined that he and his wife, Gerda Gottschalk Jablon, had to leave their country and he decided to immigrate to America. In order to leave Germany, he had to submit

an extensive set of immigration papers. That included obtaining an affidavit from someone in America who would act as a sponsor. Jablon was able to locate telephone directories for New York City and obtained addresses for people named Jablon/Yablon who were not related to him. He wrote about 100 letters, asking if any of them would be a sponsor. Fortunately, one person responded and returned the required affidavit. His name was Phillip Yablon who lived in Brooklyn and he identified himself as Gerald’s cousin. The two met later and became lifelong friends. However, an incident occurred that prevented him from leaving: “Kristallnacht.”

On November 9 and 10, 1938, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations and riots broke out across Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. Violent mobs inflamed by the rhetoric of Nazi officials destroyed hundreds of synagogues, plundered approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes and schools, and murdered 91 Jews. That event came to be known as “Kristallnacht” or “The Night of the Broken Glass.” Thirty thousand

Jewish men were arrested during Kristallnacht and sent to concentration camps. In the days following those riots, 6,000 of those Jews arrived in “Sachsenhausen,” a prison camp located near Berlin. One of those men was Gerald Jablon. In the months following the riots, the number of Jews at Sachsenhausen steadily decreased, primarly in exchange for an agreement to emigrate. Gerald Jablon was one of those fortunate enough to be released. While at Sachsenhausen, Jablon was forced to perform various kinds of manual labor — and he suffered greatly because of little to no food and extremely poor living con-

ditions. After arriving, Gerald connected with someone who had worked for his father-inlaw. He suggested a financial plan for Jablon’s release. The needed funds were raised, but they were mistakenly used by another inmate who had the same name to get out of the camp. Funds had to be raised a second time — and Jablon was finally released after spending six weeks in the camp.

After his release in 1939 and before leaving Germany, Jablon visited his parents — as it turned out for the last time because they later perished in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp located in Czechoslovakia. When he finally left Germany, he reunited with his wife then living in London, England. While in England, he earned his CPA. He and Gerda stayed there for 15 months before they sailed to New York City in 1940.

Jablon’s first job in America was working as a busboy at the New York World’s Fair. While there he learned that the symphony orchestra in Charlotte, NC, was looking for an oboe player. He applied and was accepted. The couple moved to and lived in Charlotte for about two years before making their way to Spartanburg, SC. After arriving in Spartanburg, he owned and operated his own CPA office and his family became members of the Temple B’nai Israel Congregation. Jablon continued to perform for many years playing his oboe and other instruments at special events and with orchestras in, among other cities, Sumter, Greenville, and Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Gerald Jablon passed away on June 10, 1992. ■

Gerald Jablon (né Gerhard Jablonski) was born on June 13, 1907, in Breslau, then the largest German City east of Berlin. In 1945 it became the Polish City of Wroclaw. Jablon was the only son of Siegfried and Eva Jablonski. Siegfried was a pharmacist and Eva was the daughter of a wealthy German merchant.

Gerda and Gerald Jablon with daughter Marion and son Harold, circa 1940s

Gerda & Gerald Jablon

Gerald Jablon, circa 1940s

Joe Wachter, member of SCCH, attorney

Constantly on the Run: The Survival Story of Leo Diamanstein

Josef Leo was born in Heidelberg, Germany on December 1, 1924, to Polish immigrants. He was the youngest of five children. His father was a successful quilt maker. His family was forced to relocate a number of times during the 1920s and 30s due to increasing antisemitism. They ended up in Frankfurt, where they resided until 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor. By 1934 it became clear that they had to flee again. They relocated to Italy, the only country that would open its borders to them at that time. This began the constant movement of the family to remain alive.

The Diamansteins had to leave everything behind in Germany, but the Italians were welcoming.

Leo’s father, a highly skilled and resourceful entrepreneur, was able to start a quilting business there. Once again politics dictated that the family had to leave Italy and eventually were moved into an Italian internment camp. As conditions worsened with more refugees, in 1940 the Diamanstein family was allowed to leave and settle in a small town, Arsiero, Italy. They lived there quietly for a while, his father again designing and making quilts. On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was removed from power and shortly thereafter, Italy came under German occupation.

There were many near misses for the Diamansteins but quick thinking and good luck kept them alive. They tried to hide as a

family but that was difficult, so the brothers decided to go into the Italian mountains and luckily found a small community that took them in. The people there even began arguing among themselves who was going to have the privilege of hiding them in their homes! Yet in spite of the kindness of many Italians who tried to protect them, their lives were in constant danger. Leo described the

agony of not knowing which way to go or what to do next. By the end of October, it became clear that they had to leave. Trying to stay ahead of the Germans was foremost in their minds. The family split again with Leo, his brother Maurice and his mother boarding a train at night and heading to Milan. The family pretended that they were Italian and could not understand German. Leo described this as an utterly terrifying experience. When they finally arrived in Milan, they found out that a curfew had been imposed after the Italian underground had blown up railroad tracks. Thus, Leo and his family were forced into an underground tunnel with hundreds of others. He recalls the Gestapo going back and forth, shining flashlights in everyone’s faces. No one in the crowd knew what the Germans were looking for, and at every moment, it seemed like this would be their end. But by the next morning, curfew had ended and they walked out.

Ultimately they fled through the Alps to Switzerland, where they were, once again, arrested and interned. Through many adventures and misadventures in Switzerland, they survived the war. His father established a business in Italy and Leo was working with him. Leo was quite happy to continue to work with his father and remain in Italy, but his brothers, Maurice and Adolph, and his sister, immigrated to the US. They urged Leo to follow, and he complied. After the war, Leo ended up meeting and marrying his wife, Dory, moving to Denver, CO for a time. They had one daughter, Colette D. Brouillette. Leo joined his brothers and their families and ultimately settled in the upstate, Greenville, SC. Leo and Adolph owned a toy store. Maurice and his wife Helen were members of Temple of Israel in Greenville, SC. After they retired and closed the business, Leo became an interpreter and translator and began teaching evening classes at Furman.

Leo died on August 16, 1998 at the age of 73. He was a member of Temple of Israel in Greenville, SC. ■

Still of Leo Diamanstein from a 1991 interview. The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive / The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org.

The Diamanstein family fled Germany to Arsiero, Italy and then ultimately throught the Alps to Switzerland, only to again be arrested and interned.

Leo’s father started a quilting business in Italy.

Marla Palmer, member of SCCH, teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic School

Leo admits that he had many harrowing experiences and close calls. He noted, “Everybody that survived the Holocaust has a story… Many people tried to do what we did; most of them did not make it…The idea was always…to do the most incredible things because those were the only things that really worked. If you tried to run, if you showed you were afraid, you were done with.”

Businessman, Politician, Refugee, Survivor: Mayor Max Heller

At the time of the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, Max was eighteen years old, working and attending business school part-time. Max and his family, like other Jews, lost their home and jobs and became subject to violence and public humilation. In an interview with SCETV, Max recalled being forced to participate in the so-called Reibpartien or “scrubbing parties” characteristic of Nazi Vienna, “I was forced by a schoolmate of mine, who I thought was my best friend, to get down on my knees and scrub the streets, and not only scrub the streets but clean out the gutters — and I don’t have to tell you what you find in those gutters.”

Max understood that that his family had to leave Austria, but the way to safety was difficult. American immigration was limited, and refugees were required to find sponsors before they could enter the U.S. Desperate, Max wrote a letter to a young American woman he had met in Vienna, Mary Mills from Greenville, asking for her help. Mary went to Shepherd Saltzman, president of the Piedmont Shirt Company, who promised to give Max a job. That promise in hand, Max and his sister Paula were allowed to enter the United States.

On arriving in Greenville, Max immediately went to work as a stock clerk. Soon, he found a job for his sister, and their parents and later Max’s fiancée, Trude Schonthal, were able to join them. Max and Trude married on Main Street in Greenville in 1942.

Over the next few decades, Max and Trude created successful lives for themselves and their family. After becoming vice president

and general manager of Piedmont Shirt Company, Max started his own business, Williamston Shirt Company, which he sold in 1948; later, he established Maxton Shirt Company, which he sold in 1962 but continued to work for until 1967.

After his retirement, Max was determined to repay the city that had provided him and his family sanctuary, serving as city council member and then mayor. He is perhaps most well-known for his work to restore Greenville’s downtown area; when urged to run for a second term as mayor in 1975, Max agreed under the condition that the business community match federal funding for redevelopment. The

successful public-private partnership resulted in the revitalization of downtown Greenville. Later, when he served as chairman of the State Development Board, he helped recruit companies such as Michelin North America to South Carolina; the state added 67,000 jobs during his five-year term.

Max worked to make his adopted home a better place for all residents. In his interview with SCETV, he recalled being confused by the discrimination he witnessed when he arrived in Greenville, “I worked in a plant. When I first started, I was making $10 a week. Had I been black, I probably would have made $7 a

week. When I first saw a water cooler that had a sign that said ‘Colored,’ I thought the water was going to be pink.” As mayor, Max worked for the desegregation of City Hall and the building of community centers; he also led the creation of the Greenville Transit Authority, providing affordable public transportation. Max passed away in 2011 at the age of 92. At the time of his death, he and Trude had three children, ten grandchildren, and fifteen great-grandchildren. His obituary in the Greenville News noted, “The citizens of Greenville opened their hearts and homes to him and he never forgot them.” ■

Max Heller, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, repaid the Greenville community he credited with saving his life with his public service. Today, a statue of Max, two-time mayor of Greenville, stands looking over the Main Street he envisioned and helped bring to reality.

Trude and Max Heller in 1971. Special Collections and Archives, Furman University Libraries.

Portrait of Max Heller as Mayor of Greenville, SC. Special Collections and Archives, Furman University Libraries.

Melinda J. Menzer, PhD, Chair and Professor of English at Furman University, member of SCCH, granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor

I Was Drawn to the Unspoken

Early Memories of Michael Berenbaum

Iwas born in the United States to parents who had immigrated to the United States during the great wave of immigration that began in 1881 and came to a close in 1920. My mother, Rhea, who was born in Milnice, Austria came to America in 1911 when she was less than one year old and my father, Saul, who was born in Ciechanów, Poland came in 1919 when he was nine years old. Both came with their parents and for both Americanization was essential to their experience.

The children of immigrants, they did not feel themselves to be immigrants but rather American, yet Yiddish was the language of their home, but English was definitively the language of the street. We had family members who died in the Holocaust.

More memorable, at least for a young child, were the Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States after the war. Among them were my maternal grandfather’s younger brother Carl, whom I remember as a broken man, alcoholic, single and lonely. On my father’s side were two cousins, both brothers: Samuel, who bore the same name as my paternal grandfather and Max his younger brother. Both were married, to fellow Holocaust survivors. Both were jewelers, essential to their survival in Auschwitz or so was told. Paul, Samuel and Regina’s son lived with us for a time when his mother was ill. Neither my sister Susan nor I can now

remember how long he stayed with us, whether it was a matter of a week or two or a matter of months. Our family was hush about the illness and we were perhaps too young to have much interest. So while the Holocaust had clearly touched our family, it was quite a distance away. We were far more directly touched by World War II and the almost five year separation of my parents during my father’s years in the Army. He regaled us with stories of the war, with characters such as “Sad Sack” and with the esprit de corps of his soldiers. He also portrayed himself as a proud and defiant Jew in the US Army where many of his fellow soldiers had never met a Jew and where some were clearly antisemites. Although he did not have many Army souvenirs, there was a military knife that he kept at the top of his closet and a beautifully engraved wooden box in which special letters were kept and a portrait of my father in uniform, handsome and, think, never aging, forever young, even as he began to age.

I was raised in a home that was nominally Orthodox and went to Zionist Modern Orthodox Day Schools where the language of religious instruction was

Hebrew — not English or Yiddish as was more common in those days — and where some, but surely not all, of my teachers were refugees, the term that was then most commonly used for survivors and then one that linked them to the chain of American immigrants. Virtually all my teachers were European born and educated. It was there that they learned Hebrew probably in Zionist schools as well. American men did not go into religious school teaching in that era. Other opportunities beckoned during the 1950’s. Even the Rabbinate was not yet considered a prestigious professional career. The joke that many a student remembers hearing about the rabbinate, especially for those of us drawn to religion, is “what type of career is that for a smart Jewish boy.” Better choose medicine or law, even accounting. In school in the 1950s we were never taught the Holocaust but heard some words. “Camps,” “children” “murder” Nazis.

Still, when some of my teachers rolled up their sleeves, there were numbers tattooed on their arms and we did not quite know what they meant. As Orthodox Jews, we had been taught that tattoos were forbidden and surely our pious teachers

would not violate the law. We had heard of one teacher who had lost a child but did not consider what that meant. Another teacher had a fist but no fingers and we stared at this deformity each day, whenever he held chalk or whenever he came near us. We did not know — and could not ask — what happened? Surely, we wondered. Some of our classmates were children of refugees, a few were children of survivors, most especially in the grades one or two years younger than ours because many survivors married shortly after their liberation, many brought children into the world a year or two later and many immigrated to the United States in 1946 and most especially in 1948 after the new, more open, immigration laws were passed. But we never used the words. We were more impressed by their European origins, by their accents and their foreignness, compared to our more Americanized parents. In silence, they communicated to us several important lessons that have loomed large in my life. Loss, responsibilities and inadequacy: so much had been lost and we were responsible not for the loss but to make up for that loss and we would never be able to make it up. One of my classmates and a friend during high school years was born on September 18, 1945 to Hungarian Jewish parents in Budapest. It was only

four decades later that she linked her birthday with the liberation of Budapest, nine months to the day, before her birth.

Growing up in the 1950s as a traditional Jew, school and home were two parts of a triangle of influences, the third was the synagogue. Our synagogue was established by German and Belgium refugees who had left Germany before or just after the pogroms of November 1938, known as Kristallnacht or Belgium just before the German invasion in 1940 and who had enough resources and enough initiative to successfully relocate elsewhere. They had established in Queens the communities they had left behind in Antwerp, Brussels or Frankfurt. The melodies we used were the melodies they had used. Services started on time and ended promptly. Things were orderly, decorum was essential. The older generation spoke German among themselves and English to their children. Older children had been born in Europe and the younger ones, the ones my age were American born. My father was one of the few “Americans,” seemingly one of the very few whose native language was Yiddish and English, not German and one who knew Baseball, not soccer. He was also one of the very few veterans whose service in World War II had been an essential part of the Americanization of his generation of immigrant

children. There were several survivors in the congregation, most especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Hungarian Jews who had prospered could afford to move into the neighborhood, but unlike my aunt and uncle’s community but three miles away, Kew Gardens was shaped by pre-war refugees and not by those who came later.

I also clearly remember when a survivor family moved in next door to my aunt. The parents spoke Yiddish to each other and to their children and my aunt marveled at the three year, Eli, who spoke Yiddish fluently, reminding herself of her own situation four decades earlier. Eli Zborowski was to become a leader in the survivor movement in the United States and head of Yad Vashem’s fundraising activities in the United States, but in those days he was a young man working long hours to “make it” in America.

I suspect that little of this would be of any interest had I not ended up spending much of my career studying the Holocaust and constantly being asked: “Are you the child of survivors?” “How did you get interested in this field?” I was drawn to the unspoken, to what could not be told to an American generation. In a sense my life’s work has been to bring to American audiences and to transmit into an American idiom that which could not be shared with me when I was growing up. ■

Michael Berenbaum, PhD is a Rabbi and Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at American Jewish University.

Berenbaum with Miep Gies, who is seeing her name on the Wall of the Rescuers in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Gies took care of the Otto Frank family in Amsterdam and preserved Anne’s Diary.

Michael Berenbaum’s 1955 class in Queens, New York, more than half of whom were children of refugees. Within the next few years more than half would be children of survivors and refugees.

Michael’s parents Saul and Rhea Berenbaum with him around the time of his Bar Mitzvah, 1960.

Eli Zborowski

Dr. Berenbaum, director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University, leads a 2016 lecture.

“We Wanted to Live” Survivor Francine Taylor

In an interview several years ago, Francine Ajzensztark Taylor recalled her harrowing journey from the time the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940 to liberation in 1945.

Life was normal at first, but by mid-1941 anti-Jewish laws went into effect. Among other restrictions, all Jews had to register with the German authorities and wear the yellow star. An 8:00 p.m. curfew was imposed.

In June 1942, when she was 13, Francine became ill with a lung disease. Her parents sent her to a boarding house in the French countryside where the fresh air would aid in her recovery. On July 14, her birthday, a messenger from the post office came to tell her she had a long distance call from Paris. It was her father’s cousin’s wife, a gentile woman, who told her that her father had been taken by the Gestapo and her mother and sister were in hiding. The woman wired Francine money for a train ticket along with instructions to meet her mother and sister at an address she provided in the city of Dax on the border of Free France.

Francine rode her bike to Tours to buy a ticket for the train leaving the next day. She tried to register in a hotel for the

night, but the clerk suspected she was either a Jew or a runaway because she didn’t have papers. Papers were not required for people under 15. Francine had a ration card, but it was stamped with “Jew.” She spent the night in the train station bathroom.

On the train, Francine was in a compartment with eight people. Suddenly the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. Nazis boarded and began checking everyone’s papers. Thinking quickly, Francine said she was with the gentleman seated next to her. Miraculously, the Germans moved on. She told the man she lost her purse and didn’t want to be mistaken for a Jew.

Francine got off at the next stop, retrieved her bicycle, and began the journey of 650 miles to Dax, sleeping in barns at night, scrounging for whatever she could find to eat. She arrived in Dax a month later, exhausted, hungry, and dirty, having not had a bath the entire time. She went to the train station to board a horse and buggy taxi to the address her cousin had given her.

Outside the station she saw another Jewish family that she knew from Paris. There wasn’t enough room for all of them to ride together. That family took one buggy, and Francine took another one that she shared with two nuns. The other family was immediately picked up by the Germans who stopped them to ask for their papers.

When Francine arrived at the address she was given, she found out that her mother and sister had gone to Toulouse. The next day, two boys led her across fields to Free France. Crossing the border, she was shot by a guard. The bullet grazed her back and she fell to the ground, unconscious. When it was dark, a man awakened her and took her to his home, where she was able to bathe and rest. His wife gave her clothes so she looked like a peasant and sent her on her way.

It took a few more weeks to get to Toulouse by bicycle. Again, Francine scrounged for whatever food she could find. When she got to the address, she found out that her mother and sister were gone. She finally caught up with them at Grauhlet.

For the next three years, Francine, her sister and their mother went from place to place hiding with the help of French non-Jews. They were liberated when a jeep with two American GIs who were lost came to the house where they were hiding.

At the end of the war, they went back to their old apartment in Paris, only to find it occupied by someone else. After a year they of living in a squalid hotel, they were able to move back in. They were also able to retrieve $600 that Francine’s father had hidden in a baseboard. They found out that Francine’s father, who had been in the French Underground, was denounced by collaborators and taken to Birkenau Concentration Camp, where he was murdered.

Francine married an American GI and came to the US in 1950, eventually settling in Charleston, SC. She is 94 years old.

Francine lost 56 close relatives and countless other cousins who were murdered by the Nazis.

Her son, Alan, said he once asked her how she had the will to survive her harrowing ordeal. She replied that “we wanted to live. We did what we had to do to survive.” ■

The Ajzensztark family 1937 during a holiday in Poland. This is the last picture of Francine’s family with everyone still alive. Francine is the little girl, sitting with her arms crossed. Her sister Susie is seated all the way to the right. Her mother Grina is standing, third from left.

Francine Taylor (right), with her parents and sister in 1930.

Francine Taylor at Orly Field in 1945, where she met her husband, American GI, Harry Taylor

Francine Taylor / Photo courtesy of Davod/John Pregulman

Francine and her son Alan

Eileen Chepenik, member of SCCH, Executive Director of Trident Literacy Association

The Journey of Survivors Doris and Bert Gosschalk

My father, Bert Gosschalk, was born in 1920 in a small town, Wijhe, Holland. The Germans invaded the country in May 1940 and occupied it within five days. Persecution of the Jews started slowly. First they were required to have identity cards and were not allowed in certain public places. They then had a curfew. They were prohibited from owning cars, horses or bikes and could not have bank accounts. They could only buy groceries during certain hours. Eventually they were required to wear yellow stars on their clothing and to live in ghettos.

My mother, Theodora Eliza van Blankenstein, known as Doris, was born in Groningen, Holland on April 21, 1922. She was also caught up in the war. She met my dad and eventually they married in July, 1942.

All unmarried men had to report to labor camps. There was a mass wedding ceremony performed by the mayor in the city square. My father and mother, who had been dating, were among those married. Since they did not have their own home, my mother went to her family’s home and my father went to his family’s home.

Three months later, all Jewish men, single and married, were ordered to report to the labor camps. Ultimately, my mom joined my father and they went into hiding. They lived in a family’s attic and paid a handsome sum. Soon the family demanded more money, so they found another family who did not charge as much.

A few months later, the man of the family was called away and the wife told my parents to leave. Having no place to go, they went into the woods and found an abandoned cabin with no electricity, plumbing or heat. An outdoor well was their only source of water. A cousin and friends brought them food. At times, when the Germans searched the woods, they abandoned the cabin and slept in the woods.

My father joined the Dutch underground and tried to sabotage the Germans. Once they attempted to blow up a railroad bridge, but the charge did not go off and the Germans discovered what happened.

They searched the area, including the woods where my parents were. My parents were captured. My father and another man were taken to the local jail and placed in a small cell with 25-30 other prisoners. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters and severely beaten in an effort to make them talk about the Dutch underground activities. When they returned to the local jail they learned that all of the other men had been lined up in front of the jail and machine-gunned.

My mother was taken to Westerbork Labor Camp. She had just become pregnant with me. A little later, my father was also sent there. Men and women were kept separately and they were not allowed to communicate with each other. My mother was put to work sewing. My father worked in the fields, growing food for the Germans.

The Germans knew they were losing the war and the allies were closing in. One night when the guns were close and the Germans thought the camp might be overrun, they gave my father permission to visit my mother.

On the morning of April 25, 1945, my father woke up and the camp was quiet. The guards were nowhere in sight. At great risk, he was the first one to cross the line the Germans had drawn inside the camp. He went into the houses where the Germans lived and they were empty. He found a bicycle and started riding it toward the sound of the guns. He found the Canadian Army and rode back into the camp on a Canadian tank.

At the time, my father weighed less than a hundred pounds. The Canadian troops ate lunch and threw three pieces of bread on the ground. My father picked them up, went to my mother, and shared them with her. He said

this was better than any piece of cake he has ever eaten.

The prisoners had no place to go so they remained at the camp. My father rejoined the Dutch underground and assisted the allied soldiers in searching for German soldiers who were hiding. Westerbork was used as a holding and labor camp for the Dutch collaborators. My father was put in charge.

I was born two months after my parents were liberated. My sister was born in 1948. In 1951, we moved to the United States, first to Texas and then to Charleston, SC. Once in Charleston, my mother became very active in KKBE Sisterhood. She was a kind and warm hearted, person, always putting others before herself. As she did in Westerbork Labor Camp, she was talented with her hands. She passed away on March 4, 2001. My father passed away on December 18, 1991. ■

Doris and Bert Gosschalk with Frieda and Josine

Doris and Bert Gosschalk in Holland before the war, left and in an undated photo, right

Josine Gosschalk Reavis and Frieda Gosschalk Bernstein

Frieda Gosschalk Bernstein, daughter of Holocaust survivors

Survivor Margot Freudenberg’s touch on her grandson Larry will never fade

Margot and her husband, Walter, with their nine-year-old son, Henry, came to Charleston from Essen, Germany via London and New York in 1940. Their flight to freedom and safety has been told often.

Kristalnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was the impetus for the decision that his grandmother, Margot made: they must leave Germany as soon as possible. Kristalnacht took place on Nov 9-10, 1938, when the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence throughout Germany, Austria and other occupied countries. Synagogues and businesses’ windows were crashed by the Nazis. Rampaging mobs attacked Jews in the streets, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. Broken glass littered the streets in front of burning synagogues. By the end of the night, 91 Jews were dead, more than 900 synagogues were burned, nearly 7000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were vandalized and 30,000 Jewish men had been deported to concentration camps.

Six months later and after untold hardships, Henry’s medical issues, fear and bureaucratic delays, this family of three made it to London where Henry was sent to the countryside for safety. They finally left for the US in March 1940 and arrived in Charleston with only two dollars and fifty cents. Help from the local Jewish community and international rescue agencies such

as HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society which supported Jews fleeing persecution and poverty in Europe), made it possible to find housing.

Margot was trained in physical rehabilitation at the University of Munich but could not work here as she was not licensed. New acquaintances in the medical profession helped her take and pass an oral examination; she became only the fourth licensed physical therapist in all of South Carolina. Margot Freudenberg’s name became permanently associated with health, giving and kindness.

Larry and his sisters spent a great deal of time with their grandmother, Margot. They spent overnights and weekends with her, loved her dearly, and listened to her stories of life in Europe before the war and as antisemitism grew. But their father, Henry, never spoke about his early life. He refused to talk about Germany. He wanted nothing

to do with Europe ever again. And he never did.

In 1996, Larry and his wife, Marsha, and their children traveled to Israel to commemorate the bat mitzvah of their daughter, Cara. Bat mitzvah is a coming-of-age ritual for 12-13 year old Jewish girls. They visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, which presents the history of the Shoah emphasizing the experiences of individual victims through artifacts, survivors’ testimonies and personal possessions.

Larry’s memories come from his grandmother, Margot, who took him with her, although he was only eight or nine years old, to Charleston’s nursing homes and hospitals where she provided physical therapy. Recipient of many awards and honors and recognized wherever she went in the Lowcountry, Margot was forever grateful to the United States for taking in her family. She touched the lives of thousands in the 72 years she was involved in the medical community. It was her way of paying back this country. She passed away nine years ago at the age of 105. Her ‘touch’ on her grandson, Larry, will never fade. ■

The most powerful impact on Larry Freudenberg’s life was made by his paternal grandmother, Margot Freudenberg and the experiences she shared with him of Germany prior to World War II.

Larry remembers showing his father the image of a passport of a man born in 1929 and remarking that, “He didn’t make it, but you did.” It elicited no comment from his father, Henry Freudenberg. To his death, Henry would not speak of the fear and extreme difficulties of his childhood life in Germany.

Margot Freudenberg in a 1981 interview with ETV/SCCH.

Larry Freudenberg

Henry Freudenberg and mother Margot Freudenberg

Leah Chase, original member of SCCH, journalist, travel consultant

“We need not just history lessons, but the lessons of history”

Otto Frank, The Anne Frank House and Memory of the Holocaust

We need not just history lessons, Otto Frank insisted, but the lessons of history. History lessons can be distant, far away, analyzed intellectually without emotion from a neutral stance. But the lessons of history are for today: they are moral, meaningful, and they inform how we conduct ourselves now. They are urgent, and they are in constant dialogue with the present. Memory and history are distinct, but must remain tethered closely together, or drift into the menace of mythology. If textbooks are the primary tools of history lessons, stories are the tools of memory, and Anne’s story has become a cornerstone for the world’s shared memory of the Holocaust.

Otto Frank, who as an officer of the German empire’s army endured the trials of the First World War, was perhaps the best equipped of the eight people in hiding in Amsterdam to deal with the stresses and deprivations of the

Secret Annex, the 450 sq. ft. space where the Franks, van Pels, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer spent more than two years eluding the Nazi grasp. He quieted the uproars, tamped down the conflicts and served as a peacemaker as the eight people in hiding grappled with fear, uncertainty, stress, hunger, boredom, stillness, silence, and the dim light of rooms with blacked-out windows.

Otto lost everyone to the Holocaust, but amidst his traumatic losses, he received his daughter’s diary, a profound gift to memory. Anne herself wrote about how improbable it was that a child author writer might achieve an audience, but the extraordinary resonance of her words produced one of the world’s most read non-fiction books, now available in 73 different languages, and read in communities as diverse as the indigenous Maori of New Zealand the secret girls’ book clubs in Kabul, Afghanistan, while the Taliban bans them from schools.

The Diary’s power to engage and resonate all over the globe defies simple explanation; there is childhood innocence, the reflections of a gifted writer, the juxtaposition of the mundane details of daily life in hiding against the backdrop of the cataclysmic conflict in Europe, and the power of getting to know the personal experiences of an individual so intimately. She achieves a remarkable feat of feeling relatable even as she grapples with such unique and unprecedented circumstances, in a wholly atypical context: as she put it, “The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland.”

If the Diary was the first gift to memory, the Anne Frank House itself was the second. The global interest in Anne Frank provided the support necessary to save the Anne Frank House when a corporation came to Amsterdam after the war to build a factory, intending to level the entire block to do so. Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote the introduction to the Diary when it was published in the United States, called upon her wealthy and powerful connections of the mid-1950s — including Senator John F. Kennedy — to help raise the funds to preserve the Anne Frank House; it was saved from demolition, and the Anne Frank House was formally established as the “Anne Frank Stichting [Foundation].”

Otto understood that memory was not just about the past, and that resulted in two powerful decisions. First, the Anne Frank House is today an empty space. The Nazis not only attempted to murder every Jewish human being in Europe, they wanted to steal all of their property. When tips were called in about people in hiding, the police called a moving company they had contracted

with to pull up behind them and haul away all of their property. When Otto returned from Auschwitz, everything had been removed from the hiding place. He insisted it stay that way. The emptiness of the space reflected the loss he felt, the absence of the seven human beings he had spent two years in hiding with.

Yet Otto also insisted that the space be not just a mausoleum, a place to remember the dead, but a living educational institution, and dedicated to combatting prejudice and discrimination and to bringing young people together, one where young people’s voices are empowered, and through dialogue they learn from one another. In this fashion, the Anne Frank House educators have been active in 89 countries, reaching millions of people.

Memory includes what happens passively in our individual minds. But Otto appreciated that memory is also active, and shared, and that when we act today on the lessons of the past, then remembrance has truly become part of our culture. ■

Otto Frank with Margot and Anne.

The Annex in Amsterdam where the family hid.

A recreation of Anne Frank’s bedroom, and the original notebook she received for her 13th birthday, which would become her diary, below.

Doyle Stevick, PhD, Executive Director of the Anne Frank Center at USC, Associate Professor at USC, School of Education

Memories of Liberator Nathan Schaeffer

Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders and housed 280,000 inmates, 95 percent of who were Jews.

Liberated on April 11, 1945, by the 6th Armored Division of the Third US Army under General George Patton, Buchenwald left a lasting impression upon Nathan Schaeffer, a 23-year-old sergeant (1922-2015). He is one of the South Carolinians who liberated Nazi death and labor camps. Buchenwald was second only to Auschwitz in the horrors it imposed upon its prisoners.

Jack Schaeffer remembers that his father did not discuss his war experiences when he returned from Germany. He never talked about them at that time. It wasn’t until Jack was in college at the University of Georgia that his father told him what he had seen. Nat was an amateur photographer and had carried several cameras with him. The photos he took were never shown to his children, Jack

and his two sisters, Marilyn and Michelle. The photos were only shown when he was interviewed by Ruth Jacobs (obm) in 1991 for the first videos produced by SC ETV for the SC Council on the Holocaust featuring survivors and liberators in the state. These videos are available at the website of the SC Council on the Holocaust and on YouTube.

It was the smell of burned and rotting flesh that hit Nat’s group of soldiers as they drove closer to the camp. It was the second or third day after the camp was liberated. There were no gas masks in those days so Nat and the soldiers used their handkerchiefs to cover their noses to tolerate the strong smell.

Inside the gate were wagons loaded with bodies ready to be burned. A medical facility in a nearby building was used to experiment on children. They were not allowed inside this building. He could not believe this had happened to ‘his people,’ Jack said. His father took photos of piles of ashes, of bones, of emaciated men with sunken, dead eyes. He told Jack that when the soldiers entered the camp, many gave candy and gum to the inmates. The starved inmates refused the offer to join the soldiers to eat; instead, they ate out of the garbage cans.

Later, after his three children were young adults, Nat told them of the stacks of bodies on the ground and how wood was laid on top, and then other bodies stacked on top of the wood. Then it was set on fire and the bodies burned with the wood.

A few years later, back home in Charleston

In the late ‘50s, he became depressed from the trauma, the vivid memories. His conscience bothered him so much that he destroyed many of the photos.

Nat Schaeffer continually asked himself how could the people who lived nearby and in other places in Germany not know what had taken place practically on their doorsteps. How could they not know what was going on when the odor of rotten flesh, dead and burned bodies, filled the air and reached

five to 10 miles around Buchenwald. To be there was terrifying and horrifying.

From that time on, Schaeffer involved himself with a stronger Jewish life, supporting Israel, Holocaust survivors and his local synagogue. He was a regular member and the Kiddush maven of the Brith Sholom Beth Israel Minyan House in South Windermere.

The Schaffer family had moved to Charleston in the early ‘50s. Nat opened a grocery store at Alexander and Judith Streets and later, one at Calhoun and Alexander, known as the Bargain Corner, probably the first supermarket and dry goods store on Charleston’s peninsula. His wife, Lee, was a successful and popular caterer for many years; and they were an important part of the kosher community when they owned the South Windermere bakery. ■

Nathan’s son Jack Shaeffer

Nathan Schaeffer (under the arrow) during the Liberation of Paris.

Nathan Schaeffer was a 23-year-old sergeant in the US Army when he helped liberate Nazi camps.

Nathan Schaeffer at a program honoring Liberators at the US Capitol in 2010.

Nathan and his wife Lee

Leah Chase, original member of SCCH, journalist, travel consultant

Liberator Horace Berry and the 71st Infantry Division The Liberation of Gunskirchen Camp

Horace Spartan Berry was born on February 3, 1920 in Greer, South Carolina. His middle name, “Spartan,” came from his grandfather, Spartan Commodor, and that name may be in honor of the “Spartan Regiment”, a military unit that fought in the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781; and, after which the City of Spartanburg, SC, was named in 1785.

Berry attended Greer High School and then enrolled in Clemson College — then a military school — and graduated with the Class of 1941. After he graduated from Clemson, he entered the Army and active duty on June 20, 1941, by reporting as a Second Lieutenant to Camp Croft, a World War II infantry training facility located near Spartanburg. After spending ten months at Camp Croft, he was stationed for much of World War II at Army installations from Georgia to California to the Canal Zone. He was sent overseas in early 1945 near the end of the war where he served as a captain, and thereafter as a major, of the 71st Infantry Division.

The 71st Infantry Division — also known as “The Red Circle Division” — was formed in the United States in February 1943. It disembarked at the French Port of Le Havre in December 1944, and entered combat as it advanced into the Alsace-Lorraine Region in France. Horace Berry joined the Division in early 1945 — as it was advancing into Germany in February 1945 as part of the U.S. 3rd Army, commanded by Lt. General George S. Patton, Jr. When it crossed the Rhine River, the Division was engaged in several battles with the German Army, most notably capturing the cities of Coburg, Bayreuth and Regensburg in April, 1945. Toward the war’s end, the 71st Infantry Division entered Austria, where it joined advancing military forces from the Soviet Union.

On May 4, 1945, the 71st Infantry Division — as it was moving through Austria — came upon and liberated Gunskirchen, one of many sub-camps of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria. Located just a few miles from the City of Lambach, the camp had a

short-lived history. Construction began in December 1944. The camp did not open until April 1945 — and when it did open, thousands of prisoners were sent there — evacuated on death marches from Mauthausen. Because of overcrowded conditions at the camp, diseases such as typhus and dysentery spread rapidly through the weakened and starving camp population. With the exception of approximately 400 political prisoners, the prisoners were Jews from Hungary. It is estimated that some 17,000 Hungarian Jews passed through the Gunskirchen camp. As they approached Gunskirchen, Captain Berry and others in his unit saw inmates on the road leading to the camp. They all had striped clothes underneath ragged outer garments they were all wearing — and they all were starving. Members of his unit tried to give the inmates chocolate bars and cigarettes. Most were unable to eat the chocolate bars, getting stomach cramps — though a number of them actually ate the cigarettes. Inmates died on the road as they attempted to eat. When Berry and his men entered and moved through the camp, they couldn’t believe what they saw: human skeletons crowded around them — shrieking, groaning, cheering, crying — all from the joy they felt from liberation. Captain Berry saw dead bodies wherever he looked: in the barracks and scattered in all directions among the thick trees that surrounded the camp. Many of the bodies were in a state of decomposition and that — along with human excrement and

smoldering fires — created a smell so horrible and sickening that it could and would never be forgotten. Berry was placed in charge of a

platoon and ordered to bury the dead that he had seen — and to transfer any living inmates to a local hospital. He and his men spent about a week at that task — using German SS officers to gather and bury the dead.

What Horace Berry — and other soldiers in the 71st Infantry — experienced in Gunskirchen in May of 1945 reaffirmed forever why the world came together to oppose Nazi Germany: to defeat a government built on hate, race myths and murder. As the War ended, Major General Willard G. Wyman, Commander the of the 71st Infantry Division, ordered the publication of a booklet about the experiences of Horace Berry and others under his command at Gunskirchen. The booklet contains much more detailed information about those experiences than is written here and it is entitled: “The SeventyFirst Came…To Gunskirchen Lager”. In the Foreward to that booklet, General Wyman wrote, in part, something he believed should always be remembered:

Captain Horace S. Berry during WWII

Part of the 71st Infantry Division — Horace Berry in first row, center.

Cover of booklet about Liberation of Gunskirchen published by the 71st Infantry Division

Joe Wachter, member of SCCH, attorney

“The damning evidence against the Nazi war criminals found at Gunskirchen Lager is being recorded in this booklet in the hope that the lessons learned in Germany will not soon be forgotten….The horror of Gunskirchen must not be repeated. (An) honest record…. will serve to remind all of us….that the freedom and privileges we enjoy in a democratic nation must be jealously guarded and protected.”

Memories of Liberator Henry S. Allen, Sr.

Linz-Tran, VE Day - Victory in Europe - May 7, 1945.

The small reconnaissance units worked in deplorable conditions in the camps. Malnutrition and disease were rampant, and corpses lay unburied. The Allied forces buried many, but also brought help and comfort to the survivors. Henry Allen wanted to be specific about the camps. His forces moved on to Mauthausen, a concentration camp.

He noted the importance placed on the different camp types: POW camps were prison camps. Labor camps worked the prisoners. Concentration camps were death camps. Allen remembers coming into Ohrdruf death camp on April 12, 1945. He said he was precise because President F.D. Roosevelt died that day. Ohrdruf was liberated on April 4, 1945.

His armored task force was to prevent the POWs leaving the camp. Many were suffering from extreme malnutrition; medical personnel were coming from the front line to care of them. Some able POWs acquired wire cutters and went scouting for SS (Schutzstaffel) and others who committed atrocities. Mr. Allen said, “I never did get my wire cutters back.”

As the Allies advanced across Europe, they encountered and then liberated Nazi

concentration camps and the inmates they found there. Despite the efforts by the Germans to hide or destroy evidence of mass murder, many camps remained intact and still held significant prisoner populations. Allen saw wagons filled with bodies that, due to haste, were not burned by the enemy. He saw bodies in the crematory, and bodies in trenches or other places of internment. The enemy did not have time to “hide or destroy” the bodies. He also explained a gas chamber rigged as showers and the “tooth shop” named by the allied soldiers. Teeth with gold were extracted.

The Soviet troops had freed the prisoners and occupied Majdanek concentration camp and proceeded to liberate camps throughout Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz in January 1945. Coming from the west, United States forces liberated Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945 and the British liberated Bergen-Belsen that same month.

The small reconnaissance units worked in deplorable conditions in the camps, where malnutrition and disease were rampant, and corpses lay unburied. Allied troops reacted in shock and disbelief to the evidence of Nazi atrocities. In addition to burying the dead, the Allied forces attempted to help and comfort the survivors with food, clothing and medical assistance. ■

Born in 1924 in Horry County in South Carolina, Henry Allen grew up in America with some awareness of the enemy atrocities. His family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina. Allen could have had a deferment working on ships in Wilmington for the Defense Department. Learning about classmates and friends

who were wounded, or who had given the supreme sacrifice. Henry Allen entered WWII through the draft system.

He went from basic training at Fort Bragg, NC and then to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Allen finished and was assigned to a reconnaissance unit. The reconnaissance units were small but performed a wide range of tasks to assist commanders and headquarters to make rational decisions. Allen and other reconnaissance units arrived in Europe in January 1945. United States forces came from the west liberating Buchenwald and Dachau. Allen crossed into Austria. His unit heard the last shots when they were near

“T

he things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were... overpowering... I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

— General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s letter to General George C. Marshall dated April 15, 1945.

Dwight D. Eisenhower viewing a demonstration of prisoner torture by SS guards at Ohrdruf, April 12, 1945. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, eisenhowerlibrary.gov.

Still of Henry S. Allen from a 1991 interview. The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive / The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org.

Margaret Walden, member of SCCH, retired SC educator

Peter Wolfgang Becker Witness: Napola Student and Hitler Youth

This is how Peter Becker summarized his childhood experiences during the Third Reich. He was born on September 6, 1929, in Germany and first lived 150 miles north of Berlin. At the age of 6, he was enrolled in one of the special schools set up to indoctrinate the future generation of Nazi leaders: one of 43 National Political Education Institutions (or Napola short for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt), located in Potsdam near Berlin. In an interview for the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust in 1991, Becker explained that he was enrolled in the boarding school after his father died in 1935. He did not understand why his mother left him at this early age and he never got used to the “environment” and being away from home. Then, after he turned 13, he became ill, was discharged from the school, and “became a normal child in a normal public school.”

Dr. Becker is an important witness to the Holocaust. Even though his schooling at the Napola was nothing special, neither his experience as a member in the Hitler Youth, first during the time at the Napola and then as a member of “the regular Hitler Youth outside” — as he put it. School was difficult for many students and his experiences are now a commonplace — bedwetting, illnesses, to be deemed “no longer fit material for the future elite” of Nazi Germany — so much so that we hear about them in novels, documentaries, and films (e.g., “Before the Fall” (Germany, 2004) or All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr). What makes Peter Becker’s testimony unique are his insights into the imperceptible indoctrination and his reflections on his own “painful” and “reluctant” acknowledgement of Germany’s unconceivable atrocities.

Becker also talked briefly about his memory of antisemitism. He describes how — maybe surprisingly — “Jews actually were not mentioned very often” at the Napola and in the Hitler Youth. Still, he did become aware of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It is one of the key moments in the interview when he recalls questioning his grandfather after seeing Jewish prisoners: why were not only “the enemies of Germany” but also Jews incarcerated in Sachsenhausen? His grandfather’s answer was simply that Jews were also “enemies of Germany,” and they were “put to work” clearing rubble after an air raid. Young Peter took note but did not think much of it.

After the war, he became a member of a boys’ club established by the Americans to — in Becker’s words — “transform little Nazis into little democrats.” It is only then that he learned about concentration and extermination camps, Einsatzgruppen or Nazi death squads, and the atrocities committed against Jews and others. His candid reflections are striking; he acknowledges “I was asking myself what kind of a Nazi was I, and I think I was 150% Nazi.” It was the beginning

of a very slow process that led him to study History in the United Sates to become a Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. There is a beautiful logic in his career choice. The kind of indoctrination to which he was subjected was possible because his knowledge of German history “was very limited” due to his schooling in Nazi Germany. Consequently, he wanted to teach young adults about History. And in this way, he studied History all his life. His reflections, his honesty about his indoctrination, and his evaluation about himself as a boy in the Napola and the Hitler Youth make this interview so extraordinary. At the age of 62, as the Department Chair of History at USC, Dr. Peter Becker did not seek excuses

for himself or others. His assessment of the manipulation of young Germans between 1933 and 1945 are based on historical facts and clear-eyed, life-long self-contemplations. In 1991, he was, however, also hopeful. Knowing about and having experienced WWII and the Holocaust guarantees that “a Hitler would never come to power again in Germany.” Sadly, this outlook is today fading, just as the memory of the Holocaust is in danger of vanishing as well. Is the reverse also true? That if one has not lived through such experience, one more easily accepts antisemitism? That if we do not understand the lessons of the Holocaust, we will become more easily receptable to hate, just as the young Becker had? ■

“A

nd so, in that sense, we were indoctrinated, as I said, in very subtle fashion so that, by the time the war ended in 1945 when I was 15, I had become a Nazi without ever really being aware that I was one.”

Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 1938.

At the age of 6, Peter Becker was enrolled in one of 43 National Political Education Institutions (or Napola short for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt) near Berlin.

Still of Peter Becker from a 1991 interview. (Becker died in 2018.) The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive / The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org.

Johannes Schmidt, PhD, Professor of German at Clemson University, member of SCCH

Memory should teach us that the “Road to Auschwitz”

to Auschwitz”

During the last 23 years I have had the honor of participating as a member of the Claims Conference negotiating delegation. I was particularly proud as I was the first woman to participate in the delegation. For me this is not a “job” but a “mission” as I am the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. This role has led me to work tirelessly for increased compensation to be paid to individuals and for funding to assist survivors to live in dignity in their old age. This assistance provides for social welfare services such as home care, food, medicine and more. But in this journey, the past intermingles with the present and teaches us lessons for the future.

The Claims Conference negotiates with the German Ministry of Finance located in the building built by Herman Goering in the 1930s. It has thousands of rooms and it is rumored that Goering insisted that it was large enough for a small plane to land on the roof. A labyrinth of thousands of rooms and except for the addition of computer cables and the removal of the Nazi emblems — it is seemingly unchanged. It is a haunting place. It is difficult not to sit in a room and contemplate whether the Battle of Britain was planned there — or perhaps the campaign in North Africa.

When the Claims Conference negotiates in that building it is impossible not to feel the weight of history but we also feel the burden and privilege of negotiating to assist survivors.

My most enduring recollections are from two incidents that occurred on the very first day that I went to the building. The first was a conversation with Noach Flug z”l. Noach was a survivor of Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz (and many other camps). He moved to Israel and became a diplomat of the State of Israel and upon retirement dedicated himself to advocating for survivors and among other roles was the President of the International Auschwitz Committee and head of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. Prior to our meeting with the German Government in Berlin, the Claims Conference regularly travelled to Bonn for negotiations. Our first trip to Berlin was in mid 2000 as the Federal Government only relocated different parts of its administration in stages to the capital. As we entered the building, Noach Flug whispered

to me “if I would have said in Auschwitz that I would one day walk freely around Goering’s headquarters, they would have thought I had really become mad”. It was an iconic moment that I will never forget. The second recollection from that day was a phone call I made upon leaving the building. I called my Opa (grandfather) in Australia. He had fled Berlin and arrived in Australia in March 1939. He had never returned despite offers of trips from the City of Berlin. He asked me where I was calling from in Berlin, I told him the address and there

was silence on the other end of the phone. He said not a word except to ask me if I was alright and I could tell that his memory was that of the building festooned with Nazi swastikas where Jews never entered or if they did, they never left. It was as if he could not believe his granddaughter entered and left the building.

Memory is part of every aspect of our work and drives us at the Claims Conference to fulfill our mission. But more than just recalling the past it demonstrates the resilience of survivors. Noach Flug’s story demonstrated that he not only dedicated his life to assisting the State of Israel but helping survivors everywhere. Incredulously — even perhaps to him— from the depths of Auschwitz he was now meeting with Ministers and Chancellors. He married another survivor, raised a family and his daughter became Governor of the Bank of Israel. My own Opa reestablished his life and opened

a small store. He had a daughter and grandchildren. While more “ordinary,” it too was like all other survivors “extraordinary” — as he fled with nothing but memories.

Each time the Claims Conference prepares for negotiations we identify the individuals that can be assisted by the liberalizations and funding the Claims Conference is pressing from the German Government. Over the years we have achieved dozens of liberalizations from the recognition of the trauma of living under false identity to newly researched labor camps in Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. The German government has paid more than $90 billion in indemnification to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis. While the Claims Conference is proud of the accomplishments of the previous decades, we are painfully aware of the ongoing challenges faced by survivors in their twilight years as the survivors continue to live with scars of the Shoah — sometimes physical and sometimes psychological.

We emphasize how they suffered — we listen to their memories — and most importantly we focus on their life after the war and where the intervening decades have taken them. Their resilience and courage in the face of suffering and immeasurable loss is awe inspiring. For some the post war years have been easier than others. For no-one was it simple. No one can fathom where they found the strength to put their lives together to the extent that they did. All I know is that “memory” is not only the past but how we arrive at the present. Most importantly it teaches us lessons for the future.

During our work we meet survivors that insist that the suffering they endured should not happen to any other group for whatever reason. That is the enduring impact of “memory’” — it needs to empower us to strive with all possible means to ensure a future without hate of the “other” and prejudice against those that are “different”. Memory needs to teach us that the “Road to Auschwitz” did not have to be the ”Road to Auschwitz.” ■

Karen Heilig serves as the Assistant Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference and General Counsel. Since 1999 she has participated in negotiations between the Claims Conference and the German Government, the Austrian Government and negotiations on unpaid Holocaust era insurance policies. Heilig acted as the Producer of the documentary film Reckonings released in 2022 which

delves into the creation of the first every compensation agreements — the Luxembourg Agreements in 1952.

did not have to be the “Road

Claims Conference Negotiations Delegation from left to right: Claims Conference Assistant Executive Vice President and General Counsel Karen Heilig, Special Negotiator Amb. Stuart Eizenstat, Deputy Director, Berlin Konrad Matschke, President of the International Auschwitz Committee, Holocaust survivor Marian Turski, Claims Conference Executive Vice President Greg Schneider, Director of International Jewish Affairs at the American JewIsh Committee Rabbi Andrew Baker, Amb. Colette Avital, Claims Conference Representative in Germany Rüdiger Mahlo, Legal Advisor Christiane Reeh. ©Marco Limberg / Claims Conference

The Claims Conference negotiates with the German Ministry of Finance located in the building built by Herman Goering (shown here during a parade) in the 1930s.

Karen Heilig, Assistant Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference)

The Modern Assault on Holocaust Memory

The highly accomplished musician Kanye West, who has changed his name simply to “Ye,” made several public statements of antisemitic beliefs including an interview on the Alex Jones InfoWars program where West stated, “I like Hitler…the Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that. Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” While many prominent figures rushed to condemn these statements, and rightly so, the public has had mixed reactions with some continuing to show support and others speaking out against his views.

Unfortunately, the views expressed by Ye, are not an anomaly. The Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked antisemitic incidents in the US for several decades, reported that there were 2,717 antisemitic incidents of assault, harrassment, and vandalism reported in 2021, the highest number ever recorded in the county. In the wake of this rising tide of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the United States and the world, a question surfaces: What has happened to Americans collective memory to “Never Forget” the horrors of the Holocaust and the violent antisemitism that was responsible for it?

Some may likely be quick to criticize the American education system, however, the number of states that either mandate Holocaust education or require the Holocaust be taught in multiple grade levels in adherence to the inclusion of the event in state standards has only risen consistently since the 1990s. Additionally, it is without question that there are more literature, memoirs, documentaries, websites, and films about the Holocaust available than there ever have been. Thus, access to knowledge is not absent, but rather it is abundant.

Despite the prevalence of Holocaust education and wide availability of educational resources it is apparent that the undeniable memory of the Holocaust as a fact no longer resonates with Americans as it once did, or at least appeared to have, in previous decades. We must recognize that the assault on the memory of the Holocaust has gained significant traction outside of the confines of the classroom. This attack occurs mainly in spaces on the internet, mainly in social media forums, where people of all ages can easily access a vast array of opinions at a moments notice and is perpetuated by those with intent

to distort or deny the Holocaust and it is absorbed by those who are most impressionable and also those looking for an answer or someone or something to blame for society’s ills.

Those who promote hate speech, whether it be antisemitic or targeted at other groups, and Holocaust denial or distortion have found an inexpensive and easy to use outlet to share these views with millions of others instantaneously. The social media giants, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Tiktok, have seen considerable increases in hate speech in

recent years that they have failed to effectively monitor or limit. If we consider that worldwide people spent an average of 2 hours and 32 minutes per day in 2021 and that the group that spends the most time using social media is teens ages 13-18 that spent an average of 3 hours and 1 minute per day, then we are presented with a clearer picture of the potential influence of social media.

In looking at Kanye West’s influence on social media, the troubling results become more apparent. He has over 30 million followers on Twitter, which is more than double the number of Jews in the world. Therefore, even if many of his followers dismiss his views as the rantings of a mentally unstable individual,

there are many others who take him seriously and are willing to follow his views to become antisemites and Holocaust deniers themselves. And Mr. West is only one of many influential individuals who promote these hateful beliefs through online forums.

In order to combat the surge of antisemitism and the assault on the memory of the Holocaust it is necessary to expand beyond just the walls of the education system and demand better monitoring of online hate speech and all the forms it takes. These online forums are areas that our youth spend significant amounts of time on each day, which requires us to also be vigilant in monitoring our own children and their usage of social media and to engage with them in discussing the potential perils of social media sites and the online world.

Additionally, we must expand our notion of Holocaust education to ensure that we do more than just teach the history of the Holocaust, but also clearly show how the lessons from the Holocaust can be applied in our contemporary world. One of the key tenets that UNESCO argues should be a focus of Holocaust education is “Teaching and learning about the Holocaust highlights aspects of human behaviour that affect all societies, such as the susceptibility to scapegoating and the desire for simple answers to complex problems; the potential for extreme violence and the abuse of power; and the roles that fear, peer pressure, indifference, greed and resentment can play in social and political relations.” It is lessons such as these, when reflecting upon the world we wish to live in and future we wish to create, that are essential to help youth and adults alike understand and embrace.

The South Carolina Council on the Holocaust continues to dedicate ourselves to providing quality professional development opportunities for SC teachers. Each year we offer two week long summer institutes for teachers, one day conferences, online and inperson seminars, and many other professional development opportunities to engage teachers in learning more about the Holocaust and how to teach it appropriately to their students. The SCCH is committed to fulfilling our vision of helping South Carolinians recognize the relevance of the Holocaust and human rights, apply it within their own lives, and work for the improvement of our society. ■

During an official tour of the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp, an Austrian Jewish survivor describes to General Dwight Eisenhower and the members of his entourage the use of the gallows in the camp. US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Scott Auspelmyer, Executive Director of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, retired educator

The Holocaust by Bullets: A Family’s Story

Monday, April 17 | 6:30 p.m. free and open to the public

PRESENTED BY FURMAN UNIVERSITY

Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Hwy, Greenville

Furman Hall, McEachern Lecture Hall (Room 214)

SPEAKER: Dr. Melinda Menzer, chair and professor of English, Furman University

Before World War II, Lithuania was a great center of Jewish life and learning, and yet Americans today know very little about the destruction of the Jewish community in Lithuania or what Patrick Desbois has called “the Holocaust by Bullets.” Dr. Melinda Menzer, who serves on the board of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, will recount her family’s story.

Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day

The Holocaust was the largest manifestation of antisemitism in recent history. Yom HaShoah reminds us of the horrors that Jews and other persecuted groups faced. Many commemorate Yom HaShoah by lighting yellow candles to keep alive the memories of the victims.

Temple Sinai Jewish History Center invites you to light a candle on Friday, April 21 | 1-4 p.m. in memory of these victims.

11 Church St., Sumter sumtercountymuseum.org

Columbia Jewish Federation’s Columbia Holocaust Education Commission

YOM HASHOAH

COMMEMORATION:

A Day to Remember

Sunday, April 23 at 5 p.m.

5:00 PM

storyteller. Her work explores the intergenerational impact of memory and migration. She is currently Shoah Foundation where she produces and hosts holds a degree in Communications ing History & Ourselves.

Congregation Beth Yam Yom HaShoah Remembrance

Beth Yam Yom

Beth Shalom Synagogue, Columbia

This year’s speaker, Rachel Cerrotti, is an award-winning author, educator, and documentary storyteller. Her work explores the intergenerational impact of memory and migration. She is currently the Inaugural Storyteller in Residence for USC Shoah Foundation where she produces and hosts The Memory Generation podcast. Ms. Cerrotti holds a degree in Communications from Temple University and is an alumna of The Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has completed educator’s seminars with Yad Vashem and Facing History & Ourselves.

With Our Sincere Thanks and Gratitude

To our Contributing Authors: A special thank you goes to all of the authors who spent countless hours researching and writing this historical narrative.

The Twisted Cross

PM

Program

The good and evil of German Christian clergy in the 1930’s

Sunday, April 23, 1 p.m. Hilton Head

Rabbi Brad Bloom reflected on this tragic segment of Jewish history. “The record of German Christian clergy is complex. Some embraced the Nazis, others defied them, often with loss of their lives.”

The program features Beth Yam’s Religious School students, prayers, readings, poetry and music of that time and place — and a discussion of “The Twisted Cross” by Rabbi Bloom. Come help us light the candles to rekindle our memories of the victims.

To our Survivors, Liberators, and Eyewitnesses: To the individuals and to the families, we have the deepest respect and gratitude. You have all spoken and written about a very difficult time in your life and we are deeply thankful that you shared your stories. Only by hearing your life testimonies, can we continue to tell the stories and battle those that wish to “rewrite history.” We must never forget the Lessons of the Holocaust and through these stories the lessons will live.

To the Post and Courier papers, the McClatchy papers and the Gannett papers: We are so thankful that you have continued to see this as a worthwhile project and worked with us to bring this to the communities of South Carolina. Thank you to Chase Heatherly and Scott Freedman of Free Times, and Michelle Long of McClatchy, Debbie Milteer of Gannett. A special thanks to Lisa Willis of Free Times who has spent many hours bringing the stories to life on the pages. You have provided the vehicle to reach the public and we have provided you with amazing personal and historical stories on the Holocaust.

THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS

The Columbia Holocaust Education Commission ration: A Day to Remember at

at Beth Shalom Synagogue, Columbia, SC