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.“

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? ■