Smooth Stone

Today is the 69th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and “The Night of Broken Glass”, was a massive nation-wide pogrom in Germany on the night of November 9, 1938 including the early hours of the following day and was directed at Jewish citizens throughout Germany, the newly acquired territories of Austria and Sudetenland. Germans freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. On those two days, this pogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 1574 synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. More than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps; a few were beaten to death with others forced to watch. The number of Jewish Germans killed is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 36 to about 200 over two days of rioting. The number of Jews killed is most often cited as 91.

Never forget.

From Ha’aretz:

Twenty days of systematic murder of prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp are detailed in a thick office binder in the huge archive of Nazi documents in this central German city.

The binder contains hundreds of pages written on both sides. Each one has a table containing the following information: first name, last name, date of birth, address, date of death – all written out in a careful longhand. The blue ink has faded over the years, but the Jewish names jump out. Lists upon lists of towns and cities throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. In the last column, the date of death, there is not much variety: one of 20 days in September, 1942. The title on the binder reads: Lublin-Majdanek, crematorium list 08.09-1942 – 28.09.1942.

The lists were apparently brought out of the Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated by the Russians. On the shelves around this one binder, on the first floor of the International Tracing Service (ITS) complex, are thousands more binders – the original records of the dead at the Buchenwald and Matthausen concentration camps, lists made by the Gestapo of deportees from Holland, who were captured at its headquarters after Germany surrendered, etc. All the documents are cataloged according to the names of victims and survivors, reflecting the efficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy.

This is the largest archive of Nazi documents in the world – more than 33 million pages of records, stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen, a Baroque town north of Frankfurt. The archive was established after World War II by the Allies, taking advantage of the town’s location between Germany’s four areas of occupation, and the fact that it had suffered practically no damage from bombardment. It is funded by the German government and operated by the Red Cross. Searching among the 17.5 million names recorded there, staffers assist people seeking information on the fate of their families or submitting demands for reparations from the German authorities.

Henri Amouroux, a French historian who testified on behalf of Maurice Papon at his war crimes trial and wrote several books on the Nazi occupation, has died, news reports said Monday. He was 87.

Amouroux died Sunday in Normandy, Le Parisien newspaper and France-Info radio reported. No cause of death was given.

Amouroux, who served as president of the history section of the prestigious Academie Francaise, testified at Papon’s 1997 trial for his role in deporting Jews during the World War II. Papon, a former Cabinet minister who became a symbol of France’s collaboration with the Nazis, was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity, and died earlier this year.

Born July 1, 1920 in Perigueux, southern France, Amouroux started as a journalist during World War II. He later worked for radio and television, and wrote several books on daily life under the German occupation.

Many historians accused him of being an apologist for the Vichy regime.

At the Papon trial, Amouroux countered noted American historian Robert O. Paxton’s version of the Vichy period. Lawyers representing Holocaust victims at the trial said Amouroux was sanctioned during postwar purges of the collaborationist press, charges Amouroux denied.

He was to be buried in his native Gironde region, Le Parisien reported. No information about surviving family members was immediately available.

It will enable archivists to determine just how many people were murdered in Italy. How many gypsies were sent to death camps? Which corporations were providing poison gas? How did the people who were carrying out the atrocities distance themselves from what they were doing? From The Daily Record:

A Morristown man who is interning with the Helsinki Commission in Washington, D.C., hand-delivered a letter signed by 42 members of Congress to the Italian Embassy, seeking to open Holocaust-era archives that have been sealed for six decades.

The letter, delivered by Mark Hadzewycz, 23, was a culmination of the commission’s effort to pressure members of the Italian parliament to open to scholars and the public 30 million pages of documentation once maintained by Nazi Germany and its allies during the Holocaust.

In May 2006, the 11 countries that govern the International Tracing Service, which oversees the Bad Arolsen Holocaust Archives in Germany, agreed to open the archives. But first each member country has to formally amend the 1955 Bonn Agreement, which has kept the archives essentially sealed, except for a process by which relatives can ask to have individual names looked up with no guarantee of when, if ever, they’ll get a response.

Once opened, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum would be one of several centers to receive a digital copy of the archives.

“It’s a shame that it’s taken so long to get it open to the public,” Hadzewycz said.

Hadzewycz, a graduate student of Ukrainian history at Rutgers University, has been living behind the Supreme Court in student housing since June. He applied to intern at the Helsinki Commission partly because it frequently came up in his research, he said.

Eight countries already have ratified the amendment, and Greece is scheduled to approve the amendment within the month. France has said it will ratify the amendment when parliament convenes in September. That leaves only Italy.

Click here to read the full article.

An heartfelt thank you to the Criveanu family. From Jpost:

Yad Vashem on Wednesday posthumously honored a Romanian reserves officer who blocked the deportation of Romanian Jews to Nazi death camps.

Theodor Criveanu was inducted into Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations” group of non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Nazis. His son, Willie Criveanu, accepted the award on his behalf.

The 20,000 Jews of Czernowitz, Romania, were interned during the war and slated for deportation to death camps.

As a reserves officer in the Romanian army, Criveanu was assigned the task of presenting authorities a list of Jews who were required to work in the ghetto, and were thus spared deportation. According to testimonies given to Yad Vashem, Criveanu risked his own life by handing out permits beyond the allowed limit, including to Jews who were not essential to the workforce. Yad Vashem said it could not estimate how many Jews he saved.

Criveanu married the daughter of one of the Jews he saved. He died in Romania in 1988.

“My father’s life was based on justness, correctness. He was a great humanitarian, that was his nature,” his son said at the ceremony. “He was a gift from God for my mother’s family and to so many more.”

More than 21,000 non-Jews have been honored by Yad Vashem, including Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews was documented in the Oscar-award- winning film Schindler’s List. Fifty-three Romanians have been honored.

A cowardly convicted Nazi war criminal living in Canada was in jail this weekend after an appeals court upheld an extradition order from Italy, where he was convicted in absentia.

Michael Seifert, the so-called “Beast of Balzano,” was sentenced to life after being found guilty in 2000 of nine counts of murder, committed during his term as an SS guard at the Bolzano prison transit camp in northern Italy.

The Italian government alleged the 83-year-old Seifert beat, tortured, starved and murdered inmates. People testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out a person’s eyes, beat prisoners before shooting them and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter.

While admitting he was a guard at the camp, Seifert has denied being involved in atrocities.

The Canadian court said the crimes were of the worst order, but Seifert’s lawyer, Doug Christie said he was appalled by the decision.

Christie said he would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

“The government of Canada has promised in the past to try any war crimes in Canada,” Christie said.

The Canadian court ordered that Seifert be surrendered to Italian officials on seven of the nine counts.

There is a complete CBC file on Seifert here and here.

A Jewish cemetery in southern Poland has been desecrated with around 100 tombstones daubed with anti-Semitic slogans and Nazi symbols, police said Monday.

Police spokesman Adam Gaska said that the perpetrators were believed to be local youths, and that a criminal investigation had been opened in Czestochowa in the country’s south.

“Numerous tombstones have been covered with insulting wording or SS symbols, in black paint,” Gaska told Poland’s PAP news agency.

The Czestochowa Jewish cemetery was founded in the late 19th century and houses 4,500 graves, including that of the Hasidic spiritual master Izaak Mayer Justman.

Few Jewish cemeteries in Poland are currently used for burials, and many were left abandoned for decades before restoration efforts began in recent years.

Most of the country’s pre-World War II population of 3.5 million Jews — then the largest Jewish community in Europe — were exterminated by the occupying Nazis.

After the Holocaust, Poland’s Jewish population numbered just 280,000.

Many Jews emigrated to the United States or Israel, either immediately following the war or during a wave of anti-Semitism under communist rule in 1968.

Poland now counts between 3,500 and 15,000 Jews — out of a total population of 38.2 million — according to estimates by different sources.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon urged France’s young people to remember the horrors of the Holocaust during a speech yesterday to mark the 65th anniversary of a World War II roundup of Jews. Speaking at the former site of the Velodrome d’Hiver bicycle stadium – which was used as a transit camp for thousands of Jews on July 16-17, 1942 – Fillon said the French must not shrink from the memory of those hours of shame. On those July 1942 days, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in the Paris region, and 8,160 – mostly children – were held at the stadium before being sent to Nazi death camps. “It is by recognizing fully the lights and shadows of the pastthat the nation learns and grows,” Fillon told an audience of hundreds. In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during the war. Fewer than 3,000 survived.

Received by email.

65th anniversary of Sebastopol massacre marked in Ukraine

18 July 2007

In the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Sebastopol, the 65th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of Jews during World War II has been commemorated. Holocaust survivors, local officials and Jews from Crimea marked the anniversary on Sunday in a ceremony near the city’s Holocaust memorial. More than 4,200 citizens of Sebastopol, mainly Jews, were killed in the 1942 massacre by the Nazis. At the ceremony, Jewish leaders noted with concern that the memorial had been vandalized several times over the last two years. Police detained a suspect in one of the incidents, but he was prosecuted for hooliganism, not a hate crime, to the dismay of local Jews.

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/

Received by email. From “The Woman Who Loved Children,” Ladies’ Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Her story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies’ Home Journal, was rescued by three Kansas teens.

And her story is astounding, as awe-inspiring as that of Oskar Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for nearly 60 years.‚ That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project and stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old newsmagazine. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.

“We thought it was a typo,” recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a college freshman. “We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250 children, not 2,500.”

In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw’s social-welfare department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a Catholic doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917 typhus outbreak . But she never forgot his sacrifice. “I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality, ” Sendler has said. “One must help him. It is a need of the heart.”

In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off and guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease while unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that would ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942 by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars, religious leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard against the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside the Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse inside the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.With the help of 10 “messenger friends,” as Sendler called her colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to sneak the Children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw region.

Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off Christian prayers and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of the cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their Jewish heritage.

Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers through sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance, a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to the Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his back-seat, where the Nazi guards could not see. Another supporter, an ambulance driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to bark to camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers in back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of goods. Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling the guards that they were dead.

Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a chance to live. “There were terrible scenes,” Sendler says. “One mother & I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. The grandma wanted, the husband did not. They asked what was the guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?” She couldn’t even guarantee that she could get past the guards. On slips of tissue paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued. Whenever possible, she wrote down the child’s Jewish name as well as the child’s new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend’s garden. After the war, Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish identities revealed to them.

On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long suspected she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had been caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler’s name and home address. The Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the identities of the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to talk, even when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. “I was quiet as a mouse,” Sendler has said. “I would have rather died than disclose anything about our operations.” She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she was sentenced to be executed.

At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid ahefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard subsequently posted Sendler’s name on public bulletin boards as one of the executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then went into hiding in Poland, just like the children she’d saved.

When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January 1945, Sendler returned to the friend’s garden and dug up the jars. She turned over the rescued children’s names to Zegota’s Berman, and he and other members of the group tried to locate the children’s foster families.‚ Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be found. Less than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most having perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the war, Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her career as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble walking ever since. But she never talked openly about her rescue work. Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn’t safe. For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.

Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kan. Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected Sendler as the subject of their National History Day project, and though information about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play, titled “Life in a Jar”, that had already won first place at the state level of the national contest. “We explained who we were and what we were doing,” says Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. “We told her that we found her story amazing.”

Sendler’s response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three weeks later. “I am very eager to receive and read your play,”Sendler wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students’questions, and slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international friendship was forged.

After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High, the students were invited to perform the play for church groups, nursing homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through their correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar. Their first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage. “We found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children’s home,” says Coons. “That’s just how she is.”

Although the girls didn’t win any awards when they traveled to Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play gained national and international attention, and the students have since given more than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a result, Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After learning she was to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls “My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me…. I can’t find the words to thank you, my dear girls…. Before the day you have written the play “Life in a Jar” — nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war …” One member of a Kansas City audience was so profoundly moved by Sendler’s story that he raised money to send the play’s three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.

“It wasn’t real until I actually met Irena,” says Megan Stewart. “We all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear about our lives.” Cambers told Sendler, “I love you. You are my hero.” Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected the girls’ praise. “A hero is someone doing extraordinary things,” she told them.. “What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do.

“From “The Woman Who Loved Children,” Ladies’ Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.