World War 2 – Page 36 – History of Sorts

Buchenwald Liberated

In general, I try to avoid using graphic images as much as possible. Not because I think they are not important, but because they are. and solely because I find it difficult to erase them from my memories.

However, it is important every now and then to be reminded of the unfathomable horrors.

Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945. This was really only a physical liberation because, for most of the survivors, the horrors remained with them in their memories and sometimes in their dreams. Also, those who liberated the camp were never freed from the horrors they encountered.

Below is the testimony of Edward R. Murrow, a journalist and one of the men who was there for the liberation.

This is Buchenwald, 11 April 1945
Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard if you were with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you’re at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you about Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last. As we approached it we saw about a hundred men in civilian clothes with rifles, but dancing in open order across the fields. There were a few shots. We stopped to enquire. We were told that some of the prisoners had a couple of SS men cornered in there. We drove on, reached the main gate. The prisoners crowded up behind the wire. We entered. And now let me tell this in the first person for I was the least important person there as you shall hear.

There surged around me an evil smelling of horrors. Men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over that mass of men to the green fields beyond where well-fed Germans were plowing. A German, Fritz Gersheimer, came up and said, “May I show you around the camp? I’ve been here ten years.”

An Englishman stood to attention saying, “May I introduce myself?

Delighted to see you.

And can you tell me when some of our blokes will be along?”

I told him, “Soon,” and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk.

The stink was beyond all description. When I reached the center of the
barracks a man came up and said, “You remember me. I’m Pieter Zinko, onetime mayor of Prague.” I remembered him, but did not recognize him. He
asked about Benish and Jan Mastericht.

I asked, “How many men had died in that building during the last month?” They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in a little black book, nothing more. Nothing about where, what they had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled two hundred and forty-two. Two hundred and forty-two out of twelve hundred in one month. As I walked down to the end of the barracks there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies—they were so weak.

The doctor’s name was Paul Heller. He had been there since ’38. As we walked out into the courtyard a man fell dead. Two others—they must have been over sixty—were crawling towards the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it. In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm—B6030 it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said, “The children—enemies of the state.” I could see their ribs through their thin shirts.

The old man said: “I am Professor Charles Richa of the Sorbonne.” The children clung to my hands and stared.

We crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to speak to me and to touch me. Professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all Europe. Men from the countries that made America. We went to the hospital—it was full. The doctor told me that two hundred had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said, “Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” Dr. Heller pulled back the blankets from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.

As we left the hospital I drew out a leather billfold hoping that I had some money which would help those who lived to get home. Professor Richa from the Sorbonne said, “I should be careful of my wallet if I were you. You know, there are criminals in this camp, too.”

A small man tottered up saying, “May I feel the leather please? You see, I used to make good things of leather in Vienna.”

Another man said, “My name is Walter Reuder. For many years I lived in Joliette. Came back to Germany for a visit and Hitler grabbed me.”

I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge had been a Communist, had been at Buchenwald for nine years. Had a picture of his daughter in Hamburg, hadn’t seen her for almost twelve years, and if I got to Hamburg would I look her up. He showed me the daily ration—one piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb. On top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew was what they received every twenty-four hours. He had a chart on the wall, very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each ten men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added, “We’re very efficient here.”

We went again into the courtyard and as we walked, we talked. The two
doctors, the Frenchman and the Czech, agreed that about six thousand had
died during March. Kirshenheimer, the German, added that back in the winter of ’39 when the Poles began to arrive without winter clothing, they died at the rate of approximately nine hundred a day. Five different men asserted that Buchenwald was the best concentration camp in Germany. They had had some experience of the others.

Dr. Heller, the Czech, asked if I would care to see the crematorium. He said it
wouldn’t be very interesting because the Germans had run out of coal some
days ago and had taken to dumping the bodies into a great hole nearby.

Professor Richa said, “Perhaps I would care to see the small courtyard.

I said, “Yes.” He turned and told the children to stay behind. As we walked across the square I noticed that the professor had a hole in his left shoe and a toe sticking out of the right one.

He followed my eyes and said, “I regret that I am so little presentable, but what can one do?” At that point another Frenchman came up to announce that three of his fellow countrymen outside had killed three SS men and taken one prisoner.

We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall was about eight feet high. It
adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with
concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They
were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised though
there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the
head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than five hundred men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another fifty, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation. They had not been executed, but the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald.

G-d alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years. Thursday I was told that there were more than twenty thousand in the camp. There had been as many as sixty thousand. Where are they now?

As I left that camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came
up to me and said, “You will write something about this perhaps?” And he
added: “To write about this you must have been here at least two years and
after that—you don’t want to write anymore.”

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. Dead men are plentiful in war, but the living dead, more than twenty thousand of them in one camp, and the country round about was pleasing to the eye. And the Germans were well fed and well dressed. American trucks were rolling towards the rear filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations, as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald received in four days.

If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry. I was there on Thursday and many men in many tongues blessed the name of Roosevelt. For long years his name had meant the full measure of their hope. These men who had kept close company with death for many years did not know that Mr. Roosevelt would within hours join their comrades who had laid their lives on the scales of freedom. Back in ’41 Mr. Churchill said to me, with tears in his eyes, “One day the world and history will recognize and acknowledge what it owes to your president.”

I saw and heard the first installment of that at Buchenwald on Thursday. It came from men from all over Europe. Their faces, with more flesh on them, might have been found anywhere at home. To them the name Roosevelt was a symbol, the code word for a lot of guys named Joe who were somewhere out in the blue with the armor heading East. At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.

sources

Click to access Microsoft%20Word%20-%203978.pdf

‘Orchestrated Hell’: Edward R. Murrow over Berlin

Remembering Berthold Mendel Judenfreund

Who is Berthold Mendel Judenfreund? He was just a farm labourer, not a man of violence or a criminal, just a farm labourer.

On April 10, 1943, 25 years before I was born, the Nazis murdered him at Auschwitz.

What makes his story so sad is that he could have survived.

His nephew said the following about Berthold Mendel Judenfreund:

“My father emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht. He grew up in a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt with his younger brother, Berthold. My father, Georg, was five when taken to the orphanage. His brother was three. After completing Gymnasium in 1933, my father went to the only Jewish Teacher Seminary still operating in Nazi Germany. After spending a couple of years teaching in a Jewish Day School, my father came to the United States and enrolled as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University. His brother chose to remain behind in Germany, becoming a Youth Aliyah Hachsharah training-camp director in Nazi-occupied Holland. In 1943, the Gestapo closed the camp and deported Berthold to Auschwitz.”

He was 27 when he was murdered.

sources

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/117625/berthold-mendel-judenfreund

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/tijdlijn/Berthold-Mendel-Judenfreund/27/76503

A Baby Shoe

A baby shoe and a date—

Not a birth date,

The date she died.

Today 8 April 2023, is the day I cried.

Why? I don’t know. I did not know the baby, nor did I know the parents.

On 27 March 1944, this baby was murdered.

Today I cry.

I did not know her, so why do I feel sad?

It was a young human being, a product of love, destroyed by hate

A baby shoe and a date.

Someone who perhaps had a baby with similar shoes murdered this baby.

Today I cry, for a crime committed 79 years ago, why?

Because there were millions of baby shoes and the real crime is that people have forgotten.

Tzipporah and Dov Cohen were a young couple when the war broke out who had already experienced the loss of one child during childbirth. With the German invasion of Lithuania, they unsuccessfully tried to flee to the Soviet Union. They returned to their home in Kovno and then interned at the Kovno Ghetto. Approximately half a year later, on 18 January 1942, Tzipporah gave birth to a daughter who she named Hinda after her mother. At the end of November 1943, the couple was transferred to the Aleksotas Work Camp, whose inmates worked at the airport, where they lived in very difficult conditions, performing backbreaking forced labour.

During the day the men and women would go off to work and only the children would remain at the camp with a small cluster of adults and elderly. On 27 March, trucks arrived at the camp. The adults were taken out a different gate than the usual one so that they would not see the trucks and disrupt the deportation. When the adults returned at the end of the day they discovered the extent of the tragedy: no children remained in the camp. Dov and Tzipporah went to their daughter’s bed, where they found one of her shoes and the gloves Tzipporah had sewn for her. Dov inscribed the date upon the shoe and swore to save the shoe forever.

A baby shoe and a date—

A new date is 8 April 2023. We can never ever let this happen again.

A baby shoe and a date.

But I despair because I know it has happened again.

I cry because we seem to be incapable of learning from the past.

SOURCE

https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/featured/shoe-hinda-cohen.html

Auke Pattist—Executioner of Drenthe

I cannot decide which is worse, the crimes of Auke Bert Pattist or his remorselessness. Also, the fact that some people saw him as a hero—depresses me.

Auke Bert Pattist was born in 1920. In 1943 he voluntarily entered the Waffen-SS. As an officer, he would be involved in arresting and ill-treating a large number of resistance members, many of whom later died in concentration camps. After the war, he was arrested. In 1946 he escaped from the Koepelgevangenis Arnhem. He was sentenced in absentia, to life imprisonment by the Special Criminal Chamber of the Court in Assen. In November 1978, Pattist was located by Simon Wiesenthal in Oviedo (Spain), where Pattist ran a language school. In April 1979, the Dutch government sent a request for arrest and extradition to Spain, which was initially ignored because Pattist had meanwhile acquired Spanish nationality. In February 1983, Pattist was still arrested and on 9 May 1983, a Spanish court decided that he can be extradited. On 19 May 1983, this court revised its judgment and declared that extradition was inadmissible under Spanish law.

*Pattist toasted his extradition failure in 1983*

The Pattist case had caused considerable commotion in the Netherlands and had led to questions in the House of Representatives on several occasions. Pattist died on March 21, 2001 in Oviedo.

Born in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, in 1920. He was a convinced National Socialist. His father and mother were members of the NSB. Father was a specialist in vegetable and fruit auctions and industrial cold stores. His mother worked as a training leader for the National Socialist Women’s Organization.

After Auke Pattist had completed his secondary school education, he went straight to the German police academy in Schalkhaar, where everyone who joined the police after May 1941 received a National Socialist education. According to the amateur historian Albert Metselaar from Hoogeveen, “Auke wanted to become an officer, and aspiring officers were mainly trained to act against a resisting population.

After completing his training, he joined the Zwarte Tulpen unit in Amsterdam on October 13, 1942. This police unit was named after the National Socialist and Chief Constable Sybren Tulp, who died in 1942. Pattist’s function was to round up Jews and hand them over to the Germans. In the period from November 1942 to January 1943, his unit rounded up 2,116 Jews in Amsterdam.

In 1943 he joined the Waffen-SS, where, after his service in the Balkans.

In October 1944 he came to Hollandscheveld, together with Dirk Hoogendam and under the leadership of Van Oort, to train Dutchmen, members of the Germanic SS, and Landstorm soldiers. Because people had the impression that there were also many armed ‘Partisans’ in Hollandscheveld and the surrounding area, nocturnal raids and raids were organized from the presbytery of the Reformed Church. At least 175 persons, men, women and children, were mistreated. There was a lot of torture, especially in the school. Some of the prisoners were handed over to the Germans. Eight detainees died.

The man in the officer’s uniform of the Dutch Schalkhaar police, on the right in the photo, is Dirk Hoogendam

Resistance actions were followed by reprisal executions among the local population and suspects were extradited to the SD where confessions were beaten out of them. In correspondence with Metselaar, Pattist always denied his involvement in mock executions and torture: “There was hardly any torture with us, at most a few blows, nothing more. That was not necessary. What one did not say, the other said.”

“In September 1944, in the north of the Netherlands, in Drenthe, after the battle of Arnhem, I had to train a company of recruits. We took 80 prisoners and released 40. The others were handed over to the German political police and some were executed,” said Pattist.

Auke Pattist told the ANP that he had joined the Waffen-SS in 1941 at the age of 19. “I was a convinced National Socialist,” said Pattist. He emphatically denies having been guilty of abuse during the war years and says he fought in the Balkans, in Russia and Czechoslovakia.”

About his time in Hoogeveen, Pattist stated: “Because many resistance fighters were hiding in the area around Hoogeveen who regularly attacked us, we combed the area at the time. But I never participated in the persecution of Jews, we were soldiers and not police officers …”

Of torture endured by enemies, he said: “In a period of resistance fighters, it is common to deal with those who want to kill you if you don’t put up a fight”.

“I cannot and will not deny that a lot of inhumane things took place in Hollandscheveld because of us,” Pattist would declare after the war.“ During the interrogations, the detainees were mistreated by hitting them in the face with the flat of their hands or hitting them with the handle of a grenade. It has also happened that the detainees were forced to confess by blows to the face with a karwat. There were no alternatives, the executioner believed. “In a war there are blows. My assignment was to eliminate as many opponents of our system as possible,” Pattist defended himself in a rare 1979 TV interview.

In Oviedo, Spain, Pattist became the director of a translation agency. The Hoogeveen amateur historian Albert Metselaar tracked him down there in the 1990s and started a correspondence with the man who was high on the list of wanted war criminals. Among other things, the work that Pattist had done for the Zaandam-based Dutch state-run military artillery company, A.I., which later became Eurometaal and popularly known as Hembrug, was discussed. ‘In 1972 or 1973, a holiday acquaintance, then deputy director of Hembrug, asked me if I knew guest workers for his factory,’ Pattist wrote to Metselaar. “I placed an advertisement in a provincial newspaper and the next day about 300 people showed up at my door. After an hour I was visited by a police inspector, who drew up a report because the Spanish state had a monopoly on sending guest workers. I was fined 2000 guilders and then immediately called Hembrug.’

The widow of the holiday acquaintance, C. de Rochemont, confirmed the contract when asked. According to Pattist, the fine was reduced to 200 guilders thanks to the Dutch embassy. A delegation of three employees of the Artillery Institutions and an embassy attaché are said to have visited Pattist at home a few weeks later. ‘Together with a delegate from the Spanish immigration service, we inspected guest workers for three days and ate, drank and chatted together. That fine of 200 guilders was entered by Hembrug as operating costs, “said the convicted war offender. “Unfortunately I don’t remember the names of the gentlemen. For me, it was just a translation job. Two years later they came back for business with an arms factory in Asturias. Hembrug had meanwhile been swallowed up by Eurometaal.’ Four years later he had contact with two former A.I. engineers in Oviedo. “Together with two Germans from Dynamit-Nobel and the former Waffen-SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, we worked together on a treaty with a Spanish gun factory. And all this under my name and address.”

During an interview for the Dutch current affairs program ‘Brandpunt’ in 1994 he showed no remorse. At one stage he said that he did not hate Jews, but any group of people who have been living in a country and refuse to integrate with the general population, like Jews, Arabs, Gyspies, and Turks, clearly he forgot how the Dutch never integrated into any of their colonies, not did he in Spain.

He died in March 2001, aged 80.

Disturbingly there are still people today who see him as a sort of hero.

I noticed these comments on YouTube about Auke.

“Heel duidelijk over intergratie, herken mij zelf ook in deze man, ik ben ook rechts en heb weinig met de invasieve mensen die ons hier het leven zuur maakt, zo monsterlijk vind ik deze man niet, maar goed,de overwinnaar schrijft de geschiedenis!-Very clear about integration, I also recognize myself in this man, I am also right-wing and have little sympathy with the invasive people who make our lives miserable here, I don’t find this man that monstrous, but well, the victor writes history!”

“Ach, het is allemaal al zo lang geleden. Laat zo’n man toch met rust. En het is uitgezocht door een amateur historicus: hoe serieus moet je dat nemen?-Ah, it’s all been so long. Leave such a man alone. And it was researched by an amateur historian: how seriously should you take that?”

“Hij is een held in mijn ogen.Respect, respect.
Wou dat hij mijn schoonvader was.-He is a hero in my eyes.
Respect, respect. Wish he was my father-in-law.”

Thanks to my nephew Stefano for drawing my attention to this war criminal.

sources

https://www.tracesofwar.nl/articles/1367/Pattist-Auke.htm

Gevluchte oorlogsmisdadiger wierf gastarbeiders voor Zaanse wapenfabriek

https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/detail/d5ef1e00-0259-11e7-904b-d89d6717b464/media/eae851cd-06cb-f2f2-78ee-50d5ee615833?mode=detail&view=horizontal&q=auke%20pattist&rows=1&page=1

https://www.geheugenvandrenthe.nl/pattist-auke

How Ruben Baer Saved His Mother’s Life

It is quite hard to describe this story because it is a tragedy and a miracle at the same time.

It isn’t clear when baby Ruben was born, some sources say he was born on 6 April 1943, while other sources say it was 9 April 1943. On his grave’s headstone, it says 9 April. The one thing we do know for certain is that he only lived for 4 days. However, most sources give April 9th as the date of birth.

Ruben Simon Hendrik Baer (aka Ruben Sally Hendrik Baer), was born on 9 April 1943. He did not grow old died four days later, on 13 April.

He was the son of the Jewish couple Leo Baer and Flora Baer-Salomon. They fled Germany after the rise of Hitler and settled in Roermond, the Netherlands, at the end of 1939.

Ruben’s brother Rolf Helmut Baer and his father Leo Baer were summoned to report on 9 April 1943, and then deported to Westerbork. From there Rolf and his father were deported to Auschwitz, where they were gassed on 26 October 1944.

His mother Flora Baer-Salomon was, at the time of their deportation, in the Laurentius Hospital in Roermond, to give birth to her son Ruben Sally Hendrik he died four days after birth.

His early death indicates that little Ruben may have been born too early. That seems to have saved his mother’s life.

Although Flora Baer lost her baby, she remained alive. Hospital staff kept Flora out of the hands of the Germans by taking her to a hiding place in the nearby village of Wessem. She was safe with the Van Rosendaal family until an NSB (Dutch Nazi party) member gave the address to the Germans in 1944.

On 8 August 1944, around 11 a.m., the German Sicherheitsdienst raided the house in Wessem. There was a pounding on the front door, after which Mrs Rosendaal opened the door and saw that the house was surrounded by German soldiers with rifles and machine guns at the ready. An NSB member from Roermond, named Gerrit Holla, was also involved in the robbery, he had forcefully entered through the back door and ran through the house with a gun drawn in his hand. Mother Rosendaal, her daughter Ria and Flora Baer-Salomon were present in the kitchen, among others. Mrs Rosendaal was then interrogated by Holla and a German officer in a brutal manner and at gunpoint. During this penetrating interrogation, she continued to deny that any other Jewish people in hiding were housed in the building. Flora Baer-Salomon was arrested on 17 August 1944, together with the Roermond couple Herz-Löb, who also stayed at this hiding place. She was then transferred to Westerbork and deported to Theresienstadt on 4 September 1944. Her husband and her son were there too at that time. However, she survived the hardships suffered and, after the liberation, returned nearly emaciated to her ‘Mietchen’, as she called Mrs Rosendaal.

In 1947 she moved to her mother in New York where she married Siegfried Schild on 11 December 1948, and died in March 1987. Whether Flora saw her husband and son Rolf in Theresienstadt is not known.

sources

https://www.geni.com/people/Ruben-Simon-Hendrik-Baer/6000000062748461828

https://www.maasdorpwessem.nl/nieuws/dodenherdenking-4-mei-te-wessem/

https://www.myheritage.com/research/record-10789-299678-/ruben-sally-hendrik-baer-in-jewish-holocaust-memorials-jewish-residents-of-germany?indId=externalindividual-471ad9c0712c7cf7f2669ec607a69033&trn=partner_Geni&trp=logged_out_matches_module

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/27548/ruben-sally-hendrik-baer-en

https://www.archiefroermond.nl/nl/roermonds-verleden/stolpersteine-roermond/zoek-op-naam/baer-rolf-helmut

https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/hoe-baby-ruben-het-leven-van-zijn-joodse-moeder-redde~b5225c1f/

Music and Holocaust

One of the definitions for music is vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony and expression of emotion, but it is so much more than that. Music brings hope in times of despair, comfort in times of grief and joy in times of sorrow. Music is like a time machine because a song or tune can bring you back to good and bad times. It can also be a tool of torture, a way of creating false hopes.

The power of music was understood, by both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

From the time the first concentration camps like Dachau were established in 1933, camp guards routinely ordered detainees to sing while marching or exercising or during punishment actions. This was done to mock, humiliate, and discipline the prisoners. As Eberhard Schmidt experienced in Sachsenhausen—inmates who disobeyed the rules or who incorrectly carried them out (“In even steps! March! Sing!”) gave the SS an excuse for arbitrary beatings:

“Those who didn’t know the song were beaten. Those who sang too softly were beaten. Those who sang too loudly were beaten. The SS men inflicted savage beatings.”

In December 1943, a 20-year-old named Ruth Elias arrived in a cattle car at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and was assigned to Block 6 in the family camp, a barracks that housed young women and the male orchestra, an orchestra of imprisoned violinists, clarinet players, accordionists and percussionists who played their instruments not only when the prisoners marched out for daily labour details, but also during prisoner punishments.

Performances could be impromptu, ordered whenever the SS felt like it. In a postwar interview, Elias discussed how drunken SS troops would often burst into the barracks late at night.

“First, they’d tell the orchestra to play as they drank and sang. Then they would pull young girls from their bunks to rape them. Pressed against the back of her top-level bunk to avoid detection, Elias heard the terrified screams of her fellow prisoners.”

In Westerbork, Max Ehrlich, a prominent performer in the risque pre-war Berlin cabaret scene, teamed up with fellow musician Willy Rosen to create the Camp Westerbork Theatre Group.

“Suddenly, the best cabaret in Europe was to be found in a concentration camp,” said Alan Ehrlich, the performer’s nephew. “Their music became Westerbork hits, with prisoners constantly humming their tunes.”

The camp commandant sat in the front row of all of the troupe’s performances of original songs, jokes, sketches, and dance routines. Entranced, he kept the performers’ names off the lists of those destined for the death camps. “They were playing for their lives,” said Ehrlich

Tango in Auschwitz was written in Polish by a 12-year-old Polish girl named Irka Janowski. Unfortunately, not much is known about her other than her name and age. We do know she was not Jewish and that she was murdered in one of the Auschwitz camps. The song she wrote was set to a well-known pre-war tango tune and had become popular among the prisoners of the camps in the extermination complex.

Janowski’s song and biography are a reminder to us of an aspect that is often neglected in the recollection of Auschwitz. The complex comprised several extermination camps and many labour camps, and among the prisoners were many non-Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles, Romanis, and people of colour, as well as French and Russian war prisoners, were murdered at Auschwitz. Janowski’s lyrics (translated into Yiddish by survivors) speak of the Auschwitz prisoners, but, surprisingly, do not focus on Jews:

The black man soon takes up his mandolin,
and will soon start to strum his little tune here,
and the Englishman and Frenchman sing a melody,
so a trio will arise out of this sadness.

And also the Pole soon takes up his whistle
and he will emote to the world –
The song will light up the hearts
who are longing for the freedom they miss.

The song’s chorus ignites hope in the hearts of the listeners:
Our slave tango – under the whip of the beater,
Our slave tango in the Auschwitz camp…
Oh, freedom and liberty call!

The song was one of the songs recorded by Ben Stonehill after the war. In the summer of 1948, Stonehill arrived at the Hotel Marseilles in New York, a meeting point for Jewish refugees who had arrived in the United States after World War II. He brought heavy recording equipment and placed it in the hotel lobby. His purpose was to record the refugees singing songs they remembered from their homelands; folk songs their parents sang; holiday songs from the synagogue; songs from school and youth movements; and also – the songs they sang in the concentration and extermination camps, in the ghettos and in the hiding places, where they had spent the long years of war.

The songs recorded were stored at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Archives—dedicated to the documentation, and preservation of a rich, pre-World War II Yiddish culture. The recordings eventually made their way to the National Sound Archive at the National Library of Israel.

Sources

About the Archive

https://www.jpost.com/judaism/a-tango-in-auschwitz-a-song-of-optimism-sung-in-the-nazi-camps-625273

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/16/holocaust-survivor-sings-concert-music-camps-nazis-jerusalem

https://culture.ec.europa.eu/cultural-heritage/initiatives-and-success-stories/european-heritage-label/european-heritage-label-sites/camp-westerbork-the-netherlands

https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/20/how-the-nazis-used-music-to-celebrate-and-facilitate-murder_partner/

https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/?mode=gallery&view=horizontal&q=orkesten&rows=25&page=5

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The Start of the Holocaust

The Holocaust did not start at the start of World War II, although this is what many people believe. The foundation for the Holocaust, was laid out long before that. There had been Anti-Semitism in Europe and other parts of the world for centuries.

However, during the Weimar Republic in Germany, the seeds were planted for Anti-Semitism and bigotry to become genocide.

The concerns of great groups of the population weren’t listened to, or dismissed. This gave the opportunity for the NSDAP to rise. They told the people what they wanted to hear. They promised them employment and a good standard of living, Then when they finally got to power they started to ‘deliver’ on those promises. They did, however, fail to tell the people what price was going to be paid for those promises.

In the media, I have seen very little coverage of some disturbing events which had the 90th anniversary in the last few weeks.

The Enabling Act, also known as The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich was passed by the German parliament (444 voted for/ 94 against/109 absent) on 23 March 1933, and proclaimed the next day, it became the cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. The act allowed him to enact laws, including ones that violated the Weimar Constitution, without the approval of either parliament or Reich President von Hindenburg. Making Hitler the totalitarian leader of Germany.

The first measures against the Jews included:

April 1, 1933: A boycott of Jewish shops and businesses by the Nazis.

April 7, 1933: The law for the Re-establishment of the Civil Service expelled all non-Aryans (defined on April 11, 1933, as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent) from the civil service. Initially, exceptions were made for those working since August 1914; German veterans of World War I; and, those who had lost a father or son fighting for Germany or her allies in World War I.

April 7, 1933: The law regarding admission to the legal profession prohibited the admission of lawyers of non-Aryan descent to the Bar. It also denied non-Aryan members of the Bar the right to practice law. (Exceptions were made in the cases noted above in the law regarding the civil service.) Similar laws were passed regarding Jewish law assessors, jurors, and commercial judges.

April 22, 1933: The decree regarding physicians’ services with the national health plan denied reimbursement of expenses to those patients who consulted non-Aryan doctors. Jewish doctors who were war veterans or had suffered from the war were excluded.

April 25, 1933: The law against the overcrowding of German schools restricted Jewish enrollment in German high schools to 1.5% of the student body. In communities where they constituted more than 5% of the population, Jews were allowed to constitute up to 5% of the student body. Initially, exceptions were made in the case of children of Jewish war veterans, who were not considered part of the quota. In the framework of this law, a Jewish student was a child with two non-Aryan parents.

The Holocaust didn’t start with murdering, but with false promises.

sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-enabling-act

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Enabling-Act

https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/teacher-resources/holocaust-resources/36-questions-about-the-holocaust.html#3

Pastor Abraham Rutger Rutgers—Forgotten Hero

I do despair at times when I see how many of my fellow Dutch citizens were so willing to help the Nazi regime. I know it is easy (for me) to judge because I was never put in a similar situation. But it is still a puzzle to me that a nation known for its tolerance had so many intolerant citizens.

However, there were also a significant number of Dutch men and women who did defy the Nazi occupiers and paid for it with their lives—Pastor Abraham Rutger Rutgers was one of them.

Abraham worked successively as assistant pastor in Düsseldorf in the period—1908-1909. He worked as a minister in Tubbergen from 1910 in Lochem 1914-1919, followed by an honourable emeritus status of two years. Later, he worked as a preacher in Usselo—1921 and Rotterdam from 1932 to 1942. During his work as a reformed assistant preacher in Düsseldorf (1908-1909), Abraham turned out to have a militant character. His actions against the injustice that some Dutch workers suffered there resulted in his expulsion from Germany. At an early age, Abraham was a convinced anti-militarist. After visiting Spain in 1938, he returned to his anti-militarist convictions. As early as 1933, Abraham Rutgers was protesting, with other theologians, against the persecution of the Jews in Germany. After the German invasion in May 1940, he fiercely and fearlessly denounced all the injustices of the occupiers from the pulpit. Abraham Rutgers considered himself called, there and in his catechism, to speak without any restriction and did so. He called Germany a purely imperialist power and Seyss-Inquart a traitor.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands

On Sunday, 1 September 1940, the day after Queen’s Day, he held a formal Orange (Dutch Royal Family are the House of Orange) service where the entire municipality under his leadership sang the Dutch National anthem with open doors. Fortunately, it ended well. After Abraham Rutgers was called to account several times by the Sicherheitsdienst, they arrested him on Wednesday, 11 June 1941, because of his sermon on Sunday, 1 June 1941 (Whit Monday). After the interrogation in the Oranjehotel in Scheveningen, it was a difficult time for him there. The loneliness, the uncertainty, and the powerlessness drove him to despair. It was only after almost three months that his wife was allowed to visit him for the first time. He stood behind bars like a predator in his cage and burst into tears when he saw his wife, Josephine. Fellow prisoners said that he was of great support to them. After four months of solitary confinement in Scheveningen, he was transferred to Camp Amersfoort on Tuesday, 28 October 1941. In Amersfoort, he preached clandestinely on two Sundays. After 14 days, Abraham was sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where he arrived on Friday, 28 November 1941.

On 2 April 1942, they tortured him to death in Dachau.

His resistance wasn’t by using violence or weapons but by using words, uttering his opinion. His words were deemed offensive, even offensive enough to be tortured to death. Let this be a warning.

Sources

https://oorlogsgravenstichting.nl/personen/131750/abraham-rutger-rutgers

https://www.wieiswieinoverijssel.nl/zoekresultaten/p2/558-abraham-rutgers

https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/detail/6a3d2ba6-025a-11e7-904b-d89d6717b464/media/d0eb84ef-c474-8d98-dc69-98287f3ad2d0?mode=detail&view=horizontal&q=2%20april&rows=1&page=74

Fântâna Albă Massacre—Soviet War Crime

Of all the atrocities Nazis committed prior to and during World War II, one could not forget that the USSR also committed awful crimes. In fact, between 23 August 1939 and 22 June 1941, Germany and the USSR were partners via the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

A German and a Soviet officer shaking hands.

After signing the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, the USSR occupied Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertza region in 1940. Thus, overnight, approximately three million displaced Romanians found themselves in foreign territory; where their traditions, origins, culture, and religion they practised, were not accepted.

Many arrested Romanians from Bukovina were killed or deported; churches were closed; properties confiscated; and many families began to cross the new border and went to Romania.

In January 1941, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) issued rumours that people would be allowed to cross the border. As a result of this information, on 1 April 1941, on Easter day, a large group of people from several villages in the Siret Valley headed to the Soviet-Romanian border carrying a white flag and religious insignia (icons, church flags, and crosses).

Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 unarmed civilians walked together towards the new Soviet-Romanian border. The Soviet border guards attempted to turn back the group several times, issuing a final verbal warning and firing shots in the air when the people arrived at Varnystia, near the border.^[12] After the convoy pressed on, the border guards began to shoot, reportedly after a few members fired. According to the Soviet official report, casualty figures amounted to 44 people (17 from Pătrăuții de Jos, 12 from Trestiana, five each from Cupca and Suceveni, three from Pătrăuții de Sus, two from Oprișeni), and although the numbers were reportedly higher according to survivor testimonies. Partial listings of victims later identified some of them. Most of them were cut by bullets and thrown into mass graves, some buried alive. The pursued were re-captured, tortured, and then deported. Today, Fântâna Albă (now Stary Vovchynets or Bila Krinicya) location is in the territory of Ukraine.

sources

80th anniversary of the Fântâna Albă Massacre

What was the Fantana Alba Massacre (1941)?

75 years since ‘the Romanian Katyn’ massacre at Fântâna Albă – 3,000 Romanians killed

Masacrul de la Fântâna Albă: Preţul pe care l-au plătit românii care au vrut să treacă graniţa în 1941, în ziua de Paşte. ”A fost un genocid”

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Remembering Rolf Dirk Ullmann

I wish I could tell you the story of Rolf Dirk Ullmann’s long life. I wish I could tell you about all his children and grandchildren, visiting him today for his 80th birthday.

But I can’t. I can’t tell you about Rolf’s first experience eating an ice cream or chocolate bar or anything about his first day in school. You see Rolf Dirk Ullmann was perceived to be a threat to the state, as were his mother and sister. Rolf Dirk Ullmann was born in captivity in Westerbork, on 31 March 1943.

He was put on a train to Theresienstadt on 18 January 1944. He was not alone on that transport 552 persons were with him. Some like him that were also born in Westerbork. Frank Werner was born on 21 October 1943, Regine Elizabeth Thekla Guthmann’s date of birth was 30 September 1943, and Marianne Pekel was born on 5 September 1943. Also on that train were Rolf Dirk Ullmann’s mother, Ellen Wilhelmina Ullmann and his older sister.

The transport to Theresienstadt wasn’t the family’s last journey. In early October 1944, a transport took them to Auschwitz. There they on 8 October 1944, they were murdered upon arrival.

It is sad that Rolf Dirk Ullmann’s life story is on a single registration card.