|
|
|
History > WW2 > 1939-1945
Axis powers, Germany, Europe > Antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, Nazi era, Holocaust / Shoah, Samudaripen
Survivors, Refugees
How a Holocaust Survivor Became 'Death Metal Grandma' NYT 20 July 2018
How a Holocaust Survivor Became 'Death Metal Grandma' Video NYT Op-Docs 20 July 2018
Many of us hope to remain active as we age — and in Inge Ginsberg we’ve found a new role model.
A 96-year-old poet, songwriter and Holocaust survivor, Ginsberg started singing death metal late in life, a story told in this week’s Op-Doc, Leah Galant’s “Death Metal Grandma.”
Ginsberg’s performances are a striking sight (it’s not every day you see an elderly woman, backed by guitar-wielding skeletons, screaming into a mike) but she also wants us to think about how to appreciate life in the face of aging and death.
“Beyond the spectacle,” Galant writes, “Ms. Ginsberg’s story is really that of a woman who is finding new ways to be heard.”
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V67ULQVmcZ8
Moritz (Mauricio) Hochschild 1881-1965
Moritz Hochschild circa 1944
Credit: DPA picture Alliance/Alamy
How Bolivia’s ruthless tin baron saved thousands of Jewish refugees He has been described as ‘the worst kind of businessman’, but we now know that industrialist Moritz Hochschild also rescued as many as 20,000 Jews from the Nazis G Thu 11 Aug 2022 06.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/11/
Bolivia’s ruthless tin baron saved thousands of Jewish refugees
He has been described as ‘the worst kind of businessman’, but (...) industrialist Moritz Hochschild also rescued as many as 20,000 Jews from the Nazis
(...)
Moritz Hochschild had helped to rescue as many as 22,000 Jews from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe by bringing them to Bolivia between 1938 and 1940, at a time when much of the continent had shut its doors to fleeing Jews.
The documents, which included work permits and visas for European Jews, tracked Hochschild’s efforts not only to ensure Jews escaped Europe but also to resettle them in Bolivia, investing his own fortune and using his influence with the country’s elite to secure protection and employment for as many refugees as possible.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/11/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/11/
Ingeborg Neufeld 1922-2021
Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1922, to Fritz and Hildegard (Zwicker) Neufeld.
Her father ran a freight company, and her mother was a homemaker. Ms. Ginsberg described herself as a “Jewish princess” in her youth; she and her brother, Hans, had been afforded every luxury. But that changed with the rise of the Nazi Party. Ms. Ginsberg would tell Ms. Caruso and Mr. da Silva stories of the persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Vienna. In one instance, she said, she hid all night behind a grandfather clock in a building in town to evade Nazi paramilitary forces targeting Jews. Her mother assumed the worst, but Inge returned the next morning to a tearful reunion. After the war had begun her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp but was freed, Ms. Ginsberg said, after he bribed Nazi officials. Her mother, meanwhile, using money from the sale of her jewelry, fled to Switzerland in 1942 with Inge, Hans and Inge’s boyfriend, Otto Kollman, who would become Inge’s husband. The family lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, and Ms. Ginsberg managed a villa in Lugano, which was used as a safe house for Italian resistance members; there, she said, she and Mr. Kollman would pass messages from the resistance to the American O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/
1946-1953
USA
140,000 Jewish refugees (...) fled postwar Europe
In the years after the end of World War II, New York City absorbed a similar wave of immigrants — a large majority of the 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to America between 1946 and 1953 — and it did so comparatively smoothly and uneventfully.
These immigrants were eager to get on with their lives but were still in shock or heartbroken from the brutalities they had suffered, the parents and siblings they had lost, and the hometowns they could no longer return to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/
displaced persons > 'the last million'
When Allied troops entered Germany at the end of World War II, they were astounded to learn that more than six million people had been stranded in the fallen Reich after the war.
"The number of homeless, shelterless, starving civilians [in Germany] was overwhelming," historian David Nasaw says.
Among the displaced persons were allied prisoners of war, Jewish survivors of concentration camps and forced laborers from conquered lands who had been brought in by the Nazis to fuel the German war effort.
With a few months, most of these were able to return to their homelands, but about a million people refused to go home — or had no home to return to.
(...)
"From 1947 on, the nations of the world began to accept for resettlement displaced persons — Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Yugoslavs — but they would not welcome the Jews," he says.
"Until America opened its doors to Jewish displaced persons, no nation on Earth was willing to do so."
But U.S. acceptance of displaced persons — and especially Jews — was severely restricted.
And Nasaw says that the post-War resettlement effort set a pattern for the 21st century refugee crisis.
(...)
It took three years for Congress to accept any displaced persons into the United States.
In June of 1948, Congress passes its first displaced persons law, but the law is written in such a way as to restrict visas or to prohibit visas for 90 percent of the quarter million Jews.
The law is written that if you're not in Germany on VE Day, you can't get a visa.
And a large number of the Jews were not there on VE Day, because they were in the Soviet Union or in Poland or in hiding.
The law was passed and the law was written in large part by Midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats who held the power in Congress in 1948 after a Republican victory in 1946.
They did not want the Jews to enter the United States and they said it was not simple anti-Semitism.
It was a Cold War stratagem.
The opponents of Jewish migration said we can't trust the Jews.
Why?
Because they're Polish or they had spent time in the Soviet Union and large numbers of them are probably communist sympathizers or communist operatives, and we can't let them into this country.
The law that was passed that made it almost impossible for the Jews to come in because they were [alleged] communists, had no such safeguards against Nazi war criminals and Nazi collaborators — many of whom did enter the country under the provisions of the Displaced Persons Act.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/
Simon Gronowski
Photographs of Mr. Gronowski with his sister, Ita, left, and his mother, right.
Credit: Ksenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
A Holocaust Survivor Lifts Neighbors in Dark Times Simon Gronowski escaped the Nazis as a child and went on to write and speak widely about his experiences. In April, he began brightening lives by playing jazz tunes from his apartment window. NYT Nov. 20, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/
On April 19, 1943, when he was 11, Mr. Gronowsk jumped out of a speeding train.
He and his mother were packed with dozens of others in a cattle wagon on the deadly route from Mechelen, a town where Belgian Jews were rounded up, to Auschwitz.
Of all the trains to doom, Mr. Gronowski’s became especially etched in Holocaust history.
Known as “Convoy 20,” it was disrupted by three resistance fighters soon after departing Mechelen.
In the commotion, dozens got a chance to escape into the farmlands of Flanders.
Soon after the train started accelerating again, Mr. Gronowski’s mother, perhaps emboldened by the incident and the glimmer of hope, urged him to jump off.
“I jumped because I listened to my mother’s orders,” Mr. Gronowski said.
He leapt for his life.
“If I had known she was not going to jump, I would have stayed on the train,” he said, resting his cheek in his palm as if his head was suddenly too heavy.
For the next 17 months the boy was hidden in the attics of some Catholic families.
After Brussels was liberated in September 1944, he reunited with his ailing father, who had been in and out of the hospital for years, and eventually succumbed — to a broken heart, Mr. Gronowski believes — leaving the boy an orphan the following year.
Mr. Gronowski drew on the memories of prolonged confinement, the fear and desperate sadness of the 1940s, in a newspaper column he wrote as encouragement for fellow Belgians in late March as they struggled to settle into lockdown.
“Currently reduced to forced idleness, conducive to reflection, my thinking wanders and rejoins the confinements that I suffered 75 years ago, from 1942 to 1944, when I was 10-12 years old,” he wrote.
“Today, we can stay with our family or be helped by it, keep in touch, we can do our shopping, stock up on provisions, read the newspapers, watch television, but then we lived in terror, we lacked everything, we were cold, hungry and our families were separated, dislocated,” he added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/
Esther Bejarano (born Loewy) 1924-2021
When Esther Bejarano was 18, she played accordion in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, which played marches as prisoners left the concentration camp for hard labor and upbeat music as train loads of Jews and others arrived.
“They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things can’t be that bad,’” she told The New York Times in 2014, recalling how some detainees smiled and waved at the musicians.
“They didn’t know where they were going.
But we knew.
We played with tears in our eyes.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/
Roman Kent Poland 1929-2021
Mr. Kent in the 1950s with his wife, Hannah, a Lodz native who had survived three concentration camps.
Roman Kent, Who Reminded the World of the Holocaust, Dies at 92 He galvanized survivors into a movement to memorialize the Holocaust and spoke often of his experience. “I didn’t want our past to become our children’s future,” he said. NYT May 21, 2021 Updated 12:57 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/
Roman Kent (born Kniker) 1929-2021
He galvanized survivors into a movement to memorialize the Holocaust and spoke often of his experience.
“I didn’t want our past to become our children’s future, he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/
Nicholas George Wertheim UK 1909-2015
Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg
(...)
Mr. Winton — Sir Nicholas in England since 2003 when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II — was a London stockbroker in December 1938 when, on an impulse, he canceled a Swiss skiing vacation and flew to Prague at the behest of a friend who was aiding refugees in the Sudetenland, the western region of Czechoslovakia that had just been annexed by Germany.
(...)
Mr. Winton found vast camps of refugees living in appalling conditions.
The pogroms of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” had recently struck Jewish shops, homes and synagogues in Germany and Austria.
War looked inevitable, and escape, especially for children, seemed hopeless, given the restrictions against Jewish immigration in the West.
Britain, however, was an exception.
In late 1938, it began a program, called Kindertransport, to admit unaccompanied Jewish children up to age 17 if they had a host family, with the offer of a £50 warranty for an eventual return ticket.
The Refugee Children’s Movement in Britain sent representatives to Germany and Austria, and 10,000 Jewish children were saved before the war began.
But there was no comparable mass-rescue effort in Czechoslovakia.
Mr. Winton created one.
It involved dangers, bribes, forgery, secret contacts with the Gestapo, nine railroad trains, an avalanche of paperwork and a lot of money.
Nazi agents started following him.
In his Prague hotel room, he met terrified parents desperate to get their children to safety, although it meant surrendering them to strangers in a foreign land.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba 1924-2006
born Walter Rosenberg
Alfréd Israel Wetzler / Fred Wetzler 1918-1988 Fred Wetzler wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik
The astonishing story of how Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler broke out of the Nazi concentration camp, and Vrba’s mission to make the world confront the truth about the Holocaust
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/08/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/08/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/13/
1938-1939
UK
Nicholas Winton, the 'British Schindler', honoured by Czechs
Top award for 105-year-old who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis
before the second world war
Nicholas Winton enabled 669 children – mostly Jewish – to escape from the German- occupied country, then part of Czechoslovakia, and come to Britain over the course of nine months before war broke out in September 1939.
Most of the children's families ended up being interred and died in Nazi concentration camps during the war.
(...)
It is estimated that there are around 6,000 people in the world today who owe Winton their lives.
It was late in December 1938 when he cancelled a holiday to go to Prague to see what was happening to refugees there.
He spent only three weeks in the city – the most leave he could get from his job at home – but it was enough time for him to recognise the impending threat facing the refugees who had arrived following the Nazi invasion of the Czech Sudetenland in October 1938.
He immediately set about organising eight evacuations of the children on the Kindertransport train, a rescue mission organised from Britain.
He advertised in newspapers for foster homes, got the necessary permits from the immigration office in the UK, and persuaded the Germans to let the children leave the country.
When Winton returned to his job in London on 21 January 1939 he continued the rescue mission, working in the evenings until the last train was cancelled when war broke out in September 1939. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/21/nicholas-winton-british-schindler-czechs
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/19/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/21/
Holocaust survivors
Soviet Red Army soldiers with liberated prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, in 1945.
Photograph: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
BEYOND THE WORLD WAR II WE KNOW For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing “If their eyes were mirrors, it seems I’m not far from dead.” After being freed by Allied troops, some former prisoners continued to be mistreated. NYT Published April 28, 2020 Updated May 11, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/
Children and other prisoners liberated by the U.S. Army march from Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, to an American hospital to receive treatment in April 1945.
Photograph: Byron H. Rollins Associated Press
BEYOND THE WORLD WAR II WE KNOW For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing “If their eyes were mirrors, it seems I’m not far from dead.” After being freed by Allied troops, some former prisoners continued to be mistreated. NYT Published April 28, 2020 Updated May 11, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/
Even after the victorious American and Allied forces took control of the camps, the survivors — mainly Jews, but also small numbers of gays, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others — remained for months behind barbed wire and under armed guard in what became known euphemistically as displaced persons, or D.P., camps.
Many Jews were left wearing the same notorious striped pajamas that the Nazis first gave them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/
Memories of the Holocaust
Holocaust survivors' stories
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/08/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-zigi-shipper
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-harry-spiro
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-survivors-stories
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-ben-helfgott
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-martin-stern
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/
Submerged: the Jewish woman who hid from Nazis in Berlin
Marie Jalowicz Simon was one of 1,700 'U-boats', German Jews who survived the war submerged below the surface of daily life.
Now she has told all in a book http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/submerged-jewish-woman-hid-nazis-berlin
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/
1939-1943
“Tehran Children”
The “Tehran Children” is the name used to refer to a group of Polish Jewish children, mainly orphans, who escaped the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
This group of children found temporary refuge in orphanages and shelters in the Soviet Union, and was later evacuated with several hundred adults to Tehran, Iran, before finally reaching Palestine in 1943.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/
escape of 1,000 Jewish children from wartime Poland to Iran
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/01/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/01/
1940 Lithuania
Jewish refugees queuing for transit visas at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, July 1940.
Photograph: Nobuki Sugihara
My father, the quiet hero: how Japan’s Schindler saved 6,000 Jews Chiune Sugihara’s son tells how he learned of his father’s rescue mission in Lithuania, which commemorates his achievements this year G Sat 4 Jan 2020 21.04 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/
Chiune Sugihara, his wife Yukiko (right), his sister-in law Setsuko Kikuchi (left) with their two eldest sons, Hiroki and Chiaki.
Photograph: Nobuki Sugihara
My father, the quiet hero: how Japan’s Schindler saved 6,000 Jews Chiune Sugihara’s son tells how he learned of his father’s rescue mission in Lithuania, which commemorates his achievements this year G Sat 4 Jan 2020 21.04 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/
Chiune Sugihara, was a trader who lived in a small coastal town about 34 miles south of Tokyo.
(...)
(he) saved 6,000 Jews during the second world war.
Over six weeks in the summer of 1940, while serving as a diplomat in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara defied orders from his bosses in Tokyo, and issued several thousand visas for Jewish refugees to travel to Japan.
(...)
Lithuania would suffer a double occupation by Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But for nearly 10 months at the start of the second world war, Kaunas was the free capital of independent Lithuania, “a Casablanca of the north”, a hotbed of spies, as well as a short-lived haven for refugees fleeing Soviet and Nazi occupiers.
(...)
Sent to Lithuania to gather intelligence, Sugihara had probably not bargained for the scores of refugees who arrived at his gates in 1940.
After the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania on 15 June, refugees flocked to the modest two-storey Japanese consulate that was also home to Sugihara, his wife Yukiko, their two toddlers and a newborn.
Many were Polish Jews, who had arrived only months earlier after the Soviet invasion of Poland.
Now they were looking for a second escape.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/04/
On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba.
On the voyage were 937 passengers.
Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich.
Most were German citizens, some were from eastern Europe, and a few were officially "stateless."
The majority of the Jewish passengers had applied for US visas, and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States.
But by the time the St. Louis sailed, there were signs that political conditions in Cuba might keep the passengers from landing there.
The US State Department in Washington, the US consulate in Havana, some Jewish organizations, and refugee agencies were all aware of the situation.
The passengers themselves were not informed;
most were compelled to return to Europe. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
The Nazis had allowed the ship to sail with the expectation that the Jews would never be allowed to disembark — thus, the Nazis claimed, proving Hitler’s point that Jews were unwanted and justifying his persecution of them.
Indeed, Cuba spurned them.
So did the United States and Canada.
The ship was forced back to Europe, where roughly a quarter of the passengers would die in Hitler’s death camps.
A lucky few (...) made it safely to England.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/31/
February 1939 UK Kitchener Camp rescue
Some of the rescued German Jewish men at Kitchener Camp in 1939.
Photograph: Courtesy of the family of Herbert Weiss
The forgotten haven: Kent camp that saved 4,000 German Jews G Sat 24 Aug 2019 14.00 BST Last modified on Wed 28 Aug 2019 15.40 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/24/
It is a near-forgotten chapter in 20th-century history: the rescue of thousands of Jewish men from the Nazis, brought to a camp on the outskirts of the medieval town of Sandwich in Kent as darkness fell across Europe.
The Kitchener Camp rescue began in February 1939, and by the time war broke out seven months later about 4,000 men – mainly German and Austrian Jews – had arrived by train and boat.
Although the story of the 10,000 Jewish children brought to the UK on the Kindertransport is well known, the Kitchener Camp has received much less attention.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/24/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/24/
Refugees
The Caribbean
how the Caribbean became a haven for Jews fleeing Nazi tyranny
Thousands of refugees rebuilt their lives on Trinidad and other islands.
(...)
Several thousand Jewish refugees went by boat to Caribbean islands, including Barbados and Jamaica, in the run-up to and during the second world war.
(...)
Most wanted to reach the US or Canada, but could not get entry visas.
In their panic to escape the march of fascism, they were forced to take what they could get.
“It was a last-chance destination.
The majority who ended up in the Caribbean lost members of their families who stayed in the Holocaust,” said Joanna Newman, author of Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism 1933-1945.
At the 1938 Evian conference, 32 countries discussed the growing refugee crisis, but few opened their doors.
As refugees crammed on to ships leaving European ports with no clear destination, Jewish organisations engaged in frantic negotiations to find places willing to take refugees.
“Some boats went from port to port,” said Newman.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/07/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/07/
About 120,000 Jewish refugees fled persecution after the Nazis took power in Austria in March 1938.
The second most common destination after the US was the UK, with up to 20,000 refugees registered in 1945.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/30/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/30/
other survivors
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/
Related > Anglonautes > History > 20th century > WW2 (1939-1945)
Fort Ontario Refugee Camp - Oswego, New York
Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia
conflicts, wars, climate, poverty > asylum seekers, displaced people,
intelligence, spies, surveillance
|
|
|
