30-Apr-20 The Holocaust and our family

Arnold Roth tweeted this yesterday as we marked 72 years of Israel's proudly-restored independence.

Text:

From Jerusalem on #IsraelIndependenceDay, my family gives thanks for the WW2 Alled victory and the liberation by US forces of Dachau-Kaufering, a Nazi German death camp from where my father Abraham Rottenberg, a slave laborer, emerged among the few survivors 75 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/gbB3bHx6Ie— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

And then this:

As with many Holocaust survivors, the joy concealed the background darkness. Dad died in 1982. In 2000, I learned for the first time of his first wife, murdered by the Nazi Germans. And in 2016, I learned about their daughter, murdered at age 3. Of these losses, he never spoke.

— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

Arnold's father of blessed memory, Avraham Zvi-Hersh (Romek to his friends) Rottenberg, was liberated exactly 75 years ago - on April 29, 1945. On the advice of friends in Australia, where by then they had made their home, who said a shorter, more ordinary name would help in the process of settling into a new country, he and his wife changed the family name to Roth in the 1950s.

Back to the war. In the summer of 1944, after five years of already living through horrors that in every sense of the word are unimaginable, he was shipped (we now know on the basis of post-war German documentation) to one of the sub-camp complexes of Dachau called Kaufering [background]. There he became, not for the first time in the war, a slave-labor prisoner. From an online record [here], we think he may have been working for the Messerschmidt aviation company. But we can''t be sure.

Life in Dachau-Kaufering was, in key respects, hellish even by comparison with the rest of the Nazi German genocide industry:

The prisoners were used without consideration for life and limbs. The allocation of food was inadequate. According to the report of the war crimes investigation commission... the 11 concentration camps of Landsberg/Kaufering were the worst in Bavaria in terms of inhumane housing, food and the high death rate. The prisoners called these camps "cold crematorias"... By the end of April 1945, a total of about 30,000 prisoners had passed through the camps, including 4,200 women and 850 children. In just ten months, according to estimates from early post-war times, at least 14,500 prisoners died from hunger, epidemics, executions, transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on a march death. [Source]

As Arnold wrote to our family yesterday:

What happened there is nightmarish even by comparison with... Dad's own experiences in the Krakow Ghetto (with his wife Anda and daughter Sara - both soon murdered by the Germans), in the Plaszow labor camp, in the Auschwitz extermination camp and in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in all of those. US forces took control of what was left of it on April 29, 1945 and Dad then moved to nearby Munich where he soon met Mum.

With the war over and the mad scramble to find family and learn what had happened to them, he became aware (he was one of 17 children) that both his parents and all but two of his siblings along with most of his pre-war fellow-yeshiva-students and friends had been murdered in the Nazi German death machine.

In post-war Germany, starting, as so many European Jews did in those immediate post-liberation months, as a penniless, stateless, lone survivor Displaced Person bereft of family, Romek leveraged his skills as a photographer to quickly get back to making a living. It was a line of work from which he supported his wife and children for the next twenty-five years.

In the family lore, based on snatches of recollections he shared with us, he set himself up in one of Munich's public parks, snapping photographs of people out for a stroll or just enjoying life after a devastating war. He then somehow managed to track down the people he photographed (printing photographs in those days involved chemicals, equipment and considerable time) and sold them, or some of them at least, the photos.

This is how he met and then married Gucia.

Gucia had survived with all three of her sisters by staying tightly together - as they survived the nightmarish experiences of incarceration in the Lodz Ghetto, and then Auschwitz and forced labor camp - from the first day of the war until the day they were liberated. In the course of those years, the four sisters lost (to acts of murder) their parents and all three of their brothers. Also: their health, their education, their youth.

Arnold shared several photos yesterday - among them those below - with our family in Melbourne as well as with our childen and grandchildren. He did it to honour, as he wrote, how they rebuilt their lives, soon married (there was a rush of Jewish weddings in post-war Germany), started a family (they unfortunately lost a first child), sailed off to distant Australia, and over the following years raised their two sons in what he describes as comfort and an atmosphere of love and mutual caring.

Romek in Munich - some time between 1946 and 1949. A colorized version of
a black-and-white photo.

Romek and his wife Gucia probably photographed just before they married
in Munich in November 1947

Munich, probably 1948: Gucia and Romek. The monochrome photo
was recently colorized.

Like many other survivors of the Holocaust, Romek spoke little about his experiences with his own children. That's not to say he didn't talk. He did but usually in the relaxed company of other Yiddish-speaking survivors who needed little background and no explanation from one another in order to put things into context. It was, after all, the context of their own lives too.

Arnold reflected on that when writing his mother's obituary for the Australian Jewish News a few years back:

I know terribly little about the details and cannot understand now what stopped me from pushing harder when I could to know the contours of that part of [Gucia's] life, those six years of incomprehensible nightmare. What I do know comes mostly from overhearing both my parents chatting amiably with their dinner-party guests and card-playing friends, recounting stories – sometimes hair-raising – about ghetto, forced labor camps, Auschwitz, transports. Somehow the self-restraint got relaxed when they were in the company of other survivors, and the presence of inquisitive children with big ears didn’t get in the way.

In particular, to us children, Romek never once mentioned that he had had, and had lost (to murder at the hands of the Nazi Germans), a young wife and a daughter. The child cannot have been more than three or four when she too was shot or gassed or starved. About these lives and losses we learned only many years later after Romek himself had passed away.

In the past four years we also discovered a whole hitherto-missing branch of his family, the children of an older brother who himself lived through the Holocaust (a story with much drama) but who died young in the early 1950's. That family not only survived the war in Europe (as Rottenbergs) but remained there, living until today in Belgium. It's quite a narrative, one we're still exploring.

Melbourne's Jewish community was shaped and profoundly influenced by the influx of survivors, mostly with Polish backgrounds like Gucia and Romek, after its immigration policy was belatedly liberalized starting in 1947.

The Roths arrived in Melbourne as refugees in September 1949. Australia granted them a two-year permit but in time they became devoted and happy citizens and remained there for the rest of their lives. Romek passed away in Melbourne in 1982, Gucia in 2016.

May their memories continue, as they have been until now, to be a blessing for their entire growing family.

27-Jan-16: Reality, invention, memory and media

Image Source

We're fans of the columns penned by the journalist and commentator Evelyn Gordon. This paragraph comes from one of her latest:

...[F]or anyone who’s still confused about the difference between a real siege and a fictitious one, here are two simple tests: First, in real sieges, people die of starvation, because the besieger stops food from entering; in fake ones, the “besieger” sends in 2,500 tons of food and medicine per day even during the worst of the fighting. Second, real sieges get swept under the carpet by the UN; only the fake ones merit massive UN publicity. And if you think I’m joking, just compare the actual cases of Madaya and Gaza... So next time you hear people talking about the “siege of Gaza,” remember Madaya. And then tell them to stop wasting their breath on fake sieges when people are dying in real ones. ["How to Spot a Fake Siege", January 25, 2016]

Being reminded of the difference between reality and ideologically-driven spin is especially relevant today, January 27. That's the date on which, annually, Holocaust Memorial Day is observed - at least in those places where it's remembered at all.

What's remembered, what's forgotten and what's willfully twisted and distorted is, of course, part of the reason the commemoration exists. How effectively is a matter worth thinking about.

Why was January 27 set aside? On that date Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi network of industrialized death camps, was freed in 1945 [source]. In our own family, that's more than a historical footnote since two of our children's grandparents were among the relative handful of Jews who were sent there and, despite the unspeakable horrors, survived to build families and productive lives.

During its five years of operation, Auschwitz became

"the site of the largest mass murder in history. An estimated 1.1 million people were killed there between 1940 and 1945, 90% of whom were Jews. The camp survived World War Two largely intact, and today it forms one of the most significant and disturbing locations on earth.at the concentration camp..."

Is Gaza equivalent to what Auschwitz was? (There's no shred of doubt in our mind, and there shouldn't be in yours, that the answer is: absolutely not - not even in the very smallest, most trivial sense.) Many will say it depends whom you ask. The very idea, ironically, stems from propaganda first pushed into the public sphere by the defunct Soviet regime

and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media... In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left... [Martin Kramer writing in Mosaic Magazine, August 2014]

Anyone wanting to see for themselves how closely Gaza matches up to the libelous claims alleging it's a latter-day concentration camp can find no shortage of web-based reports depicting Gaza's luxe hotels, well-stocked supermarkets and glitzy shopping malls. Ditto a host of serious news analysis pieces (Washington Post, The Guardian, Honest Reporting, UK Media Watch and many others). It's there for anyone who wants to see.

The trouble is, reality is usually nuanced, often complex. It's clear that neither facts nor photos are enough to displace some people's prejudices and simplifications. Time has an effect too. The generation of Auschwitz survivors is, in the nature of things, approaching its natural end, making it that much easier for the deniers of the Holocaust's reality to attract audiences. And as the evidence sadly shows, there's a growing slice of humanity - among them a disturbingly large number of college students - who have been persuaded that not only did the Holocaust never happen, but it was the Israelis that did it with its principal victims being Palestinians.

"My visit to the Gaza concentration camp" [Source]

Don't be so quick to scoff. Fundamental mistakes of fact and of history are all around us; they are grist for the echo chamber that some parts of the mass media have become.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist whose work we have quoted admiringly here several times refers to some vignettes (in an article he wrote for Gatestone Institute) that are so shocking that a person could easily think they were invented. They illustrate what he terms a "degree of incomprehension -- and professional laziness -- [that] is difficult to imagine in the Internet age". Some instances (all direct quotes):

• When Israel assassinated Hamas's founder and spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, a British newspaper dispatched its crime reporter to Jerusalem to cover the event... Well, our hero reported on the assassination of Ahmed Yassin from the bar of the American Colony Hotel. His byline claimed that he was in the Gaza Strip and had interviewed relatives of the slain leader of Hamas...
• [A] Ramallah-based colleague... received a request from a cub correspondent to help arrange an interview with Yasser Arafat. Except at that point, Arafat had been dead for several years. Fresh out of journalism school and unknowledgeable about the Middle East, the journalist was apparently considered by his editors a fine candidate for covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Two Western journalists recently asked to be accompanied to the Gaza Strip to interview Jewish settlers living there. No, this is not the opening line of a joke. These journalists were in Israel at the end of 2015, and they were deadly serious. Imagine their embarrassment when it was pointed out to them that Israel had completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip ten years ago.

We could add several more from our personal experiences of meeting and being interviewed by literally hundreds of members of the brigade of what Khaled Abu Toameh calls "parachute journalists":

catapulted into the region without being briefed on the basic facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sadly, correspondents such as these are more the rule than the exception... Of course, the above tales hardly apply to all foreign journalists. Some correspondents from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe are both very knowledgeable and very fair. Unfortunately, however, these represent but a small group among mainstream media in the West... [But not] all foreign journalists. Some correspondents from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe are both very knowledgeable and very fair. Unfortunately, however, these represent but a small group among mainstream media in the West...

Those of us who care about truth, and its close companion, justice, understand that these are realities that must never be ignored. Khaled Abu Toameh expresses it sharply in the context of the journalism that we see practiced in this part of the world, which he correctly says

is not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, it is about being "pro" the truth, even when the truth runs straight up against what they would prefer to believe.

All the worthy memorials and monuments and anniversary events are helpless in the face of reportorial incompetence, massive ignorance, malevolence and fabrication. The deliberate rewriting of history absolutely matters.

So does forgetting the victims and their suffering and the lives they built afterwards.

17-Jul-12: Ne les oublions jamais

A tourist who walks through one of the  world's most beautiful cities can notice the many plaques on the street-facing outside walls of Parisian buildings, especially older buildings, memorializing this or that historical person or event. 

As Jews with a sense of history, our visits to Paris have included stopping and noticing the plaques that honor the dead and courageous of France's experiences under German occupation. 

Our own extremely frustrating experiences here in Jerusalem with trying to hold the local authorities to their obligation of remembering the victims of this ongoing war and of the attacks against the people of Jerusalem in the last twelve years by the armies of the terrorist forces have taught us that not everyone - and that certainly includes some public officials and other bureaucrats whose salaries we help to pay for - understands how important history and memory are. [Anyone not familiar with our struggle on this might be interested in "A plaque at Sbarro" and "No memorial, not even a plaque..."]

For people needing a reminder, and especially for those familiar with France's tragic experiences with the Nazis and with the many other racist haters of the Jewish people of more recent times, we offer the following article, published this morning by Haaretz. 

It illustrates again that memory thrives on remembrance; history withers and disappears in the absence of active maintenance.

The photo above is representative of many French public memorial plaques. It seems cold stone is not enough. People need reminding, and that calls for ongoing efforts from those of us who do remember.

Poll finds French youth never heard of mass 1942 deportation to Auschwitz

PARIS - Hundreds of people gathered at the site of a World War II internment camp outside Paris on Monday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the mass roundup of Jews for deportation from occupied France. French police, acting on orders from Nazi Germany, arrested 13,152 Jews, mostly women and children, in occupied Paris and its environs on July 16-17, 1942. Most of the prisoners were deported to Auschwitz. Only a few dozen survived. The Vel d'Hiv Round-up, as it is known after the indoor cycling arena where the prisoners were held for the first five days, was one of the worst acts of collaboration with Nazi Germany by the regime of Marshal Philippe Petain. Monday's ceremony took place at the site of a former transit camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, which was the staging post for the deportations. Rabbi Moche Lewin called on the assembly, which included a handful of survivors of the raids, to keep the memory of the victims alive "for the salvation of humanity." His appeal came as a survey by CSA pollsters showed between 57 percent and 67 per cent of French people under the age of 35 saying they had never heard of the Vel d'Hiv Round-up.
France did not officially recognize its complicity in the persecution of Jews until 50 years after the war, when then-President Jacques Chirac admitted the state had "committed the irreparable."
President Francois Hollande is set to preside over an official commemoration Sunday at the site of the cycling arena near the Eiffel Tower. The arena was destroyed by fire in 1959. A monument to the deportees marks the site where it stood. France did not officially recognize its complicity in the persecution of Jews until 50 years after the war, when then-President Jacques Chirac admitted the state had "committed the irreparable." President Francois Hollande is set to preside over an official commemoration Sunday at the site of the cycling arena near the Eiffel Tower. The arena was destroyed by fire in 1959. A monument to the deportees marks the site where it stood.

We pay a measurable and painful price for our inertia as individuals and as a community. The full article is here.