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Dear Child Survivors of the Holocaust, We trust that the New Year will bring good health and happiness to you and yours. In some ways the New Year didn’t exactly get off to a good start. The reports of antisemitism despite the best b t efforts ff t off our own community organizations, is once again in the headlines of newspapers and the nightly news. I cannot fully imagine what the sight of neo-Nazis marching in Spring Street must have meant to our Holocaust survivors. We felt it was time CSH as a group had something to say on the subject. We believe that the CSH lived experience is relevant today; child survivors know only too well the potential antisemitism has if left unchecked. Please mark your calendar with: Date: Sunday 26 November Time: 2.30 – 4.30 pm Mirror on the past - Reflections on our future. Antisemitism, 2023. Child survivors and their family and friends are invited to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum to hear Dr Paul Valent, Founding President of the Child Survivors Melbourne Group, Psychiatrist, Traumatologist, Author; will share his thoughts on antisemitism. He will be joined
by panelists: Gary Fabian OAM, Child Survivor, Holocaust educator Germany; Lisa Lewis, Volunteer Relationships Manager, Courage to Care, educates against prejudice, racism and discrimination; and Rabbi Gabi Kaltmann Ark Centre, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, mission Board Member, advocate against antisemitism. You will all receive an official invitation. With the subject of antisemitism on our minds, Roza Riaikkenen has shared her thoughts on this issue including childhood memories in Lithuania. Gary Fabian has informed us of his thoughts on the current state of antisemitism in Germany after his recent visit. This article provides a valuable insight into the situation from one of our own Child survivors, information we need to be aware of. We have included a heartwarming story about Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 Jewish children and an inspiring story about a hidden child – Tswi Josef Herschel. We trust you enjoy this edition of Connections and we look forward to seeing you at our event, 26 November. Warm regards, Viv Parry and Lena Fiszman Co-Presidents
From Lena’s Desk ‘Hidden child’ Holocaust survivor lives how his father dreamed Hidden child survivor Tswi Josef Herschel was given to a Christian family when he was four months old to escape the Holocaust. Approximately 1.5 million children were murdered in the Holocaust; thousands Tswi Herschel in who survived disappeared into hiding, 1943. (credit: Tswi Herschel) convents, monasteries and Christian and Catholic foster homes. Approximately 1.5 million children were murdered in the Holocaust; thousands who survived disappeared into
convents, monasteries and Christian and Catholic foster homes. “Hidden children” were given up out of love by desperate Jewish parents who wanted their children to survive what they foresaw to be unsurvivable. The children had to change their names, their histories and their religion to blend in, leaving them feeling lost and confused, struggling to make sense out of the fragmented pieces of their lives for years to come. Hidden child survivor Tswi Josef Herschel was given to a Christian family when he was four months old. With International Holocaust Remembrance Day falling today, January 27, he tells the Magazine, “Although I was
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a little baby, my first trauma was the separation from my biological parents.” After the war, hidden children continued to live in the shadows, forbidden from speaking about the past and eclipsed by stories of survivors of concentration camps. Herschel explains, “No one wanted to listen to us, and we needed to talk. We needed to express ourselves because it was a necessity to tell our story, our grief, but the hidden child survivors were swept under the rug… We are children of muteness.” The story of Tswi Josef Herschel: A hidden child Holocaust survivor Herschel was born on December 29, 1942, in Zwolle, a town with a small Jewish community of about 800 people in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. His young parents, Ammy and Nico, were forced to relocate to the Amsterdam ghetto that served as a collection point before Jews were deported to the Westerbork concentration camp, and then to an extermination camp afterward. They feared for their lives and the life of their child. Nico, an accountant, contacted his close friend and boss, Piet Schwenke, who was part of the resistance, for help. Schwenke arranged for his wife and 17-year-old daughter, Christina, to smuggle Herschel out of the Amsterdam ghetto. Christina carried him in her arms – as though he was her own baby – back to their home in Oosterbeek, an eastern village in the Netherlands. Because Mr. Schwenke had just been arrested for opposing the Germans, it was too risky for Herschel to stay with them, so he was taken into hiding by the family of a friend of his, Willem de Jongh, head of the resistance of Oosterbeek, and his wife, Margje. The de Jonghs were already hiding two Jewish teenagers, one of whom was extremely ill. They were a kindhearted, altruistic family who had five children of their own and “just wanted to save lives, “ Herschel explains. “The risk that people took for taking in Jews to put them in hiding was as high as to be a Jew in those days, and the fate of them was exactly the same, not only for one person, but for the whole family.” Herschel spent the next three years as Henkie de Jongh because his birth name, Tswi, was a Jewish name, Hebrew for “Herman.” Later in life, he discovered that he had been named after his paternal grandfather, who had been murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz a few months before Herschel was born. Herschel remembers with fondness how the de Jonghs made him feel part of their close-knit family. “I was taken care of with love. I was taken in as their own child,” he says. “My (foster) siblings were my brothers and sisters.” They were a religious Christian family, and Herschel
Tswi Herschel and Natali Herschel in Israel last yea
had no idea that he was really Jewish. Herschel describes how “every day there was the Bible at the table; after lunch, they read a chapter…I was Christian, I went to church, even the prayers I know today.” On September 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden, a famous World War II battle, commenced. For 10 days, the Allies fought against the Germans and succeeded in liberating two Dutch cities and several towns but did not fulfill their main objectives, such as liberating all of the Netherlands. Herschel vividly recalls, “We saw gliders landing around our house, and the parachutes came down. It was a magnificent sight, to tell you the truth.” His foster father hid everyone in the basement just in time – his sisters screamed as a bomb hit the house, and it went up in flames. Herschel and the de Jonghs were evacuated to Spankenburg, a Dutch village near Amsterdam, where a charitable family offered them shelter in their home, along with other evacuees. After the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, Herschel’s paternal grandmother, who had also been in hiding, showed up in Spankenburg, determined to take him back to Rotterdam with her. Herschel’s father had told her where Herschel’s hiding place was, and she hitchhiked to Oosterbeck to find him. She was shocked to see their decimated house, and neighbors informed her of where the family was staying. Herschel never got to say goodbye to his foster parents. He felt like his entire life and everyone he loved was ripped away from him. “It was the most devastating moment and trauma after the bomb fell on our house, but at least I had my [foster] mother and father. I was snatched away; forced to go with a strange woman to a totally new surrounding.” Herschel’s grandmother forbade him from having any contact with the de Jonghs. When he became so distraught, she recognized her grave mistake. “After six months of nagging and crying, she arranged to meet with my foster parents. Since then, I saw them more often, but it was never, ever the same.“ Herschel adds, “Up 2
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immense emotional undertaking of living through his father’s wartime experiences. Even though Herschel’s father had a heightened awareness of the perilous times they were in, his outlook remained unwaveringly optimistic, an attitude Herschel inherited. His father drew a life calendar with pictures illustrating what he believed would happen. His visions for the future were documented as though they had already occurred, and “90 percent came true,” Herschel states. One of the pictures is captioned “In August 1964 we arrived in Israel” with a hopeful Star of David. Tiny hand-drawn Magen Davids also decorates the pages of his diary, like reminders to keep looking forward. One entry reads “A people without a country doesn’t have a future.” Herschel’s parents were members of Naharut Israel, a Zionist youth movement in the Netherlands, and they dreamt about making aliyah. While separated for a year in 1941 due to work circumstances, they corresponded through letters almost every day. Herschel describes his parents as “already in love when they were teenagers. You can see it in the way my father writes about my mother.” They kept professing their love for each other and for their homeland. “Their hopes, their dream to go on aliyah were indescribable.” Herschel says, “My father wrote to my mother that chas v’chaliliah [God forbid], if something happens, if we’re going to be separated, that we will find each other in the harbor of Haifa. And then I stopped reading.” The last entry of Herschel’s father’s diary, dated August 14, 1941, states, “Officials of Jewish blood [the Netherlands] are called upon to perform services in labor camps. Maybe I’ll manage to stay out of harm’s way. However, a Jew imprisoned in Europe has few chances.” Instead of two young people in love making plans to spend the summer together with their child, in July of 1943 Herschel’s parents were forced into cattle cars with 2,200 other Jews headed to the Sobibor extermination camp. It was the last deportation from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands to Sobibor in German-occupied Poland. Herschel’s words are heavy with sorrow when he says, “All the passengers, all the Jews were gassed upon arrival.” His father was 27 and his mother 24. Herschel describes feeling the presence of his parents guiding him like an angelic force throughout his life. “The moment I started to realize that I am an orphan, my parents were always looking from above and guiding me. Sometimes I was very alone, and I didn’t know what to do, and so somehow, I don’t know my parents, I never heard their voices, [but] there was a voice in my head
till today, I have contact with their grandchildren, and I’m still Uncle Henk, Henkie de Jongh.” The de Jongh family has been honored at Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations. In Rotterdam, Herschel became someone else with a new name (Herman) and a new religion with a new language. Even when his grandmother was in hiding, she kept kosher, and it was crucial to her that Herschel be raised to do the same. She forced Herschel to go to Hebrew school twice a week. He describes feeling like he was living two lives. “I didn’t want to be Jewish… I came from a background that was totally different; I had to learn all these [new] things.” Adding to Herschel’s distress were his classmates at public school who were children of Nazi collaborators. They beat and taunted him, saying he should have been gassed. Herschel remembers, “I was ‘the stinking Jew,’ ‘dirty Jew.’ I had to fight… Even my teachers were antisemites. In high school, it was the same. Early on, I went to learn Judo so I could defend myself, and then they had more respect for me.” “I was ‘the stinking Jew,’ ‘dirty Jew.’ I had to fight… Even my teachers were antisemites. In high school, it was the same. Early on, I went to learn Judo so I could defend myself, and then they had more respect for me.” Tswi Josef Herschel It was a dark time of unimaginable grief for the Dutch Jewish community. Herschel describes the Jewish people he encountered, as well as his Hebrew school teachers, as being “all traumatized because they were survivors. Everyone lost their families.” Despite their anguish “the community was very resilient. They wanted to live and to build up their lives,” Herschel says. Herschel was eight years old when he discovered that he, too, shared the terrible trauma of losing his family. He learned that he was an orphan and his birth name was “Tswi” when a family tree his father sketched came tumbling down off a bookshelf he was forbidden to look through, confronting him with a past he didn’t know existed. HERSCHEL REVEALS, “How I found out about my real name is that my grandmother said, ‘You are not allowed to touch the top bookshelves.’ I took a chair one day and took one of the 10 diaries. My father wrote 10 diaries starting in 1932, and in 1941 he stopped. I took one of his diaries, and out fell a family tree… There was my name, and it was connected to Nico Herschel, who I knew was my father.” It was not until he was 35 years old that Herschel could bring himself to read his father’s diary entries. “I couldn’t touch it – it was too emotional,” Herschel says. He wanted to wait until he felt strong enough to bear the 3
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saying, ‘You have to go this way to do that.’” Herschel founded a manufacturing company which produced smooth metal parts and machinery. It was a great success. After he sold the company, he fulfilled his childhood dream to emigrate from the Netherlands to Israel with his wife in 1986, following his two daughters who already lived there. Overcome by emotion, he expresses how proud he is that his grandchildren are born in Israel and serve in the IDF. Herschel says that for many years, he struggled to understand why his parents gave him up. It was not until he became a father himself that he truly understood it was an act of the deepest kind of love intertwined with faith and hope for the future. “I was born out of love, and out of love I was given away,” he says. Herschel began speaking publicly about his life on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Washington, DC in 2004, where he was a candle lighter at the memorial ceremony on Capitol Hill. After he participated in an interview hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Elie Wiesel approached him and said, “Mr. Herschel, we are both survivors. Your [story] is totally different than how I survived, but you can convey a message, especially for the young generation. Please do it!” Herschel has been telling his story ever since. Herschel’s youngest daughter, Natali, remembers finding her father in his dark office with the reading light on. “I never knew what he was doing in the middle of the night,” she says. “20 years ago, when he started lecturing, I found out he was reading my grandfather’s diaries at night.” Today, Herschel and Natali travel together across Europe and Israel to lecture at schools, religious institutions,
police academies and Holocaust museums, such as Yad Vashem and The Anne Frank Center Berlin, about the dangers of antisemitism, populism and intolerance. Natali focuses on the impact of the Holocaust on the next generations. In 2019, Herschel was awarded The German Order of Merit by German President Frank Walter-Steinmeier, and in July 2022, the German President of the Police of Lower Saxony honoured them for lecturing at police academies. Herschel will be awarded with the 2022 Simon Wiesenthal Prize for his work in March. Last year, Herschel and Natali were featured in a documentary, WiederGut (Is It All Right?), which examines how Holocaust education is taken much more seriously in schools in Germany than in the Netherlands, even though the Netherlands had the highest number of Jewish Holocaust victims in Western Europe. They also converse with descendants of Nazis, who Natali says frequently come up to her after her lectures, crying. “They feel so ashamed… Since their childhood, it was an issue. They’re embarrassed. It hindered them in their growth; they’re frustrated, they’re angry… it’s taboo to talk about.” “They feel so ashamed… Since their childhood, it was an issue. They’re embarrassed. It hindered them in their growth; they’re frustrated, they’re angry… it’s taboo to talk about.” Natali Herschel and Natali believe we are on the verge of another foreboding time. “We have to be thankful that we have our own country,” Herschel states, “because we are in this situation, and I see its gathering clouds, and when you close your eyes, then all of a sudden you wake up and say, ‘How is it possible?’” Tswi Herschel’s website: tswiherschel.net
“Antisemitism and the lessons I learned from my mother.”
Roza with her rescuers Maria and Kasys Baksha 1944.
As I understand it, antisemitism is a phenomenon of stereotyping Jews as scapegoats who are to blame for all humanity’s problems and miseries. Stereotyping Jews as those who are plotting against the rest of humanity began as early as the founding of Christian Church in the fourth century AD and resulted in a lot of suffering. Then why, even in our educated times, people fall to such stereotyping? After WWII, German researchers
were especially eager to understand why their nation fell as low as to instigate the Holocaust. World-renowned German social psychologist, Erich Fromm, in his seminal book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 275,1977, explains what he calls, ‘conformist aggression’: “…for most people reality is constituted by general consensus and not based on reason or critical examination.” This general consensus on ‘conformist aggression’ is always magnified by common problems and emergencies, such as wars, depressions and pandemics. People search for scapegoats instead of uniting to solve the problem. And propaganda often shows them where these scapegoats can be found. How can we overcome this problem? In my 4
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us to punish these soldiers for the horrors that Hitler’s regime inflicted on the Jews. We should be humans in any situation, and this implied sharing what we have with others. I was seven years old at that time, just a year after being saved from the ghetto by a Lithuanian couple. I received another lesson by Roza’s mother - Sara Lamdanskaya, 1945. experience from my foster mother and rescuer, Maria Bakshene, a Lithuanian Catholic Christian. She was not educated, but she had a heart of gold. So, perhaps, if we teach our children unconditional love, then we can guarantee that they will be impervious to any stereotyping and aggression. I remembered my both mothers’ lessons on values throughout my whole life and I shared them with my daughter and her four children. Roza Riaikkenen
understanding, only through education, truthful information, and instilling in children the habit of free and ethically charged thinking. I was lucky because my parents had wholesome values that included a humanitarian approach to other people whoever they were. My mother, Sara Lamdanskaya, once gave me an unforgettable lesson of such an approach. When she had just returned from a German concentration camp in May 1945, and we miraculously met after the war in Vilnius, a city in ruins, my father, Pinchus Lamdanskis, received an apartment for our family from the state. The apartment was partly destroyed during the battle for Vilnius in July 1944, so my father’s workplace sent several German prisoners of war to fix it. Food was scarce, and when I saw that my mum shared our dinner with these prisoners, our former prosecutors, I asked her why she did this. My mum told me that in her eyes the German soldiers were also common humanity forced to do evil things by a corrupt government. They had been sent to war, and they did what they were ordered to do. It is not up to
The Resurging Antisemitism in Germany of all kinds, the idea of a “secret Jewish world order”. During the COVID pandemic, there was a movement of people who were sceptical towards vaccinations, the virus such as Covid does not exist, it was invented by Bill Gates and the Jews. Unfortunately, part of the Covid-sceptics mixed up with the old Nazi, with the old-style German nationalists. This led to an increase od antisemitism in Germany. Statistics say the approximately 4% of people living in Germany today used to belong to the group of “old Nazis”. After Covid the estimate is that this has risen to 6%. The other factor points to the increase of right-winged parties across Europe has also resulted in an increase of antisemitism on the political level. While this is especially true for countries such as Poland, and Hungary, as well as recently for Italy and parts of Spain. In France there is Marie Le Pen and her movement, in Germany the AfD. Last year I spent a week in Lyon, France where the signs are even more disturbing. On a main street, there were multiple placards, “Free Palestine” and practical every lamppost had swastika drawings on them. While all these parties are anti-migration, ant-Islam, they also promote re-enforcement of nation-stated within Europe. This also includes a very critical view on Israel and the Holocaust. Many of these parties say “The war is over for now for more than years, so let’s stop talking about sins of the past. Don’t let Israel, the Jews, and the ultraliberals dictate what we are allowed to say or
Having travelled to Germany many times over the last four decades, and particularly over the last ten years, as a Holocaust survivor I have observed the emergence of ultra-right-wing elements, who over the last five years have seen some being elected to Garry Fabian both state and federal parliaments in OAM Germany. While on my visits I have been mainly isolated from firsthand evidence of antisemitism, as I have been chiefly associated during my visits with groups and people who promote peace, harmony, understanding, social cohesion and critical approach to Germany’s darked past. Also, there is no Nazi style graffiti visible, as the strident laws against such public manifestations are rigidly enforced. On the wider scale, here is a look at the broader picture. One observation I have made over the last decade, that while government and concerned groups still erect memorials, hold seminars to remember the events of the 1933-1945 events and the Holocaust, today’s generation takes the view, “lets draw a line under this era and move on”. There have always been (and unfortunately will always be) people in Germany attracted by the old Nazi ideology. These people still admire Hitler, the SS and the Nazi regime and due to that they believe in all forms of conspiracy theories. This includes Jewish conspiracies 5
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not”. Those parties are not openly antisemitic. But their narratives and rhetoric’s are similar to the propaganda and language used by the Nazis. This promotes a form of hidden and secret antisemitism which does not show openly these days, but which could become more visible anytime in the future. Last, but not least, there is a third form of antisemitism in Germany. Many of the immigrants from Muslim countries are anti-Israel and following this, often antisemitic. Young Muslims at schools in Germany often protest when history teachers start the lessons covering the holocaust, Germany’s responsibility today and they often start to argue with their teachers, bring their view and perspectives and these discussions to nurture a “soft antisemitism” within the groups of young people. Many refugees from the Ukraine believe that Germany cares too much about its past and that they should become
more critical towards Israel and the “cabalistic Jewish world order”. On the other hand, many young people believe in multiculturism, that global problems can only be solved on an international level. They do not care too much about Germany’s past, but believe in equality, tolerance and acceptance and therefore fight and protest the rightwinged parties, the antisemitic movements but also against anti-LGBTTIQ discrimination or against people in ignoring climate change. This may sound like a mix of topics, which in some extend do not belong together, but for this young generation they are all the same quality, and they are very outspoken, meet for demonstrations, are in talk shows on TV, providing some hope for a better future. Garry Fabian OAM
Irena Sendler and the Girls from Kansas her forgotten story 60 years later. Liz, Megan, and Sabrina, who began as students of history for a National History Day competition, became recorders of history, championing Sendler’s legacy in Poland, the U.S., and around the world. Three teenagers from rural Kansas helped crack open the silence about the Holocaust in Poland. My first brush with this story came in the winter of 2001, in my Middlebury, Vermont, paediatric office, while going through my mail. This was before the electronic health record, and I daily triaged a prodigious stack of paper. Everything had about three seconds to be kept, filed, recycled, or thrown away. I am a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Each year I send a contribution, and they send me a calendar highlighting 12 monthly Holocaust heroes. As I quickly flipped through, I was brought up short by the November entry. It was the photo that stopped me—a young Irena Sendler, twenty-nine years old, who looked a lot like my niece. I read the short paragraph below the photo: Irena Sendler, (1916–unknown) As head of the children’s division of Zegota, the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, social worker Irena Sendler (code name “Jolanta”) helped smuggle more than 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto. Hiding them in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals, and private homes, she provided each child with a new identity, carefully recording in code their Jewish names and placements so that surviving relatives could find them after the war. Arrested by the Gestapo in the fall of 1943, Sendler was sentenced to death. Zegota rescued her before her execution. She assumed a new identity and
“At the time of the pandemic, we celebrated the helpers and the heroes, some of whom forfeit their lives. During World War II, many Holocaust heroes were unsung; they died during the war or lived their Megan tok this photo of lives quietly afterward. Irena Sender, May 3rd, One such hero was Irena 2008. Irena passed away Sendler, a Polish Catholic nine days later on May 12th, 2008. social worker.” Between 1942 and 1943, Sendler and her network of 10 compatriots rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. Disguised as an infection-control nurse, Sendler knocked on doors in the ghetto, asking parents and grandparents to give up their children and grandchildren so that she could smuggle them out. Each child was given a new Polish name and forged identity papers and hidden in foster homes, orphanages, or convents. Sendler insisted that lists of the children be kept, documenting their Jewish and Polish names, so that after the war they would know their original identities. She hid the lists in milk jars that were buried in the backyard of one of her co-conspirators. After the war, Poland’s Communist government persecuted members of Poland’s wartime resistance, Zegota, of which Sendler was a part. They were harassed, interrogated, imprisoned, and even executed. Sendler and others who rescued Jews during the war kept silent. Almost no one knew of Sendler and her heroism. She would have remained an unsung hero were it not for three teenage American girls who discovered 6
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dimension. I have been a closet writer most of my life, and I was thinking about writing a novella about the Warsaw ghetto. Irena Sendler seemed like a compelling character, and I wanted to know more about her. I was also intrigued by the two stories—Irena’s wartime history and the contemporary story of three Kansas teens. I Irena Sendler Warsaw, called their teacher in Kansas, 1930 Norm Conard. “It’s serendipitous that you should call,” he said. “We’re looking for someone to write these two stories.” I hesitated. I had not written nonfiction before, only fiction and poetry. But I felt the powerful synergy of these two stories. I was not eager to write a wartime history of a Holocaust hero because most Holocaust literature leaves me angry, sad, depressed, and frustrated. But this story was different—an inspiring story of three typical American teenagers who helped restore the history of a great hero. I agreed to write the story and, in 2004, visited Uniontown, Kansas, where the girls went to school. A small town with a population of 264, it was down on its luck. Many stores were shuttered. It had the look of a Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans black-and-white photo from the Depression. I met Norm and the girls at the high school, and I was hooked. Uniontown High School, with only about 120 students, is one of the lowest-income school districts in Kansas. There was no diversity in the school—never a Jew, an African American, or even a Catholic—yet these teens had discovered Sendler’s story and told the world. I spent a week interviewing the students, their families, their teacher, community members, and Holocaust survivors from Kansas City who had taken a great interest in the play and the Irena Sendler project. My wife and I accompanied the students and Conard to Poland on their third visit, in 2005. I was able to do more extensive research and interview Sendler, Holocaust scholars, and some of the children Sendler had rescued, now in their sixties and seventies. We met Elzbieta Ficowska, rescued as a six-month-old infant. Sendler had sedated her and put her in a carpenter’s box. Her parents kissed their baby good-bye and left a small spoon in the box with her name inscribed on one side and her birthdate on the other. It is the only memento of her parents, who were murdered at Treblinka. She and I have become good friends, and I have held her spoon many times, always with tears. Ficowska became
continued her work for Zegota. I was stunned. I’m a child of Holocaust survivors. How could I not know Irena Sendler’s story? Everybody knows Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,100 Jews from a German concentration camp in Poland and whose story was told in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. Even at the USHMM, the preeminent scholars of the Holocaust didn’t know much about Sendler. They had her birth year wrong (it was 1910, I later found out), and they didn’t know if she was still alive. I kept this calendar in a file labelled “Interesting Stuff.” And there it sat for almost three years. Then, in February 2004, I came into my office one night to see a sick child. On my desk someone had left a copy of the Ladies Home Journal, opened to an article, “The Woman Who Loved Children.” It was about Irena Sendler and three Kansas teens who uncovered her story. The article explained that, in 1999, while planning a National History Day project, they found a brief reference to Sendler in a U.S. News and World Report article entitled “The Other Schindler’s.” Sendler’s story inspired their NHD project: a play they wrote and performed called Life in a Jar. It retold, in dramatic form, the emotional story of Sendler knocking on ghetto doors and asking Jewish parents to give up their children to save them. The title, Life in a Jar, refers to the lists Sendler buried. The teens read that Irena had been arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and tortured in Pawiak Prison, the most notorious prison in the ghetto, from which almost no one escaped. Logically, they began searching cemetery records and reached out to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, seeking information about where she might be buried. Soon after, they received a letter from the foundation, saying that Sendler was alive! She was in her nineties and living in poverty with her daughter-in-law in Warsaw. The foundation then put them in touch with Sendler. The three students made plans to travel to Poland and meet Sendler, first trying to raise money through candy sales, until philanthropists and Holocaust survivors from the Kansas City Jewish community stepped in to help cover the trip. Traveling out of the country for the first time (the first time on a plane for one of them), the girls finally met Sendler at her Warsaw home in 2001. They maintained a tender friendship with her for the next seven years until she passed, making several trips to Poland to visit her, each time performing Life in a Jar at various venues. And they began working with Polish high school students who were telling the forgotten stories of rescuers from their own communities. As I read the Ladies Home Journal article, I remembered the USHMM calendar. This story now took on a new 7
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of postwar Poland’s Communist anti-Semitism, Polish rescuers who had received Yad Vashem medals hid them and told no one of their wartime activities. At one performance of Life in a Jar in Warsaw, I sat beside an old man, old enough to have been an adult during the war. Throughout the performance he sat with his hands together, clutching something inside. After the performance I asked him about it, and he opened his hands to reveal his Yad Vashem medal. There were tears in his eyes as he explained, “I have kept this buried in my basement for 60 years. I told no one except my wife. I didn’t tell my children, family, friends, or coworkers. Now, because of these American students, I can show this proudly. It was the finest thing I have ever done.” My first time in Warsaw, in 2005, I could find few markers of the Warsaw ghetto and no commemoration of the wall. In my research for the book, I found no reference to Irena Sendler before 2000 other than by Yad Vashem (1965 Righteous Gentile medal, and in 1983 a tree planted in her honour next to that of Raoul Wallenberg) and the U.S. News and World Report article that launched the Kansas teens on their National History Day project. When I returned in 2013 for the release of the Polish translation of my 2011 book Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project (also translated into Russian, Chinese, and Mongolian), I saw how much had changed in Poland. Where there had been no markers of the wall, now there is a footprint, 10 inches wide that says, “MUR GETTA/ GHETTO WALL 1940–1943,” placed in sidewalks and lawns showing the exact location of the ghetto wall. At each of the 22 gates there is a memorial plaque with a map and description of what happened in the ghetto. There are now 35 Irena Sendler schools in Poland, three in Germany, one in France, and one in England. I have met to discuss Sendler with Poland’s Deputy Foreign Secretary Jerzy Pomianowski, given radio, TV, and print interviews, and met with a journalist from the Catholic News Agency. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw opened in 2014, and the Lowell Milken Centre Europe, a Polish office of the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation, works with Polish teens on similar projects. The project changed Poland as well as the American students who started it all. From my time with the Kansas teens, I learned that each girl knew something about losing or almost losing their own parent. Liz was abandoned by her parents as a young child and raised by her grandparents, Megan’s mother developed cancer, and Sabrina’s mother suddenly died during the project. The girls courageously allowed me to tell their own painful stories in my book. And it became clear to me that the
Children rescued by Sendler, living in Polish Convent, circa 1943
one of Sendler’s caregivers and the chairperson of the Association of Children of the Holocaust in Poland. It was Sendler’s ninety-fifth birthday when I interviewed her. She was energetic, and her memory was clear and specific. She wanted to be sure that I credited all of her network of rescuers and liaisons. She ensured that I had everyone’s name spelled correctly. Poland was arguably the most victimized country in occupied Europe. The consequence for hiding or even feeding a Jew was execution, often in public as a warning to other Poles. When I asked Sendler why she put herself and her family at such risk, she said, “It was a need of my heart.” She rejected the appellation of hero. “I only did what any decent person would do. . . . The heroes were the babies—they were the heroes of their mothers’ hearts. . . . It was the parents and grandparents who gave up their children, they were the true heroes.” She said it was her father’s teaching that inspired her. “If you see someone drowning you must rescue them, even if you cannot swim.” And “there are only two kinds of people in the world, good and bad, regardless of race, religion, or creed. And most people are good.” She lamented that she had not done enough—for every child they saved almost one hundred went to their deaths at Treblinka. Sendler has become a Polish national hero. Poles have been eager to tell their stories, in part because the Life in a Jar project stimulated Polish/Jewish dialog as well as scholarship about Poland during the German occupation. Although there has been a disturbing return of antiSemitism and Holocaust denial in Poland, Sendler’s story continues to be told. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, recognizes more Righteous Gentiles—those who rescued out of principle, not for personal gain— from Poland than from any other country in occupied Europe. In 2019, it listed 27,362 Righteous Gentiles, with 6,992 from Poland, or around 26 percent. But because 8
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last three children Irena Sendler rescued were the girls from Kansas. Today, Elizabeth Cambers Hutton has two master’s degrees and teaches Holocaust history in Missouri. Sabrina Coons-Murphy is an elementary schoolteacher in Kansas. Megan Stewart Felt, the program coordinator for the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation, still works with Norm Conard to further Sendler’s legacy and continues to play Sendler in performances of Life in a Jar. The story has also changed me. I am a German-American Jew, born after the war to parents who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. Others in my family did not. For the first five years of my life, I lived in upper Manhattan, in Washington Heights—an urban shtetl of German Jews who had survived the Holocaust. I didn’t speak English until I was five years old. The Holocaust was the baffling but iconic story of my childhood, a subject of nervous, hushed, adult conversation. It was frightening, mysterious, impossible to grasp, yet everywhere—it was the atmosphere. There was an awkward gracelessness on the part of those who lived through it, a furtiveness I now understand to be a kind of PTSD. It was the unacknowledged elephant in the living room—huge but shrouded. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I learned that my grandfather had been arrested on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, and imprisoned in Dachau. My grandmother went to high school with one of the administrative guards at Dachau. He accepted a bribe from her, and my grandfather was released after six months. In 1999, my parents were interviewed as part of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project. In the course of the interview my mother brought out her identity papers, marked “Jew,” and her nursing certificate, stamped with a swastika. My brother and I had never seen these artifacts. Growing up as a child of survivors, I had a sense of mission about the Holocaust, but didn’t know how that would manifest. Now in my seventies, I find that in writing Life in a Jar, and speaking about it to new audiences, I am fulfilling that mission.
The three students Liz, Megan, and Sabrina at the Lowell Milken Centre Kansas, 2018.
In my talks, sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council, I emphasize how Sendler and the girls from Kansas were repairing the world—tikkun olam in Hebrew. Few of us would have the courage to do what Sendler did, but all of us can do what Liz, Megan, and Sabrina did—performing small acts of decency and respect for all people. Acts that change the world. About the author Jack Mayer is a Vermont paediatrician and writer. In addition to Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project, he has written a work of historical fiction, Before the Court of Heaven, inspired by the history of how Germany’s Weimar democracy became the Third Reich—a cautionary tale. He is on the VHC Speakers Bureau and speaks about both books and the history that inspired each. He donates 60 percent of his author royalties to the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation in Kansas, where Norm Conard and Megan Stewart- Felt continue to work with students around the world on projects about unsung heroes. They continue to perform the play in the U.S., Canada, and Poland. Jack Mayer Humanities Summer 2020, Volume 41, Number 3
Film ‘Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer’ Film Producer/Director Danny Ben-Moshe latest Film ‘Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer’ will have its Melbourne Premiere at the Jewish International Film Festival with a special preview, Sunday 29 October at 4.00 pm. Here is a short trailer for the film: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=t4SvIwe0zGA Richard Rosen OAM, CSH founding member, exceptional public speaker and Holocaust advocate,
features in the film. There will be a Q&A after the presentation. Following the Jewish International Film Festival, the film will be released in cinemas across Australia in December and will go to air on the ABC TV in early 2024.
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Greetings from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, Museum Director & CEO children who were hidden during the war: Floris Kalman, Paul Grinwald, Halina Zylberman, John Lamovie, Sonia Kempler, Joe de Haan and Henri Korn. Essentially the exhibition experience is designed so that visiting students ‘meet’ their historical peers and discover their stories, and the acts of kindness and bravery that ultimately led to their rescue. This is not a traditional exhibition – it is experiential – and will be part of a school program for 10–14-year-olds. The exhibition will be open to the general public, however it is only available in booked and timed sessions, as it is a 45-minute experience, with all participants starting at the same time. Bookings will soon open via our website. Once again, the invitation is always open for any of you to volunteer with us. Please contact Rae Silverstein or Anna Berhang on (03) 9528 1985 with any enquiries. On behalf of the staff and Board of Melbourne Holocaust Museum we look forward to showing you our new exhibitions towards the end of the year and welcoming you here for many more events. Best wishes,
Dear Child Survivors, I hope this finds you well. It is wonderful to share with you that we are in the final stages of completing our new permanent Holocaust exhibition. Opening this exhibition to the public in November will enable us to broaden the vital lessons and history of the Holocaust to the wider community. Included in this very powerful exhibition are so many stories of child survivors, including Irma Hanner, Henry Buch, Walter Glaser, Henry Ekert, Horst Eisfelder, Maria Lewit and others who have donated artefacts to our collection. We are painfully aware that many child survivors don’t have any documents or artefacts from the war period, so it is really incredible that there even are some that can be displayed and are able to convey a few stories to represent so many others. We also have a powerful display specifically on the experiences of children in the Holocaust. Additionally, and as has been conveyed to you previously, we have another permanent exhibition, designed for 10–14-year-olds, entitled ‘Hidden: Seven children Saved’. This immersive experience features the stories of seven
Jayne Josem, Museum Director & CEO
In Memory: Charles Kessler to ask me to dinner. In their modest, comfortable house in Toongabbie (one of the earliest settlements in Sydney) I met Charles and Tania and three of their four children and immediately felt at home. They subsequently came to our house and met my family and then life took over and I didn’t see Charles until the early 1990’s when I went back to England for a reunion with the “Lingfielders’ where I got to know him more as a gentle considerate soul who liked people and connected with many. Sadly, Tania passed away too soon, sixteen years ago and i kept a tenuous contact with Charles until his recent death. His funeral was a real celebration of his life. The chapel was filled with his children and grandchildren and his many friends from all walks of life. Photos were shown and anecdotes were told. It is often at people’s funerals that we learn more about our friends and acquaintances than before. Such was the case with Charles when his son Michael gave the most moving eulogy that really gave a true picture and calibre of the man. No one could have put it better so with Michael’s permission, I have enclosed his tribute in full as an attachment in memory of my friend Charles. Litzi Lemberg Child Survivor Group Sydney
I went to an old friend’s funeral last week. He was special though I saw him rarely. Charles was a child Holocaust Survivor in every sense of the word. His only surviving relative was his mother who could not look after him. His wife, children and many friends from all walks of life were his family. I first met Charles in 1985 after Sarah Moskovitz’s visit to Sydney from L.A Sarah was a guest at the first public gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Australia to about her book ‘Love Despite Hate” in which she interviewed 25 adults who were children under 12 who survived Terezin and flew from Prague to England in 1945 and eventually arrived at Windemere and then Lingfield house, the orphanage in Surrey. Charles’s wife Tania was one of those children, as was I, though I was not aware at the time. How ever we’re in photos together at Windemere and that made it real. Charles came to our orphanage sometime after I had left. He and Tania, as they matured had a special connection and eventually married and moved to Australia. I had my own journey from England to Australia, oblivious of Charles and Tania until I met Sarah. Sarah gave me Tania’s number and though I was nervous I did not hesitate to contact her and she did not hesitate 10
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Charles Kessler Eulogy weeks of his ongoing brain cancer driven delirium he was still managing to dress himself at 1am, 2am, 4am, any inappropriate muster time really! By the late 1950s most of the orphaned kids at Lingfield House had graduated to jobs and studies and had either stayed in the UK or emigrated to the U.S. or Israel. But Dad made what I think all us kids believe today was his best call of all - emigration in 1965 to Australia as 10-pound Poms. It´s perhaps a little hard to imagine now but at the time that was an outrageously courageous decision. A man and his wife, with no real parental role models, no money to their name, basic education, and with no family in their new country, made the call to start a new life with three young children in a country on the other side of the world. Looking back on Dad´s life now however, the move to Oz kind of makes sense. He has over the years revealed himself as an adventurer at heart really. And not afraid to take risks. As a young soldier he hiked the length of Southern Africa. On arrival in Sydney, he walked into the Goodyear factory and scored himself a job. He needed more money though to support a young family so set about driving taxis in a totally foreign city. And he loved speaking to people, to anybody really and it’s no surprise that his most enduring job, a clerk at the Shell refinery at Clyde, endeared him to many, many people and gave him lifelong friendship. Australia was not as tolerant a place in the 60s as it is today, and I think I´m correct in saying that we were probably the only Jewish people living in Sydney´s third convict settlement called Toongabbie. Dad had bought a house there and he and mum were determined to give us kids as normal and steady upbringing as possible despite us being pretty poor. With younger brother Ben`s arrival in 1971, we were six living in the cramped and small fibro house at 25 Picasso Crescent that Dad was still living in 3 days before he passed. Despite the sometimes-adverse circumstances, Mum and Dad succeeded. Dad today is survived by us four kids, 7 grandchildren - Natalie, Hayley, Maddie, Ruby, Adam, Mat and 3 Great-Grandchildren Lexi, Savvy and Max. We all hold with us wonderful memories of Dad and I`d personally like to thank him here for one in particular. To a boy from Toongabbie who’d never ventured much further by himself outside of Parramatta, it didn’t seem like it at the time, but the best thing Dad ever did was send me to Israel when I was 16 going on 17. “To learn about our culture, about being Jewish”, he said to his skint son who was about to be joined for 6 weeks in in the Holy Land by 30 Double Bay and Toorak Jewish
I remember saying at my mother´s funeral sixteen years ago that her legacy of tolerance towards others was what most inspired me about her, in spite of the horrific losses she had suffered as child during the Holocaust. Today I feel equally as proud of our father, who despite surviving enormous loss and disruption as a boy during the Holocaust years, was able to live his life in such an understated way yet at the same fill it up with so many memories for all those around him, his kids, grand-kids, great-grand kids and his large circle of friends. Our Dad, Charles Henry Kessler, was born in Vienna, Austria on October 21 in 1937. Europe was headed for another World War and an unimaginable pogrom of Jewish people was around the corner. Charles´s father Austria was a well-known football player and once it became clear that tension in Austria and beyond in Europe was reaching a point of no return, he decided to eventually flee the country for Spain but before doing so with the help of the Resistance hid his young son on a farm in Belgium. Dad`s mum Elizabeth was given an ultimatum by the government to leave Austria and soon settled in London. Charles grew up speaking French and he has told me many times about how happy he was living the country as a boy, and you can see that in the black and white pictures of him at his local rural school with his friends. In his last week’s dad returned to the nursery rhymes he´d sung in French as a young boy. There´s also a photo from that time of a smiling young Charles riding on his father´s back - perhaps for the last time – and it remains such a heartbreaking image for me. Post-war life didn’t get much easier for Dad. His mum couldn’t afford to keep him, so he was sent to an orphanage to live with other child Holocaust survivors. It’s there he met Tanya – our mum – quite the extraordinary story. After Dad did his British Army service in Kenya in the late 50s, he and mum married, Charles Jnr was born and a stint in the early 60s stationed in Antwerp, in ironically, Belgium, also saw two more children born, myself and my sister Deborah. Dad enjoyed army life and its discipline, and it stayed with him throughout. Even up until his final days at home, barely able to stand up, he was still attempting to make his bed as he had all his life. And in the midst of 11
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suburbs boy the exception to the rule. I believe now that Dad`s adventurism has rubbed off on me but it’s also down to a softness of touch… a belief by him that a simple plan with some nudging would always one day bear fruit. I remember the last outing my wife Sophie and I had with Dad at the Botanic Gardens the day before he went into the Palliative Care hospice. He´d been pretty disengaged most of the trip in and who knows what tremors were pulsating through his brain. As we entered the gates to the Gardens, with the Opera House just behind to our left and the harbour in front of him, I said to Dad from behind the wheelchair: “The Gardens are beautiful aren’t they Dad?” “Terrific”, he responded quietly. Dad said “terrific” a lot when he really, really liked something but he´d say it in that slight, understated way that was his own. That´s kind of how he lived his life really. Rest in peace Dad. Michael Kessler
Princes and Princesses. That trip taught me two life lessons which I´ll list here: • Work hard and see the value of paying your own way. My Dad is and always was, well, frugal with money. There’s another word for it somewhere. A tight… something or rather. He made me pay for half the trip out of the money I earned working part time in the Coles Supermarket. • Knowledge is power. It was December 24 and this naïve 17-year-old Jewish boy had just bowed his head on the sacred Western Wailing Wall in the heart of Jerusalem and as the youth group made its way to the bus, thought to say: “We should buy Xmas presents for tomorrow.” Seriously though, my life changed the minute we took off in that 747. I became seriously obsessed with travel and spent most of my last year at school figuring out a way to live overseas or at least outside of Toongabbie. If Dad had not pushed me, I would never have gone to university which back in the early 1980s made these western
Dear Child Survivors, since finalising this edition of Connections we have all become aware of the terrifying and deadly attack on Israel. We are including this painting by Josh Birtwistle, Aboriginal artist, who wanted to show his respect for the Jewish people now and in the Holocaust (on display at Ark Centre). This beautiful painting is a symbol of hope for the future.
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