SECOND VORTEX: THE BIELSKI FOREST

THE SCHINDLER LEGACY

During World War 2 Oskar Schindler continually risked his life to protect and save his Jewish workers. He desperately spent every penny he had bribing and paying off the Nazis to get food and better treatment for his Jews. Nobody was hit at his factory, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps like the nearby Auschwitz.

But soon the Nazis' Final Solution threatened Schindler's factory itself. Increasingly helpless, Schindler found that dangerous incidents happened more and more often.

By a mistake 300 Jewish Schindler-women were deported in cattle cars to the death camp Auschwitz. Certain death awaited. A Schindler survivor, Anna Duklauer Perl, later recalled: 'I knew something had gone terribly wrong .. they cut our hair real short and sent us to the shower. Our only hope was Schindler would find us.'

The Schindler-women did not know whether this was going to be water or gas. A survivor, Etka Liebgold, later told:'One night they took us to the gas chamber. We were waiting the whole night - in the morning we found out: Schindler is here.'

The women heard a voice:'What are you doing with these people? These are my people.' Schindler! He had come to rescue them, bribing the Nazis to retrieve the women on his list and bring them back. And the women were released - the only shipment out of Auschwitz during WW2.

Thomas Keneally tells in his famous book Schindler's Ark how the women were marched naked to a quartermaster's hut where they were handed the clothes of the dead. Half dead themselves, dressed in rags, they were packed tight into the darkness of freight cars. But the Schindler-women with their heads cropped, many too ill, too hollowed out, to be easily recognised - the Schindler-women giggled like schoolgirls. One of the women, Clara Sternberg, heard an SS guard ask a colleague: 'What's Schindler going to do with all the old women?' 'It's no one's business,' the colleague said. 'Let him open an old people's home if he wants.'

The train rolled out of Auschwitz ..

A Schindler survivor, Abraham Zuckerman, later recalled: 'Can you imagine what power it took for him to pull out from Auschwitz 300 people? At Auschwitz, there was only one way you got out, we used to say. Through the chimney! Understand? Nobody ever got out of Auschwitz. But Schindler got out 300 ...!'

When the women arrived to the factory in Brunnlitz, weak, hungry, frostbitten, less than human, Oskar Schindler met them in the courtyard. They never forgot the sight of Schindler standing in the doorway. And they never forgot his raspy voice when he - surrounded by SS guards - gave them an unforgettable guarantee: 'Now you are finally with me, you are safe now. Don't be afraid of anything. You don't have to worry anymore.'

One of the Schindler-women later recalled that on seeing him that morning she felt that 'he was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.'

The Holocaust

On another occasion a young Schindler-worker Isak Pila had made the mistake of falling asleep under a table at the factory the same day that Amon Goeth came by for an inspection. When Goeth saw the sleeping young man, he told Oskar Schindler to kill him instantly. Schindler desperately tried to find a way out and hit the boy on one side of the face, then the other. Finally he said to Goeth, 'He's had enough. I need him. We've got a war to win. This can always be settled later ..'

Schindler's usual technique but Amon Goeth complied - and Isak Pila survived.

In his book Schindler's Ark Keneally tells the story of the Danziger brothers, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Oskar Schindler was away on a business trip and someone denounced the brothers to Amon Goeth. They were immediately arrested and their hanging advertised in the next morning's roll call in Plaszow.

Oskar returned at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, three hours before the execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove to the SS headquarter at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He found Goeth in his office and no one knows the extent of the deal that was struck that afternoon.

It is hard to believe that the SS Commandant was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, he was soothed by Schindler, and at six o'clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned to Schindler's factory in the back seat of Oskar's plush limousine.

Oskar Schindler with Schindler Jews

During World War 2, millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps, but Oskar Schindler's Jews miraculously survived Hitler's genocide. The boy Moshe Rosenberg was one of them.

In his book The Boys - Triumph Over Adversity Sir Martin Gilbert tells how Moshe Rosenberg, then 16 years old, was being whipped one day at the KZ camp Plaszow by Nazi guards for daring to take a rest while road-building. After twenty-five lashes the whipping unexpectedly stopped. The boy looked up - and he saw Oskar Schindler. "I'll take care of this one," Schindler told the guards, and proceeded to drag the boy to a nearby stable.

Moshe Rosenberg later recalled: "Loud enough for the Germans to hear, he shouted What's this shit? Then he threw some food wrapped in paper and walked out. It was his way of smuggling food to the Jews. Without him stepping in, the guards would have beaten me until I was dead."

A few months later, while he was working in Schindler's factory DEF, Moshe Rosenberg sat down for a moment. At that very moment Schindler came in to the factory, followed by the SS Commandant Amon Goeth. Rosenberg later recalled how Schindler "raced ahead of Goeth, grabbed my jacket and slapped my face, shouting, Get back to work! It was an act. Schindler never hit anyone or raised his voice. If Goeth had found me sitting down he would have shot me on the spot."

Leon Leyson was just a skinny kid when he was chosen to work for Oskar Schindler, though he was so little that he couldn't reach the handles on the machine. He used to stand on an upside-down box. Schindler developed a fondness for him, nicknaming him little Leyson and showing him many kindnesses.

Leyson later recalled: "Occasionally, when he was by himself, he would come and talk to me. He ordered that I get extra rations of food .." David M. Crowe tells in his great book Oskar Schindler how Schindler on one occasion gave little Leyson "a hunk of bread", which Leyson later described as "the most exciting thing" he had been given in a long time. The boy hid the bread and later shared it with his father and brother.

When Leyson's vision began to blur from the factory work, he was excused from the night shift. Schindler's most important act was putting little Leyson on the final list. His two eldest brothers did not survive the war, but he, his parents and brother and sister were saved by Schindler.

For almost five decades, Leon Leyson never said much about the horrors of Holocaust or the salvation of becoming one of Schindler's Jews.

But the film Schindler's List changed everything. Overnight everyone was interested in the subject - people were eager to hear from someone who had actually been there with Oskar Schindler. Leon Leyson found himself talking about and sharing a part of his life that was locked inside him for so long.

Many students have heard Leon Leyson tell the story of his sixteen-year-old brother, Tsalig, who refused Schindler's railway station offer of safety and chose instead to accompany his girlfriend to a death camp because he did not want her to be alone.

In Elinor J. Brecher's great book Schindler's Legacy Leyson tells how the Nazis took Tsalig and sent him with a transport to the death camp Belzec, though he might have been saved: "It seems that Oskar Schindler was at the station, looking to pull someone off the train. He had seen Tsalig at Emalia with Moshe - he had the memory of an elephant - and offered to take him off. But Tsalig didn't want to leave his girlfriend."

They were both murdered by the Nazis.

More than 60 years later, Leyson still cannot tell his brother's story without tears in his eyes.

Leon Leyson met Oskar Schindler once after the war, in 1972, when a group of survivors invited Schindler to Los Angeles. Leon was among those who welcomed him at the airport. He wasn't sure Schindler would recognize him, but no reminder proved necessary.

"I know who you are," said Oskar Schindler. "You are little Leyson ...!"

Oskar Schindler And Poldek Pfefferberg

Poldek Pfefferberg was instrumental in publicizing the story of Oskar Schindler. He and his wife Ludmilla were saved by Schindler - the rest of his family was not as lucky. Almost 100 perished including his parents, sister and brother-in-law.

One day, in November 1939, a man knocked on the door, and Pfefferberg thought it was the Gestapo. It wasn't. It was Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who had purchased an enamelware factory that had been confiscated from Jews. Schindler had come to ask Pfefferberg's mother, an interior designer, to redecorate his new apartment.

"I was hiding in the next room", Pfefferberg later said, "but listening to Schindler, I knew he wasn't Gestapo. Even then I could tell he was a good man. I began to talk to him and we became friends."

He began to work a little for Schindler, procuring rare commodities for him on the black market. In 1940, he met Ludmila Lewinson, and the two were married in the Crakow ghetto, where Jews were confined. They subsequently worked for Oskar Schindler in his factory.

Schindler promised the Jews who worked for him that they would never starve, that he would protect them as best he could. And he did, building his own workers barracks on the factory grounds to help alleviate the sufferings of life in the nearby Plaszow labor camp. He gave safe haven to as many Jewish workers as possible, insisting to the occupying Nazi officials that they were essential workers, a status that kept many from certain death.

"Oskar Schindler was a modern Noah", Pfefferberg said, "he saved individuals, husbands and wives and their children, families. It was like the saying: To save one life is to save the whole world. Schindler called us his children. In 1944, he was a very wealthy man, a multimillionaire. He could have taken the money and gone to Switzerland ... he could have bought Beverly Hills. But instead, he gambled his life and all of his money to save us ..."

After the Liberation in Mai, 1945, Poldek and Ludmila had gone first to Budapest and eventually to Munich where Poldek - a physical education instructor before the war - organized a school for displaced children. Oskar Schindler, too, had settled in Munich where his best friends, the people he regarded as "his children", were the Jews he had helped survive.

It was there, in the midst of a card game, that Poldek Pfefferberg made his promise, vowing he would tell the world what had happened, how even on the days when the air was black with the ashes from bodies on fire, there was hope in Crakow because Oskar Schindler was there: "You protect us, you save us, you feed us - we survived the Holocaust, the tragedy, the hardship, the sickness, the beatings, the killings! We must tell your story ..."

Poldek Pfefferberg spent 40 years trying to drum up interest in the Schindler-Story - and the story was told so the whole world knew it by heart.

Mejzesz Puntierer - today Murray Pantirer - was the only one of his family to survive. He lost both his parents, two sisters and four brothers during the war, all murdered by the Nazis.

He himself was saved because Oskar Schindler gave him work at his factory, provided him with food and protected him from the Nazi reign of terror. Murray Pantirer later recalled the time a prisoner stole some potatoes:

"An SS man put a potato in his mouth. He had to stand outside like that in the cold weather, and it was written on him 'I'm a potato thief.' When Schindler saw it, he took the potato out of his mouth, and said to the guy, 'go back to your work.' And he told the SS man: In my camp you don't do those things."

Oskar Schindler

During World War 2 Abraham Zuckerman spent his teenage years in Nazi concentration camps, never hearing about Oskar Schindler until he was sent as a worker to his factory, known as Emalia, at Plaszow in 1943.

"The moment that I arrived, I knew that my life had changed," Abraham Zuckerman later recalls. "There was food and mountains of potatoes. One never went hungry ..."

"The movie showed one thing, but there were other things that he did in camp, little things," says Zuckerman. "He was a chain smoker, so he used to take a puff and throw it away. For the survivors, the people who were smoking, it meant a lot to them to pick it up and have a puff. He would do it on purpose, knowing that people would pick it up."

He couldn't just give them cigarettes or extra food because there were Nazi guards in the factory who might squeal if they witnessed behavior deemed too humane; indeed, says Zuckerman, Schindler was arrested a couple of times because somebody reported him.

Despite the conditions, Oskar Schindler was always a perfect gentleman to the inmates, he says. "He bowed to you, and he said good morning to you," Zuckerman says, which may not sound like much of a favor, but to those beaten-down Jews, that small acknowledgement of their dignity gave them enormous hope.

Abraham Zuckerman has devoted himself to memorializing Oskar Schindler. Zuckerman published his memoirs in 1991. His "A Voice in the Chorus" is a moving and powerful addition to the library of works on the holocaust.

Bronia Gunz spent World War 2 largely under Schindler's protection: first at Plaszow and later, at the factory in Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia.

She later recalled how Schindler told the prisoners to dig graves to deceive the Nazis. But he assured them he could save them and then he disappeared for days. "We were digging the graves and thinking: This is the end" Gunz said. Then Schindler returned. "One day this beautiful, gorgeous man shows up with a piece of paper, and he says: Saved, no digging anymore ... "

By 1944, when the workers on Schindler's list were transferred to Brinnlitz, their feelings of security were unshakeable. "Doubts? No, never!" insisted Bronia Gunz. "He was for us like God."

Oskar Schindler With SS Officers

Rena Ferber - today Rena Finder - was only 10 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. Her father was killed at Auschwitz and she and her mother were sent to KZ Plaszow.

They began working at Emalia, Schindler's enamel and ammunition factory. The conditions in Schindler's factory were more humane than Rena and her mother would have encountered in any other circumstance during the war. She later recalled that Schindler "treated us with kindness and respect ... Schindler bribed Goeth and others to get food and better treatment for the Jews during a time when all Germans were killing the Jews."

She later told how a Nazi guard was about to shoot her for mistakenly breaking a factory machine - and Oskar Schindler intervened: "He said: You idiots, this little girl could not break that machine .."

"He was wonderful," Rena said of Schindler: "He was tall and he was handsome and he had a twinkle in his eye. He was our hero and our God. How can you say thank you for someone who saved your life? .. I wish he were here today so I could hug him and kiss him."

She said: "I would not be alive today if it wasn't for Oskar Schindler, my Mother survived and so did my grandfather. It's a tragedy that Oscar Schindler died young before the world could acknowledge his heroism. His country men considered him a traitor, to us he was our God, our Father, our protector."

In his book Witness The Making Of Schindler's List Franciszek Palowski tells about Janina Olszewska, who had worked for Oskar Schindler at his office and had known him well during World War 2. She later told that Schindler not only saved Jews but also helped many Polish people.

When her husband was arrested and sentenced to death for his work with the Polish underground, Schindler miraculously got him out of the prison and thus saved his life.

Janina recalled once when a friend came to her in tears - the Nazis were taking her son to slave labor in Germany. She asked Schindler for help and he arranged the boy's release, employing him in his factory till the end of the war.

On another occasion an escaped Polish prisoner from Auschwitz showed up at Janina's. When Schindler was asked for help, he hired the man as his chauffeur.

Amon Goeth
After World War 2

Helen Beck, then Hela Brzeska, No. 18 on Schindler's List, was torn from her family as teenager and was 15 when she was thrown into KZ Plaszow a kitchen help. She later recalled the SS Commandant Amon Goeth as being "incredible bloodthirsty - he would walk the line with his dogs and order them to rip people apart. And after a few minutes of torture, Goeth would shoot them in front of everyone ..."

At an evening line up in Plaszow the Nazi guard smacked Helen so hard, the girl collapsed and the guard ordered her death. But she was spared, saved by Oskar Schindler as she suddenly was enlisted in his work forces. Today, she still doesn't know how Schindler did it. But the next morning in Schindler's factory, the tall man with soft blue eyes and a Nazi lapel pin walked by her and said: Just keep working, keep working.

Helen later recalled when she worked in the kitchen at one of Schindler's parties. At the end of the party, in front of some of the top Nazis, Schindler asked the Jewish servants to come out and take a round of applause for their hard work and good service. Scared, they came out and to their surprise, the drunken Nazis applauded them.

Only after the war, as Helen searched for her family, did she learn that she had lost six of her nine siblings, along with her parents.

Helen Beck later said: "We gave up many times, but he always lifted our spirits ... Schindler tried to help people however he could. That is what we remember."

Oskar Schindler With An SS Officer

Anna Duklauer Perl had her name on Oskar Schindler's List - No. 76235, Anna Duklauer, Metallarbeiterin or metalworker it says in German next to her name.

Long before Steven Spielberg ever heard of him and decided to make his movie, Oskar Schindler's name was kept nearly as close to Anna Duklauer Perl's heart as the names of her own children and grandchildren. For almost five decades, she never said much about the Holocaust or the salvation of becoming one of Schindler's Jews. She later said: "I just told them that, without a man named Oskar Schindler, I wouldn't be here." But she didn't tell them the whole story until Spielberg's movie was made.

In 1942 Anna, barely 20 years old, was sent to the forced labor camp of Plaszow. Here the conditions of life were made dreadful by the SS Commandant Amon Goeth. She didn't think she would survive very long, she was beaten regularly and her life was almost unbearable.

Then one day in the laundry, in the spring of 1943, she was approached by a small Jewish man who told her he needed women to work in the factory. Oskar Schindler's factory. "I don't know why I was chosen that day," she later said, "It's a question I've asked myself hundreds and hundreds of times. Why me ? Why was I chosen to live ?"

At first, Anna did not want to go and leave her sister Erna. "But she begged me. `Go. With Schindler, there is life. You must go`", Anna later said.

At Schindler's enamelware factory DEF Anna worked 12 hours a day, alternating her time between making pots and pans and working in the kitchen preparing meals. But she was away from harassment and the killings. At Schindler's factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps.

Anna Duklauer worked at Schindler's factory until the Liberation. "Schindler was a good man. You could tell that ... Schindler and us grew together. And in the end, he gave away all his money." Anna later said.

Over the years Anna heard bits of news about Oskar Schindler from others on "The List". Unloved and unrecognized at home, he reached for the bottle. He had become an alcoholic during the war and struggled to wean himself off the habit. "He was like in the movie", Anne said, "Very handsome. A ladies' man. And he had this huge ring. We used to say you could see him coming from the light of his ring."

She didn't remember the exact day, but it was sometime in 1974 when she heard that Oskar Schindler had died. "I think a little bit of us all died, too", she said, "If it weren't for Oskar Schindler, we wouldn't be here."

Oskar Schindler

Another time at Schindler's factory, during an inspection by Amon Goeth and his SS officers, the attention of the visitors was caught by the sight of the old Jew, Lamus, who was pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory courtyard, apparently utterly depressed. Goeth asked why the man was so sad, and it was explained to him that Lamus had lost his wife and only child a few weeks earlier during the liquidation of the ghetto. Goeth ordered his adjutant Grün to execute the Jew "so that he might be reunited with his family in heaven," then he guffawed and the SS officers moved on.

Someone from the metal hall rushed up to Oskar Schindler's office and alerted him. Oscar came roaring down the stairs and reached the yard just as the SS man ordered Lamus: "Slip your pants down to your ankles and start walking." Dazed, the old man did as he was told.

Schindler called out desperately:"You can't do that. You are interfering with all my discipline .." The SS officer just sneered. Schindler continued, blurting out the words:"The morale of my workers will suffer. Production for der Vaterland will be affected." The SS adjudant took out his pistol, ready to shoot.

"A bottle of schnapps if you don't shoot him", Schindler almost screamed, no longer thinking rationally.

"Stimmt!" To Schindler's astonishment, the SS man complied. Grinning, the officer put the gun away and strolled arm in arm with the shaken Schindler to the office to collect his bottle of schnapps. And old Lamus, trailing his pants along the ground, continued shuffling across the yard, waiting sickeningly for the bullet in his back that never came.

On another occasion, three SS men walked onto the factory floor without warning, arguing among themselves. "I tell you, the Jew is even lower than an animal," one was saying. Then, taking out his pistol, he ordered the nearest Jewish worker to leave his machine and pick up some sweepings from the floor. "Eat it," he barked, waving his gun. The shivering man choked down the mess. "You see what I mean," the SS man explained to his friends as they walked away. "They eat anything at all. Even an animal would never do that."

Holocaust Photos - The Nazi Genocide

Stella Muller, today Stella Müller-Madej, owes her life to Schindler's list. She was 14 but registered as being 2 years older and as a metal worker - all so she could survive as essential for the war industry. Both she and her parents would not have survived World War II without it. Aided by notes, diaries and a vivid memory, she managed to capture her recollections of the wartime period in a book: Through the Eyes of a Child, which has been published in eight countries. The book deserves a place next to Anne Frank's Diary. She later told:

'What I’ll say is nothing poetic, but I will repeat till the end of my days that the first time I was given life by my parents and the second time by Oskar Schindler.

In ‘44 there were around 700 women transported from Płaszów, 300 of whom were on his list, and he fought for us like a lion, because they didn’t want to let us out of Auschwitz. He was offered better and healthier ‘material’ from new transports, unlike us, who had spent several years in the camp. But he got us out .. he saved us ..'

The Holocaust Children

In Holocaust Testimonies, edited by Joseph J. Preil, the survivor Aaron Schwartz recalls Plaszow and the slaughter of the Kracow ghetto:

"When I came to Plaszow the first day, they put me in a group where we were digging a huge grave .. they brought in trucks, with children, from infant to twelve years old. They were all killed .. when the children were brought in, they were shot, right in that grave ..

A little girl, a beautiful blond girl, sat down in the grave, dressed in an Eskimo white fur coat, was all bloody, and asked for a little bit of water .. this child swallowed so much blood, because it was shot in the neck. And then it started to vomit so terribly. And then it lay down and it says, "Mother, turn me around, turn me around." ..

This child did not know what happened to it. It was shot, it was half-dead after it was shot. And this child sat down in the grave, among all the corpses, and asked for water .. it was still alive. There was no mother, just children brought from the Cracow ghetto.

So this little girl lay down, and asked to be turned around. What happened to it? I do not know. It was probably covered alive, with chlorine .. I am sure, because they did not give another shot to that girl .."

Over one million children under the age of sixteen died in the Holocaust - she was one of them ...

Oskar Schindler In Israel

This is a letter written in 1945 by Oskar Schindler’s former workers, signed: Isaak Stern, former employee Pal. Office in Krakow, Dr. Hilfstein, Chaim Salpeter, Former President of the Zionist Executive in Krakow for Galicia and Silesia.

"Brothers!
We, the undersigned Jews from Krakow, inmates of Plaszow concentration camp, have, since 1942, worked in Director Schindler’s business. Since Schindler took over management of the business, it was his exclusive goal to protect us from resettlement, which would have meant our ultimate liquidation. During the entire period in which we worked for Director Schindler he did everything possible to save the lives of the greatest possible number of Jews, in spite of the tremendous difficulties; especially during a time when receiving Jewish workers caused great difficulties with the authorities. Director Schindler took care of our sustenance, and as a result, during the whole period of our employment by him there was not a single case of unnatural death. All in all he employed more than 1,000 Jews in Krakow. As the Russian frontline approached and it became necessary to transfer us to a different concentration camp, Director Schindler relocated his business to Bruennlitz near Zwittau.

There were huge difficulties connected with the implementation of Director Schindler’s business, and he took great pains to introduce this plan. The fact that he attained permission to create a camp, in which not only women and men, but also families could stay together, is unique within the territory of the Reich. Special mention must be given to the fact that our resettlement to Bruennlitz was carried out by way of a list of names, put together in Krakow and approved by the Central Administration of all concentration camps in Oranienburg (a unique case). After the men had been interned in Gross-Rosen concentration camp for no more than a couple of days and the women for 3 weeks in Auschwitz concentration camp, we may claim with assertiveness that with our arrival in Bruennlitz we owe our lives solely to the efforts of Director Schindler and his humane treatment of his workers. Director Schindler took care of the improvement of our living standards by providing us with extra food and clothing. No money was spared and his one and only goal was the humanistic ideal of saving our lives from inevitable death.

It is only thanks to the ceaseless efforts and interventions of Director Schindler with the authorities in question, that we stayed in Bruennlitz, in spite of the existing danger, as, with the approaching frontline we would all have been moved away by the leaders of the camp, which would have meant our ultimate end. This we declare today, on this day of the declaration of the end of the war, as we await our official liberation and the opportunity to return to our destroyed families and homes. Here we are, a gathering of 1100 people, 800 men and 300 women.

All Jewish workers, that were inmates in the Gross-Rosen and Auschwitz concentration camps respectively declare wholeheartedly their gratitude towards Director Schindler, and we herewith state that it is exclusively due to his efforts, that we were permitted to witness this moment, the end of the war.

Concerning Director Schindler's treatment of the Jews, one event that took place during our internment in Bruennlitz in January of this year which deserves special mention was coincidentally a transport of Jewish inmates, that had been evacuated from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Goleschow outpost, and ended up near us. This transport consisted exclusively of more than 100 sick people from a hospital which had been cleared during the liquidation of the camp. These people reached us frozen and almost unable to carry on living after having wandered for weeks. No other camp was willing to accept this transport and it was Director Schindler alone who personally took care of these people, while giving them shelter on his factory premises; even though there was not the slightest chance of them ever being employed. He gave considerable sums out of his own private funds, to enable their recovery as quick as possible. He organized medical aid and established a special hospital room for those people who were bedridden. It was only because of his personal care that it was possible to save 80 of these people from their inevitable death and to restore them to life.

We sincerely plead with you to help Director Schindler in any way possible, and especially to enable him to establish a new life, because of all he did for us both in Krakow and in Bruennlitz he sacrificed his entire fortune.

Bruennlitz, May 8, 1945."

Translated from the original document in German
Source: The Oscar Schindler file, Department of Righteous among the Nations, Yad Vashem
YAD VASHEM, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority

Sign In Memory Of Oskar Schindler

After the war, the Schindler Jew Murray Pantirer, emigrating to the United States in 1949, set up a construction firm with his friend Abraham Zuckerman. From the beginning, they knew they had to find a way to remember their protector. "After the war he couldn't find himself," said Pantirer. "He was too big of a man to start over."

"When we started the business - we came in 1949, we incorporated in 1950 - in our first subdivision in South Plainfield, N.J., the first thing we did was put his name on a street, Schindler Drive."

Their greatly differing complexes have one thing in common. Each has a Schindler Street, a Schindler Drive or a Schindler Way, named for Oskar Schindler. As a mark of their gratitude, Zuckerman and Pantirer have by now dedicated 25 streets in New Jersey to his memory. Planning authorities often queried their choice of names, they say, but none objected when they made known the reasons for their requests.

Zuckerman and Pantirer's devotion didn't stop with street naming. From 1957 until he died in 1974, the two helped Schindler financially as well with money and air tickets, sponsoring his trips to America, where they would buy him clothes and shoes.

Pantirer's son, Larry, met Schindler on several occasions and remains in awe of the person who saved his father's life. "He still had charm and personality," recalled the younger Pantirer. "You could see the way he carried himself, even as an old man."

Pantirer not only assisted Schindler but also contributed to the construction of various Jewish and Holocaust museums, and founded, in Schindler's name, a bursary for Hebraic studies in Jerusalem, again with Zuckerman.

For Abraham Zuckerman's daughter, Ruth Katz, that history was a living history. She remembers Oskar Schindler, "Uncle Oskar", coming to visit when she was a child and staying at her home, where she would talk to him in Yiddish while he would answer in German. "He would always pat the back of my head," she says. "He loved children; he would always call us 'kinder, kinder.'"

Katz says though she grew up as a child of Holocaust survivors, in her house there was no sadness and there were no horror stories. "Everything was music, happiness, they never talked about the bad things. And then the movie comes out, and I say to myself, 'My God! This is what they went through! This man really did save their lives.' When I tell people now that my father was a Schindler Jew, they can't believe it, they're in awe: 'Your father was really saved by Schindler?'

"The stories were always told to us when we were little, how he saved them, and what he did. But when you're a kid, you think they're stories. Some people's parents put their kids on their lap and told them bedtime stories; my father put us on his lap and told us how wonderful this man was to him.

"I remember the day Oskar Schindler died, I was a freshman in college in my dorm. It was one of the saddest days, because I had never really experienced any sadness with my parents. I had never seen my father mourn anyone, because he didn't have anyone to mourn. And he really mourned him. It was a really really traumatic time for him. They were really sad, they had a loss that they hadn't experienced since the war."

The primary goal of Pantirer and Zuckerman has been to express their everlasting gratitude to the man who saved them both from certain death.

In a 1964 interview, standing in front of his dingy apartment Am Hauptbahn No. 4 in Frankfurt Am Main, West Germany, Oskar Schindler for once commented on what he did:

"The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice."

When asked, Schindler told that his metamorphosis during the war was sparked by the shocking immensity of the Final Solution. In his own words: "I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more."

Oskar Schindler died in Hildesheim in Germany October 9, 1974 and he wanted to be buried in Israel in Jerusalem. As he said: My children are here ..

Bibliography/Sources:
www.oskarschindler.com
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC 20024-2126
USHMM - archives
USHMM - Photo Archives/Leopold Page Collection
Erika Rosenberg
Toby Axelrod, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark
A tale of intrigue, feuds, Hollywood tycoons - Linda Diebel, The Totonto Star
Schindler's List Teaching Guide - Southern Institute for Education and Research
Herbert Steinhouse - The Real Oskar Schindler, Saturday Night, April 1994
Rickey Rogers, Reuters News Pictures Service
Elinor J. Brecher - Schindler's Legacy
Washington Post Foreign Service
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
AP Photo/Diether Endlicher
Associated Press
Rafael Wollmann
Letter from Berlin by Gerald Posner, The New Yorker, March 14, 1995
Holocaust Testimonies, edited by Joseph J. Preil. The Holocaust Resource Foundation for Kean University 2001. Rutgers University Press.
Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals, The United Nations War Crimes Commission
University of the West of England
The Nizkor Project
JewishGen` ShtetLinks The Jews of Krakow
Julius Perl
Fred Kirsch, Staff Writer, The Virginian-Pilot
New Jersey Jewish News
Dispatch Online
The Jerusalem Post
The Southern Shofar
Beacon Journal
The Jewish Times

BUCHENWALD

Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Monument erected at Konzentratzionslager Buchenwald by the survivors

The photo above was taken in April 1945 by Tech/5 Dan Curtain, a soldier in General George S. Patton's Third Army, who visited the camp after it was liberated on April 11, 1945. All the photos on this page were contributed by Rob Hughes, the nephew of Dan Curtain, who died in 1992.

The monument shown in the photo appears to be the memorial that was erected by the Communist prisoners at Buchenwald on 19 April 1945 in honor of the political prisoners in the camp. The Jewish survivors were not allowed to attend the ceremonies when the monument was dedicated.

This stone monument was moved in 1961 to a spot called Frederic-Manhes-Platz, which is the place where the road to the camp branches off from the main road up the hill called the Ettersberg. The place where it now stands was named after a French Resistance fighter named Col. Henri Frederic Manhes. Buchenwald was one of the camps to which captured partisans in the French Resistance were deported. The main camp for French Resistance fighters was Natzweiler-Struthof.

The Buchenwald concentration camp was located in a forest on a hill called the Ettersberg, high above the city of Weimar. Dan Curtain is shown in the photo below, standing on the hill where the camp was located.

Tech/5 Dan Curtain at Buchenwald

Bodies piled up at the crematorium at Buchenwald

There was a typhus epidemic in the Buchenwald camp and the bodies of the prisoners, who were dying at the rate of 100 per day, could not be burned fast enough. When the American soldiers arrived, there were bodies stacked outside the crematorium, as shown in the photo above.

The photo below shows two wreaths that were placed on the wall of the crematorium building. Prisoners continued to die after the camp was liberated and their bodies were added to the pile outside the crematorium.

Soldiers view the corpses outside the crematorium

The two photos below show the ovens in the crematorium which still had some of the unburned remains of corpses. Some of the American soldiers thought that the prisoners had been burned alive.

Ovens in the Buchenwald crematorium

Bones and ashes inside an oven in the crematorium

A JEW FROM AN ATHIEST'S PERSPECTIVE

"I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations … They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more and more happily than any other nation, ancient or modern."

- John Adams (From a letter to F. A. Van der Kemp [Feb. 16, 1808] Pennsylvania Historical Society)

"This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth... [But] for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; [and] as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

- Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers [New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978], 116. Professor Jastrow was the founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute, now director of the Mount Wilson Institute and its observatory.)

"...If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

- Mark Twain ("Concerning The Jews," Harper's Magazine, 1899, see The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Doubleday [1963] pg. 249)

"if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history."

- David Gelernter, Yale University Professor

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"...it would be a mistake...to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew."

- U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his The State

"In the facades we put on for others we demonstrate our potential; through our children we reveal our reality."

- Lawrence Kelemen, To Kindle A Soul p. 195

Intolerance lies at the core of evil. Not the intolerance that results from any threat or danger. But intolerance of another being who dares to exist. Intolerance without cause. It is so deep within us, because every human being secretly desires the entire universe to himself. Our only way out is to learn compassion without cause. To care for each other simple because that 'other' exists.

- Rabbi Menachem Mendle

"Intelligent people know of what they speak; fools speak of what they know."

- Minchas Shabbos Pirkei Avos 3:18 / Ethics Of The Fathers

A renowned genius once asked a student, "What are you watching when you sit on a hillside in the late afternoon as the colors turn from yellow to orange and red and finally darkness?" He answered, "You are watching the sunset." The genius responded, "That is what is wrong with our age. You know full well you are not watching the sun set. You are watching the world turn."

- Jeremy Kagan, "The Jewish Self"

"The entire purpose of our existence is to overcome our negative habits."

- Vilna Goan, Commentary to Mishlei 4:13

"If a Jew doesn't make Kiddush (to sanctify himself by maintaining a distinctly Jewish lifestyle), then the non-Jew will make Havdalah for him (by making the Jew realize he is truly different)."

- R' Chaim of Volozhin

Most people are servants of their passions, but the truly free person is the one who can control his desires. When the sages taught "Only one involved in Torah is truly free" (Pirkei Avos 6:2), they meant to say that only Torah allows one to free himself from the shackles of desire and to truly exercise free choice. Without Torah, one is not free at all, he is a slave, controlled by a master foreign to his better instincts. While intellectually he might have correct ideas of how to live, ultimately his master - his passion - will force him to act otherwise.

Excerpt from: The Torah Treasury pg. 146 (Artscroll Publications)

"All that is thought should not be said, all that is said should not be written, all that is written should not be published, all that is published should not be read."

- Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern of Tomashov (the Kotzker Rebbe)

"Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place."

- Paul Johnson (Christian historian, author of A History of the Jews and A History of Christianity)

"No ancient people have had a stranger history than the Jews. … The history of no ancient people should be so valuable, if we could only recover it and understand it. … Stranger still, the ancient religion of the Jews survives, when all the religions of every ancient race of the pre-Christian world have disappeared … Again it is strange that the living religions of the world all build on religious ideas derived from the Jews. …. The great matter is not “What happened?” but “Why did it happen?” Why does Judaism live?"

T.R. Glover (The Ancient World, Penguin, pp. 184-191)

"What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?!

The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.

The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity."

- Leo Tolstoy (What is the Jew? quoted in The Final Resolution, pg. 189, printed in Jewish World periodical, 1908)

"90% of the Jewish people have lived in their lands for no more than 50 or 60 years!"

- Leschzinsky (The Jewish Dispersion by in Discovery Booklet pg. 55)

"The preservation of the Jew was certainly not casual. He has endured through the power of a certain ideal, based on the recognition of a Higher Power in human affairs. Time after time in his history, moreover, he has been saved from disaster in a manner, which cannot be described excepting as 'providential.' The author has deliberately attempted to write this book in a secular spirit; he does not think that his readers can fail to see in it, on every page, a higher immanence"

- Cecil Roth (History of the Jews, New York, 1963, p. 424)

"It is true that we aspire to our ancient land. But what we want in that ancient land is a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit.

- Theodore Herzl

IN AUSCHWITZ THERE IS A GREAT HOUSE

In Auschwitz there is a Great House
by Ruzena Danielova

Ausvicate hi kher bro
Odoj besel mro pirano
Besel, besel gondolinel
Te pre mande pobisterel

O tu kalo cirikloro
Lidza mange mro lilro
Lidza, lidza mra romake
Hoj som phandlo Ausvicate

Ausvicate bokha bare
Te so te chal amen nane
Ani oda koter maro
O blokris bibachtl

In Auschwitz there is a great house
And there my husband is imprisoned
He sits and sits and laments
And thinks about me

Oh, you black bird!
Carry my letter!
Carry it to my wife
For I am jailed in Auschwitz

In Auschwitz there is great hunger
And we have nothing to eat
Not even a piece of bread
And the block guard is bad

Friday, June 26, 2009

THE BIELSKI FOREST

When Germany invaded Poland in WWII, the Polish Jews that the Germans did not immediately kill were jammed in ghettos, there to await their execution by the Nazi SS. Though the ghettos were closely guarded to prevent the escape of Jews, some Jews risked facing an immediate date with a firing squad and escaped. For the escapees, sanctuary of a sort often lay just a short distance from the ghettos — in the forests of Poland.

In the forests, Jewish partisan groups operated, evading and attacking the German occupiers. But if escapees from the ghettos thought the forests and its denizens assured them of safety, they were wrong. The dangers of the forest were many: Germans, local collaborators, suspicious Russian troops, cold, disease, starvation, and even physical abuse from their own comrades. These are the stories of a partisan commander and a female partisan.

Genesis of a Partisan Commander

Yehuda Bielski knew precisely what he had to do. And he realized he had to act very quickly if he was to live.

Yehuda was a Jew trapped in the Novogrudek ghetto in Byelorussia during the summer of 1941. It became apparent to him that surviving a third “selection” — the process by which Hitler’s storm troopers (SS) decided which Jews lived or died — was unlikely. He refused to follow in the footsteps of family, friends, and neighbors who had taken the Third Reich’s one-way truck ride to the massacre pits outside Novogrudek, where Jews lay by the thousands side by side.

Yehuda knew that somewhere beyond the horizon of the barbed wire and wooden fences of the closely guarded ghetto was a refuge. Densely packed giant trees, wild vegetation, and dangerous swamps in the Byelorussian forest offered concealment from the Germans and their collaborators.

Yehuda’s war with Germany actually began two years earlier on September 1, 1939 when, as an officer in the Polish army, he defended his country on the western front.

Germany’s blitzkrieg left western Poland under German control within a month and sealed the fate of every Polish Jew under German occupation. Following Poland’s capitulation, a wounded Yehuda carefully maneuvered his way back into Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, the area absorbed by Stalin as his spoils of the Molotov/Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa shattered the temporary peace between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht (German army) and SS crossed the Russian/German demarcation border in Poland with two objectives: kill every Jew the Wehrmacht and SS could find and take Moscow as soon as possible. On the way to the Russian capitol, Germany reduced villages to rubble and ash, and massacred Jews or resettled them in squalid urban ghettos transformed into vast open-air prisons.

By early July the Wehrmacht took Novogrudek and converted it into two ghettos. Captive Jews were required to identify themselves by wearing the Star of David on their clothing and were stripped of their citizenship. All their money, property, and valuables were confiscated. In Novogrudek, Yehuda saw it all firsthand.

The world he had known as a child and young man had changed catastrophically. He had grown up with six siblings in this vibrant city where his father had been a successful glazier. He was educated in the city, and was also an athlete, played the violin and guitar, and became a noted ballroom dancer.

He spoke several languages, including Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. His skills, talents, and sophistication had been crucial in his becoming a Polish officer, and would now be pivotal for his survival.

By the end of July, the SS was in charge in Novogrudek. Selections occurred daily. The massacre of Jews was an SS priority. Certain that his time was up, Yehuda planned his life-or-death escape.

Set to flee, Yehuda received a letter delivered by a Christian friend, Konstantin Koslovsky, who had access to the ghetto:

Dear Yehuda,

We are hiding in the forest and we do not plan to submit to the Germans. Bring your wife, a few good men and we will build something together. Please do not hesitate. I hope to see you soon in the forest.

Your cousin, Tuvia

His older first cousin Tuvia, who was hiding in the forest with his three brothers and sister (all raised in a tiny nearby village) and about a dozen others, needed Yehuda’s expertise.

Yehuda quickly assembled a group of nine and led them to the fence surrounding the ghetto. They made a hole in the wood boards through which they crawled onto an open field and made it into the forest where Yehuda soon met up with his Bielski cousins.

One quick glance by the former officer revealed that the group was undisciplined and disorganized. Journalist Peter Duffy in his book The Bielski Brothers picks it up from there: “Soon after the arrival of the new members, a meeting was convened to discuss the group’s expansion.... Yehuda Bielski rose to speak. ‘We have come here into the forest, my dear ones, not to eat and drink, and enjoy ourselves,’ he said. ‘We have come here, every one of us, to stay alive.’ He then outlined a simple plan that pleased everyone: The goal is to find more weapons and strike at the invaders.... ‘We must choose a commander and give our unit a name,’ he continued.”

Yehuda then nominated Tuvia as head commander. The reason: the leader would have to do business with the Soviets and the treacherous NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) — which Yehuda had to avoid at all costs. Stalin, fearing that Polish officers would galvanize resistance against his takeover of Poland, had ordered them to be shot on sight.

Tuvia, 36, was enthused with his new leadership role. His 30-year-old brother Zus, whom Yehuda considered “a drinker who, when he was out of control with weapons, could be very dangerous,” was not happy. As a result, the two brothers’ bickering, reportedly begun before Tuvia assumed command, soon intensified.

Tuvia’s plan was to allow any Jew to join the Bielski partisans. Zus wanted to keep the group small, turning away Jews who escaped death in search of life. They also disagreed on the purpose of the camp. Tuvia wanted the group to be noncombative, avoiding contact with the Germans and locals in order to have the best chance of surviving. His brother insisted on doing battle with the enemy.

Zus eventually got his wish. He became the deputy commander of Ordzhonikidze, a Red Army/NKVD-controlled partisan unit that fought fearlessly and carried out acts of sabotage against the Germans. But as a result, the Poles saw him as their enemy for allying himself with the hated Soviet occupiers. Zus returned to the Bielskis in the waning days of the war.

The Bielski family group evolved into a fighting/family camp with an ever-growing community of escapees from ghettos and German roundups. Young and old, married and single, even orphaned children, were welcomed.

Commanding the Bielski partisans was an all-consuming responsibility. From the start, the partisans had to acquire weapons in order to defend the camp from the Germans and their collaborators. The partisans also needed food, medication, and especially clothing to overcome the brutal winters in the Byelorussian forest. If these necessities could not be purchased, armed partisans raided villages for their needs.

The partisans also obtained clothing from dead Russian and German soldiers. Uniforms provided warmth, but the German uniforms in particular proved to be valuable disguises for the partisans in their missions to obtain supplies.

Tuvia had challenges to his leadership, from his brother Zus as well as from other partisans. Insurrections could put the survival of the entire group in jeopardy.

Dealing with the Russians and the NKVD was especially tricky. Tuvia, who was not a communist, managed to convince the Russians that his partisans were not a threat to Stalin. As a result, the Russians airlifted supplies, including automatic weapons, into the camp. His relationship with the Soviets also enabled him to shield Yehuda from the NKVD.

Other Jews throughout Eastern Europe also hid from the Nazis in the forests. They too created family and partisan camps. The groups had much in common. Most of these Jews grew up in proximity to the forest where they would hide; they were familiar with the terrain and knew many of the locals, some of whom they could ask for help or understood to avoid.

The groups shared many challenges. They all needed weapons, food, clothing, medications, and other supplies. Women had special problems to overcome, from hygiene to pregnancy. The unique needs of children and the elderly presented extreme challenges. Religious members had to adjust to life without traditional dietary restrictions.

However, what distinguished one group from another was its leadership. The seclusion of the lawless forest meant that morality was subject to the decency or indecency of the camp’s commanders. “The forest life changed no one,” observed Yehuda. “If a person was decent before the war, no matter what the situation in the woods, that person would behave properly. If the person was a low life before the war, he was a low life in the forest too. But in the woods he could take more advantage and get away with it.” Lola Hudes Bell, a member of four partisan groups including the Bielski partisans, agreed. “The woods had absolutely no effect on peoples’ values,” she recalled. “Fine people before the war would share their only slice of bread. A scoundrel before the war, who after a mission returned to our partisan camp with a whole loaf of bread, wouldn’t offer a hungry person even a crumb.”

The most effective of all the partisan bands were the Bielski partisans of Byelorussia; no other group could claim to have saved over 1,200 Jews (Tuvia’s estimate) while losing only about 50 of its members. No group received such extraordinary fame as fearless fighters and rescuers. And no leadership was more controversial for its being connected to alleged war crimes against locals.

To this day, the Bielski name evokes strong emotions. Some Jews compare Tuvia to Moses for ordering his partisans to rescue them. And they laud his absolute determination in sheltering them and facilitating their survival against overwhelming odds. Some acknowledge with gratitude the protection Tuvia provided while at the same time recalling that his generosity could come at a price. Others remember Tuvia and Zus as absolute potentates who took advantage of women, and who as judge, jury, and executioner, decided the life and death of other Jews. And some survivors, remaining fearful of the tempestuous Bielski brothers, chose to have seen nothing, heard nothing, and known nothing.

Genesis of a Female Partisan

While the Bielski partisans were expanding their base, Lola Hudes was planning her escape from the nearby Stolpce ghetto.

Lola had come a long way to Byelorussia from her comfortable life in Lodz, Poland. Her father and oldest brother were importers. Another brother was a journalist and the third a student. One sister taught Polish and the other was a mother of three children.

Lola’s plans to attend university in France came to an abrupt halt when the Germans arrived in September 1939, renaming the German-speaking city Litzmannstadt. She soon fled east. Her fluency in German and Polish were instrumental during her journey on German military transport trains and later on foot into the Russian-occupied city of Stolpce in Byelorussia.

Safe for a short while, Lola was thrust back into the war by Operation Barbarossa. Stolpce soon became a German-occupied ghetto, and she was selected to work directly for the kommandant, thereby avoiding the massacre pits. Her language skills, including Russian, made her valuable as a translator and typist. Although working for the kommandant gave Lola some privileges and access to many areas forbidden to others, she understood that neither her duties nor the trust of the kommandant could earn her a pass from an eventual spot in a mass grave. Returning under guard every evening after her work at headquarters to a diminishing population in the ghetto convinced Lola that her luck would soon run out. She had only one option left.

“As I was planning my escape, Jakob and his brother Raffi [two young Jewish men] stopped by,” Lola recalled in her memoir One Came Back.

They had an escape plan and wanted to include me.… Raffi told me what he wanted.

“Lola, you have a pass that can get you to where the guns are kept. We need them when we will be hiding in the woods,” he said. “Are you out of your mind?” I asked. “You expect me to just walk into the room where the weapons are kept, take guns and bullets, hide them on me, and then with German soldiers walking up and down the corridors smuggle them back into the ghetto?” “Yes, Lola. You have to do it or we won’t have a chance to survive when we get out,” he said in a very matter of fact way.

“If I get caught, I’ll be shot on the spot,” I reminded him. “Lola, you are going to get shot anyway in a few days. So why not at least try to survive?” Jakob pointed out. We talked some more about how I could steal the weapons and bullets. Jakob’s idea was for me to sew some pockets into the inside of my coat and smuggle the arsenal out that way. After discussing it further, I was convinced that it was our only hope for a successful escape and survival in the woods.

We planned to flee the ghetto the following night, so I was under great pressure to get the weapons the following day. We were to meet at 10 o’clock by the ruins of a building.

But Lola’s work schedule the next day made it impossible for her to get into the arsenal storage room. She returned to the ghetto that night without the guns and ammunition. Jakob and Raffi, probably surmising that she had been caught because she did not show up at the agreed upon time, were nowhere to be found. So Lola fled the ghetto by crawling on her belly under the barbed-wire, avoiding the searchlights which lit up the field, and inched her way into the unknown forest.

The 21-year-old cosmopolitan woman wandered alone through a forest where she had never before set foot. Lola eventually joined two family camps and the famed Israel Kessler partisans, which later linked up with the Bielski group.

She recalled her first impressions of the place:

As soon as we arrived at the new camp, I immediately saw that it was a much larger operation with many more people. In fact, it appeared to be a community — almost like a small town.

We were sitting together as a group while Kessler was in conversation with several men from the other partisan group about their merger. “Bielski,” someone in our group whispered. And the name soon spread quickly. “That’s Bielski and his brothers,” said another man in my group as he pointed in the direction of the meeting. “Who is Bielski?” I asked. “You will soon find out,” Stefan, sitting near me, responded. Stefan did not look too happy.

It wasn’t long until I got a hint of what “you will soon find out” meant. Several men approached us. They wanted to know what items we had in our bundles, bags and knapsacks. One man took most of my underwear. In time, I would know him as Tuvia, the commander of the partisan group. I later found out that he gave my underwear to his girlfriend and sister.

Giving the Bielski brothers what they wanted, including money, watches, and jewelry was the price we all had to pay to become part of this group. And believe me, the brothers took whatever they thought could be useful to their families and girlfriends. They claimed that they needed our property to buy weapons and supplies, but an accounting after the war never took place to reveal if anything they took remained.

The camp was spread out in the woods where skilled people displaying tremendous energy were at work. The kitchen had large pots where potato soup was constantly cooking. There was a bakery with an oven. A bathhouse was constructed for washing and so that members could avoid getting typhus and other illnesses. A barber kept people reasonably neat. Shoemakers were making repairs. Tailors worked to sew old clothing and create new clothes, especially underwear which was in great demand by everyone. Carpenters built the work areas and the underground bunkers we slept in. A blacksmith took care of the partisans’ horses. A watchmaker repaired weapons.

A synagogue brought some members together for services and ceremonies, including funerals. There was an infirmary. Babies were delivered. Unfortunately, there were also abortions. For most, having babies in such a dangerous place and in such an unpredictable time was unwise. There was a dentist there as well. When children were not playing, they were educated by former teachers. Occasionally, there would even be shows performed by members of the camp. It was a village within the forest. And for those who violated the Bielski rules in this village, there was also a jail.

With no one to control them, Tuvia and Zus, especially when they were drunk, could be terrors. Tuvia and his two brothers made the law of the camp and everyone had to follow it. Zus liked to show off his gun displayed under his belt for everyone to see as he walked around the camp. But give him credit for being a real fighter which was important for our survival.

Amid the austerities and perils of camp life, Lola met and fell in love with Yehuda Bielski, who had lost his first wife to a German ambush before Lola arrived at the camp.

Life in the Bielski camp was constantly overshadowed by the danger of discovery by the enemy. Lola recalled one such lethal encounter:

One afternoon while I was knitting a woolen scarf, gunfire broke the relative quiet and calm of the camp. Germans in retreat from the east who were running for their lives through the woods stumbled upon the Bielski camp. The partisans and the Germans were in battle.

People ran for cover behind trees, rocks, and anywhere they could avoid being hit by a bullet. Still, bullets flew over my head hitting trees behind and around me. The partisans fought back valiantly, especially since they were taken by surprise when the Germans reached our camp. Explosions from hand grenades made the ground shake. The battle took about an hour, but it seemed as if I was behind that tree for days.

When the shooting stopped, I slowly and carefully walked back to our camp base. I was worried that some Germans may still be around and only be too eager to point their rifles at me and shoot. Many Germans lay dead on the ground. Closer to the base, partisans were removing their boots and clothing. They were also checking their gear for food or other items. All the weapons and bullets were placed in the center of the camp.

Soon I noticed a group of partisans standing in a circle. I could hear German being spoken. As I got closer, one of the partisans told me to leave the area. Minutes later I heard shots.

That evening Yehuda told me, “Lola, we captured two Germans. They were begging for their lives. They showed us pictures of their families, their children and parents. They weren’t very smart because they didn’t understand how we were looking for revenge after they killed our children and parents. We took off their shirts. One German had an SS mark on his arm so we killed him. The other we let go home,” concluded Yehuda.

Surviving the Holocaust

Well-armed partisans, prepared for battle, penetrated ghettos to rescue Jews. During one mission Yehuda was commanding, several residents of the ghetto were praying while Yehuda urged them to immediately leave with him and his men. God would save them, they insisted. Yehuda held up his weapon and responded, “With all respect to God, this is the only thing that will save you here.” Those who refused to leave with the partisans were eventually killed. Those who joined Yehuda survived.

Upon “liberation” by the Soviets in 1944, the Soviets told the partisans that they were now free to march out of the forest and make their way to their homes. The war was over for them.

The survivors from the Bielski camp embraced life. Yehuda married Lola and, like many other surviving partisans, went to Palestine to fight for a Jewish state. Yehuda was welcomed by the Irgun, a militant underground organization formed to defend Jews against Arab terrorism and push the British out of Palestine. In 1948, Yehuda, unlike his commander cousins, was commissioned an officer in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and fought with distinction in the War of Independence.

Yehuda, Lola, and their two children — one of whom is the author of this article — came to America in the 1950s. Yehuda’s cousins with their families followed. Today, the descendants of the Bielskis and of the approximately 1,200 people who survived the war in the Bielski camp number many thousands.

Earlier this year, Hollywood released the theatrical movie Defiance that tells (unfortunately, with a number of misrepresentations and inaccuracies) the story of the Bielski brothers.

With stories emerging about the Bielskis varying wildly, an admonishment from William Shakespeare: “This above all: ‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man’” (Hamlet, act 1, scene III).

Y. Eric Bell is a graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a television producer/director. He is the son of the late Lola and Yehuda Bell (formerly Bielski).

All photos herein appear, with permission, from the Yehuda & Lola Bell Collection; Beginning photo: Officer Yehuda Bielski, left in his summer uniform, has his picture taken with Polish army comrades on the eve of WWII. He learned skills in the army that would aid the partisans fighting the Germans.

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KILL A JEW - ANY JEW AND GET AIR MILES

I am learning how to fight the Jews and kill Jewish children

Written by ck

11-year-old Muhammad, Gaza
One of the benefits enjoyed by the Palestinians as a result of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, other than freeing up space for a “400 acre tourism, entertainment and movie production facility” is that it also frees up space for terrorism training. And since it’s summer time, and those pesky kids keep getting in the way, why not kill two birds with one stone and also provide the lovely kinderlach with some wholesome outdoor activities to keep them busy and teach them some lessons in civics, Gaza style? Case in point is 11-year-old Muhammad, pictured above, who, along with dozens of boys between the ages of nine and twelve, joined the big kids in fun, healthy activities like “…exercises in raiding Israel’s border with Gaza and kidnapping of Israeli troops; shooting practice using automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs; and explosives testing.”

“The old (Jewish) settlements gave the Palestinian resistance enough space to have big trainings. We never had this space and these possibilities when the Zionists were in Gaza,” Abu Muhammad, a senior Gaza-based leader of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization, told WND in an interview… “The resistance is having a second benefit from chasing the Jews from Gaza. [This weekend's exercise] was proof of the big victory, using land they were occupying for training in preparing us for our next great victory,” Abu Muhammad said… Committees terror group spokesman Muhammad Abdel-Al, also known as Abu Abir, told WND yesterday his group was not brainwashing children… “We are not educating them on hatred. This is our strategy – to turn all the Palestinian people into weapons of resistance,” Abdel-Al said when questioned about his group’s use of boys.

Doesn’t that make you all warm and fuzzy inside?

BUT...... SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWISH

I get it. You are not anti-semitic. Certainly not. That is ridiculous. I'm only charging you with that to shut you up, to slander you, to ignore what you have to say. Far be it from you to hate Jews. You eat bagels and lox and once were invited to your co-worker's Passover seder. You've seen "Fiddler on the Roof" at least 4 times. You even dated a Jewish girl in college. What more proof do I need? You have nothing against Jews; we've already established that. You just hate Israel. Jews aren't a people; they're just a religious group. There's a big difference between being an anti-Zionist and an anti-semite. Of course.

Keep talking. Maybe if you say if enough, you'll succeed in convincing someone. Certainly, only a Zionist fascist would deduce that being committed to the destruction of the Jewish state would imply hatred of Jews. Seeing as the most probable way that the State of Israel would come to an end is either through a nuclear Holocaust or at the hands of genocidal invading armies, that suggestion doesn't seem so ridiculous. And the fact that the only country you want wiped off the face of the earth is Israel sets off some alarms. Anti-Zionist, if you're simply naive rather than genocidal, know that the end of the State of Israel would mean the mass murder of its over 6 million Jewish inhabitants. But you have a Jewish doctor...

Your ranting and raving over "poor Palestinians children" every time Israel defends itself is reasonable. Just like your opposition to Jews protecting their right to exist. Hey, you read Anne Frank's diary. Now that's a Jew that you can like! Why can't we all be more like her? Anti-Zionist, let's call a spade a spade. You understand the motives behind a suicide bomber blowing himself up in a cafe full of Jews, or why someone would gun down a library full of students. You explain that its because of "poverty", "racism" or "the occupation" that they lynch Jewish soldiers and dance on their corpses, displaying their bloody hands proudly to the world. And yet no sort of reaction on the part of the attacked is permissible, at least if the victim is Jewish. For a Jew to fight back would be a disproportionate response. It would be a war crime, and you would evoke every despicable sort of Nazi comparison possible.

Anti-Zionist, are you getting the picture? Do you see the error of your ways, or is your hatred much deeper engrained? You proclaim the right of self-determination for all peoples, especially the made-up entity known as the "Palestinians", except for Jews. While every little tribe and clan should be able to make its own decisions, only Jews must be condemned to constantly live as minorities, at the mercies of others. You have no problem with Jews, as long as they know their place and keep quiet. A weak Jew is your favourite. Israel is victim to your double-standards, delegitimization and demonization. You condemn as a racist apartheid state the only country in the Middle East with free elections, based on democratic principles. The most diverse country in the region is racist in your eyes. A Jew living in Judea and Samaria is a crime against humanity. A Jew praying at his most holy site, the Temple Mount, is forbidden lest the Arabs be offended. Jews have no right to a state unless they accept a Rwanda-style bi-national state, while no other people would except such a thing. Jews should just be happy with whatever they're given- they're lucky we let them live.

Still, you're not an anti-semite. Only a fool or a neocon warmongerer would accuse you of that. After all, the Jews aren't even a people. They're just a religious group. Too bad that Jews have always defined themselves as a nation, held together by common bonds of religion, faith, culture, heritage and ancestry. You are chief rabbi now, and you have decided that we are not a people. And the only Jews whose opinions count are Neturai Karta and the loony self-loathing Left. It doesn't matter that living in Israel is equivalent to keeping the entire Torah, according to Jewish law. It is immaterial that the vast majority of the world's Jews choose to express their identity through nationalism and peoplehood. You make the rules, great rebbe and pasken. And you've decided that we don't deserve a country. In fact, such a thing is racist. Never mind that the French, Chinese, Iraqi and Zulu are entitled to one. Jews can only exist as guests in somebody else's country. Their own is racist and colonialist.

Anti-Zionist, let's not pretend here. You use the same classic anti-semitic canards in a new anti-Israel wrapping. The collective guilt of the Jews over their crimes of deicide has been replaced with Israel's original sin of land-grabbing and theft, the "Nakba", or disaster. The Zionists are responsible for the world's current ills and led the US into its disastrous war in Iraq. The Mossad was behind 9/11 and just about every other man-made and natural disaster since and before then. AIPAC and the Israel lobby are pulling the strings behind the US government. Jews no longer kidnap Christian babies to use their blood for matzot; they murder Arab babies with impunity. Jews don't poison the wells but rather Israel intentionally spreads disease among the Arabs.

Save it. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably hates Jews. You hate the Jewish state vehemently. You are obsessed with Israel/Jewish/Zionist conspiracies and see the Mossad's/Jew's hands behind everything. Check on double standards. Check on disproportionate condemnations. Check on historical revisionism and denial of Jewish basic rights. You, my friend, have all the basic characteristic of the classic anti-semite. Anti-semitism has proved itself extremely resilient throughout the ages, making itself suitable for every particular time and ideology. Anti-Zionism is simply its latest reincarnation. You're not fooling anyone. Give up the act.

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