(this is the complete text of the booklet which is available, free of charge, at the Air Force Museum gift shop. You can also request a copy from us. Note that some of the people spoken of in the present tense have passed away since the booklet was published.)
Introduction
PREJUDICE AND MEMORY: A HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT is a compilation of the memories, artifacts and photographs of Holocaust survivors, liberators (Americans who freed concentration camp victims at the end of the war), and rescuers (non-Jews who helped save Jews at great risk to themselves and their families).
What makes PREJUDICE AND MEMORY different
from most exhibits on this subject is that it tells the personal stories of
people who live or have lived in the Dayton area.
THESE ARE YOUR NEIGHBORS. Unless
told or recorded, Holocaust stories will die, leaving the door open for another
such horrendous persecution to happen - perhaps to another group of people -
because of prejudice and hatred arising from ignorance and history unremembered.
People respond best to the individual story. I have
discovered that personally as I spoke to thousands of school children and other
audiences for the past thirty years. A single picture, a passport with
the red letter “J,” a letter revealing the death of grandparents in Auschwitz,
these touch one’s soul.
This exhibit remembers the millions killed but focuses on the
individual - mother, father, child. It tells stories of incredible courage,
of horror, sacrifice, loss and rebirth.
We are eternally grateful that we can join in partnership with
the U.S. Air Force Museum in presenting Prejudice and
Memory. We thank the Museum director, Major General Charles D.
Metcalf, USAF (ret.) for his vision and foresight. We are also very proud
to include in the exhibit a tribute to the unknown hundreds of American prisoners
of war who were also part of the Holocaust tragedy."
Many others on the Museum staff have contributed to make this
presentation unique. Their interest and empathy enrich the Dayton Holocaust
Resource Center’s mission. The volunteer docents make a visit to the exhibit
a true learning experience which children and adults tell us they will never
forget.
We are proud to have as part of the exhibit thirty-one black
and white photographs, called PLACES OF HA’SHOAH, by Cy Lehrer of Tucson, Arizona.
Words cannot express our appreciation for the most generous contribution
made by Ronald S. Lauder of New York that allowed us to begin this journey.
And to all the subsequent contributors and grantmakers we are most grateful.
With the MEMORY of the past and a firm hope that PREJUDICE will disappear in the near future, with a complete faith in the resilience of the human spirit and a hope for the healing of the world, we offer this exhibit to those who enter these halls of history.
Renate Frydman
Curator and Project Director
PREJUDICE AND MEMORY: A HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT
Holocaust Survivors
The Dayton area became home to a number of Holocaust survivors after World War II. Some came here to work for the Air Force, some because they had relatives here, others came because of business opportunities and some entirely by chance. Many of the survivors featured in "Prejudice and Memory" still live in the area. Others have moved elsewhere after retirement, and some have died.
Rescuers
While most Europeans under the Nazi occupation supported or turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews, a few listened to their own conscience and tried to help -- even at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their families. Many of these selfless people have been identified over the years by the Israeli government and honored with the title "Righteous among the Nations" or "Righteous Gentile." Many others who sacrificed to help their neighbors will never be known. Dayton has been home to several of these righteous people.
Liberators
This term is often used for soldiers who were present at the liberation of death camps and concentration camps, mostly during April of 1945. Some actively assisted in the rescue of inmates and others just observed, but their testimony is always valuable. Most of the liberators were very young men, 18 to 20 years of age. They never got over the inhumanity they witnessed at the camps. Some also rescued survivors of the "death marches" at the end of the war.
TIMELINE
1918: World War I ends in German defeat
1919: Germany becomes a democratic republic
Laws restricting Gypsies enacted
Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Germany
German Workers' Party (DAP) founded
Pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine
1920: League of Nations meets for first time, Geneva
First mass meeting of National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP,
or Nazis)
Adolf Hitler publishes first Nazi party program
1921: Allies assess Germany $31 billion in war reparations
Hitler establishes Sturmabteilung (SA), the "Storm Troopers"
NSDAP begins publishing its newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter
Hitler named chairman of NSDAP
Mussolini establishes Fascist government in Italy
1922: Walther Rathenau, Jewish foreign minister of Germany, assassinated
Great Britain takes control of Palestine
First Nazi attacks on Jews in Germany
1923: German economy collapses, Deutschemark worthless
France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr
Hitler establishes Schutzstaffel (SS)
Hitler's failed "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich
1923-1924: Hitler serves nine months in prison, begins writing Mein Kampf
1924: US limits immigration from eastern Europe
Nazis win 6.6% of vote in Reichstag elections
1925: Fascist organizations founded in several European
countries and
in the US
Huge Nazi rally in Munich
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg elected president
League of Nations outlaws chemical/biological warfare
Mein
Kampf published
1926: Hitler Youth Organization founded
American Eugenics Society founded
1927: Many Jewish cemeteries vandalized by Nazis
Rising anti-Semitism in Romania
German government lifts speaking ban on Hitler
Joseph Goebbels publishes Der Angriff
1928: Nazi Party wins 12 seats in the Reichstag
1929: Jewish settlers killed in Jerusalem
Hitler appoints Himmler head of the Schutzstaffel (SS)
Nazi party rally at Nuremberg draws over 100,000
1930: Ustasha, Fascist organization, founded in Croatia
Hitler appoints himself leader of the Storm Troopers
Nazis win 108 seats in the Reichstag
Nazi Party of Denmark founded
1931: "Führer" is Hitler's new title
German banking system collapses
Nazi Party forms alliance with other right-wing parties
Nazi Party of the Netherlands founded
1932: Hitler becomes a German citizen
Hitler receives 11.3 million votes in presidential election, but
Hindenburg wins
Franz von Papen becomes Chancellor
German-American Bund founded in US
Nazis win 230 of 608 Reichstag seats, but later lose 34 of them
Hindenburg offers to make Hitler Chancellor; Hitler refuses
1933: Albert Einstein speaks out against the Nazis
Hitler becomes Chancellor on January 30
Reichstag burns; Hitler blames Communists
Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president of the United States
SA (Sturmabteilung) foments riots and attacks on Jews throughout Germany
Dachau, first concentration camp, established
Legal discrimination against Jews begins
Gestapo established
First public book burnings
Nazis begin sterilizing "undesirables"
Germany withdraws from League of Nations
1934: Himmler becomes head of all German police
Hitler announces intent to re-arm Germany
Thousands attend pro-Nazi rallies in US
"Night of the Long Knives" - Hitler executes suspect Nazis
Hindenburg dies; Hitler takes all power
1935: Germany introduces conscription, builds up armed
forces
First "Nuremberg Laws" passed
Jews disqualified from German citizenship
New Polish government begins to persecute Jews
1936: Germany defies Versailles Treaty, occupies Rhineland
"Death's Head Units" formed to guard concentration camps
Reinhard Heydrich becomes head of SD (Sicherheitsdienst)
Spanish Civil War begins
Olympic Games in Berlin (August)
Hitler and Mussolini sign Axis pact
Germany signs treaty with Japan
1937: Hitler declares Third Reich will last 1000 years
Buchenwald established
Hitler abrogates Versailles Treaty
SS begins “euthanasia” of "defectives" (physically and/or mentally handicapped)
1938: About half of Germany's Jews have now emigrated
Hitler names himself head of German military
Germany annexes Austria
Confiscations of property and discrimination against Jews stepped up
Evian Conference: many nations, including US, will not admit Jewish refugees
Mauthausen, a concentration camp, established in Austria
Munich conference, Sudetenland crisis (September)
Kristallnacht (November 9 & 10)
Jews forced to wear yellow badges
All Jewish students expelled from schools
Kindertransport begins
1939: All Jewish economic assets seized
Hitler warns that war will mean extermination of Jews
Hungary authorizes forced labor for Jews
Spanish Civil War ends with Fascist victory
British limit Jewish immigration to Palestine
Refugee ship St Louis turned away from US
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and the USSR (August)
Invasion of Poland, World War II begins (September 1)
Thousands of Polish Jews interned
1940: Six "euthanasia" centers established in Germany
"Blitzkrieg" invasion of western Europe begins
Lodz Ghetto in Poland sealed off
Auschwitz concentration camp established
France, Low Countries occupied
Battle of Britain
Wall built around Warsaw Ghetto
Deportation of French Jews begins
1941: Population of Warsaw Ghetto reaches 400,000
Dutch workers strike to protest deportation of Jews
Krakow Ghetto established
Germany invades USSR (June)
Jews in Baltic states ordered to wear yellow badges
First Soviet prisoners at Auschwitz
Babi Yar massacre
Belzec death camp established
Odessa massacre
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor
1942: Allies establish War Crimes Commission
Wannsee Conference calls for "Final Solution"
Gassing
begins at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka
concentration camps
Mass starvation in Polish ghettos
Lublin, Czestochowa ghettos liquidated
Medical experiments on Auschwitz victims
Switzerland expels Jewish refugees
1943: Joint Rescue Committee begins work
Liquidation of Jewish slave laborers in Berlin begins
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp established
Katyn Forest massacre
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May)
Mengele begins "medical experiments" at Auschwitz
Himmler orders liquidation of all ghettos in occupied USSR
Allies invade and occupy most of Italy, Mussolini flees
Most of Denmark's Jews are saved
Revolt of prisoners at Sobibor concentration camp
1944: Oskar Schindler saves Jewish workers
Mengele's "twin studies" (medical torture and death) at Auschwitz
Lodz Ghetto liquidated
Normandy invasion (June)
290,000 Hungarian Jews exterminated in 23 days
Raoul Wallenberg saves thousands of Hungarian Jews
Paris liberated
Soviets begin to liberate concentration camps in East
Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz
First "death marches" from Auschwitz to German camps
Battle of the Bulge
1945: Soviet army liberates Poland and Hungary
Anne Frank dies at Bergen-Belsen
Evacuation of Auschwitz
Death marches across Poland and Austria
Yalta Conference
US Army crosses the Rhine
Liberation of camps in Germany
Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Last death marches within Germany
Suicide of Adolf Hitler
Murder of Benito Mussolini
Liberation of Mauthausen
Surrender of Germany (May 8)
Gradual evacuation of camp survivors to Displaced Persons (DP) camps
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed
World War II ends (September 2)
Nazi officials imprisoned and interrogated
1945-1946: Nuremberg War Crimes trials
1.5 million Europeans in DP camps
after 1945: Emigration of survivors to US, Israel and elsewhere
1948: Establishment of the State of Israel
1951: United Nations bans genocide
1961: Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel
1966: Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach released from prison
1978: Joseph Mengele dies in South America
1987: Klaus Barbie tried in France
1993: US Holocaust Memorial Museum opens
1996: Misappropriation of Holocaust victims' funds by Swiss bankers revealed
1999: Germany announces plans for Holocaust memorial in Berlin
late 1990s: Controversies over reparations for Holocaust survivors
2000 and after: You help remember the Holocaust and help heal
the world
The People of Prejudice and Memory
The asterisk* indicates that this person was interviewed
for the
"Faces of the Holocaust" video series.
Bird, John
Bosma, Marinus & his mother Helena
Cooper, Delbert
Feenstra, Joseph & Margarethe
Flacks, Paul
Fromm, Theodore
Frydman family
Garfunkel, Felix & Erica
Gordon, Maurice
Gutman, Bernie
Gutmann, Max
Haddix, Ross
*Heider, Sam
Kahn, Joseph & Martha
Kahn, Gertrude Wolff
Kahn, Robert
*Key, Donald
Landau, Helga
*Levy, Helga
*Long, Fred
May family
Mellman, Bernard
*Muler, Ben
*Muler, Bernice
Pauzar, Karl
Poirrier, Adrienne
Poll, Irene Kahn
Steeber, Henry
Stine, Abraham & Judith
Unger, Gilbert
*Vacca, Gabriel
*Van Schagen, Johanna
Vancourt, Abbe Raymond
Weil, Felix
*Weisman, Murray
Wyrobnik, Henry
Zyznomyrsky, Stacia
Historical Notes
Auschwitz
Bergen-Belsen
Berlin
Buchenwald
Dachau
escape routes
Frankfurt
French Resistance
Kindertransport
Kristallnacht
Lille
Lodz Ghetto
Mannheim
Mauthausen
Netherlands
Neustadt
Polish Underground
Polish Jews
Romania
Soviet Union
Third Army
Ukraine
Vilna
The People of Prejudice and Memory
John S. Bird
Born in England, John came to the United States at the age of five in 1930. He attended a private school in Canada and lived in New Jersey and New York. Drafted shortly after beginning studies at Princeton University in 1943, he was assigned to the 86th Infantry Division. John expected to be sent to the Pacific, but instead went to Europe during the Battle of the Bulge (late 1944) and was with Patton's army as it advanced through Bavaria and Austria. As the war was ending, his platoon - leaving the main highway to avoid German snipers - stumbled upon Dachau and assisted in its liberation. Soon afterwards, the 86th was given a short furlough at home and then sent to the Pacific for the invasion of the Philippines. He was there when the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war against Japan. For about six months after V-J Day, he helped comb remote Pacific islands for Japanese soldiers who did not know the war had ended. He was eventually able to resume his studies at Princeton and went to work in New York City. He married, moved to Ohio, and eventually settled in Troy to work at Hobart Brothers. He retired in 1990 as Superintendent of the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology. He and his wife have three children and eight grandchildren.
General George Patton's Third Army took part in the invasion of Normandy and then the vast sweep across France which liberated that country in the summer and fall of 1944. Patton continued on into Germany that winter, and his troops were usually at the forefront. This is why so many were present at the liberation of concentration camps.
Moritz Bomstein
Moritz Don Bomstein (originally
Bomsztajn) was born in Belchatow, Poland on April 8, 1904. He moved to
Piotrkow Trybunalski and married Paula Szpiro. They had three children
- Zosia, Jakob (Jack) and Mania. The family was forced
into the Piotrkow Ghetto, Poland’s first ghetto, by the Germans.
From there, the mother and two girls were sent to Treblinka (a death camp
in Poland) and were never seen again. Moritz and son Jack were sent to
Czestochowa and then to Buchenwald, where Moritz Bomstein wore the uniform
in this exhibit. Later, they were sent to Dachau. In 1945, they were put
on a train to be transferred again but the Americans stopped the train
and liberated them. After the war, the Americans sent them to a DP
(displaced persons) camp in Landsburg, Germany to await their quota number
to enter the United States. They were in Germany for five years before
coming
to Cincinnati in 1950. Later, Jack married Bernice and
came to Dayton to open a business. They had three sons in Dayton and still
reside here. Jack says to survive, they did as they were told. Moritz Don
Bomstein died in Cincinnati in February 1954 of a heart attack. He was
49 years old.
Marinus and Helena Bosma
The Bosmas are natives of Arnhem, in the Netherlands.
They lived in Arnhem during the first three years of the war, where they
helped many Jews, but between 1943 and 1945 they were in hiding as members
of the Dutch underground. The son, Marinus, recalls that his mother
helped find shelter for at least 30 Jewish people, and that they themselves
housed at least twelve - a group of four, and later a group of eight. In
1943, Marinus and his father spirited the last group to Amsterdam where
they were handed over to another group that helped them escape to Belgium.
As far as Marinus knows, only two of the people they helped were captured
by the Germans. The Bosmas’ underground shelter was discovered by
the SD while Marinus and his father were still in Amsterdam. His
mother and sister were held overnight as the Nazis waited for their return.
Marinus came home but his father was warned and stayed away. Helena, Marinus
and his sister managed to escape out the back door, each going separate
ways and leaving all their belongings behind. "Our survival depended
on a lot of good people that were willing to help at great personal danger
and no monetary compensation," Marinus says today. "Food stamps,
money, clothing somehow showed up. When a people get oppressed by a ruthless
enemy as the Germans were, it is unbelievable how people can form a solid
united front against a common enemy." When asked how they were brave
enough to help so many people, Marinus says, “I really don’t know. We were
lucky, very lucky. And I see now that the good Lord kept an eye on
us, watched over us and let us get away with it. Many were not so lucky.”
Marinus and his wife, Nelly, emigrated to the United
States after the war with their three children. A fourth child was
born in 1956 in Tipp City, Ohio. Helena died in Holland. The Bosmas still
live in the Dayton area and winter in Florida. They celebrated
their 50th anniversary in September 1999 and have seven grandchildren.
Delbert Cooper
Del Cooper was born in Dayton and graduated from
Fairmont High School in 1941. As a soldier with the 71st Infantry
Division in 1945, he was among the first Americans to enter and liberate
Gunzkirchen, a satellite of the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp.
His most vivid
memory of that harrowing experience is “the sickening
smell of dead bodies - the odor of evil," as he calls it today. The
day after liberation, he wrote a detailed account to his wife Joan. He
also took part in the capture of some German soldiers and an SS officer.
After the war, he worked until 1972 at the Defense Electronic Supply Center
in Kettering and now lives in Beavercreek. He and his wife have one daughter.
Johannes and Margarethe Feenstra
Born in Bonn, Germany, Margarethe married a Dutch citizen. The couple were living in Amsterdam when the war broke out. Johannes was arrested by the Nazis only days after Margarethe gave birth to their daughter, Marilou, and for six months she did not know where he was. Margarethe went to the German headquarters hundreds of times to get information about her husband, which eventually helped in his release. Interned at a satellite camp near Sachsenhausen, Johannes was allowed to “work” in Berlin as a volunteer - digging out live bombs that had fallen on the capital. “His pay was coming away from it alive,” his daughter says. The Feenstras were reunited when Marilou was only a year old. They later came to the United States. After the war, Johannes had a difficult adjustment to normal life and worried about his friends’ survival. The Feenstras live in the Dayton area and have two daughters and three grandchildren.
Paul Flacks
Paul Flacks was drafted at age twenty and assigned to the Third Army. As an advance scout, he was often inside German lines as the Allies advanced across Europe. He was one of the first Americans to liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He worked as an interpreter during the American occupation of Germany and helped identify key members of the SS. His family preserved a number of Nazi books, posters and photos, some of which are now in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. As a Dayton businessmen, he was active in Jewish organizations and was Executive Vice President and National Executive Director of the Zionist Organization of America for twenty years. Even after retirement he edited a Zionist newsletter. His wife Shirley is still active in Dayton’s community affairs. They have two children and four grandchildren.
Buchenwald was established in July 1937. It became the largest death camp in Germany and is still maintained as a memorial by the German government. It is located in Upper Saxony, not far from Nuremberg. Between 60,000 and 65,000 people lost their lives there.
Theodor Fromm
Born in Lautenberg, East Prussia in 1912, Theodor’s
family moved with him to Berlin after 1919 because their province became
part of the new state of Poland. His mother died soon after and his
father remarried. At fifteen he became an apprentice in a department store,
but lost his
job when Hitler came to power and Jewish businesses were forced
to close. His father’s shop also went out of business and, with his brother,
he sold neckties on the streets. Theodor met his wife Rosa at a spa where
she was employed. They were married in 1937 and not long afterwards, Theodor
took his wife and her two sisters to Hamburg where they boarded a ship for America.
Rosa was already pregnant with her daughter Barbara, who was born in Louisville
and is now a retired teacher in Dayton and a member of the Holocaust Education
Committee. The sisters settled with relatives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Joseph returned to Rosa’s hometown near the French border to prepare the rest
of her family for emigration. Rosa’s parents were able to leave as well,
arriving in the States in September 1938. Theodor was still in Germany
at the time of Kristallnacht, working at a moving and packing firm in Berlin.
With help from his employer and others, he was able to
avoid arrest for two and a half years. He was granted an emigration visa in
March 1941 because he had relatives in the United States, and travelled here
by way of Lisbon. Later he learned that all of his family had died in
concentration camps in Poland. In Louisville, he and his wife, apart for
seven years, were unable to resume their marriage and soon separated.
But they later reunited and became parents of a second daughter in 1948.
Barbara was raised by relatives and after graduating from college took her younger
sister in. Theodor returned to Berlin in 1961 to seek reparations.
The family did not hear from him again until 1984, when he was reunited with
Barbara. He died in 1987, and Rosa died in Dayton in 1998.
Frydman Family
The Frydman family lived in and around Radom, Poland.
Charles' father and grandfather were kosher butchers. In summer they lived
on a fruit farm and made a living selling produce. Nearly all the family was
rounded up and sent to ghettos and then concentration camps when the Nazis occupied
Poland. Most of the family - including his mother, Chana, two younger sisters,
and all those depicted in the exhibit photo - were killed at Treblinka, a death
camp. Charles was interned in several small camps but soon escaped, joining
the partisans in the Polish forests. After two and a half years in the
forest, he was liberated by the Russians in January 1945.
He says that he and the other Jews hiding in the forest wanted to survive to
see the downfall of Germany because of the suffering it had caused his family
and so many others. The single most important factor in his survival was looking
forward to having a family of his own someday. He came to Dayton in 1950 and
became a successful businessman. He and his wife, Renate, have four children
and many grandchildren, all living in the Dayton area.
Erika Garfunkel
Erika Baier (Garfunkel) was born in Papenburg, a
small German town with a population of twenty-four Jewish families.
On November 9, 1938, her father Salomon was taken to a camp. His
tobacco wholesale business was destroyed by Nazi storm troopers.
Because the mayor of Papenburg wanted the Baiers’
house, he offered to issue the family passports without the letter J (for
“Jude”) on them. The family had applied for an immigration visa to
Paraguay. The mayor bought the house for his son for a ridiculously
low price, but then issued the passports with the letter “J” on them.
This made the family’s departure for Paraguay impossible.
Elli Waldbaum Baier, Erika’s mother, went with
her aunt Gida to Bremen to beg for visas at the consulates there.
Through their efforts, Erika’s father was released from the camp and permitted
to emigrate with his family to Ecuador. The family settled in Guayaquil
in April 1939.
Through her parent’s sacrifices, Erika survived to graduate
from the Universidad Central del Ecuador’s College of Dentistry in 1954.
She married Felix Garfunkel, also a survivor, that same year. He later
graduated from a medical school in Ecuador (see below). They came to the
United States in 1958. From a large family on both
sides, only Erika’s immediate family - including her brother Herman, an aunt
and uncle, and their three children - were able to escape the Nazis.
Felix Garfunkel
Cernauti, Romania was home
to Felix’s middle-class Jewish family. He was eight years old when the
war broke out and the Soviet army, in accordance with the infamous Hitler-Stalin
pact, occupied his country. In June 1941, the Germans came, and the Garfunkels
were ordered into a Jewish ghetto with 46,000 others. A few weeks
later they were put on a train to the Ukraine for slave labor. Felix
recalls the journey as a nightmare of violence and fear. On arrival,
men and women were separated and a forced march began. Felix and
his father escaped and hid in an abandoned house -- he remembers that it
had been flooded, and was full of mud. They made their way to Mogilev,
but were forced into slave labor again. Felix worked on a farm and
his father in a foundry. He estimates that 80 to 85% of Mogilev's
Jews died from starvation or disease during that period. In the summer
of 1943, he was sent to a concentration camp but escaped three months later.
He was again in Mogilev when the Soviets liberated the town in the spring
of 1944. Remarkably, both parents were still alive, and after they
were reunited the family returned to Cernauti. After the war they
journeyed to France and eventually to Ecuador, where Felix's father had
a cousin. He completed high school and then medical school in Quito
and emigrated to the United States in 1958. He has worked as a radiologist
in Canton, Ohio and in Xenia, where he retired from Greene Memorial Hospital
in 1990. He and his wife, Erika, have three children and three
grandchildren.
Romania was a monarchy until the end of World War II, a relatively new country created in the late nineteenth century out of provinces conquered from the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish population of this region has been large since at least the Dark Ages. Romania also has the world's largest Gypsy population, despite the fact that a quarter million of these semi-nomadic people also were killed in the Holocaust.
Maurice Gordon
Maurice Gordon was eleven years old when forced
into one of the many Polish ghettos.
He escaped with his family and hid in the forests with
help from Poland's underground resistance movement. They were still
in hiding hen the Soviet army liberated Poland in 1945. Remarkably,
the entire family survived -- Maurice calls this "a work of God" along
with a little luck. He came to the United States after the war and
worked in the mobile home industry. He has three children and two
grandchildren.
The Polish Underground, also known as the 'Home Army,' operated throughout the war under the direction of the exiled government in London. The espionage network was highly efficient and supplied much valuable information to the Allies. The underground movement was also joined by some Jewish refugees and supplied weapons for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Max and Bernard Gutmann
Our exhibit includes a photograph of Max (age 12) and his brother Bernie (age 14) with a pair of oxen, plowing the family fields in prewar Germany. The Gutmanns raised cattle and grew hay, grain, fruit and potatoes. Bernard Gutmann emigrated to the United States in the spring of 1937, sponsored by a great uncle in Cincinnati. Max, his sister Ilse and their parents were still in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht. At the end of 1938, when violent persecution of Jews had begun, the family was forced to sell their farm for 15,000 German marks and then was taxed 14,000 marks for the transaction. Max's father was arrested on Kristallnacht and spent a few months in Dachau. Max and his parents went to Shanghai, China in 1939 after the father’s release from Dachau. Ilse was sent to England via the Kindertransport. Max served three years in U.S. Army Intelligence and came to Dayton in 1948. He went into the retail business and eventually became CEO of the Elder-Beerman Stores Corporation. Bernie served in Patton's Third Army on the European front during the Normandy campaign and later became prominent in the shoe industry. The two brothers and their wives still live in Dayton.
Many of the Jews who escaped the Nazi terror ended up emigrating to the United States. Some came here in a very roundabout way: sometimes across Siberia to China or Japan, sometimes via South America or Africa.
Ross Haddix
Ross Haddix was born in Kentucky in 1921. As a soldier in the First Armored Division, he worked with Sherman tanks. At the end of the war he was with the 11th Armored Division in Czechoslovakia. This division liberated one of the worst camps, Mauthausen in Austria. Ross helped set up a pumping system that brought up water from the Danube River for the liberated prisoners. He also visited and photographed the camp at Gusen. He worked for many years as a printer and now lives in Xenia. He has a daughter, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Mauthausen is in Austria, near Linz on the Danube. Life there was particularly hard because inmates were forced to work under terrible conditions in a stone quarry. The death rate was very high, and Mauthausen was one of the last camps liberated on May 5. About 120,000 died there. It was also one of the starting points for the 'death marches,' the forced treks that occurred at the end of the war when the Nazis tried to move prisoners away from the Allied advance.
Samuel Heider
Sam Heider was born in 1924 in the small village of Biejkow, one of six children of Yankel and Chaja Hajder. Unlike most Polish Jews, the Hajders had been farmers for generations and owned their own land. In 1941 the farm was confiscated by the German occupation forces, and the family moved to the ghetto in nearby Bialobrzegi. In 1942 the ghetto was liquidated, and Sam's parents went to their deaths at Treblinka. Sam survived because he was in a work camp at Radom. All he had left of his family was a photograph of his sister, which – remarkably -- he was able to keep with him by hiding it under his arm, even in the showers. He still has the photograph. Sam and his wife, Phyllis, also a survivor, have three children and five grandchildren.
Before World War II, the largest single population of Jews resided in Poland. During the war years 2.9 million Jews died in camps or ghettos - 88% of all Polish Jews. Most families had been there for centuries, driven out of western European nations or Russia during the Middle Ages. It is believed that they numbered three million in the 1930s. Today there are virtually none. Most were rounded up and sent to camps when Germany occupied Poland in late 1939, and systematic extermination began early in 1941. Three million Polish Catholics also died in the Holocaust.
Gertrude Wolff Kahn
Gertrude Wolff Kahn was born in 1925 in Neustadt, in the German Palatinate. Her parents owned a business, supplying iron materials for the building trade. When the Nazis came to power the Wolffs were boycotted by all their former customers. As life in Neustadt became more difficult, her parents sent Gertrude to a Jewish boarding school in Berlin, and her sister to a similar school in Switzerland. During Kristallnacht in 1938, her father was severely injured. Shortly after this Gertrude was put on one of the Kindertransports to England where she lived through the London Blitz. Her parents eventually escaped and the family was reunited in America. Gertrude is the wife of Robert Kahn, also a survivor.
Neustadt an der Haardt is
a small city in the Palatinate region, located at the mouth of the Speyerbach
river. Its picturesque location attracts tourists, and before the war
it was a rail junction center. It is the center of the Pfalz wine region
and each year celebrates the national Deutsche Weinlesefest.
Kristallnacht - November
9/10, 1938 - was the real turning point in the history of the Holocaust.
Persecution of Jews had been indirect and mostly nonviolent until then. But
early in November, a
Jewish student assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris. This
event was the excuse for turning loose the Nazi SS and their sympathizers on
the Jews of Germany. That night, all over the country, Jewish homes and
shops were looted and synagogues were burned. The window glass that littered
the streets in Jewish neighborhoods gave rise to the expression "Night of Broken
Glass”. The shape of the plexiglass panels on our exhibit recalls that
horror. After Kristallnacht many Jews realized that the government was
out to destroy them, and thousands fled the country. Many others were unable
to escape before the war broke out ten months later. About 150,000 of
Germany's 500,000 Jews managed to escape.
Joseph and Martha Kahn
Joseph, father of Robert Kahn, is shown in the exhibit wearing a German soldier's uniform from World War I. Ironically, he was decorated for bravery by Adolf Hitler in 1934. His medal is also part of the exhibit. In November 1938, the Kahns were evicted from their Mannheim apartment and Joseph was severely beaten. Soon afterward he was taken to Dachau but escaped by signing over his business and property to an SS guard. The family travelled to the United States, where Joseph worked as a shipping clerk, and his wife Martha worked as a seamstress in a factory. Their son Robert was in the U.S. Army. After the war they were also reunited with their daughter Irene, who had been hidden in France by a priest (also pictured on the display) throughout the war.
Robert Kahn
Robert Kahn grew up in Mannheim, Germany. Because of growing discrimination in the 1930s, he was forced out of most childhood activities but took violin lessons at home and learned metalworking in a Jewish trade school. In November 1938, his school and synagogue were burned. When he came home, he saw his father being beaten and mother tied up. The Nazis burned their furniture. As Nazi storm troopers looted the apartment, they forced him to play his violin for a watching, jeering crowd. This violin is now part of the “Prejudice and Memory” exhibit. The Kahns fled to Luxembourg but again came under Nazi control when the Low Countries were occupied in 1940. Robert was able to escape through France and Spain to the Canary Islands and then went to the United States where he was reunited with his parents. He fought with the U.S. Army in the Pacific theatre and later attended the University of Oklahoma. In 1946 he joined the Intelligence Section at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he received awards and remained until retirement. He lives in Dayton with his wife Gertrude and has three children and seven grandchildren.
Mannheim is a medium-sized city in northern Baden-Württemburg at the confluence of the Rhine and the Neckar rivers. It dates back to at least the eighth century and has a famous 'old town' area called the Quadraten. Laid out in a grid pattern, the squares are identified by the letters of the alphabet. Because it was a rail and industrial center more than half the town was leveled by Allied bombers near the end of World War II. The Kahns' apartment house no longer stands.
Donald Key
Donald was born in Union City, Ohio but grew up and now lives in Union City, Indiana - the town is split by the state line. On graduating from high school in 1942, he got married and was soon drafted. Serving as a courier with the Third Army, he participated in the D-Day invasion and was present when the first American troops crossed the Rhine at Remagen in 1945. Although he carried thousands of messages and was always near the front lines, he says he had never heard about the concentration camps until his regiment liberated Buchenwald in April 1945. The experience left him with a lifelong interest in Judaic culture, and his family has many connections with the local Jewish community.
Helga Landau
Helga Landau was born in Hagen, Germany. When she was sixteen her widowed mother sent her to England via one of the Kindertransports in May 1939. Prior to that, she and her mother lived in an apartment owned by Jewish people. Three other families moved in with them when forced out of their own homes. In England she lived for a time with a family in London (where she attended secondary school), and then in Bournemouth and in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. She made a living as a seamstress. Her mother’s letters went first to the U.S., then to England to Helga. After the war she married a German boy she had known before going to England. They emigrated to Lima, Ohio, where an aunt lived. Her mother and step-father also survived the war through people who helped them. Helga and her husband had two daughters, but were later divorced. Helga moved with her aunt to Dayton. She worked for many years at Reynolds & Reynolds Company.
The Kindertransport helped trainloads of Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia reach the safety of Great Britain where they were taken into English homes. About 10,000 children, all forced to leave their parents and families behind, escaped Nazi-controlled territory between November 1938 and September 1939 when war broke out in Europe. Noel Baker, English House of Commons Labor Party member, made an impassioned plea for the rescue of Jewish children in German-occupied lands. It sparked a speedy collection of money by British Jews, with help from church groups, especially the Quakers and Methodists. The Kindertransport was one of the largest children's rescue efforts in history. However, another million and a half Jewish children did not survive the Holocaust.
Helga Levy
Born and raised in Berlin, Helga recalls seeing Hitler,
Goebbels and other Nazi officials as they drove through the streets of the capital.
When Hitler took power, her school began to teach about 'Aryan superiority,'
and she recalls that a Jewish friend was the only classmate whose head had the
perfect 'Aryan' proportions. A teenager when the war began, she was assigned
to a job in a munitions factory. For that reason she was not taken away
to a concentration camp with her parents, whom she never saw again. Realizing
that she too would eventually be liquidated, she 'went underground' with the
help of her father's Gentile friend Emil Krollzig. Amazingly, she survived
the war years living right in Berlin under a false identity. She was there
when Soviet troops captured the city in April 1945. With
the help of American officials she was able to board a ship for the United States.
In the mid-1980s she visited Germany and was reunited with Emil's widow.
Helga still resides in the Dayton area.
Berlin was the old capital of Prussia and, after 1871,
of united Germany. During the Nazi era it was home to thousands of
high-ranking military and civil officials, the headquarters of the SS and
SA, and for a time, the real nerve center of Europe. Throughout Helga's
time 'underground,' Nazis were everywhere, almost literally underfoot.
Moreover, Berlin suffered hundreds of Allied bombing raids between 1940
and 1945 - some 76,000 tons of explosives, five times the power of the
first atom bomb. Berlin was largely rubble when the Soviet
army marched in on May 1, 1945. Helga Levy never left the city, and
her survival is nothing short of miraculous.
Fred Long
Born on a farm in Harlan County, Kentucky, Fred enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was trained as a medical corpsman in England and participated in the Normandy invasion in June 1944. He was with Patton's Third Army as it moved across France and Belgium into Germany in 1944-45. Allied troops were not told of the existence of the concentration camps (although their superiors knew), and it was often a traumatic experience when young soldiers stumbled into them. As Fred said, even the horrors of the battlefield were not enough to prepare him for his first sight of a death camp. His regiment was the first to enter Dachau, and the episode affected him for the rest of his life. He died in 1999 in Dayton, leaving behind a large family. During his 93 days at Dachau, assisting the survivors, he drew a remarkable map of the camp. This map is now part of our exhibit.
Max May Family
Another picture on the display shows
Max and Lydia May and their daughter Carmen in Frankfurt. The family had been
in Germany for hundreds of years before the Holocaust. Max May was born in Horchheim,
Lydia in Frankfurt, and Carmen in Worms. Max was an artist and architect
and a decorated veteran of the First World War. A visionary, he saw that the
situation for Jews in Germany would worsen after the victory of Hitler’s party
in 1933. After someone dropped a rock on his granddaughter’s baby carriage from
their apartment house in Frankfurt, he decided to make a new life for her in
the United States. Max May was the first of his family to leave and came to
New York in 1936.
On Kristallnacht, his wife, daughter,
son-in-law and granddaughter escaped from Frankfurt to Holland, then to England
and finally to the U.S. in December 1938 to be reunited with Max. Other family
members were not able to get out in time and were killed at Theresienstadt,
Auschwitz and Riga. Max May died in 1959 and his wife Lydia in 1988, both in
Dayton.
The family thrived in America and still
resides in the Dayton area, leading productive, community-enhancing lives.
Bernard Mellman
Bernie Mellman enlisted in the Army reserves in 1942 and served with the U.S. Army in Europe in 1945-46. In April 1945 his battalion, the 542nd Field Artillery, assisted in the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau. He was twenty years old and like most American soldiers, had no idea that the death camps existed -- even though he was Jewish. It was, he remembers, "a soul-wrenching experience for me. . . . I can still see. . . . starved, emaciated inmates. . . . I remember seeing those ovens and smelling the stench of dead bodies." A few days later Bernie took part in the capture of nearby Munich. After the war, he became an accountant. He and his wife, Beverly, have four children and eight grandchildren and resided in Dayton until 2000.
Dachau, located in a suburb of Munich, was the first concentration camp established by Hitler in 1933. It became one of the largest and most notorious, though it was never technically considered a death camp. During its twelve years of operation it housed at least 206,000 prisoners, 35,000 of whom died.
Ben Muler
The son of a newspaper printer in Wilno, Poland
(now Vilnius, Lithuania), Ben knew about Nazi anti-Semitism long before
the war. In 1939, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression
pact, Wilno was occupied by the Soviets. But in 1941, the Nazis occupied
the city, and Ben fled with some friends. His family remained behind,
convinced that the Germans
would not harm them. He never saw his family again.
From Minsk, he was recruited into a Russian labor corps and worked near
the Volga River until that region, too, was occupied by the Germans.
He fled into the Ural Mountains where he worked as a lumberjack - and also
met his wife Bernice. At the end of the war he was permitted to return
to Wilno but found no one he knew. He learned later that his mother
had been shot and his father sent to a camp in Estonia, where he caught
typhoid and was burned to death with other sick prisoners in a human bonfire.
He did, however, eventually find a sister who had escaped into Russia.
He came to the United States and worked as a printer in Jackson, Mississippi.
Later he found a better job at the Dayton Daily News, where he worked until
retirement in 1986. He and Bernice have two children and four grandchildren.
Wilno, Vilna, Vilnius - the capital of Lithuania has been part of Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, and the realm of the Teutonic Knights. It was founded in the tenth century and was capital of Lithuania after 1323. From 1795 to 1915 it was under Russian control, and during that period flourished as a center of rabbinic studies. Between the world wars, Vilna was the capital of a Polish province, and the 1931 census showed a Jewish population of 54,000. As a result of the notorious non-aggression pact of August 1939, Vilna became the capital of the new Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. Nazi occupation troops held it from June 1941 until July 1944, and during those three years nearly the entire Jewish population was murdered or taken away to camps. It is still the capital of Lithuania, now an independent state.
Bernice Muler
Born Bronia Fogel in Poland in 1925, Bernice was
fourteen when the war broke out and her village came under German control.
Departing Russian troops gave her family and neighbors thirty minutes to
decide whether they wanted to be evacuated to Russia. Knowing their
possible fate under Nazi rule, the Fogels decided to go. They went
to an uncle's house in Vladimir, but in 1940 were sent on to a work camp
in the Urals and later settled in a nearby town. Bernice was able
to attend school for the next few years, but also worked twelve hours a
day. She met Ben Muler while in Russia. Her father died in Russia in 1944
for lack of medical treatment, but she, her brother and sister continued
to live with their mother in a one-room apartment. Life was
very hard, but they knew that they would not have survived
in Poland. They were permitted to leave the Soviet Union and Bernice came
to the United States in 1949, with husband Ben and their young son, Leon.
She and Leon are pictured on a ship on the way to America. She later
had a daughter, Elizabeth, in the U.S. Her mother and sister eventually
settled in Israel. The Mulers recently moved to Florida.
While protecting eastern European Jews from Nazi genocide, the Soviet Union often forced them into conditions approaching slave labor. Able-bodied Jews dug ditches, laid railroad track, and sometimes died under harsh conditions - but hundreds of thousands were saved from the death camps. The Soviet government helped families to reunite and allowed the fugitives some freedom of movement. After the war most of these survivors came to the United States or to Israel. Of the Soviet Jews who lived in areas occupied by the Nazis, 107,000 died in Russia and 900,000 in the Ukraine.
Karl Pauzar
Born in 1923 in Dayton, Karl was an All-City football
player at Chaminade High School before he was drafted into the Army in
1943. He was sent to Europe in the fall of 1944 and served as a combat
infantryman in the 14th Armored Division. He saw action in Alsace,
the Ardennes and in Bavaria, where his division accidentally stumbled upon
and liberated the small concentration camp at Ampfing, near Munich.
He still vividly remembers the starved, emotionless prisoners they found
there. After the war he continued in the Army Reserve, and was called
to active duty during the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961. He eventually
retired as a lieutenant-colonel. He has been married more than fifty
years and has no children. Karl is also still active in the Veterans
of
Foreign Wars.
Adrienne Poirrier
Adrienne Poirrier was born in 1902 in Mauprevoir,
France. Her husband Raymond was killed during the German invasion
of France in 1940, leaving her with a young daughter. Working as
a bookkeeper in a suburb of Paris, she joined the French Resistance.
Her job at a city hall enabled
her to steal ration coupons and blank ID cards, which were distributed
through the underground network to Jews in hiding. Questioned three times
by the Gestapo, she escaped arrest the third time only because her daughter
Paulette removed the ration stamps hidden in their home and rode the Paris metro
all night with the contraband. Paulette later married an American
soldier, Robert Hinders, who brought her and her mother to Dayton in 1947.
Adrienne died in 1984 but her daughter contributed her story for this exhibit.
The French Resistance, "Maquis," or "Underground," better known but less effective than similar movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia, was directed from London by the Free French government in exile. Most Maquisards had little military training and could not offer much support to the Allies. However, many of them did help fugitive Jews. In some cases the entire Jewish population of towns or villages was saved. Often Jewish children were passed off as Catholic members of French families, and some did not rediscover their Jewish origins until decades later.
Irene Kahn Poll
Irene Kahn Poll, born in Mannheim in 1922, remembers
being called a "dirty Jew" and watching her brother Robert being beaten
by a Nazi teacher in front of his classmates. In 1935, as her family
was
persecuted and their business ruined, she was sent to
Lille, France to attend school. She was briefly reunited with her
family in Luxembourg in 1939, but lost track of them during the war.
In 1942, hiding her Jewish identity, she worked for a time as a governess
near Orléans but
then returned to Lille where she was hidden by Abbé
Raymond Vancourt until the liberation in France in 1944. Later she
again found her family in America.
Henry Steeber
Henry Steeber, a native of Vienna, is a survivor of Theresienstadt and now lives in Dayton. He has contributed valuable artifacts to this exhibit.
Abraham and Judith Stine
Abe and Judith Süss Stine were both in their teens
when taken from their homes in Poland and sent to concentration camps.
Judith survived three years of forced labor at Auschwitz and lost all of her
family except for one sister. Abraham was liberated from Bergen-Belsen
in 1945, having escaped a last-minute massacre by hiding in a pile of dead
bodies. He returned briefly to Poland but then went back
to Germany, where he met Judith. They were married in 1946 and had a son,
and then emigrated to Israel for a time. They came to the United States
via Germany, and Abraham worked in the scrap metal business in Dayton for
many years. Judith has now passed away and Abraham lives
in Florida.
According to their son, Dr.
David Stine, they were unable for many years to tell their friends and
family about their experiences in the Holocaust.
Auschwitz, with its sister camp Birkenau, was the largest of all the death camps. Located in southern Poland not far from the Czech border, it housed several million prisoners between its founding in June 1940 and its liberation in April 1945. Hundreds of thousands died in its gas chambers, and the total death count is about 1.6 million. It was also notorious for Joseph Mengele's medical experiments and other research with chemical weapons. Factories operating with slave labor surrounded the camps.
Bergen-Belsen, another major death camp, is south of Hamburg. About 50,000 Jews were exterminated there.
Herbert Strauss
Herbert Leopold Strauss was born in Leipzig
in 1900. He traced his roots back approximately 400 years in Germany. Strauss
served in the German Army during World War I. He graduated from Heidelberg
University and completed his education at the Leipzig College of Law, becoming
a practicing attorney. He and his wife Gisela had one daughter, Eva,
born in 1937.
In 1938, Strauss was arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
He remained there for six months. He was one of the lucky ones who was released
from Buchenwald, under the condition that he leave the country with his wife
and child. He was forced to leave behind everything of value. The family spent
two years in England and came to the United States when Strauss was 40.
He worked at several jobs to support his family, including being a truck driver's
helper and hardware store clerk in Huntington, West Virginia. Eventually he
became a bookkeeper in Portsmouth, Ohio. Had he wished
to practice law, he would have had to return to law school, graduate and pass
the bar exam. At forty, he decided against it.
Strauss had three grandchildren and died
in Dayton in 1980. His family's contribution to our exhibit was the sign
which reads (in German): "Germans, go to German attorneys!"
Gilbert Unger
Gil Unger was born in Dayton and served with the 90th Infantry Division, landing at Normandy shortly after D-Day in 1944. His division liberated the concentration camp at Flossenburg on April 28, 1945. Even as the soldiers entered the camp, guards were murdering inmates. Gil's division also rescued Jewish prisoners and American POWs from the infamous "death marches." After the war he attended the University of Cincinnati and worked for many years as a music teacher in the Dayton public schools. He and his wife Lois had four children and there are six grandchildren.
Gabriel Vacca
Major Vacca was a fighter pilot whose squadron was
stationed at a captured base in Weimar just before the end of the war.
He was one of the first Americans to see Buchenwald when it was liberated,
and he witnessed a famous event: hundreds of civilians from Weimar were
rounded
up and brought to see the death camp. Born in Youngstown,
Ohio, Gabe joined the army in 1941 and worked as an aircraft mechanic.
He then went to flight school and was trained as a fighter pilot, sent to England,
and then to France after the Normandy invasion. His 406th Fighter Group
provided air support for the Third Army. After the war, he visited
Israel six times and developed a strong interest in Jewish history and culture.
He died in 1999, but his wife still lives in Riverside.
Abbé Raymond Vancourt
When Irene Kahn (Poll) left Mannheim for Lille, France at the age of thirteen, she had never heard of the priest Raymond Vancourt. But during the war he would save her life, along with those of her aunt, uncle and cousins, and a great many other Jews in occupied France. Vancourt, a professor at the University of Lille, was a highly respected scholar. Irene and other young Jews were hidden in his house, and only at the end of the war did she learn of his activities with the Resistance. In 1975 she documented his activities for the Israeli government, and as a result he and his cousin and housekeeper, Raymonde Lombard, were honored as "Righteous Gentiles."
Lille is a major industrial center in northern France. It was a prime target for the German army during the Blitzkrieg because of its factories and its strategic location, as well as its military installations. It has been a center for textile manufacture since the Middle Ages. The university was established in 1887. Allied air raids damaged the city severely in 1944.
Johanna Van Schagen
Johanna was born in Holland in 1915. She married
Cornelis Van Schagen in 1937 and gave birth to their first child, Johnny,
in September of 1938. When the Netherlands was occupied in 1940,
its Jews faced the same fate as those in Germany and other occupied countries.
Because of
Anna's conscience and through connections with the underground,
the Van Schagens began sheltering Jewish refugees. The first, a woman
named Susan, ultimately chose to leave in an attempt to join her husband in
England. Though the Van Schagens successfully hid her and protected her
even through a serious illness, they learned later that she did not survive.
Immediately after Susan left, another woman named Meta arrived. It was
during her time with the family that Johanna gave birth to her second child
Nell. Meta later moved to another house to help out because the wife was
ill. Meta survived the war.
Two more women, a niece and her aunt, came next.
They were sheltered by the Van Schagens until the end of the war.
They too, survived. In all, the Van Schagens sheltered four total
strangers during the years of 1942 to 1944. Anna and Cornelis had
three more children, all sons, and emigrated to America, settling first
in Dayton and then Vandalia. Anna owned and operated a day care center
which still bears her name. Cornelis died in 1977. In 1992, Anna
was honored by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations".
Germany invaded the Netherlands in the spring of 1940, part of the larger Blitzkrieg that overran western Europe that year. The Dutch government surrendered quickly to avoid reprisals and destruction, and the Queen fled to London. During nearly five years of occupation, the Dutch people suffered many hardships but most did not collaborate, and many worked actively against the Nazis through the Underground. The Netherlands was liberated in the fall of 1944. About 106,000 Dutch Jews, or three-quarters of the Jewish population, died in the Holocaust.
Felix Weil
A native of Frankfurt-am-Main, Felix attended the prestigious 'Philanthropin' school. After Kristallnacht many Jewish families sent their children out of Germany via the Kindertransport to escape the coming catastrophe. At the age of eleven he found himself in England, still not realizing that he would never see his family again. In 1941, his parents and sister were sent to the Lodz ghetto in Poland, and his father died there. His mother and sister died later in concentration camps. In 1945, an aunt and uncle brought him to the United States, but he was drafted and sent back to Germany to serve with the occupation forces. He graduated from Kent State University and has lived in Dayton since 1950. He is now retired from the art business. He and his wife Frances have two children and a grandchild.
Frankfurt, one of
the largest cities in Germany, dates back to Roman times (it was the “ford of
the Franks”). The medieval town grew up in the twelfth century around
an imperial castle. The Holy Roman emperors were usually elected and crowned
there, and it was a center of the Lutheran Reformation. In the Napoleonic
era, Frankfurt was the capital
of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the first national German
assembly was held there in 1848. After the unification of Germany in 1870
it grew into a major industrial center. It was damaged heavily in World
War II and afterwards was the headquarters of the American occupation forces.
Today it is a global financial center and the site of one of the world's busiest
airports. Jews have lived in Frankfurt since the early Middle Ages, and
before the war they were very numerous and active in the city's cultural, educational
and business life.
Murray Weisman
Murray Weisman was born in Lodz, Poland in 1930.
At the age of nine, on his way to school, he was snatched off the streets
by Nazi troops and taken with a truckload of men to a labor camp.
He never saw his family again but later learned that most had died at Chelmno
after deportation
from the Lodz Ghetto. Murray himself is a veteran of no
less than seven camps, including Auschwitz, where he escaped death by pretending
to be older than he really was. He worked on road construction and as
a carpenter. He was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 and is one of the
youngest to have survived such a long imprisonment in the camps. After
liberation he went to France under the auspices of the French Government in
cooperation with the Jewish Family Service in Paris, the "OSE". In 1950
he emigrated to the United States. He attended the University of Minnesota
and Ohio State, where he obtained a BA, MSW and a JD. He was Executive
Director of the Montgomery County Mental Health program and subsequently
was a Legal Counsel for the U.S. Air Force. He recently moved to Florida with
his wife Marianne. They are the parents of three children.
The Lodz Ghetto was one of the largest Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Europe (205,000 Jewish inhabitants before the war). Lodz is in northern Poland, and at times has been under Russian or Lithuanian control. The ethnic mix is very diverse. The German occupation forces established the ghetto as a vast prison in 1940, herding into it thousands of Jews from all over northern Poland and later from western Europe. During the war years it was a source of slave labor. An unrecorded number of Jews were killed there or died of disease or starvation.
Henry Wyrobnik
The man pictured in the
exhibit with a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm is Henry
Wyrobnik. Henry was born in Lodz, Poland. He, his parents, siblings
and many other family members were put into the Lodz Ghetto by the Nazis
until August of 1944, when they were sent to Auschwitz. As the Allied
armies approached, he and thousands of others were taken on a Death
March beginning on January 15, 1945. They were given only small amounts
of bread. They marched for two weeks, day and night. If someone lagged
behind or walked out of line, they were shot immediately by the German
soldiers. They were put on open coal trains, other cars were hooked
on, and they spent two more weeks on the train. They had nothing
to eat but snow.
In Czechoslovakia,
people threw food to the trains as they went through the countryside,
but Czech people were shot by the SS if they were caught throwing
food. One hundred and eight people were on Henry's train, "packed
like sardines," and at the end only 35 remained alive. The train
finally took them to Mauthausen. There they were forced to bury bodies
in mass graves. In Mauthausen, they had no clothes, no food, and
were housed in crowded barracks. At the end of three or four weeks,
they were sent to Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen.
At the end, Henry says,
they "spent three weeks without water to drink, living in woods with
mud so deep if you stepped into it, you would sink in." Many
people from other countries were also imprisoned there.
On May 5, 1945,
Gunskirchen was liberated and Henry was freed and eventually sent
to a hospital to recuperate. He had lost his whole family, including
parents, one brother and two sisters. Henry met his wife, Dora, also
a survivor, in a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp at Feldafing, Germany.
They came to the United States in 1949 and he worked for Shillito’s in
Cincinnati. Later he owned his own business and came to Dayton, where
he now makes his home. The Wyrobniks have three children and seven
grandsons.
Stacia Zyznomyrsky
Born in the Ukrainian town of Kalynew, Stasia says she spent the war years motivated primarily by two emotions: love and fear. Her non-Jewish family hid her best friend, Helen Bittner, in the attic of their house when the Germans occupied the region. Stasia and her sister lived a 'normal' life, going to school and playing with friends, but when at home they shared in the responsibility of caring for their secret guest. Always the family lived in fear of discovery. In 1944, as the front line of battle approached their village, the anti-Communist Zyznomyrskys fled to Poland. Helen was left behind with falsified documents identifying her as the niece of Stasia's father. After the war, under the War Orphans Relief Act, Stasia was able to come to the United States. In 1991 Stasia found Helen again. Her parents and brother had died in the Holocaust, but Helen had married and come to the United States via Israel. She now lives in Florida and has a family of her own.
The Ukraine, now
an independent republic, was one of the fifteen Soviet Republics
within the USSR and was part of Russia since ancient times. The Ukrainians are,
however, a distinct people with their own language and have not always been
friendly toward Moscow. Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941 drove directly
across this region, aiming for the oil fields near the Caspian Sea and for industrial
centers like Stalingrad. Soviet resistance was fierce, all the more so
because many Ukrainians sympathized with the Nazis and might have tried to help
the invaders. Some of the bloodiest and most destructive battles of World
War II were fought
in Stasia's 'back yard.' Nine hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews were exterminated
in the Holocaust.
American Airmen in the Holocaust
As Allied air forces took control of the skies over Europe in the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler ordered the immediate execution of Allied flyers accused of committing certain acts. Branded as a “Terrorflieger” (“terrorist flyer’), the unfortunate airman was not given a trial. However, the German Foreign Office expressed concern about shooting prisoners of war, and suggested that enemy airmen suspected of such offenses not be given the legal status of POWs. Following this advice, the Gestapo and Security Police sent 168 captured Allied airmen (including 82 Americans) to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. These airmen had been shot down over France and turned over to the Gestapo and secret police by traitors in the French Resistance.
Arriving at Buchenwald on August 20, 1944, these men received
the same horrible treatment as other inmates. After sleeping outdoors
for the first three weeks, the 168 airmen were moved into an overcrowded, filthy
150' by 30' hut along with another 757 inmates - including about 350 Gypsy boys
aged eight to fourteen. Most of the boys were soon removed (probably executed)
to make room for the Allied POWs, but they still slept five men to a bunk.
With medical care essentially nonexistent, the injured and sick airmen suffered
immensely. On the night of October 18/19, 1944, 156 of the 168 were transported
from Buchenwald and arrived at Stalag Luft III on October 22. Earlier
that year, the Gestapo had murdered fifty Allied POWs who had escaped from this
same Stalag. Too sick to travel, twelve of the POWs remained at Buchenwald.
Two of them died, including an American who contracted pneumonia. The
remaining ten were later transported to POW camps.
In 1999, the German government paid 34.5 million Deutschemarks in reparations to various survivors of the Holocaust who were United States citizens, both civilian and military, interned in concentration camps during World War II. American POWs who had been at Buchenwald were among those receiving reparation payments.
Sergeant Alvin L. Abrams (Survivor)
Alvin L. Abrams was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1924.
He entered the U.S. Army at the age of eighteen in early 1943 abd participated
in the Normandy landings with the 229th Field Artillery Battalion, 28th Infantry
'Keystone' Division. He was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and
was transited first to the STALAG 9B prisoner of war camp. In early February
1945 Sergeant Abrams, along with 300 other Jewish prisoners of war, was segregated
and sent to Berga-am-Elster, a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
There he was part of a forced-labor group along with prisoners from other camps,
digging tunnels by hand through mountain rock for underground factories.
He was liberated in late April 1945 and after many months of recovery, was discharged
from military service. He founded a successful construction business in
New Jersey, and is still active in the company today.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hastin (Survivor)
Lieutenant Colonel Hastin was born on Lopez Island, north of
Seattle. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in August 1941. After
pilot school, he was assigned to the 361st Fighter Group, 374th Fighter Squadron.
While on his sixty-ninth mission, he was shot down and bailed out of his P-51
over France. He was helped by French farmers who gave him food, clothing
and shelter. Making his way to Paris, he believed that he was on his way
to freedom. He and another American were assisted by a French couple who
had them pose as Belgian workers on the way to a new job. But German troops
apprehended them at a roadblock. They were taken to a prison camp, and
then transported by boxcar to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Hastin
was liberated in April 1945 and discharged from military service. He entered
the heating and ventilation business in Washington state, and retired in 1986.
THE “PEOPLE OF PREJUDICE AND MEMORY” BOOKLET HAS BEEN DEVELOPED BY THE HOLOCAUST EDUCATION COMMITTEE OF THE JEWISH FEDERATION OF GREATER DAYTON
EDITORS: Dr Thomas Martin and Renate Frydman
LAYOUT: Linda Nisenbaum
PROOFREADER: Shirley Flacks
PRINTED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF THE DAYTON FOUNDATION AND THE
HOLOCAUST EDUCATION FUND OF THE JEWISH FOUNDATION OF GREATER DAYTON