Home Blog

Alice Muller memoir – My Name is Alice | Holocaust in Czechoslovakia

My Name is Alice is a first-person Alice Muller memoir, an indomitable courageous spirit, told by her as she views things in the voice of her age at the time of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia.

Alice Muller Memoir

My Name is Alice Paperback –

Chapters One and Two along with photos of Alice Muller

by Alice Muller (Author), Dr. Tzipporah Bat-Ami (Author)

Get “My Name is Alice” bookSee on Amazon

Alice will move you, make you want to finish the book in one reading. You will learn about places and times no longer here, about heroism, about acts of kindness remembered for three quarters of a century and now passed on to you, with her diagrams of places and streets, and also a lesson plan for tolerance.

Timelines included for those who want to understand the context. The book is best read and shared with family members, including those who were alive at or near that time.

We recommend parental guidance for younger children. You will treasure this keepsake, its cheerful inside and out despite the horrors that Alice endures.

The book is for all people of all faiths. Descriptions of Jewish customs are all explained, and any Yiddish or Hebrew words are translated.

This book is easy to read because of large print and cream pages, and it is easy to read because you will be captured by Alice’s voice. We hope you will find it moving and life altering. And a little child shall lead them!

Holocaust in Czechoslovakia Book By Survivor

Memories of My Childhood in the Holocaust by Judith Jagermann | Theresienstadt ghetto

Alice Muller Memoir | My Name is Alice
Alice Muller – My Name is Alice Cover photo enhanced.

Alice Muller Memoir –

Forward to My Name is Alice

It is my privilege to comment on this history of a young child in the Holocaust. This work portrays, through early memories in the town of Michalovce, what life was like for Jews in pre-war Slovakia.

It provides factual information on the Slovakian Holocaust by first person testimony, which makes this book a critical historic document at a time when such testimony is harder to obtain.

This work is an inspirational narrative of one little girl who survived against all odds; though 83 percent of the Jewish citizens of Slovakia were murdered, 95 percent of children under fourteen were annihilated.

But Alice’s book also serves to illustrate the effects of the Holocaust on its child survivors.

It illustrates the effect of an early childhood perspective on life that remains to inform an entire lifetime. It documents the massive trauma at early developmental stages that can
only be mastered by being passed to each successive generation in retelling, naming, and in testimony and here, in this publication.

Loss of parental figures can never be fully resolved because throughout much of their lives, children survivors last saw their parents alive and well and did not know the actual mechanisms of mass killing of the Third Reich, so it is easy to understand why such survivors spent decades still hoping for their parents’ return.

Child survivors and their new families wait in limbo, and time becomes malleable, where once the return of these loved ones happens, childhood life can magically restart as if there was no catastrophic interruption.

Once the knowledge of the likely mechanism of murder has been received, there is no gravesite to visit and no headstone to make, just missing ones, or unidentified parts in mass graves, or tons of ash.

The knowledge that human beings can be branded as animals, and that their parts can be used in manufacture, set a new low for humanity, and a sense of peril for their safety imbues such survivors’ beliefs.

What we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder is nearly universal among Holocaust survivors because of the degree of trauma and the bizarre nature of the trauma.

Though children may be resilient to a greater extent, early malnutrition and loss of parental figures increase the degree of these symptoms. So, such children in adult life carry fear of low flying planes, fear of registration in any form, fear of showers in case they are gas, and all these fears are adaptive in that they serve as protection.

However, we can understand that the vigilance that once was adaptive can interfere in peacetime with adaptation to ‘normal’ life.

What you will also see here is the tremendous courage and strength such children have displayed in youth, becoming adults as children. And it also has given survivors an edge on calamities, knowing how to adapt, paying attention to, and warning others of, pending calamities, as has been seen with COVID when many just chose instead to use the defense of denial.

Because of the lack of early milestones of educational achievement, many survivors feel insecure about themselves, yet they mastered what most of us in America could not:

  • they left their previous homes and communities, often without any finances, possessions, and
  • navigated paperwork and interviews,
  • traveled by ship to new countries they have blessed with lawful contributions to their new homelands,
  • where they learned new languages and new cultures and studied to become proud and thankful citizens.

In schema compensatory action, they often became leaders of their fields, or they raised homes and gave children the names of the murdered to renew life.

And their progeny uniquely went into fields of service in overwhelming majority, to try to heal the horror. Many became physicians, many entered the mental health field, many worked with survivors and dedicated their lives to advocacy for survivors.

So it appears that despite lack of formalities of education, these survivors managed some level of success despite inner trauma.

As survivors age, disabilities and limitations recreate the sense of helplessness of the Holocaust, and cause fear because the need to be on guard is so valued for survival.

Limited social access by disability or by pandemic further enhances the loneliness of having an experience that with Gods help, few will ever be able to comprehend.

To that end, Alice has written down this Holocaust memoir in the hope that her experiences will kindle a desire for more knowledge of what happened to so many millions, and for our youth to be able to connect to what she experienced with all the details that are provided by Alice in this remarkable work.

Her book is divided into sections, and early chapters can be read to a four-year-old. It is designed as something that can be read intergenerationally, and to advance in the book as development proceeds.

Of course, the irony is that Alice at age six had no way to opt out of the current events, of seeing teachers who wore insignia of those people who wished to kill her. And of course, the later sections are suitable for adults, but you will be able to hear Alice’s voice as she goes through all of this as a child.

It has been an honor to help bring this testimony to the written page and we hope it will help increase understanding among peoples and make Never Again a reality.

Dr Tzipporah Bat-Ami – 2023
Copyrighted Material 2024

 

Alice Muller Memoir – Beginners (Chapter One)

My name is Alice. Well, I guess you already know that from the title! But this is the story of how I got my name, and who I became once I had it.

I was born on a summer’s day a long time ago. The year was 1932. I was born in a country 4000 miles away, on a continent called Europe.

Its name was Czechoslovakia. It had a different language and customs from us. I was born in a town called Michalovce, which has a guttural sound in the first c, and the second c is pronounced like the sound tse in tse-tse fly.

It is in the eastern part of the country, and you can see my town circled in red in the map on the next page. I am also adding a postcard picture of the railroad station. It’s very pretty, but it will seem different later.

My Name is Alice | Alice Muller Memoir
Michalovce circled in Red on the Map of Czechoslovakia 1933

In those days, babies were often born at home, so I was born at 24 Slobodna Ulice. That means 24 Liberty Street. And of course, there was sunshine when I was born!

My father was named Herman Muller, and I called him Opu. My mother was named Esther Klein Muller, and I called her Onyu. I had an older brother Norbert, and I called him Norbert.

My Name is Alice | Alice Muller Memoir

Pictures of me and my family. From left to right, are my mother, father, my brother Norbert, and me.

So just like there are rules here, there were rules in my country, but it was not the same.

In my country, Jews were not permitted to carry names in the Bible, so when my father rushed to register my birth and said I was to be called Rachel, the town clerk said that was not allowed, and he decided that my name should be Rosalie because it started with the same letter, and filled out the documents with that name.

When my father came home to tell my mother that my name was now Rosalie, she said in no way was her baby going to be called Rosalie.

She said that Alica, pronounced with a soft c, was a popular stylish name, and that would be my name, though my Hebrew name remained Rachel, pronounced with a guttural c. and just so you know, my brother had a Hebrew name too, Nachum, and my father’s Hebrew name was Tzvi, or Herschel and my mother’s Hebrew name was Esther.

We were a wonderful family living in a Jewish home.

My Name is Alice | Alice Muller Memoir
Michalovce train station SOURCE: https://www.dolnyzemplin.sk/

CHAPTER TWO

Alice Muller Memoir – My Name is Alice

First, I would like to tell you how my home looked from the outside.

When my parents first got married in 1930, and moved to Michalovce, they moved into a large apartment in the fancier section of the ell of 24 Slobodna Ulice that faced the Slobodna street.

There was a fence separating the two sections, and at that time, my parents worked in a small tavern adjacent to their apartment.

After my brother was born in 1931, my mother was unable to continue working in the tavern due to child care, so they moved to a smaller apartment to save money.

This was where I was born, but because my mother was known far and wide as a beauty, and my father was so in love with her, he schlepped the vanity mirror he had bought her to the new apartment so she could adorn herself as befits a woman with such regal bearing!

Because of the ell structure, our new apartment faced the courtyard, which you will see later made all the difference in the world to us. My apartment was on the first floor above a short stoop and I could play in the grass when I came outside.

My neighbors adjacent to us were also a Jewish family, and they also had kids.

There was no apartment above us. The only time I ever saw the original apartment where my parents first resided, was when my mother needed a seamstress, and I went to bring clothes to tailor to the woman living there. More on her later.

I drew you a diagram so you could see the layout, on the next page. I also have an aerial view of a similar space in more modern times, so you can appreciate the layout that way too.” (Drawing not available for this free excerpt.

END ALICE MULLER MEMOIR – MY NAME IS ALICE EXCERPT

All materials, words, and photos from:

Get “My Name is Alice” bookSee on Amazon

My Name is Alice | Alice Muller Memoir

My Name is Alice Copyright 2024 Alice Muller and Dr. Tzipporah Bat-Ami

Forget Adam Weinberger

“A moving and powerful portrait of a Polish Jew who returned from the camps disconsolate and mute, Forget Adam Weinberger is an unforgettable novel”  —La Libre Belgique

A story that explores the difficulty of speaking about the Holocaust.

First there is Adam Weinberger’s long childhood, in a world that has no idea yet what is in store for it. The childhood of a lover of illusions, who dreams of changing the world and of freeing his family from the burden of a tradition that he finds unbearable.Forget Adam Weinberger

The adolescence of a young boy who is unable to express his love for Esther, his admiration for his uncle, his tenderness toward his mother. The helplessness of a young man who sees that dreams and fiction are unable to halt the destruction of this world and of its inhabitants.

Later there are fragments of narrations, the broken mirror that, through more or less well-meaning intermediaries, reflects the flight of this child who has become a man, who no longer believes in dreams, who no longer believes in words -who has taken refuge in gestures, those of his profession, medicine, and those of his great passion, the construction of ships in bottles.

And who flees words and other people to the point of losing his identity. Between the two is there, of which one dares not speak.

And then, in the end, after forgetting, at the end of all the flights, there is a return of childhood from beyond death, the single truth of fiction – of the narration of life.

PART I

 

BEFORE

 

ADAM

Forget Adam Weinberger
Midjourney AI Image inspired by Forget Adam Weinberger

Once I was a child. At least I think so, which in itself is not such a bad thing, since the past, regardless of what people say, is unverifiable. I already had the same name, and the awkward features were taking shape that would later become my adult face,  which today is in a state of decomposition.

I shared my name, like it or not, with the beings who formed the fairly large entity of a family, my family, whom I appreciated in different ways.

Closest to me was my sister Rachel, seven years older than I.  As soon as I was old enough to grasp what was happening and what people around me were saying, I understood that she was perpetually preoccupied by the search for a husband: before meeting one because she feared never finding one, and, once she did, because he spent all his time in the town cafés, sometimes for days on end. Rachel … you weren’t a great beauty, but you were my sister, and I would have preferred another brother-in-law instead of that idle Moishe—belated regrets, you’ll excuse me. In any case, I did what I could …

Along with Rachel and me, the Weinberger family had two other heirs, both male. I never had much to say to Samuel, five years my senior. He was devoted body and soul—especially body—to sports.

When he wasn’t kayaking on the river, he was running, wrestling—anything to work up a sweat and impose his tyranny over me.

The only words I spoke to him, to the despair of my parents, were those of pleading, when he caught me in his iron grip, and curses when I felt I was at a safe distance—often followed by pleading when I had underestimated the distance.

Avner was different. Although ten years older than I, he was kind to me, at least when he noticed my presence. He was “our” rabbi, who, to maintain this distinction, spent all his days immersed in books or prayers.

Samuel, though younger, had quickly exceeded him in size—horizontally and vertically—but he never dared lay a hand on him. To each his privileges: Samuel didn’t hit Avner, but Avner spoke to him even less than he did to me.

So, to surround me with the affection I needed, I had a brother with a mind lost in visions, who tried to instill wisdom in me; another who persecuted me for my own physical well-being; and a sister who either comforted or cared for me, all the time whining about her hypothetical or phantom husband, depending on the time period.

Ruling over us all were my parents, the inseparable couple, Sarah and Avram Weinberger—inseparable because there is nothing like time to twist and tighten the ties that bind.

As our family name indicates, my father’s father was a Hungarian wine merchant like his ancestors before him. But my own father had broken with tradition, since only one brother was needed to carry on the family business and since no one else was there to take up his father-in-law’s lumber company.

Avram Weinberger was a reasonably successful businessman but a worried father. He knew that his elder son wouldn’t take up the trade, but he couldn’t complain because Avner had devoted himself instead to the Eternal One, blessed be His name, and no one was ever against having a rabbi in the family.

However, he had doubts about Samuel’s future. Since he was stronger and more outspoken than most boys his age—I can bear witness to this from having been on the receiving end of his outspokenness more often than I deserved—what adventure wouldn’t tempt him?

My father feared most of all that Samuel might frequent the young Zionists, since he was so well endowed with the physical and mental qualities they required.

As for me … but let’s not go into my father’s suffering just yet.

At this point in the story, the rules of the genre require me to speak of the other half of the parental couple. My mother.

She was … what should I say, other than that she was my mother and everything that follows naturally from that? Beautiful, of course.

She took care of the house and her children. She busied herself all week but even more on Friday, in preparation for Shabbat, our day of rest.

I often watched her work so hard that I began to doubt the true holiness of this day. There’s something rotten in this earthly realm that violates the spirit of the Commandments and prevents people from observing them perfectly unless money is involved— which is not really orthodox.

Even if my father’s income was enough to support a woman and four children—one of them a sports lover—it didn’t allow him to hire someone to help my mother. My parents should have had one less child, but since I was the youngest, I preferred not to think about this solution.

Rachel helped my mother, but she sighed constantly and wasn’t all that useful. As for me, I tried sometimes, but, over and above the Commandments, there is Tradition, and I was a man.

For that matter, during childhood, which often lasts a long time, one doesn’t have that much concern for other people, and it’s only later that one feels remorse.

My father and mother, then, constituted what is called a couple.  The reality of the situation depends on the meaning one gives this word.

They lived and slept together, had married because they were supposed to, and for the same reason had procreated—there was no required number of offspring as long as it was large.

Maybe you’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof? I know fools with university degrees today who assert that that kind of situation couldn’t have existed because they were born in the age of Coca Cola and the Apollo spacecraft.

I had fewer sisters than Tevye had daughters, my father wasn’t a Rothschild and sang off key, but my parents spoke to each other even less than Tevye and Golde.

Certain questions never even entered their minds—too bad for us and for the rest of the world, because it wouldn’t have hurt anyone if they did. There are silences that kill. I say so even if it’s a cliché, because when you know the victim, nothing is a cliché.

When I consider the sum total of the fatigue, the problems, the pain that four children represented for my mother, right from the moment of their conception, I can’t understand how anyone can seriously claim that children are a blessing.

Maybe we brought her a few joys—in our sleep or when we weren’t around—and she had managed to avoid having to live alone, alone with a husband who had nothing to say to her and didn’t even hide that fact with small talk, which sometimes allows others to believe that happiness can exist (although that would require some imagination …).

Forget Adam Weinberger
Midjourney AI Image inspired by the book Forget Adam Weinberger

As for yours truly, he was born smack in the middle of a war, in the month of June. The fact that he was the youngest didn’t prevent his parents from naming him Adam.

It was as if, lacking any inspiration, they had returned to Biblical sources in search of a name and had stopped fairly quickly, although without having to resort to calling him Tovu v’Bohu or Bereshit, which would be difficult names to have to carry around.

I like my name. It smells of the earth, even if Poland is no paradise.

Oh yes, I forgot to tell you: as if life wasn’t difficult enough, we lived in a small, drab Polish village inhabited one-third by Jews and two-thirds by tranquil, dull anti-Semites, able to suppress their sentiments toward their neighbors of my religion out of Christian charity and good business sense.

I’m exaggerating—they weren’t all anti-Semitic. We even had Christian friends. I’m saying that so you’re aware in advance …

I don’t think I was a difficult child—I caught up later, though—and I was a good student.  My relative calm was closely related to a feeling of profound, general indifference for the universe around me, which should have interested me more.

I didn’t confide in my family or seek their confidences. When my sister started to moan, I fled—unless she was busy caring for me.

I had no friends and a total lack of interest in my religion, which would have worried my mother if she had had the time to think about it and only slightly vexed my father.

If God exists, I said to him with the mature wisdom of a ten-year-old, He doesn’t need me to go to the synagogue to pray to Him.

Moreover, I added, I found most of the Ten Commandments inappropriate and, what’s more, fairly useless. The others, like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not steal,” were so self-evident that it seemed pointless to connect them to any single religion.

I have always been naïve, and I believed for a long time that any person with a minimum of common sense would follow the axiom that one should do unto others as one would want others to do unto him.

I should point out again that I lived in an environment that was rather unusual in Polish Jewish society between the two World Wars.

My father was neither rich nor poor, at least before 1935, and paid little attention to religion. I don’t think he was leaning toward assimilation, though. He was not unhappy that one of his sons wanted to become a rabbi, and he no doubt took this fact as an embrace of Judaism sufficient to reassure his family.

No more was necessary. As for Avner, there were no choices and no worries:  first heder, then yeshiva.  But my father was not eager for his other two sons to follow this path.

He found the classrooms squalid and the teachers too violent. He had no doubt kept in his heart the memory of some unjust punishment he had received, and he wasn’t the type to find relief from his own unhappiness in imposing it on others.

But where should he send Samuel and me? The schools financed and run by the Bund seemed too leftist to him.  Communism represented a greater threat to him than Zionism.

The Tarbut schools were a direct extension of the latter. The Agudath Israel schools were too orthodox, and private schools cost an arm and a leg.

That’s why he sent us both to a free Polish public school, where classes were held only in the morning. In the afternoon, Avner was supposed to inculcate in us the values necessary to make us good Jews, which he did in as perfunctory manner as possible, since he was too absorbed in working for his own future.

This choice brought criticism upon my father. Not only was he offering his children up for conversion, but, even worse, he hadn’t even enrolled them in a Jewish school for the afternoon.

He held fast to his position for a long time, because he didn’t have a lot of time to spend with us, because it was the most economical solution, and because, as I mentioned, he was quite liberal. I admit that I never had any reason to complain about his decision.

Nor about refusing to have any friends, since I lived in a milieu where no one would be tempted to have a relationship with a Jew anyway.

Furthermore, these free afternoons were a blessing. Lost in reverie or just lazy, I read a lot. Weather permitting, I took off deep into the woods with a book and didn’t return until nightfall.

Samuel also took advantage of this freedom, but in a different way. He spent all his time involved in sports. Later he used it to perfect his knowledge of Zionism.  Nevertheless, as you will see, I wasn’t able to enjoy this freedom for long.

So, I was a lonely, dreamy child who spent his spare time wandering through the beech trees along the river—scenery so typical of Poland.

When I heard the particular cries upstream that announced that my brother Samuel was about to burst into view with his friends, paddling like a bunch of maniacs in small boats that the rushing water seemed to want to get rid of by forcing them toward the river bank, I hid behind a barrel and let them pass.

If I had few things in common with my brother, I had even fewer with his friends. I shared my father’s dislike of the Zionists—which most of them were—but for different reasons.

I didn’t take satisfaction in the image of the Jew as martyr, fearful and weak, always afraid of some pogrom. I was a child, and above all I was myself.

I frequented a few non-Jews, the occasional classmate, and I wasn’t religious.  Therefore I saw no reason to flaunt my Judaism, which would only end up causing me problems.

I wanted to continue living peacefully where I was, because moving somewhere else seemed to me to be the worst possible curse. From my point of view, the Zionist adventure and the call for a Jewish state in Palestine—with the requirement to go live there and fight—seemed like implausible and absurd aspirations.

Maybe a Jewish state in Poland … but what would we do with the Poles? I was afraid of the Zionists, because I imagined our government demanding that all Jews living comfortably in the Diaspora should emigrate to the desert, with every other nation following their example to get rid of us once and for all.

Therefore, since I couldn’t climb in the hierarchy of the movement, I must confess that as soon as I was old enough, I used my own pitiful means to attempt to sabotage my brother’s Palestine plans.

Without meaning to, I ended up in this way being a considerable support to my father, which had the unpleasant effect of depriving me of the joys of success and of everyone-for-himself.

Not to mention that this didn’t help make me more likable in my brother’s eyes, even if he wasn’t always aware of my activities and of my responsibility for his setbacks. I have to say that, even if I had good reasons to resent Samuel, he had no lack of detractors for his involvement in the Zionist movement.

My father was against it in principle and because he thought you had to be crazy to go live in a country filled with Brits and Arabs—worse than the Christian Poles, whom at least we were familiar with—and start over from square one.

The fact that Jews had been forbidden for centuries from owning land didn’t help to develop much of a taste for the joys of agriculture in him:

“So, Shmuel” (he thought this Hebrew name was endearing), can you imagine yourself behind a plow?!”

And he tapped his forehead while making an “oy” of consternation.

My mother, too, was against the idea in principle but also because of tradition: her husband was opposed to it, and it was the custom for a Jewish mother to do everything possible to keep her sons close to her.

As for Rachel, she didn’t care, at first because Zionism wouldn’t provide her with a husband and, once she was married, because her husband had lots of faults, but not that one.

Avner, who never thought about anything but the Torah and the Talmud, was violently opposed for religious reasons that I found completely incomprehensible, and that today seem tragic and preposterous: it wasn’t right to found a Jewish state until the coming of the Messiah.

The Messiah didn’t come, but Hitler did in His place, and you have to admit that, in spite of my antipathy toward Zionism, if it had gained steam earlier, the Nazis would have had to go farther to find us, and we would have given them a proper welcome.

But let’s not be unrealistic: even “if”, I can assure you that 80 percent of the Jews would have stayed in Europe for fear of investing their future and their past in such a ridiculous plan. And it’s not by means of “ifs” that we could have beaten the Germans.

I also had measles when I was three, and other normal childhood diseases—normal but painful when you’re the victim—and the Messiah never came out of his hiding place to save me.  So?

The Messiah—now there’s a story … On our street lived a boy named Moishe, whose father was very rich—as a joke we called him Pharaoh, because of his son—and who had the incredible good fortune to take a trip to Rome to visit distant cousins.

Everyone in the community was talking about it: imagine, a Jew from our town in the city of the Pope! And there was a legend that claimed that the Messiah was waiting at the gates of Rome.

Before Moishe left—at that time the question interested me because of all the others, especially my rabbi brother’s—I had asked him to do a discreet investigation.

At his return, I was triumphant: I had been right. The Messiah wasn’t there. I told Avner that he could eliminate one place from his research—I didn’t say it maliciously but rather to help him and save him time.

But he just ran his hand through my hair with a very sad or very religious look, according to your point of view, telling me that Moishe didn’t have good eyes.

I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but I believed the Messianic legends even less.

Anyway, I’m digressing. I introduced you to my family. I’ve set the scene, as they say, because one must respect the reader and never suppose that he’s clever enough to understand everything on his own.

However, I’m far from having mentioned the important things.

 

RACHEL

Forget Adam Weinberger
Midjourney AI Image inspired by Rachel in Forget Adam Weinberger

To be sure, there is still a lot to say about the members of my family and about my childhood, a period that it’s a pleasure to speak of since one knows for sure that he can’t relive it.

I grew, since I couldn’t do otherwise, and everyone around me got older. Avner was more and more the rabbi—he finally became one altogether—and Samuel confirmed our father’s fears by becoming more and more of a Zionist.

Rachel, searching endlessly for a husband, despaired more and more of ever finding one.

As for my parents, they didn’t work more—that wouldn’t have been possible—but they seemed more and more tired. My father even began to consider Shabbat a blessing, and my mother exhausted herself more and more to observe the day when even Adonai, blessed be He, rests.

If He knew how much my mother did to prepare for this day of rest, I’m sure He would have provided us with two of them. But he didn’t know or didn’t want another day, and now He wouldn’t accept that His Jews be just the slightest bit Christian one day a week.

Too bad, because Sunday is a great idea, right after Shabbat. Luckily for those born after my mother, the British invented the weekend, without asking Him His opinion—but my mother didn’t know anything about the British.

And besides, she would have probably exhausted herself twice as much.

So time passed, and not only in the glorious Polish Third Republic.  But when it doesn’t bring any big changes, besides a few gray hairs at your parents’ temples, you can treat it lightly, even with almost total indifference.

I grew stronger and could escape more easily when Samuel chased me. Avner’s lectures began to get on my nerves, but I still listened to him to make him happy, and I even let Samuel beat me up once in a while so that he didn’t lose confidence in himself.

I was still comforted by my sister, but her tears grew more abundant. I think she must have fallen in love with a young Jew who was passing through. Of course, they never were able to speak to each other, and he left ignorant of the passion that he had ignited—or rather incarnated—for a few weeks.

My parents were also worried that Rachel wouldn’t find a husband. I was approaching my bar mitzvah, and she was almost twenty: two pressing concerns for Jewish parents.

I would have liked to help them by telling them that as far as I was concerned, I could have easily done without this ceremony, but I don’t think that would have given them any solace.

And what right did I have anyway to deprive my family of a celebration? So they sent me to the rabbi, and Avner spent more time teaching me.

As for my sister, my father finally resolved to ask for help from a matchmaker, to the great displeasure of my mother, who knew better than anyone else the results one could expect from such a move.

Although the matchmaker had been creeping around our house for several years and was furious at us for not taking advantage of her services, she got strangely friendly, took her time, and ended up presenting us with what was left at the bottom of the barrel.

When she arrived, I would hide behind the door to spy on her, as she triumphantly proposed an aged alcoholic or some neurotic widower. Rachel found good reasons to despair, as did my parents.

Fearing that the quality of her care for me would decline, or even that I’d end up in turn having to take care of her, I decided to hunt for a brother-in-law myself.

Where could I hope to dig up this rare phenomenon when I was barely twelve years old and the entire male Jewish population had already been approached, or almost?

And there was my mother’s example, which gave me pause. I refused to allow Rachel to ruin her health preparing for Shabbat and appreciated less and less the lethargy that fell over our community every weekend while I wanted to get out and have a good time.

Even Samuel, whose main characteristic was the inability to sit still—even less to reflect on anything—sacrificed himself to the laws of Shabbat. What could I do to help Rachel escape this curse?

I saw only one solution and resolved to befriend the first classmate who had a brother old enough to marry. A goyish classmate, of course. It was the only way to escape the drudgery of preparing for Shabbat and be able to enjoy Sundays.

You need to understand what a sacrifice this represented for me at that time. Not because of frequenting non-Jews (I already explained about that) nor of turning over my sister body and soul to one of them, but to have to—even for a limited amount of time—conduct a friendship, with everything that involved!

A lot was at stake.

For a few days, I asked around discreetly. I was quickly able to choose three families that fulfilled the conditions of having two sons and being Christian. I had a wealth of choices, so to speak, and was already overjoyed: my sister had waited almost twenty years, and me? Two weeks …

The first family, the Majarskis, had a lot going for them. The father was rich—he owned a store and a house and had a servant so strong that he could have prepared Shabbat every day.

Their older son was twenty-five and didn’t seem to be thinking of marriage.  The problem was that, like all good Poles, they were very Catholic.  Every Sunday, the family marched off to church dressed to the nines—the mother several times a week.

What good would it do to change from one form of religious drudgery to another? Especially since, when I tried to enter into a conversation with the younger son, who was in my class, he turned his back to me with disdain, whispering that he didn’t associate with us.

I understood clearly whom he meant. I wasn’t going to put myself out to cultivate a brother-in-law who wouldn’t talk to his wife or his mother-in-law. As my parents’ case proved, it wasn’t necessary to look to a goyish family to match up a couple who didn’t speak to each other!

The second family gave me more hope. The von Statts were Germans who had been in Poland for three generations. If they were crazy enough to come live here, they could certainly consider marrying down.

Furthermore, they were Protestant, not Catholic.  That seemed to be an acceptable religious compromise. There would just have to be an arrangement to maintain the best parts of both traditions.

I was easily able to befriend Hans, a short, husky blond boy who spoke little. We were made to get along, since neither one of us liked to talk.

But, in order not to waste time or limit my options, I also decided to form a relationship with the third family I had selected, the Dobjinskis, completely atheist Poles—which isn’t common—and whose father was a tremendous drinker—which definitely is. Janek, their younger son, had the unfortunate flaw of being a chatterbox—so much so that at school no one went near him.

So it wasn’t hard for me to become his friend. The difficult part was to stay that way for the necessary amount of time.

I spent all my free time with either Hans or Janek. I was received equally well in both their homes, but I have to admit a clear preference for Hans because he was quiet and his family’s cook baked wonderful cakes.

Let’s not forget, though, that my real targets were not my friends: it was their brothers.

I liked Hans’s brother, Johann. He was the same age as Avner, but he wasn’t planning on becoming a pastor—which, for that matter, wouldn’t have thwarted my plans.

Janek’s brother, Pavel, was more like my brother Samuel: he was in constant motion and hardly spoke a word to me. All I needed now was an opportunity for my sister to meet them.

Strangely enough, it was simpler with Pavel. I noticed that he often came to get his brother when school was over. I had only to go home with a new whim: demand that my sister also come to school to wait for me.

Since she was often bored and annoyed my mother with her continual lamentations, my parents willingly gave in to my request.

From that day on, the last few minutes of class were very trying for me. I imagined Rachel and Pavel both waiting outside the gate. When the bell finally rang and we could leave, the first thing I did was look to see if I could distinguish them among those who had come to collect their little darlings.

After a while, I realized that this wasn’t going to be enough: they had the habit of waiting at opposite ends of the long iron fence, so they couldn’t see each other.

I had to act again. One afternoon I announced to Janek that I wanted to introduce him to my beautiful sister. I took her by the hand so she could shake hands with my friend.

And with his brother.  I said to her,

“Rachel, this is Janek, my friend, and his brother, Pavel.”

Then I explained that, since they both came to wait for us, Janek and me, they might as well meet each other. But I didn’t elicit wild enthusiasm, and Rachel dragged me away, barely saying hello.

She wasn’t really putting her all into this. How would she ever find a husband? On the way home I spoke about Janek but mostly about Pavel.

Since I knew so little about the latter, I had no trouble inventing all kinds of positive qualities for him. But Rachel was hardly listening to me, or at least she didn’t show she was.

I was so mad at her that I thought I’d drop the whole idea and return to my beloved solitude, which I had sacrificed for so long.  What was my poor sister hoping for?

Of course, she was far from being ugly, but she was even farther from being rich. And there’s something I haven’t mentioned so as not to make her situation sound even worse: she spent all her time, when she wasn’t crying, reading French novels, which, unfortunately for her, were translated into Polish or Yiddish, if that language means anything to you.

Obviously, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Balzac tried desperately to give her ideas and raise her hopes. It’s easy for a writer to promise happiness to his readers when he knows he doesn’t have to wipe away their tears.

Rachel was often seated on a bench alone, a book in her lap, eyes staring into space, dreaming about the happiness before her in paper and ink and waiting for those sweet romantic lies to become reality.

When my mother called her, she would stand up sighing, wondering where the handsome, rich young man who would love her passionately would appear from.

Before going inside, she would gaze one last time at the road and the horizon.

Often, rather than the longed-for lover, she would see the matchmaker spring up suddenly with her evil smile and loathsome suggestions.

Sometimes I thought that it was weakness on my father’s part to be so liberal that he wouldn’t marry his daughter against her will.  At this rate, if she didn’t abandon her reading and her Madame Bovary dreams, she would end up an old maid.

Getting a grip on herself to accept a husband wouldn’t make her unhappier than that.  Sometimes you have to do things to make others happy in spite of themselves. In any case, that was my plan, even if it was beginning to become a burden.

Fortunately, when I was leaving school the next day, I found Rachel and Pavel talking to each other. I jumped for joy, seeing myself already relieved of my responsibility.

On the way home, I spoke some more about Pavel. I was so happy, that I had no problem finding all kinds of new things in his favor, and it appeared to me that my sister was finally listening to me.

However, for the sake of caution (and because I liked their cook’s cakes), I kept up my friendship with Hans and Johann. And it was thanks to their mother that I had the opportunity to introduce Rachel to them.

This fine woman, who had taken a shine to me, had the idea of inviting me to spend a day in the country with her husband and children. I pretended to hesitate, arguing that my parents would never allow me to leave home for a whole day with people they didn’t know.

But there was perhaps a way: if my sister could join us …

As for Rachel, I didn’t have much trouble convincing her. A ride in a carriage, a picnic on the grass—she had read about that so often!  And since nothing in particular seemed to be going on between her and Pavel, we might as well play several cards at once …

It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday. Mr. von Statt had rented an old carriage drawn by two horses. My sister was overjoyed.

She had put on a simple, pretty dress that made a good impression. Mrs. von Statt knew how to win her over and asked her to sit beside her for the ride.

The women were seated opposite the three of us, while Mr. von Statt, transformed into a poet or a workman by the leisure of a Sunday excursion, held the reins.

I was delighted: it wasn’t only for Rachel that this outing was a first. I immediately decided that I preferred Johann to Pavel as a brother-in-law, and I felt satisfaction in thinking that my sister, even though she saw the latter every day, didn’t seem to have developed an undying passion for him.

The weather was glorious. Hans was as calm as usual, and Mrs. von Statt chatted happily with my sister, whom—miracle of miracles—Johann couldn’t stop looking at.

Rachel, completely absorbed in the conversation with her future mother-in-law, didn’t notice anything.  Of course, the day had barely begun …

Seeing how everything turned out, even today I don’t know whether I should congratulate myself for having offered my sister the opportunity of living for a whole day, plus a few more afterward, as if she were in a French novel.

Of course, such an experience must make the rest of one’s life seem sad and insipid, even after a very brief moment of happiness.

I don’t think my mother ever experienced even a tiny fraction of this joy—although she was the one who put the finishing touches on my efforts.

We stopped at the edge of a river in a patch of thick grass warmed by the sun. Everything was perfect. I was sure I wasn’t going to risk the sudden appearance of my brother Samuel and his friends in their boats: this river was too calm and too narrow.

It was made for peace and quiet, not for Samuel. We unfolded the tablecloth for our picnic. Rachel was trembling slightly and gave me a look every once in a while as if asking me to reassure her that she wasn’t dreaming.

Johann couldn’t keep his eyes off her, his parents were smiling, and his brother was laughing. I was in heaven.

I almost felt like taking an oath of unending friendship with Hans, sealed with a drop of blood.

It’s amazing how strong an illusion can be.

The lunch almost caused a few problems when Mrs. von Statt took out the sausages that were supposed to accompany the salads and the bread. Rachel grew pale.

She had never thought about this.  Me neither, because it had been a long time since my mind was on such things. Pork!

I’ve already said that we weren’t a particularly religious Jewish family—with the exception of Avner. But ancestral customs survive the loss of the faith of which they were the foundation.

And they probably compensate for actual belief in order to ensure that one remains part of the fold. So, except for Avner, whose whole existence it constituted, the deepest religiosity didn’t inspire the day-to-day life of the Weinberger family, even though my father still went to the synagogue with my mother—but seated apart, as you might know—and we all went for big occasions.

Given the times and the region where we lived, we were taking considerable liberties with the Eternal One and His laws! Except for me, no one even thought about easing the rigors of Shabbat or the laws of kashrut for his own purposes.

It was the way we lived: we bought from Jewish merchants, and we would never have looked for any other kind of food. For that matter, we weren’t any worse off eating this way.

With the von Statts, however, in order to manifest my opposition to tradition—though I admit that I didn’t risk those concerned even noticing this expression of my independence—and also to avoid compromising my plans, I accepted all kinds of food, explaining that in our home we didn’t pay much attention to these archaic rules.

We were good Jews who didn’t want to attract attention. So, when Mrs. von Statt invited my sister, she didn’t think it was necessary to prepare anything in particular.

Rachel gave me a troubled look. She wasn’t going to ruin everything for a slice of ham, was she?

If she were going to meet Stendhal, she had to give it her best, and her future happiness was well worth a bite of sausage!

I already said that she wasn’t ugly—I’m taking the risk of creating doubt by repeating it—but what replaced physical beauty in her wasn’t enough to excuse everything. Johann seemed to find her to his liking—let her do as much for the pork!

Rachel had lowered her head and was busy torturing a few poor blades of grass that had nothing to do with this kashrut business.

Fortunately, even though I’ve been speaking about it for a while, no one had yet noticed her malaise. It was up to me …

Pointing to the ham and giving my sister a sharp jab with my elbow, I exclaimed,

“Look, Rachel! Your favorite ham!”

Then, to our hosts, who were already smiling as my sister turned the color of the forbidden meat, I said,

“If you don’t hurry up, she’s going to eat the whole thing. Just think: we have centuries of abstinence to make up for!”

I have no idea what Rachel was thinking at that moment, but I had succeeded in preserving our chances. The von Statts were laughing heartily, and my sister, red as a beet, grabbed the first slice of ham she had ever touched in her life.

She muttered, “My brother always exaggerates …”

“What she hasn’t told you,” I added to outdo myself, “is that our uncle brought us a ham like this one last week, and Rachel ate so much she got indigestion! But I think it will be OK for us to have just a little.”

I couldn’t very well abandon my sister altogether …  Mrs. von Statt, who perhaps suspected something, affirmed that, in any case, there were enough bread and salads so that Rachel wouldn’t die of hunger.

My sister, who had never seen so many people smile at her in such a short amount of time, performed the first act of her life in contradiction not of a law that she was hardly acquainted with and didn’t understand, but of her customary way of doing things, or that of her entourage, which meant about the same thing.

It still warms my heart to think that this trap I set for her allowed her to perform the first freely chosen act of her existence.

Rachel bit into the forbidden meat, not without suppressing a slight look of disgust. None of the von Statts began a discussion on the miracle of a Jew eating pork.

Dreading that my sister might spit everything out, I swallowed my portion. I didn’t calm down until I noticed that she actually seemed to be enjoying the forbidden fruit.

She was also looking more often at Johann. She had probably finally noticed how much the young man was paying attention to her, which must have helped her to forget the exact nature of what was in her mouth.

She even reached out to take some more, but she thought better of the idea and concentrated on the salads and the bread.

They asked her about her activities, her tastes, her plans—things that she had never thought about. She responded in monosyllables, blushing, which the von Statts seemed to appreciate.

Most of the time, I tried to elaborate on her reticence by supplying more information, longer if not exactly true.

I became bolder when I noticed that Rachel didn’t contradict me. Was she beginning to realize exactly how lucky she was? She embellished each and every one of my lies.

The plates were emptied, and the conversation ebbed. Mr. and Mrs. von Statt were slow digesters and thus silent by necessity.

Johann seemed intimidated by Rachel. My friendship hadn’t made Hans any more talkative, and my sister remained mute, staring at the grass.

She raised her eyes once in a while toward Johann and then lowered them as soon as their gazes met each other’s.  Encouraged by his parents’ winks, Johann tried to talk enthusiastically about his studies and his future career as a lawyer.

He planned to move to Warsaw, which must have made my sister’s heart beat faster, since, after all her reading, any capital city for her was Paris.

But even Johann stopped talking. There were a few moments of silence during which I was wracking my brains trying to find a way to bring “my” couple together.

Finally, Mr. von Statt stood up heavily, stretched as much as his sluggish digestion allowed, and announced that he was going to take a nap in the shade. His wife followed him, while I suggested to my friends and my sister that we take a walk along the river.

We started out. I went ahead with Hans, determined to leave behind the ones I already called “the two lovebirds.”

But every time the distance became too great, my sister would call me back. So, she didn’t understand anything! Me, she could see all the time.

A young, handsome, intelligent man was waiting impatiently to speak to her of love; the weather was splendid, and the landscape would have made the surliest civil servant dream of poetry; and she didn’t want me to leave the two of them alone …

Once again, I had to invent something! I was the only one who didn’t have the right to the calm necessary for digestion. I took a look at the river and suggested to Hans that we go for a swim.

I was sure that my sister would refuse to appear in only her slip before people she barely knew, and Johann would therefore be happy to keep her company.

Hans accepted enthusiastically: he found the walk and the heat unpleasant. But my plan wasn’t to my sister’s liking: “No, Adam, it’s too dangerous to swim just after a meal.”

“Oy, oy, oy,” my father would have said, and with him all the Jewish characters that appear in literature.

What was the matter with her? Was she incapable of understanding that the purpose of this day wasn’t to make her appreciate ham so she could become a nun?

Fortunately, Johann showed some initiative:

“Let’s let them enjoy themselves. The water’s not deep, and we’ll stay on the bank to keep an eye on them. Unless you want to swim, too …”

She refused, blushing, and Hans and I didn’t wait for her permission to undress and dive into the cold water.

I hate water. Cold water even more. For half an hour I endured this sacrifice to ensure Rachel’s happiness.

Hans enjoyed the experience much more than I did, probably because of his generations of distant ancestors who had sailed the Baltic, whom he had spoken to me about one day.

They were the source of his family’s relative prosperity. I did my best to look as though I was having a good time and tried hard to resist my growing disgust for the water and for all the questionable things it might be carrying along.

I held back my cries when a lascivious water plant brushed against me, making me imagine billions of microbes and viruses attacking my skin and endangering my health.

I found a little more courage when I finally saw Rachel and Johann alone on the bank, talking quietly. There were long moments of silence, to be sure, but they no doubt had their secret necessity.

Finally, my resistance gave out, and I pulled Hans away in a race to the sunny meadow, where, as quickly as possible, we could get rid of the freezing drops that were clinging to us. I heard my sister shouting that she wanted to follow us. But Johann must have found a new argument, no less convincing. I liked this guy …

I lay on the grass next to Hans, out of breath but delighted, confident in the future, which would provide me with a brother-in-law and free my sister from anguish and a joyless life.

For the first time I imagined what my parents would think if their daughter married Johann or Pavel, a goy … but they had to understand! It was that or nothing.

In our community, there had already been a case of a girl who had married a Christian. Her father chased her from his house, disinherited her, and considered her dead.

Even though she hadn’t left the town, she was never able to see her parents again. The mother despaired but didn’t dare go secretly to visit her daughter, who, people said, cried every day thinking of her parents.

Nevertheless, her husband’s family was charming, not too Catholic, and almost tolerant. The father-in-law even reached out a few times, but in vain. Everyone attributed the death of the young girl’s first baby to her sorrow.

She herself remained between life and death for a long time, but her father never came to see her. Her mother fell ill, etc. The whole nine yards, which didn’t do much to strengthen the Catholics’ love for us.

Our whole community talked about it. They tried to reason with the father, to no avail. My own father often went to speak to him. He condemned his reaction, which gave me hope. But I wasn’t completely reassured.

And in this case it wasn’t just some Jewish girl marrying some young German Protestant or Polish atheist, but his own daughter marrying a goy….

The sun was going down. Rachel and Johann brought us our clothes. We walked back to the meadow, where the parents were still asleep.

We were silent: Hans and I from the sun and fatigue, Rachel and Johann for reasons that transcended words.

Rachel didn’t say another word on the way home. Thank God Hans and I were there. We had had such a good time, we affirmed, that we ought to do the same thing the following week.

Mr. and Mrs. von Statt accepted with pleasure, and Rachel—my going depended on her—complied without batting an eyelid.

After having thanked and taken leave of our friends, Rachel and I made our way back to our neighborhood. I didn’t dare say a word, and she seemed to share my sudden awkward discomfort.

She had become very pale again—she certainly had turned every possible color today! Suddenly, she took a step toward the ditch at the side of the road, leaned her hand against a birch tree, and threw up what her religion couldn’t swallow.

I thought she was going to make a terrible scene, that she resented me intensely for having led her into this trap, and I prepared myself selflessly for the cries and tears that I was so accustomed to.

But she walked back toward me, whiter than ever in spite of having been out in the sun all day.

Her eyes were drowned in tears, but she wasn’t actually crying. In a soft, trembling voice, she asked me, “You won’t say anything to Mama and Papa, right?”

I took her hand with all the tenderness I could muster at that moment, and we walked home, bound together by a great, heavy secret.

The next day, after school, I saw from afar that she was standing next to Pavel. He was speaking freely, but she was barely listening and wasn’t looking at him or answering him.

I thought I would tell her that she needn’t come to wait for me anymore, but I decided in the end that it was premature to sacrifice one of “our” opportunities.

On the way home, I took a risk and made a few references to the previous day’s outing, but most of all to the next one, and I could see that my sister was impatient for the weekend to arrive.

We couldn’t let things drag on. Hannah, the matchmaker, would end up completing her job one day, when she felt her pride was avenged.

The following Sunday was as idyllic as the previous one, especially for Rachel and Johann—even though I had to dive into the cold, repugnant water again.

We continued these expeditions, which became a habit throughout the springtime, and the weekly swim was transformed into a ritual imposed on only those who enjoyed it, namely everyone else but me.

I was annoyed at myself for not having been able to find something else to do the first time, especially since, on our way home from our second Sunday in the country, Rachel remembered that I hated the water.

I can’t help thinking that, from that day on, she took a certain pleasure in forcing this weekly burden on me, in revenge for the ham.

I was going to end up hating Sundays as much as Shabbat, but exams were approaching, and we had to put an end to our outings until summer vacation.

Meanwhile, from time to time I continued to frequent the Dobjinskis. Since he had begun to spend a few minutes every day talking with my sister, Pavel had become more cordial toward me.

This, combined with Janek’s nonstop yakking, made each of my visits to their house extremely trying. I sensed that the family talked about us.

The insinuations and allusions became more and more numerous, and the father, between glasses of wine, began to ask me questions.

Forget Adam Weinberger A NOVEL THAT EXPLORES THE DIFFICULTY OF SPEAKING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST.

First there is Adam Weinberger’s long childhood, in a world that has no idea yet what is in store for it. The childhood of a lover of illusions, who dreams of changing the world and of freeing his family from the burden of a tradition that he finds unbearable.

The adolescence of a young boy who is unable to express his love for Esther, his admiration for his uncle, his tenderness toward his mother. The helplessness of a young man who sees that dreams and fiction are unable to halt the destruction of this world and of its inhabitants.

Later there are fragments of narrations, the broken mirror that, through more or less well-meaning intermediaries, reflects the flight of this child who has become a man, who no longer believes in dreams, who no longer believes in words -who has taken refuge in gestures, those of his profession, medicine, and those of his great passion, the construction of ships in bottles.

And who flees words and other people to the point of losing his identity. Between the two is there, of which one dares not speak.

And then, in the end, after forgetting, at the end of all the flights, there is a return of childhood from beyond death, the single truth of fiction – of the narration of life.

About the author of Forget Adam Weinberger

Vincent Engel Forget Adam Weinberger author
Vincent Engel – author of Forget Adam Weinberger

Vincent Engel was born in Brussels in 1963. When he was five years old, he began to invent stories (the poor, deprived child had no television), and at age nine, he started to try to write them. School for him was clearly a waste of time. When he got home, he wouldn’t waste any of his energies on lessons and homework, either, preferring to devote his time to his passions.

This resulted in a somewhat complicated academic trajectory until he finally went to university, thanks to the tenacious will of his father, for whom a son without a university education was not his son.

Although he hated school and the teachers who didn’t predict much of a future for him, he definitely enjoyed earning a doctorate in literature and becoming a university professor specializing in contemporary French literature. He had a particular interest in issues of memory, especially concerning the Holocaust and what he calls the “desire to remember” (2020).

At the same time, he continued to pursue his writing and chanced upon a crazy publisher couple from Quebec, who would put out his first collections of novellas and become his good friends.

In 2000, he completed Retour à Montechiarro (Fayard, 2001), Volume I of the “World of Asmodée Edern,” which met with great commercial success.

Today Vincent wears many hats: professor at the University of Louvain, novelist, playwright – in particular as friend and right-hand man (although he is left-handed) to the late Franco Dragone for a decade – and screenwriter, not to mention his many collaborations with the press and the media as a columnist and literary critic.

– Translated by Richard Kutner. Richard Kutner is an independent translator of fiction and non-fiction. His translations include After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann, and Cast Away on the Letter A, by Fred, for which he was awarded a Hemingway Translation Grant from the Book Office of the French Embassy in the United States.

Follow me on Instagram : @vincent_engel_officiel

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s After the Roundup – Graphic Novel

After the Roundup is the true memoir of eleven-year-old French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris by the French police along with 13,000 other Jews (4,000 of whom were children) in July 1942 and held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium.

From there, he and his family were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande.

Extensive After the Roundup excerpts:

Escape

Chapter 3 of After the Roundup book 

Separation from After the Roundup Book

1. ARRESTING “FOREIGN” JEWS
The French police will arrest the 22,000 foreign Jews
in Greater Paris. They’ll be taken to Drancy,
Compiegne, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande. p. 17

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

2. THE VELODROME d’HIVER
A storm is starting. We’ll sit here.
I don’t know how long
we’ll be staying. p. 27

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

3. DEPARTURE

ATTENTION, ATTENTION! THE FOLLOWING FAMILIES GATHER
IN THE COURTYARD. IF YOU HEAR YOUR NAME, YOU MUST
COME AT DAWN TO SIGN UP FOR TOMORROW’S DEPARTURE.
AARON, ABRAHAM, ABRAMOVICZ P. 43

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

 

4. DEPORTATION
What does he mean, “deported”? p. 47

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

 

5. TEARING APART P.48

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

6. SEPARATION
Mama….Mama….MAMA!!! P. 4

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

WE’LL MEET AGAIN
7. Pitchi Poi…Pitchi Poi….We’ll meet again in Pitchi Poi… P. 50

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

8.  Summer 1942. Detention camp of
Beaune-la-Rolande, France P. 1

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

9. FREEDOM!! P. 68

ESCAPE
I made it! Joe, I…..
I MADE IT!!
I MADE IT!!

Really? Really truly? What do you see, Joseph? What do you see?

There’s….an open space and then a grove of trees. About
20 yards I’d say. Joe, do you think your legs will hold up?

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

 

 

LIBERATION

10 THE AMERICANS! THE AMERICANS!! p. 89

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

 

RESOLVE – p 95

11. I couldn’t understand how good, honest people like my parents or innocent little girls could be murdered only because they were Jewish…..

I kept hearing names…..names of places, all of them in Poland.

On the radio, in newspapers, they spoke of….of millions.

But I didn’t want to hear.
Not yet.

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

12. Remember – Never to accept the unacceptable p 120 French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

 

 

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann's After the Roundup - Graphic Novel

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s After the Roundup Graphic Novel

PREFACE

I was born in Paris in 1931. In 1942, I was eleven years old, and I wore the yellow star.

My parents, my two sisters, and I were arrested on July 16, 1942, during the big Vél’ d’Hiv’ Roundup, before being taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium. We stayed there five days and five nights, without food, water, or sanitation.

Then we were transferred to the internment camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, in the Loiret region of France. After being held for about two weeks, the rest of my family was sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp, in Poland.

As soon as they arrived, they were gassed and burned in the crematory ovens.

Even with the gendarmes, watchtowers, and barbed wire, I managed to escape from Beaune-la-Rolande with my friend Joe, who was as bold as I was.

Despite the collaboration of the Vichy government, the entire French population cannot be considered guilty. Of all the occupied countries, France had the smallest percentage of French and foreign Jews sent to the camps.

We should also remember that 75 percent of the Jews of France survived. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac finally acknowledged the participation of the French state in the fate of its Jews: the government had indeed abandoned to the occupier a segment of its population that it should have protected. This admission was an immense comfort to me.

Urged on by Simone Veil well before this, I began to reflect on an obligation that was mine as well after such a long silence: the duty to bear witness, the necessity to be willing to tell others about what I had lived through.

For more than forty years, I have visited countless middle and high schools in France and abroad, a commitment that led to my being named Officier de la Légion d’Honneur and to my receiving the Palmes Académiques (for distinguished contributions to education).

In Le Mans, where I have lived for decades, the Villaret Middle School became the Joseph Weismann Middle School in 2019, a source of great pride for me.

The narrative that you are about to discover inspired Rose Bosch’s film La Rafle (The Roundup), which was released in 2010. It was essential, though, to tell the rest of the story: in collaboration with Caroline Andrieu and the publisher Michel Lafon, I wrote the memoir After the Roundup, which came out in 2011.

Then a lucky coincidence put me in contact with the artist Laurent Bidot, who, along with the author and scriptwriter Arnaud Delalande, created the graphic novel that you have in your hands. After the film and the book, it was of the greatest importance that it be realized.

This book has a specific goal: the unceasing transmission, to the young as well as the old, of the memory of one of the darkest pages of the history of humanity, the Holocaust (“Shoah” in Hebrew, meaning “catastrophe”), a word that designates the murder of nearly six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

I am one of its last survivors.

By means of this testimony, I wish to continue to inform people so that this tragedy never occurs again.

For my entire life, I have borne the terrible pain caused by the loss of my loved ones. But I have also developed a determination and an optimism that have succeeded in bringing down mountains, no doubt molding myself into an “example of psychological resilience,” as the psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik would say.

I am now ninety years old.

But I can still convey one last message: never accept the unacceptable.

After the Roundup by Joesph WeismannAfter the Roundup – Escape

French Holocaust Survivor Joseph Weismann’s Story from the Original Book

We begin a methodical exploration of the camp.  Only the entrance gate isn’t protected by tight rows of barbed wire, but it immediately appears impassable to us.  It’s guarded by several teams of gendarmes, inside and out.

So we’ll have to deal with the barbed wire, no matter how sharp and thick it is.   Going over the top of it is out of the question:  First of all, it’s too high—more than two yards from the looks of it.

And it seems to extend over a long distance, so we could be seen too easily.  We consider digging, but the soil, dried up by the summer heat, is too hard.

One last option presents itself to us, the one that will work:  separate the metal wires to create a passage.

The camp is shaped like a rectangle, and there’s a watchtower at each corner.

At night, the police sweep the open area and the edges with spotlights, ready to fire at anything that moves.  We might as well try to escape in the daytime.

“We need to choose the moment when there’s the most activity,” Joe suggests.

Together we exclaim, “Lunchtime!”

At noon, everyone assembles in front of the food shed for the only meal of the day.

Of course, no one wants to run the risk of missing lunch, so it’s there that all the guards’ eyes are focused while the food is being given out—about two hours in total.

Joe is worried.  “The barbed wire is really thick …  We’re gonna be skinned alive.”

“You’re right, but we don’t have any choice.  We’re going to have to equip ourselves … Do you know where to find some sturdy clothes?”

He knows.  The clothes left behind by everyone who’s passed through the camp have all been put in one of the barracks.

We sneak inside unnoticed.  Sweaters, pants, and shirts are piled up on the bedsteads, with no regard for size or shape.  No problem—we do the sorting ourselves …

Toward the end of the morning, with the August sun shooting out its hottest rays, here we are, dressed for wintertime:  two pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, two shirts, and a thick wool beret on our shaved heads, everything in the darkest colors we can find, brown and dark green.

We stay far from the others and pretend to be sleeping, leaning against the wall of one of the barracks the way so many other kids do …

I imagine that thoughts like mine are racing through Joe’s head.  It’s been two days since our parents were taken away.

We haven’t even taken the time to tell each other about our lives.  All I know about him is that he lives in the twentieth arrondissement and that he has no brothers or sisters.

We adopted each other spontaneously because we share the same taste for freedom and also maybe a certain clear headedness.

We don’t formulate a plan—we’re barely conscious of what we’re about to do, but we sense that we have to do it.

Something deep inside of us sets off an alarm:  We have to get out of here; it’s a question of life or death.

There are no smiles on our faces at the thought of our flight.  On the contrary, we’re serious, worried, and filled with emotion.

We look at the other children.  Some of them aren’t even three years old, and few are as old as we are.  Many are sick from what they’ve been eating for weeks, and perhaps even more from the privation they’ve endured for years now.

Some play, oblivious.  The rage to live that compels Joe and me to want to escape drives them only to go running through the dust of the camp as they wait to rush into their parents’ arms.

Hope or some kind of reckless unawareness keeps them going, I don’t know.  Just like Joe and me in the end, except we’re going in another direction.

They’re all like the two of us:  the same yellow star sewn on their chests, the same imprisonment, the same nightmares, the same hunger gnawing at their stomachs—and, in all our hearts, the same boundless love for our fathers and mothers.

The lunch bell rings at the other end of the camp.  We watch the children pop out of every corner to go get their piece of bread.

The two of us take off.

*

*   *

Joe goes first.  Flat on his stomach, nose in the dust, he begins to separate the barbed wire to create a kind of tunnel through it on the ground.

But it takes him many minutes to disentangle even one inch because the wires are so tightly enmeshed.  It’s nothing like the open wire fences surrounding fields of cows!

The wall before us seems to be made of an impossible tangle of rolls of metal wire.  I heard from the grown-ups, when they were still here, that the camp was originally built to keep German soldiers prisoner.

If the security fence around the camp was judged sufficient for solid, well-nourished soldiers, it’s reasonable to conclude that two skinny runts like Joe and me have no chance of escape.  Only we’re absolutely not reasonable.

Fortunately, Joe is big … After an hour of effort and perseverance, he’s succeeded in creating a passage just wide enough for someone his size, and now that it’s long enough, I slide in behind him.

We advance at the pace of a sickly snail through the mass of metallic brambles so thick that the sunlight can barely penetrate it, but we’re still moving forward.  And we have plenty of time:  it’s not like in school.

No one’s taking attendance, and no one’s waiting for us.  And if we’re not there tonight in our dormitory for lights out, no one’s going to notice.

Even if a guard making his rounds passes by the hole we made in the barbed wire, he’ll have to bend down to see it.  I wouldn’t say we were calm, but our adventure seems to be off to a pretty good start.

Joe is breathing hard in front of me.  My nose is on his heels.  There’s no real reason to be this close except to encourage him.

All of his precautions are in vain:  protecting his hands with the sleeves of his shirt to separate the wires one by one, he still tears up his fingers.

“Ow!  These damned things really hurt!”

“Joe, be quiet!  You’re going to attract attention!”

“Easy for you to say.  I’m bleeding everywhere.”

“It’s all right.  It’s all right.  We’re moving ahead.”

“Well, I can’t keep doing this.  It’s your turn.”

There’s one problem:  the passageway he’s made isn’t wide enough for us to pass each other, even though I’ve enlarged it a little.  We crawl backward toward the camp.  I get out, Joe follows me, and I creep back into the tunnel, with Joe right behind me.

We hold our breath for a few seconds.  Nothing happens.  There’s still the same noise, the same sobs, the same shouts of children who have lost all control of themselves.

No one saw us, no gendarme on his rounds, no policeman from his watchtower, probably because of the thickness of the barbed wire.

My index fingers and thumbs form pliers precise enough to grab hold of the wires and separate them one by one.  I’m panting and cursing like my friend before me, but soon I clear a four-inch-long passage wide enough for our shoulders.

I suddenly move my head, and my beret gets stuck on the barbs.  Is it lice, fleas, scabies, or scratches from the wires?  I’m not sure what’s itching.

Besides, pretty soon I don’t feel anything.  Neither the blood flowing down my hands, elbows, and neck nor the skin being peeled off my knees from rubbing against the ground.  I hear Joe breathing behind me, but we don’t speak.

We have no need to urge each other on.  And we have to conserve our strength, because this is a long–a very long–procedure.

How long has it been since we started to make our way through this mass of barbed wire?  It seems like hours.

In fact, it has been hours, but we’re unaware.  Once again, we’ve lost the notion of time.  We have only one idea in our minds:  pass under this wall of metal, make it out, and stand in the fresh air of freedom.

We have no choice:  it’s not hard to imagine what would happen to us if we were to go back.    We have no knowledge that elsewhere members of the Resistance are joining forces and singing “Freedom guides our footsteps.”

But it’s the idea of this same freedom that helps us to endure our painful crawl.  We’re exhausted, but in no way discouraged, firmly convinced that we’re going to succeed.

We’re right.  After many hours, I catch a glimpse of brighter light.  I redouble my effort.  Anesthetized by the pain, my hands no longer feel anything.

I pick up the pace, helped by luck:  the network of metal wires is a little less dense near the outside of the enclosure.  Suddenly, right in front of me, I see a hole about eight inches in diameter already formed in the wires.

Could some villager secretly have tried to create a passage into the camp to see what was going on there?  Or to help prisoners escape?  Who knows?  In any case, he didn’t finish the job.  Joe and I, on the other hand, have almost completed our work.

With my last remaining strength, I create a tunnel to the hole I just discovered.  I take off my beret, and, in a gesture of rage, I throw it outside.

“Joe, my beret is free!”

“Dickhead!  I don’t believe it!  You still need it!”

“I don’t care.  Maybe I’m not out yet, but my beret is, and I’m planning to join it!”

I hear my friend grumbling behind me.  “What a moron!  He’s going to cut his head open at the last minute … Whatever got into me to try this with such a halfwit?”

“Joe, keep your insults to yourself.  We made it!”

“We made it?  I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true, I swear.”

“What do you see?”

There’s an open space.  We’re going to have to run a little to reach the trees.  I’d say … about twenty yards.  Are your legs still working?”

“Don’t worry—they’re fine … Get a move on, and wave to me when you’re there, OK?”

“OK!”

I pick up my beret and launch myself like a rocket.  My shoes race forward, and my little sparrow’s feet follow them as best they can.

I squeeze my fists with all my remaining strength.  It’s the most beautiful run of my life—I fly, I slide, I skid, and finally I throw myself into the ditch!  I feel like shouting with joy, like dancing, like swinging from the branches like a monkey.

In a fraction of second, however, the little voice in my head brings me back to reality:  Calm down, Joseph, calm down.  You’re only halfway there.  There’s still Joe …

            No chance that I’ll forget him.  I’m fully aware of the fact that I couldn’t have succeeded without him.  This little, slightly chubby guy, hardly any heftier than me really, has earned his freedom as much as I have.

I lie flat on my stomach in the grass and study the space separating us.  About as long as a school yard.  If a gendarme, up in his watchtower, catches sight of Joe, it’s all over.

I can see only shapes up there:  I can’t make out which way the guards are facing.  We’ll have to take our chances.  Joe is watching me, on the lookout for the slightest sign.  I wave him over.

He springs up like a goat.  In less time than it takes to tell about it, he’s already on the ground next to me, sweating, panting, really in bad shape but alive and free!

No troubling sounds come from the camp.  The gendarmes didn’t see us, or they didn’t want to see us—we don’t care which.  Joe catches his breath and extends his hand.

“We did it, Joseph!  We did it!”

“We did it, but you’re a mess!”

He bursts out laughing.  “Look who’s talking!”

What time must it be?  We started to inch our way through the barbed wire when the lunch bell sounded.  Now the sun is much lower in the sky, and it’s not as hot.

It must be late in the afternoon.  So it took us at least five hours to make our way through that briar patch of metal.  How many yards did we go?  Fifteen, I’m sure, maybe more.

“Joseph, we can’t hang around here too long.”

“I know.  But I’m exhausted.”

“Come, let’s get away from here.”

 

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: What Did He Know?

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust
Members of the Royal 22e Regiment in audience with Pope Pius XII

The legacy of Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, is fraught with controversy due to his role—or lack thereof—during World War II and the Holocaust.

The extent of his knowledge about the Holocaust remains a topic of intense debate among historians, theologians, and scholars. This expanded discussion aims to delve deeper into historical references that can shed light on what the Pope knew.

This blog post examines historical evidence, including correspondence and diplomatic communications, to better understand what Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust.

With the recent release of another letter showing the Vatican had information about the Holocaust has recently been released:

“The letter, dated Dec. 14, 1942, was written by Father Lother Koenig, a Jesuit who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany and addressed to the pope’s personal secretary at the Vatican, Father Robert Leiber, also a German.

Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco told the Corriere that the importance of the letter was “enormous, a unique case” because it showed the Vatican had information that labor camps were actually death factories.

In the letter, Koenig tells Leiber that sources had confirmed that about 6,000 Poles and Jews a day were being killed in “SS-furnaces” at the Belzec camp in southeastern Poland. 

The camp was about 20 km (12 miles) northwest of the town of Rava-Ruska, a railway center that was then also part of German-occupied Poland but is now in western Ukraine.”

Letter shows Pope Pius XII probably knew about Holocaust early on By Philip Pullella

Early Warnings to Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust

Pope Pius XII ascended to the papacy in March 1939, just months before World War II began—his earlier role as the Papal Nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.

He developed an intricate network of contacts, offering him a ringside view of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. This diplomatic experience set the stage for how Pius XII would interact with the Nazis during the war.

In the early years of World War II, the Pope received multiple warnings about the mass killings of Jews. Notably, in 1941, reports from the bishops in Poland highlighted large-scale deportations and killings.

Similarly, Jan Karski, a Polish underground operative, met with American and British officials and religious authorities, including members of the Vatican, to provide eyewitness accounts of mass killings.

In 1942, the Allies issued the “Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations,” which specifically mentioned the mass extermination of European Jews. The information was so alarming that it was broadcast globally, including on Vatican Radio.

“From all the occupied countries, Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. 

In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. 

None of those taken away are ever heard of again.” – Excerpt from the Joint Declaration shared on Vatican Radio Broadcast, 1942.

“Pius XII had already prepared the text of a public protest against the persecution of the Jews. 

Shortly before this text was sent to L’Osservatore Romano, news reached him of the disastrous consequences of the Dutch bishops’ initiative. 

He concluded that public protests, far from alleviating the fate of the Jews, aggravated their persecution and he decided that he could not take the responsibility of his own intervention having similar and probably even much more serious consequences. 

Therefore he burnt the text he had prepared. .” Pius XII as he really was, 13/02/1999 by Peter Gumpel in The Tablet

Vatican Diplomatic Channels: A Balancing Act Revisited

Pope Pius XII kept diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany, primarily through the Apostolic Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo in Berlin, who held his position from before the war started until its conclusion.

The Papal Nuncio was in a precarious position; his role was to maintain lines of communication with a regime that was antithetical to the teachings of the Church.

Papa Nuncio Cesar Orsenigo
New Year’s reception for Hitler in Berlin. – In the foreground: Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop in conversation with Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo. In the background: Leader and Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H26878 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Historically, Papal Nuncios acted as diplomatic mediators. Their task is to maintain relationships with host countries while upholding the tenets of the Catholic faith.

Orsenigo had reported as early as 1940 that there were rumblings about a “final solution” within Nazi circles. While the document did not outline specifics, it indicated that the Vatican was not entirely in the dark about the extreme actions the Nazis were planning.

The Vatican’s open channels with Nazi Germany present a particularly complex dimension to Pope Pius XII’s role during World War II.

Communication with the Nazis was a double-edged sword. They offered the Pope some leverage and vital intelligence. They also made the Vatican susceptible to accusations of complicity through silence.

Perspective of Other Countries: The Media Landscape

Comparing the Vatican’s knowledge to what was publicly available at the time offers an additional layer of complexity. Newspapers and media outlets in other countries reported Nazi atrocities by 1941, albeit often in a piecemeal fashion.

The New York Times, for instance, published articles on mass killings of Jews as early as 1941. Similarly, the BBC was broadcasting reports about the killings, and the information even made its way to neutral countries like Sweden.

However, what sets the Vatican apart is its extensive network of clergy and nuncios in various countries, which could have acted as additional intelligence sources.

The Catholic Church was present in nearly every country involved in the war, from the Axis Powers to the Allies and neutral states. 

In this context, it’s reasonable to assume that the Pope’s knowledge wasn’t solely based on diplomatic communiqués but also church networks.

A Balancing Act: Diplomacy and Ethical Responsibility

Maintaining diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany was like walking a tightrope. On the one hand, the Vatican needed to keep these channels open to gather intelligence and exert influence where possible.

On the other hand, by maintaining diplomatic relations without public condemnation, the Vatican risked appearing complicit or, at the very least, complacent.

Imagine a doctor who has a patient with a highly contagious disease. The doctor must maintain contact to provide treatment but risks spreading the disease to other patients.

Similarly, the Vatican had to balance its moral duty to intervene with the diplomatic repercussions that could result from any such intervention.

Complexity in Retrospect

When examined through history, the Vatican’s diplomatic balancing act with Nazi Germany remains intensely scrutinized.

While the Pope had several avenues of knowledge—from Orsenigo’s reports to Church networks and public media—how he acted on that knowledge is still debatable.

The decision to opt for quiet diplomacy over public condemnation is not black and white, and scholars continue to dissect the nuances of this complex issue.

Public Silence, Private Actions?

Pope Pius XII’s public silence about the Holocaust is perhaps the most criticized aspect of his wartime conduct. 

The Pope’s defenders argue that he opted for quiet diplomacy, working behind the scenes to save Jews by facilitating visas and helping them escape.

“…the Catholic Church, under the pontificate of Pius XII, was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000, Jews from certain death at Nazi hands…. 

These figures, small as they are in comparison with our six million martyrs whose fate is beyond consolation, exceed by far those saved by all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.” Three Popes and the Jews, Pinchas Lapide, Hawthorn, 1967, pps. 214-15. Lapide was a Jewish historian and diplomat.

The Pope addressed the issues of racial persecution in the following terms in his 1942 Christmas address:

“Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or to a slow decline [also translated: “marked down for death or gradual extinction”]. Ritner, Carol and Roth, John K. (eds.). 2002, p. 3. Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Pope Pius XII reportedly used diplomatic backchannels to save Jews. 

For instance, he provided visas and facilitated passage to safe countries. However, the real scale and effectiveness of these quiet efforts remain hotly debated topics.

Ethical and Moral Quandaries

The Pope’s silence raises complex ethical questions. A public condemnation might have endangered Catholics and Jews in occupied territories. 

Some argue that a more vocal condemnation from the Pope could have swayed Catholic nations allied with Germany or at least mobilized public opinion.

A school of thought suggests that a vocal papal intervention might have pushed Hitler to expedite his genocidal plans as an act of defiance. 

It could have led to severe repercussions for the Church and the Jews in occupied territories.

Unpacking the Vatican Archives: A Deeper Dive

The Vatican Secret Archives, now more accessibly known as the Vatican Apostolic Archives, has long been a source of mystery and speculation. 

The recent opening of these archives has offered scholars a treasure trove of documents that provide new perspectives on Pope Pius XII’s role during World War II.

While some documents corroborate the Pope’s knowledge of the Holocaust, others reveal diplomatic communications where the Pope prioritized the preservation of the Church.

One controversial document is a 1942 letter from the U.S. representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, stating that the Pope was “convinced that he had done all in his power.”

But the Pope and the Nuncio were not the only figures involved; several other key players within the Vatican also had significant roles.

Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini

Two individuals who frequently appear in these archives are Domenico Tardini and Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI. 

Both were close advisors to Pope Pius XII. Tardini was the head of the Vatican Secretariat of State, while Montini was his Undersecretary.

Their roles were vital in shaping Vatican policy and crafting secret diplomatic missions. 

Documents show that both were involved in internal discussions regarding how to respond to reports about the Holocaust. 

These advisors helped the Pope strategize the Vatican’s next moves like a chess game with high stakes.

The Jewish Delegation to the Vatican

Another fascinating aspect of the archives is the details about a Jewish delegation that sought an audience with Pope Pius XII. 

The delegation presented evidence of the ongoing Holocaust to secure a public papal denouncement.

While no public denouncement came, documents suggest that the Pope took the delegation’s information seriously.

Some scholars argue that the Pope’s subsequent actions, including the extension of aid and shelter to Jews in Rome, were influenced by this meeting.

Consider it a consultation with a subject-matter expert that subtly but significantly changes your course of action.

Correspondence with Other Religious Figures

The archives also unveil correspondence between Pope Pius XII and other religious figures, both Catholic and non-Catholic. 

Leaders of Protestant churches in Germany, for instance, communicated their dilemmas and actions concerning the Nazis. Additionally, letters from Catholic bishops in Eastern Europe detail the atrocities they witnessed. 

Such letters corroborated what the Pope was hearing through other channels and likely weighed on his moral calculus.

The U.S. and the Vatican

Another revealing piece of the puzzle is the correspondence between Myron Taylor, the U.S. representative to the Vatican, and Pope Pius XII. 

In these documents, Taylor expresses that the U.S. government would appreciate a more assertive stance from the Vatican against the Nazis. 

The Pope’s replies give an insight into his thought process as he navigated the diplomatic intricacies between condemning evil and protecting the Church.

Nuanced Complexity

The documents in the Vatican archives add a layer of nuanced complexity to Pope Pius XII’s wartime role. They illustrate the agonizing decisions that must be made and reveal that the Pope did not make them in a vacuum. 

Advisors, delegations, foreign diplomats, and other religious figures all shaped the Vatican’s policy during this dark period.

Conclusion – Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

The question of what Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust is entangled in a web of diplomacy, ethical considerations, and historical contexts. 

Evidence suggests that he had early warnings and detailed information about Nazi atrocities. 

Whether his public silence or quiet diplomacy approach was the best course of action remains a topic of ongoing debate.

Key Takeaways:

  • Pope Pius XII had early warnings about the Holocaust.
  • The Vatican’s diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany were both informative and problematic.
  • Early reports from bishops and operatives indicated mass exterminations.
  • The Vatican’s diplomatic channels with Nazi Germany offered a unique vantage point, but they also posed ethical dilemmas.
  • This complexity is magnified compared to public information in other countries, revealing a highly nuanced picture of what Pope Pius XII knew and how he chose to act.
  • Pope Pius XII chose a “quiet diplomacy” path but faced criticism for his public silence.
  • The Vatican Archives reveal that the decisions made during the Holocaust were not unilateral actions the Pope took alone.
  • A host of other players, both within and outside the Vatican, shaped the course of the Church’s actions, thereby painting a picture of intricate moral and diplomatic complexity.
  • The scale of the Pope’s efforts to save Jews is disputed.
  • Ethical quandaries surround the Pope’s silence.
  • New findings from the Vatican archives add complexity but must resolve the controversy definitively.

References:

  1. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe” by David I. Kertzer
  2. Vatican Secret Archives
  3. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII” by John Cornwell
  4. Correspondence between the Holy See and the German Reich
  5. New York Times Archives detailing Holocaust reports during World War II
  6. BBC Historical Archives on World War II broadcasts
  7. Vatican Apostolic Archives, Records Relating to World War II and Pope Pius XII

 

Lani Silver – Remembering the Holocaust Oral History Project and Her Contributions

Lani Silver
Lani Silver – Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project founder and friend of Remember.org

In the early days of Remember.org, I went out seeking content to share on this new thing called the Internet. That’s where I met Lani Silver (1948-2009).

Since most of the organizations housing the essential interviews and content about the Holocaust were run by Jewish organizations, trying something new and not knowing me or my background was a big challenge.

Not for Lani Silver. She welcomed me to the Oral History Project, and upon hearing the story of what I was beginning in 1993, she introduced me to her project. 

She told me about rock impresario Bill Graham founded it. However, I later learned while he did help it out immensely, the founder was Lani.

And she was generous as she was gracious. She immediately shared videos with me and gained permission from the survivors to share it on Remember.org:

Those transcriptions I did and shared with her formed the early foundation of this site. I am not only grateful; Lani’s example was one that I’ve found time and again in sharing stories of survival.

People are willing to help and share so students and teachers can gain access to these critical experiences. Her generosity is hopefully extended here as well, as we’ve never charged anyone to share their content and share it worldwide with people so that we all remember.

Remembering Lani Silver

Lani Silver was a professor of political science and women’s studies at San Francisco State University. She was also a social activist for many years and many causes. 

In 1981, she founded the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, which collected and preserved the stories of Holocaust survivors. The project eventually grew to include over 1,700 interviews.

Silver’s work with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project was groundbreaking. It was one of the first projects to collect and preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors. 

Scholars, educators, and filmmakers have used the project’s work to learn more about the Holocaust.

Here’s some background for all who haven’t had the privilege to meet Ms. Silver, a guiding force in collecting firsthand stories of survival and hardship.

Her journey began in 1985 when she told The Chronicle that these recordings were more than just historical accounts; they were deeply emotional reunions.

“Sometimes the survivors haven’t even told their own children. And when they do, the whole room breaks down. And yes, that includes me,” she said.

For over a decade, Ms. Silver cultivated her solo venture into an army of passionate individuals—interviewers, photographers, and transcribers alike. She was the project’s beating heart until 1997.

Her expertise didn’t go unnoticed. Spielberg consulted her for his oral history mission, the Shoah Foundation. She trained 500 interviewers for Spielberg’s initiative, which now holds tens of thousands of irreplaceable interviews.

But her work didn’t stop at collecting stories; she unearthed heroes lost to time, like Chiune Sugihara, Japan’s consul general in Lithuania during WWII, who saved thousands by handwriting visas. 

He died quietly in Japan, but not before Ms. Silver breathed new life into his story. She not only memorialized him in Tokyo but coined him “the Japanese Schindler.” She cemented his legacy through workshops, exhibits, and even an opera.

In 2000, Ms. Silver shifted her focus, not her passion—directing the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project. Interviewing 2,500 Americans, she peeled back the layers of everyday racism and its painful scars left on ordinary lives.

“Most of us have a standard job or freelance career. Silver’s “job” was working as a passionate activist with a breathtaking list of passionate and important causes. 

She even listed her occupation on Facebook as an activist. Her range was from the political battles of the day (women’s issues, liberal politics and campaigns, gay rights and gay marriage, Media Alliance and Jeff Perlman, Obama, Jeff Adachi) to the unconventional (founding the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History project and later a racism project growing out of the case of James Byrd Jr., who in 1998 was chained to a truck by three white supremacists and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas.) …

Two of Silver’s latest and last passions were the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (where she was an ever passionate board member) and the Chauncey Bailey Investigative Project (where she was a founding member and ever passionate participant). 

The Chauncey project was a media coalition that has had much success and fame in investigating the 2007 murder of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey while investigating the finances of Your Black Muslim Bakery.”

LANI SILVER Teacher, Oral Historian, Activist 1948 – 2009 by Bruce Bruggman

Ms. Silver’s origins are traced back to Lynn, Mass., but her family moved to San Francisco when she was two months old. 

“She was the dinner table philosopher, always provoking thought,” her sister Lynne Jacobs noted. 

And a trip to Soweto at 19 sparked the activist in her. From then on, she was not just an observer but a participant—taking her nieces and nephews to political rallies and attending protests even when her own life was hanging by a thread.

She was a lifetime learner—earning degrees from the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and the University of Chicago. She lent her voice as a freelance writer and producer for over 30 years.

Lynne said it best, 

“From that moment in Soweto, she was an activist.” 

An activist, an educator, but most of all, a friend to countless survivors and a beacon for stories that needed to be told.

In addition to her work with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project and the Shoah Foundation, Silver also worked with several other organizations dedicated to Holocaust education and remembrance. 

She was a founding member of the Racism Project and the James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project. She also served on the board of directors of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Silver’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the American Jewish Committee’s Human Relations Award and the National Women’s History Month Award. She was also named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the Bay Area” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lani Silver was a remarkable woman who significantly impacted the world. Her work to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors has helped to ensure that their experiences will never be forgotten. 

She was a tireless advocate for tolerance and understanding, and her legacy will continue to inspire others for many years.

Here are some additional details about Lani Silver’s work:

  • She worked with the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project for over 20 years.
  • She trained over 500 interviewers for the project.
  • She helped to develop the project’s curriculum and educational materials.
  • She spoke at schools and conferences around the world about the Holocaust.

Her work to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors has helped to ensure that their experiences will never be forgotten. 

Her presence vibrates through her extensive work, challenging us to confront uncomfortable truths. While she may not be here, her vision for a just world endures.

Thank you, Ms. Silver, for your relentless curiosity, activism, and invaluable friendships formed through your work. 

Your legacy isn’t just in the stories collected but in the hearts and minds touched and opened.