eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One’s Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers’ dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation.
The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy—and in saving literally thousands of Jews—is finally revealed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827612952 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 672 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Saving One's Own
Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust
By Mordecai Paldiel
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Mordecai PaldielAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8276-1295-2
CHAPTER 1
Germany and Austria
Outwitting the Nazis in Their Home Base
Germany
Jews have lived in Germany since Roman days primarily in what is today the city of Cologne. Starting with the Crusaders in 1096, persecutions, pogroms, mass killings, and expulsions followed the Jews from one German region to another, and later the great Protestant religious reformer Martin Luther fulminated against the Jews and actually called for the utmost violence against them if they persisted in maintaining their separate religion. But at the dawn of the modern age, with the unification of Germany in 1871, Jews were fully emancipated, and they prospered and shared in the country's economic, political, scientific, and cultural life. This gave birth to antisemitism, a modern term coined by the German publicist Wilhelm Marr. However, through World War I and into the Weimar Republic that followed, Jews continued to rise in prominence in all spheres of the country's life, including journalism, the theater, music, philosophy, and science. The integration of the Jews proceeded here much further and deeper than in many other European countries. This was especially so in the big cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg, where Jews and non-Jews intermingled with each other daily, to the extent that three out of ten marriages of Jews in 1932 were to non-Jewish partners.
Hitler's assumption of power on January 30, 1933, sounded the death knell for German Jews, who numbered 566,000 (a bit less than 1 percent of the population). It must, however, be stated at the outset that Hitler's regime initially favored a policy of forced emigration through increased anti-Jewish measures, and indeed many left if they could get a visa. Thus the Zionist movement was able to carry on with relative freedom and with little interference as it, like the Nazis, urged Jews to leave — and as fast as possible.
Under Nazi rule one more repressive law after another and one more restrictive regulation after another were designed to deny Jews a proper and normal human existence. It began with the one-day boycott of Jewish stores on April 1, 1933, which was soon followed by two new laws, one that dismissed Jews from work in the civil service and one that drastically reduced the number of Jewish pupils who were allowed to attend public schools. Then came laws restricting Jews from the practice of law and medicine and Jewish exclusion from cultural life — the media, theater, and cinema. All Jewish organizations had to close their doors and were subsumed under one Gestapo-controlled Jewish umbrella organization, the Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden), a Judenrat-type precursor, later applied in other countries under German domination.
In September 1935 came the infamous Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and forbade marriage and intimate relations between Jews and nonJews. An adjunct to this law also defined who was fully Jewish (one with three or four Jewish grandparents) and created a new category known as Mischlinge — non-Jewish and non-Aryan (those with one or two Jewish grandparents). This was meant to create a so-called pure Aryan society. Jews were eliminated from commerce by being forced to sell out their business at a below-market value, under a program known as Aryanization. Jews were forced to add a Jewish middle name on the id cards (Israel for men; Sarah for women), and their passports were marked with a large J (Jude-Jew).
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched a massive pogrom in every German city (this included Austria and the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, both annexed to Germany), known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), causing the destruction of hundreds of synagogues, the vandalizing of thousands of Jewish homes and small businesses, the murder of close to 100 Jews, and the detention in concentration camps of some 30,000 Jewish men. On January 30, 1939, Hitler in a public address warned that in the event of a war, all Jews in Europe would face "annihilation" (Vernichtung). With the start of the war on September 1, 1939, Jews were moved to specially designated Jewish homes (with as many as eight persons to a room) and required to perform menial labor. They had to hand over their jewelry, radios, cameras, electrical appliances, and pets. In September 1941 Jews ages seven and above were ordered to wear the Jewish Star and were no longer permitted to use public transportation, but were still required to perform menial labor.
Deportations had begun earlier, in October 1940, when 7,500 Jews from the Baden/Palatinate/Saar districts were expelled to German-occupied France. In September 1941 thousands of Jews began to be deported eastward to Polish ghettos and concentration camps and to Soviet-occupied areas, where they were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units. Some 42,000 mostly elderly people and others were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto in former Czechoslovakia. In July 1943 the Nazi regime proudly announced that Germany was "clean" of Jews (Judenrein). In fact, up to 20,000 Jews still remained in Germany, most in hiding, including partners in mixed marriages as well as so-called half-Jews.
Jews in hiding inside Germany were referred as U-Boaters, "submariners," as they were mostly in hiding or passing as non-Jews with the help of false credentials. More than half of all those in hiding in Germany were in Berlin, given the demographic concentration of the Jewish population in wartime Berlin and the better prospects for hiding that the anonymity of the big city offered to Jews going underground. Of the approximately 150,000 Jews remaining in Germany in October 1941 (at the start of the mass deportations), some 12,000 to 15,000 (8–10 percent) opted for an illegal way of existence, mostly in hiding. Of these, about 75 percent were seized by the Gestapo, according to one estimate. Altogether, some 3,500 to 4,000 (25–28 percent) survived while the rest were caught and deported.
In summary, of the 566,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler came to power, some 300,000 were able to save themselves, mostly by emigrating (an option until November 1941) or by avoiding apprehension while in hiding. Of the rest, some 200,000 were deported, including German Jews deported from German-occupied countries to where they had earlier fled, and 160,000–180,000 of them died in the Holocaust. Now to stories of some of the Jewish rescue activists who worked to get Jews out of Germany while this was still possible
Recha Freier
She worked tirelessly to get thousands of German Jewish youth out of danger's path by helping them to emigrate to Palestine through the organization she founded, Youth Aliyah.
On the eve of the Nazi takeover in 1932, five Jewish youths asked to see Recha Freier in her Berlin home. These sixteen-year-old boys of Eastern European Jewish background had been told that she, a rabbi's wife, could assist them. In her words, "There they stood, thinking, excited, gloomy, despair on their pale faces. They told me that they had been sacked from their jobs for no other reason than that they were Jews. They were looking for a way out. Could I help them to get to Western Germany?" That year, the Nazi party, not yet in power, had garnered more votes than any other single party and was attracting many people to its ranks. Standing before Freier, the boys wondered whether there were any chances of finding employment in the coal mines or perhaps she had other advice for them? At that time, Freier, a rabbi's wife, was engaged in research on folklore, and she did not understand why these boys had come to her. However, that visit disturbed her peace of mind. As she stated, "The right to work, that is, the right to exist, had been taken from these boys and this — because they were Jews. ... The utter senselessness of Jewish life in the Diaspora stood palpably before my eyes."
The following day, still unsure how she could be of help to these distraught boys, she went to the Jewish Labor Exchange in Berlin, the director of which was a member of Poalei Zion, a Socialist-Zionist organization, to seek his advice. She was shocked by the man's dismissal of the boys' concern. As she related, "He shrugged his shoulders. 'This state of affairs is undoubtedly due to the general unemployment in the country,' he said. 'As soon as this comes to an end, the Jewish boys will get work again.'" He advised Freier to let matters take their course, but his response left her disturbed. "The way that director shrugged his shoulders made me shudder."
Youth Aliyah
After some further thought, she got an idea: the predicament of these boys could be resolved through the creation of a movement of youngsters for work in Palestine, where they would strengthen their self-confidence and simultaneously help build up the Jewish community there. The boys responded enthusiastically. Thus was born the idea of Youth Aliyah — one year before the Nazi assumption of power, but with increasing dark clouds hovering over the Jewish community in Germany, as the Nazis continued to gain electoral strength.
Enzo Sereni, a kibbutz emissary, was then passing through Berlin, and Freier explained her idea to him. "Do it," he said, "and revolutionize the entire German Zionist Movement!" To help put the Youth Aliyah idea into action, he advised her to get in touch with the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine. Freier suggested to that organization that German Jewish youths aged fifteen and sixteen be educated and trained in the kibbutzim with a view to their settling in the country. The reply was positive, but doubts and opposition to Freier's idea soon sprouted, and they threatened to undo the whole undertaking before it had taken root.
When she approached Zionist leaders in Germany with her idea, she was greeted with laughter and derision. "'Fantastic! Impossible!' they cried." Instead, "'Send the lads to German farmers where they will really learn something and where the money will be properly spent.'" In a Palestinian kibbutz, they claimed, the boys would be spoiled. Freier was thunderstruck at the blindness of these leaders to the signs of impending disaster. She also encountered resistance from parents and Jewish organizations, who felt that the situation in Germany wasn't that bad. But Freier received encouragement from the Histadrut when it sent her a list of Jewish settlements prepared to accept youth groups, such as Ein Harod, Geva, and Nahalal, and an estimate of the costs involved.
She then began to approach people one on one, and she organized public meetings. She offered to create a special unit within the German Federation of the Women's Zionist Organization (WIZO), but was turned down. A "Children's crusade!" (recalling the tragic conscription of children for a holy crusade to the Holy Land by the Crusaders in the eleventh century), they disdainfully scoffed at this idea. Appealing to Ezra, the religious youth organization, she was also rebuffed, but for a different reason. Ezra's leadership refused to be a partner to the education of Jewish boys in Palestinian kibbutzim, owing to the nonobservance of Jewish rituals and lack of traditional Jewish education in many of these places. "The youth would become Communists there," they warned her. The Ezra organization, nevertheless, agreed to place its bank account at Freier's disposal for holding all funds collected for her Youth Aliyah purposes. But this is as far as it would go.
Undeterred, Freier decided to appeal directly to the Jewish youth in Germany, and the response proved widespread and affirmative. This in turn led the German Zionist organization to view her plan favorably, provided that the Jewish community in Palestine created a satisfactory organ to supervise the necessary arrangements for settling the children and look after their education, as well as undertake responsibility for financial matters that might arise. It was suggested that she contact Henrietta Szold, who headed the social department in the Vaad Leumi, the Palestinian Jewish National Council. The American-born Szold was a notable Zionist leader, having established the Hadassah Women Organization and settled in Palestine. Freier did write to her about her Youth Aliyah idea, but she received a negative reply; she was told that, for the moment, no children could be brought over. Although Szold later changed her mind and assumed the leadership of the Youth Aliyah operation, she simultaneously carried on a vindictive campaign against Freier, based it seems on a personal dislike for reasons unclear. This was coupled with an attempt to undercut Freier's work and claim for herself the authorship of the Youth Aliyah idea and leadership.
But Freier did not relent. As she related: "My faith in the ultimate success of my mission was likewise becoming stronger and stronger. I was convinced that the task I had taken upon myself was a vital necessity and that it was up to me to fulfill it." She contacted Kibbutz Ein Harod, and they agreed to take the boys. The kibbutz's emissaries, then in Berlin, contacted her to arrange the journey of the first group. Freier was also encouraged when she learned in June 1932 that the founder and director of the Ben Shemen children's village in Palestine was about to visit Berlin and had asked to meet her. This took place in Freier's home, in the presence of a group of forty youths. Ben Shemen offered her twelve immigration certificates and places in its youth village. The Königsberg Zionist Women undertook to cover the cost of immigration and training of five boys, and seven other places were reserved for Berliner youths.
Department store head Wilfrid Israel also helped by offering equipment from his store for the trip, and the Aid Association of German Jews (Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden) defrayed the cost of the journey. Now all that was needed was the consent of the boys' parents in writing, and they dutifully signed. Departure date was set for October 12, 1932. At the train station, the boys sang Hebrew songs, excited about this, their first big journey. Wilfried Israel whispered to Freier reassuringly: "'This is an historic moment!' ... The work had begun; no one could interfere with it anymore." Another group of twenty-five young immigration candidates was formed in the summer of 1932, with six arriving in November 1932 and directed to the youth village of Ben Shemen.
This led to another religious organization, the Union of Religious Pioneers, known as Bachad, to get in touch with Freier on the aliyah of a youth group to the religious settlements. Szold again rejected Freier's request for assistance and gave an additional reason: kibbutzim in Palestine were not the right places for the education of youth, since vocational schools on a par with those in Germany did not exist in Palestine. In addition, there was no reason to be in a hurry, as the Nazis had not yet obtained power (although in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, they had doubled their representation in the Reichstag and emerged as the most powerful political party).
Recha Freier dreamed of ultimately sending 10,000 boys to Palestine, but she was satisfied to start with very small groups. She created a committee of seven members, whom she picked from the leaders of the Zionist youth organizations. On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler assumed power, Freier's committee's first official meeting took place at the office of a notary. The new organization's name was Aid Committee for Jewish Youth (Hilfskomitee für Jüdische Jugend), but among themselves they preferred to call it Youth Aliyah, or Children's Aliyah. As they left the notary's office and turned onto Unter den Linden Boulevard, they could not help but witness the torchlight procession of thousands of Nazi Storm Troopers (SA) celebrating Hitler's accession to power. The bell of doom had just rung for German Jews.
Some months later, in May 1933, with the Nazis already in power, Freier sailed for Palestine to inspect the various colonies in the Galilee and take a firsthand look at the German youth enrolled in the Ben Shemen children's village. She also met Henrietta Szold in Jerusalem, but the two could not agree on working together to further the Youth Aliyah program. (Szold eventually took over its leadership on November 27, 1933.)
During the second half of 1933, about 1,000 children came to Palestine under Youth Aliyah auspices. More would come in the following years, most placed with private families as well as in kibbutzim and other settlements. A total of 4,000 had arrived by the end of 1938, many of them thanks to Freier's dedicated work. As German schools began to dismiss their Jewish pupils under Nazi pressure, Freier's Youth Aliyah office in Berlin created special classes for ninth graders, with Hebrew, Jewishhistory, and Zionism as the bedrock of the curriculum, together with practical studies linked to agricultural work in Palestine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Saving One's Own by Mordecai Paldiel. Copyright © 2017 Mordecai Paldiel. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Photographs,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Germany and Austria: Outwitting the Nazis in Their Home Base,
2. Poland: Rescue in the Deadliest Place in Europe,
3. Lithuania and Belarus: Getting Out in Time, Refuge in Forest Lairs,
4. Slovakia: Negotiating to Stop Deportations,
5. Hungary: Zionist Diaspora Youth at Its Best, Some Debatable Rescue Undertakings,
6. Croatia and Italy: Children on the Run,
7. France: The Many Who Helped Save Most of the Country's Jews,
8. Belgium: Organized Self-Help, Stopping a Deportation Train,
9. The Netherlands: Pulling the Wool over the SS's Eyes, Hiding and a Run across Borders,
10. Toward Palestine, the Land of Israel: Boat People on the Danube with the Connivance of the Nazis,
11. Switzerland: Outstretched Hands from Nearby,
12. Concentration Camps: Flight and Rescue from Hell on Earth and Challenging Himmler,
13. England: A Rabbi and the Religious Obligation to Save,
14. United States: Organizational Assistance amid Conflicting Agendas,
Afterword,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,