Emil Holzner had had bad experiences with the Gestapo, having spent a week in prison on some unclear charge, and paying a large amount of money to be released. The experience had changed him:
When my father came back, he ordered that all of the hidden objects were to be brought back and that every last item was to be handed in. He didn’t want to keep anything. Although his friends said they would keep the things, he wouldn’t have it. My father never told me what the Gestapo did to him. He was completely drained when he came back.
Yehuda Bacon Yehuda particularly remembers 14 June 1940, the day German troops entered Paris.75 As his parents were no longer allowed to work in Ostrava, they were forced to sublet some of their apartment. Mrs Florian, a tenant, was visited on that day by her son, who was in the German Wehrmacht.
He was drunk, gave us a dirty look and said: ‘You’ll all be eliminated soon like they’re doing in the East. If I wanted to, I would just have to say the word and you’d be kicked out of your home straightaway. But I’m not like that.’ Then he looked at me sympathetically and said: ‘I’m sorry for you. You don’t look particularly Jewish. I’m sorry on your account.’
Yehuda had initially attended a Jewish primary school in the town of his birth. He didn’t go to grammar school, since the Nazi laws prohibited Jews from obtaining secondary education. To secure as wide-ranging an education as possible for the pupils, however, a few additional classes were added on to the primary school. ‘Until 1941/42 the school was semi-official. Later, the classes were completely forbidden and we had “krousky”, teaching circles, that were illegal and took place in private homes with six to eight pupils.’
Around the end of 1941, two ‘halutzim’ (Jewish pioneers for Eretz Israel, the biblical name for the land of Israel) came. They wanted originally to flee to Slovakia and said that all Jews in Prague were sitting with their suitcases packed because they could expect to be rounded up for transport at any moment. ‘They asked us to flee with them. We thought that the atrocities they related were not true. Perhaps we didn’t want to believe them.’ Two of Yehuda’s teachers, Sissi Eisinger and Jakov Wurzel, both 24 years old, came from Brno. ‘And suddenly they were summoned for transport, because the people from Brno were taken away earlier.’
Yehuda can still remember their departure. ‘Jakov Wurzel told us a Hasidic story, that every person has a “nitzotz”, a spark, and that this spark bursts into flame once in every person. He was trying to say, I think, that everyone can show spiritual and moral greatness at some point in their life.’ The pupils were so moved that they cried, ‘with only a slight inkling at the time what the parable meant’.
Notes
1 1 Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (Oxford 1990), pp. 53–4; Reinhard Sturm, ‘Zerstörung der Demokratie 1930–1933’, in Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, ed., Weimarer Republik, new revised edition (Bonn, November 2011), pp. 54–73; Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London 1986), pp. 30–1.
2 2 Helmut Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J – Bilder, Dokumente, Berichte zur Verfolgung und Vernichtung der deutschen Juden 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main 1979), pp. 36–7; Gutman, Holocaust, vol. I, pp. 234–7.
3 3 Wolf Gruner, The Persecution of the Jews in Berlin 1933–1945: A Chronology of Measures by the Authorities in the German Capital, trans. William Templer (Berlin 2009), pp. 59–60.
4 4 Barkai et al., ‘The Organized Jewish Community’, in Barkai et al., German-Jewish History, vol. IV, pp. 95–6.
5 5 Michael Berger, ‘“... liebt nächst Gott das Vaterland” – Jüdische Soldaten und ihre Rabbiner im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Der Schild (published by the Bund Jüdischer Soldaten), 1, 1 November 2007; S. Neufeld (Ramat Chen), ‘Die Frühvollendeten’, in Hugo Gold, ed., Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden, 2/3 (1970), pp. 87–8; see also Peter C. Appelbaum, Loyalty Betrayed: Jewish Chaplains in the German Army During the First World War (London 2014).
6 6 ‘Die Juden ziehen dahin, daher, sie ziehen durchs Rote Meer, die Wellen schlagen zu, die Welt hat Ruh’; ‘Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt, geht’s noch mal so gut.’
7 7 Reinhard Rürup, ed., 1936 – Die Olympischen Spiele und der Nationalsozialismus, 2nd edition (Berlin 1999), pp. 131–41.
8 8 Hermann Kaienburg, ‘Sachsenhausen – Stammlager’, in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, eds., Der Ort des Terrors – Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, 9 vols. (Munich 2005−9), vol. III, pp. 18–21, 28.
9 9 Rose, ‘… täglich vor Augen’, pp. 65–8; see also Johannes Heesch and Ulrike Braun, Orte erinnern – Spuren des NS-Terrors in Berlin, 2nd revised edition (Berlin 2006), pp. 89–95.
10 10 Gruner, Persecution, p. 117.
11 11 Spector, ed., Jewish Life, vol. I, p. 128.
12 12 Gruner, Persecution, pp. 116–17.
13 13 Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat – Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Maßnahmen und Richtlinien – Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg and Karlsruhe 1981), p. 255.
14 14 Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (Cambridge 2006).
15 15 Gruner, Persecution, p. 118.
16 16 Israel (Jürgen) Loewenstein, ‘Ich habe ein Zuhause gefunden’, in Evangelischer Arbeitskreis Kirche und Israel in Hessen und Nassau, ed., ‘Wer hätte das geglaubt!’ – Erinnerungen an die Hachschara und die Konzentrationslager (Heppenheim 1998), pp. 28–32.
17 17 Leo Trepp, Die Juden – Volk, Geschichte, Religion (Wiesbaden 2006), pp. 304–5.
18 18 Loewenstein, ‘Zuhause’, p. 28.
19 19 Barkai et al., ‘Population Decline and Economic Stagnation’, in Barkai et al., German-Jewish History, vol. IV, p. 33.
20 20 Gutman, Holocaust, vol. I, p. 200.
21 21 Gruner, Forced Labor, p. 212.
22 22 Arbeitskreis Berliner Regionalmuseen, ed., Zwangsarbeit in Berlin 1938–1945 (Berlin 2003), p. 17.
23 23 See Förderverein für eine Internationale Begegnungsstätte Hachschara-Landwerk Ahrensdorf e.V., ed., Herbert Fiedler, ‘Träume und Hoffnungen’, nos. 1 and 2, ‘Ein Kibbuz in Ahrensdorf‘ and ‘Unser Landwerk Ahrensdorf, Luckenwalde’, undated.
24 24 Arbeitskreis Berliner Regionalmuseen, ed., Zwangsarbeit, p. 17.
25 25 Gruner, Persecution, p. 147.
26 26 Gabriele Layer-Jung and Cord Pagenstecher, ‘Berlin-Schöneweide’, in Benz and Distel, eds., Der Ort des Terrors, vol. III, pp. 12−123.
27 27 Alfred Gottwaldt and Diana Schulle, Die ‘Judendeportationen’ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–45 (Wiesbaden 2005), p. 121.
28 28 Data from the Jewish Community of Latvia on its website, https://jews.lv/en/jewish-cemeteries-and-memorial-sites/rumbula-memorial. Other studies put the number at around 27,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto murdered on 30 November and 8/9 December 1941 in the forest in Rumbala; see Newsletter of the Fritz Bauer Institut zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust, 26 (Autumn 2004).
29 29 Gottwaldt and Schulle, ‘Judendeportationen’, pp. 132, 134, 255, 257, 258, 259.
30 30 Ibid., p. 399.
31 31 Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945 (New York 1997), p. 283.
32 32