My second hand connection to the Holocaust ...

[marble falls]

My friend Irvin's parents were in Birkenau ...

... when I would visit Irv, I'd see photos from the twenties, thirties, his father's tailor's tools, some decorative items. I couldn't understand how a family that had been in Poland hundreds of years and reduced by the Nazis to exactly six on the whole planet still had anything.

I couldn't understand how they managed to hold onto it through the camps. Like Laurie Anderson said when her father died, it was as if a library burnt down. When Ester Fichtenbaum died, a library definitely burned down.

She told me that when they were released, they walked home and dug these things up and then walked to a then West German Displaced Person's camp, where they lived until 1952 when they came to the US. Irv's sister was born in the camp, Irv after they got to Akron, Ohio. Irv was born '54 and his dad died in '58.

I know the Holocaust is real. I know it's effects will be unfolding for a longer time still.

I heard about an an incident from Irv that had extra significance after I learned from his mother how those treasures made it to Boomfield Ave.

When Irv was four, around the time of his father's passing, Ester caught Irv putting money through the floor boards of the dining room of their home. A genetic memory? Reaction to a genetic trauma?

This story has stuck to me for more than 50 years, I think of it almost weekly.

[True Blue American]

1. My late husband

Was there to help liberate the camps. I have the Brownie pictures to prove it!

[marble falls]

3. I imagine that affected him more than any other "thing" in the war.

[True Blue American]

16. Getting wounded on Omaha Beach

When the second guy in front of him stepped on a land mine, killing him. The second guy was badly wounded, he took shrapnel.

My Dad was in that war , too when they started taking men with one child. One 35 the other barely 18. Neither one wanted to talk about it. Until we saw live coverage of Normandy at Wright Pat, few
Knew he served.

[marble falls]

11. Have you considered getting these to the Holocaust Museum at the right time? ...

... it could make a nice memorial to your husband. Too bad you don't still have that camera, it documented history and crime against humanity,

[True Blue American]

17. Yes I have

Along with a German Luger with permission from the Commander to bring it home. Been offered money.

[marble falls]

24. You're another good example of who we mostly are on DU, it makes proud to be among ...

... some of the most open minded and hearted folks I know of.

[True Blue American]

27. I agree

The reason I like this board so much.

It is such a relief to be among sensible people who deal with reality and how we need to fight to preserve the values so many fought for.

[Ilsa]

2. Effects of such wretched evil seem to be passed along.

Yes, I think geneticists have found genetic linkages, such as higher stress hormones in the children of holocaust survivors, from nazi trauma.

We have to keep the personal stories alive and passed along.

The father of a friend from work was an US Army liberator of a concentration camp. He told his son, my friend, of the results of the horrors he witnessed.

The people who witnessed it first hand are almost all gone. There are still films, but pissants, not always neo-nazis, like to claim they are doctored or created via digital manipulation. Screw them.

[marble falls]

4. The very first time and then not again for at least a decade, I heard of liberators feeding ...

survivors without understanding that it was lethal, was from Ester. She said in the first week almost half the survivors died from being fed without a period of getting digestive systems working.

That actually haunted me for a long while.

[True Blue American]

18. They gave Medals of Freedom

30 years later to those left alive. The Chaplain who went across Europe with them told the story from France to Germany! We watched over 200 older men with tears running down their cheeks as he described it. Children accepted forthose who were gone.

[mitch96]

5. My father lost his whole family that stayed in eastern Europe in the holocaust.

Growing up it was the 800 pound gorilla in the room.. He was ANTIFA at Normandy.
m

[marble falls]

6. Irvin had not wanted to talk about it. I think Ester needed to talk about it, and I really needed...

... to know about it. She started talking about it when I was around 18.

[MLAA]

7. I'm really glad you shared this.

As you think of more stories from Ester please share them. May she, her husband and all her ancestors Rest In Peace.

[marble falls]

8. About 20 years ago Irv asked me if I thought I could track down one of the two relatives ...

not of his immediate family, still alive after the war. He thought he was in Montreal and I was working a consulting gig there (regarding fire rated windows).

I found him and I found the other, too - in Ecuador.

Only Irv's parents, his Aunt and uncle, and these two were the remains of his family at the war's end.

When Irv passed four years ago, his entire family consisted of his sister and a niece and nephew, two cousins each with two children.

He always wanted to get married, never got around to it.

Just another path: Another friend and debate partner was Warren Glick. His grand father lived with them (in '61 or '62). He was as close to 100 as anyone I'd knew up to that point and very sharp. He told me he left Russia to escape the draft, which was a twenty year hitch in those days, and got out just before the revolution.

I was born at the right time and went to the right schools. If I'd have lived in another district, I might have missed all I got to pass on to others.

[MLAA]

12. Did Irv get in touch with the two relatives you tracked down for him?

[marble falls]

13. I believe he did contact the man in Montreal, but I do not know for sure. I felt this was ...

... personal to him and I waited to hear from him about it. We were the closet friends of our 'set', but Irvin was excellent at compartmentalizing his life. He did not let me know how close he was at the end, and I was operating on seeing him right around the time he died.

Another two friends were looking after him in his illness (a blood cancer) and a complication of a fungus in his lungs that treatment of one affected negatively the treatment of the other. Basically he was spiraling.

When he got to the point of hospitalization, he was optimistic and so were Tom and (i cannot remember her name and I had dated her in the seventies -saw the Beau Brummels and McKendree Springs at the Red Dawg Saloon) - optimistic, too. Irv used the time to do the art for a couple of albums he recorded.

One morning Tom went to Irv's room. The bed was broken down and the art was on the hospital table over it. It broke Tom down emotionally for days, but it made me a bit happy, Irv never felt like it was the end.


How our other friends picked through Irv's estate was my nightmare.

One loaded Irv's record collection of over 10,000 records and hocked it for $600.

Things that had value beyond cash were trashed. I still have a photo of his mother and a couple of girls friends smoking cigarettes and laughin, wearing 'Newsy' caps laughing and at ease in Warsaw in the early, early 1930s. I wish I weren't so technology challenged so I could post it.

To me it's like a relic.

[FakeNoose]

32. Do you know anyone who has a scanner?

Nowadays many desktop printers are also scanners. It's possible to scan photos, documents etc. and create a .jpg, which is a digitally created photo. So the .jpg scanned photos are (mostly) what we post on DU. Also copy shops such as Fedex will scan items and give you a .jpg which you'll need to transfer to your phone or a USB thumbdrive. (They might even email the .jpg to you.)

If you don't have a way to scan the photo, it's also possible to take a picture of it with your cellphone. The quality won't be as nice but maybe you can try that yourself?

Before you can post it on DU, the .jpg file (digital photo) must be saved on Google, Chrome or some other hosting website. Look in the "Community Help" section for pointers on how to do that. Once you have saved the .jpg (scanned photo) on the hosting site it's possible to share that photo on DU. I hope someone you know can help you do this, but maybe you can try it yourself.

Good luck my friend!

[marble falls]

34. I have a scanner, but I am also dyslexic and left handed, I have tried in the past to do this ...

... have never been successful.

Part of it is I have no trust in google or google chrome.

I would love - absolutely love - to post this picture

[FakeNoose]

35. Any friends or relatives close by who can help with this?

It's not hard to do my friend, once someone helps you do it the first time.

You should scan the photo for your own use, even if you never share it.

Old photos fade, they can get dirty or ruined accidently, they can be lost or burned in a fire. Once it has been scanned and saved in an archive, you'll never have to worry about that.

[marble falls]

37. I am my own youngest relative within 250 miles. I have a younger brother and sister, I am 71 ...

... so 'younger' in my circumstance is truly relative.

I can scan it to a thumb drive and send it or scan it as an e-mail attachment to you, maybe?

I would dearly love to see this posted.

[ananda]

9. I have a connection too... her story was sobering.

A couple I met and played with at my bridge club
are Jewish. The wife is from Hungary and evacuated
to the USA as a young chlld. Except for her and her
parents, her entire family were exterminated in the
Holocaust.

After she told her story, I said a few words and then
"Life goes on." And she said, yeah, life goes on.

[marble falls]

10. I believe that attitude is what the Jewish people also needed to keep their historical record ...

... of being abused manageable in the middle of yet another pogrom.

[agingdem]

14. My parents were Holocaust survivors..Auschwitz

Last edited Thu Oct 7, 2021, 02:30 PM - Edit history (1)

my mother never recovered...night terrors, suicide attempts, in/out of psychiatric hospitals...the Holocaust permeated every second of my life...not the greatest of childhoods.. but the upside of growing up with two damaged souls is I understood hate and learned tolerance very early in life

[marble falls]

23. Irv's mom had night horrors and had a fear that Irvin never ate enough ...

... not the Hollywood Jewish mother mime but a person who was truly panicked at the possibility that her children might actually starve here in the US. She passed in her sixties.

[Behind the Aegis]

15. Thank you for sharing.

We had relatives, while not in the Holocaust, as they had fled White Russia and Ukraine years before, who did the same thing. They hid valuables around the house in secret compartments, many of the hiding places were in plain sight, as to be easily overlooked. Some kept bags packed with important papers, including medical files. Some had a list of family names "encoded" so if the luggage was ever discovered or taken, it couldn't be used to find other Jews.

Another poster made a post in the Jewish Group about Dave Chappelle's latest anti-Semitic rant. The poster linked to a Jewish person who broke down the "joke" so others could easily understand the anti-Semitic nature of it....the resulting Twitter thread served as a stark reminder as to how prevalent and noxious anti-Semitism really is, with more than a few "chanting" the idiotic "109", to signify the number of nations or areas in which Jews were expelled over history and basically blaming the Jews for it. I mention it because while the bigots thrive on how "109" allegedly signifies the horrid nature of the Jew, it is a REAL reminder to my people what happens to us and how many times, and how many locations, we have chased from, sometimes on a moment's notice.

You also touch on another part of the Holocaust that, personally, I feel many people have no idea about and completely ignore, and that is after the liberation of the camps, Jews, and others, didn't just merrily skip back to their homes and resume their lives, pre-war. Many ended up in Displaced Persons camps, some for years! So, they went from one camp to another, and in a few DP camps, the treatment was better, yet these victims were still treated like trash. For gay men, well, we were simply sent to jail after being "liberated."

There is a huge focus on the build-up to and the actual events of The Holocaust, which is completely understandable. However, there is a missing component, and that is the aftermath. Sometimes there are stories about how they learned to cope (or not) to what happened in the camps, but the real history that took place in the years directly following WWII is overlooked. Disease, homelessness, statelessness, the still ever present anti-Semitism, and other issues also forged a generation of Jews and other marginalized groups. I do wish some of the few remaining survivors would speak to that small window of time, because it is there many went from victims to survivors.

[Demovictory9]

19. Never heard of these dp camps

Thanks for history lesson.

Wasnt there a recent - last 10 yrs- effort to record stories of survivors?

[marble falls]

20. Yes, and time is running out, we are very close to the centenary of WWII and the ...

... survivors are coming down to zero.

[Behind the Aegis]

21. There is an on-going attempt to record as many stories as possible.

As for the camps...

Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks.[1]

At the end of the Second World War, at least 11 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about seven million in Allied-occupied Germany. These included former prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and both non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. The Allies categorized the refugees as “displaced persons” (DPs) and assigned the responsibility for their care to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
more...

From 1945 to 1952, more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) lived in camps and urban centers in Germany, Austria, and Italy. These facilities were administered by Allied authorities and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

---

Emigration
After liberation, the Allies were prepared to repatriate Jewish displaced persons to their homes, but many DPs refused or felt unable to return. The Allies deliberated and procrastinated for years before resolving the emigration crisis, although some Allied officials had proposed solutions just months after liberation. Earl Harrison, in his August 1945 report to President Truman, recommended mass population transfer from Europe and resettlement View This Term in the Glossary in British-controlled Palestine or the United States. The report influenced President Truman to order that preference be given to DPs, especially widows and orphans, in US immigration quotas. Great Britain, however, claimed that the United States had no right to dictate British policy insofar as the admission of Jews to Palestine was concerned.

---

On May 14, 1948, the United States and the Soviet Union recognized the State of Israel. Congress also passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, authorizing 200,000 DPs to enter the United States. The law's stipulations made it unfavorable at first to the Jewish DPs, but Congress amended the bill with the DP Act of 1950. By 1952, over 80,000 Jewish DPs had immigrated to the United States under the terms of the DP Act and with the aid of Jewish agencies.

With over 80,000 Jewish DPs in the United States, about 136,000 in Israel, and another 20,000 in other nations, including Canada and South Africa, the DP emigration crisis came to an end. Almost all of the DP camps were closed by 1952. The Jewish displaced persons began new lives in their new homelands around the world.
more...

THE RETURN TO LIFE IN THE DISPLACED PERSONS CAMPS, 1945-1956

After the war, the western Allies established DP camps in the Allied-occupied zones of Germany, Austria and Italy.

The first inhabitants of these camps were concentration camp survivors who had been liberated by the Allies on German soil. Conditions in these camps, especially at the beginning, were very difficult. Many of the camps were former concentration camps and German army camps. Survivors found themselves still living behind barbed wire, still subsisting on inadequate amounts of food and still suffering from shortages of clothing, medicine and supplies.

---

In the DP camps, Holocaust survivors sometimes lived alongside antisemites and individuals who had harmed Jews during the war. In the summer of 1945, Earl Harrison, US President Truman’s emissary to the camps, wrote a report on the Jews’ suffering in the DP camps. As a result, the Jewish refugees were transferred to separate camps where they were given a degree of independence, and conditions improved. The Americans enabled US Jewish relief organizations and activists from Eretz Israel to operate in the camps. The living conditions in the British-occupied zone, where Jewish refugees had arrived mostly from Bergen-Belsen, were far less comfortable.

---

After the Holocaust, there were tens of thousands of Jewish survivors in Poland, as well as refugees who had returned there from the Soviet Union. On comprehending the enormity of the destruction of Polish Jewry and being confronted with manifestations of antisemitism, which reached their zenith with the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, these Jews decided to move westward to the American-occupied zone, and so they too arrived at the DP camps. In 1947, they were joined by a further wave of Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and the total number of DP camp inhabitants reached a peak of some 250,000.
more...

[marble falls]

22. I grew up in DP neighborhood on the near Westside neighborhood of Cleveland ...

... when I was about 7 or 8, we played 'war', all of us had a some close relative or another who had been in the military and we were well equipped.

All the WWII war movies were centered on the fighting and never touched on the politics or the dirty truths. Germans were just combatants, not the instrument of Nazi horrors.

My brother and sister and I were the designated Germans (I never really heard or knew the significance of what "Nazi" meant), I think because we were blond haired and blue eyed and because we were Lutherans, most of the neighborhood were Roman Catholic or Orthodox. We would usually win because we were some of the few kids who had the patience to sit in an ambush quietly for an extended period of time.

Every one had US flags and we had no German flag. One day I found a red load flag that had fallen of a load and took it home to ask my uncle Jack ( a collage student at Case Western U.) and asked him to help me make a flag.

He took a black crayon and colored in a big swaztika on it an mounted it on apiece of 1x1" lumber, and we stepped outside and marched around the block carrying it.

When we got to the side of the block, a fairly old Serbian saw us. I'd never seen anyone vault a fence before in real life and this 60 or so year old man did it, right over one of those old iron fences with the little spear pickets.

He grabbed the flag out of my hands and ripped it off the staff, wadded it, spit on it and threw it to the ground stomping on it.

As upset as he was, and he was very upset, he was gentle to us telling us it "was a very bad flag", and that we were very good kids.

I've never ever forgot that: I mark it as the spark to understand what it was about.

I think that little old man changed a major portion of my life and what my values are today. He didn't teach me, he got me to teach myself.

[Retired Engineer Bob]

33. This is an example of why I think social media sucks so badly

People post outlandish things with no real consequences. At worst, you may get a negative comment back, a comment that is easily ignored or is attacked by fellow group thinkers. There are no consequences.

My folks were on vacation in San Francisco, taking a bus tour to the Napa Valley wineries. One jerk on the bus was loudly spouting off on the evils of homosexuality. This went on for a while. My dad got up from his seat, approached the guy, and told him “why don’t you just shut the hell up, nobody wants to hear your crap” (words to that effect). Others on the bus gave my dad verbal support. The bigot was silent for the remainder of the tour. Consequences.

[marble falls]

36. My dad fixed that for us kids when we were young. Like the other kids in town, we had started ...

... calling each other 'queers'. He heard us do it exactly once. He sat us down and said, "everyone is different, everybody deserves respect. There are some words good people just do not use." That made an impression on me, though I did not get the meaning of that word until some years later.

Hillary Clinton is right: it takes a village to raise a child.

At the time of this sit down, we had two men as tenants in our back "little house". The "Major" was older, and his housemate who was a young adult. Genuinely nice to my brother, sister and me. In the summer sometimes I'd meet the Major at his bus stop around 5:00pm and walk my bike home while he talked to me like I wasn't some dumb kid.

One afternoon, I was late and wheeling my bike to meet the Major, I came around the corner as he was passing a neighbor on the side walk watering his flowers. I was too fast to stop, but I had enough time to realize I couldn't ride on the tree lawn (devil's strip in 50's Cleveland) and I did not want to hit a tenant, I ran into the the neighbor who sprayed me down good.

[canetoad]

25. Born in the UK, '54

Nine years after it ended. My dad served in the occupation force (national service) in the Royal Engineers. In primary school, there were 'DPs' living next door, that was pretty standard. My best friend's parents fled the Jugoslavian fascists. My childhood involved learning about the, "Belsen Horror Camp". Nothing was hidden, so full and violent was the repugnance at the Nazi actions.

Interesting you should post this today. I've been looking at the origins of Holocaust denial. One of it's early airings was at the trials of Ernst Zündel in the 1980s. I can't really remember organised denial before that. The Zündel trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Z%C3%BCndel) featured evidence from Fred Leuchter, a fascinating, nutcase in his own right. Error Morris made a documentary: Mr Death.

David Irving apparently didn't glom onto holocaust denial until the Zündel trial, poor bugger. That was never going to be a winning position.

If you get a chance - have a look at this doco. 'After Hitler' covers the years after WW2; it was not all peace, light and happiness in the years after WW2. Millions were homeless. Millions were raped and brutalized. Millions were dispossessed - many of them were miles and miles from home. It was a horror comparable to the fighting.

[marble falls]

28. I was living in Nebraska when I learned about Fred Leuchter, at about the same time ...

... that was going on, this was going on in Nebraska:

https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/jewish-cantor-and-his-family-resist-terrorism-convert-attacking-ku-klux-klan-leader-1991

This story meant much to me and when I first read it, it was a very emotional thing.

As a Lutheran we are taught to offer unconditional love: Cantor Weisser and his wife and family are among the very few I know about who actually live it.

[Shellback Squid]

26. Walters brother decided to remain in Austria while he escaped to England and later to the US

his brother died in the camps, he married Lotte, two children, he was a good man, his wife Lotte died a few years
ago, he died years before
he was proud of his Austrian heritage, he loved to wear his hat with the pheasant feather sticking out of the band

in memory of Walter of Austria and Lotte of Lichtenstein

[marble falls]

29. In Memoriam, requiescat in pace ...

When these libraries burn down, it is our duty and great honor to be their memorials.

[Maeve]

30. My last college roommate's parents had the camp wrist tattoos

We never talked much about it, but I believe that their experiences were part of why they always made sure she had snacks galore, even though she was on the dorm food plan; they had known starvation and never wanted her to know hunger. She was a very generous and loving soul.

[marble falls]

31. She'd never let me leave without a paper lunch bag of her spaetzle ...

... it just occurred to: she served the lunch line at an elementary school.