Sacrilege

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945

To Jews, ever mindful of Jewish history and a never-ending plague of assaults on their presence by communities wherever diaspora Jews have put down alternate roots, after their second expulsion from Judea, their ancestral homeland in the Middle East, the Holocaust represents an unspeakable atrocity committed by Nazi Germany with the considerable assistance of eastern and western Europe and the determined oblivious attitude of the West in general to their plight. 

 

When Jews repeat in their minds 'never again' it means that they will do their utmost personally to fight back against the persecution and defamation they are endlessly subjected to. 'Fighting back' is a passion expressed in the struggle for survival. Slights, born of an inbred, taught and sought discrimination  expressed against the Jewish presence has a habit of becoming socially institutionalized. It ebbs and flows, like the oceans surrounding continents.

 

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial

 

And whatever continent Jews happen to populate, a minority group within much larger groups, they are always 'noticed' as outsiders. With that notice comes a degree of suspicion. A suspicion often a nudge away from contempt and hatred. For within the larger population there are always those whose antipathy toward Jews -- even and particularly if those haters know nothing about Jews, do not know any individual Jews, have never met Jews -- twists them toward rage against Jews.

 

There are Holocaust memorials erected in various geographies across the world, in a determined effort never to forget the stark inhumanity that humans are capable of exerting against other humans. Where governments and individuals embrace the opportunity to learn and to empathize, committed to ensuring as believers in elementary human rights that nothing of this dread magnitude will ever re-occur. And yet, on a smaller, and equally inexcusable scale, they do, and each time they do humanity is shamed and shocked anew.

 

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob

 

Start small? With ignorance about the fact that a fascist horde schemed to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, on its way to conquering the world for Aryan purity. That the organized industrial-scale mass murder succeeded to the degree that an estimated six million Jews were systematically slaughtered. The corpses were used to produce soap and fertilizer. Children and adults alike fed into death chambers where Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, killed them, and their bodies were shovelled into vast, non-stop crematoria. The odour of burning flesh and the ash circulating as particulate matter lifted by the smoke exuded by the giant chimneys to fertilize the fields of Europe. 

Canada was late to erecting a memorial to the Holocaust; but one was finally built and opened to the public in 2017. On a number of occasions, the stark, grey angular walls of mourning attracted professional photographers on fashion shoots, as likely backgrounds to show off glamorous designer apparel featuring poised, sleek female models. The photographers in each instance appear not to have known, or really gave no thought to the fact that their commercial enterprise in artistry and mercantilism in a place sacred to the memory of millions of people was an assault on social morality and values.

In the latest of these events, the photographer was scathing in his response to criticism over his obtuse choice of backdrop for a photo shoot:

"If taking a photo with grey walls as a backdrop is a crime, lock me up."

"If you don't want people shooting at certain walls in the city, you should put on a reflective vest, get a whistle and go stand in front of them year 'round."

According to statistics available from the Jewish Virtual Library online, in 1939, the year World War Two broke out, there was a total of 16,728,000 Jews across the globe. By 1945, following the Holocaust years and the end of the War when Allied powers defeated the Axis powers headed by Nazi Germany, there were 11,000,000 Jews left world wide, after their mass extermination by the Third Reich throughout the war years. Latest figures for 2018, give a world Jewish total population of 14,606,000. Clearly a complete recovery of numbers has not yet been realized a full 75 years later.

My father and mother arrived in Canada in the mid-1920. My father's passage had been arranged by a philanthropic organization that had picked him and other young Jewish boys off the streets of Warsaw where they lived as orphans and runaways from pogroms. My father, arrived in Warsaw from a much smaller town, called a 'shtetel' when, at age 13, his parents both died and he was placed in a poor house operated as a charity by the locals. He ran away to Warsaw in search of his older brother. He failed to find that brother, and began living on the street. And like the other children he became an indentured farmhand in Canada until the years passed and he was able to pay off his debt, and was freed to assume a normal life.

My mother and her older sisters emigrated from the Pale of Settlement during the time of the Russian Revolution. They managed to leave that zone that encompassed parts of  Ukraine, Latvia and Poland, multi-lingual, oppressed and discriminated against thanks to a loan given them by an extended family member who had earlier emigrated to the United States and was comfortably settled there. At that time it was easier to enter Canada than the United States, although during the war years few countries opened their borders to Jews desperate to escape an inevitable fate.

I was three years old when the war began, and nine when it ended. I knew I was different than other children because other children didn't have to experience being accused of being a 'Christ killer'. Other children had grandparents while I had none. I had questions, some of which my parents responded to, and others which never left my lips. I knew that Jews lacked popularity in society and despite that unlike a child crying in a locker room that I dimly recall from my early school years, never wished to be other than a Jew.

I overheard my parents discussing the plight of European Jews in whispered tones of panic that disturbed me, but questions respecting that subject were not entertained as unfit subjects of conversations with children. But I could read, and occasionally came across papers in my father's possession alluding to claims of mass murder, a concept well beyond my understanding, but leaving me with a fearful hunted feeling that haunted me, and left me with the feeling that I must always be on guard.

As I grew older, I read accounts of the Holocaust constantly. Historical accounts and personal accounts. I wanted to know every possible detail. While of course reading much earlier accounts, almost from the dawn of history of the Jewish struggle to overcome adversity, the hatred, suspicion and violence accorded their presence throughout the world, through the ages. And then, this, as good an ecapsulation as any of the experience of a then-young girl who survived Auschwitz:

Witness To Genocide : Margit Buchhalter Feldman

"Margit [Buchhalter Feldman] devoted her life to telling her inspiring story and touched the hearts of thousands of students, educators and members of the community."
"Her goal was to inspire people to stand up for one another and fight against all forms of prejudice and hate."
Obituary, Margit Buchhalter Feldman, 90, Somerset, New Jersey, COVID victim

Holocaust survivor Margit Buchhalter Feldman, 90, died the coronavirus. (Twitter)

"It is important for me to remember that 6 million of my fellow Jews were slaughtered, and a million and a half of those victims were children."
"I am here and I firmly believe it is because God wanted me to survive and be here and tell the free world what an uncaring world did to its fellow human beings."
"You were put into a barrack, where people died. The straw that you laid down [on] was full of whatever came out of their bodies -- vomit or excretions. It didn't take 24 hours for your body to get covered with lice."
"I rose from the ashes of Auschwitz, Krakow, Greentsery, Bergen-Belsen as a child of 15 years of age from the Holocaust to rebirth and a new life."
Margit Buchhalter Feldman

"Her legacy is best captured in her work to ensure that the world never forgets the horrors of the Holocaust."
"Margit gave us so much hope over her 90-plus years."
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy

"She was just an extraordinary human being, to have lived through all that, to have lived that life and to have suffered through those camps, yet to be grateful for life, to see the promise of tomorrow, she was just such an exceptional person."
"After living through that hell, she was blessed with the gift of authenticity. She lived fearlessly and she loved fearlessly."
"It's like there was nothing that the world could do that would cause Margit to live anything less than with full authenticity and the full measure of her being."
Jim McGreevey, former Democratic State Assemblyman, former New Jersey Governor 

A photo dated April 1945 of women prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp gathering dead fellow inmates before burying them. BRITISH ARMY HANDOUT

This courageous woman who defied the intention of the Third Reich to slaughter her as they had done her close and extended family, her parents and her relatives, lived to make a full life for herself, to raise a family of her own and to become a valued member of the society in which she lived. She was born in June of 1929 in Budapest as an only child. She and her family were forced to leave their home in the agricultural town of Tolcsva, all that they owned no longer theirs. Imprisoned nearby temporarily, then shipped off to Auschwitz.

There she no longer was to know herself as Margit Buchhalter, but A23029, the tattooed number burnt into her flesh as a concentration camp inmate destined for extermination. She was only fifteen, but passed herself off as 18, a life-saving decision on her part, which ensured she would be sent to slave labour camps before being sent to a death camp. She recalled "big heaps and mounds of dead bodies laying all around", as people died of hunger, exhaustion and disease, during her time as a forced labourer.

She was liberated on April 15, 1945, alone and deathly ill, suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy, seriously injured as well, when the Germans attempted to destroy the camp with the use of explosives. She was nursed back to health in Sweden, recovered, and chose to move to the United States in 1947 where she was received an education as an X-Ray technician. Her work led her to meet her future husband who was recovering from tuberculosis, at a hospital in New York.

She and Harvey Feldman married in 1953 and raised two children together, who eventually gave them three grandchildren. On Tuesday, Margit Buchhalter Feldman died of the effects of COVID-19. Her husband Harvey remains hospitalized with the novel coronavirus. Their son is now a doctor, and he works on the front lines of the New Jersey pandemic where over 75,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus have been identified, causing over 3,500 deaths.

Although this Holocaust survivor spoke nothing of her painfully wrenching experiences for many years, there was an occasion when she had agreed to speak to young students in her Bound Brook, New Jersey neighbourhood whom she introduced to the unspeakable catastrophe that had befallen  her family of 70 related Jews, and of her incarceration in a number of concentration camps as a slave labourer. The children's reaction inspired her to continue her work as a witness to genocide.

In 1991 the-then state assemblyman Jim McGreevey collaborated with this survivor to promote Holocaust Education in New Jersey through the formation of a special commission. She went on to help pass a bill mandating a Holocaust and genocide curriculum in public schools in the state, while speaking to classrooms of children for years, and finally releasing a 2003 book detailing her life as a teenage survivor: "Margit: A Teenager's Journey Through the Holocaust and Beyond".

The railway tracks leading to the main gates at Auschwitz II - Birkenau Scott Barbour/Getty

At the supermarket earlier today where we do our usual weekly shopping, there was navel oranges from South Africa and Egypt, dates from Iran, figs from Turkey, grapes from South Africa and clementines from Morocco. We usually enjoy oranges, clementines, grapes, dates, and figs. Today, we bought none of them, no dates, no figs, no navel oranges, no grapes, no clementines. These are all produce-exporting countries that express their avowed hostility to Israel, the Jewish state, and some of them threaten its existence as well.

As Jews, we have the freedom in Canada to express our own personal hostility to those who feel the Holocaust, which according to them didn't really exist, and if it did, it didn't kill as many Jews as evidence and history state, and in any event however many Jews were exterminated it simply wasn't enough. So we indulge in our own very personal boycott; one that obviously does no damage to the countries that produce the fruits that we will not eat, but which salves our sense of conscious justice.

It rained throughout the day yesterday, and when we awoke this morning it was still raining. No walk for us and our puppies in the ravine, alas. But by the time I put away all the groceries on our return home from shopping, and pre-prepared a casserole of macaroni, chopped green onions, green peas, canned salmon and a cheese choux for dinner, the rain had petered out.

So off we went into the forest, down into the ravine, for a mind-calming walk-about. A somewhat physically difficult one as it happens, since the snowpack has been both melting and softening, so that every step taken sinks deeply into the snow tamped down on the trails through the forest, and it takes far more energy to hike along under those circumstances. The creek at the bottom of the ravine is full and running furiously; two days of rain will do that.

There was a light foggy mist rising from the creek, giving a somewhat opaque albeit sheer look to the atmosphere. Jackie and Jillie were happy as always to be out in the forest, gorging themselves on newly-released aromas, some innocent enough and others quite, quite rude. One important thing we are guaranteed when we ramble through the forest, is peace of mind and scenic vistas to revel in, throughout our wonderful natural surroundings.

The amusing thing is that our street is habitually so poorly plowed by the municipality following snow storms that it is relatively more comfortable and easier making our way through the forest trails than it is wading up our street to access the entrance to the ravine. Whether driving or walking on the street one is forced to wallow in thick layers of ice and snow interspersed with rain-freed areas now presenting themselves as akin to little lakes.

On Saturday evening we settled down to watch a German film titled "Labyrinth of Lies". The film is a period piece, taking place in Germany fifteen years after the Second World War. When the vanquished Germany of fascist Nazi aspirations was licking its wounds and carrying on with life. It was reaching toward normalcy, not quite spurning the recent past, but tucking it away in some obscure place in peoples' apprehensions, generally disinterested in disinterring any aspect of what had just recently passed.

And most particularly the Holocaust. It was not just denial, but indifference. Germany felt it had suffered and suffered enough, that any recollection of what they had no wish to recall, and felt they knew nothing of was unwelcome. Most Germans claimed never to have heard the placename Auschwitz much less be aware of what it signified as the most hideously-linked place in Poland where Germany felt it safe from public censure to get on with its plan to obliterate the presence of Jews throughout occupied Europe through a plan of physical erasure by any means proving successful.

The Final Solution employed many means of extinguishing the lives of Jews, young and old, but it discovered the most efficient in a combination of suffocating gas chambers and vast crematoria whose chimneys lofted to the heavens belched the minuscule blackened remains of millions of innocent children, women and men, infants and elderly alike. In the minds of most Germans it never happened. In the minds of German officials it was best to behave as though it never happened. No reckoning required, no inner search for the rationale that held the liberation of the world would be accomplished by obliterating the presence of an ethno-cultural-religious group whose members had been recognized as achieving great forward strides in advancing civilization, in artistic and scientific breakthroughs enriching humanity.

Had they been a group whose presence on Earth added nothing of significance to the greater good, their anguish and destruction would still have cried to the heavens for moral retribution.

The year 1958 saw a newly introduced staff member to the German federal court prosecution team, a young man whose idealism was groomed by his memory of a father who instructed his son to "always do the right thing". The father had never returned from the war front, and fifteen years on was presumed dead, but his memory remained precious and large in his son's mind, as someone who rejected the Third Reich, inspiring the son to take on a campaign to restore honour and dignity to a Germany he loved, and throughout the course of his passionate adventure in discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, discovering that no one was interested, everything chose to deny, and his course of action was doomed to fail because of governmental obstructionism.

His commitment to cleansing Germany of its immense moral blot against humanity spurred him to see justice done impartially in the recognition of the great crime committed against Europe's Jewish community. First-hand narrative accounts of the suffering and horrors witnessed by survivors left him shaken and appalled. The grief expressed by survivors burrowed deep into his own soul. Discovering that his venerated father was in fact a member of the Nazi Party, the chief prosecutor attempted to assuage his junior member's despair by assuring him that membership had been universal within the legal community. Just as the knowledge of the vicious oppression of the Jews was common knowledge among average Germans who claimed to have known nothing of what had occurred.

His commitment and determination against all odds, however, and the support he was given by his superior, the federal prosecutor general, who just happened to be a Jew who had been a wartime slave worker in Auschwich, saw Johann Radmaan, the young prosecutor, eventually prevail. His desperate search to apprehend the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, came to naught, but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Mossad capture Adolf Eichmann, and was outraged when Germany had no interest in requesting his extradition from Israel, to face public trial and the consequences due him.

His efforts did result in the arrest and prosecution and trial of relatively routine, minor members of the Nazi military, complicit in the extermination of their helpless Jewish victims.

My husband and I have lived our lives in the harrowing shadow of the Holocaust, it is never far from our minds. So we don't necessarily seek out films depicting any reference to those horrors. We don't need reminders, we have never 'forgotten'. Last night, however, we decided to watch a film documenting the struggle of an Austrian-born Jewish woman to recover her family's wealth in paintings, specifically paintings owned by her family, by Gustav Klimt whose famous painting of her aunt was among them, one treasured as a family heirloom, which the State of Austria treasured as a state heirloom of great renown, rejecting its Jewish provenance, presenting it as an anonymous subject. They renamed it from Portrait of Adele to Woman in Gold. And Helen Mirren, through her acting skills portrayed Austrian-American Maria Altmann movingly.

Gustave Klimpt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

I had read so much as a child and young woman revealing the extent of Nazi-led atrocities against the Jews of Europe leading to the ultimate plan to achieve the mass extermination of an ethnic group of peoples whom German fascism under Adolf Hitler considered not merely unter-mensch, but a pestilence. I hardly needed reminders. Still, it was an additional jolt.

The proud, nationalist country that gave the United Nations its grave and honourable demeanour under Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's nine-year authority, and which rallied around him in grand defiance when it was revealed that he had been a medalled and commended part of the military intelligence of Nazi Germany whose signature appeared on documents linked to massacres and deportations did all in its power to retain in its possession iconic art treasures looted from Jews.

That viewing brought back memories of my own, aside from my growing horror as a child reading about the persecution of Jews going back into ancient history, to discover that modern history outmanoeuvred the primitive pogroms to morph into a state-sponsored, detailed and mechanized efficient killing-machine dedicated to genocide.

Back in 1957 when I was 20 and working at a large accounting firm Deloitte, Plender, Haskins & Sells in downtown Toronto there was a young German woman about my own age also working there. For some reason I had invited her and her husband over for dinner one evening. There we were, all four pleasantly seated at the dinner table in the first house my husband and I owned, chatting about various things when the conversation turned to people we didn't like in our workplace. The lanky young husband smiled and with his accented German said something to the effect that it was too bad Germany hadn't targeted such people instead of the Jews. A stifling cloak of silence fell over us. I was aghast and repelled that I had invited someone of that ilk into our home.

Many years later when our firstborn was 17, a young woman approached me in a downtown shopping mall, asking if I knew where she could buy yogourt, in an accented German, a vulnerable-looking woman-child. I responded and somehow gained the knowledge that she was backpacking her way across Canada, and had been sleeping in an abandoned building on an island with a bridge approach nearby. We went with her to her sleeping place, gathered her belongings and took her home with us where she showed me the knife she carried with her, showered, washed her clothing, and slept over a few days. She asked my husband to drive her to the highway leading to Montreal, her next destination. We gave her a few dollars to tide her a bit, hugged her and waved her off.

Later still, canoe-camping for a week at Killarney provincial park with our youngest son we were hiking up a steep hill on a day-trip when my husband and I begged off going any further, leaving it to our son to continue to mount to the summit while we sat awaiting his return. It was a lengthy wait and eventually a young couple hove into view undertaking the same ascent. They were pleasant, eager to talk, and German. German youth are adventurous.

When we lived in Tokyo and became members of Friends of the Earth hiking club there were a number of young Germans who were also members of that club, and we fraternized with them during our week-end adventures when the group would take buses, trains, subways in a long succession of trips to gain the outer edges of the city and on into small towns adjacent mountain hikes. One young man in particular often chose our company; he hoped my husband could help him obtain a visa to Canada.

One end-of-summer adventure that took us to northern British Columbia with our youngest son, to the Kariboo Mountain range where at the 3,000-foot level the Bowron Lakes canoe-camping circuit beckoned, saw us introduced yet again to a young, adventurous couple whom we twice shared a camping spot with. This pair was Austrian. And they revealed to us their fear resulting from the presence on the circuit of a pair of Germans. It was the Germans, they declared, who were responsible for the Second World War and its excessive atrocities; Austrians were completely innocent.

As a now-elderly Jew who as a child grew up in the dark shadow of World War II and the morbid horrors of the Holocaust, I was happy to hear that the previous, Conservative-led government of my country, the only Allied nation that had heretofore not established a memorial to the Holocaust, was prepared to launch such a memorial.

My husband and I were quick to respond as subscribers to the funding campaign that was initiated back then. Another government has since come to power, led by the Liberal Party of Canada. Under the current government the memorial was completed, and recently opened to the public, among much fanfare. The current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, took credit for what his predecessor, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government had initiated.

At the opening ceremony for the Holocaust memorial, there was Justin Trudeau and other government notables, including the minister of Heritage, under whose auspices the memorial falls. There too, were members of the Jewish community, heads of religious congregations, and a number of Holocaust survivors, all attesting to a sense of closure that Canada had finally erected such a memorial.

And then came the topper; this government led by 'progressive' liberals, which vaunts itself as inclusive; unlike the war years and the singular horrors of the Holocaust unfolding when Canada refused admission to Jewish refugees seeking haven, sending them back whence they came, to obliteration in Europe, this Canada invites global refugees to its shores. Justin Trudeau preens himself as Canada's sunny alternative to its neighbour's bleak, dark refusal to continue accepting migrants posing as refugees.

And although six million Jewish lives were extinguished during the years of Nazi Germany's fixation on exterminating Europe's Jews, the plaque on the newly-unveiled Holocaust memorial in Ottawa, the nation's capital, makes no mention of Jews. It does assert that countless men, women and children perished during the Holocaust; minority groups such as Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, the physically and mentally delayed, political dissidents and gays. Who were indeed persecuted, imprisoned and murdered.

But the six million Jews? There is Holocaust denial and then there is the more subtle averting of full recognition.

Senator Linda Frum: In Justin Trudeau's Canada the new Holocaust Monument plaque doesn't mention Jews, anti-Semitism or the six million.

"Bey, where have all these human bones along this road come from?" Balkian asked the captain disingenuously.
"These are the bones of Armenians who were killed in August and September. The order had come from Constantinople. Even though the minister of the interior [i.e., Talat] had huge ditches dug for the corpses, the winter floods washed the dirt away, and now the bones are everywhere, as you see", Captain Shukri replied.
"Upon whose orders were the massacres of the Armenians committed?" Balakian probed.
"The orders came from the Ittihad [i.e. Unionist] Central Committee and the Interior Ministry in Constantinople", Captain Shukri explained. "This order was carried out most severely by Kemal . . . vice-governor of Yozgat. When Kemal, a native of Van, heard that the Armenians had massacred all his family members at the time of the Van revolt, he sought revenge and massacred the women and children, together with the men."
Balakian's questions did not upset the captain. He seemed to enjoy filling the long hours in conversation with the priest, inured to the evil he recounted: of the thousands of men hacked to death, of 6,400 Armenian women systematically robbed of their possessions and murdered along with their children, actions he consistently referred to as "cleansing"(paklamak in Turkish).
The mass-murdering Ottoman officer even seemed to develop an affection for the Armenian priest, offering to protect him from all harm if only he would convert to Islam.
Through conversations with Turkish officers, Balakian learned every aspect of the Armenian tragedy from the government's perspective. In his exchanges with survivors encountered along the way, the priest also deepened his knowledge of the Armenian experience of the genocide. He wove both perspectives together in his remarkable memoirs, first published in Armenian in 1922, thereby discharging his duty as a witness to what Balakian dubbed the "Armenian Golgotha".
Surviving the genocide was easier said than done. By preserving cordial relations with his captors and, in his own words, putting his trust in God, Balakian lived one day at a time, always at risk of sudden death. During the length of their forced march, the priest and his fellows confronted the magnitude of the horror that had befallen the Ottoman Armenian community: the bodies of the dead, the pleas of starving survivors, the shame of those who had converted to Islam to save their lives. He recorded the details in his diary as the caravan made its way across Anatolia to Cilicia towards the Syrian Desert. The accounts of other survivors of the Armenian genocide confirmed much of what he wrote.
Fear of violent death that might come at any moment without warning compounded the daily experience of brutality, exhaustion, and deprivation. Many Armenians chose to take their own lives rather than face the cruelty of strangers. Even Grigoria Balakian, who had vowed to survive, was driven to contemplate suicide. When accosted by an armed gang near the Halys River, Balakian and his comrades agreed to drive into the torrential waters in the event of "inescapable disaster", as many had done before them.
"Surely this deep grave of tens of thousands of Armenians would not refuse to take us too into its flowing turbid currents . . . and save us from harrowing and cruel deaths, at the hands of these Turkish criminals", he recalled. Only Balakian's presence of mind in negotiating the caravan's way past the gang spared them all on that occasion.
Manuel Kerkyasharian, who called himself M.K., was only a nine-year-old boy when he watched his mother dive from a bridge into the turbulent waters of the Euphrates. Natives of Adana, M.K.'s family had been deported to the Mesopotamian settlement of Ras al-Ayn (in modern Syria). An only child, M.K. saw his family robbed by armed gangs and beaten by the gendarmes sent to escort them. His mother's feet swelled painfully from the extensive marching, but she struggled to keep up with the caravan, knowing the fate of those who fell behind.
One night, when she knew she could walk no further, M.K.'s mother made a terrible request of her husband: "Lead me to the river's edge. I am going to throw myself into the water. If I stay, the Arabs will kill me with torture." Her husband refused, but a neighbour understood her fears and carried M.K.'s mother on his back to the banks of the swollen Euphrates. Her young son and a priest followed them to the river, but M.K. averted his eyes when she threw herself into the torrent. When he turned back, he saw his mother briefly before the current carried her away.
Within two days of his mother's death, M.K.'s father died in his sleep. The young boy was now an orphan with no one to care for him. He watched as soldiers killed a number of women and children who, like him, had been left behind by the caravan. He was robbed of his remaining clothes down to his underpants and abandoned by the roadside alone -- hungry, thirsty, and terrified.
The Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian encountered many such orphans along the way. At Islahiye, near where M.K. was orphaned, he encountered an eight-year-old boy begging with his eleven-year-old sister, both nearly naked and dying from hunger. The elder sister explained "in a schoolgirl's proper Armenian" how all the other members of their family of fourteen had died, leaving the  children to fend for themselves. "How I wish we hadn't survived". she sobbed.
Buffered by forces beyond his control, young Manuel Kerkyasharian did survive. He found himself among Arabs and Kurds, people whose languages he did not speak and whose actions he did not understand. Some gave him food and clothing; others stoned and robbed him. He witnessed acts of terrible brutality and crossed plains covered with Armenian corpses. He was rescued by four Kurdish women who found him wandering on the open road and took him back to their village as a domestic servant. He spent the remainder of the war years moving among the Kurdish villages on the Turkish-Syrian frontier, living off the kindness -- and fleeing the cruelty -- of strangers.
As he moved between the villages of south-eastern Anatolia, M.K. encountered a number of Armenian children and young women who, like him, had taken refuge among the Kurds. Many had been collected from the death marches and taken to work in the homes and farms of the Kurdish villagers. M.K. met several young Armenian women who had married into the families of their Kurdish protectors....

From: The Fall of the Ottomans -- The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

Remembering the Holocaust

• To ruminate upon exile, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehension, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, and to resolve to sleep no more. Sir Thomas Browne
• It is more wretched to commit than to suffer an injury. Seneca
• It is the mark of a good man not to know how to do an injury. Publilius Syrus
• It is a principle of human nature to hate those whom you have injured. Tacitus
• But when I observed the affairs of men plunged in such darkness, the guilty flourishing in continuous happiness, and the righteous tormented, my religion, tottering, began once more to fail. Claudian
• To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it. Plato

 The Home Book of Quotations

• Still on Israel's head forlorn, Every nation heaps its scorn. Emma Lazarus
• Who hateth me but for my happiness? Or who is honoured now but for his wealth? Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus, Than pitied in a Christian poverty. Marlowe
• He hath . . . laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Shakespeare
• If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. Albert Einstein 
• Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon. Benjamin Disraeli
• The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes. George Eliot
• When people talk about a wealthy man of my creed, they call him an Israelite; but if he is poor they call him a Jew. Heinrich Heine

 The Home Book of Quotations
 

•  April 20, 1943: Near Krakow, Poland, Jewish women attack their male SS guards while being transferred from one person to another. Most are killed.
• April 30, 1943: Two thousand Jews deported from Wlodawa, Poland, to Sobibor attack the death camp's SS guards on arrival at the unloading ramp. All of the Jews are killed by SS machine guns and grenades.
• May 6, 1943: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, suggests to the Bulgarian foreign minister that Bulgarian-Jewish children should be sent to Poland rather than to Palestine.
• May 7, 1943: Nearly 7000 Jews are killed in Novogrudok, Belorussia; a group of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto is ambushed by German troops while travelling through the city's sewer system; Sephardic Jewish homes in Tunisia are ransacked and looted by departing German troops.
• August 11, 1945: Anti-Jewish riots erupt in Krakow, Poland.
• November 19, 1945: Anti=Jewish riots erupt in Lublin, Poland.
• November 20, 1945: The Nuremberg Trials open. Defendants include Hermann Goring, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolph Hess, and Julius Streicher.
• December 1945: Antisemitic Poles murder 11 Jews in the town of KosowLacki, Poland, less than six miles from the Treblinka extermination camp.
• December 22, 1945: The American Displaced Persons Act makes it easier for Nazi war criminals to immigrate to the United States; particularly benefiting Baltics, Ukrainians and ethnic Germans many who engaged in a "high level of collaboration:" with Germany.

 

• 1945 -- 1950: Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews survive German concentration-camp incarceration. About six million Jews have perished; 1.6 million nonincarcerated European Jews also survive. Jews emigrate from Europe en masse: 142,000 to Palestine/Israel; 72,000 to the U.S.; 16,000 to Canada, 8000 to Belgium and about 20,000 to other countries.

The Holocaust Chronicle