Newsletter for Generation 2 Generation

Editorial

A lot has happened since our last newsletter went out. On 7 October we marked a year since the most brutal assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Israel’s response to that atrocity is still in progress, with all its concomitant trauma and loss of innocent lives. Politically, we see the rise of right-wing governments across the Western world, elected democratically, discriminating against and dehumanising migrants and anyone seen as outside their ‘norms’.

Despite the lessons of the Holocaust, and subsequent genocides, the world does not yet seem to have learned from history. We find ourselves again watching a resurgence of the genocide in Sudan, human rights violations across the globe, and power handed to a convicted criminal, serial liar and racist demagogue (not Hitler this time).

And yet: this is when keeping alive the belief and hope that education can make a difference becomes crucial. We salute the determination of Lily Ebert, Holocaust survivor and educator, and Professor Yehuda Bauer, Holocaust academic and author, both recently passed away, to keep reminding the world of where wrong choices can lead. Those who have lived through the darkest of times – and that now includes witnesses to the 7 October massacre – know the importance of bearing testimony and keeping it alive.

In this issue we mark the anniversary (on 9-10 November) of the November Pogrom of 1938 (previously known as Kristallnacht). Anita Peleg compares those ‘race riots’ with the ones that took place in the UK this past summer. Joan Noble tells of her mother’s witnessing of the rise of persecution in her hometown in Germany. Together, these pieces remind us that all supporters of democracy have constantly to be on guard to prevent history repeating itself.

Vivienne Cato

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Recent Events

G2G Presents

G2G Presents: Calum Isaacs, The Miracle of Survival
Vivian Hassan-Lambert
 
Mirjam Finkelstein, G2G presenter Calum Isaac’s grandmother, was born two years after my mother (a Slovak survivor) in 1933. She was from an established, intellectual family in Charlottenburg, Berlin. As the Nazis came to power, Alfred Wiener, her father, collected documentation and his extensive archive became the Wiener Library, now housed in London’s Russell Square. In 1934, when Mirjam was one year old, the family moved to the Netherlands. There Mirjam and her two sisters attended school with Anne and Margo Frank.

Around 70 people, myself included, attended Calum’s online talk, which seamlessly wove historical information with the family’s experiences. The talk was framed within the idea of miracles and the luck of survival, interspersed with clips of filmed interviews with Mirjam. Mirjam comes across as intelligent, articulate and positive. Someone you want to listen to and learn from.

At the age of ten, Mirjam, her sisters and mother were transported to Westerbork transit camp and then to Bergen-Belsen. A year-and-a-half later, as part of a prisoner exchange, they were taken to relative freedom in Switzerland. Her mother died soon afterwards. Miraculously, her father also survived.

Mirjam eventually moved to London where she finished her education, became a maths teacher, married and had three children – all of whom became successful members of UK society: Anthony, an engineer and government scientific advisor; Daniel, a journalist, politician and author of the memoir Hitler, Stalin, Mom and Dad; and Tamara, permanent secretary to DEFRA.

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G2G Presents

The world’s most neglected genocide
Judith Hayman

OVER the last twenty years the people of Darfur, Sudan, have suffered the worst genocidal atrocities on the planet. – 600,000 have been killed and nine million people have been displaced – yet the world seems neither to know nor care about the tragedy.

G2G marked Refugee Week by highlighting the ethnic cleansing in Darfur with refugee and human rights organisations HIAS+JCORE, Waging Peace, and René Cassin.

Maddy Crowther of Waging Peace said: ‘Sudan does not make the news.’ She revealed the ongoing atrocities taking place today in El Fasher, capital of Northern Darfur, by militiamen of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its allies. She spoke of many hundreds of thousands of people’s lives being at risk in the city if the world did not take action. She warned: ‘The situation bears all the hallmarks of a genocide.’

G2G’s Vivienne Cato, who hosted the event, explained: ‘As the children of refugees we feel it is our duty to highlight the plight of Darfur. Genocide is a live issue in Darfur.’ From 2003-2008 there were 300,000 civilian deaths in Darfur and 2.7 million displaced civilians, making it the world’s largest displacement crisis.

Sonja Miley of Waging Peace spoke of her work raising the profile of the continued atrocities in Sudan. Shockingly she revealed that black Africans in Darfur are subjected  to beheadings and rape by Arab militia solely because of their different skin tone.

Children who saw their parents being murdered in front of them now have their drawings exhibited at the Weiner Library in London to raise awareness. Zeinab, who was too scared to reveal her surname, is one of hundreds of thousands of black Africans displaced by ethnic cleansing by the Arab militia. Zeinab has been in the UK for fifteen years and she wants people to see the children’s drawings of the genocide they have witnessed and learn the truth.

Zeinab explained: ‘Sudan is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment. There are 25 million people in urgent need of humanitarian aid. Zeinab spoke of people sleeping on the ground in refugee camps in Chad lacking food and water. All the refugees in these camps have lost loved ones in the conflict. Harrowingly she spoke of a three-year-old boy shot by militiamen while being cuddled by his mother – just because he was a boy.

HIAS+JCORE is a Jewish humanitarian organisation that is working with governments to provide life-saving aid to thousands of refugees from Darfur who have crossed the border into Chad. Monim Haroon was born in Darfur and fled the genocide in 2006. He is now advocacy manager at HIAS Israel. He said: ‘The situation is getting worse by the day. It is dire in Darfur and there are no talks and limited international attention to Sudan. Chad refugees and the situation in Sudan are not a priority for the UN.’

Mia Hasenson-Gross, executive director of René Cassin – the Jewish voice for human rights – said: ‘As Jews we have not to be silent in response to human rights violations.’

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In memoriam: Lily Ebert

Lily Ebert, born in Hungary at the very end of 1923, died aged 100 on 9 October. She was one of the last surviving ex-prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The mission of her final, indefatigable, decades was to bearing witness to the experience of Holocaust victims.

Lily did not speak of her experiences until the 1990s, after joining a survivors’ support group.  She then became a prolific speaker and activist, sharing her memories and the lessons of her experience with schools and colleges, conferences, journalists and government ministries. At the grand age of 96 she published a bestselling memoir (co-written with her great-grandson Dov Forman) called Lily’s Promise: How I survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live. ‘I realised that I wanted to record what had happened to me in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I wanted my children to know eventually and their children and their children’s children.’ Always open to new ventures, she created with Dov a TikTok account, which gained two million followers.

She was awarded a British Empire Medal, was made a Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit in Hungary, and last year an MBE.  Her portrait and those of six other survivors are in the Royal Collection.

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In memoriam: Yehuda Bauer

Holocaust scholar Professor Yehuda Bauer, 98, died in Israel on 18 October.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, he emigrated with his family to Palestine on the eve of World War Two. A kibbutznik who spoke eight languages, he became a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He wrote prolifically about the Shoah, including on antisemitism, Jewish resistance, and the reaction to the catastrophe. He was the founding editor of the journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and honorary chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

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Features

Reflections

Anita Peleg

“I have just returned from a tour of Friedrichstrasse and city districts where Jewish shops are being smashed and looted by youths in plain clothes, followed by large and smiling crowds including soldiers and others in party uniforms. Police were taking no notice.

…Business offices owned by Jews are also being entered and smashed up apparently with impunity. Similar attacks on Jewish property are said to be taking place all over Germany.

Chief Rabbi of Berlin has been arrested and seven synagogues have been burnt.

The facts that these attacks began only after midnight last night and that Jewish shops and offices have been systematically signalled out indicate that this action was deliberately planned.”

(Telegram from Sir G. Ogilvie Forbes (Berlin),10th November 1938)

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“Riots have spread across numerous cities and towns in England, and in Belfast in Northern Ireland, over the last week in the worst outbreak of civil disorder in Britain for 13 years. Police have made 378 arrests since anti-immigrant and far-right unrest erupted after the killing of three young girls in Southport in north-west England last Monday.

… On Sunday, rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham and attacked police officers. Later, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, a similar incident played out at a Holiday Inn Express hotel, where reports suggested asylum seekers were also being housed, with fires, smashed windows and missiles thrown at officers. In the north-eastern town of Middlesbrough, rioters smashed the windows of houses and cars and hurled objects at officers.”

(The Guardian, 6.8.2024)

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…..Reflections continued

When I reflect on the past year, I have some wonderful memories of great friendships, great sporting events, great holidays and my son’s wedding, memories that will stay with me. But there are also some more sobering memories: the rise in anti- Jewish hatred since the 7  October attacks by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza, and the increase in anti-Muslim hatred, culminating in the frightening riots throughout the UK in August. Both are evidence of growing divisions in our society, a lack of understanding and compassion for the other, a growing feeling of vulnerability across many minority groups.

 
Although personally I have not experienced any of this bias or hatred, I have, perhaps, more recently felt a little more cautious. My feelings changed this summer as these divisions, these vulnerabilities, were exploited by extremists to fuel August’s race riots. These riots shocked me, they shook me, they frightened me. 
 
We saw refugees, particularly Muslims and people identified as Muslim, targeted, attacked, their living quarters surrounded. Rioters attempted to enter their living spaces, smashed their windows and started fires with the aim of harming and of injecting fear. We heard blame theories, conspiracy theories, people calling for violent action and people blindly responding to those calls.
 
Of course, I have seen TV coverage of rioting and looting before but for me this was different. These riots were focused against people, not institutions or policies – they were against people living in the UK, by people living in the UK. They demonstrated how easily people can be manipulated and misled; they demonstrated how the seeds of hate can grow from bias into an outpouring of hate and violence.
 
And that is how it started in Europe in the 1930s. The riots have their echo in Germany where my father grew up, in Poland where my parents-in-law grew up and in Hungary where my mother grew up.  It started from ingrained bias and resentment and all that was needed was a leader to incite violence and fear, and for ordinary people to willingly participate, or to turn a blind eye. As I watched these riots, images of the November Pogrom – Kristallnacht – came to mind: the fear that my father and his family suffered as they were physically attacked, the anxiety suffered by mother’s family when the Hungarians took over and friends and neighbours turned against them; and the terrible antisemitism experienced by my parents-in-law in Poland in 1939 after the German invasion.
 
For now, that is where the parallel ends. Here in the UK, we have a strong justice system that acted immediately against the perpetrators, whereas in Nazi-occupied Europe the hatred was state-led, and the injustice was legalised. Here in the UK, there were also fearless people who did not allow the hatred to escalate further, and a majority who denounced the rioters. In several places across the UK people countered the rioters by forming a protective ring around those being attacked, or by gathering to protest against racism. They did not stand by and thus allow hatred to win. Some brave Muslim leaders offered the rioters food and welcomed them inside their mosques, inviting discussion instead of confrontation.
 
Although that gives me hope, I am also aware that we must not be complacent. Eighty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the threat of hatred on our streets, the rise of extremist political parties together with these stories of positive action motivate me to continue telling my mother’s story of survival from Auschwitz and to promote her message of understanding between faiths. These events of the past year here in the UK may frighten me, but they also inspire me to remind people that although what happened in Nazi Europe may seem very far away, we must be aware of what happens here in our own country and emphasise what we have in common rather than what divides us.  
 
As a speaker for G2G, I hope I can help young people to think about the relevance of the past to our own communities here in the UK and to connect with the Holocaust Memorial Day theme ‘For a Better Future’. The call this year is for people ‘to come together, learn for a better future: both from and about the past, remember for a better future and take actions to make a better future for all’. (HMDT:2024).

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Liesel’s Story: The Diary of a Jewish German Teenager

Joan Noble
Growing up in South Africa, my sister and I were always conscious of the fact that
our parents were from Germany. They spoke with an accent, and we had no
grandparents. They did not explain much about the past and we only became more
informed as we grew up.
 
Photographs below of Leisel and her family.

…Liesel’s Story continued

 Sadly, when we came to England my mother passed away suddenly, aged 47. We
had a few of her possessions from when she emigrated to Palestine in 1938. The most precious was a diary which she started writing on her 16^th birthday, in January 1933.
 
It was written in the old-style German script, and we were unable to relate to it.
Many years later we felt ready to deal with it, helped by a German local
historian who had shown an interest in the Jews of his town – Grevenbroich – where
my mother Liesel, her brother Walter and her parents Alex and Elfriede Katz lived.
 
They were well-established German Jews, well-integrated into this town in the
Rhine area for more than six generations. Like many loyal German Jews, my
grandfather had served in the First World War, as a cavalryman. Having the diary transcribed and translated has revealed so much of what happened in those early years, seen through the eyes of a very insightful and mature teenager.
 
Liesel writes with much innocent optimism and the hope of an adolescent, shifting to her growing fear and indignation at the gratuitous humiliation suffered
through her personal experiences at her Catholic school. Other incidents she relates include receiving hate speech on a train journey, and a particularly terrifying event when local Nazis enter to burgle the house. They threaten her and subsequently she endures stressful court appearances to bear witness to the event.
 
 Mostly written in 1933, the diary juxtaposes regular teenage emotions of young love,
with passion for the cinema and the film stars of day. When the elections loom she hopes that things will change, writing, “Let’s give Hitler a chance” – and being especially glad to have the day off school!
 
There is a long gap during which she does not write till 1937, clearly showing the change of mood when she recognises the seriousness of the situation. This period coincides with increasing laws and restrictions for German Jews.  Her brother emigrates to South Africa in 1937, and other relatives obtain visas and sponsorship mainly to South America.
 
She applies to emigrate to Palestine but is refused many times because she had
been a witness to the robbery.  Eventually she is given permission to emigrate in 1938.
Her parents had left things too late to emigrate legally as all doors across Europe were closing.
 
On Kristallnacht, her father Alex is one of the many German Jews who are
imprisoned for a short time. The synagogue was torched and desecrated, with local bystanders watching whilst the fire service protected the neighbouring buildings and left the synagogue to burn to ashes. Today in Grevenbroich it is an open place honoured by the locals as Synagogue Platz.
 
Kristallnacht was clearly a major turning point. Her parents were forced to sell their home and property for a pittance and moved to Cologne. They made plans to
emigrate to Palestine and prepared a shipment, which sadly never took place due to their incarceration.
 
Overnight they fled into occupied Belgium where they were imprisoned as foreign
immigrants, as they were subsequently in France. They were rounded up with thousands of other foreign Jews and taken to Drancy Internment Camp. Finally, in 1942 they were transported to Auschwitz Birkenau and murdered. Ironically my grandfather, a cattle dealer, was transported in a cattle truck to his death.
 
My mother was not aware fully of what had happened to her parents. Her
correspondence with them had now stopped and she was making every effort to
obtain visas for them for Palestine, but the British Mandate at that time made it
impossible. 
 
On Rosh Hashanah 1939, my mother wrote in her diary the most moving letter. She was alone in Palestine, forging a new life for herself, setting herself up in business. Whilst unaware of her dear parents’ unfolding plight, she expressed her hopes for them in this last diary excerpt:
 
“My dear ones, I am so fearful for you. You are like prisoners, helpless and in the grip of a hostile power. I am putting my faith in the hope that you are safe from the horrors of war and that you have the support of good friends who are making sure that you are not in dire straits.
 
I can take no pleasure in the freedom I have here. I would rather bear a heavy burden together than know that you, my dearest loved ones, are so far beyond reach. If only you can stay healthy and stout-hearted, I feel sure that we shall see each other again. You must be able to sense how often I think of you. And yet we are all alone, even Walter. 
 
When will this end?”
 
Years later, our German historian found documents revealing the real fate of my grandparents and their horrendous four-year plight as refugees and victims of the Holocaust.
 
This was the incentive for me to now put the puzzle together. Initially, as an artist, I
made family collages to tell their story visually. I later committed to using the
documents to relate the family tragedy for a G2G presentation.
 
Most commonly I present Liesel’s story to school audiences of the same age as was my mother when she wrote her diary. Her writing explains so well the horrendous antisemitic hate that young Jewish people could equally be experiencing today through social media. It highlights the plight of refugees and the power of governments that can dictate their future.
 
Learning about my family’s experiences has revealed our ancestry and heritage. I am especially proud to have the link with my mother’s hometown, particularly with several schools and young people who have taken it upon themselves to carry out projects to honour the former Jews of the town. They regularly commemorate Yom HaShoah, Anne Frank Day and Kristallnacht. They maintain the Jewish cemetery, holding vigils on these occasions involving the community. Their motto, ‘We Remember’, is a key legacy of Liesel’s story.
 
I am always delighted to end my talk with a photograph of my new great-niece who
has also been named Liesel.

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