Speakers at the Yom HaZikaron – Remembering the victims of the Shoah – event 2022
Sue David: The reason for getting involved with this event is because I have spent much time researching the Holocaust, many family members were murdered during this time, some definitely in Auschwitz, and others ‘disappeared’ in Warsaw.
This is a brief account of my Jewish paternal family, the David family. My father, Henry, was born in 1911 in what was part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire – now part of Western Ukraine. The town, Ivano-Frankivisk is about 80 km south of Lviv, a 2 hour road journey. This area was once part of Poland and the family were Jewish and Polish. Grandfather, Amzel, fought the Russians while serving in the Austrian-Hungarian army, during the 1st World War – most probably in the nearby Carpathian mountains. Ivano-Frankivisk (then Stanislawow) was almost on the Front Line. When the Russians ‘pulled out’ of the war due in part to their 1917 Revolution, my family now refugees, moved to another part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire, Bohemia, and this area became part of the newly established Czechoslovakia in 1918.
Gablonz, later to be named Jablonec (after an apple tree), promised a better future. It was, and remains, a world-famous glass and jewellery making centre. Grandfather’s brother, Max, was already living there. There was a thriving Jewish community with a synagogue. In 1906, in nearby Liberec, there had been a large exhibition showcasing local German enterprises – it was visited by Emperor Frantisek Josef.
The interwar years appear to have been fairly uneventful. Grandfather became an exporter of jewellery, and his brother Max established a jewellery factory. My father and his brother Paul attended jewellery school, father later working for his uncle Max where he met my mother Marie – she was 16 and he, 17.
Hitler’s relentless discrimination against the Jews as soon as he rose to power in 1933, clearly caused concern. Father twice applied for citizenship, but each time the application was refused, as documented in Prague archive police papers. The last refusal coincided with the burning of the Gablonz synagogue in November 1938. By this time father had a jewellery business in nearby Turnov where garnets are mined locally. He sold his business and moved to London in December 1938.
Grandfather fled to Warsaw to be with his daughter Rosyl and her family, and grandmother Sura moved a few miles ‘inland’ away from Hitler’s annexed area of Bohemia. My mother followed father to London in January 1939 – they had been courting for 10 years. They mentioned how a Major Golding helped – was he a Prague Embassy attaché? I should have asked them. Called up during the war to serve in a prisoner of war camp in Wem, Shropshire, my father later learned via the Red Cross, the fate of some of his family members. Grandmother Sura, her brother-in-law Max and his family (Emilia, Luisa, Artur, Gustav, and 8 year old Ruth) were all sent to Theresienstadt on 16th January 1943, and on to Auschwitz four days later on 20th January 1943. There was no news of the fate of grandfather Amzel, his daughter Rosyl and her family who were living in Warsaw – their apartment was in the Ghetto.
To end on an uplifting note:
Jakob de Jonge: I was born and raised in a small town in the Netherlands. I was a very lucky boy my mother always told me. Not only had I grandparents on both sides, on my mother’s side even one set of great grandparents. That was a great exception after the Holocaust in German occupied territory. Both sides of my parents survived as they were hidden. My mother, her brother and parents were hidden in a small town called Ede, near Arnhem, so well-known from the Operation Market Garden from September 1944 where the bridge too far was located. She remembers seeing the parachutists come down. They were on the attic and through the window she could see them sailing down, but that is all, as the angle of the window did not allow her to see more. She also said that she heard the whistling of POWs marching through their street. That gave them support in their attic and hope, because as long as POWs were walking, there was fighting. When she was liberated, it became clear how many uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces were murdered. It is interesting how my mother talks about that. The Dutch have all kind of euphemisms. They were taken away, they didn’t return. It is simply too hard to say the word: killed, destroyed. But those are the true words.
My father was from Germany and escaped in 1939 to The Netherlands. His father had already had stints in concentration camps. The first one started in July 1933. A Nazi in his small town did not like him and got him imprisoned for about a year. After that he was internally exiled. He was arrested again after Kristallnacht and then he, a very proud German, who had volunteered to fight in WW1, realised he had to leave. His eldest son had already moved to the Netherlands and started a business and the rest of the family joined. They had contact with one of the top resistance fighters in the province called Krijn van den Helm and he organised a hiding place for them. My father’s sister, Ruth, was with Krijn and his family and took part in resistance activities- transporting Jewish children, messages etc. She died only a year ago at 99. She cleaned Krijn’s blood from the pavement when he was shot dead by Dutch traitors.
My grandfather survived the war, but died a few years later, his body ravaged by the maltreatment in the KZ’s and the tough times in hiding. After the war there were some mementoes left from my father’s time in hiding which we donated to Yad Vashem. And a display was made in the museum. My mother had a memento too which she brought, which was pictured in a book. All these items will tell the story of the suffering long into the future, when all the witnesses are gone.
Eleanor Jacobson “I feel very humbled to be taking part in this year’s Yom Hashoah Commemoration. My personal reason for being involved is to remember my father Ralph Stock, or as he was known Rolf Stoch. He was one of the lucky ones. Ralph was born in Cologne Germany in 1922 into a happy and prosperous family. His father, Benjamin, had fought in the First World War and vowed that if he survived the family would become religious. He was rewarded by the Kaiser with the Iron Cross and an inscribed leather bound Siddur. Benjamin could never accept that the country he defended turned against him and all the Jews. The family were very aware that life was changing in a frightening way. As a result Ralph’s newly wed sister and brother in law were sent on ‘on honeymoon’ to South Africa as guests of the generous German Jewish congregation in Johannesburg, The plan was for them to work there and sponsor the immediate family to get out of Germany.
On Kristalnacht 9th November 1938 when Ralph was 16, he bravely ran through the streets of Cologne with a Christian friend going from shul to nearby shul rescuing Sifrei Tora and hiding them in a safe place. The family were helped by loyal Christian friends and colleagues to board one of the last boats to South Africa in 1939. Tragically the many relatives left behind perished. Ralph wasted no time in joining the South African Air Force as a maintenance engineer and was sent to fight with the Allies in North Africa. Sadly, both his parents passed away shortly after settling in Johannesburg but he was not allowed compassionate leave. He did however manage to get a weekend pass to Palestine as it was known. Throughout his life Ralph was left with a strong belief never again to leave a country in a hurry and the only place for him was Israel.
It took 40 years to build up a business in Johannesburg which then enabled my parents to finally go on Aliya in 1979. After 30 years in Ra’anana they came to live in London to spend their twilight years with children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Ralph never forgot that he was one of the lucky ones.
Judy Joseph: My slot to speak was the last. I’d no idea what to say; picking up on the threads of the others, that they each had significant Holocaust factors in their families, I realised my being 2nd generation born here, my family stories started with pogroms in Rumania, blood libel in Hungary. Those who have seen Fiddler on the Roof: my grandmother’s cousin was that little girl who was caught up on her father’s shoulders when the Captain of Police warned them to get out of the village, to go to the railway, probably paying their fares. She thrived, went to university, married a lecturer who became a professor of English, her own children becoming a medical doctor and a social worker. Then during the 1930s, the realisation that family in Germany needed to come out, that refugees were arriving, some to the communities where my mother’s family now lived.
In 1939 one of her uncles went into Germany to bring out a family member. He was so obviously a Jew, short and stout, speaking good German and fortunately had a brand new British passport. The juxtaposition of this passport in the hands of a German Jew amused the Gestapo officer who was checking documents on the train out of Germany, so much so, he waved my uncle through. On having arrived home safely, he continued his work with Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld and others, to rescue children, then to find houses for refugee families to live away from what he knew would come, the war and with it, bombs. In that way, citing that on the morning of Sunday 3 September, he drove with my mother from Ilford to Chesham to locate houses which would be more likely be safe from bombs. By 11am, letters securing rentals of properties were placed in Estate Agents’ letterboxes. Ten orthodox families formed a small community in Chesham for the duration of the war. Later, I met mothers who had been in the camps with their children, heard how they’d survived, arrived in England, and thrived; the children were educated here to professional levels, married and had children, grandchildren.
That the Holocaust was terrible is an understatement. What we as a community can learn from it, is we need to nurture and make sure that life can go forward; that such things are still happening – most recently the Uighurs, Rohingas, Bahais, and others – and we must do what can to make life possible for those who have survived. That even small communities can do much to make life better for those in need. Birmingham may be a very small and dwindling Jewish community but what comes out of it in quality, is more than its quantity.
Ruth Jacobs then invited Phillip Carmel, CEO of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, an international foundation set up in 2015 to protect the thousands of Jewish burial sites across Central and Eastern Europe, to speak. This organisation which has, to date, fenced 234 Jewish cemeteries in eight European countries, focussing particularly on burial grounds in towns and villages where Jewish communities were wiped out in the Shoah and where the cemetery is often the last physical witness to the presence of centuries of vibrant Jewish life in these areas. It has also mapped and surveyed over 3,500 cemeteries across Europe, utilising state-of-art drone technology and intensive historical research.
“On this day, the last remnants of the Jewish community of Warsaw, once the largest Jewish community in the world with a million souls, rose up against the Nazi might. Many were killed in that Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The others were sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Please think of that number. There are probably around 2 million Jews in the whole of Europe today, 80 years on. There were a million in Warsaw alone, three million in Poland. I want to focus on the sheer size and dispersion of Jewish communities in Europe before the Nazi horror and to reflect that once Europe contained more than 90% of the world’s Jewish population and today it contains less than 10%.
Throughout the course of our work in preserving what is so often the last physical witness to what was once a thriving Jewish life in thousands of cities, towns and villages across Europe, I am brought face to face with this enormous loss, both to our people and to Europe itself. And yet, my presence here tonight as a speaker is somewhat incongruous. To the best of my knowledge, no members of my family were killed in the Shoah. As a fourth generation British Jew, my parent’s recollection of the years 1939-45 in Manchester was probably very similar to those of the same age here in the West Midlands. A memory of Blitz and destruction of our great cities as Britain stood against the Nazis.
And even my work in preserving Jewish cemeteries in some communities which had already disappeared by the war perhaps itself does not immediately connect to the Shoah, though it is certainly true that in the Holocaust of Bullets in the former Soviet Union, many times the Jews of a village or town were driven on foot through the streets towards the Jewish cemetery. Local people watched this happen, either paralysed by fear, silenced by apathy, or even pleased to be rid of Jews. The victims were told to dig a mass grave and they were shot into it. There are at least 2,500 such mass grave sites in these areas, 2.5 million of the 6 million Jews killed in the Shoah.
But as we delve into the history of these Jewish communities – and there were over 8,000 of them between the Elbe in Germany and the Dnieper in Ukraine, from the Baltic in the North to the Balkans in the South, – I realise that perhaps there is a lesson for all of us on this day of Yom HaShoah which is indelibly linked to our work in preserving these sites – so far, almost 250 of them in 8 countries over the last 8 years, yet a drop in the ocean when we know there were over 8,000 in 1939.
We see, for example, over 250 Jewish cemeteries in Transcarpathia, now in South-Western Ukraine. An area about the size of the Midlands. More than 200 Jewish communities wiped out in four months alongside their brothers and sisters in Hungary, at the very time of the D-Day landings in the spring and summer of 1944.
The Nazis were already losing in the West and the East, but nothing was more important to them than sending trains to Auschwitz to kill more Jews. More than 400,000 Hungarian and Slovak Jews were murdered in these months.
I want to tell you though about another connection we all have here to the Shoah, something else I have learned through our work. Daily, as we research the history of these Jewish communities, we come across two dates, both of them some time before the Shoah. The first is 1897, the year of the last great census of the Russian Empire. A year when perhaps the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, today’s Ukraine and Belarus, was at its highest ever. Millions of Jews were already fleeing pogroms to make a new life for themselves in the United States, in Britain, in South America, in Africa, in the pre-state Yishuv in the Holy Land and in parts of Western Europe.
The second date is 1921, the last great census of the pre-war Polish Republic detailing the Jews in Poland and in parts of today’s Lithuania. Most of today’s Jews in the United Kingdom trace their personal genealogy to these vast centres of pre-war Jewish life. They were pushed out by antisemitism. If they hadn’t been, like those who went to other parts of the world, and let us not forget that most stayed, not 6 million Jews but 11 million Jews would have been killed in the Shoah. I doubt whether it would have been even possible to restore Jewish life anywhere had that happened. There would have been no re-born and vital Jewish communities, there would not have been a Jewish State, the independence of which we celebrate next week.
We, British Jews, owe an immense debt of gratitude, twice over, to this country. Firstly, because they welcomed our forebears as refugees well before the Shoah, because there, but for the Grace of God, would have gone all of us, our great grandparents murdered and ourselves never born. Of course, not everybody welcomed us, because not everybody welcomes refugees. There was an Aliens Act in 1903 to make it as difficult as possible for pogrom fleeing Jews to come here and there were even fully-fledged pogroms in Tredegar and other parts of the South-Wales coalfield against Jewish refugees. But overall, this country welcomed Jews and we remember that and we honour it.
And a second time, when all of Europe had already capitulated or collaborated and this country stood alone against the Nazis in the grim days of 1940, and the war could have ended then with a Nazi victory and there would have been no Jews, not just there over the Channel, but here too.
We work to preserve this memory of these communities. We seek to educate young people in these towns and villages where Jews once lived that there were Jews there and why there aren’t Jews there now. And we focus on the cemetery because it’s so often the last physical witness, a visible fact you can’t deny.
Here, in the humbling presence of Holocaust survivors, we pledge that as memory becomes history, we will continue to preserve the fact of the Shoah for future generations. May our memories of them be for a blessing. Yehi Zichram Baruch.”
After showing a film highlighting aspects of his talk, he answered questions from the audience who clearly had found Philip’s passionate exposition very enlightening.
