Mother's Love and a Nobel Prize

(Originally posted 2013)

It was a great privilege to meet and photograph Nobel prize winner Roald Hoffmann earlier this year. As Roald recounted his story of surviving the Holocaust as a young child, the heroic tale of his mother captured my attention. I could not help but be drawn to this woman who in the midst of extreme adversity created an environment of love, nurture and intellectual stimulation for her young child.

After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town of Złoczów, Roald’s family was placed in a labor camp. Roald’s father, Hillel Safran, was an engineer with a detailed knowledge of local infrastructure and so was an asset to the Germans while working in the camp. 

As the situation worsened Hillel made arrangements for his wife Clara and son Roald to be hidden by a Ukrainian school teacher they had befriended in a village not far from their town. Along with two uncles and an aunt they were hidden in the attic and then storeroom of the local schoolhouse for the last fifteen months during the war. 

In this cramped and difficult situation Roald’s mother, Clara made the best of a bad situation. A school teacher by training, Clara found herself confined in the attic storehouse of the school with books, paper and pencils at her disposal and a young son with many hours to fill. 

Roald Hoffmann (then Safran) explains how his mother taught him to read using the school books that were stored in the tiny storeroom:

‘Mother invented endless geography games. I learned latitude and longitude at age six. She would say to me, “Tell me how you would go from here to San Francisco”. I had to describe the route in excruciating detail. It was not enough to say take a train. I would have to explain where I would catch it, where it went. I would have to describe all the surrounding bodies of water, whether to go through a canal or on the sea. And which sea.  She invented a game called “Wet or Dry”. She would specify a latitude and longitude and I would have to tell whether it would be on ocean or dry land. This made for a longish game. But I’m still good at geography’

This resourceful and determined mother was not going to let incarceration imprison the mind and spirit. Could Clara have imagined that those many hours spent stimulating the intellect of her young charge would produce a future Nobel prize winner? 

Whilst this young mother was in hiding Hillel Safran remained at the Labour camp. The Germans valued his skills and Hillel made use of the relative freedom of movement that his position afforded him to work with a resistance group that was planning a breakout. He was able to smuggle weapons into the camp. Unfortunately Hillel along with other leaders of the resistance group were betrayed. This led to their arrest, torture and execution in June 1943.

A friend who witnessed Hillel’s execution informed Clara of the terrible news via a letter to sent to the house. One can only imagine the sorrow of that dreadful moment. Clara poured her grief onto the pages of her husband’s notebook. In this notebook her husband had written notes from a book he was reading on relativity. How apt that the son of this young couple would become a chemist and poet.

The fifteen months in hiding did not mean that Clara avoided the harsh treatment of the Germans. During their time in the labour camp Clara received a terrible beating from one particularly sadistic labour camp director.  Not content with just physical brutality, these perpetrators of terror also engaged in psychological torment. When Roald was four or five some of the drunken SS man wanted to show off and scare the people. They made the Roald sit on the dog house while they used it for target practice. They shot and killed the dog while saying to Roald’s mother, “Don’t be afraid, lady. We’re not going to shoot your son.”

Roald describes his mother as a strong, small woman:

”My uncles were weak from not being able to move after 15 months of confinement. When we walked to the Russian lines at the end of the war, the men had great trouble. Mother, however, carried me for three kilometers to the Russian lines. Mother was leader of this small group of five. Her brothers, lifelong, listened to her.”

Roald was aware of the incredible danger that lay beyond his hiding place. Although he was confined in difficult circumstances Roald remembers being surrounded by family and cocooned in an atmosphere of love. 

What a legacy for a young mother to pass on to her child and what a joy it must have been for her to see her son succeed in the land that adopted them after the war. This small brave woman remarried, immigrated to New York in 1949, had another child in her forties and lived to the grand age of almost 95.

---

View Roald’s story

When Queen Elizabeth Helped Us Hunt Nazis

First posted on Times of Israel

This past week’s media was dominated by the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at age 96, after reigning over the United Kingdom for seventy years. This was true in Great Britain of course, and throughout the British Commonwealth (which still has 15 fifteen countries), but it was also true all over the world, and even in Israel. The Jewish community in Britain also participated, and Chief Rabbi Mirvis not only very warmly eulogized the Queen, he even composed a lovely prayer “On The Passing Of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth,” in which he noted her “generosity of spirit…dignity, wisdom” and described her as “a most gracious monarch, who occupied a throne of distinction and honour.”

Very interestingly, the one positive characteristic in the prayer that was mentioned twice was justice. In Rabbi Mirvis’ words, Queen Elizabeth “signified order and justice,” and was “a steadfast guardian of liberty, a symbol of unity and a champion of justice in all the lands of her dominion.”

In fact, I personally can attest to the Queen’s devotion to justice, in relation to the Wiesenthal Center’s efforts to convince the British government to prosecute Nazi criminals, who had found a haven in Great Britain after World War II, an aspect of her reign that was completely overlooked in all the obituaries, eulogies, and commentaries.

Starting in the mid-seventies, it became known, initially in the United States and later in the major Anglo-Saxon democracies (Canada, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand), that many Nazi criminals had emigrated to countries that fought against the Third Reich, by hiding their collaboration with the Nazis, and posing as innocent refugees fleeing from Communism. The United States, which admitted the largest number of such persons, was the first country to decide to take legal measures against these individuals. It established a special agency, the Office of Special Investigations, to prosecute them. As time went on, more and more such cases were discovered in the other Anglo-Saxon democracies, and pressure mounted on these countries to take action.

As the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, my job was to find as many as possible of such cases, in order to help convince Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand to decide to take legal measures against these Holocaust perpetrators, who up to that point, had escaped justice. As far as the United Kingdom was concerned, our saga began on October 22, 1986, when Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper submitted a list I compiled of suspected Nazi criminals who were living in the UK to the British consul in Los Angeles, Donald Ballantine. The list – 11 Latvians and 6 Lithuanians – was accompanied by a request to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that the government investigate the allegations, and if necessary create a legal mechanism to deal with the problem.

From the start, the British government was very reluctant to do anything. Its initial response was that despite the Prime Minister’s “deep revulsion at the atrocities committed during the Nazi era,” it was most likely that “legal constraints would prevent the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in Great Britain.” The reason was that prosecution was limited to crimes committed in Great Britain, and extradition to the Soviet Union or Israel was impossible, because of the lack of an extradition treaty with the former, and the provisions of the existing extradition treaty with the latter. In addition, the conservative media was absolutely opposed to prosecution and made no secret of their staunch opposition. Thus, for example, the Times editorial on March 3,1987, reminded its readers that “Britain is a Christian country…[whose] laws enshrine principles of justice tempered with mercy not vengeance,” and concluded that “it is wise and humane to let matters rest.”

And that sentiment was not the only problem we faced. Our major problem was that all the suspects had committed their crimes in areas that were now part of the Soviet Union. As a Jewish defense organization that was fighting for the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, we were hardly the type of group whom the Soviet authorities would help, which is why we appealed to the British government to request the information from the Soviets on a bilateral basis. Thus with little political will to proceed in London, our chances of obtaining positive results appeared to be very slim. Luckily for the cause, MPs Greville Janner and Merlyn Rees formed an All-Party War Crimes Group in the Parliament which helped to galvanize political pressure on the government to take action.

Dr Efraim Zuroff in Jerusalem, 2018.

Their efforts resulted in the government establishing an independent inquiry to assess the evidence against the suspects, which in turn endorsed a change in British law to enable criminal prosecution of Nazi criminals living in Great Britain. Such a step would have to be passed by the Parliament, as well as the House of Lords. The proposed bill passed in the House of Commons by a huge margin of 348 to 123, but was roundly defeated in the House of Lords. To the government’s credit, it was returned to the House of Commons, but again it was rejected by the House of Lords. The government refused to give up and submitted it once again to the House of Commons, where it was passed by a huge margin of 254 to 88, and at that point, Queen Elizabeth, for the first time in 70 years, used her power to sign a bill into law over the opposition of the House of Lords. That step created a legal framework to prosecute Nazi criminals who entered Great Britain illegally and sent a very important moral and judicial message that the United Kingdom, in principle, will not be a haven for those who committed the crimes of the Third Reich.

So Queen Elizabeth was indeed worthy of the praise she received as a “champion of justice in all the lands of her dominion.” Rest in peace dear Queen.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. He serves on the International Council of Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Watch our 2018 interview with Dr Zuroff.

Five EU countries that shouldn’t be throwing stones

First published on Times of Israel

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

Several days ago, I was shocked to learn that five heads of state from Lithuania, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland, all post-Communist Eastern European countries, had recently beseeched the leaders of the European Union to step up efforts to “preserve historical memory.” It was addressed to the European Council president, European Commission president, and the Czech prime minister, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

For the past three decades since their transition to democracy, these countries have excelled in grossly distorting their own respective histories of the Holocaust. Yet the quintet of leaders now maintains that the Kremlin “is seeking to rewrite history and use it to justify its aggression against sovereign states.” Thus, they urge the bodies of the EU to take a leadership role in “preserving historical memory and preventing the Russian regime from manipulating historical facts.” They contend that this concern “is particularly relevant in light of Russia’s intensive use of history for propaganda purposes in the context of the war in Ukraine.”

These heads of state know how to deal with this problem of rewriting history. They recommend the following four steps as the means of taking corrective measures:

• the promotion of “European Remembrance narratives across the whole EU” through national educational programs;

• providing adequate political and financial support to the Prague-based Platform of European Memory and conscience;

• completing the project for a memorial to the victims of totalitarian regimes in Brussels;

• stepping up the fight against disinformation.

These steps constitute a renewed effort to establish a false historical narrative as the “accurate/universally accepted” narrative of World War II and the Holocaust. Particularly ironic, coming from the these five countries, is their statement: “Without an accurate, honest, and comprehensive assessment of the past, we will not be able to effectively prevent future crimes on our continent or investigate the current ones in Ukraine.”

Each of these countries has produced its own false narrative of the events of the Shoah, either extremely minimizing, or completely erasing the highly significant role played by their own local Nazi collaborators. It must be noted that only in Eastern Europe did collaboration with the Nazis include participation in the systematic mass murder of Jews. None of them is ready to admit the full scope and significance of their complicity and culpability.

There is, of course, no doubt that the Russians are manipulating history to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, a plea by these leaders to “preserve historical memory,” is the height of hypocrisy and chutzpah. Before making demands on the EU, let them begin to practice what they preach at home.

With the exception of one case in Poland, not a single Holocaust perpetrator has been convicted and punished in any of these countries since independence. They are reluctant to return Jewish property and compensate survivors. In short, they have totally failed to confront their crimes, and have failed in every aspect of dealing with the Shoah.

Indeed, in the Baltic countries, they have glorified anti-Communist fighters, even if they were Holocaust perpetrators. These figures include active participants in the murders of Lithuanians Jonas Noreika and Juozas Krikstaponis and Latvians Herberts Cukurs, Voldemar Veiss and Vilis Tunkelis, among numerous others. They continue to promote the canard of equivalence between Communist and Nazi crimes.

Brussels should therefore put pressure on these countries to begin telling and teaching the truth about the Holocaust and the role played by local collaborators in their own countries, instead of complying with the requests in the letter of the quintet.

The Jewish people have two foundational narratives about our history in the 20th century: the Zionist narrative of our return to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, and the chronicle of the Holocaust. When the Palestinians deny the former, we respond strongly, but Israel has failed to respond forcefully to the Eastern European distortions regarding the Holocaust that have been on offer ever since these countries obtained independence. The letter of the quintet should be a wake-up call for Israel as well.

Anti-Zionism, NZ and the IHRA Definition

In recent decades it has been a go-to strategy for antisemites to clothe their hatred in the garb of anti-Zionism. In contexts where open hostility toward individual Jews and diaspora communities is frowned upon, antagonism toward the state of the Jews frequently wins a free pass.

As has been observed, antisemitism adapts itself to the values and perceived priorities of the period. The religious values of the Middle Ages and the racist ideas of the Nazi period have largely fallen from favour, thus providing less fuel for antisemitism. Instead it is the language and framing of social justice that presently help to keep the fires of antisemitism burning in the West.

Calumnies against Israel cast her as an international pariah, an apartheid state and a colonialist occupier displacing an ancient indigenous population. The facts of history and realities on the ground have done little to dampen the impact of a narrative that has now established deep roots in academia and mainstream media.

Thus the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation welcomes the recent announcement that New Zealand has been accepted as an Observer by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. While this does not mean that New Zealand has, or will, adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, it is a first and important step toward that goal.

Founded in 1998, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is an intergovernmental agency seeking to strengthen and promote Holocaust education, remembrance and research internationally. To date 35 nations have become full members.

In regard to anti-Zionism, the strength of the IHRA definition rests in the examples included with the definition itself. Addressed directly are the right of Jewish self-determination and the double standards applied to the Jewish state.

More broadly, engagement with IHRA will strengthen the work of those seeking to protect and sustain a faithful telling of the events of the Holocaust, memorialisation, research, and the all important work of education.

We commend those who have taken the important step to take up observer status with IHRA.

What Really Changed in 1945? Yom HaShoah Speech

This speech was given at the Yom HaShoah service,
Auckland Hebrew Congregation, New Zealand, 27 April 2022

In the fourteen years we have spent interviewing and photographing survivors for the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation we have encountered stories of tragedy and depravity, and all too rarely, courage, compassion and conviction. 

In 2019 we visited Auschwitz in Poland and Le Chambon Sur Lignon in the South of France. Some of you will recall that at last year’s event we played the three minute film we produced as a result of our visit to Le Chambon.

Although it is less than a day’s journey from Auschwitz to Le Chambon, they may as well occupy distant universes.

Auschwitz was a product of Europe’s most culturally, scientifically and educationally advanced society. In contrast, Le Chambon and the surrounding towns were home to mostly simple peasant farmers and villagers. Led by Protestant Pastor Andre Trocme, the people of Le Chambon were characterised by courage, compassion, and a willingness to defy authority in order to live according to conscience. As a consequence the 5000 people in the Le Chambon area were able to rescue up to a similar number of Jews.

If there is tragedy associated with Le Chambon it is that it was not replicated throughout Europe.

In 1945 the world emerged from war. What came to be known as the Holocaust was brought to an end.

But what really changed in 1945? We know the allies prevailed but in regard to what has drawn us together tonight, what really changed?

Did ordinary Europeans repudiate the Jew hatred that for centuries had manifested in economic, social and religious discrimination?

Were the masses of willing accomplices brought to account, or at least filled with remorse?

Did the philosophers who influence society from above abandon their intolerance of Jewish distinction and particularity?

Did theologians reject the toxic and incoherent supersessionism that for centuries had driven Christian persecution of Jews?

Was there a change of heart in the Muslim leaders so keen to see Hitler’s policies implemented in their own lands?

Were the western political and military leaders who knew what was happening to European Jews and yet chose to do little or nothing - were they brought to account?

Of the many nations that chose to close their doors to Jews fleeing certain calamity, how many were willing to acknowledge their moral failure? 

Did the philosemitism and courage of Le Chambon begin to permeate other European cultures?

The answers to these questions are disturbing, confronting and relevant.

The Holocaust was unique and that very uniqueness must be fiercely defended. And yet it stands in a series of historical events that form an essential context. Namely, millennia of persecution, marginalisation and antagonism toward the Jewish people. 

Indeed, antisemitism has come to function as a social constant, as reliable as gravity, as unrelenting as the waves of the sea. 

Enemies have been many and friends have been few. And the character of friends like those of Le Chambon is ultimately only proven in times of peril. The Shoah taught us that those considered friends are worse than irrelevant if they will not act.

Another painful lesson of the Shoah is that when an entity declares its genocidal intentions it must be believed.

In the 1930s, some of Europe’s brightest minds chose not to see what was obvious - that European Jewry was destined for disaster. The act of seeing the obvious, bore just too great a price. And the call to think the unthinkable, required vanishingly rare courage.

Thus, tonight we commemorate the liberation and yet recognise with sadness that in the broader context it represents, as it were, a punctuation - an abeyance in a state of Gentile hostility extending three and half millennia, of a persistent hatred that reinvents itself from age to age.

Sadly, too little changed in 1945. And if we have a debt to those who perished it includes a willingness to think honestly about the causes of the Shoah. And a call to honour and emulate those who act in the spirit of Le Chambon.

It is not sufficient merely to remember. If the need arises, we must be willing to think what many deemed unthinkable, and to see what many refused to see. 

And having thought and having seen, we have a debt to act.

Antisemitism in New Zealand 2021 - Download the Survey

The Holocaust Foundation contributed to the Survey of Antisemitism in New Zealand 2021, conducted by the New Zealand Jewish Council. The full report can be downloaded via the link below.

Survey of Antisemitism in New Zealand 2021

Vaccines, Mandates, and the Holocaust

The systematic murder of six million Jews is an event of such monstrous proportions that it has entered popular culture as a kind of archetypal symbol. For many it functions as shorthand for ultimate evil.

When passions are aroused and there is the urge to denounce one’s opponent in the strongest terms, or cast a movement, ideology or event as profoundly evil, terms such as Nazi, Holocaust, Hitler and Auschwitz, are amongst the most powerful in the verbal toolkit. What could be more vilifying and damning, yet crisp and succinct than these code words for supreme evil?

While Holocaust awareness is declining at an alarming rate, Holocaust and its associated terms remain the most potent in our vocabulary and have lost none of their popularity. What they have lost, at least in popular parlance, is their specificity and particularity.

That the Holocaust represents ultimate evil is not in question. But the evil in question was of a certain kind - and its most targeted victims were of a particular people. Its unique historical context is ignored, hidden, and by inference denied, when the Holocaust is harnessed in service of other causes, no matter how worthy or unworthy those causes may be.

In most cases, those today labeled “Nazis” are not Nazis. Similarly, that which is casually called “Holocaust” is not the Holocaust. What may provide the utmost emphasis in social media posts, political rhetoric or even certain academic papers, does harm to an event that stands unique in history. And such behaviour is intellectually dishonest.

We have seen the Holocaust (ab)used in rhetoric around vaccines, mandates, civil rights, animal rights, gay rights, racism, abortion, totalitarianism, sex trafficking and more.

And we have even seen those charged with custodianship of Holocaust memory stray from their mission by illicitly linking to other causes. The impulse to make common cause or modify the message so as to make it more palatable is readily understood. Even Anne Frank’s father consented to the editing of Anne’s writings in order not to offend German readers. Anne’s story as it is most often presented today is, according to a number of scholars, de-Judaised, sanitised and universalised. One scholar has said it “enacts in its very text a designed avoidance of the very experience it is reputed to grant us…”

Reality is less palatable - and of course much less marketable. The Holocaust faithfully presented is deeply and necessarily confronting. And it is that confrontation that is lost when Holocaust terminology and imagery is hijacked in popular discourse around vaccines and mandates.

When opponents of government overreach don yellow stars and deface politicians’ images with moustaches, they do their cause no good and misuse history - a history that is increasingly under assault from both friend and foe.

It is never the right time to invoke, universalise or otherwise use the Holocaust.

Never.

Holocaust Foundation work shown in Berlin and Dubai

The Abraham Accords have marked a new era in the Middle East and have had a profound and welcome impact on relations between Israel and a number of nearby Arab nations. Unprecedented economic cooperation has been widely reported but there have been significant developments in other areas also. Last week saw International Holocaust Remembrance Day events held in cities across the region, including Cairo, Abu Dabhi and Dubai. 

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation was pleased to receive a request for our stories to be shown in the pavilion and event at the Israel Expo in Dubai.

Our work was also featured in Berlin at an important event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. The event was staged by European Coalition For Israel, a group that in 2005 initiated and hosted the first ever Holocaust Remembrance Day event in the European Parliament in Brussels, a year before the UN announced the official International Holocaust Remembrance Day. EC4I has used our Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation stories at many of its events over the last decade.

EC4I director Tomas Sandell chose to use the story of Leo Pomeranz at the Berlin conference. Leo was born in Berlin in 1933 and spent nearly five years hiding alone in an attic. We interviewed and photographed Leo in 2016 in cooperation with Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies.

Wannsee and the Education Myth

On a Winter’s day in the early 1940’s, fifteen men gathered in a grand estate in one of Germany’s most cultured cities. Among them were some of the best educated leaders of Europe’s most advanced society. Indeed, more than half of the men present held doctorates earned at the finest European universities.

The date was 20 January 1942 and the meeting was what became known as the Wannsee Conference. Nazi leaders had gathered to plan the execution of The Final Solution. A strategy was established by which the eleven million Jews considered to be within reach of the Nazi regime could be efficiently eliminated. The best of German technology would be applied to a task considered essential to the advancement of society. Such goals were consistent with the prevailing ideology and would enjoy support from many within the educational institutions, the church and society more broadly.

Image: House of the Wannsee Conference via JTA

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference we must confront the oft-heard mantra and myth: the answer to antisemitism is education. Certainly in the case of Nazi Germany, education did nothing to prevent the rise of a genocidal regime and the subsequent murder of six million Jews. Indeed, it seems clear that many of the philosophical assumptions underlying the education of the time only propelled Jew hatred.

But what of the present day? 

Recent surveys both here in New Zealand and overseas have revealed alarming trends. Of particular concern to our present topic is the finding that antisemitism, specifically anti-Zionism, is somewhat disproportionately present amongst academics and at institutions of learning.[1] (Elsewhere we have made the observation that anti-Zionism is the weapon of choice for Western antisemites.[2] It may also be the form of Jew hatred most likely to go unchallenged.)

The statement “the answer to antisemitism is education”, is, in its unqualified form, quite unhelpful. It ignores the reality that all educational endeavours proceed on the basis of certain worldview[3] assumptions - and those assumptions are seldom declared. 

Let me be clear: our Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation is an educational trust. We do indeed believe that Holocaust education can be exceedingly valuable, and we strive to produce outstanding resources in the form of exhibitions, events, websites and an App. But my point is this: none of us proceed from a position of neutrality - the notion of unbiased education is a fantasy. Whether our worldview is declared or undeclared it guides us today just as it guided the well-educated Wannsee fifteen who planned the industrialized murder of Europe’s Jews.

Those of us committed to keeping Holocaust memory alive have choices. 

Will we take the politically lubricated path that sanitizes and universalizes the Holocaust, presenting it as merely one among many forms of racism and unkindness, diminishing it by harnessing its power in service of other causes? Or will we take the more difficult road and insist on antisemitism’s uniqueness and particularity, daring to declare that the Holocaust, taken in its broader historical context, did not - and I would argue - could not have happened to any but the Jews?[4]

It is our underlying worldview that will answer that question. And it will determine the nature of our educational and memorial efforts, and whether they will be fit for purpose and a truly faithful witness.

Footnotes:

1 https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/08/19/cuny-and-the-warfare-of-academic-antisemitism/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/study-uncovers-antisemitic-behavior-among-university-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-staff/

2 See A Brief Survey of Antisemitism available on our App:
get.theapp.co/fd5x

3 Worldview:
1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. In both senses also called Weltanschauung.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/worldview

4 Roma, homosexuals, and others perished in the Holocaust but it was the Jews who were intensively targeted for elimination. The number of non-Jews to have died in the Holocaust is usually stated to be five million. However, according to Yehuda Bauer the correct number is one tenth of that figure, at most.