"Let G-d nobody see it again"

I have always been secretly jealous of the Americans. They all have such interesting backgrounds. Nearly everyone can list that their grandfather was Irish or grandmother was Italian, or how they are part Cherokee Indian, part Swedish, part German, or how their ancestors arrived in the new land on Mayflower.

The TV show "Who do you think you are" is an interesting deep-dive to the family roots of certain American celebrities. The episode I picked to write about here is the one of Lisa Kudrow and her great grandmother's fate in Belarus during the WWII.

I didn't even realize she was part Jewish. Somehow, it was Ross Geller (or David Schwimmer) and not Phoebe Buffay in the TV show Friends who stole the part of being Jewish :-).

The heading of this article is a direct, translated quote from the episode. It was said by an old Belarussian woman in the village of Ilya, how she testified the destiny of the Jews in the village. Trying to escape death at a human bonfire, a little girl tried to hide under the bed. A German officer spotted her and dragged her by force, only to shoot the child. "Let G-d nobody see it again", said the witness.

View the episode in full at the link below:
http://vimeo.com/21724326

B-10197

I could not believe my eyes when some days ago I saw a familiar face on TV. It was about a half a decade ago when I came across in my back-then neighborhood with an old man who had a story to tell. B-10197 was tattooed on his arm. He was an Auschwitz survivor.

Screen shot of the documentary. Courtesy of YLE.

Recently, Mayer Franck (1928-2012) crossed my mind quite often. I was wondering if his story had properly been documented in Finland, and whether he was still alive or not. The documentary movie on TV answered my first question, and Google the second.

What happened to Mayer is pretty unbelievable. Was it luck, persistence, God's will or what, but he survived and pulled through every twist and turn in the plot. Mayer was 11 years old when he was forced with his family to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. His father died (doctor refused to mend him if there was no pay in food - the family had none to give) and mother and two sisters were put on the first train to Auschwitz. Mayer escaped this scenario, hiding in a sewer. He never believed the stories that those who got on the train, were given a sack of potatoes and were headed for better conditions.

The ghetto was being emptied in quite a hurry, and at some point Mayer and a couple of his friends built a secret annex (much like the Frank family in Amsterdam). At daytime, they were hiding in the annex and at night searched the streets for food and cooked whatever they found on a small stove. One day when the Germans were searching their hiding place, one of the officers noticed the stove was warm. He noticed a hutch attached to the wall and pushed it aside, revealing the boys' hiding place. They were put on a train and sent to the place where "you must say goodbye to your wife and kids, everyone goes to heaven". It was summer of 1944.

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Mayer was put in the line on the right. He was inspected, and sent to work. Every day at roll call, Mayer pinched his cheeks and stood on his toes, in order to appear healthy and sturdy. One day he was picked to go work for a German company to shovel sand. A hopeless task, especially when winter came and the ground froze.

In 1945, there came an order to evacuate the camp. Germans marched the prisoners, walking and walking for hours that felt like eternity. One morning, after the group spending the night in a barn, Mayer hid in the hays. There was a search and a poker brushed his back, but he dug his way deeper in the hays. Those who were found hiding in the barn, around 12 of them, were shot dead on the spot.

Mayer waited the whole day in the hay, and at night continued the journey on his own. A friendly old couple at a homestead accommodated him. The Totenkopf visited the house, but didn't capture him.

The war came to an end, and Mayer went to one of the Red Cross's camps. He had no ID, no photos, nothing. His whole family was dead. He returned back to the ghetto. A place that was buzzing with 250.000 people was now empty. Mayer went to live at an apartment that used to belong to a friend's family.

The family's late mother's brother, who lived in Helsinki, came to the ghetto looking for relatives. He found Mayer and took him to Finland. Mayer was 18 years old. In Finland, he kept working in fur business, a business he had learnt when working in the ghetto.

You would have never believed that this man had been through hell and lived to tell about it. He had a certain glimmer in his eyes, a smile, a positive attitude and always up for a chat. Sometimes he would offer sweets or chocolates, just out of kindness.

Mayer died on the 13th of May, 2012 in Finland. On that day, I was in Israel, preparing to go to Jerusalem. May he rest in peace.

The 300 of Finland

As I have now finished reading even more books on Holocaust, understanding it actually becomes even more difficult. Controversies, paradoxes, complexities are constantly unwrapped the deeper you dig. One of the most interesting – at least for the Finns – is the case of the 300 Finnish soldiers fighting for their country during the Continuation War against the Soviet Union in 1941-1944.

So, what makes it interesting? These 300 were Finnish Jews. And what makes it even more interesting? Simultaneously as these 300 were protecting the independence of Finland, 220 000 German soldiers were sent to Finland. They fought side by side. The tragic stories of what is happening in Poland and the rest of Europe to Jews had spread to Finland as well. It is no wonder that these soldiers felt a little uneasy finding Wermacht soldiers in the tent next door.

An accident waiting to happen, then? Actually, no. The Jewish soldiers built a synagogue amidst the battles. They were given Saturdays off so all the Jewish soldiers, also from the nearby area, could ski to the synagogue for service. They were given Yom Kippur off to celebrate the most important Jewish holiday. All this – under Germany's eyes.

agricola.utu.fi

 How many synagogues were built - not destroyed - in the German battlefields? This was probably the only one.

Quoting one of the soldiers when a German officer asked him how this was possible, ”in Finland there is freedom of religion, I was born in Finland, raised in Finland, went to Finnish schools and have a duty as a citizen to protect my country when my country needs me”. The German officer said back to him ”I'm no SS, personally I have no problem with Jews”, and they both went on fighting their battles.

Afterwards, these 300 soldiers have been called fascists by other Jews. But the way the saw the situation, just like the Christian Finnish soldiers was that there was no alliance with Germany and they were fighting for the freedom of Finland and not a religious war – citizenship and religion are two separate things. And just as a remark for some rebellion from these Jewish soldiers: they did not greet the Germans. Also, three of these 300 received a German Iron Cross, from Hitler, as an honour for great acts of bravery – but none of them accepted this token.

It is admirable of these 300 to fight for Finland. If the Soviet Union had won, the whole of Finland would have suffered. If Germany had won, only they would have suffered. They concentrated on protecting the whole of Finland. Is that patriotism or what? They made a movie about the 300 soldiers in Sparta... What about a movie about this? Steven Spielberg, are you listening? :)

Treblinka: Chil Rajchman's story

After recently rediscovering the Finnish libraries' vast book collections, I used particular search words to find books to read. Chil Rajchman's name came up, the title of the book liberally translated is ”The last Jew of Treblinka”.

I have to admit, I didn't know where Treblinka is. A lot of Ukrainian guards are mentioned, so I would have guessed somewhere there. But according to Google Maps, it is located somewhat East of Warsaw, Poland. A remote, forgotten piece of unfruitful land that Himmler decided to turn into a factory of death. The earth there was literally spitting up blood, as it could not absorb all the bodies buried in mass graves.

This map screenshot is courtesy of Google Maps.

Chil Rajchman's memoirs from this extermination camp is another book written in blunt, honest, straight-to-the-point way. Chil was born in 1914 in Poland. His mother died just before the war, and the only one of his family, in addition to himself, to survive the war was his brother, who managed to escape to the Soviet side of Poland. What happened to his father or youngest sister will never be known. Another sister was dead after 24 hours of her arriving together with Chil at Treblinka in 1942.

Like Shlomo Venezia (whom I wrote about previously), Chil was chosen out of thousands of men arriving at the camp and put to work. Again, to strip and dispose of the bodies. First, he sorted out the luggage and clothes left behind by those who were gassed to immediate death. He found among the mountains of clothes his sister's dress, and cut off a piece of it to keep with him until it all was over. Then he was a barber, cutting off women's hair before they entered the chambers. Then he was moved to carrying bodies once the doors of a gas chamber were opened and a mass of human corpses melted together rolled out. Afterwards, he worked as a dentist, pulling out golden teeth out of the corpses' mouths. Bodies needed to be burnt in open bonfires, so no evidence would be left behind.

This was the routine at the Treblinka camp. It was purely for the purpose of killing. No one transported there came there to stay, but were marched off to death immediately. The guards were called murderers, and at its worst, the trains carried 15 000 Jews there daily. Estimates between killed people at this site range from 700 000 to 900 000. An incomprehensible number. It is like sweeping out the whole capital region of Finland in a matter of a couple of years.

How did Chil manage to escape? Inspired by the riots in Warsaw, the men at Treblinka arranged their own riot. Most were killed during this brave attempt, but a handful survived – Chil among them.

After the war, Chil moved to Uruguay, married and had three sons. Until his death his memoirs were not published but only read by family members. His wish was to let the world know what was done to Jews during those horrendous, dark years in European history. That's why I wanted to write about the book here, too.

Sonderkommando

Moving on to a totally different "book review", compared to my last post. Yet again, I was sucked in by a book by a Shoah survivor. I already earlier wrote about Ladislaus Löb, so this time it was Shlomo Venezia's story that mesmerized me. I actually finished the book in 4 hours or so.

The book Sonderkommando is Shlomo's story from Auschwitz and how he was made to work in a group with some other Jews held in the same camp. Sonderkommando, meaning special unit, consisted of these "selected" people who were handling the disposal of the numerous bodies and maintaining the gas chambers and crematories at the camp. Basically, cleaning up the mess the Nazis created when executing these mass murders.

Shlomo Venezia was a Greek-Jew, living in Thessaloniki (also known as the Jerusalem of the Balkan). His family had fled Spain in the 1400s and settled in Italy (hence the family name Venezia) until ending up in Greece. His mother for instance didn't speak any Greek, only Ladino, and his father died when he was a little boy. Due to his background though, he had Italian citizenship and avoided the persecutions in Greece for a little while, until the transportations also from Greece to the death camps began. He was 21 years old when ending up in Poland.

What makes Shlomo's story special is, that not only did the Nazis want to exterminate him for being a Jew, there was an additional cause why he was wanted dead: they did not want any witnesses alive from the sonderkommando. It is by a miracle, you could say, that he was saved – a young man that didn't expect to live and didn't even think of the future, but still fought for his life every day and survived.

The book is actually an interview, so the story is immortalized almost word-to-word in the book. He talks about the happenings with great honesty and detail. How he felt in a way he was helping the Nazis but had no choice. How you had to be selfish and fight for your survival under those conditions. How a 2-month-old baby girl is the only known survivor from a gas chamber – only to be shot dead by SS officer minutes later. How the hair of the bodies was cut and sent off to factories for making fabric, or gold teeth pulled out and sent to Berlin for melting. How the chimneys of the crematories were all shiny from the burnt fat of the dead bodies.

Gruelling, disgusting, sends shivers down your spine. Stories like this leaves you get again wondering how on Earth the human kind could allow a genocide so brutally efficient, organized, planned and targeted to happen. Quoting Shlomo himself though, stories like this need to be told and printed, so nothing like it would ever happen again. I had wanted to read this book for a while now, and I am glad I finally did - to never forget. Sometimes it is good to know and be aware about things, even if one is not able to fully process or comprehend them or the big picture.

The horrifying truth, packed inside these covers.

Prinsengracht 263

The Amsterdam address mentioned in the headline needs no introductions, and neither does a certain young girl called Anne Frank. Her diary, translated into dozens and dozens of languages, is one of the most known and read stories from WWII and the museum draws numerous visitors each day after its opening in 1960.

I had read the Diary before, but hadn't visited the Anne Frank House during my two previous short visits to Amsterdam. Third time is the charm, so dreading the long queue squirming outside the house, it was time to pay the scene of the Diary a visit.

The queue looks worse than it actually is.

The house looks on outside like any other Amsterdam house. Tall, narrow, big windows. Inside, there are steep staircases and creaking floors. But no other house hosts a certain bookcase that served as a hidden entrance to the annex of this building, which was used as a warehouse in the front - and a hiding place in the back.

The rooms in the annex are empty, left that way after Otto Frank's wishes. It is meant to symbolize the void left after all the people that never came back from the camps. The 46m2 of the annex housed eight people and for two years provided them hopes of surviving - until someone (still unknown) tipped them off. Otto Frank was the only one of them to survive. All that is left now are faded pictures of movie stars glued on the walls of the annex, and marks on the wall showing how much Anne had grown in height during these two years. Something so normal and humane, abruptly ended by something so abnormal and inhumane.

It was touching to visit the scene and think that this was the exact location where Anne had written her Diary. You get to walk the same floors, take the same stairs, see the same view from the attic. Anne's stories come to life, as you can place each resident of the annex in the locations doing their own things and chores, silently and patiently waiting for the war to end.

The House is yet another reminder and testimony of the horrific things humankind did and allowed to happen not so long ago. For those interested, I highly recommend reading the Diary and visiting the museum and witnessing this young girl's short, but powerful legacy.

Exactly 70 years ago, 25th of September 1942, Anne wrote the following to Kitty (= the Diary):

"Mouschi, the cat, is becoming nicer to me as time goes by, but I'm still somewhat afraid of her."

careysbookproject.files.wordpress.com

Dealing with Satan

In July, I wandered to Stockmann's bookstore together with my significant other to find my friend a birthday present. On my way to the cashier I noticed a pile of books on sale and glanced through the selection. My eye was caught by a striking title in Finnish: sopimus saatanan kanssa, original title being Dealing with Satan. The cover featured a jerked black and white picture of a wooden shack surrounded by barbwire and Magen David in the back.

Even a mediocre blonde like myself could put two and two together and figure what the book is about but, as they say never judge a book by its cover, I picked up a copy and read the back cover. And then I purchased the book for myself (my friend got something lighter to read). And then I started reading it immidiately, pushing aside that damn boring JFK bio I had been stuck with for months.

The book is written by Hungarian-Jew Ladislaus Löb who is a WWII survivor. This is his way of paying respects to the man, Rezso Kasztner, who saved him (and 1699 other Hungarian Jews) from mass destruction and certain death. In normal circumstances, acts like this would be considered heroic but Kasztner's story didn't quite have that ending in the newly independent Israel in 1950s. He was a Jew, who saved hundreds of other Jews, but was condemned by Jewish judges as a Nazi affiliator and finally was killed by the bullets of Jewish assassins.

Lately, his name seems to be somewhat cleared but why I found the book so well-written and touching is that it is a true story from the author directly to the reader. Books are something so much more personal than movies or TVs. What should I read next?

 Six million stories from the WWII will never be heard.
But here is one that survived.

What did Finland do?

A couple of days ago, exactly 100 years passed since the birth of Raoul Wallenberg. He is very well remembered for his brave, unselfish acts when saving 40 000 Jews during WWII. Wallenberg served as a Swedish diplomat in Hungary those days, and together with other noble-minded people granted passports for Jews so they could be rescued.

Last June when I visited the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, I couldn't help but notice the praise for Denmark and the resistance there how 8000 Jews were saved and sent to neutral Sweden by sea.

And where was Finland in all this? It gives me great discomfort to learn about the actions of this country during WWII. No matter how you try to twist and turn it, Finland got blood on its hands.

Even though Finland remained democratically-ruled and was never invaded, for a moment it fought alongside Nazi Germany. The Jews who had Finnish citizenship were never subject to the mass persecution and were protected by the government, but unlike our noble neighbors, eight Jewish refugees with no Finnish passport were sent back to death. And this was eight too many.

Sure, Sweden, Norway and Denmark didn't have the Red Army breathing down their neck and trying to rip them from their independence. Some try to justify the actions of Finland by saying that the enemy of our enemy was our friend during desperate times. Until things turned sour with this ”friend” of course, and they burned our Lapland.

The Finnish Prime Minister made an official apology somewhat 50 years later. In 1971, a small group of Finnish Christians founded Yad HaShmona in Israel, naming it in the memory of these eight unfortunate people. All good gestures, but it quite doesn't change what happened.

If anyone raises this topic at a dinner table in Israel with me, I've got nothing to defend Finland with. I would bow my head in shame and sadness - saying sorry wouldn't make a difference (this could be called the Finnish guilt?). The treatment these eight refugees received pains me. It doesn't sound like the Finland I was born to. God forbid similar events ever happening again, but if it did, I hope my country would act otherwise.