To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

French President Jacques Chirac

Fifteen years ago, in July, 1995, French President Jacques Chirac gave a speech finally acknowledging the French role in the July 16, 1942 “Velodrome d’Hiver roundup.” Here are his words:

July 16 and 17, 1942, Paris, France

“These black hours will stain our history forever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was supported by the French, by the French state. Fifty-three years ago, on 16 July 1942, 450 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders, obeyed the demands of the Nazis. That day, in the capital and the Paris region, nearly 10,000 Jewish men, women, and children were arrested at home, in the early hours of the morning, and assembled at police stations…France, home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners.”

Family Stories workshops (All ages) The purpose of this session is to help children learn about their parents’ histories. I work with families in groups as children learn how to ask questions about their parent’s early life experiences and parents share some of their stories. Great opportunity for families to bond.

Parent Book Clubs (Adults or Parent/Child groups) My books have been popular with adult and parent child book clubs. I give presentations to these groups.

Writers Workshop (Grades 3 and up) I teach the craft of writing, inspiring parents and children to develop their own sense of identity through story.

1938- my grandmother, my mother, my grandfather. This is the last picture of my mother’s family, taken just before she was sent to America.

Neurobiologist Eric Kandel wrote in his work, In Search of Memory, that people have the desire to destroy people outside the group to which they belong. “There may be an innate response,” he writes, “that is capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group.”

In my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, a village of 2,000 people and two Jewish families, that phenomenon was evident in 1938.

My grandfather was a respected civic leader in town, which his family had helped settle in 1721. No farmer in the area could bring his crops to market without the services of my grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld. In addition, my grandfather introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. His family had the first telephone and the first car in the area. The family was assimilated into the town and he served as a trusted lender to many members of the community. In fact, most families in the town had borrowed money from my grandfather; that way, they could stay solvent and keep their farms afloat.

When Hitler came to power, as Kandel puts it, “the successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews.” The townspeople of Stockstadt did nothing to defend or protect Westerfeld and his family. After all, how convenient it would be if the town lender would simply disappear and the loans would be eradicated.

A member of a family who had borrowed money from my grandfather came to me about ten years ago and cried. “My father  owed your grandfather a great deal of money,” she said. “I feel that his blood is on my family’s hands.”

Note: For a larger discussion on this subject, please visit www.shadowsoftheholocaust.com.

Note: A reader sent me the following article about another rescue effort.

The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product – precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient. Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family-owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany ’s most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.

And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, “the photography industry’s Schindler.” As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as “the Leica Freedom Train,”
a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were “assigned” to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States.

Leitz’s activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany. Before long, German “employees” were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.

Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom — a new Leica. The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.

The “Leica Freedom Train” was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders. By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes’ efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?

Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz’s single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.

Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works. A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe. Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland . She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.

Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the “Leica Freedom Train” finally come to light. It is now the subject of a book, The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train, by Frank Dabba Smith.

Since the 1940s, one of the few ways American Jews protested the Nazi regime was to refuse to buy certain German products. High on the list was the Mercedes. (Volkswagon and German wine were other targets.)

In 1998, things got complicated when Chrysler Corporation bought a majority share of Mercedes manufacturer Daimler-Benz. Then, some newspapers and magazines asked Jews if they now would begin to boycott Chrysler. Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick said that, as a “private memorial” to the Nazis’ victims she would boycott Chrysler.

Some survivors and refugees continue to boycott German products even today. But in the global economy, it is increasingly difficult to know who owns a product.

It’s debatable whether the boycott was effective. But it’s clear that the boycott didn’t make a dent in the financial portfolio of the man who brought the world the Mercedes.

Frederich Flick was one of Germany’s biggest tycoons of the 20th Century. In addition, the Allies listed him third of 42 industrialists most responsible for Nazi crimes.

1990 - Edith (wearing corsage) reunites with elementary school classmates,
52 years after she last saw them.

One of my mother's German classmates from elementary school
just finished reading Is It Night or Day?. He sent my mother
his reaction to the book in this email. My good friend Frank Nordt
translated the letter from German to English below. 

Liebe Edith,

Fern`s Buch habe ich nun zweimal gelesen und es stets bedrückt,
traurig und betroffen aus der Hand gelegt.
Immer wieder ist mir Sigmund Freuds (??) Wort in den Sinn gekommen:
"Der Mensch ist des Menschen Wolf."
Goethe hat es behutsamer gesagt:

   Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,
   Ihren Lieblingen ganz:
   Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
   Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz.

Die Zeit, Schweres zu ertragen und zu vergessen, ist zuweilen
dereinzige Trost und Helfer.

Dear Edith,

I’ve now read Fern’s new book twice and I always put it down feeling sad, depressed, and dejected. Freud’s words ??? (actually, Thomas Hobbes’ words) always come to my thoughts: “Man is Man’s Wolf.” (The meaning of the phrase is “Man is a wolf to his fellow man.”) Goethe said it in a more gentle fashion:

The gods give everything, the infinite ones,
To their beloved, completely,
Every pleasure, the infinite ones,
Every suffering, the infinite ones, completely.

The pain of that time is heavy to bear. To forget is sometimes the only relief.

Passport photos: Gerda Katz and Edith Westerfeld

In our quest to find my mother’s old friend, “Gertie Katz,” we discovered that my mother had the wrong spelling of her friend’s name.

That’s not surprising, given that the two knew each other when they were 12 years old — seventy-three years ago.

The two girls immigrated together on the Deutschland. The ship left Bremen, Germany on a cold, gray day, March 8, 1938 and arrived in New York City on a sun-splashed March 19, 1938. Gertie and Edith became inseparable on the ship. (See blog below: WANTED (by Edith) Gertie Kahn of Seattle)

We contacted the One Thousand Children Foundation (OTC), asking for any information about “Gertie.” Here is the response from the OTC that identified our error:

dear edith,

yes, there is a gerda katz in the otc database who arrived in the us on 3 19 38 but we have never found her. perhaps you can find a lead from the archivists at YIVO (http://www.yivo.org) where indivudual otc childrens’ files exist.

good luck

Ahhhhh, GERDA KATZ.

Here is the passenger record the OTC included in the email:

Lost childhood

From reader Karin Gordon:

“The one scene in the book, Is It Night or Day?, that stays with me is the young boy who lay curled up on the deck crying he wanted to go to the zoo. I was without my parents for several years during the war.

“The Germans walked into Denmark in 1940 when I was two years old. When I was four, the Germans took our house, the Resistance movement bombed the milk factory where my father worked. (The Resistance bombed anything that could be of help to the Germans, in this case, milk and butter.) No one could take in a family of four so we were scattered like unwanted puppies.

“For three years, I stayed with different aunts and uncles and once with a friend of my mother’s. Some treated me well, one undressed and beat me for no reason – I was so sick at that place I couldn’t eat but threw up constantly (while they taunted me). My father came one evening on his bicycle, saw my condition, put me on the crossbar of his bike, but had nowhere to take me, so he dropped me at a cousin’s house on the way to the town where he had a room. I had no idea where the rest of the family were. I saw one of my parents on occasion. No one wanted to talk about it afterwards.

“We were united in a flea-infested flophouse near the end of the war in 1945. The other lodgers were pimps, whores, black market racketeers. the owner was a witch. My mother broke down and continued breaking down resulting in long stays at a sanatorium. This led to me being farmed out again, to a lovely aunt, but I was desperate for my mother.

“I remember how terrifying it was not to know when I’d see my parents again. My aunt once told me I’d get to see my mother in ‘two weeks,’ but I didn’t know how long that was.

“We were not united with our family in our own apartment until I was 11, but my mother remained threadbare, unavailable.”