Conference taveng::bagels

       In the spirit of tangents, I will answer none of Michael's
       questions.
       
       I will, however, remind people in the Boston area that a current
       film that is said to be extraordinary (I haven't seen it yet)
       is a series of interviews with Holocaust survivors and others
       directly connected to the Holocaust.  The movie is called "Shoah",
       and it is playing (only) at Copley Place; it is 9-1/2 hours
       long (no misprint), and it is shown in two parts.
       
       --Don

Not really a tangent Don.

Sounds very interesting, I would like to see it.  WOuld anyone like
to get together and see, at least half of, it ?

Send me mail

Michael

RE .0

New Jersey has instiuted a state-wide program for all high school 
students to explain the Holocaust and its meaning.  Jewish groups
helped the state develop the program.  Governor Kean is very
active in Holocaust studies and feels that it is important for
all to understand what happened.  

My mothers cousin who we are very close to married a survivor and
he has never talked about it.  However she did get him to tell
his story for a major story in an issue of the Miami Herald Sunday
magazine.  It was very hard for me to handle knowing him and reading
what happened.

WS

I used to be active in an organization for children of holocaust survivors and 
other interested people: ONE GENERATION AFTER.  They usually meet once a month
on a Sunday evening at Zionist House in Boston, 17 Commonwealth Ave.

I had been on their Oral History committee, and had conducted oral history
sessions with several survivors.  The only mistake I made was interviewing
my mother, too many prejudices, etc.  It would have gone better if a stranger
had conducted it.  My mother is not a survivor of "the" holocaust, but some
years preceding it (and after the revolution) she and her family were the 
only Jews to survive a murderous pogrom.  The entire population of her town
was killed by Ukranian anti-semites.  They managed to save themselves by 
hiding by boarding up their house and hiding under a bed for three days.

As for the monthly meetings of OGA, they sometimes have interesting speakers
and films.  If you are interested, I'll respond to this note again tomorrow
with names of people to contact, etc.  I just don't have that information
handy here in the office.

David 

My father is a Holocaust survivor.  He was in a German concentration 
camp in Ukraine for two years.  In 1943 he managed to escape and a 
Ukranian family hid him in a basement of the house for another year.  I 
do not know much about this -- he doesn't like to talk about those 
years.  Only after a drink (which happens once a year at the most) he 
could say a few more words about his life.

But these years were not the worst!  Later, when he got back home, he 
was imprisoned in a Soviet concentration camp.  The reason -- if a Jew 
was not killed by the Germans, he was probably a traitor of his 
country!  After his release from there he was not able to find a job 
for the same reason.  His papers stated that he was a POW and lived on 
occupied territory.

As you may guess, even now, 40 years after WWII, he still hates all 
German -- people, state, goods -- you name it, and all the Soviet 
system.  You may call it prejudice, but there is nothing ne can do 
about it.

Leo

1. I grew up in a community of survivors; my father and most of my parent's
friends were victims of the Holocaust. Most of them (unlike my father)
have made concerted efforts to assimilate into American life as a way
of disassociating themselves from their past.

2. I've been exposed to the Holocaust from a very early age. I can remember
when I was 3 or 4 asking my mother what the numbers on my uncle's arm were
for. She told me that some "very bad people" did that to my father, uncle,
and their family many years ago. 

When I was in my teens, I went through a phase where I read everything about the
war that I could get my hands on - not political, economic or military matters,
but personal experiences recounted by survivors. It was a morbid curiosity; I
think I wanted to get as close to the exerience as I could, since I obviously
couldn't live it first-hand. 

Fortunately, my father has opened up to the family in a number of intimate and
emotional family discussions. He is also currently engaged in writing his
memoirs, which I look forward to seeing when I go home for Thanksgiving.

3. As for faith in God, I think that more people lost it than gained it.
My father outwardly claims not to believe in God because "no God could have
allowed such a horrible thing to happen". Inwardly, I think that he really
does believe and that he HATES God for allowing it to happen.

4. Most Americans don't want to know about this horror, so it not often
taught in school or discussed in any forum. A number of people have made
comments to me that Jews are hung up on the Holocaust/martyr complex, and
why can't they just forgive and forget? Needless to say, these remarks 
infuriate me.

5. There is a group called Association of Holocaust Survivors that keeps a
registry of Holocaust survivors. They have been holding world-wide gatherings
for the past three years. The first was in Israel, and the last two were in
Wash. DC and Philadelphia. I have more information on this group if anyone is
interested. Also, the Simon Weisenthal Center dedicates its efforts to tracking
down Nazi war criminals who live freely throughout the world.

	Marla

	I am intending upon seeing "Shoah" after I return from New York
	next week.  If anyone would like to get together and see
	the first half and then catch the second half later, please
	send me MAIL adn we can pool it.

	For those visiting Boston, please try to include this film
	in your agenda.

	Michael

	My father and his family are also surviors. Unfortunatly he won't
talk to me or my brother or sister about it. He has acutally talked with
strangers about it but doesn't like to bring it up in front of us. One other
thing is his reaction to WWII shows on TV. He won't see movies about it but
if he sees something on tv he will watch it and then have nightmares for
several days but he will always insist on watching. The only thing he would
never let us watch was Hogan's Heros cause he said nothing was funny about
that part of the war and it should never have been made into a comedy.

-warren

A friend of mine, Noam, had told me, when I was a child, that
his mother and father objected to him watching "Hogan's Hero's".
I find easy to believe, but I try to take that show for what it
was -- a mockery of the Nazi's.  A sort of Satire.  I agree that
perhaps the show might be offending to some people, based on the
subject matter it covered, but it is a sort of 'rag' on the
Germans.

Hmmm, there are ALOT of Jew's in the television industry, I am going
to find out if any of the creator's of that show are still around
and ask them about their reasons for creating the show.

Michael "Perhaps this should have been a MAIL message -- sorry."

	The man who played LeBoe (sp), the Frenchman, is Jewish. 

I think that most people who watched Hogan's Heroes did see it as a satire
and a harmles one. However, I do remember hearing objections from time to
time. MAD magazine (What Me Worry?, etc) did a satire on Hogan's Heroes
called Hochman's Heroes, or some such thing. It depicted the same situation
in a concentration camp and was fairly disgusting. Many people found this
satire objectionable.

Not only is Robert Clary, who played LeBoe, Jewish, but he is a survivor 
of Auschwitz and spends quite a bit of time these days lecturing on his
experiences to various groups. He has said that back in the days of
Hogan's Heroes, he didn't like recalling his experiences, but he now
feels it very important to educate people and preserve the memory of the
six million.

	Marla

Further to Marla's mention of the Association of Holocaust Survivors (11.6),
there was a TV film over here in England a little while ago called "Remebrance
Of Love", with Kirk Douglas. It was based around the AHS "conference" in Israel,
and was a love story about 2 Polish children who were separated by Nazis during
the War, but found each other again at the conference.  It was very touching and
very real, even though some parts seemed a little too coincidental.

Fortunately, my family came over from Russia (on my Father's side) and Poland
(on my Mother's side) well before even WWI, so none of us (as far as I know)
were taken by the Germans.

Susan.

From:	ISWISS::CURTIS       "Dick 'Aristotle' Curtis"  5-DEC-1985 10:21


[From the 8 Nov 85 issue of THE CATHOLIC FREE PRESS, published by the (Roman)
 Catholic Diocese of Worcester, Mass.]


	'Shoah', a magnificent film about the Holocaust
     ENSHRINING HORROR POETICALLY FOR POSTERITY

	NEW YORK -- Midway through a showing of the epic film about the
Holocaust, "Shoah", an anguished young Jew in the New York audience cried out
in loud protest. Immediately, those nearby shushed him into silence.

	What had provoked him -- and palpably disturbed the rest of the predom-
inantly Jewish audience in the theater -- were the comments being made on the
screen by Polish Catholic churchgoers to explain the Holocaust.

	It was, they are saying, retribution for the Jewish people having
rejected Our Lord.

	One woman sums it up: "So Pilate washed his hands and said: 'Christ is
innocent', and he sent Barrabas. But the Jews cried out: 'Let his blood fall on
our heads'."

	She concludes, as her neighbors nod in vigorous assent: "It was God's
will, that's all."

	This is the explanation of the Holocaust by the townspeople of Chelmno,
the Polish village where Jews were first exterminated by gas. In front of
detached and curious Christian onlookers, the Nazis had herded the Jews into
the church in Chelmno, and then gassed them in vans enroute to their burial in
a mass grave.

	Other Polish witnesses in the nearby village of Grabow testify to the
"dishonesty" of Jews, of how the Germans killed them because "they were rich",
and because "the Jews ran Poland". These comments come from poor peasants who
bettered their lives by moving into homes taken from the Jews, who had been
mostly tradespeople and tanners.

	The film makes plain [that] there persists in modern Poland, ardently
Catholic Poland, the Poland of Pope John Paul II, the most primitive and viru-
lent strains of anti-Semitism. This -- 40 years after the Holocaust, and 20
years after the Church Fathers renounced hereditary guilt of the Jewish people
and deplored anti-Semitism.

	The relevance to the here and now is one of the more chilling aspects
of this oral history about how Germany tried to exterminate a whole people.

	He was in a train to the death camp at Treblinka, says Alexander Bomba.
"Most of the people, not only the majority, but 99 percent of the Polish people
when they saw the train going through -- we really looked like animals in that
wagon, just our eyes looking outside -- they were laughing, they had a joy, 
because they took the Jewish people away."

	The title of the motion picture, "Shoah", is a Hebrew word that means
annihilation. Ten years in the making by Claude Lanzmann, a French Jew, it
recently opened in New York and is scheduled for nation-wide distribution.

	Nine-and-a-half hours long, it predictably will not attract as large
an audience as "Rambo", even shown in two parts on different days. And that is
a shame because "Shoah" depicts, in a strangely beautiful and haunting way,
society gone mad. It does not use one foot of archival film. It has no back-
ground music. It raises directly no overarching moral questions and does no
preaching. It simply describes. People tell their own stories -- of the death
factories of Auchwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobidor, of the destruction of
the Warsaw Ghetto, of the German bureaucracy which mass-produced the death of
Jews even at the expense of the war machine.

	Those who perpetrated this crime against humanity also give testimony.
Mr. Lanzmann filmed some of the surreptitiously with a hidden television camera
because they didn't want to appear on film. [I think I heard one of these ****s
hospitalized him for his trouble -- Dick]

	Former SS officer Franze Suchomel says it is "an exaggeration" that
18,000 Jews a day were liquidated at Treblinka at its peak.

	"How many?" asks Mr. Lanzmann.

	"Twelve thousand to fifteen thousand. But we had to spend half the
night at it."

	Suspense is sustained in closeups of faces and in the exquisite framing
of modern-day scenes. As the people talk, birds chirp at Treblinka, Warsaw
bustles where the ghetto had been, Berlin blinks in neon, Israeli gunboats
patrol the sunny Mediterranean. And, intermittently, relentlessly, the sight
and sound of rolling trains. It was the wonderful European train system stretch-
ing all the way to Greece that allowed the Nazis to haul the Jews to the death
camps.

	Dr. Raul Hilberg, the University of Vermont historian who wrote the 
definitive account of the period, "The Destruction of the European Jews",
gives context to the testimony at various points.

	He explains that Christianity had prepared the way for the Nazis. The
anti-Jewish laws -- from Jews being barred from office to their having to wear
the Star of David -- all had precedents. Even in propaganda, Dr. Hilberg points
out, "they were remarkably in the footsteps of those who proceeded them, from
Martin Luther to the 19th century."

	From the earliest days, he says, "the missionaries of Christianity had
said in effect to the Jews: 'You may not live among us as Jews.' The secular
rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages then decided: 'You may not
live among us,' and the Nazis finally decreed: 'You may not live'."

	But, one may ask, is another account of the Holocaust needed, especially
since so much has already been written and filmed?

	The answer needs to be "yes" so long as the attitudes that allowed
Christians to watch mute and detached persist.

	The answer needs to be "yes" so long as the Christian Churches fail to
understand the meaning for Christians of the extermination during the years
1939 to 1945.

	The answer needs to be "yes", too, considering the artistry of this
production.

	Mr. Lanzmann does for the Holocaust in "Shoah" what Dante did for
Hell in "The Inferno": he enshrines horror poetically for posterity.


(Gerald Renner, a free lance writer and former editor of Religious News
Service, is writing a book about the Vatican and Zionism.)

My parents are both survivors of the Holocaust. Their entire families were
nearly wiped out. My father has only one living relative left; a niece living
in Israel. My mother has two brothers, one in Israel and one in Chicago.

What bothers me the most is how much the US knew about what was going on
in the death camps, and how they refused to do anything about it. The evidence
is overwhelming. An excellent book, "Aushwitz and the Allies", by the British
historian Martin Gilbert, shows reports and photographs from US and other
Allied reconisance of the camp. The state department and the war office refused
many requests to bomb the gas chambers. The state dept. at the time was
extremely anti-semitic, and would not even discuss the situation. I am appalled
that the US could have saved many, many thousands of lives by destroying
the killing machines, but refused to do so.

I wouls also like to see Shoa, but have not yet had the opportunity.

    A few more related items on this subject:
    
    	Another fine movie on the effect of being a Holocaust survivor's
    child is "Kaddish" which appears at the Coolidge Corner Theater
    in Brookline occasionally.
    
        David Wyman (who is not a Jew himself) has written a book (I forget
    the title; it is something like _The_Abandonment_of_the_Jews_) on the
    US's failings during the Holocaust, and he spends a good deal of time
    speaking on the subject.  He and the book are worth seeking out.
    
        Finally, some more oddities about "Hogan's Heroes."  The men who
    played both of the leading German characters came to the US before WWII
    because they were exiled from Austria for political reasons.  I don't
    think that Werner Klemperer (son of Otto Klemperer, the conductor), who
    played Klink, is Jewish, and I know that John Banner, who played
    Schultz, was definitely not Jewish.  Banner fled the Nazis because he
    was a Socialist; I don't know the story about Klemperer.  I wonder
    how they felt about playing those roles. 

    			David

RE: Notes 48.8,48.9,48.10,48.11

It's funny how differently we react to things.

I am a survivor of the Holocaust. I have now grown sons, but when they were
young, they of course watched too much television and of course as a concerned 
mother I would  walk over to the T.V. set and would turn it off, so they can
do their homework, go to bed, clean up their room, practice the violin, rake
the leaves, etc. etc. etc.   ...BUT NEVER when Hogan's Heroes was on.

To this day in our household it's not customary to make generalized, derogatory
remarks about any nation. I always felt that I can not break this rule even in
the case of the Germans, ...but where is it written that I can't let them watch
Hogan's Heroes? 

...and to this day, I am too embarrassed to tell my sons about the 'exception'.


						Marika

P.S. I read somewhere (TV Guide?), years ago that John Banner (Schultz)
was indeed Jewish. Wrong?

    Right.

.16> P.S. I read somewhere (TV Guide?), years ago that John Banner (Schultz)
.16> was indeed Jewish. Wrong?

    	I'm not sure he was Jewish, but he did leave Austria (where I
    understand he was one of the most popular actors of the time) before
    WWII.  The reason may have been political rather than religious.

    	Werner Klemperer (Klink) also left Austria in the '30s for similar
    reasons.

    -----

    	It's interesting that the two leading German characters on "Hogan's
    Heroes" had these backgrounds, and that they didn't seem to mind
    playing these roles.  "HH" has always been a little controversial; in
    _The_Powers_That_Be_, David Halberstam described it in passing as
    perhaps the lowest possible taste that television had yet sunk to in
    the '60s.  (I can think of worse!)

    		David

    Can't tell you more than:
    

    
    If they were Austrians (and Banner WAS jewish), they don't have
    a problem in parodizing German Nazis.
    
    Well, if some of you guys insist on keeping the Austrians and Germans
    one and the same identity, I suggest you walk off and talk to some
    of the Jews currently living in Austria.
    
    Highlightingly yours,
    
    Chris

I remember reading somewhere that the Col. Klink character has it written
into his contract that the "German's" will never win.

Martin.

    I am a survivor of the holocaust.
    I was born in 1938, in France.  There are many different ways of being 
    a survivor.  I never was in a camp.  We hid in France throughout the
    war.  First we went to the South of France when everyone was afraid
    Paris would be bombed.  Then we went back to Paris becaude nothing
    happenned .It was called "la drole de guerre".  My father was taken
    into the french army and send to an army camp in the south. Then the
    Germans made a deal with the french Vichy government.  They took over
    the top of France and let Vichy govern the south ...For a while.
    Meantime, my mother left with two children thougt we better get out of
    Paris fast. So she leased a railroad merchandise car and loaded it with our
    possessions and sent it to the south. (my father was out of the army
    by then after faking mental illness not to be sent to the front- I am
    skipping some, there are five years to cover...). My (resourceful)
    mother also bought a button making machine and spent the night making
    buttons and bows for all her dresses.  In each button was a gold coin,
    in each bow made of fabric, a $100 bill (nobody trusted the local
    currency during the war).  She said her dresses were so heavy she would
    get tired just standing up.  Then we left at night to cross from the
    (german) occupied zone to the free (not really for the Jews) French
    zone.  Guides were paid to cross us, in groups, in the middle of
    the night through country fields that were patrolled by Germans with
    dogs.  My sister and I were carried on the shoulders of two guides,
    adults walked with their fur coats and hats, carrying heavy suitcases
    through the pitch dark french countryside.  
    We stayed in Nice on the Riviera until the Germans took all of France.
    My grand mother was arrested in Nice and sent to a transit camp.  She
    escaped Auswitch because she was born in Turkey and they were the
    germans allies. So even though she was Jewish she was sent to
    Istambul.  We left Nice and hid in a number of small villages until
    the end of the war.  After the allies debarked in the South of France,
    the Germans retreated through our village.  Long convoys of trucks
    and french buses painted grey passed all day and all night.
    My parents were hysterical with fear, going from the balcony
    to the room, holding their face between their hand.  I was only
    5 or 6, but I saw terror and the fear of death in their eyes.
    I learned then there was no security in life, not even with your
    parents.  They can't protect you, not when they are that afraid.
    The war for me lasted two more years.  We were not sure the Germans
    would not come back. besides, the french were as much to fear for us.
    
    Very few Jews were ever rounded up by the Germans. The french police
    was only too happy to do it for them.  French ministers used to make
    suggestions to the Germans on how to persecute the Jews, confiscate
    their possessions, round them up. (see New York Times magazine
    article of Sept 30 89 on Touvier, the french collaborator hidden by
    the french catholic church in convents for over 40 years...)
    
    My parents put their children in a boarding school so they could go
    back to Paris and start their business again.  (my father had done
    well in business before the war, but after five years of hiding,
    money was running low).  They had to sue all those who, thinking all
    Jews were killed by the Germans, had occupied his appartment,
    store, office building.  Even though he came back, they would not
    give them back and had to be taken to court.  
    
    While in Nice, we had all been baptized, thinking the certificate could
    be helpful one day.  The day we went to boarding school is the first
    time I found out I was Jewish.  That was when my father told me:
    "Don't tell anyone you are Jewish !"
    
    I an still angry at the french.
    I belong to an organization of holocaust survivors who were children
    during the war.
    We have had national gathering for the last two years.
    I would like to form a group of children survivors in the Boston
    area, preferably the north shore.  We used to have such a group
    and it was helpful to talk about our experiences during the war.
    
    I also would be interested in meeting other Jews of french culture
    (I keep saying: "I am not french, I am of french culture.  French Jew
    is a contradiction in terms", although this is not true since Jews
    from North Africa moved to france.  They are quite ascertive about
    their Jewishness.)  I live to speak french and french culture.
    
    I also would be interested in meeting Jews of the Boston area who
    might speak Ladino (not all Jews know what Ladino is: It is for
    Jews who left Spain at the time of the inquisition [my family], what
    Yiddish is to Jews who lived in central Europe.  Ladino is medieval
    spanish mixed with Hebrew, arabic and also french, or Greek or
    whatever was the local language of the country in which the Jews
    resided.  Ladino is dying.... I always refused to learn it as a child
    (but I am fluent in Spanish), I did not want to be more different
    than I had to.  Being Jewish was hard enough.
    
    My name is Jean-Pierre Angel.  I have lived in the U.S. since 1957.
       
    
    
    

    Another related show on this topic was shown on PBS a year or so ago -
    The Wanassee Conference. For those of you who didn't see it, it took
    place in 1942 in the Wanassee district of Berlin and was the
    culmination of all information leading to "The Final Solution". All the
    top Nazis were there,(Army, SS, Administration, Justice) under the
    direction of SS General Hydreich, and discussed, for ninety minutes,
    the distruction and total eradication of European Jewry.
     What was so fascinating (not to say deeply chilling) was the script
    was taken verbatum from the minutes of the meeting and that the
    attitude was that of a logistical/business problem!
     Contact your local PBS station or public library if a videotape is
    available.