Fighting the rising tide of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial
This Holocaust Remembrance Day, stories of witnesses such as in ‘Rebuilt from Broken Glass’ more important than ever
Fred Behrend and I labored for seven years to piece together his memoir Rebuilt from Broken Glass: A German Jewish Life Remade in America. But in our desire to focus on the uplifting parts of his tale — how his family survived the Holocaust, his brushes with history in the U.S. Army, and more — we realized late in the process that we had subconsciously avoided the unavoidable. We had told little of the fates of relatives murdered by the Nazis.
When I went online to flesh out the research, the picture of a bright, gold-colored object caught my eye. It was something called a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) and bore these words about a cousin of Fred’s who was killed at about age 25. Written in German, it said: “Here Lived Else Jelin. Born August 1919. Deported, Murdered in Riga (Latvia).” It woke me to the depths of the Holocaust differently than I had ever experienced.
I discovered it was the work of German artist Gunter Demnig and is one of 67,000 brass, four-inch square plaques embedded over the last 20 years in front of victims’ last address of choice. The stumbling stones are a powerful symbol of how anti-Semitism and raw hate escalated into the worst genocide in history — a story worth telling as Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) begins at sundown Wednesday.
But I also learned on CNN’s website last month that 400 such stones have been stolen since the project began. The number is on the rise, with police investigating neo-Nazi gangs as possible suspects.
Despite every effort to remember the Holocaust, there remain efforts by others to deny or downplay it. Anti-Semitism, which for many years had been on the decline, has resurfaced in the United States and worldwide with a vengeance, giving more urgency to the mission of Fred, 91, and others to bear witness while they still can.
The Anti-Defamation League reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents was 57 percent higher in 2017 than 2016. It was the largest single-year increase since the ADL began tracking incidents in 1979 and included a 41 percent jump in harassment and 86 percent in vandalism. The most memorable incident, of course, was when white supremacists and neo-Nazis paraded in Charlottesville, Virginia. ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt attributed the increase to the worsening divisiveness of American politics, emboldened extremists, and social media.
But it is a worldwide phenomenon, with the stumbling-stone thefts just one example.
· Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, 85, was murdered in Paris on March 28, stabbed 11 times in her apartment and her body found partly burned as attackers tried to set her apartment on fire.
· Poland recently passed a libel law criminalizing statements that its country bore any responsibility for crimes of the Holocaust. Prime Minister Lateusz Morawiecki recently went as far as to say there were also “Jewish perpetrators” in the Holocaust.
· A Pew Research Center survey found that 1 in 5 adults in some Central and Eastern European countries would not accept Jews as fellow citizens.
Despite 6 million stories of murder, the disease of anti-Semitism has never abated. Else, the youngest of the Jelin cousins, and Aunt Klara and Uncle Leopold were among them. As Fred Behrend tells in the memoir:
Records list (Klara and Leopold) as dying in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. But one of their sons, Curt, became a soldier in the American Army, and toward the end of the war discovered their actual fate upon returning to his hometown of Herne in western Germany. In an oral history from 1977, he said his parents were supposed to be sent to a concentration camp but instead were placed on a cattle train that was sealed and gassed. … Else tried to escape to England, failed, and was killed at about age 25 ahead of the Russian advance in a camp near Riga, Latvia, toward the end of the war. He said her death was because she was in charge of the gold knocked from dead people’s teeth and that she knew where the gold was.
Fortunately, most of Fred’s family members escaped such a fate, but only narrowly. Nazi intimidation visited his family on March 13, 1933, just weeks after Hitler took power. Stormtroopers paraded past his parents’ store, known as “Robert Stern” for his mother’s first husband and the shop’s original proprietor, who died in World War I. The Charlottesville marchers did not have official sanction, unlike the stormtroopers, but given that they chanted “Sieg Heil” while carrying a swastika past a synagogue, the sentiments were all too similar.
Fred’s father was arrested and sent to a concentration camp after Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938. He was released a few weeks later on the condition that he and his family emigrate as quickly as possible. They fled to the only country that would take them — Cuba — and remained there for over a year until their quota number was called, allowing them to enter America. As a U.S. soldier, Fred would turn the tables as an instructor in a program to teach German POWs about democracy.
Fred will keep telling his stories for as long as he can. And with Germany’s nationalist, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on the rise, and others like it resurgent in Europe, we must continue to support people like Demnig by opposing anti-Semites wherever they rear their heads.
AfD lawmaker Wolfgang Gedeon is one of those anti-Semites. In February, according to CNN, he issued a statement to his local parliament saying: “With their actions, the stumbling stone initiators impose a culture of remembrance on their fellow human beings, dictating to them how they should remember who and when. Who gives these obtrusive moralists the right to do so?”
The survivors like Fred Behrend. And the martyrs like Else Jelin. That’s who.
Rebuilt from Broken Glass is available from online from Purdue University Press, Amazon, and other online retailers, as well as local bookstores. To hear more on Fred Behrend’s story on Kristallnacht and escaping the Holocaust, watch the video below.
