The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

“Memory Needs Names and Faces”

A service in recognition of Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day

by Rev. John Gibbons and Hanna Papanek

delivered on Sunday, May 1, 2005

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Opening Words:

First they came for the socialists

    and I didn’t speak up,

       because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the Jews,

    and I didn’t speak up,

       because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

    and I didn’t speak up,

       because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

    and by that time there was no one

       left to speak up for me.

             —Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

A story for all ages, as told by Hanna Papanek:

“Dorli”

Today is a sad day because we are remembering a time sixty years ago when some terrible things happened.  Many, many people died.

I want to tell you about one of them, my best friend when I was twelve years old and living in a different country.  Her nickname was Dorli (her real name was Doris).  We lived together in a Children’s Home, a live-in kind of school, like the school shown in the picture here.  We slept in the same room and our beds were very near each other.  She had dark curly hair and was a little smaller than me but we were both very good at sports and played games like soccer.

When I was thirteen, I had to leave her behind in the Children’s Home when my parents and I came to America.  Dorli and her parents couldn’t come along.  We used to write letters to each other but one day the letters from her stopped.  For a long time I didn’t know what happened to Dorli and then I found out she had been killed, along with her parents and many other people.  She was only fourteen when she died.

I’ll never forget her and my sad feelings will never go away. But what I remember about her makes me happy and keeps her alive in my heart. 

Our school, which was built like a castle, was in the middle of a big forest. Dorli and I used to sneak away from the other children to climb some of the trees in that forest.  When we got to the top, we felt the tree swaying in the wind, it was like flying. 

One day we found a lot of blackberry bushes and started picking the ripe berries.  We ate a lot of them because we were always hungry.  But then we thought about the other children back at the school and wanted to carry some berries back to them.  We didn’t have backpacks along, so we took off our blue shorts, tied the legs together to make two bags and filled them with ripe blackberries.  We came back to the school in our underpants and gave the berries to the other children.  Nobody laughed at us and everybody was happy to eat the blackberries even though they were a little squashed.

* * * * * * * * * *

John Gibbons:

In Hebrew, the word “shoah” refers to catastrophe or utter destruction and, thus, Yom Hashoah, is a day of remembrance of the Nazi holocaust.  Officially, this year, it will be observed next Friday, May 6.  We recall the six million Jews who were murdered but we also should remember that the first to be killed were all those of every religious faith who politically opposed and resisted the Nazis, and we should further recall that homosexuals and all who were designated undesirable were, with Jews, targeted for annihilation.

It is common and incorrect to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust for the date of Yom Hashoah was chosen to honor the heroes and martyrs of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.  In truth, this day is not about victimhood but about resistance.

In the summer of 1942, 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to the concentration camp at Treblinka.  On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Seven hundred and fifty fighters fought the heavily armed and well-trained Germans. The ghetto fighters were able to hold out for nearly a month, but on May 16, 1943, the revolt ended. The Germans had slowly crushed the resistance. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to killing centers or concentration camps.

Thus, Yom Hashoah falls after Passover but during the period of the Warsaw uprising.  Today, the point is to remember and mourn – but also to celebrate the enduring power of human agency, our ability to say no, to resist, and to claim our dignity as human beings.

It is also common in Holocaust remembrances to recall the vast incomprehensible numbers of victims.  Perhaps at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the Holocaust museum in Washington, you have seen the piles of shoes or, worse, the piles of human hair that were shaved for mattress stuffing.  Horrible as these are, the time has come – and the museums are revising their exhibits – to recall the names and faces, the particularities not the generalities, the individual human beings, who resisted and were often consumed by this horror.

Hanna Papanek is a member of First Parish.  She does not consider herself a Holocaust survivor but she and her family were profoundly touched by the Holocaust.  Born in Berlin, her parents were prominent political opponents of the Nazi regime.  With her parents, she left Germany in 1934, first seeking exile in Prague, then in Paris.  She lived in a children’s home – like those supported by the Unitarian Service Committee – from 1938-1940.  She lives in Lexington. She is a distinguished anthropologist. Her husband, Gus, is an economist working in under-developed countries. Their daughter Joanne is a friend and colleague in the Unitarian Universalist ministry.  Hanna has lived and worked extensively with women, especially, in India, Indonesia and throughout Asia.

The theme, this morning, is memory: remembering the names and faces.  Sometimes in the course of human events it is not right to “get over it,” to “move on,” or to “find closure.”  It is vital and life-affirming to remember, to keep the spot sore, the wound open: to feel, to never forget, and to claim the dignity that is entitled to every human being.

* * * * * * * * * *

Hanna Papanek:

“Memory”

I started today with my friend Dorli, because memory must have a face and a name, as the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit reminds us, or it has no meaning. 

And some memories are like wounds that must not be allowed to heal -- on the contrary, they must be torn open again, every once in a while.  If justice is to be done, it begins in the act of remembering. 

Forgetfulness has become my foe: I strive to remember friends and family who live only in my memory and whom I honor through remembrance.

My sense of responsibility to friends and family drives me to pass on their stories.  But that is an act of choice: I don’t like the words “let’s just move on”.  Others may feel differently.

In the memory of the Holocaust, numbers cannot take the place of names and faces.  The numbers are too great to comprehend, as they are in all wars, all genocides.

When I started to remember the friends and family touched by the Holocaust, to write only about them, I expected it to be an easier task.  It is not: it is unspeakably harder.  The mere numbers, I now think, are a shield to keep us from knowing more.

I feel lucky -- now I know more about things that I only “sort of knew” before.  I have learned a lot in recent years by searching through records of the past: personal letters, public archives, personal memories, photographs, and books.  It is hard work, yet I do not feel that I suffer from “survivor’s guilt” -- only from “survivor’s sorrow”.

The story of the Holocaust is millions of different stories, told from many different angles, by those touched, however remotely, by this great evil.

Today I want to talk about a few of the people I remember: a childhood friend, Dorli, and a favorite aunt, Aunt Fanny, my non-Jewish mother’s younger sister. And also about people I never knew -- my Jewish father’s relatives in Eastern Europe.        

Reading:

These are the words of theologian Frederick Buechner: 

“Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer.  It is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.  The people we loved.  The people who loved us.  The people who, for good or ill, taught us things.  Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us – and through them to understand ourselves – in new ways, too….”

Hanna Papanek:

“Dorli, again”

To finish the rest of Dorli’s story, I start with my own escape from France in the fall of 1940. 

My parents and I were lucky, as was the family of the childhood friend I later married in New York. The Jewish Labor Committee and the Emergency Rescue Committee, both in New York, managed to obtain Emergency Visitors Visas for about five hundred political exiles, many of them Jews, so we could enter the United States.   Similar efforts were made by a few other groups, usually working together, that included a very important Jewish organization, the Joint Distribution Committee, as well as the Unitarian Service Committee and the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers), to rescue people from the trap Europe had become.

The US State Department was reluctant to admit too many refugees, especially Jews, and had ordered US consular officials in France to “go slow” in issuing these life-saving visas.  This is a very long story, well studied by historians but often unknown to the broader public.  Thousands of people, Jews and non-Jews, could have been saved by prompt and more generous American action. 

My friend Dorli, and other friends from those days, were not so lucky.  Their families did not receive life-saving visas to the US or to Mexico but stayed behind in southern France.  Some of them hid on the farms of French villagers or in huts in the forest.  My friend Dorli’s father could not hide because he was in a forced labor camp with other foreigners.  

On August 26, 1942, the government of unoccupied France, led by men who collaborated closely with the victorious Germans, sent trucks throughout the unoccupied zone to pick up the Jews who had been forced to register themselves.  Those who had not managed to flee abroad or go into hiding were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz where most of them were murdered.  

On the same date, in the middle of the night, a truck with French police and militia also came to the Château Montintin where Dorli and I had climbed trees two years before and took away some of the children who had not gone to hide in the forest.  My friend Dorli wasn’t there at the time but I have never been able to find out whether she had been transferred to another Children’s Home or had gone to stay with her mother in a city near the father’s labor camp.

The only thing I do know is that her name was not on any of the lists of children who were rescued from France and brought to America.  I don’t know why she wasn’t on those lists. 

I did find her name on one of the long lists of names of people rounded up in France and sent to Auschwitz.  She and her parents are listed in Convoy Number 30, leaving France for Poland on September 9, 1942.

These Deportation Lists were carefully kept by the Bureaucrats of Death.  They were published many years later.  I found several of my friends on these dreadful lists.  Also my uncle Bernhard Rubinstein, my father’s elder brother, deported from Paris on Convoy 67, on February 3, 1944, a few months before the liberation of Paris. 

Each convoy carried about one thousand human beings to their deaths.  In all, about 76,000 Jews were handed over to the German murderers, most of them foreigners in France but also many French Jews.  Only a few hundred came back from Auschwitz, including Ernst Koppel, one of the boys from the Château Montintin, who had somehow managed to survive.   

Hymn:

“Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“My Thoughts Are Free”)

“Fanny”

My next story does not erase the guilt of the killers but is told from the other side of history: the story of my German aunt Fanny, my non-Jewish mother’s younger sister.  Both were members of the Berlin working class, born in the 1890s. Fanny was a seamstress and stayed on in Berlin, along with the rest of my mother’s family after the Nazis came to power in 1933.  She earned very little and, after her divorce, lived in a tiny walk-up apartment, sharing a toilet with the neighbor across the hall.

My mother and I left Berlin for Prague in 1934, to join my father who had crossed the border illegally six months before. He was in greater danger from the Nazis, as a well-known Social democratic writer, and a Jew.  We stayed in touch with my mother’s Berlin family until the war began in 1939, through carefully coded letters and occasional visits from them.  Then -- silence and anxiety as we watched the news of bombings of German cities, then hope after D-Day and advancing Allied armies. 

In November 1945, six months after the war ended, we finally got the first family letters from Berlin.  My cousin Inge was the first to write on behalf of the whole family.  After telling us of many deaths and losses, she also wrote that Fanny had been able to save a Jewish woman from death by hiding her in that tiny apartment for nearly three years.  The whole family had helped and they were all proud of Fanny’s civil courage.

The same mail brought a letter from Fanny to my mother, Elly:

“...I tried to repair the injustice at least in part.  Between January 4, 1943 and May 4, 1945 I had Leni Leroi with me, and so tore one Jew out of the claws of the Gestapo and of that I am proud.  The bombing attacks made it harder but with cold blood and a little courage we made it to the goal.” 

“...By and by I will write more about how it came about that I took Leni to live with me.  Elly, I just could not stand it any more, the women and children with the [Yellow] Star, nobody spoke to them, in the streetcar they had to stand, I always stood with them.  Then they were taken away from the factories, couldn’t go home, were deported without letting their relatives know, like cattle.”

Later she wrote:

“I always thought, you share the guilt if you let all that happen.  I came to the decision to take someone in...it had to be a single woman… When I asked my brother one day what was going on with our friend Leni, he said: Oh, they’ve already sewn everything for her, a travel bag, woolen blankets, and wool underwear for the Evacuation.  I was stunned...[He asked her and she said] that she would be glad to come.  It went pretty well.”  

At that time, everyone in Germany thought Jews were being “evacuated” to labor camps in Poland.  Parts of the truth came out slowly, bit by bit, through German soldiers home on leave.  But the full horrors of the Holocaust murders were not revealed until after the war ended. 

My aunt Fanny was not the only Rescuer of Jews in Berlin.  About one thousand Jews survived the war in Berlin, hidden by Germans.  For every hidden Jew in Berlin, ten or more Germans must have been complicit and helped in their rescue.  One family friend, a middle-aged Jewish woman, had survived in thirty-three hiding places.

In the Berlin city archives, I found testimony from my aunt Fanny’s neighbors that they had suspected the hidden woman was Jewish but had said nothing to anyone about it.  In fact, the whole building must have known about her when she came with my aunt to the air raid shelter.

Everyone tells me that Berlin is not typical of Germany but even ten thousand Germans who helped Jews to survive in that city are not enough to erase the horror of Auschwitz and other killing fields -- a crime planned by Germans, carried out by Germans, perhaps the older brothers of the girls I had sat next to in my Berlin elementary school.

But knowing about my aunt’s actions at a time when people everywhere thought only with horror about Germany’s deadly crimes made me feel a little better about coming from that place, speaking that language.  It helped me to avoid self-hatred and enabled me to go back to Germany in recent years to work on that history.

In October 2001, a month after 9/11, I went with my husband to Berlin to receive the posthumous award for my aunt as a “Righteous Gentile” at the Israeli Embassy.  The Hebrew designation is more beautiful and complex than the prosaic English, “Righteous Gentile”.  The Hebrew words encompass profound meanings: “chasidei umot ha-olam” can be literally translated as “the loving ones of the nations of the world.”  I can now think of my aunt as a “chasidot umot ha-olam” -- “one belonging to the nations of the world who is imbued with the spirit of “chesed”, a word that means benevolence and loving kindness. 

“Riga”

I shake the kaleidoscope of memory one more time, take another look at the history of my widely dispersed family to talk about my first visit to Riga, Latvia.  I have gone there again, many times.

In 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War, I made my first trip to Latvia, the place of my Jewish father’s birth in 1881, while it was still part of the Russian Empire.  I had no memory of hearing him talk about the family he had left behind when he crossed the border into Germany in 1906.  Family, for me, meant the Kaisers of Berlin, my mother’s family.

In 1990, when Beatrice Rubinstein, my cousin in Paris, told me about another cousin in Riga who had survived the Holocaust, I decided to visit him on my way to a conference in Helsinki, Finland, where I was to give the keynote speech.  I had never heard of him.

I stayed in Riga’s one hotel, across the street from my cousin’s big pre-war apartment, where he lived with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, eleven people in all.  My cousin Volja Vigdorciks was twenty years older than I, a widower, a retired dental surgeon. He looked so much like my father that I recognized him immediately at the airport but the rest of the family were tall and blond.  (There had been a lot of intermarriage with non-Jewish Latvians.)  Volja and I spent each morning looking through photographs while he identified the aunts, uncles, and cousins, whom I never knew.  He told me of his survival, hiding in the countryside as a farm laborer during the German occupation.

My new-found relatives in the big apartment took me in warmly but in those days they spoke only Latvian.  I spoke German with my cousin Volja and broken English with his son Alexander, an engineer, who translated for me.  One day he told me “my wife says you are our people” and I was happy. 

On my last day in Riga, my cousin’s granddaughter Anna, a dentist in her thirties, asked me to explain exactly how I was related to them.  I sat down to draw a genealogy chart.  My side of the chart was easy.  Then my cousin gave me the names of his parents, his aunts and uncles, their children, and I drew them in.  I asked about dates of birth and he gave me those.  And then there was silence.  I looked up from my chart and asked about dates of death.  He was quiet for a long time. 

The dates of death of the sixteen relatives, men, women, children, babies, were all the same: in less than a week, between November 30, and December 5, 1941, they had all been murdered on the outskirts of Riga, in a little wood between the road and a railway line, in a place called Rumbula, by German soldiers and their Latvian collaborators.  The Riga Ghetto was being emptied to make room for more Jews, being brought there from many cities in Germany. Later they were killed too.

My insides turned to stone as I wrote down those dates.  I knew only one thing: I could not leave, not now that I had discovered these remnants of my father’s family.  These people who had recognized me as one of them.

On my plane ticket, I “accidentally” misread my departure time.  When we got to the airport, the Aeroflot plane was already closed, ready to fly.  There would not be another flight for three days.  That night, my cousin’s son, the engineer, drove me to Tallinn in Estonia. 

The next day I took the ferry to Helsinki, to the other world of my conference. 

Reading:

And from the Kaddish, the Mourners’ Prayer (after a poem by Zelda, adapted by Marcia Falk):

Each of us has a name

given by the source of life

and given by our parents

Each of us has a name

given by our stature and our smile

and given by what we wear

Each of us has a name

given by the mountains

and given by our walls

Each of us has a name

given by the stars

and given by our neighbors

Each of us has a name given by our sins

and given by our Longing

Each of us has a name

given by our enemies

and given by our love

Each of us has a name

given by our celebrations

And given by our work

Each of us has a name

given by the seasons

and given by our blindness

Each of us has a name

given by the sea

and given by

our death.