BREAKING NEWS:
According to preliminary results, Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Muhammad Mursi has won the first round of Egypt’s election and will face off against Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under Hosni Mubarak, in a run-off vote scheduled for June 16 and 17. With ballots counted from about 12,800 of the roughly 13,100 polling stations, Mursi reportedly garnered 25 percent of the vote, Shafiq 23%, followed by Islamist Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh with 20% and leftist Hamdeen Sabahy with 19%. Official results will be announced next week. (Reuters, May 25.)
ONE MAN, MANY SAVED
Michael Carin
Montreal Gazette, May 23, 2012
In 1944, when the Holocaust came to Hungary, Agnes Lörinczi Kent was a teenager in Budapest.… She ended up being one of the thousands of Hungarian Jews whose lives were saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Swedish diplomat hailed as one of the heroes of the 20th century. In downtown Montreal this week, Agnes Kent joined a commemoration in Place Wallenberg, in the garden of Christ Church Cathedral. Wallenberg’s achievements proved that a single man can light the torch of civilization, even in the midst of the darkest barbarity—and make it shine brilliantly.
By the beginning of 1944, the Allies knew that Germany under Adolf Hitler was systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe. Eyewitness testimonies about the gas chambers of Auschwitz had removed any doubt as to the meaning of “the final solution.” [As] Hungary had allied itself to Germany, however, Hungarian Jews, numbering about 700,000, had thus far been spared.
After the fall of Stalingrad, Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy sued for a separate peace, prompting Hitler to order the occupation of Hungary. With the country under the German boot, the Nazi annihilation machine went to work. By July 1944, upwards of 400,000 Hungarian Jewish men, women and children had been deported, in cattle cars, to their deaths in Auschwitz. The man directing the genocide, Adolf Eichmann, now turned his attention to the 200,000 Jews of Budapest.
At this point Raoul Wallenberg arrived as first secretary of the Swedish legation.… Wallenberg came with a single mission: to rescue as many Jews as possible. With nothing more than the authority of his character and a mantle of diplomatic licence, he proceeded to bluff, deceive and defy the Nazis. He distributed thousands of pseudo “passports” that identified the bearers as emigrants to Sweden. With bundles of such life-saving documents, he appeared at train stations and pulled Jews off death cars. He interceded at forced marches and plucked Jews from death columns. He purchased food and medicine, hired doctors and guards, protected Jews in rented safe houses.
Over a period of six months, at mounting risk to his own life, Wallenberg negotiated with the Nazis, bribed them, intimidated them. Days before liberation, in his most daring stroke, he prevented a massacre in the ghetto by threatening a German general with execution as a war criminal. Wallenberg’s example inspired similar rescues by neutral Switzerland, Portugal and Spain. His actions are estimated to have saved about 100,000 lives.
Agnes Kent’s life was one of them. She has been a Montrealer for over six decades, but she remembers certain events as if they happened yesterday. She and her family watched from their Budapest apartment as a group of German soldiers stripped a man in the courtyard. Seeing that he was circumcised, they executed him on the spot. She remembers the day her father and uncle were seized, both fated to perish when they could not continue on a forced march. She and her mother were saved by papers provided by Wallenberg.
Agnes Kent lived her life, thanks to a man with no personal stake save his own conscience. She brought up two children, and now glories in two granddaughters. Her experience is emblematic of tens of thousands of other lives—lived!
The exact fate of Wallenberg will never be known. The Red Army arrested him in 1945. He was never seen again. The Soviets claimed he died in Lubyanka prison in 1947.
Books, articles and movies have commemorated his boldness and the scale of his achievement. I asked Agnes Kent for counsel. What could I add about Wallenberg’s heroism to the mountain of words already written? Remind people, she told me, that while statesmen and whole countries remained silent and did nothing, a single individual chose to act, with ramifications that proved enormous. Similar choices confront us today. Write that simple truth, she said. It can never be repeated often enough, because the world keeps forgetting it.
(Michael Carin is a member of the Montreal Committee
for the Commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg.)
THE GOOD GÖRING
Christoph Gunkel
Der Spiegel, May 2, 2012
In downtown Vienna under the Nazis, two members of the SA had decided to humiliate an old woman. A crowd gathered and jeered as the stormtroopers hung a sign bearing the words “I’m a dirty Jew” around the woman’s neck. Suddenly, a tall man with a high forehead and thick mustache pushed his way angrily through the mob and freed the woman. “There was a scuffle with two stormtroopers, I hit them and was arrested immediately,” the man later said in a matter-of-fact statement.
Despite this open act of rebellion, the man was released immediately. He only had to say his name: Albert Göring, brother of Hermann Göring, the commander of the German air force and Hitler’s closest confidant.
Years later, after the fall of the Third Reich, Albert Göring was arrested once again, this time by Americans. Again he gave his name, but this time it had the opposite effect. “The interrogation of Albert Göring…constitutes as clever a piece of rationalization and ‘white wash’ as the SAIC (Seventh Army Interrogation Center) has ever seen,” American investigator Paul Kubala wrote on September 19, 1945.… Kubala’s interpreter, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was likewise skeptical. “Albert told a fascinating story, but one I had trouble believing,” he commented.
The life of Hermann Göring’s younger brother indeed makes a fascinating story, one that has remained essentially unknown in the nearly seven decades since the end of the Nazi dictatorship. Perhaps it’s because today many have the same reaction that the American investigators had then: Can it really be possible that Hermann Göring’s brother was a member of the resistance?…
“It has been four months now since I was robbed of my freedom, without knowing why,” Albert Göring wrote in September 1945 in a heavy-hearted letter to his wife. He had turned himself over to the Americans voluntarily on May 9, 1945. After spending years trying to thwart his brother’s policies in various small ways, now he felt betrayed. So he took up a pen and paper and wrote an alphabetical list of 34 names, entitling it “People whose life or existence I put myself at risk (three Gestapo arrest warrants!) to save.”
For decades, that list and the few other existing documents on Albert Göring sat in archives, gathering dust.… In 1998, [however, Australian] William Hastings Burke, then 18…scraped together the money for a ticket to Germany.… [He] devoted the next three years…combing through archives and meeting with friends and family members of people Albert Göring was said to have helped. The result was “Thirty Four,” a book named after Albert Göring’s list, published in 2009. The German translation will be released on May 21 under the title “Hermanns Bruder: Wer war Albert Göring?” or “Hermann’s Brother: Who was Albert Göring?”
Burke’s book describes a man who could not have been more different from his infamous brother. “He was always the exact opposite of me,” Hermann said in a statement after the war. “He wasn’t interested in politics or the military, and I was.…” At first, Albert thus simply tried to keep out of the National Socialists’ way. A mechanical engineer, he chose not to join the Nazi Party, instead moving to Vienna, Austria in 1928.… But the world-power politics Albert so hated, and which his ambitious brother promoted, caught up with him there with the 1938 annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany.
At some point, Albert decided he wanted to help instead of turning a blind eye. For example, he helped Oskar Pilzer, former president of Tobis-Sascha-Filmindustrie, Austria’s largest film production company.… When the Gestapo arrested the film mogul in March 1938, Albert Göring intervened. “Albert Göring used the power of his family name and pulled out all the stops, first to find out where my father was and then to make sure he was released immediately,” Pilzer’s son George later testified.
That was no isolated incident, and many people had similar testimony to present after 1945. Alexandra Otzop, for example, recalled, “My husband and his son…were persecuted in the fall of 1939. Mr. Göring managed to get them deported, instead of being sent to a concentration camp.” It’s said that Albert Göring once even got down on his hands and knees to scrub a street in Vienna, out of solidarity with women who were being bullied by stormtroopers.… While his brother was hard at work perfecting his air force, Albert obtained fake papers, warned friends of impending arrests and provided refugees with money. Again and again, he deftly used his name to intimidate public officials.…
In late 1939, the younger Göring himself took an influential position, becoming export manager for the Skoda automobile factory in the Czech city of Brno. From this position, he supported the Czech resistance, activists later testified. If their statements are accurate, Albert Göring even revealed…[Germany’s] plan to break the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. This sensitive information, the Czech resistance fighters stated, was successfully passed on to Moscow and London.
But even that isn’t the whole story. Göring is also believed to have saved prisoners from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. “He said, I’m Albert Göring from Skoda. I need workers,” Jacques Benbassat, the son of an associate of Albert’s, later related. “He filled the truck with workers, and the concentration camp director agreed to it, because he was Albert Göring. Then he drove into the woods and released them.”
A number of notes turn up in German files that prove these stories were not simply made up. The Gestapo’s Prague bureau, for example, complained that Göring’s office at the Skoda factory was “a veritable nerve center for ‘poor’ Czechs.” The general of the Prague police, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank…asked permission to arrest [Albert] in 1944 on “profound grounds for suspicion.” Now the man who had helped others escape became the persecuted one.…
While Hermann Göring, sentenced in Nuremberg, escaped execution by committing suicide in October 1946, the Americans remained suspicious of Albert Göring after the war.… Although the last of a series of caseworkers did recommend his release, Göring was turned over to the Czech Republic and tried in Prague for possible war crimes, because Skoda had also manufactured weapons.
Only after many former Skoda employees testified on Göring’s behalf were the charges dropped, and Göring was acquitted in March 1947. He died in 1966 in a Munich suburb, an impoverished and bitter man. Despite being a highly qualified engineer, he had been unable to find work in postwar Germany. Being Hermann Göring’s brother, a fact that likely saved his life in the past, ultimately became a curse.
NAKBA, A SELF-INFLICTED CATASTROPHE
Moshe Arens
Haaretz, May 22, 2012
Many catastrophes occur in this cruel world. Some are caused by nature, and over them humans have no control. Some are man-made catastrophes caused by wars of aggression and wars of oppression by one people against another. Such was World War II, an attempt by Germany to conquer the world, oppress the non-Germanic peoples and exterminate the Jews. It took more than five years to roll back the conquering German armies, at great sacrifice to the Allied armies that defeated Germany. On May 8, V-E Day, the world celebrates the victory in Europe, the day on which Germany surrendered unconditionally in 1945. It was a victory of light over darkness.
The German people suffered during that war. More than 5 million German soldiers were killed during the fighting, and more than 2 million German civilians died. In addition, millions were left homeless and millions became refugees as eastern Germany was turned over to Poland and the Sudeten region was returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. German cities were destroyed by aerial bombardments…[meant] to disrupt the German war effort and force Germany to surrender.
Yet the German people do not commemorate V-E Day as their day of catastrophe, as the German Nakba. No demonstrations are held in Germany on that day. The German people know that they brought the devastation upon themselves. They know…they have only themselves to blame.
There is another day on which the world celebrates victory in World War II. It is V-J Day, August 15, the day in 1945 when Japan, Germany’s ally, surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces. The Japanese people suffered grievously during the war—a war in which they tried to conquer China, the Philippines, Burma and Indonesia. More than 2 million Japanese soldiers were killed and more than 3 million Japanese civilians perished. Tokyo was firebombed, and two atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the Japanese people do not commemorate their suffering during the war on V-J Day as the Japanese Nakba.… They know that the blame for their suffering cannot be shifted onto others.
So what is the Palestinian Nakba all about? Those who promote the commemoration of the “Palestinian catastrophe” have chosen May 15—the day in 1948 on which the Arab armies invaded Palestine in order to destroy the infant Jewish state—as Nakba Day. The Arabs intended to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine, were confident that they were going to win, but in the end lost the war. That is the origin of the Palestinian catastrophe, a catastrophe the Arabs brought upon themselves.
So why is it that the Arabs do not accept that it was the war that they began…which is the cause of their suffering? That their catastrophe is self-inflicted? Why don’t they recognize their own responsibility for their catastrophe, as do the Germans and the Japanese following World War II, and instead try to place the blame on Israel?
The difference is that the Germans and Japanese were forced to surrender unconditionally, and when the war was over they harbored no hope and had no intentions of overcoming the powers that had defeated them. The Arabs, however, did not surrender; they were prepared for an armistice—no more.… And unlike the Germans and the Japanese after World War II, many Palestinians and their Arab supporters harbor hopes of ultimately defeating the State of Israel and destroying the Jewish state.
For them the Nakba demonstrations are one more stick with which to beat Israel. With a total disregard for the facts, they are out there demonstrating on May 15, blaming Israel for a catastrophe they brought upon themselves.…
OUR HOPE (FOR WHAT?) IS NOT YET LOST
Daniel Gordis
Jerusalem Post, May 17, 2012
Neshama Carlebach, daughter of the revered Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, issued a noteworthy message last week: “Two weeks ago, The Forward honored me with a request to perform their new version of our timeless and beautiful ‘Hatikva,’ the Jewish national anthem. My intention was not to make a political statement of any kind but to speak to the hearts of people from all faiths and backgrounds with love.…”
I’m willing to take Carlebach at her word that she intended no political statement by performing this “new” version of “Hatikva” (it’s on YouTube if you’re interested). But even if Carlebach had wholly innocent intentions, she was certainly naïve if she imagined that singing a revised version of “Hatikva” which effectively de-Judaized Israel’s national anthem would evoke only expressions of love.
The specific incident that prompted the latest renewed focus on “Hatikva” was Justice Salim Joubran, the second Israeli Arab to serve on Israel’s Supreme Court, who, at a ceremony marking the retirement of Israel’s Chief Justice, stood silently as the anthem was sung. And who can blame him? Why should an Israeli Arab, no matter how patriotic, sing “As long as Jewish spirit yearns deep in the heart”? (The Forward’s version, for example, says “an Israeli spirit yearns deep in the heart.”) Why should he say “Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two millennia, to be a free people in our land?…”
In typical American fashion, which cannot easily abide cognitive dissonance and which believes that every problem has a readily apparent solution, American Jewish voices leapt to the rescue. Leonard Fein, to cite but one example, wrote an article to which The Forward gave the title “Judge’s Silent Protest of Israeli Racism.…” Yet whatever one wants to say about the “Hatikva issue,” the issue isn’t racism. Justice Joubran, after all, is on the Supreme Court.…
What is the issue, then? And why would intelligent people such as those at The Forward make the mistake of thinking that the issue is racism?
The problem stems from the often unspoken but widely held American Jewish assumption that Israel should be a Middle Eastern version of the United States of America. If the US does not mention Christianity in its anthem, the logic goes, then Israel should not mention Judaism. And if Jewish members of the US Supreme Court live in a country in which they have no problem singing their anthem, then surely Israeli-Arab justices should be accorded the same respect.
But matters are not that simple. For the United States and Israel have utterly different purposes, as indicated even by a comparison of their Declarations of Independence.… The American Declaration of Independence says that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.…” There is a purpose to the United States: It is to provide its citizens with the opportunity to realize their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” without regard to their religion or ethnic background. And in that America has been an extraordinary success.
Now let’s look at Israel’s Declaration of Independence.… “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”
There is a purpose to the State of Israel, too, and it is utterly different from America’s. Israel obviously does not object to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, but that is not its purpose. Its reason for being is the restoration of political freedom to the Jews, and the revitalization of the Jewish People that that freedom has wrought. In that, Israel has also been an extraordinary success.
The challenge for us is to honor Israel’s citizens who are not Jews and who are loyal citizens without pretending that Israel is just a Hebrew-speaking America. Canada solved the problem by having two versions of its anthem, one in English and one in French, with intentional differences to satisfy the populations who would recite it. Should Israel have a version in Arabic that Israeli Arabs can sing with pride? Perhaps. Is some other solution possible? Maybe.…
But changing the anthem now to accommodate those who cannot feel the power of 2,000 years of Jewish yearning would be utterly destructive to communicating Israel’s very purpose. Would we also change the flag, which was consciously designed to look like a tallit [prayer shawl]? Yes, some Jewish Israelis want to rid Israel of its Jewish focus. That’s their right. And it is our right, indeed our responsibility, to remind them that Israel is the fulfillment of a 2,000 year old dream, and a Jewish one at that. It is more than a state with many Jews; it is a state with a distinctly Jewish purpose.…
