Secrets of the Dead: Escape from Auschwitz - tonight on PBS

Secrets of the Dead
Escape from Auschwitz #702

Air: Wednesday, April 27, 8:00 pm on KCTS 9 HDSeattle/Yakima

The Secrets of the Dead website (linked from the KCTS site) always streams the show online.

Broadcast In: English

The truth about the Auschwitz death camp was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Third Reich. Prisoners who tried to escape were executed in public as an example to other inmates, and very few ever made it out alive. "Escape From Auschwitz" tells the story of two young Slovak Jews, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who managed to escape by hiding in a woodpile for three days, then fleeing across enemy territory, determined to tell the world about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis at the camp. Hoping to stop the deportations and put an end to the constant stream of victims transported to their deaths, Vrba and Wetzler wrote a detailed account of their experiences in the camp. The report was sent to Allies around the world, but to Vrba's horror, some took ages to arrive in the right hands and the most urgent copy was suppressed by the head of the Hungarian Jewish underground, who worried it would destroy a deal he himself was trying to make with Adolph Eichmann. Ultimately, the delays cost thousands of lives and caused a controversy that raged long after the Holocaust was over. Even so, Vrba's and Wetzler's heroic efforts saved many thousands from the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz.

Run Time: 00:56:46

Rating: TVPG DVS

Visit the Website: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/

Everett Herald - Holocaust Survivors at Everett Community College

Holocaust survivors talk at EvCC

By Muatasim Qazi, Herald Writer

EVERETT -- Some in Amsterdam watched helplessly as Nazis arrested their neighbors and hauled them away to concentration camps. Others were indifferent, peeping from doors of their homes.

Klaas and Roefina Post lived on a small farm in a northern Dutch village called Makkinga. They knew all was not right. Dutch Jews were being killed mercilessly. They couldn't save everyone, but they knew they had to try.

The year was 1940, and spring had already started to give in to summer at a time when most of Europe was under Nazi aggression. Dutch forces had capitulated to the Nazis who prowled the streets of Amsterdam dressed in green uniforms and rounding up the country's Jews. ...Read full article.

Irena Sendler - WWII Warsaw Women Outfox the Nazis SUNDAY on PBS

IRENA SENDLER

In the Name of Their Mothers

In the bombed debris of WWII Warsaw, young Polish Catholic women fight to save the most vulnerable of Poland's Jews -- the children.


Don't miss the moving story of Irena Sendler and a group of young Polish Catholic social workers who smuggled thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto and kept them safe until the end of the war. Seven years in the making, this film features the last long interviews Irena Sendler gave before she died in 2008 at the age of 98 in Warsaw.

WINNER
2010 UK Jewish Film Festival Audience Award
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Cinequest International Film Festival 2011

..it is the profoundly committed artistry of filmmaker Mary Skinner that brings the horror, sadness and magnitude of Sendler's story so overwhelmingly to light...appealing not just to the mind, but to the soul..

- Charlie Cockey, Programmer

New speaker Marie-Anne H. in action

New Speakers Bureau member Marie-Anne H. gave her first presentation this past Friday to a group of students at Alternative School No. 1. The presentation was with teacher and Center affiliate Jo Cripps, whose middle school class jumped at the opportunity to hear Marie-Anne's unique presentation.

Marie-Anne tells the story of her grandmother and mother - both part of the French resistance during the Holocaust:

When I was a little girl, I heard stories around the dinner table from family members about what happened during the Nazi German occupation of Paris, home of my mother’s family. My Grandmother has always been my hero, as she helped to save 300 Jewish refugees escape to Free France.

If you would like to learn more about Marie-Anne H. and/or the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau, click here.

Holocaust Survivor Forum at Everett Community College

Holocaust Survivor Forum Starts April 13 at Everett Community College

Forum Schedule and Details

With Everett Community College's 12th Holocaust Survivors forums scheduled to start April 13, founder and EvCC humanities instructor Joyce Walker shared why she started the forums and what she hopes students will learn.

In Spring 2000, Walker started the Humanities 150D class, Surviving the Holocaust, and she's taught it every year since. As director of EvCC's Humanities Center, she started the Holocaust forums at the same time as part of the class and has opened the forums to the campus and local community each year.

Walker has long been interested, both professionally and personally, in the history of the Holocaust.

"Stays in Germany in both high school and college caused me to wonder how such a great culture could fall so low in the Holocaust - from the apex to nadir of human civilization," said Walker, who said her Ph.D. in comparative literature includes a major focus on German language and literature.

Walker's class attempts to answer questions like "Why did the Nazis kill?" and "How did people survive such dehumanization?"

"My hope is that by studying the Holocaust, students will resolve to stand up for others in the face of hate speech and hateful acts," she said.

The Holocaust forums start April 13 with Survivor Fred H. Taucher's story. His father was seized during Kristallnacht, and his family was hidden by a high-ranking Nazi Party member until he was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Taucher will speak from 12:20-1:50 p.m. in Baker Hall 120.

The Holocaust Center is proud to have worked with Joyce Walker and Everett Community College for many years, providing speakers and professional development opportunities.


About the photo above:
Instructor Joyce Walker, founder of EvCC's Holocaust Forums, examines notes taken Jan. 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, when top German Nazi officials formally announced the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," the decision to deport and murder the Jews of Europe. The minutes of that meeting, known as the Wannsee Protocol, are preserved in the room where the meeting took place near Berlin, now a Holocaust museum. Walker travelled to Berlin March 17-26 with study abroad students from Fullerton College, a community college in California, at the invitation of her brother, Western Civilization and German professor John Walker. Joyce Walker lectured the Fullerton students on the Holocaust during the trip.

German Hagaddah from 1926 - Artifact

"Hagaddah Shel Pesach"

This Hagaddah shel Pesach, with commentary by Dr. M. Lehmann, was published and printed by Oscar Lehmann in Frankfurt am Main in 1926. It is printed in old German typeface and Hebrew.

The 12 illustrations are black and white reproductions of hand-painted manuscript pages from Hagaddot [the plural form of "Hagaddah"] from the 13th and 15th Century now housed in museums. The service and commentary fill 211 pages.

The signature of the owner and the date of 1926 are handwritten on the flyleaf. It is a timely reminder of life before World War II.

We gratefully accept artifacts to our growing collection. We especially value and record the stories told to us by the donors. Please contact Dee Simon, the Holocaust Center's Co-Executive Director at delilas@wsherc.org if you have any items that you think would be a good addition to our collection. On view to visitors and used by the Speakers Bureau, these items are used in educational presentations.

Review - Terezin: Voices from the Holocaust

Terezin: Voices from the Holocaust
by Ruth Thomson
Candlewick Press 2011
Rating: Recommend* grades 5 and up

Review by Marie-Anne Harkness

Middle School and high school students studying the Holocaust will find this book enlightening to understand daily life in the Nazi’s showcase transit camp using diary entries, photographs, drawings and paintings throughout. Terezin was a fortified city in northern Czech Republic, transformed into the Theresienstadt Transit Camp in Oct. 1941 by the Nazis during World War II..

The privileged Jews deported from all over Europe were told they were going to a spa-like Ghetto for artists, intellectuals and the wealthy. It was to be a holding camp where none would be harmed. Allowed to pack only 2 suitcases, they were forced to sign away their homes and furniture to be redistributed to Germans. They packed their suitcases with their nicest clothes, and belongings only to have them confiscated immediately upon arrival.

The reality was that the people were on their way on regular transports to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, if they had not died from starvation and disease at Theresienstadt.
Through documentation secretly recorded by artists, writers and diaries of children and adults, the reader experiences the true heartbreak of the camp.

When Jews from Denmark were deported to the “Spa” at Terezin in April 1943, the King of Denmark sent a delegation from the Danish Red Cross to inspect the living conditions of the Danish Jews. A sham “family camp” was erected on a carefully laid out route just before the delegation arrived. They did not see the real camp for what it was, only café’s, schools, theatre, neatly planted gardens and freshly painted houses as they were escorted by SS officers. The deception worked because the delegation reported back to the King that the Danish Jews were being well treated.

The layout of the book is attractive, including sidebars that expand on the text, index, glossary and a very interesting timeline. The material is well documented with source notes. A useful primary source website is listed: http://www.azrielifoundation.org/memoirs/.

Seattle Times: Traveling Exhibit Detailed Nazi Persecution of Gays

Nazi persecution of homosexuals

By Melissa Allison

Seattle Times staff reporter

Related

Anyone who missed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's traveling exhibit at McCaw Hall can access an online exhibit at http://bit.ly/eRHSyb.

It is well-known that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, but the plight of 5 million other victims — including people with disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and gays — are rarely detailed.

A traveling exhibit by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sheds light on the Nazi persecution of gay Germans. Though the Nazis never intended to murder all gays, as they intended to eliminate all Jews, they nevertheless sent thousands of them to concentration camps and destroyed the lives of tens of thousands others.

The free exhibit, which ended a five-day run Sunday at McCaw Hall in Seattle, attracted roughly 2,000 people, said Dee Simon, co-executive director of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.

With help from sponsors, the center presented the exhibit as a complement to the Seattle Men's Chorus' "Falling in Love Again" concerts over the weekend. The concerts also shed light on the Nazi persecution of gays.

Some attendees had no idea before hearing about the exhibit that Nazis targeted gays, Simon said. "With what's happening today, especially with the bullying of homosexuals in schools, people said they wanted to have a perspective of what it looked like during the Nazi era."

Within a month of taking power in 1933, the Nazis closed gay and lesbian publications and gathering places. Their aim was to terrorize gays into sexual and social conformity, according to the exhibit and a lecture Simon gave Sunday.

Nazis targeted gays partly because of Germany's declining birthrate; 2 million German men had died in World War I. They thought gays endangered public morality and they considered homosexuality an infection that could become an epidemic, particularly among youth.

In forwarding their hateful agenda, the Nazis often cited "traditional family values," Simon said.

Germany "can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline, especially in love," the Nazi party wrote in 1928. It was responding to activists' efforts to eliminate or at least change a law from the 1800s that outlawed "indecency" between men.

The law did not include lesbians, even after the Nazis expanded it to include "simply looking" or "simply touching" as grounds for arrest and conviction. All women were considered vessels for childbirth; mothers who bore at least eight children were given gold crosses to wear in public.

Under Nazi rule, more than 100,000 gay men were arrested; 50,000 were imprisoned. Thousands went to concentration camps.

To avoid that fate, many gay men married, killed themselves or even castrated themselves, believing it would help them avoid prison, Simon said.

When the war ended, the law was not revoked, and some gay men who had suffered in concentration camps were rearrested. When Germany began reparations to Nazi victims in 1956, it did not include people sent to concentration camps because they were gay.

Only in 1990 did Germany fully abolish the law that made it possible to arrest gays, and in 2002 it pardoned men who had been convicted under that law during the Nazi regime.

Simon said 76 countries today criminalize sexual acts between people of the same sex; in seven countries, it is punishable by death.

Read article online

Anyone who missed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's traveling exhibit at McCaw Hall can access an online exhibit at http://bit.ly/eRHSyb.