Post by Ulios on May 9, 2022 9:22:53 GMT
Coby Lubliner posted by BT here
What I question (and that’s why I have put quotes around “Holocaust survivor”) is the appropriateness of labeling the experience that I survived (six years of imprisonment in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps as a child during World War II) — an experience that was, to me, simply a part of the War — as part of something that, for me, did not exist until it was invented in the late 1950s and never seemed anything but a pretentious literary metaphor for what was supposedly a unique experience of Jewish suffering.
When, as a nine-year-old, I spent a month in Buchenwald, it never occurred to me that those of my fellow-inmates who were Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, or Danish policemen arrested for helping the Jews escape, were undergoing experiences that were different from mine. We were all experiencing the War, a many-fronted war, one of whose fronts happened to be the war ... that the German state waged against the Jewish people. Ever since, for over half a century, I have not been able to accept the singling out of this one front, horrible as it may have been, as a unique epoch-making event that requires its own grandiose name, its own capitalised dictionary entry, its own academic discipline called “Holocaust studies”. It is in this sense that I count myself as a Holocaust denier.
Now, when it comes to assessing the totality of the European Jewish experience of World War II — as opposed to an individual experience — a survivor’s opinion should weigh no more nor less than anyone else’s.
Both of my parents survived, and I had no siblings. I have no tattoo (though I sometimes perversely envied those who had them). I was never beaten or starved. After the War I went on with school at the normal grade level. And when I recently visited the Buchenwald memorial site, the foremost thought in my mind — unrepentant cinephile that I am — was to find the location of the barrack where I saw my first movie; never mind that my first screen image was of a smiling Hitler on horseback, introducing a newsreel. The search for the site of the barrack where I actually lived took second place.
My youthful concerns were internal in part because that is the nature of youth, but in part also because, in my memory at least, the Holocaust as a subject of worldwide interest did not emerge until the sixties, with the Eichmann trial as beacon. I don’t recall being aware of Elie Wiesel and his cohort until, perhaps, the late 60s.
I first encountered the word “Holocaust” in the title of a book published in 1965, Holocaust and Rebirth, Bergen-Belsen, 1945-1965. The book is of some personal interest to me, since I spent the last months of the War, after Buchenwald, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and several years after the War as a resident of the DP camp there; my name and youthful pictures can be found in the book.
In order to find out whether my youthful self-absorption might have clouded my memory, I performed a little computer-aided experiment. I checked the list of titles that the library of the University of California at Berkeley lists under the subject heading of “Holocaust, Jewish (1939-45).”
Of the 344 items, thirteen carry publication dates before 1960 (from 1943 to 1958, to be exact), and another four from 1961 to 1964; in other words, about a book a year. But the lustrum 1965-69 brings 34 entries, with the H-word first appearing in the title of the aforementioned Bergen-Belsen book. And the rhythm is maintained in subsequent decades: 63 entries for 1970-79, 129 for 1980-89, 101 for 1990 to 1998.
BERGEN-BELSEN
When Anne Frank and her sister Margot were ...in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March of 1945, there was a sizable group of Jewish children from Amsterdam — more than fifty — living in a special compound in which they were adequately fed and received a modicum of medical care... This facility, housed in a bungalow known as the Kinderbaracke(children’s barrack),...
While the children were supposed to be under sixteen to live in the compound, at least two of them seemed to be older; they had lied about their ages so as to remain with their younger siblings. Anne Frank, fifteen at the time, was in principle eligible for the Kinderbaracke; in all likelihood she chose to stay with her older sister.
The facility was managed by a woman named Luba Tryszynska, herself a Jewish prisoner from a town in eastern Poland that is now in Belarus; when she spoke Polish it was with a marked Russian accent, and she seemed to pass for Russian. She was assisted by two other Jewish women: Hermina (I don’t know her surname), from Czechia, and Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, from Sosnowiec, Poland, who had studied medicine in France before the war and served as the doctor for the compound.
In addition to the parentless children overseen by Luba and her assistants, the barrack also housed, across the hall from them, young women with infants of their own.
After the war the children were repatriated to Holland and reunited with what was left of their families. Many of these families had been in the diamond business and the children came to be known as the Diamond Children. Luba got to accompany the children and was received by Queen Wilhelmina, who, it seems, called her “the Angel of Bergen-Belsen,” a title that she boasts to this day.
Like a number of other Polish Jews liberated in Germany, Luba went to Sweden, where she married a fellow Polish Jew. When they moved to the United States, she became known as Luba Tryszynska-Frederick, but kept her angelic title.
In 1998 the A&E network ran a documentary called “The Angel of Bergen-Belsen” in its Investigative Reports series. Most recently, an as-told-to children’s book titled Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen (written by Michelle R. McCann) was published by Tricycle Press with a 2003 copyright.
Luba’s story is that one night in December of 1944 she heard the crying of fifty-four Dutch children who had been abandoned in a snowy field behind her barrack. “Some,” as the McCann narrative tells us, “were just babies tucked into pillowcases.” After a conversation in which the oldest of the children told her that their parents had been taken away on a truck and that the children were left to die in the cold, Luba “gathered the group together and led them back to the barracks.”
“The next morning,” the story continues, “fifty-four stomachs were rumbling, but Luba was gone. … Suddenly, the door flew open. ‘Quickly, take this,’ Luba called to Hermina, handing her a steaming pot. Seconds later she returned with another.” And, further: “It was a miracle Luba performed for months during that winter. To get food for the children, Luba had to walk across the camp to the kitchen area twice a day, and each time she had to pass through a gate guarded by Nazi soldiers.”
I have a rule of thumb that I have followed for sixty years: any Polish Jew’s account of his or her experiences during World War II must be taken with a grain of salt.
When it comes to Luba’s story, I find it very hard to imagine that the SS, or whoever was in charge, would simply abandon a large group of children to their fate in a field,... What’s more, right around the same time, when the male population of what was left of the ghetto in Piotrków, Poland, was brought to Buchenwald and was found to include eleven boys under sixteen, steps were taken to get these boys out of Buchenwald (which was a labour, not an extermination camp), and an elaborate journey by passenger train was organised, involving special compartments and several train changes.
And where were these boys taken? Why, to the Kinderbaracke in Bergen-Belsen.
Oddly enough, none of Luba’s accounts seem to have ever acknowledged the presence of children from her own country, or, for that matter, of Hadassah Bimko, except that, according to the book, “[w]henever the children got sick, Luba went to a Jewish doctor for help.” This, however, is immediately followed by the statement that “[t]he other women in the barracks did their part to care for the children as well.”
The fact is that “the other women” soon became irrelevant, since early in 1945 the children were moved to the special barracks that became the official Kinderbaracke. Once there, the children from Holland and Poland were joined by yet another group – of some thirty – from Bratislava, Slovakia. And this group, too, is unacknowledged in the story.
In fact, some newspaper accounts printed shortly after the war, duly referenced in the book, speak of 94 children having been liberated. But there is no attempt to reconcile this number with the 54 “Diamond Children” who are the exclusive subject of the tale.
Likewise, the official status given the Kinderbaracke is absent from Luba’s account. As she tells it, it was a clandestine bootstrap operation until the end. “Every day the children got more and more hungry, until they couldn’t even feel their hunger anymore. And soon many of them were sick... One evening Luba looked around the barracks. The children were so thin. Many were suffering from typhus. The next morning… the guards were gone, and at the camp entrance huge tanks rolled through the gates. The British army had arrived. The war was over... Inside the dark barracks, [the British soldiers] saw a few women prisoners surrounded by swarms of children.”
The barrack was, in fact, brightly lit by the sun on liberation day, and the “few women prisoners” were Luba, Hermina and Hadassah. While the typhus epidemic was quite virulent and deadly in the camp population at large, those of the children who were touched by it had rather mild cases and recovered quickly. I was among them.
Hadassah herself gained a fair amount of renown after the war. First, as Ada Bimko, she was a prosecution witness in the trial of Josef Kramer (the commandant of Bergen-Belsen) and his minions, in the course of which she testified to the presence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. (This testimony earned her a prominent place in the literature of denialism.) Later she married Josef Rosensaft, himself a Bergen-Belsen survivor, and, as Hadassah Rosensaft, she wrote and lectured about the Holocaust and served on various Holocaust-related bodies in the United States. And she, too, does not appear to have ever referred to her association with Luba Tryszynska.
cobylubliner.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/oy-vey-another-hoax/
What I question (and that’s why I have put quotes around “Holocaust survivor”) is the appropriateness of labeling the experience that I survived (six years of imprisonment in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps as a child during World War II) — an experience that was, to me, simply a part of the War — as part of something that, for me, did not exist until it was invented in the late 1950s and never seemed anything but a pretentious literary metaphor for what was supposedly a unique experience of Jewish suffering.
When, as a nine-year-old, I spent a month in Buchenwald, it never occurred to me that those of my fellow-inmates who were Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, or Danish policemen arrested for helping the Jews escape, were undergoing experiences that were different from mine. We were all experiencing the War, a many-fronted war, one of whose fronts happened to be the war ... that the German state waged against the Jewish people. Ever since, for over half a century, I have not been able to accept the singling out of this one front, horrible as it may have been, as a unique epoch-making event that requires its own grandiose name, its own capitalised dictionary entry, its own academic discipline called “Holocaust studies”. It is in this sense that I count myself as a Holocaust denier.
Now, when it comes to assessing the totality of the European Jewish experience of World War II — as opposed to an individual experience — a survivor’s opinion should weigh no more nor less than anyone else’s.
Both of my parents survived, and I had no siblings. I have no tattoo (though I sometimes perversely envied those who had them). I was never beaten or starved. After the War I went on with school at the normal grade level. And when I recently visited the Buchenwald memorial site, the foremost thought in my mind — unrepentant cinephile that I am — was to find the location of the barrack where I saw my first movie; never mind that my first screen image was of a smiling Hitler on horseback, introducing a newsreel. The search for the site of the barrack where I actually lived took second place.
My youthful concerns were internal in part because that is the nature of youth, but in part also because, in my memory at least, the Holocaust as a subject of worldwide interest did not emerge until the sixties, with the Eichmann trial as beacon. I don’t recall being aware of Elie Wiesel and his cohort until, perhaps, the late 60s.
I first encountered the word “Holocaust” in the title of a book published in 1965, Holocaust and Rebirth, Bergen-Belsen, 1945-1965. The book is of some personal interest to me, since I spent the last months of the War, after Buchenwald, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and several years after the War as a resident of the DP camp there; my name and youthful pictures can be found in the book.
In order to find out whether my youthful self-absorption might have clouded my memory, I performed a little computer-aided experiment. I checked the list of titles that the library of the University of California at Berkeley lists under the subject heading of “Holocaust, Jewish (1939-45).”
Of the 344 items, thirteen carry publication dates before 1960 (from 1943 to 1958, to be exact), and another four from 1961 to 1964; in other words, about a book a year. But the lustrum 1965-69 brings 34 entries, with the H-word first appearing in the title of the aforementioned Bergen-Belsen book. And the rhythm is maintained in subsequent decades: 63 entries for 1970-79, 129 for 1980-89, 101 for 1990 to 1998.
BERGEN-BELSEN
When Anne Frank and her sister Margot were ...in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March of 1945, there was a sizable group of Jewish children from Amsterdam — more than fifty — living in a special compound in which they were adequately fed and received a modicum of medical care... This facility, housed in a bungalow known as the Kinderbaracke(children’s barrack),...
While the children were supposed to be under sixteen to live in the compound, at least two of them seemed to be older; they had lied about their ages so as to remain with their younger siblings. Anne Frank, fifteen at the time, was in principle eligible for the Kinderbaracke; in all likelihood she chose to stay with her older sister.
The facility was managed by a woman named Luba Tryszynska, herself a Jewish prisoner from a town in eastern Poland that is now in Belarus; when she spoke Polish it was with a marked Russian accent, and she seemed to pass for Russian. She was assisted by two other Jewish women: Hermina (I don’t know her surname), from Czechia, and Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, from Sosnowiec, Poland, who had studied medicine in France before the war and served as the doctor for the compound.
In addition to the parentless children overseen by Luba and her assistants, the barrack also housed, across the hall from them, young women with infants of their own.
After the war the children were repatriated to Holland and reunited with what was left of their families. Many of these families had been in the diamond business and the children came to be known as the Diamond Children. Luba got to accompany the children and was received by Queen Wilhelmina, who, it seems, called her “the Angel of Bergen-Belsen,” a title that she boasts to this day.
Like a number of other Polish Jews liberated in Germany, Luba went to Sweden, where she married a fellow Polish Jew. When they moved to the United States, she became known as Luba Tryszynska-Frederick, but kept her angelic title.
In 1998 the A&E network ran a documentary called “The Angel of Bergen-Belsen” in its Investigative Reports series. Most recently, an as-told-to children’s book titled Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen (written by Michelle R. McCann) was published by Tricycle Press with a 2003 copyright.
Luba’s story is that one night in December of 1944 she heard the crying of fifty-four Dutch children who had been abandoned in a snowy field behind her barrack. “Some,” as the McCann narrative tells us, “were just babies tucked into pillowcases.” After a conversation in which the oldest of the children told her that their parents had been taken away on a truck and that the children were left to die in the cold, Luba “gathered the group together and led them back to the barracks.”
“The next morning,” the story continues, “fifty-four stomachs were rumbling, but Luba was gone. … Suddenly, the door flew open. ‘Quickly, take this,’ Luba called to Hermina, handing her a steaming pot. Seconds later she returned with another.” And, further: “It was a miracle Luba performed for months during that winter. To get food for the children, Luba had to walk across the camp to the kitchen area twice a day, and each time she had to pass through a gate guarded by Nazi soldiers.”
I have a rule of thumb that I have followed for sixty years: any Polish Jew’s account of his or her experiences during World War II must be taken with a grain of salt.
When it comes to Luba’s story, I find it very hard to imagine that the SS, or whoever was in charge, would simply abandon a large group of children to their fate in a field,... What’s more, right around the same time, when the male population of what was left of the ghetto in Piotrków, Poland, was brought to Buchenwald and was found to include eleven boys under sixteen, steps were taken to get these boys out of Buchenwald (which was a labour, not an extermination camp), and an elaborate journey by passenger train was organised, involving special compartments and several train changes.
And where were these boys taken? Why, to the Kinderbaracke in Bergen-Belsen.
Oddly enough, none of Luba’s accounts seem to have ever acknowledged the presence of children from her own country, or, for that matter, of Hadassah Bimko, except that, according to the book, “[w]henever the children got sick, Luba went to a Jewish doctor for help.” This, however, is immediately followed by the statement that “[t]he other women in the barracks did their part to care for the children as well.”
The fact is that “the other women” soon became irrelevant, since early in 1945 the children were moved to the special barracks that became the official Kinderbaracke. Once there, the children from Holland and Poland were joined by yet another group – of some thirty – from Bratislava, Slovakia. And this group, too, is unacknowledged in the story.
In fact, some newspaper accounts printed shortly after the war, duly referenced in the book, speak of 94 children having been liberated. But there is no attempt to reconcile this number with the 54 “Diamond Children” who are the exclusive subject of the tale.
Likewise, the official status given the Kinderbaracke is absent from Luba’s account. As she tells it, it was a clandestine bootstrap operation until the end. “Every day the children got more and more hungry, until they couldn’t even feel their hunger anymore. And soon many of them were sick... One evening Luba looked around the barracks. The children were so thin. Many were suffering from typhus. The next morning… the guards were gone, and at the camp entrance huge tanks rolled through the gates. The British army had arrived. The war was over... Inside the dark barracks, [the British soldiers] saw a few women prisoners surrounded by swarms of children.”
The barrack was, in fact, brightly lit by the sun on liberation day, and the “few women prisoners” were Luba, Hermina and Hadassah. While the typhus epidemic was quite virulent and deadly in the camp population at large, those of the children who were touched by it had rather mild cases and recovered quickly. I was among them.
Hadassah herself gained a fair amount of renown after the war. First, as Ada Bimko, she was a prosecution witness in the trial of Josef Kramer (the commandant of Bergen-Belsen) and his minions, in the course of which she testified to the presence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. (This testimony earned her a prominent place in the literature of denialism.) Later she married Josef Rosensaft, himself a Bergen-Belsen survivor, and, as Hadassah Rosensaft, she wrote and lectured about the Holocaust and served on various Holocaust-related bodies in the United States. And she, too, does not appear to have ever referred to her association with Luba Tryszynska.
cobylubliner.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/oy-vey-another-hoax/