The items listed on this page are original source materials or scholarly articles that complement the site. They are for those who want to go to a greater depth in their study of the Holocaust.
About this Text: Introduction
Solomon Radasky’s memory of his selection for Auschwitz comports with German documents published in one volume in 1989 as the “Auschwitz Chronicle”. The Chronicle is a compilation of documents from various sources arranged in the order of day by day.
The story Mr. Radasky tells is that a soldier comes to Majdanek camp to select 3 groups of 750 people. He was in the 2nd group. The soldier arrives just in time to save Mr. Radasky’s life. A rope has been hung around his neck and he is about to be hung by the Lagerfurher of Majdanek as a punishment.
The soldier argues with the Lagerfurher to stop the hanging. Mr. Radasky cannot be hung because he has already been selected to be sent to Auschwitz. So Mr. Radasky is saved. He is transported to Auschwitz and put to work in the Buna camp laying railroad tracks.
The “Auschwitz Chronicle” is a day by day compilation of records which survived the attempt to destroy incriminating evidence in the summer of 1944 and in January 1945. The entries from June 24, 1943 through July 8, 1943 tell the story of Sell and Kitt who go to Majdanek concentration camp (also called Lublin) to select slave laborers needed at the Buna plant at Auschwitz for extremely hard labor. Sell and Kitt select 2000 prisoners but reject the rest because of their poor physical condition.
SS Lieutenant Colonel Maurer (who as head of WVHA Office D-II was the person in charge of the deployment and the productivity of prisoner labor and who was tried and executed in Krakow in 1951) disputes Sell and Kitt’s evaluation of the prisoners’ condition. Maurer personally goes to Majdanek camp and finds 3000 more prisoners suitable for hard labor. Majdanek is running short of space and Auschwitz needs the labor. A medical examination is conducted to determine why Sell and Kitt rejected them in the first place.
The record for July 8, 1943 concerns the transfer of a group of 750 prisoners that include Mr. Radasky as his camp number (No. 128232) falls among that group. These were prisoners originally rejected by Sell and Kitt and personally selected and ordered transferred by Lieutenant Colonel Maurer.
A word about the slave labor system as practiced in Nazi Germany. Slave laborers worked in the armaments industry, in building the camps themselves and doing heavy work like road building or quarrying stone. In the most extreme conditions, and at the Buna camp in Auschwitz these conditions prevailed, slave laborers were worked to death at short intervals. The demand for slave labor was insatiable and it was conducted as a kind of torture despite the fact that if the prisoners had been treated more humanely they could have done more work. Under a death threat from brutal guards starved and poorly clad prisoners were worked long hours out in the open in unsafe conditions. The argument between Sell and Kitt and Maurer takes on an ironic quality given these circumstances.
Excerpts from the “Auschwitz Chronicle” follow. The complete entry is given for each relevant day:
June 24, 1943
SS Second Lieutenant Max Sell, Deputy Director of Labor Deployment, and the Camp Doctor, Bruno Kitt, arrive in the Lublin (Majdanek) C.C. to evaluate prisoners selected by the Lublin Camp Doctor for deployment in the Buna plants or Jaworzno. They find out after their arrival that of the 5,500, male and female prisoners made available by the WVHA, 1,700 have already been earmarked for the labor camp in Radom. Only 3,800 prisoners remain for Auschwitz. In addition, they confirm that only 30 percent of the 1,000 prisoners selected are suitable for the work in the Buna factories or Jaworzno.
Nos. 125386-125418 are given to 33 male prisoners and Nos. 46419-46424 to six female prisoners who have been sent from Kattowitz. Among them is a prisoner from Leipzig, given No. 125400.
Documents and Materials, pp. 138ff
June 25, 1943
In the Lublin (Majdanek) C.C., SS Second Lieutenant Sell and SS First Lieutenant Dr. Kitt select 2,000 prisoners who are suited for the hardest labor. They find the others unfit for the work in the Buna plants or Jaworzno and reject them.
Documents and Materials, pp. 138ff
With the results of the inspection conducted in the Lublin concentration camp by Sell and Kitt in hand, Labor Deployment Director Schwarz asks Office D-II of the WVHA whether it might not be possible to obtain an additional 1,000 prisoners from the Lublin C.C., for masons, carpenters, and plumbers are urgently needed in the Buna plants. SS Second Lieutenant Sell, who is still at the Lublin camp, could make the selection of the suitable prisoners.
APMO, D-Aul-3a/334, Labor Deployment.
June 26, 1943
1,052 male and female Jews who SS Second Lieutenant Sell and SS Camp Doctor Kitt considered fit for extremely hard labor are sent from the Lublin (Majdanek) C.C. The 426 men are given Nos. 126377-126802 and 626 women are given Nos. 46797-47422.
July 1, 1943
Commander Hoss informs the SS members of the garrison that the fence of Section II in Birkenau, in Camps B-IId, B-IIe, and B-IIf, is connected to the mains and carries a high-voltage charge.
APMO, D-Aul-1, Garrison Order 25/43.
805 Jews selected by SS Second Lieutenant Sell and SS Camp Doctor Kitt are transferred from the Lublin (Majdanek) C.C. Among these are 222 men, given Nos. 127157-127378, and 583 women, given Nos. 46732-48214. Lejbko Ponzek, born on February 1, 1914, flees during the transport.
APMO, D-Aul-1/1, p. 182, Telegrams; 1Z-8/Gestapo Lodz/3/a/88/466.
July 3, 1943
The Commandant’s Office receives word from the Head of Office D-11 of the WVHA, SS Lieutenant Colonel Maurer, that he personally carried out an inspection of the prisoners destined for Auschwitz in the Lublin (Majdanek) C.C. and determined that these prisoners are able-bodied, which is why he does not understand their rejection by SS Second Lieutenant Sell and Camp Doctor Kitt. For this reason, he is ordering the transfer of the other 3,000 prisoners, men and women, to Auschwitz, particularly as 1,500 men in any case will be useful in the Buna plants, and in New-Dachs, whereas in Lublin space for new prisoners must be created.
Three prisoners sent from Kattowitz receive Nos. 127471-127473.
APMO, D-Aul-3a/344, Labor Deployment.
July 8, 1943
The 75 male Jews transferred from the Majdanek camp by order of Head of Office D-II Maurer are given Nos. 127913-128662 [Note: Radasky’s No. is 128232] and the 750 female Jews get Nos. 48349-49098. In order to determine why Sell and Kitt rejected them, medical examinations are conducted that show that 49 male prisoners must be assigned to the prisoners’ infirmary or the convalescent block because of significant exhaustion, sever skin and connective tissue inflammations, and hernias; 277 male prisoners must remain in the Auschwitz camp because of slight physical exhaustion; 424 male prisoners can be transferred to the Buna plants after a four-week quarantine; five female prisoners have died after arrival; two female prisoners show traces of gunshot wounds; 80 female prisoners, including 28 between the ages of 15 and 17, are unable to work; two female prisoners have pulmonary emphysema; 44 female prisoners show traces of slight and severe wounds on their arms and legs; five female prisoners have gangrenous legs; one female prisoners has in inflammation of connective tissue, and the other female prisoners are plagued by scabies. It is further established that the general condition of the transferred prisoners does not permit their labor to be fully exploited in Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
D-Aul-3a/348, Labor Deployment; Documents and Materials, Documents on pp. 140ff.
Copyright: Henry Holt and Co., 1989
Long before Hitler’s arriving, we in Poland felt the discrimination against us, the Jewish people. It came from the top, from the government. Anti-Semitic outbursts were not right. The struggle was hard for making a living.
I learned to be a Carpenter and in 1939 when the Hitler army overran Poland I already had a shop of my own and hired hands.
At that time I had very little cash. My money was in material or in long term checks. Anyway, I could not collect anymore.
The Germans started catching Jews to work. They beat, tortured, and cut beards from the elderly people. Polish children showed the Nazis where to find the Jews. They created caps at the new border with the Russians and sent there young people. Young people from all over the country started running to the Russian border. Most made it there. My brother and I tried but we had less luck. The Ukrainians caught us, a group of 15 people and handed us over to a Russian officer and they forced us back to the German site.
Instead of trying again we decided to go home and try to persuade our parents to go back with us, so the whole family would be saved. We observed things happening at the border.
To our sorrow, we could not influence our Daddy. Our uncle also worked against us. They did not like Stalin very much. I decided to stay with my family. I was the oldest and besides I had a girl with whom I had went out with for years. I was afraid to take her with me because the conditions on the other side of the border were terrible. My brother left and he made it over to the Russian side.
In the beginning of 1940 I got married. I still made some money by manufacturing soap and other different things.
The town of Radom had about 100,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom were Jews. The German administration established two ghettos in town, one with twenty-two thousand and one with eight thousand, where we were forced to move.
We found an apartment with two rooms. We moved in together with my family. Then in 1941, m y wife became pregnant. We had a boy. When the baby was six weeks old he became sick. We had to go to a larger ghetto for a doctor. We risked our lives to move to the larger ghetto, but it did no good because the baby died.
We brought two cows with us to the ghetto . We sold the milk to feed ourselves and the cows. It wasn’t much but better than nothing. People were hungry. It got worse from day to day. People were shot trying to get out to buy food for their families. The Poles were afraid to come near us to sell us goods. There were a few in certain places that would. Our people traded everything they had in exchange for potatoes, bread, flour, etc.
The worst was at night hearing the children crying, “mamma I am hungry”. The Jewish ghetto administration organized a kitchen with one meal of soup a day. Unfortunately lack of funds made it impossible to continue. People looked like skeletons and then they would swell up. They would fall on the streets dead. Death was everywhere. They were being shot by the Nazis. The Jewish administration had a full time job of picking up the bodies to bring them to the cemetery on horse wagons.
In the meantime, the Jewish ghetto police received order from the Germans to provide people for work. We received cards instructing us to come to the police station. If we didn’t show up they would look for us. They would force us to work.
The ones who had money bought replacement hands. Some were glad to go because they had the chance to buy or get something to eat outside the ghetto.
In the beginning of 1942, a German gendarme accompanied by a Polish policeman walked into our yard. They began searching all over. They noticed one of our cows didn’t have an earring of registry. They took my father with them. The next day we received the news he was dead. They brought him in the large ghetto near the window of a friend and shot him. His face was blue and swollen from them beating and torturing him. His last word was “My children,” then Shema Yisrael Addonai Elohaynu Addonai Ehud.” [Here O Israel the Lord is My God The Lord Is One; Deuteronomy; the Kiddush ha-Shem]
God did not listen. The hell went on. There was nowhere to run. Some people ran to the Polish side to look for Polish friends but very few had any luck. The German administration threatened the Poles to shoot them if they found any Jew with them. Then they paid five pounds of sugar and five liters of petroleum for denouncing a Jew. Some denounced and even killed to get the clots or the watch off. In the forest there were some reactionary organized resistance groups with initials A. K. They too, killed many Jews who came to organize themselves in groups to fight the Germans.
>From everyone’s point of view, it looked bad. One night, S. S. Troops came into the ghettos searching for young people. They took them out into the streets and shot them. They called it an action against communists.
One day about three months after my father’s death, they started putting up new bulbs on the electric posts. We wondered what was coming now. It used to be dark but now we were going to have light. At that time I worked in a Bata shoe factory close to the ghetto. I had a certificate for coming and going to work. My shift was in the afternoon. As usual, my wife, who was six months pregnant, would escort me to the end of the ghetto. I kissed her good bye. About an half an hour later the ghetto was surrounded by armed S. S. Everyone knew something bad was coming.
What I did not know was when I came to work, they didn’t let any Jewish workers through the gate. It was about 20 Jewish workers. They didn’t stop me, their mistake. Later I met three more Jewish workers they mistakenly let in. None of us could do our job, but my manager didn’t mind. The four of us went up to a higher building to look down in the ghetto. It was lit up but we couldn’t see much.
Around eleven o’clock the shooting started, machine guns, revolvers, shooting like in a war. We could hear crying from woman and children and the hollering of the S. S. men. They formed a line of people making them move in the direction of the train station. As they passed by the fence of the Bata factory the shooting still went on. They pulled out people, we could hear them hollering, begging for their lives, asking for mercy, then a shot and then quiet.
The night started disappearing as did the marching people. From time to time, we could still hear riffles, probably on people who tried to hide.
We went back to the first floor of the building where we could see clearly the field around the factory . Our people were digging holes and the S. S. men were watching them. Some carried the dead to the holes. We learned later from a friend who was shot in the arm that his mother and sister were dead. They were lying on him. The boys helped him. He helped carry his mother and sister to the grave so the S. S. men would not notice. He is alive and lives in France now.
I didn’t have my family to go home to any more. We were not allowed to go to the ghetto. By ten o’clock a.m. the gates opened and in marched several hundred Jewish people from the large ghetto. After a selection they went through. The S. S. men took away two thousand people from the large ghetto and put them on a train together with the eight thousand of ours. From a few Jewish policeman who brought the workers to the Bata factory we learned that they marched the two thousand people to the train. Again the same shootings and beatings.
The cattle wagon floors were covered with bleach powder about two inches thick. They pushed in every wagon, so many people, that it was impossible to breathe. They pushed the smaller children over the heads of the people. After it was filled up we knew they couldn’t stay alive for very long. It was a choking death, a terrible death, I felt like I was choking myself. I was resigned, I didn’t care when they gave out coffee and pieces of bread to the people.
I almost got shot when an S. S. man chased a man who tried to go in the direction of the ghetto. He ran back mixed in with the mass and the S. S. man thought that I looked to be the one. He finally gave up.
We were quartered in the Bata factory. We received some food but it was not enough. We slept on a cement floor. I had nothing to put on the floor to make it softer. Then it was August 17th, we were ordered to line up. They marched us to the large ghetto through the fields behind the town. The fields were full of bloody spots and other signs of killed people; like hats, bags with bread and sandwiches and damaged suitcases.
They let us in the ghetto. We learned we were trapped. They were putting up bulbs on the posts. The S. S. surrounded the ghetto; like animals in a cage. People ran around to find any spot to get out.
It was already dark when S. S. troops marched in the ghetto calling and hollering to get out on the street. From there they ran us to a huge place free of buildings.
There a mass of people squeezed together fighting for breathe. Mothers lost their children. People stepped on some, there was no way to help them. You could not bend down to help. What was going on? Were the people in front the ones the S. S. picked out to shoot? Everybody in front tried to move to the middle. This was calculated strategically by the S. S. to keep mass together. They formed lines, higher rank S. S. officers stood in front of them selecting by pointing with their finger where to go, left or right.
It didn’t take much to see that right was the good side. He showed me to the right. There was a group of young people I joined. When the group got bigger, they led us, four in a line, to a yard in a leather factory. They also brought in young women but kept them separated from us.
I like to mention that a week or so before that compulsory transfer some factories, run by Germans, like the ammunition factory or division of the army and police enlisted young people and kept them quartered there. Some ran outside the ghetto and are hiding in the forests taking their chances there.
The S. S. troops marched the people from the ghetto to the train the same way as before, and us the so called lucky ones were brought back in the ghetto only a smaller one. They let us have a small part of the large ghetto. Everyone ran to find a place to stay. It took about one hour when S. S. men and Jewish Police started knocking on the doors calling to get outside again. They ran us in one direction of the street. They stopped and started forming two parties; it was hard to decide which was the good one. Only a little later we knew. I was lucky again. They needed some more people to fill up the train. To take the gas chamber in Treblinka, we learned a few days later. Also the ten thousand people with my family went there.
A day later they took people to work. I was among them. The S. S. men took us, a group of 30 people to work in the ghetto emptying the people. We went through the place where the selection was made. It looked like a slaughter house. Blood all over, packages with belongings, some had groceries, bread and so on. Everyone of us were hungry but few of us grabbed the bread. I watched one take off a slice soaked with blood and the rest he ate. I couldn’t forgive him. The bodies were already removed.
We searched in the houses for the better things, that was the orders from the S. S. men. (furs, textile materials, leather and so on.) Of course, we dressed ourselves a little better too when we found something suitable.
I started working with a group in a gendarme unit, building barracks. It was the beginning of 1943. They brought back to the ghetto people from different places where they were quartered.
On the morning of January 13th, again the little ghetto was surrounded by S. S. They didn’t let us out to work, yet people registers from before to immigrate to Palestine were called out by name. They let them in the yard of the Jewish police. The others they lined up to go to the train. I was in. I knew I was marching to my death and yet there was nothing I or we could do, now or even before.
The biggest part of the polish population was anti-Semitic. The influential Catholic Church would not practice “MERCY”. When I think of that it makes me so sad; how we could have helped each other against our mutual enemy.
Like I said we were moving toward the gate of the ghetto, and the S. S. did nothing to discourage people from turning back. The S. S. knocked them over their heads with anything they got a hold of. They used legs from chairs, their pistols and they shot some and so on. Then I noticed a friend of mine, he was a carpenter on the side walk with an S. S. man. I called him loudly, he heard me and gave me a sign to come over. I did. They looked for more carpenters. Across the street from us three wooden boxes were displayed and they made the people take off their gold rings, watches, necklaces and so on and put them in the boxes.
Our group got bigger. The S. S. added some tailors, shoe makers, etc. , we were 30 people. He led us in police yard and we waited until the last of the people left the gate. There we stood in a line. Before us was laying a dead man who had been shot.
Our S. S. man walked out with us. He took us to a camp at the end of our town, Radom Barracks under barbed wire. There I surprisingly met a cousin of mine between the hundred of young people. Men and women who worked mostly for the ammunition factory. There was also a tailor shop in the camp, a cabinet maker shop and others.
We made furniture for the high ranking officers. They shipped it home to Germany. As the days went by we talked and wondered how life is so strong. We lost our families, our own life was in danger every day and yet our people joked, sang and ever performed theater sometimes on Sunday evening.
A group of our people were taken every day to work in a printing plant. They often brought back a German paper. We learned to read between the lines. It was encouraging. The news from the Russian front. We hoped that the United States and the allies would start the second front.
In the meantime these murderers kept on murdering. They picked up a group of intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and so on, over thirty people. Outside the ghetto was waiting a truck with armed Ukrainians, under S. S. Command. They brought them on a field and shot them. One doctor managed to grab a pistol from one of the S. S. men and shot him. One woman they brought back to the ghetto alive. It looked like they wanted her to tell the story.
Then one day in 1943, I don’t recall the exact date, they liquidated the little ghetto. They bought all the people in our camp and kept them separated from us. They went through a selection, and picked out the young people. They put the young people to one side. The older people and the few children that were still left by saving them in different ways. On the other side, I stood and watched a friend of mine, they wanted her to give up her little boy. He was 6 years old and they would let her go to the other side if she gave him up but she wouldn’t. She put up a fight when they grabbed the boy. They finally took her by the legs and arms and threw her and the child in a big truck with the others. A truck with armed Ukrainians followed them.
As so my telling the story could go on and on, and sometimes it is a heroic story of some of my people I have to shorten it because I only have 45 minutes of recording time.
Around July 1943, our camp in Radom became officially a concentration camp. In July 1944 they liquidated the camp. They brought us to Auschwitz, where we went through a selection, then sent to Vaihingen, Germany.
In November 1944, from Vaihingen, we were sent to Hessenthal. In the beginning of April 1945, from Hessenthal, we marched to Allach (Dachau).
In the morning of April 29, 1945, we noticed a white flag in front of our camp. We knew we were free, but most of us could not get up from the cement floor. We looked like skeletons.
The first American officer came in, we yelled greeting him. The sound was like from yelling cats. I was feeling sick. I went to a doctor and he told me I had T. B. I was put in a sanatorium.
About this Text: TESTAMENT OF ABE BORENSTEIN
Written: 1972 Copyright: Isak Borenstein
Collected by: Elaine Menszer for the Living History Committee of the New Orleans Chapter; Brandies University National Women’s Committee Long before Hitler’s arriving, we in Poland felt the discrimination against us, the Jewish people. It came from the top, from the government. Anti-Semitic outbursts were not right. The struggle was hard for making a living.
I learned to be a Carpenter and in 1939 when the Hitler army overran Poland I already had a shop of my own and hired hands.
At that time I had very little cash. My money was in material or in long term checks. Anyway, I could not collect anymore.
The Germans started catching Jews to work. They beat, tortured, and cut beards from the elderly people. Polish children showed the Nazis where to find the Jews. They created caps at the new border with the Russians and sent there young people. Young people from all over the country started running to the Russian border. Most made it there. My brother and I tried but we had less luck. The Ukrainians caught us, a group of 15 people and handed us over to a Russian officer and they forced us back to the German site.
Instead of trying again we decided to go home and try to persuade our parents to go back with us, so the whole family would be saved. We observed things happening at the border.
To our sorrow, we could not influence our Daddy. Our uncle also worked against us. They did not like Stalin very much. I decided to stay with my family. I was the oldest and besides I had a girl with whom I had went out with for years. I was afraid to take her with me because the conditions on the other side of the border were terrible. My brother left and he made it over to the Russian side.
In the beginning of 1940 I got married. I still made some money by manufacturing soap and other different things.
The town of Radom had about 100,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom were Jews. The German administration established two ghettos in town, one with twenty-two thousand and one with eight thousand, where we were forced to move.
We found an apartment with two rooms. We moved in together with my family. Then in 1941, m y wife became pregnant. We had a boy. When the baby was six weeks old he became sick. We had to go to a larger ghetto for a doctor. We risked our lives to move to the larger ghetto, but it did no good because the baby died.
We brought two cows with us to the ghetto . We sold the milk to feed ourselves and the cows. It wasn’t much but better than nothing. People were hungry. It got worse from day to day. People were shot trying to get out to buy food for their families. The Poles were afraid to come near us to sell us goods. There were a few in certain places that would. Our people traded everything they had in exchange for potatoes, bread, flour, etc.
The worst was at night hearing the children crying, “mamma I am hungry”. The Jewish ghetto administration organized a kitchen with one meal of soup a day. Unfortunately lack of funds made it impossible to continue. People looked like skeletons and then they would swell up. They would fall on the streets dead. Death was everywhere. They were being shot by the Nazis. The Jewish administration had a full time job of picking up the bodies to bring them to the cemetery on horse wagons.
In the meantime, the Jewish ghetto police received order from the Germans to provide people for work. We received cards instructing us to come to the police station. If we didn’t show up they would look for us. They would force us to work.
The ones who had money bought replacement hands. Some were glad to go because they had the chance to buy or get something to eat outside the ghetto.
In the beginning of 1942, a German gendarme accompanied by a Polish policeman walked into our yard. They began searching all over. They noticed one of our cows didn’t have an earring of registry. They took my father with them. The next day we received the news he was dead. They brought him in the large ghetto near the window of a friend and shot him. His face was blue and swollen from them beating and torturing him. His last word was “My children,” then Shema Yisrael Addonai Elohaynu Addonai Ehud.” [Here O Israel the Lord is My God The Lord Is One; Deuteronomy; the Kiddush ha-Shem]
God did not listen. The hell went on. There was nowhere to run. Some people ran to the Polish side to look for Polish friends but very few had any luck. The German administration threatened the Poles to shoot them if they found any Jew with them. Then they paid five pounds of sugar and five liters of petroleum for denouncing a Jew. Some denounced and even killed to get the clots or the watch off. In the forest there were some reactionary organized resistance groups with initials A. K. They too, killed many Jews who came to organize themselves in groups to fight the Germans.
From everyone’s point of view, it looked bad. One night, S. S. Troops came into the ghettos searching for young people. They took them out into the streets and shot them. They called it an action against communists.
One day about three months after my father’s death, they started putting up new bulbs on the electric posts. We wondered what was coming now. It used to be dark but now we were going to have light. At that time I worked in a Bata shoe factory close to the ghetto. I had a certificate for coming and going to work. My shift was in the afternoon. As usual, my wife, who was six months pregnant, would escort me to the end of the ghetto. I kissed her good bye. About an half an hour later the ghetto was surrounded by armed S. S. Everyone knew something bad was coming.
What I did not know was when I came to work, they didn’t let any Jewish workers through the gate. It was about 20 Jewish workers. They didn’t stop me, their mistake. Later I met three more Jewish workers they mistakenly let in. None of us could do our job, but my manager didn’t mind. The four of us went up to a higher building to look down in the ghetto. It was lit up but we couldn’t see much.
Around eleven o’clock the shooting started, machine guns, revolvers, shooting like in a war. We could hear crying from woman and children and the hollering of the S. S. men. They formed a line of people making them move in the direction of the train station. As they passed by the fence of the Bata factory the shooting still went on. They pulled out people, we could hear them hollering, begging for their lives, asking for mercy, then a shot and then quiet.
The night started disappearing as did the marching people. From time to time, we could still hear rifles, probably on people who tried to hide.
We went back to the first floor of the building where we could see clearly the field around the factory . Our people were digging holes and the S. S. men were watching them. Some carried the dead to the holes. We learned later from a friend who was shot in the arm that his mother and sister were dead. They were lying on him. The boys helped him. He helped carry his mother and sister to the grave so the S. S. men would not notice. He is alive and lives in France now.
I didn’t have my family to go home to any more. We were not allowed to go to the ghetto. By ten o’clock a.m. the gates opened and in marched several hundred Jewish people from the large ghetto. After a selection they went through. The S. S. men took away two thousand people from the large ghetto and put them on a train together with the eight thousand of ours. From a few Jewish policeman who brought the workers to the Bata factory we learned that they marched the two thousand people to the train. Again the same shootings and beatings.
The cattle wagon floors were covered with bleach powder about two inches thick. They pushed in every wagon, so many people, that it was impossible to breathe. They pushed the smaller children over the heads of the people. After it was filled up we knew they couldn’t stay alive for very long. It was a choking death, a terrible death, I felt like I was choking myself. I was resigned, I didn’t care when they gave out coffee and pieces of bread to the people.
I almost got shot when an S. S. man chased a man who tried to go in the direction of the ghetto. He ran back mixed in with the mass and the S. S. man thought that I looked to be the one. He finally gave up.
We were quartered in the Bata factory. We received some food but it was not enough. We slept on a cement floor. I had nothing to put on the floor to make it softer. Then it was August 17th, we were ordered to line up. They marched us to the large ghetto through the fields behind the town. The fields were full of bloody spots and other signs of killed people; like hats, bags with bread and sandwiches and damaged suitcases.
They let us in the ghetto. We learned we were trapped. They were putting up bulbs on the posts. The S. S. surrounded the ghetto; like animals in a cage. People ran around to find any spot to get out.
It was already dark when S. S. troops marched in the ghetto calling and hollering to get out on the street. From there they ran us to a huge place free of buildings.
There a mass of people squeezed together fighting for breathe. Mothers lost their children. People stepped on some, there was no way to help them. You could not bend down to help. What was going on? Were the people in front the ones the S. S. picked out to shoot? Everybody in front tried to move to the middle. This was calculated strategically by the S. S. to keep mass together. They formed lines, higher rank S. S. officers stood in front of them selecting by pointing with their finger where to go, left or right.
It didn’t take much to see that right was the good side. He showed me to the right. There was a group of young people I joined. When the group got bigger, they led us, four in a line, to a yard in a leather factory. They also brought in young women but kept them separated from us.
I like to mention that a week or so before that compulsory transfer some factories, run by Germans, like the ammunition factory or division of the army and police enlisted young people and kept them quartered there. Some ran outside the ghetto and are hiding in the forests taking their chances there.
The S. S. troops marched the people from the ghetto to the train the same way as before, and us the so called lucky ones were brought back in the ghetto only a smaller one. They let us have a small part of the large ghetto. Everyone ran to find a place to stay. It took about one hour when S. S. men and Jewish Police started knocking on the doors calling to get outside again. They ran us in one direction of the street. They stopped and started forming two parties; it was hard to decide which was the good one. Only a little later we knew. I was lucky again. They needed some more people to fill up the train. To take the gas chamber in Treblinka, we learned a few days later. Also the ten thousand people with my family went there.
A day later they took people to work. I was among them. The S. S. men took us, a group of 30 people to work in the ghetto emptying the people. We went through the place where the selection was made. It looked like a slaughter house. Blood all over, packages with belongings, some had groceries, bread and so on. Everyone of us were hungry but few of us grabbed the bread. I watched one take off a slice soaked with blood and the rest he ate. I couldn’t forgive him. The bodies were already removed.
We searched in the houses for the better things, that was the orders from the S. S. men. (furs, textile materials, leather and so on.) Of course, we dressed ourselves a little better too when we found something suitable.
I started working with a group in a gendarme unit, building barracks. It was the beginning of 1943. They brought back to the ghetto people from different places where they were quartered.
On the morning of January 13th, again the little ghetto was surrounded by S. S. They didn’t let us out to work, yet people registers from before to immigrate to Palestine were called out by name. They let them in the yard of the Jewish police. The others they lined up to go to the train. I was in. I knew I was marching to my death and yet there was nothing I or we could do, now or even before.
The biggest part of the polish population was anti-Semitic. The influential Catholic Church would not practice “MERCY”. When I think of that it makes me so sad; how we could have helped each other against our mutual enemy.
Like I said we were moving toward the gate of the ghetto, and the S. S. did nothing to discourage people from turning back. The S. S. knocked them over their heads with anything they got a hold of. They used legs from chairs, their pistols and they shot some and so on. Then I noticed a friend of mine, he was a carpenter on the side walk with an S. S. man. I called him loudly, he heard me and gave me a sign to come over. I did. They looked for more carpenters. Across the street from us three wooden boxes were displayed and they made the people take off their gold rings, watches, necklaces and so on and put them in the boxes.
Our group got bigger. The S. S. added some tailors, shoe makers, etc. , we were 30 people. He led us in police yard and we waited until the last of the people left the gate. There we stood in a line. Before us was laying a dead man who had been shot.
Our S. S. man walked out with us. He took us to a camp at the end of our town, Radom Barracks under barbed wire. There I surprisingly met a cousin of mine between the hundred of young people. Men and women who worked mostly for the ammunition factory. There was also a tailor shop in the camp, a cabinet maker shop and others.
We made furniture for the high ranking officers. They shipped it home to Germany. As the days went by we talked and wondered how life is so strong. We lost our families, our own life was in danger every day and yet our people joked, sang and ever performed theater sometimes on Sunday evening.
A group of our people were taken every day to work in a printing plant. They often brought back a German paper. We learned to read between the lines. It was encouraging. The news from the Russian front. We hoped that the United States and the allies would start the second front.
In the meantime these murderers kept on murdering. They picked up a group of intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and so on, over thirty people. Outside the ghetto was waiting a truck with armed Ukrainians, under S. S. Command. They brought them on a field and shot them. One doctor managed to grab a pistol from one of the S. S. men and shot him. One woman they brought back to the ghetto alive. It looked like they wanted her to tell the story.
Then one day in 1943, I don’t recall the exact date, they liquidated the little ghetto. They bought all the people in our camp and kept them separated from us. They went through a selection, and picked out the young people. They put the young people to one side. The older people and the few children that were still left by saving them in different ways. On the other side, I stood and watched a friend of mine, they wanted her to give up her little boy. He was 6 years old and they would let her go to the other side if she gave him up but she wouldn’t. She put up a fight when they grabbed the boy. They finally took her by the legs and arms and threw her and the child in a big truck with the others. A truck with armed Ukrainians followed them.
As so my telling the story could go on and on, and sometimes it is a heroic story of some of my people I have to shorten it because I only have 45 minutes of recording time.
Around July 1943, our camp in Radom became officially a concentration camp. In July 1944 they liquidated the camp. They brought us to Auschwitz, where we went through a selection, then sent to Vaihingen, Germany.
In November 1944, from Vaihingen, we were sent to Hessenthal. In the beginning of April 1945, from Hessenthal, we marched to Allach (Dachau).
In the morning of April 29, 1945, we noticed a white flag in front of our camp. We knew we were free, but most of us could not get up from the cement floor. We looked like skeletons.
The first American officer came in, we yelled greeting him. The sound was like from yelling cats. I was feeling sick. I went to a doctor and he told me I had T. B. I was put in a sanatorium. [Abe Borenstein’s Testament ends here. Note: Ed.]
Copyright: Isak Borenstein, 1972
Introduction: We have accounts of the last moments of Tzerna Morgenstern (Shep Zitler’s niece) from 2 sources. One was published just after the war in a book by Abraham Sutzkever, a famous Yiddish poet. The other account was given by partisan fighter and poet Abba Kovner in his testimony during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The accounts differ in some particulars but they concur in that a sadistic Nazi inflicts mental torture on a brave girl at a the Ponary killing ground. The Sutzkever story identifies the torturer as Martin Weiss, a notorious Nazi who was sentenced to prison after the war. From: Ghetto Vilna
Author: Abraham Sutzkever Translated by Shep Zitler
Zelda Einhorn, an escapee from Ponary, saw her whole family shot to death there. She told (the writer) that she had seen how Tzerna Morgenstern, a young woman of 18 years, the beautiful daughter of a well-known Vilna professor, was murdered. She had been marched with her mother and young brother. She stood near a deep ditch. She was told to remove her clothes. Those who did not respond had their eyes stabbed out. It was evening. The moon had just begun to appear above where Tzerna stood, half undressed by the ditch. The Nazi commandant, Weiss, approached Tzerna rapidly and pulled her aside, as if to rescue her. Tzerna resisted, preferring to be with her mother and little brother, already shot lying in the ditch. Weiss would not let her go. “A beautiful girl like you should not die,” he said and dragged her further away. She screamed and cried but to no avail. Weiss continued, “How beautiful is the world with the moonlight shining on the leaves, and you, young girl, are more beautiful by the moonlight.” He spoke to her like a lover, extolling the beauty of life to this unfortunate girl as he removed his revolver from his back pocket and shot the sad young girl in the head. Then roaring with laughter, he proudly dragged the dying girl to her family’s ditch.
From: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 27, Testimony of Abba Kovner
Introduction: Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem in 1961 and 1962 for war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people. Eichmann was instrumental in furthering the Final Solution. Attorney General: You learned that in Ponary they were simply murdering Jews? Witness Kovner: If you will allow me, I shall describe the thing which is engraved in my memory most of all. Attorney General: What was engraved in your memory most of all? Witness Kovner: This is the story of a woman named Sara Menkes, who was rescued from the pit, and she told me of the execution of a group of women, in October 1941. She told me about this several weeks later. In this group there was, amongst others, one who you could say was a pupil of mine. For several months I had taught her in the gymnasium, the daughter of Epstein (actually Michal Morgenstern), a teacher at the gymnasium in Vilna. Her name was Tzerna Morgenstern. I shall describe it briefly: they were taken to Ponary. After they had waited at some point, a group of them was taken and lined up in a row. They were told to undress. They undressed down to their shirts. A line of men of the Einsatzgruppen stood facing them. An officer came out in front of them, looked at the row of women, and his glance fell on this Tzerna Morgenstern. She had wonderful eyes, a tall, upstanding girl with long plaits. He looked at her for a long time, smiled and said: “Take one step forward.” She was terrified, as all of them were. At that moment nobody spoke, nobody asked anything. She remained where she was, evidently panic stricken, and did not step forward. He ordered her, asking: “Hey - don’t you want to live - you are so beautiful - I say to you: ‘Take one step forward’.” Then she took a step forward. He said to her: “It would be a pity to bury such beauty in the ground. Walk, but don’t look backwards. There is a path here, you know this path, walk along it.” For a moment she hesitated and then she began walking. The rest of us - Sara Menkes told me - gazed at her with a look in our eyes, I don’t know whether it was only of fear and also of envy. She walked forward weakly. And then he, the officer, drew his revolver and shot her, as the first, in her back. Why should I tell more?
From: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 27 Testimony of Abba Kovner
Introduction: Abba Kovner was an underground leader and the 2 nd commander of the FPO, the Vilna partisan organization, he was also a poet. When Vilna was captured by the Germans at the end of June 1941 and Kovner learned of the massacres at Ponary he decided that armed resistance was the only response. At a meeting on the night of December 31, 1941 he read a manifesto that he had drawn up. Scholar Israel Gutman claims in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust that this was the first time that the mass killing of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen was analyzed as being part of a master plan for destruction of European Jewry, and also the first time that Jews were being urged to organized resistance. What follows is his testimony concerning that manifesto at the Eichmann Trial. Adolf Eichmann was instrumental at implementing the Final Solution. Prosecuting Attorney: Then the underground was organized and you issued a call to the Jewish youth in Vilna to join its ranks? This was the first manifesto - it seems to me that it is in your handwriting? Kovner: Yes. This is my handwriting. Prosecuting Attorney: Was this the first announcement to be issued in Vilna? It says here on the cover “Der erste ruf” (The First Call). Kovner: This was the first announcement of revolt, not only in Vilna: Allow me to read it. I shall try to read it directly in Hebrew. It is written in Yiddish, although I remember that I wrote the original in Hebrew - afterwards I myself translated it into Yiddish thereafter it was published in typewritten form. [He reads the manifesto]:
“Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth! Do not believe those who are deceiving you. Out of 80,000 Jews of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (Vilna), only 20,000 remain. In front of your eyes our parents, our brothers and our sisters are being torn away from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were snatched away for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are those naked women who were taken away on the horror-night of the provocation? Where are those Jews of the Day of Atonement? And where are our brothers of the second ghetto? Anyone who is taken out through the gates of the ghetto, will never return. All roads of the ghetto lead to Ponary, and Ponary means death. Oh, despairing people, - tear this deception away from your eyes. Your children, your husbands, your wives - are no longer alive - Ponary is not a labor camp. Everyone there is shot. Hitler aimed at destroying the Jews of Europe. It turned out to be the fate of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first. Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter. It is true that we are weak, lacking protection, but the only reply to a murderer is resistance. Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath.”
Please note the date is 1 January 1942, in the Ghetto of Vilna. Presiding Judge: This will be T/289.
by Lawrence N. Powell
Tulane University
Between September 1, 1939, when Nazi troops invaded Poland, and Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Hitler waged two wars. One was against Allied forces on three continents.
The other was against the Jews--the Holocaust--which in actuality had been underway since the enactment of the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, if not earlier.
The sobering fact about this latter conflict is how close the Führer came to total victory. The estimated 5 to 6 million Jews who perished at Nazi hands comprised two-thirds of all European Jewry, and in countries like Poland, which before the Second World War still included parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, the Jewish death toll surpassed 90 percent.
The 20th century has been the age of mass murder: the Armenian genocide, Stalin’s “terror famine” against the peasantry, the Cambodian killing fields, and, more recently, the slaughter in Bosnia and Rwanda. So, the Jewish tragedy is hardly unique. But Hitler’s genocidal campaign is singular for its technological thoroughness. Under the Nazis every living Jew old and young, male and female was slated for destruction. Three quarters of Hitler’s victims died within an eleven-month period alone (March 1942-February 1943). Jews who fell under German control in Eastern and Central Europe were quickly stripped of their rights and property. They were isolated from their neighbors, first by the requirement that they wear stars on their clothing, and then by being herded into crowded ghettos, where overwork, disease, and slow starvation marked the days.
The largest ghetto was in Warsaw. Comprising a mere three percent of the city’s land mass, it contained nearly one-third of the prewar population. By the middle of 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, 4,000 to 5,000 Warsaw Jews perished every month from hunger and diseases brought on by malnutrition.
The onset of the Nazi-Soviet war signaled the beginning of the “Final Solution.” Most of the slaughter happened in the “East”--in Poland, the Baltic states, the Balkans, and areas of Soviet territory conquered by the Nazis after the June 22, 1941 attack on Russia. Trial and error characterized the early phases of mass murder. Before utilizing gas, SS forces carried out open-air shootings, often with the assistance of local collaborators recruited from among the most anti-Semitic elements in the Baltic and Ukrainian populations.
Following in the wake of German armies, mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen marched thousands of Jews into the woods and shot them en masse. Between July 4 and 20, for example, as many as 5,000 Jews from Vilna, Lithuania, the ancient center of Jewish piety and learning, were carried to fuel pits in the nearby Ponary forest, ordered to undress, and gunned down as they held hands. On September 29 and 30, 1941, over half of the 60,000 Jews living in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev were marched into a ravine in an area northwest of the city called Babi Yar and shot in small groups. All together 1.3 million Jews died in these outdoor massacres. The Nazis resorted to mass gassings in early 1942, in part to ease the psychological burden on troops who often became queasy after firing on young children. The conveyor-belt extermination occurred in six killing centers in Poland: Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and, of course, Auschwitz, where the gas of choice was hydrogen cyanide known by its trade name Zyklon B. (The other killing centers utilized carbon monoxide, with the partial exception of Majdanek, which later switched to Zyklon B.) Most of the gas chambers were stationary, although a few camps deployed mobile gas vans.
At a Final Solution conference held in a wooded villa overlooking Berlin’s most popular summer resort on the Wannsee Lake, high-level deputies from various German ministries were informed that the deportations would commence from west to east. Jews by the trainloads arrived in Poland from Germany, Holland, and Belgium. Initially placed in transit ghettos, before long they were deposited directly in the death camps proper.
Meanwhile, one Polish ghetto after another was liquidated: 380,000 Jews from Warsaw, 30,000 from Radom, 21,000 from Kielce; then in 1943 and 1944, 300,000 Jews from Romania, 400,000 from Hungary, plus the 90,000 or so remaining inmates of the Lodz Ghetto. By the beginning of 1945 Jewish communities in continuous existence for nearly a millennium had ceased to exist.
The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the coordinator of the Final Solution, set off an angry debate about Jewish honor and resistance. Why didn’t the victims put up more of a fight? Since then enough evidence of Jewish resistance in places like Warsaw and Vilna (even within the death camps themselves) has come to light to put the debate to rest. The real mystery is not why Jews failed to resist but why any survived at all. The balance of power was one-sided in the extreme. The deception was as brilliant as it was cynical. The indifference and often hostility of the outside world was a sad reality. Most Jews who were lucky enough to survive fled before the Nazi noose closed completely. The great majority went to Russia, some to Scandinavia. A few even ended up in Shanghai. But escaping was difficult because high unemployment in the 1930s, which in America drove anti-Semitism to historic highs, disinclined the democracies from accepting the boat people of that era. In 1939 the United States turned away 930 Jews who had set sail from Hamburg on the S.S. St. Louis.
Those who were trapped behind German lines and lived to tell about it often assumed non-Jewish identities provided they were sufficiently assimilated to pass. Another group of survivors weathered the war by hiding in city basements and forest bunkers, sometimes joining bands of partisans. A small number emerged from the camps, often broken in body and spirit. And there was a special category of hidden children who were secured away in Catholic convents and orphanages or temporarily adopted by non-Jewish families. An untold number of these children never returned to the Jewish community.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Jewish survival is the success achieved by those who emigrated to these shores. Approximately 140,000 Holocaust survivors came to America after 1948, when Congress passed a new immigration law. Most settled in the New York area. The remainder flowed through such ports as New Orleans on their way to new homes on the prairies and the West Coast; about 150 of them settled in New Orleans. They were mainly in their 20s and 30s. Often they formed their own communities, standing in as aunts and uncles for each other’s American-born children. (In New Orleans they called themselves the New Americans.) They prospered as small businessmen, independent craftsmen, professionals. They scrimped to educate their children. By 1953, only 2 percent of the postwar immigrants still required outside assistance; by 1990, their per capita income far exceeded the national average, as did that of their children.
The willingness of some survivors to share their stories is a recent phenomenon. For a long time, most refused to talk about the war, chiefly because the act of remembering an offense is itself traumatic. There was a lot of unresolved mourning for family members they hoped to meet again but knew deep down they never would.
A curtain of silence blocked out the past. The publicity surrounding Eichmann’s 1961 trial lifted it slightly. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, when survivors came to terms with their own mortality and public interest in the Holocaust grew apace, that America’s remnant of European Jewry took up the obligation to remember. Since then, the assault upon historical truth by pseudo-scholarly Holocaust “revisionists” has only steeled their resolve to speak out. For Holocaust denial both defames the survivor experience and dishonors the memory of those who perished.
There are preconditions to the kind of tragedy that befell European Jewry. The first is prejudice, which places people different from ourselves outside the bounds of ordinary human obligation and can begin as innocently as an ethnic joke. There was quite a lot of prejudice against Jews in pre-World War Two Europe, where religious and economic anti-Semitism had been spawning periodic pogroms and restrictive regulations from the Crusades forward. A second precondition is the myth that economic and social problems have biological solutions, that you can cure poverty by getting rid of poor people. This myth of biological racism was at the root of Hitler’s Promethean project of ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering, and it still crops up in contemporary civil wars and current-day political discourse.
A third precondition requires numbing people’s civil courage. The Holocaust happened in full public view; it reached awful culmination because millions were content to be bystanders, even in Germany. Indeed, especially in Germany, where Jews during Nazism’s apotheosis were a minuscule minority (less than 1 percent of the population) and anti-Semitism an abstract concern in the minds of most Germans. The sober truth is, Hitler didn’t need to turn the man on the street into a fanatical anti-Semite; he merely needed his acquiescence. As the British historian Ian Kershaw has written: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.” A multicultural democracy like the United States is dedicated to protecting individual rights, especially those of minority groups. The commitment forms the cornerstone of our civic creed. But it means little in the absence of a morally aroused citizenry. One way to replenish democratic decency and civility is to remember the terrible things people do to one another once they climb onto the slippery slope of racial hatred and intolerance. For that reason the Holocaust will always be the defining memory of our time.
American Jewish History 85.4 (1997) pp. 393-419
It is a truism that Jewish identity has traditionally been more attenuated in the South. The greater degree of assimilation below the Potomac is mainly a byproduct of pressures felt by Southern whites of all stripes to toe the line on matters racial and religious. What has been different for Southern Jews is their isolation and small numbers, which intensify the conformist pressure. For pragmatic reasons they have sought to blend in with their gentile surroundings, exalting the values of social adjustment over the claims of a separate Jewish identity.
In few other Southern Jewish communities has assimilation (in the nonpejorative meaning of the word) advanced as far as it has in the Crescent City. The New Orleans Jewish community is unusual even by Southern standards. It is very old, tracing its origins to the early nineteenth century. It is comparatively small for a city of New Orleans’s size: only around 10,000 Jews resided in New Orleans as recently as 1970, or one percent of the population. It is overwhelmingly Reform German Jewish (by a margin of two-to-one at last reckoning) because of the relatively small number of Russian Jews who settled here. And it is extraordinarily well-adjusted. Descendants of old-line Jewish families have dominated the local retail and wholesale trade. They have loomed large in the city’s big downtown law firms and have sat on the boards of major charitable and educational institutions. And, because of their social and economic success, they have generally frowned on anything that called attention to their Jewish identity, such as Zionism, which they once staunchly opposed. Within the closely woven regional networks of Southern Jewry they were even famous for carrying spiritual assimilation to unheard-of heights. For years the men’s club of the city’s leading synagogue used to host shrimp boils in the Temple.1On New Orleans Jews see Julian B. Feibelman, A Social and EconomicStudy of the New Orleans Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1941), 133and passim; Bobbie Malone, Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist,Southerner, 1860-1929 (University, Ala., 1997); Evans, TheProvincials, 227-46; Leonard Reissman, “The New Orleans JewishCommunity,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jewsin the South (Baton Rouge, 1973), 288-304; Calvin Trillin,“U.S. Journal: New Orleans Mardi Gras,” The New Yorker (March 9,1968), 138-44.
Of course, there has always been more than one Jewish community in New Orleans. A much smaller Orthodox group, rooted in eastern Europe and arriving later, has historically felt more at home with its Jewish identity, and that different orientation toward Judaism has given rise to tension and disagreement between the two Jewish communities, one old, the other new. It should be noted that the underlying tensions have not turned on Jewish identity as such but on its meaning. For all the temptations and opportunities that have existed to convert, few old-line Jewish families have done so. They may have eschewed ritual (at least until very recently), but they have not abandoned Judaism. Theodore Lowi’s observation regarding “old” Jews in Gadsden, Alabama, applies equally well to New Orleans: “Old Jews display virtually every feature of ethnicity save its acceptance.”2Theodore Lowi, “Southern Jews: The Two Communities,” in Dinnersteinand Palsson, eds., Jews in the South, 265-82 (the quotation is on 281).
Still, disputes over whether to make public one’s Jewish identity have divided the New Orleans community since turn-of-the-century debates over Russian Jewish immigration (the older Reform community wanted to discourage it). For years Zionism was a flashpoint of conflict. During the desegregation crisis the disagreement focused on whether the organized Jewish community should take a public position as Jews. Because of its greater size, economic power, and cultural prestige, the older Jewish community invariably had its way in these matters. But there was one occasion when they had their hands full: when their assimilationist identity clashed with one grounded in the memory of the Holocaust.3Malone, Rabbi Max Heller, 84-94.
The confrontation happened in May 1961 when the neo-Nazi agitator George Lincoln Rockwell led a hate ride to New Orleans to picket the local premier of the movie Exodus. The local and regional backdrop was one of rising racial tension and incipient anti-Semitism. Established Jewish leaders in the city reacted by trying to quarantine Rockwell, in order to deny him publicity and limit his chances for stirring up anti-Semitic feelings. This was not the response favored by the city’s small community of Holocaust survivors, who numbered around 50 families, mostly belonged to the city’s small Orthodox congregations, and came from overwhelmingly east European backgrounds. The sudden intrusion of Nazism into everyday awareness aroused their anger and fear. More than that, it reawakened long-repressed memories, triggering that inner conflict which so many survivors feel between the need to forget and the obligation to remember. Between the Southern Jew’s instinct to blend in and the survivor’s impulse to bear witness, there was little room for compromise. “Rockwell aroused the community pretty damn good,” says Barney Mintz, long-time board member of the New Orleans Anti-Defamation League (ADL).4Bernard Mintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995. He was putting it mildly. The 1961 controversy over Rockwell’s hate ride, like the 1977 furor in Chicago over neo-Nazi attempts to parade through Skokie,5The Skokie controversy has mainly been treated as a free speechconflict between strong-willed survivors and the ADL, but there isevidence that the crisis also precipitated latent divisions between newand old Jews over Jewish identity. See Donald Alexander Downs, Nazisin Skokie: Freedom, Community, and the First Amendment (Notre Dame,Indiana, 1985), and David Hamlin, The Nazi/Skokie Conflict: ACivil Liberties Battle (Boston, 1980). laid bare deep social and ideological rifts within the New Orleans’s Jewish community.
Son of a radio comedian who counted among his friends such Jewish entertainers as Benny Goodman and Groucho Marx, George Lincoln Rockwell was a seminal figure in America’s postwar white power movement. Indeed, to a generation of American racial extremists he was practically a role model. William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance and pseudonymous author of The Turner Diaries, which inspired both a murderous bankrobbing spree in the early 1980s and, apparently, the 1995 bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, got his start in neofascist politics by editing a Rockwell quarterly.6Right: A Handbook, new revised edition(New York, 1988); James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan,Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture(New York, 1990), 66. David Duke was another Rockwell disciple. “The greatest American who has ever lived has been shot down and killed,” the high school senior sobbingly told a friend, after learning of Rockwell’s assassination by a disgruntled former follower in 1967.7Tyler Bridges, The Rise of David Duke (University, Miss.,1994), 13 (for the quotation) and 40; Michael Zatarain, David Duke:Evolution of a Klansman (Gretna, La., 1990), 116-7.
Rockwell’s enormous influence within the neofascist movement, however, had little to do with organizational prowess. The American Nazi Party (ANP), which he founded in 1959 and served as commander, never came close to building a mass following like that of the anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. At its height the ANP probably claimed fewer than 3,000 members. And his hard-core followers--mostly young men from broken homes and lower-middle-class backgrounds, many with criminal records--could hardly have numbered in excess of 30. These he formed into storm trooper units, replete with khaki uniforms and swastika armbands. He and his men lived together in a ramshackle, two-story frame house in Arlington, Virginia, on a rise Rockwell called Hatemongers Hill, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. One visitor to Rockwell’s headquarters was struck by unpaid bills piled high on the table.8Leland V. Bell, In Hitler‘s Shadow: The Anatomy of AmericanNazism (Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1973), 112-3;Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 66; Frederick J. Simonelli, “TheAmerican Nazi Party: 1958-1967,” The Historian, 57 (Spring1995): 559-61; Tony Ulasewicz with Stuart A. McKeever, ThePresident’s Private Eye: The Journey of Detective Tony U. from N.Y.P.D tothe Nixon White House (Westport, Conn., 1990), 134-9; “Death ofa Storm Trooper,” New York Times, 27 August 1967, section IV, 4:1.
There is no question that Rockwell was a troubled man. He failed at nearly everything he tried, from commercial art to magazine publishing. Personal relationships were a challenge, too, including marriage (he was divorced twice). His autobiography, This Time the World, reads like a Rorschach test of conflicted sexuality. It is brimming with anger at his mother for programming his wedding night with store-bought gadgets. It rages at “masculinized” women. It swoons with admiration for the naked male body over that of nude women. It is shot through with dread of black male sexual potency (“Negroes can beat white men any day in speed of sex maturity and accomplishment”).9George Lincoln Rockwell, This Time the World (n.p., 1963;second edition), 95, 98, 128, 173, 45. At Brown University, where hecontributed cartoons to the school magazine before dropping out to becomea naval pilot during World War II, his artwork betrayed a “consistentpreoccupation with violence” and “themes of death, cannibalism.” ADL,“Facts: Rockwell,” vol. 13, no. 10 (September 1960), 161-2, in GeorgeLincoln Rockwell File, General Files II, IV, B45, Jewish Federationof Greater New Orleans Records, Tulane University, 4 (hereinafter GLR,JFGNO, TU).
For all of his quirks and organizational shortcomings, the commander did possess a rare tactical genius. Rockwell was the one who devised the shock tactics that neo-Nazis employed before they began running for office in the 1980s. The tactics were principally publicity stunts calculated to provoke a reaction from Jewish defense groups like the American Jewish Committee and the ADL. With the sharp ebbing of anti-Semitism from its wartime high-water mark, organized American Judaism sought to capitalize on the improved climate by giving professional Jew haters the silent treatment, denying them the headlines that counterdemonstrations by angry Jews might produce. The strategy had a name: the “quarantine policy.” Some called it “the cold shoulder treatment” too. Whatever the nomenclature, the policy accorded well with the American Jewish community’s traditional commitment to defending civil liberties, even those of the enemy. Indeed, that stance had practically become a cultural value.10Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York andOxford, 1994), 151-2; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: TheAmerican Jewish Committe, 1906-1966, with an introduction bySalo W. Baron (Philadelphia, 1972), 375-6. Rockwell reasoned that he could lift the news blackout by ceasing to be “a sneaky Nazi,” like his “sissy” comrades on the extreme right, and becoming an “OPEN, ARROGANT, ALL-OUT NAZI.” The aim was to “aggravate them so bad … that they will have to notice us.”11Rockwell, This Time the World, 245-6, 253-4;American Jewish Committe (AJC), “Rockwell Scores in his Campaign toStir Up Trouble,” in For Your Information, AJC Bulletin, VI, 2(February 1961), 4, in GLR, JFGNO, TU.
There was nothing halfway about the commander’s provocations. Bathed in floodlights, a huge swastika nailed to its front gable, his house in Arlington, Virginia, became a veritable Nazi shrine. The Horst Wessel hymn blared from its wire-mesh windows. Two guard dogs--a Doberman named Gas Ovens, and a German Shepherd called Auschwitz--patroled the premises. “When I was in the advertising game, we used to use nude women. Now I use the Hakenkreuz and storm troopers. You use what brings them in,” he said. Students from local universities came to gawk and returned with Nazi flags to fly from their fraternity houses. In the summer of 1960 Rockwell vaulted to national attention when he staged a series of open-air meetings in full Nazi regalia on the Washington mall next to the Smithsonian Institute. Angry Jews mobbed him. On July Fourth he tried to hold a rally in New York City’s Union Square. The mayor’s office denied him a permit, an action later reversed by state courts. At the turn of the year Rockwell mounted a picketing campaign in selected American cities against the newly released film Exodus, a box-office hit recounting the founding of the state of Israel. Carefully preannounced, often by flyers declaring “He is Coming” or “We Are Back,” Rockwell’s appearance in company with a handful of armbanded storm troopers triggered major riots in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. The tumults reaped the ANP a publicity bonanza.12“Rockwell Scores,” 1-4; “Bigot Seeking Buildup: The ‘News’Techniques of George Lincoln Rockwell,” a fact sheet from the AJC (March1962); “Rockwell and ‘Exodus,’” confidential AJC memo, March 6,1961; the quotation appears in ADL, “Facts: Rockwell,” 163. See alsoBell, In Hitler’s Shadow, 112; Ulasewicz, The President’sPrivate Eye, 139-42.
Meanwhile, Rockwell hit upon another headline-grabbing stunt: a hate ride to New Orleans. On Saturday, 20 May 1961, he wired the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) that he intended to picket the Wednesday evening premier of Exodus as well as the local NAACP headquarters. A few days earlier the New Orleans theater where the film was scheduled to open had received anonymous letters daubed with red paint and stamped with swastikas. Flyers announcing that “the commander is coming” also appeared in the mailboxes of selected New Orleans Jews.13“Supplemental Report relative to the arrest of George LincolnRockwell, et als,” from Presly J. Trosclair to Joseph A. Guillot, May 30,1961, Offense Reports, Item E-11897-61, New Orleans Police DepartmentRecords, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library (NOPL), hereinafterRockwell Police Report. A copy of one of the flyers can be found in“American Nazi Party, 1961,” the Delesseps S. Morrison Papers, in NOPL.
The commander’s latest project was calculated to play off recent headlines. On the same day that Rockwell wired the NOPD, Alabama Klansmen had assaulted an integrated group of freedom riders in the Greyhound bus terminal in Montgomery. A week earlier white racists had firebombed the first freedom rider bus on a highway outside Anniston, Alabama, and savagely beaten its occupants. Both civil rights contingents were on their way to New Orleans. The brutal attacks made front-page news around the globe. For the next several days public opinion was riveted on the furious negotiations taking place between the Kennedy Justice Department and Alabama state officials to arrange safe passage for fresh reserves of civil rights protesters. To make sure that his hate ride arrived in town in tandem with the freedom ride (the civil rights bus never made it), Rockwell waited until Monday, 22 May, to dispatch his hate bus from Arlington.14Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,1954-63 (New York, 1988), 412-70. Not really a bus, it was actually a blue and white Volkswagen van carrying five storm troopers. Painted beneath the rear window were the words “LINCOLN ROCKWELL’S HATE BUS.” Emblazoned on the top and sides were the statements “WE DO HATE RACE MIXING” and “WE HATE JEW-COMMUNISM.” The driver was one of Rockwell’s most zealous supporters, an action-loving ex-Marine and Greek-American from New York who had Americanized his name to John Patler. Blessed with dark good looks, he had been drummed out of the Corps for moonlighting as a storm trooper while stationed at Quantico, Virginia. Shadowing the hate bus southward was a 1961 green Chevrolet carrying three more troopers. Rockwell himself did not enplane for New Orleans until the following day.15Rockwell Police Report. See also ADL, “Facts: Rockwell,” 164.
According to a UPI reporter, the commander described New Orleans as “a real hot spot.”16Rockwell Police Report. Rockwell had obviously been following the local news. For seven months White Citizen Council housewives had been picketing nonstop two recently desegregated public elementary schools in a poorer section of town. In November 1960 hundreds of white teenagers had run amok through the central business district, assailing blacks and tearing through public buildings. Five special sessions of the state legislature in Baton Rouge managed to keep the pot boiling by seizing control of the Orleans Parish School Board only to have their obstructionist enactments immediately annulled by a federal district judge.17Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle inLouisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga. and London, 1995), 234-64. By May 1961 the city was a tinderbox of racial unrest.
In the eyes of national Jewish leaders the hate ride was a calamity waiting to happen. Rockwell’s recent escapades in Northern cities had proven that American Jews were far from lockstep agreement concerning the quarantine policy. It was not merely teenagers who were mobbing Rockwell’s picketers at theaters where Exodus was showing. Holocaust survivors had also thronged the crowds. “It is emotional satisfaction that the counterdemonstrators seek and obtain,” wrote an official of the American Jewish Committee. These “New Americans” needed to be taught that in a democracy the only thing they needed to fear was fear itself.18“The Time to Educate About Quarantine is Now,” memo from Dr. S. AndhilFineberg, AJC Institute of Human Relations, New York, Feb. 6, 1961, inGLR, JFGNO, TU.
But national leaders were afraid. Their greatest concern was that Rockwell’s Southern forays might cement a union between American Nazis and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. There had been, after all, a rash of bomb attacks against Southern synagogues between 1954 and 1959; in fact, almost 10 percent of bombing targets had been Jewish. Just as worrisome was the possibility that headline-grabbing stunts like the hate ride might enlist racial backlash in the service of anti-semitism.19Ulasewicz, The President’s Private Eye, 131, 136; Green,The Temple Bombing, 6. It was an anxiety that the organized Jewish community in New Orleans knew all too well.
The city’s Jewish leadership never doubted for a moment where it stood on the quarantine policy. The cold shoulder strategy formulated by national Jewish organizations harmonized perfectly with their assimilationist desire to avoid controversy--indeed, to keep the word “Jew” or “Jewish” off the front page. The community’s upper echelon was well represented on the board of the local ADL. “We had top quality not only in terms of contacts but actual ability, men and women who had direct access to the mayor and the police. We had everything in place here,” says the slight, goateed Irwin Schulman, who headed the branch office at the time. The executive committee included such local influentials as board president Moise Steeg, a prominent lawyer and behind-the-scenes powerbroker of Alsatian Jewish origin, and Barney Mintz, a furniture store owner and legendary football halfback at Tulane in the 1930s. Alerted by the national office months in advance that the ANP would likely demonstrate in their city, the local ADL called an emergency meeting of the executive committee as soon as news broke that Rockwell’s hate bus was journeying toward New Orleans, with the commander soon to follow. The committee met on Monday evening (22 May 1961). There was scant debate over tactics and philosophy. Everyone agreed that Rockwell’s civil liberties must be respected. Quickly attention focused on the real task at hand: devising a plan for choking off Rockwell’s publicity. With little prompting, committee members volunteered to contact the city’s three television stations, 10 radio stations, and three major dailies. Others promised to use their good offices with the mayor, the governor, the governor’s secretary, the Tulane Dean of Students, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Civil Defense Director in Washington. “We didn’t have to start de novo,” Schulman explains. “We just started pressing buttons and making calls.”20 Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995; Schulman toMoise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file at the New OrleansADL office. Thanks to Jerry Himmelstein, current ADL director, forsending me a copy of this detailed report on the Rockwell incident. Seealso the memo of Isaiah Terman to Harry Baron, “Picketing of ‘Exodus,’”6 February 1961, AJC, in GLR, JFGNO, TU. The contacts were all completed by noon the following day.
If the ADL leadership acted with more than usual dispatch it was probably because the city’s mounting racial tensions were fast eroding the middle ground of political moderation. Many New Orleans Jews had been trying to occupy the moderate center since at least the 1930s. They included Edith Stern, Julius Rosenwald’s daughter, who would shortly underwrite a major voter registration drive in the Deep South, and Rabbi Julian Feibelman, who had thrown open the doors of Temple Sinai in 1949 for an address by Ralph Bunche to the first integrated audience in the city’s modern history. But the center was definitely beginning to collapse. The nonstop picketing by white housewives, the sit-ins by black students at downtown lunch counters, the ongoing battle between federal courts and state officials--all intensified the pressure on Southern whites to stand up and be counted in favor of white supremacy. To be sure, the segregationist coercion fell with particular severity on Southern Jews in isolated rural communities. But their co-religionists in cities like New Orleans caught some of it as well. A major source of discomfort was the prominence of Northern Jews in the freedom rides. “‘Oh, they’re just Yankees. They think different,’ I remember Southern Jews saying to take the heat off themselves,” says Anne Levy, who experienced the Holocaust as a child and came of age in New Orleans.21Anne Levy, interview with the author, 12 October 1995. But the heat rose steadily all the same. Virulent anti-Semitism even began cropping up on bumper stickers around town. One read “I Like Eich,” a reference to the Adolf Eichmann trial then underway in Jerusalem. Social discrimination was nothing new to Crescent City Jews. It had long barred their entrance to the city’s elite Mardi Gras carnival krewes. Yet tongue-in-cheek endorsements of genocide bespoke a conspiratorial anti-Semitism that was somewhat new to the Crescent City.22Reissman, “The New Orleans Jewish Community,” 303-4; Evans,The Provincials, 310-5; Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism inAmerica, 188-91. Says the ADL’s Irv Schulman: “We lived with the fact that many segregationists had a kernel or more of antisemitism.”23Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995.
The segregationist about whom Schulman and his associates worried most, however, was no run-of-the-mill anti-semite. The absolute boss of mineral-rich Plaquemines parish, Judge Leander Perez carried racial extremism so far as to bring on his excommunication from the Catholic Church. Perez not only dominated the White Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans, the vehicle of massive resistance in Southern Louisiana, but from behind-the-scenes he even stage-managed the Louisiana legislature’s massive resistance to desegregation. The silver-haired judge was responsible for much of the nonstop picketing against two integrated public elementary schools in the lower Ninth Ward. Moreover, in November 1960 he had incited teenage rowdies to riot in downtown New Orleans. In a speech to a massive rally at Municipal Auditorium the night before the melee, he thundered, “Don’t wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don’t wait until the burr-heads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now.” At the same time he lashed out against “Zionist Jews,” whom he regarded as “the most dangerous people in the country today.” On other occasions Perez had blamed the Jews for instigating both the Communist conspiracy and “forced integration,” which he believed was nothing less than a Jewish plot to destroy “our white Christian civilization” by manipulating “emotional Negroes.”24Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 244; Glen Jeansonne,Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta (Baton Rouge and London, 1977),225-6.
Perez’s anti-Semitism and growing political strength powerfully focused the Jewish community’s attention on its own vulnerability. This feeling of growing isolation doubtless explains the obvious resolve of community leaders to separate Jewish concerns from those of Rockwell’s other major target, African-Americans. The commander had made no secret of his intention to simultaneously picket both the Exodus premiere and a meeting of the New Orleans branch of the NAACP. But the ADL leadership never gave a moment’s thought to forging a cross-racial alliance of tolerance against the forces of bigotry. “As I recall,” says Schulman of the Monday evening strategy session, “there was no mention of desegregation, no concern about civil rights and anti-Semitism, except that Rockwell was linking the two.” The ADL leaders were clearly determined to keep those concerns apart. “This was ‘Tokkes an der Tisch’ time,” says Schulman, employing the Yiddish phrase for important business. It was an old and understandable reflex among Southern Jews, this placing of self-preservation ahead of sympathy for the oppressed, another way of blending in and donning the camouflage of conformity. During the Rockwell crisis anti-Semitism was not merely the primary concern, it was the only concern.25See Eli Evans’s sensitive and insightful observations aboutsouthern Jewish dilemmas during the civil rights movement in TheProvincials, 311-2, a theme that Melissa Fay Greene likewise develops brilliantly in Temple Bombing.
Not surprisingly, then, New Orleans’s Jewish leadership tacitly embraced the white establishment consensus regarding “outside agitators.” It was based on the argument of immoral equivalence. Mayor Chep Morrison captured it in a press release equating freedom riders and hate riders: “The ‘Nazi Storm Troopers’ and the ‘Freedom Riders’ . . . mean nothing but trouble and are not welcome here,” he declared, denouncing “publicity stunts continuously put on by agitators representing extreme and radical viewpoints.” The Times-Picayune echoed the argument, as did the Young Men’s Business Club, which passed resolutions chastising Nazis and civil rights activists alike for bringing on federal interference with states’ rights. The city council passed a resolution urging the police “to escort ‘freedom riders’ and other agitators through the city non-stop.”26“Statement by Mayor Chep Morrison,” 24 May 1961, DelessepsS. Morrison Papers, NOPL. See the editorial “Same Purpose,” New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 25 May 1961, p. 19; also “Club Condemns ‘Riders,’‘Nazis,’” ibid., p. 10; and “Agitators Face Non-Stop Order,”ibid., 26 May 1961, p. 22.
Through it all, the paramount concern of the city’s Jewish leadership remained what it always had been: to keep a damper on their own community and thus deny Rockwell an incident that could win his party fresh recruits from the kind of people then swelling Perez’s racist movement. But there were early signs that micromanaging this crisis might be easier said than done. A few younger men in the community were angry enough to provoke a confrontation. Bernard Bennett, a six-foot-four and athletically built Jewish contractor, and his cousin Sam Katz, both members of one of the oldest Reform synagogues, declared flat out that they planned to challenge Rockwell and his men. “I was determined those guys weren’t going to march,” Bennett says. A cousin who worked for the mayor called to try to talk him out of it. “Will you go to jail?” she asked. “Well, I’m prepared to do that.”27Bernard Bennett, interview with the author, 19 December 1995.
The biggest worry racing through the minds of ADL leaders was the reaction of the city’s New Americans, as local Holocaust survivors were known. Members of the executive committee were all too familiar with refugee involvement in anti-Rockwell demonstrations in Boston, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Would survivors who settled in New Orleans also take to the streets? The answer was not long in coming. During the ADL’s Monday evening strategy meeting, the head of the NOPD’s Counter Intelligence Unit called Schulman with information that a group of “local refugees” was planning a counterdemonstration at the opening of Exodus at the Civic Theater downtown. Shortly after getting off the phone Schulman received a call from one of the New Americans. At the very moment the ADL board was formulating its hush-hush strategy a large group of survivors had been meeting in Ralph Rosenblat’s butcher shop on Carondelet street, in the heart of the old black-Jewish shopping district. Schulman and the survivor talked and argued for nearly two hours. They hung up agreeing that a delegation of survivors would meet the next day at noon with the full ADL board, which included the presidents of the Jewish federation, the Jewish Welfare Fund, and B’nai B’rith.28Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
More than 20 men had responded to the call for an emergency meeting at Ralph’s Butcher Shop, and they took about as little time to reach consensus as did their ADL counterparts. However, the New Americans decided to confront Rockwell’s storm troopers rather than give them the cold shoulder. The decision stemmed from a fury that offset any fear survivors may have felt about Rockwell’s scheduled appearance. “The anger gave us courage to fight,” says Felicia Fuksman, a Lodz ghetto survivor. “And this time we were in a position to fight back.”29Felicia Fuksman, interview with the author, 3 February 1996. The anger was not directed at Rockwell alone. They were also furious at their adopted country for having allowed Nazism to make a comeback. They viewed American politics through the lens of recent European history, and they were therefore baffled by the paradox that one should defend the free speech rights of those who would abolish free speech. The bewilderment only widened the rift between themselves and American Jews, who after all looked on civil liberties as both a cultural value and a political strategy. Let Reform Jews exercise their quiet power behind the scenes, New Americans told themselves. As far as they were concerned they were going to protest Rockwell’s visit come hell or high water. After all, were they not witnesses to an epochal catastrophe? And for that reason did they not have a message for the future, the warning, as Primo Levi put it, that “It happened, therefore it can happen again”?30Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 199.
This need to bear witness sprang from the deepest wells of survivor guilt. Like survivor communities elsewhere in America, the refugees who had settled in New Orleans after 1948 as displaced persons had experienced the Holocaust in all of its dimensions. They had jumped from trains and hid in forests. They had faced starvation in ghettos. They had fled to the Soviet Union or passed as Christians on the “Aryan side.” They had been in labor camps, concentrations camps, transit camps, even death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. But however they had experienced Nazi persecution, each was oppressed by a sense of having usurped earthly places belonging by right to murdered loved ones or close friends. That unwarranted guilt stemmed from the belief--to quote Levi again--that “the worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.”31Of all the voluminous writing about survivor guilt and testifying,Primo Levi’s insights remain the most penetrating. See his Survival inAuschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York, 1961), 5-6,36; The Reawakening (New York, 1965), 207; and especially TheDrowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 12, 76-84, 149-51(the quotation is on p. 82). There is also deep insight in Robert JayLifton’s essay “On Survivors” in his History and Human Survival(New York, 1971), especially 169-70. Lawrence Langer, HolocaustTestimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven and London, 1991),especially, 39-76, is indispensable. So why were they spared while saintly sisters perished? “I felt disappointed when I survived,” says Gita Rosenblat, Ralph Rosenblat’s wife and the only surviving member of a Jewish family that had once comprised a large proportion of her Polish village.32Gita Rosenblat, interview with the author, 17 February 1996. The murder of those innocent victims seemed so senseless. How could these deaths be rendered meaningful? There was only one way--remembrance: by never forgetting and never letting the world forget the memory of those who had perished. Remembrance was thus both an obligation and a way to assuage the guilt. As Mrs. Rosenblat’s husband bluntly puts it, “I owe a debt to remember those losses.”33Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 14 February 1996.
Nonetheless, until Rockwell came to town the New Americans of New Orleans had been trying harder to forget than to remember. Because traumatic events are less remembered than relived, survivors were understandably averse to dredging up the painful past. Besides, Cold War America seemed little interested in what they had undergone. After the revelations of the liberated camps sent shudders of revulsion through the public mind, Americans quickly shrank from the smell of quicklime and ash. In the 1950s it was tempting to sublimate horrific scenes of corpse-strewn pits into vague anxiety about nuclear war and meaningless mass death. The times were unreceptive to survivor testimony. “Nobody was listening to us back then,” says Shep Zitler, a Vilna native and camp survivor. Indeed, the very subject of the Holocaust, with its imagery of victims tramping off to death like sheep to slaughter, raised troubling issues concerning Jewish honor and self-worth. How did survivors manage to survive? Why didn’t they put up more of a fight? American Jews were reluctant to ask, and survivors, fearful that the audience they sought to reach might be repelled by the story they tried to tell, found it easier to keep their memories under lock and key.34It is worth noting that the term holocaust did not come intogeneral circulation until the 1960s. On the conspiracy of silence inthe 1950s and 60s, see Dorothy Rabinowitz, New Lives: Survivorsof the Holocaust Living in America (New York, 1976), 93, 120,193-4; Deborah Lipstadt, “The Holocaust: Symbol and Myth inAmerican Life,” Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel,40 (1980-81), 73-88; William Helmreich, Against All Odds:Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America(New York, 1992), 39-42, 69-70; Helen Epstein, Children ofthe Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters (New York, 1979),26, 97-8; Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle toCreate America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995), 1-15; andMichael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York, 1987),3-5, 108-12. Lawrence Graver’s recently published AnObsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the “Diary” (Berkeley,1995), is a moving study of the struggle between assimilationist Jewsand Jewish novelist Meyer Levin for ownership of Anne Frank’s memory. “They were afraid of being judged,” remembers Anne Levy, the child survivor of both the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos. “They didn’t understand,” adds Shep Zitler. “How could they? It was beyond belief.”35Anne Levy, interview with the author, 18 August 1995; Shep Zitler,interview with the author, 10 January 1996. See also, Langer, HolocaustTestimonies, iv-xv.
Given the climate of the 1950s it is understandable why New Orleans survivors lost themselves in the present and tried to bury the past. They had spent their days building new lives. “We didn’t have much time to think about the past,” says Ralph Rosenblat. In those early years all energy was bent toward making it in America. New Americans established businesses and raised new families with very little help. After taking care of the immediate employment and housing needs of Europeans refugees, American Jews had swiftly forgotten about the survivors. Assimilation was the dominant mood, and that temper discouraged unacculturated greenhorns from getting too close. So the survivors stayed to themselves, transforming their marginality into a close-knit community of fictive aunts and uncles to give their American-born children a sense of family that had been torn from them by a world-historical tragedy. When they came together for picnics and parties, they took pains to bar the past. “We were trying to have a little good time,” Rosenblat says, “we were trying to forget.” But it was not always easy to keep the past at bay. Merely slicing bread could trigger memories of nonstop camp dreams of how good it would feel to possess the entire loaf. Or someone else might say when the fatigue of a long week was loosening its grip, “Look what our family is missing. I wish our family would be here.”36 Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 17 February 1996. The reminiscing often happened over coffee and desert, during games of gin rummy, or while on Sunday afternoon outings to the Lakefront or the beach, when breezes off the water rustled blankets heaped with food and their American children played Parchesi or pitch and catch under ancient live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. Then survivors might release themselves in Yiddish and start comparing notes about who was in which camp when, and what each saw and knew. “I was there then.” “My brother went to that Lager.” “My grandmother used to live in such-and-such town.” In the ‘50s these moments happened rarely and never lasted long.37Felicia Fuksman, interview with the author, 2 February 1996.
But two things occurred in 1961 that abruptly wrenched them back to the past. One was the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the former head of the SS Jewish Desk who had been abducted by Israeli agents in front of his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for his role in organizing the death camp transports. Commencing in April 1961 and lasting through August, the trial featured testimony from a parade of Holocaust survivors living in Israel. The New Orleans’s media covered the proceedings extensively. The other jolt, of course, was Rockwell’s hate ride, which coincided with the Eichmann trial’s climactic moment, the riveting testimony by Joel Brand and others concerning the 1944 extermination of 500,000 Hungarian Jews.38Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust(New York, 1991), 323-66; New York Times, 25 May 1961, A12. By itself the Eichmann drama was enough to awaken long-dormant memories. All across America the publicity surrounding the trial bestirred Holocaust survivors into breaking their silence.39Segev, The Seventh Million, 327, 350-1, 361; Rabinowitz,New Lives, 193. But survivors in New Orleans confronted the added provocation of neo-Nazi exhibitionism on their hometown streets. The effect of Eichmann and Rockwell barging simultaneously into consciousness was cathartic, to say the least. A tidal wave of returning memory engulfed the city’s New Americans, bringing with it that debt of remembrance that, to many survivors, was the only reason they survived. Everything came rushing back now.
Thus, when 20 or so survivors gathered that Monday evening in Ralph’s Butcher Shop the air was charged with electricity. Anger filled the store. Solomon Radasky, a Warsaw furrier who had survived the ghetto uprising and subsequent imprisonment in Maidanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, said, “I come from a family of 78 people. Aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins. A large family and not one is alive now.” He was determined to stand tall. As he stated, “I survived to speak in the name of my family.” Everyone else present that evening spoke with equal vehemence and the same sense of loss. They were simply in no mood to listen patiently to reasoned appeals from American Jews about the political wisdom of keeping the peace and avoiding controversy.
Because it was a workday, only five participants from Monday night’s gathering at Ralph’s met with the full ADL board the following day. The delegation included Sam Radasky and Ralph Rosenblat, Max Fuksman, David Meisel, and Leo Scher--all were activists in the tiny survivor community. Some were known for quicksilver tempers. Given the conflicting agendas, the meeting would have been turbulent in the best of circumstances. But the fact that the ADL executive committee made the New Americans wait nearly two hours in the anteroom while sifting through unfinished business only heightened the survivors’ resentment. “The ADL didn’t take us seriously, like we didn’t know nothing,” says Solomon Radasky.40Solomon Radasky, interview with the author, 10 September 1995.
The meeting was tense throughout. For ADL Executive Director Irving Schulman, it was “one of the most difficult sessions I have sat through in my five years with the league,” as he wrote in his official report.41Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office. Leo Scher recited his travails in the Czestochowa ghetto and several labor camps. Another survivor gave testimony. Their English was broken, their words thick in sibilants. One American said he didn’t understand what they were trying to say. Solomon Radasky raised his hand. “Can I say something?” Sure, he was told. Radaksy’s speech often begins softly, with faint traces of Jewish singsong. He is rawboned, with a shock of wavy hair. “Look, I am from Poland. I am from Warsaw.” Radasky proceeded to tell his history. “Where I was, about the ghetto uprising, which concentration camp I was in, everything. And I showed him the number on my arm.” The man said he now understood but quickly added that the ADL was powerless to keep Rockwell from picketing. The survivors lived in a democracy now. They had the police on their side. Things were done differently in America. Here there was a constitution. It was important to avoid violence and confrontation. They should deny Rockwell publicity. This was the way to handle the situation. This was sound politics. Everybody needed to follow the plan that community leaders had already painstakingly devised.
The lecture didn’t go over well with the New Americans. “I started talking rough,” Radasky says, who flushes when he becomes angry. “‘Well, if you and the ADL cannot do nothing, we gonna do it, because it’s not 1939 or ‘40 or ‘44. We gonna do it.” The room temperature shot up. “We batted heads on this at length,” Schulman’s report stated.42Ibid.; Solomon Radasky, interviews with the author, 10September 1995, 3 February 1996.
Several ADL leaders in the room that day were World War II veterans who wore their self-possession easily. But the New Americans, seething with frustration over their status as poor relatives, spoke from experiences possessed by few others. “You gentlemen,” they said, “you gentlemen, what do you know about this stuff? You don’t know anything about how to survive. You don’t understand the Nazis. We know. Let us handle it.” The message could not have been clearer: you might be good Reform American Jews, but your knowledge of the world is not as deep as you think.
“It was like an epee, just slicing them to pieces, like Zorro with a Z,” Schulman remembers. “And they did it so finely, I’m not sure the guys knew exactly what was happening. They tried to respond with quiet, sophisticated frustration.”
Says ADL board member Barney Mintz, “There was no way of discussing anything with them. They were going to beat the hell out of Rockwell and his men with baseball bats. They didn’t care what the law said. In my opinion, they didn’t have the sophistication and the understanding of what our constitutional rights were.” Mintz, whose department store was firebombed in March 1965 during his stint as president of the local ADL, is an uncompromising defender of civil liberties.43Detonated in the vestibule by a hand grenade stuffed with blackpowder, the bomb shattered two large showroom windows. There was no noteor letter, nor was the culprit ever found. Bernard Mintz, interviewswith the author, 5 October 1996, 6 September 1997; New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 22 March 1965, 14. “We’ve got to be purer than Caesar’s wife on free speech because as a minority Jews are the first people to feel a backlash.” Still, even he admits that constitutional arguments seemed abstract at the time. “They were adamant. ‘Did you see it? Do you know what it’s like?’ It’s pretty damn hard to answer that.”44Bernard Mintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995.
It is unclear how the meeting ended. The record indicates that the ADL board persuaded the New Americans to go along with its strategy on a trial basis. But it must have lacked confidence in the agreement, because it called a larger meeting for 5:00 pm the same day in the International House downtown. All day Monday and Tuesday the phones in the ADL office had been ringing off the hook. Rumors were flying right and left. One had it that survivors intended to bring bags of unopened razor blades to the theatre to avoid charges of carrying concealed weapons. “If these people [the storm troopers] gave them any trouble they were going to slice them up with single-edge razor blades,” says Moise Steeg, the ADL board president at the time.45Moise Steeg, interview with the author, 2 February 1995. It is one of those details that several ADL leaders recall vividly but local survivors cannot remember at all. “They got a little bit scared,” says Shep Zitler of the city’s Jewish leadership. “Maybe they were thinking, ‘These Goddamn refugees, maybe they’re going to start killing. That’s all we need in the city of New Orleans. These crazy people just might do it. What can we do?’”46Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996.
The late afternoon meeting was heavily attended. All of the city’s rabbis were present, as were the heads of the Jewish Federation, the Jewish Welfare Fund, the National Council of Jewish Women, and Hadassah. Since it was at the end of the workday many survivors showed up as well. Everyone jammed into the chandeliered, flag-draped assembly room on the third floor. For good measure Moise Steeg invited police superintendent Joe Giarrusso to address the crowd. Steeg calmly set forth the steps taken so far to deal with the crisis and “implored the dissidents to refrain from using violence.”47Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office. Then Superintendent Giarrusso, his barrel chest bulging in his customary dark blue suit, reassured the audience that the police department had matters well in hand. “I just told them we would be right on top of the situation,” he says.48Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
The New Americans were still steaming from the ADL meeting earlier in the day. Radasky raised his hand again. He gave a minilecture about Hitler’s rise to power and his double game of professing respect for the rights of Jews and gypsies while actually hating both groups--”like people here are hating the blacks.” Then he issued the same ultimatum he had put to the ADL board. “You’re the chief of police. If you want to help us, you can help us. If not, we gonna take Rockwell off the street.”49Ibid.; Solomon Radasky, interview with the author, 10September 1995.
Giarrusso vowed to arrest anyone who broke the law. But now other survivors were piping up. “I recall a guy sitting in the front row,” Giarrusso says. “He got up and got beside himself with what he might do.”50Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995. It was probably Ralph Rosenblat. “Chief, I don’t care what you gonna do or how you gonna do it. I cannot be responsible for my blood. I cannot say at that moment how I am going to react if I’m walking on the sidewalk and see Rockwell with his people wearing SS uniforms with the Hakenkreuz.” Giarrusso reiterated his threat to arrest law-breakers. “Chief, you will have to do your duty, but I cannot endure. You do your part; I will do my part,” Rosenblat replied.51Ralph Rosenblat, interviews with the author, 1 February 1995, 14February 1996; Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September1995.
The meeting broke up with another vague pledge by the survivor group to abide by the communal consensus to let the ADL and the police handle the situation. But the ADL still lacked confidence that the agreement would stick. So Schulman and one of his board members showed up at Ralph’s Butcher Shop later that night to implore the New Americans to stay calm. They clustered around the deli case near the walk-in cooler where Rosenblat stored kosher meat, close to the chopping block and grinding machine. “People were talking. We were shouting,” says Shep Zitler. “I will kill him! I will shoot him!” screamed one survivor, referring to Rockwell.52Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 14 February 1996; ShepZitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996 “Trust us,” Schulman pleaded. “I pledged my reputation, which is pretty good,” he says. “They trusted me 70 or 80 percent, maybe. But they trusted only themselves, and probably not each other.” The meeting concluded with further promises to abide by agreements reached earlier in the day. But the situation remained tense.
“It was a bitch,” Schulman admits.53Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995.
Superintendent Joe Giarrusso was not the sort of man who worried easily. A World War II Navy veteran, he had a well-deserved reputation for crisis management. Upon taking office he had wasted little time cleaning up a police corruption scandal. He dealt peremptorily with lunch-counter sit-ins at downtown department stores, arresting civil rights activists for “criminal mischief.” With fine impartiality he moved vigorously against the thousands of prosegregation rowdies who had stormed the school board offices in November 1960 following Judge Perez’s inflammatory speech in Municipal Auditorium. Giarrusso ordered the fire department to spray blue dye at the rioters’ feet and arc it high above their heads, to make it easier to identify participants. Sympathetic toward the crowd, the firemen instead turned on a garden hose at low pressure. Giarrusso was known for plain speaking. “I can piss a harder stream than you’re putting out there,” he barked.54Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995; EdwardF. Haas, DeLesseps S. Morrison and the Image of Reform (BatonRouge, 1974), 217, 261, 269-71.
But the superintendent knew a dangerous situation when he saw one, and he had seen enough of the local survivors’ volcanic emotions to sense that the situation contained, as a subsequent police report put it, all the ingredients for “a full-scale riot.”55Rockwell Police Report. Something of the kind had taken place inside the New York County Courthouse at Foley Square during a hearing on the American Nazi Party’s legal battle with Gotham authorities to obtain a speaking permit. Rockwell had stepped up to the television microphones planted in the Rotunda and shouted, “Eighty percent of the American Jews are traitors and should be exterminated.”56Ulasewicz, The President‘s Private Eye, 135. The crowd exploded in a flurry of punches as umbrellas sliced the air. Giarrusso was worried enough to employ personal diplomacy. He telephoned contractor Bernard Bennett with a plea to avoid violence,57Bernard Bennett, interview with the author, 19 December 1995. and he had his oldest brother, Rudy, intercede with Solomon Radasky, who lived a block away. Rudy, like the rest of the Giarrusso boys, also served on the police force, and his son was good friends with Radasky’s son David. Rudy came over one night to talk Radasky out of confronting Rockwell. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked.
Toby Radasky Kornreich was listening in the next room: “I remember my father saying, ‘Yeah, we want to do this. It’s really important. You have to understand it.’ And then there was this discussion about World War II and Hitler.” Rudy Giarrusso left shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I’ll talk to my brother. We’ll take care of it. You don’t have to come with your bats and whatever.”58Toby Radasky Kornreich, interview with the author, 2 September 1995.
The superintendent went all out to prevent trouble. “We watched them the whole time they were here,” he says of Rockwell and his men. According to the police report, as soon as Rockwell and his traveling companion, Roy James, landed at Moisant Airport--”at 1:46 pm on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 23, 1961”--the two men came under continuous surveillance. When the Volkswagen hate bus crossed the hourglass straits separating the lakes from the Gulf and reached the city limits, NOPD squad cars picked up the tail from state police units. It was 10 in the evening. Fifty minutes later the graffiti-covered vehicle turned into a restaurant and trailer court on Chef Menteur Highway, and several police cruisers pulled up alongside. The head of police intelligence approached John Patler, the driver, and told him to remove the lettering from his bus, quoting Revised Statutes of 1950, Title 14, Paragraph 7. “We cautioned them in strong words. We told them to take that Swastika off that Volkswagen,” says Giarrusso, who was also at the scene. Patler and his companions did as they were told.59Rockwell Police Report; Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author,12 September 1995.
Thereafter police surveillance shifted into even higher gear. The picketing at the Civic Theater and the NAACP meeting was not scheduled to take place until the next evening, Wednesday, 24 May. So, as a run-up to the evening’s events, the Rockwell group drove across Lake Pontchartrain that morning to stage a rally at the Fountainebleu State Park in Mandeville. The police were practically on their bumper all the way across the 26-mile-long Causeway. The commander and his men were forced to turn around as soon as they reached the park because state authorities had padlocked the entrance. The police attention was beginning to make the storm troopers jumpy. On the drive back the driver of the hate bus tried to elude the police tail by speeding down one of the Causeway’s turn-around ramps. But the vehicle caromed off the concrete railing while trying to avoid hitting a state police car, and the driver was taken into custody for “reckless driving.” The police released the bus.60New Orleans States-Item, 24 May 1961, p. 1; New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 25 May 1961, p. 1.
Even Rockwell was becoming unnerved by the suffocating scrutiny, for later that morning he called police headquarters from his Canal Street hotel room, where he was huddling with his remaining nine followers. He wanted to know how many pickets he would be allowed to put on the streets that night and if there were any restrictions as to lettering. He asked if he would be permitted to make a speech in a public park. The police told him that no more than two pickets would be allowed at both the Civic Theater and the NAACP meeting at the Corpus Christi Church and that he should use his own discretion as to what to write on his signs. But under no circumstances would he be “permitted to make a speech here in New Orleans due to the present situation.” Meanwhile, a police detective was listening in on the Rockwell group from an adjoining hotel room. The superintendent was leaving nothing to chance.61Rockwell Police Report. According to the police report, the detectiveoverheard snippets of conversation about the use of a shotgun or “abouta BB gun in place of a shotgun.”
Yet one factor in the equation seemed beyond Giarrusso’s control. What were local survivors planning to do? The fury Giarrusso had witnessed at the International House meeting the previous day had him worried. Late in the afternoon, a few hours before the movie was due to start, he sent a patrol car to Ralph’s Butcher Shop to remind the New Americans that he was serious about arresting anyone caught disturbing the peace.62Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
Despite the threats, the gentle admonitions, the pleas and moral arm-twisting, the “New Americans” were determined to do what their gut feelings had been telling them they should do when the news broke that neo-Nazis were coming to town. As the 8:00 pm screening time for Exodus approached, 20 survivors piled into five cars and drove to the Civic Theater on Baronne Street, in the heart of the central business district. They were armed, but not with razor blades. “Just baseball bats and pieces of iron pipe, half inch, three-quarters of an inch pipe,” says Solomon Radasky. “We was ready to fight.”63
Giarrusso was prepared for trouble. He had detailed 35 to 40 patrolmen to the vicinity of the theater alone. “We had them all over the place,” he admits.64Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
Moise Steeg, interview with the author, 2 February 1995, BarneyMintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995. The ADL also appeared in force--”eight or 10 of our friends who were fairly physically inclined,” as Moise Steeg describes them. Even the local FBI office had set up a surveillance post on the second floor of Barney Mintz’s furniture store right across the street from the theater.65Moise Steeg, interview with the author, 2 February 1995, BarneyMintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995.
Because New Orleans sits on the hinge of two weather systems that are often in collision, downpours can be biblical. At around 7:00 pm a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf, dumping several inches of rain on the downtown area. In a matter of minutes two feet of water was streaming down Baronne Street in front of the Civic Theater. Groups of moviegoers took shelter inside covered doorways up and down the street. A sodden crowd stood shivering in the theater arcade. Having trouble parking, the New Americans waded to the phone company’s arched entranceway down the block from the theater. “It was a pouring day,” remembers Ralph Rosenblat. “We was swimming.”66Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995; RalphRosenblatt, interview with the author, 1 February 1995; Bernard Bennett,interview with the author, 19 December 1995. The rain pelted the downtown area for 45 minutes. Then, almost as suddenly as it started, the storm slackened into a drizzle and the waters parted, as the city’s elaborate hydraulic system pumped the runoff into Lake Pontchartrain. A few minutes later a 1961 green Chevrolet carrying six storm troopers pulled up in front of the theater. Rockwell and Roy James climbed out. They were wearing khaki uniforms and red armbands emblazoned with swastikas. The square-jawed commander, his trademark dark cowlick drooping over his forehead, was carrying a sign that read: “EXODUS … Written by a Communistic Jew.” On the obverse side were the words, “AMERICAN [sic] FOR WHITES--AFRICA FOR BLACKS--GAS CHAMBERS FOR TRAITORS.”67Rockwell Police Report.
Everything happened fast after that. Rockwell and James made a few passes in front of the theater, 40 feet in each direction. Then the New Americans emerged from the phone company entranceway and started walking in formation toward the two picketers. The crowd packed under the theater marquee pressed forward. The atmosphere was electric, as if the fast-moving weather front had deposited a charge outside the theater. Bernard Bennett, who had been waiting in the arcade with his cousin Sam Katz, had to restrain a male survivor standing near him, because, as Bennett later testified, “the sight of the Swastika armbands caused an emotional reaction almost uncontrollable.” As soon as the New Americans got within 20 feet of the sign-carrying picketers, Giarrusso ordered Rockwell and James arrested. They were charged with violating the same criminal mischief statute under which civil rights lunch counter demonstrators had been arrested the year before.68Rockwell Police Report; New Orleans States-Item, 25 May 1961,p. 1; Ralph Rosenblatt, interview with the author, 1 February 1995.
The police then moved quickly against the four storm troopers parked near the theater in the green Chevrolet, taking them into custody and confiscating a toy gun and a “stiletto-type knife” found under the front seat of the car. Just then the blue and white hate bus drove up in front of the theater. Police had chased it from the NAACP meeting at Corpus Christi Church for “obstructing traffic.” Now Giarrusso had its four passengers placed under arrest as well. The entire operation was over by half past eight.69Rockwell Police Report. ADL Director Irving Schulman, in his official postmortem, characterized Giarrusso’s crisis management as “one of the swiftest and most effectively carried out bits of police action I have ever seen.” But the arrests also happened to be unconstitutional.70Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
As for the New Americans, they bought tickets for that evening’s performance and went inside and watched the movie. Their role in the controversy was a deeply satisfying experience, one they still talk about with great animation. They had confronted a specter that had destroyed their families in the Old World. And, perhaps just as important, they had forced the local community, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, to take them and their experiences seriously. It was the first time since their reception as refugees that they had been regarded with anything except benign indifference.
Like most real-life crises, Commander Rockwell’s 1961 hate ride to New Orleans lacked neat resolution. Because the freedom riders never made it to New Orleans, the ANP was deprived of the publicity bonanza that Rockwell had been counting on from the beginning. Refusing bail, Rockwell demanded that the FBI investigate the NOPD’s violation of his civil rights. Then, mimicking freedom riders who were then fasting to protest their own incarceration in Mississippi, the commander and his men staged a hunger strike in the Orleans Parish Jail. Rockwell stayed in jail only until June 1, when he posted a bond and, according to some reports, made a beeline for a local steak restaurant, wiring storm troopers still behind bars that they should end their fast. “Your will and dedication is inspiring white men everywhere to stand up and fight,” it read. “Start eating and God Bless you. Sieg Heil.”71American Jewish Committe (AJC), "Neo-Nazi Hate Bus Tours South," inFor Your Information, AJC Bulletin, VI, 6 (June 1961), 2 (for thequotations), in GLR, JFGNO, TU; New Orleans States-Item, 27 and29 May 1961; New Orleans Times-Picayune, 31 May; 1, 2, 7 June 1961.
Beginning on 13 June, the trial lasted two days. The local chapter of the ACLU assumed the defense of everyone except Rockwell, who acted as his own attorney. All 10 Nazi defendants were convicted, fined, and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 30 to 60 days. A three-judge panel overturned the verdict in 1962, however. A year later the US Supreme Court struck down the criminal mischief statute used by New Orleans authorities to stifle civil rights activists and neo-Nazis alike. Rockwell was in his glory. “The hate bus tour of the South has ended, at last, with total victory for the White Man and the American Nazi Party!” he crowed in the pages of The Stormtrooper.72The Stormtrooper, 2 (August, 1962), 14; State of Louisianavs. Seth David Ryan et als, (June 12-14, 1961), 170-951, SectionC, Clerk of Court Records, Orleans Parish Criminal Courthouse. See alsoNew Orleans Times-Picayune, 13 and 14 June 1961; 29 May 1962;Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 US.
After his jailing in New Orleans, Rockwell remained in the national limelight off and on for the next several years. In 1962 he attended a Nation of Islam convention in Chicago, heaping praise on black separatist Elijah Muhammed as “the Adolph Hitler of the Black Man.” He toured the college and university lecture circuit, producing tumult and news coverage wherever he went. When street protests against the Vietnam war erupted, Rockwell and his storm troopers pelted “peace creeps” with eggs, paint, and fists.
His face scarred from numerous street battles, his finances shakier than ever (most of his income derived from a mail order business in “hatenany” records and “White Power” T-shirts), Rockwell grew morose toward the end of his life. He was depressed at losing control of youthful storm troopers who had been drawn to the ANP by the romance of streetfighting action. They soon grew frustrated with the commander’s legalistic strategy of notifying the police of his next move so as to maximize publicity. One of the malcontents was swarthy John Patler, the hate bus driver. Rockwell expelled him from the ANP in April 1967 for fomenting discord between dark-skinned and fair-skinned party members, the latter of whom Patler habitually referred to as “blue eyed devils.” Four months later, as the commander was backing his blue and white Chevrolet out of a parking space at an Arlington, Virginia, shopping center, Patler fired several shots from a Mauser semi-automatic pistol through Rockwell’s windshield while crouched atop a coin-operated laundromat. The commander stumbled out of the passenger side door and collapsed in a flurry of soap flakes. He died almost immediately of massive damage to major blood vessels leading to the heart. Patler was convicted in December 1967 of first degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.73“Rockwell, U.S. Nazi, Slain; Ex-Aide Is Held as Sniper,” New YorkTimes, 26 August 1967, A1; “Rockwell Burial Causes a Dispute,” NewYork Times, 27 August 1967, A28: 1; “Ex-Nazi Aide Guilty in RockwellDeath; Gets 20-Year Term,” New York Times, 16 December 1967, A33:5. See also Bell, In Hitler’s Shadow, 115-23; Ulasewicz,The President’s Private Eye, 141, 144. After Rockwell’s murder theNazi and Klan movements achieved a fusion during the 1970s and 80s. SeeEvelyn Rich, “Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988” (Ph.D. diss., BostonUniversity, 1988); and Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 79-91.
Rockwell’s assassination was about the only aspect of the 1961 hate ride possessing resolution. The tensions aroused by the commander’s visit between local survivors and American Jews certainly did not disappear. Surface relations returned quickly enough to customary civility, but the paths of the two communities seldom crossed, and the underlying difference over the meaning of Jewish identity remained as wide as ever. Coming off the self-confidence gained from the Rockwell affair, the New Americans sought to solidify that identity in Holocaust memory. Less than a month after their confrontation at the Civic Theater they filed incorporation papers with the Secretary of State in Baton Rouge under the official name New American Social Club, giving official existence to what had heretofore been merely an informal group of friends. One purpose for seeking a charter was to institutionalize the new survivor tradition of collective action. “When we went through the Rockwell experience,” Shep Zitler says, “we figured out that one individual cannot do anything, but as a group we can do something.”74Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996; New OrleansJewish Ledger, 21 July 1961, p. 2. But the main motive was to assert a communal Jewish identity based on the collective memory of World War II, for the first order of business was to plan an annual Holocaust Remembrance ceremony that would take place on or near the April 19 anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Continuing up to the present, it is one of the oldest such ceremonies in the country.
The city’s survivors paid a high price for this new foray into public life. Almost immediately the “New Americans” were torn asunder by schisms and secessions. The small contingent of German survivors, always standoffish toward their Polish counterparts, were the first to leave. Then several Polish survivors dropped out. Club meetings became stormy, at times nearly pugilistic. Language difficulties lay at the root of some of the fights. “There was always misunderstanding because we were having the meeting in English and our people are thinking in Yiddish and to translate from Yiddish to English isn’t easy,” says Shep Zitler. Thus, as a member of the second generation explains, someone might blurt out, “Your daughter is a dog, when they really meant to say she was in puppy love.”75Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 14 August 1995; Martin Sher,interview with the author, 26 August 1995. Electioneering added new friction. Strong-willed individualists clashed over who was going to be in charge, who was going to be the macher, to use the Yiddish term for big shot. “You have a room full of bosses,” explains Solomon Radasky’s son David, now a lawyer in Kansas City. “When it comes to New American Club politics, there are a lot of people who say it’s not worth it, and I’m one of them.”76 David Radasky, interview with the author, 26 August 1995.
But most of all there were shouting matches over the primacy of suffering and the ownership of memory. “We were competitive people with strong ideas,” says Shep Zitler with considerable understatement. Quarrels broke out over what should be included in the ceremony, who should read the kaddish, who should sing the song of remembrance. Increasingly the issue of leadership got mixed up in the contentious issue of memory. Should the president be the most acculturated member of the group, so as to let American Jews know that they, the survivors, had long ago sloughed off their greenhorn roughness? Or should the club’s leader be the individual possessing the most authentic Holocaust experience? Solomon Radasky, the Maidanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, says, “A person that was not in a concentration camp cannot assume the feeling of speaking about the Holocaust.”77Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 14 August 1995; SolomonRadasky, interview with the author, 3 February 1996. He eventually withdrew from the club.
For that first ceremony, in April 1962, the fledgling club pulled out all the stops. They raised $5,000 for a wood-carved sculpture to be placed in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center, where the annual event continues to be held. And they invited every Jewish organization in the city to send representatives. This was the New Americans’ chance to become a social force within the larger Jewish community, to come out of the shadows and into the center of things for a change. But that first audience, like many subsequent ones, was comprised mainly of New American family members. As for the city’s Reform community, only the National Council of Jewish Women bothered to send a representative, and she brought her knitting. “We were disappointed,” complains Shep Zitler of that first service. “We were treated like poor cousins.”78Shep Zitler, interviews with the author, 10 January, 27 March 1996. The disappointment lasted until the mid-1980s, when the Holocaust started to become a new civil religion and substantial numbers of American Jews began attending the annual Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony. By that time a heavy influx of transplants from the North had helped reinvigorate Jewish traditionalism, creating more emotional space for assertions of Jewish identity. By that time, too, most of the differences that once separated old and new Jews in the Crescent City were beginning to mist over with time, which is how many deep-seated disagreements seem to resolve themselves anyway.
Lawrence N. Powell teaches courses on southern history, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Holocaust at Tulane University. He is finishing a biography of a woman Holocaust survivor who came forward to challenge David Duke during his recent ascendancy in Louisiana politics. Notes
For an overview of Southern Jews see Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York, 1973). There is much insight in Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, Mass., 1996); Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Braided Identity of Southern Jewry,” American Jewish History, 77 (March 1988): 363-87; and Carolyn Lipson-Walker, “‘Shalom Y’All: The Folklore and Culture of Southern Jews” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986). The author wishes thank the following individuals for their suggestions and helpful criticisms: Mark Bauman, Steve Goodell, Lance Hill, Richard Latner, Joseph Logsdon, Bobbie Malone, Patrick Maney, Henry Mason, Naomi Paiss, Joseph Roach, Plater Robinson, and Rebecca Scott.
1. On New Orleans Jews see Julian B. Feibelman, A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1941), 133and passim; Bobbie Malone, Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist,Southerner, 1860-1929 (University, Ala., 1997); Evans, TheProvincials, 227-46; Leonard Reissman, “The New Orleans JewishCommunity,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jewsin the South (Baton Rouge, 1973), 288-304; Calvin Trillin,“U.S. Journal: New Orleans Mardi Gras,” The New Yorker (March 9,1968), 138-44.
2. Theodore Lowi, “Southern Jews: The Two Communities,” in Dinnersteinand Palsson, eds., Jews in the South, 265-82 (the quotationis on 281).
3. Malone, Rabbi Max Heller, 84-94.
4. Bernard Mintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995.
5. The Skokie controversy has mainly been treated as a free speechconflict between strong-willed survivors and the ADL, but there isevidence that the crisis also precipitated latent divisions between newand old Jews over Jewish identity. See Donald Alexander Downs, Nazisin Skokie: Freedom, Community, and the First Amendment (Notre Dame,Indiana, 1985), and David Hamlin, The Nazi/Skokie Conflict: ACivil Liberties Battle (Boston, 1980).
6. Right: A Handbook, new revised edition(New York, 1988); James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan,Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture(New York, 1990), 66.
7. Tyler Bridges, The Rise of David Duke (University, Miss.,1994), 13 (for the quotation) and 40; Michael Zatarain, David Duke:Evolution of a Klansman (Gretna, La., 1990), 116-7.
8. Leland V. Bell, In Hitler‘s Shadow: The Anatomy of AmericanNazism (Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1973), 112-3;Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 66; Frederick J. Simonelli, “TheAmerican Nazi Party: 1958-1967,” The Historian, 57 (Spring1995): 559-61; Tony Ulasewicz with Stuart A. McKeever, ThePresident’s Private Eye: The Journey of Detective Tony U. from N.Y.P.D tothe Nixon White House (Westport, Conn., 1990), 134-9; “Death ofa Storm Trooper,” New York Times, 27 August 1967, section IV, 4:1.
9. George Lincoln Rockwell, This Time the World (n.p., 1963;second edition), 95, 98, 128, 173, 45. At Brown University, where hecontributed cartoons to the school magazine before dropping out to becomea naval pilot during World War II, his artwork betrayed a “consistentpreoccupation with violence” and “themes of death, cannibalism.” ADL,“Facts: Rockwell,” vol. 13, no. 10 (September 1960), 161-2, in GeorgeLincoln Rockwell File, General Files II, IV, B45, Jewish Federationof Greater New Orleans Records, Tulane University, 4 (hereinafter GLR,JFGNO, TU).
10. Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York andOxford, 1994), 151-2; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: TheAmerican Jewish Committe, 1906-1966, with an introduction bySalo W. Baron (Philadelphia, 1972), 375-6.
11. Rockwell, This Time the World, 245-6, 253-4;American Jewish Committe (AJC), “Rockwell Scores in his Campaign toStir Up Trouble,” in For Your Information, AJC Bulletin, VI, 2(February 1961), 4, in GLR, JFGNO, TU.
12. “Rockwell Scores,” 1-4; “Bigot Seeking Buildup: The ‘News’Techniques of George Lincoln Rockwell,” a fact sheet from the AJC (March1962); “Rockwell and ‘Exodus,’” confidential AJC memo, March 6,1961; the quotation appears in ADL, “Facts: Rockwell,” 163. See alsoBell, In Hitler’s Shadow, 112; Ulasewicz, The President’sPrivate Eye, 139-42.
13. “Supplemental Report relative to the arrest of George LincolnRockwell, et als,” from Presly J. Trosclair to Joseph A. Guillot, May 30,1961, Offense Reports, Item E-11897-61, New Orleans Police DepartmentRecords, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library (NOPL), hereinafterRockwell Police Report. A copy of one of the flyers can be found in“American Nazi Party, 1961,” the Delesseps S. Morrison Papers, in NOPL.
14. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,1954-63 (New York, 1988), 412-70.
15. Rockwell Police Report. See also ADL, “Facts: Rockwell,” 164.
16. Rockwell Police Report.
17. Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle inLouisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga. and London, 1995), 234-64.
18. “The Time to Educate About Quarantine is Now,” memo from Dr. S. AndhilFineberg, AJC Institute of Human Relations, New York, Feb. 6, 1961, inGLR, JFGNO, TU.
19. Ulasewicz, The President’s Private Eye, 131, 136; Green,The Temple Bombing, 6.
20. Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995; Schulman toMoise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file at the New OrleansADL office. Thanks to Jerry Himmelstein, current ADL director, forsending me a copy of this detailed report on the Rockwell incident. Seealso the memo of Isaiah Terman to Harry Baron, “Picketing of ‘Exodus,’”6 February 1961, AJC, in GLR, JFGNO, TU.
21. Anne Levy, interview with the author, 12 October 1995.
22. Reissman, “The New Orleans Jewish Community,” 303-4; Evans,The Provincials, 310-5; Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism inAmerica, 188-91.
23. Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995.
24. Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 244; Glen Jeansonne,Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta (Baton Rouge and London, 1977),225-6.
25. See Eli Evans's sensitive and insightful observations aboutsouthern Jewish dilemmas during the civil rights movement in TheProvincials, 311-2, a theme that Melissa Fay Greene likewise develops brilliantly in Temple Bombing.
26. “Statement by Mayor Chep Morrison,” 24 May 1961, DelessepsS. Morrison Papers, NOPL. See the editorial “Same Purpose,” New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 25 May 1961, p. 19; also “Club Condemns ‘Riders,’‘Nazis,’” ibid., p. 10; and “Agitators Face Non-Stop Order,”ibid., 26 May 1961, p. 22.
27. Bernard Bennett, interview with the author, 19 December 1995.
28. Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
29. Felicia Fuksman, interview with the author, 3 February 1996.
30. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 199.
31. Of all the voluminous writing about survivor guilt and testifying,Primo Levi’s insights remain the most penetrating. See his Survival inAuschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York, 1961), 5-6,36; The Reawakening (New York, 1965), 207; and especially TheDrowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 12, 76-84, 149-51(the quotation is on p. 82). There is also deep insight in Robert JayLifton’s essay “On Survivors” in his History and Human Survival(New York, 1971), especially 169-70. Lawrence Langer, HolocaustTestimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven and London, 1991),especially, 39-76, is indispensable.
32. Gita Rosenblat, interview with the author, 17 February 1996.
33. Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 14 February 1996.
34. It is worth noting that the term holocaust did not come intogeneral circulation until the 1960s. On the conspiracy of silence inthe 1950s and 60s, see Dorothy Rabinowitz, New Lives: Survivorsof the Holocaust Living in America (New York, 1976), 93, 120,193-4; Deborah Lipstadt, “The Holocaust: Symbol and Myth inAmerican Life,” Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel,40 (1980-81), 73-88; William Helmreich, Against All Odds:Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America(New York, 1992), 39-42, 69-70; Helen Epstein, Children ofthe Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters (New York, 1979),26, 97-8; Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle toCreate America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995), 1-15; andMichael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York, 1987),3-5, 108-12. Lawrence Graver’s recently published AnObsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the “Diary” (Berkeley,1995), is a moving study of the struggle between assimilationist Jewsand Jewish novelist Meyer Levin for ownership of Anne Frank’s memory.
35. Anne Levy, interview with the author, 18 August 1995; Shep Zitler,interview with the author, 10 January 1996. See also, Langer, HolocaustTestimonies, iv-xv.
36. Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 17 February 1996.
37. Felicia Fuksman, interview with the author, 2 February 1996.
38. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust(New York, 1991), 323-66; New York Times, 25 May 1961, A12.
39. Segev, The Seventh Million, 327, 350-1, 361; Rabinowitz,New Lives, 193.
40. Solomon Radasky, interview with the author, 10 September 1995.
41. Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
42. Ibid.; Solomon Radasky, interviews with the author, 10September 1995, 3 February 1996.
43. Detonated in the vestibule by a hand grenade stuffed with blackpowder, the bomb shattered two large showroom windows. There was no noteor letter, nor was the culprit ever found. Bernard Mintz, interviewswith the author, 5 October 1996, 6 September 1997; New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 22 March 1965, 14.
44. Bernard Mintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995.
45. Moise Steeg, interview with the author, 2 February 1995.
46. Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996.
47. Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
48. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
49. Ibid.; Solomon Radasky, interview with the author, 10September 1995.
50. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
51. Ralph Rosenblat, interviews with the author, 1 February 1995, 14February 1996; Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September1995.
52. Ralph Rosenblat, interview with the author, 14 February 1996; ShepZitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996
53. Irwin Schulman, interview with the author, 2 October 1995.
54. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995; EdwardF. Haas, DeLesseps S. Morrison and the Image of Reform (BatonRouge, 1974), 217, 261, 269-71.
55. Rockwell Police Report.
56. Ulasewicz, The President‘s Private Eye, 135.
57. Bernard Bennett, interview with the author, 19 December 1995.
58. Toby Radasky Kornreich, interview with the author, 2 September 1995.
59. Rockwell Police Report; Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author,12 September 1995.
60. New Orleans States-Item, 24 May 1961, p. 1; New OrleansTimes-Picayune, 25 May 1961, p. 1.
61. Rockwell Police Report. According to the police report, the detectiveoverheard snippets of conversation about the use of a shotgun or “abouta BB gun in place of a shotgun.”
62. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
63. Solomon Radasky, interview with the author, 10 September 1995.
64. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995.
65. Moise Steeg, interview with the author, 2 February 1995, BarneyMintz, interview with the author, 5 October 1995.
66. Joe Giarrusso, interview with the author, 12 September 1995; RalphRosenblatt, interview with the author, 1 February 1995; Bernard Bennett,interview with the author, 19 December 1995.
67. Rockwell Police Report.
68. Rockwell Police Report; New Orleans States-Item, 25 May 1961,p. 1; Ralph Rosenblatt, interview with the author, 1 February 1995.
69. Rockwell Police Report.
70. Schulman to Moise Steeg, 15 June 1961, ADL records, on file atthe New Orleans ADL office.
71. American Jewish Committe (AJC), "Neo-Nazi Hate Bus Tours South," inFor Your Information, AJC Bulletin, VI, 6 (June 1961), 2 (for thequotations), in GLR, JFGNO, TU; New Orleans States-Item, 27 and29 May 1961; New Orleans Times-Picayune, 31 May; 1, 2, 7 June 1961.
72. The Stormtrooper, 2 (August, 1962), 14; State of Louisianavs. Seth David Ryan et als, (June 12-14, 1961), 170-951, SectionC, Clerk of Court Records, Orleans Parish Criminal Courthouse. See alsoNew Orleans Times-Picayune, 13 and 14 June 1961; 29 May 1962;Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 US.
73. “Rockwell, U.S. Nazi, Slain; Ex-Aide Is Held as Sniper,” New YorkTimes, 26 August 1967, A1; “Rockwell Burial Causes a Dispute,” NewYork Times, 27 August 1967, A28: 1; “Ex-Nazi Aide Guilty in RockwellDeath; Gets 20-Year Term,” New York Times, 16 December 1967, A33:5. See also Bell, In Hitler’s Shadow, 115-23; Ulasewicz,The President’s Private Eye, 141, 144. After Rockwell’s murder theNazi and Klan movements achieved a fusion during the 1970s and 80s. SeeEvelyn Rich, “Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988” (Ph.D. diss., BostonUniversity, 1988); and Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 79-91.
74. Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 10 January 1996; New OrleansJewish Ledger, 21 July 1961, p. 2.
75. Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 14 August 1995; Martin Sher,interview with the author, 26 August 1995.
76. David Radasky, interview with the author, 26 August 1995.
77. Shep Zitler, interview with the author, 14 August 1995; SolomonRadasky, interview with the author, 3 February 1996.
78. Shep Zitler, interviews with the author, 10 January, 27 March 1996.
About this Text: Lawrence J. Powell. When Hate Came to Town: New Orleans’ Jews and George Lincoln Rockwell, American Jewish History. Volume 85, Issue 4 (1997): pp. 393-419. ©1997. American Jewish Historical Society.
Copyright: American Jewish Historical Society, 1997
The Times-Picayune, Tuesday, March 15, 1949, page 10.
PHOTO CAPTIONS (left to right):
GAZING THROUGH PORTHOLE of the transport General Sturgis as it pulls up to the wharf, Mr. And Mrs. Josef Sher and their 10 month old son, Mordecai, see a new left ahead of them.
TORTURES, SEPARATIONS, heartbreaks are behind them as the young Polish couple walk down the gangplank onto American soil for the first time.
WELCOME- Leopold Stahl, New Orleans, kisses his cousin, Mrs. Sher. Behind them are Mrs. Stahl and Sher. Son munches on a cookie.
A HOME AT LAST awaits them at 2417 1/2 Milan after years of living in concentration and displaced persons’ camps. Mrs. Freda Stahl, Mrs. Sher’s aunt, holds door open.
THEY HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN what real comfort was like. Here, Sher feeds Mordecai while Mrs. Freda Stahl offers Mrs. Sher some food. Mrs. Stahl had cooked a special dinner for them and they loved it.
A Displaced Persons couple from Poland stood in the center of a New Orleans apartment here Monday and stared around them, unbelieving.
At last they had a home of their own-a place where they could live like human beings, unhounded and with a sense of human dignity.
It was what they had dreamed of through long years in a Nazi concentration camp; through later years in a DP camp. It was a dream they had taken out in the middle of the night and dusted off, hoping that somehow it would make them forget the horror of seeing parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers herded off to be burned alive.
And tears crept into the eyes of Mr. And Mrs. Josef Sher as they stood in the small apartment at 2417 1/2 Milan and tried to thank their cousin Leopold Stahl, for making all of this possible. In her arms Mrs. Sher held her 1 month old son Mordecai, who was born in a DP camp and who still clutched an American flag in his hands.
“It is for him particularly that I am happy,” said the sweet faced young mother. “That he should grow up in this great land which is America, grow up to be free that is what I thought of as our ship pulled in and I saw welcoming me from the shore your little Statue of Liberty.”
On the voyage over, the mother recalled, the baby contracted measles and she and her husband were seized with a new fear. Suppose something happened to him just as real happiness lay within their grasp?
Even when the ship’s doctor reassured them, the Polish couple fretted. Suppose they weren’t permitted to go ashore because of the measles? Suppose they baby was placed in quarantine?
They smiled at their worries as they walked around inspecting their apartment; feeling happily the softness of the mattress, sniffing hungrily at the odors of food being cooked the kitchen.
All morning, Mrs. Sher’s 72 year old aunt, Mrs. Freda Stahl, had been busy preparing dinner for them soup, chicken, a festive dish in Poland; fruit, vegetables and a holiday cake, called Hamantashan.
Sher, a tailor in Czestachowa, Poland, before Hitler and his troops arrived, said all he needs to make his happiness complete is a job. “I want to get a job, forget the past, support my wife and child,” he said simply. “To have privacy, not to be ordered about, not to have to stand in linethat is all I ask of life.”
Sher said when Hitler invaded Poland, he was only 20 years old. His wife is three years younger than he.
“It has been so long, so very long since I’ve known the meaning of a real home. First I was sent to the Ukraine to dig ditched, something I would like to forget. Then, after nine months, the money of a fried bought me my freedom and I returned quickly to my home town to marry the girl I loved. But happiness was not for me.
They had been married only a short while, he recalled, when all the Jews of the town were herded into the market place. The young were separated from the old, and the old were lead off to crematories.
His mother was one of these and when his young sisters refused to leave her side they suffered a similar face. Members of his wife’s family also were murdered.
“My grandmother,” said Sher, “ was 105 years old here let me show you her picture. As she was being led away, she turned to a Nazi officer and said to him “ I have lived so long, will you not permit me sir to finish my life in peace?”
“But the Nazi only laughed. He said to my grandmother, You old goat! So you want to live, he?’ And with that he tood out his gun and shot her.”
Sher said he was herded off to cone concentration camp, his young bride to another. That, to his, was the greatest suffering o all, he said, adding:
“Not to know if she was living or dead. Every time someone new arrived in my camp, I would say to him, Have you seen my wife perhaps?’ and in her camp, she was asking the same question. For a whole year this went on and a comparison, the beatings, the hunger, the constant fight to keep lice from my body were as noting.”
Then one day, Sher recalled a neighbor told him he had seen his wife. At first he couldn’t believe it. Then, like a miracle he discovered she had been sent to the same concentration camp.
“After that it was as nothing to receive 50 lashes from the whip for stealing a potato. That potato kept my wife Rachel alive. After that I did not mind so much clawing into the ground like an animal to dip up the scraps the Nazi soldiers had discarded. There was still hope left in the world.”
Sher said he and his wife remained in the concentration camp until the was ended. Then they were sent to a DP camp. And although he added, “it was like heaven by comparison it was still not home.”
“That is why I laughed when one of the agency representatives at the docks asked me if I was not weary. Oh I admit it was a bit tiresome, waiting in line to go ashore, answering your number when it was called, seeking out your baggage. But when it is answering numbers and waiting in line for the last time, one forgets to be weary.”
The little tailor smiled. Then he added, seriously: “I must also tell you this, lots of people were left behind a the DP camp in Germany. It was because they had no families over here, no one to vouch for them. They wept bitterly when we departed. Some of them even fell to their knees, kissed my hand, begged me to do all in my power to mike it possible for them to come to America. They are so alone, these poor people! Poland does not want them back. Germany has no place for them. They looked upon my wife and I as though we had inherited $1,000,000.
“Right now I feel better than a millionaire.”
Permission granted by The Times-Picayune Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
For Rose Kahn New Orleans States Tu. 2411, Ext. 52
New Orleans Section, National Council of Jewish Women
Service to Foreign Born Program
Volunteers met boats at New Orleans Port of Embarkation; acted as interpreters, helped travelers clear through customers; served lunches and dinners at the Jewish Community Center to those looking for a place to live, or those who were awaiting trains and planes to take them to other cities; helped write letters to families in the United States etc.
After homes were found, Council volunteers showed them how to shop at super markets; how to register their children at school; how to register adults at Rabouin School for classes; took their children to clinics at hospitals if necessary; helped these who were able, to find jobs, Some of the New Americans were able to do work at home, dressmaking, etc, and Council set customers to them. A furniture bank was set up at the Jewish Community Center with Council members sending all types of furniture, bed spreads, curtains, lamps, etc. and the New Americans were able to select furnishings to give them a start.
Council set up English classes that supplemented the courses given by the Public School system, and also started a lecture series at the request of these newcomers. The subjects that were requested were: City Charter; National Election; Louisiana History; B’nai Brith’s Anti Defamation League, and also a lecture on Judicial Gov’t.
Council members were asked to send their unused concert tickets so that the New Americans could use them.
The women who settled in New Orleans were given free membership to the Council of Jewish Women.
Council members are ever watchful of the immigration laws and protect the newcomers by keeping them advised of action they must take; such as registering change of address, naturalization processes etc.
Last year, in cooperation with the City of New Orleans, the newcomers were taken on a tour of the city (see picture)
The New Orleans Council of Jewish Women cooperates with the Jewish Federation in assisting the New Americans in every way possible to enable them to become valuable citizens of this country. Mrs. Dan Steuer is our chairman of the service to Foreign Born Program.
Mrs. Moise W. Dennery Un. 2542
By permission of the Special Collection of the Howard and Tilton Memorial Tulane University Library
