The executioner behind the violin
Richard Rokita was a prominent German officer at the Tarnopol camp and earlier at Janowska. He had two hobbies – one as a mass murderer, the other as a violinist and musician who organized an orchestra from Jewish prisoners. The orchestra accompanied many of Tarnopol's Jews to execution sites while playing the "Death Tango." Rokita insisted on this. Sometimes he would point his pistol at someone and kill them simply because he felt like it in that moment. But occasionally, one of Poland's greatest violinists, someone Rokita knew from pre-war days, would see the hand with the gun and rush over. He would break into virtuoso playing, enchanting Rokita, and the gun would return to its holster.
When Professor Ram Ben-Shalom was about three years old, around 1962, he disguised himself as a secret agent equipped with a Beretta pistol with the clear mission to hunt down Rokita. This story closes the narrative of one of the best books I've ever read about the Holocaust. That closing chapter brings into action figures like Ilya Ehrenburg, the Beatles, and Rokita himself. Rokita was then in his 60s. He had given up one hobby – the mass murder of Jews – and kept his second hobby, which became his profession – playing violin in jazz bands in Hamburg. Simon Wiesenthal managed to discover the murderer behind the violin. The man who played in one of the clubs near the basement where the Beatles sometimes sang and sometimes screamed their first hits before becoming famous in Liverpool.
When I met Professor Ben-Shalom this week, author of "Salomea's Letter" (Magnes Press), I asked if he could guess what my first question would be. He couldn't say. The question was why he included Chapter 86 in the book. For me, the story called "Report from 1962" confused and troubled me greatly. His character takes the stage and whispers in violinist Rokita's ear, "Rache." Revenge.
"In this book, I'm actually in two roles. I'm also the researching historian, looking at this detective story from the outside," he answers. "And as a historian, I operate according to all the known methodologies and possibilities of the profession. At the same time, I also serve in some way as a witness. It's hearsay, not eyewitness testimony, as a second-generation survivor. As such, I'm both one of the story's heroes and examining the plot from the outside with all the facts, documents, and archives. But I'm also reflecting my father's story (Shmuel Ben-Shalom) from fragments, from broken pieces that I heard in my childhood, and had to undertake a long journey into my memory to bring them back. This is how the last chapter was written, which was obviously written after the entire book was finished. I was left with some empty space that I needed to resolve."
About revenge
"You beautifully develop this revenge motif. I read what seems to me a masterpiece. I felt you were in the same territory as Timothy Snyder's 'Bloodlands' but penetrating much deeper, in a more detailed way. And then, with the story at the end, you make me doubt whether everything you wrote until the last chapter is even real."
"I know. I took into account that this could raise doubts. On the other hand, I'm so confident in my work as a historian and in the professionalism of the puzzle of facts, the realistic details. I'm so in command of the methodology and the material that after so many years in the profession, I allow myself to also go in the direction of the detective novel. With the understanding that the skilled reader can make the distinction themselves."
After reading "Salomea's Letter," it seems that the letter event, which is almost unknown in Israel, soars to heights parallel to the "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising," which has lost altitude over time. Salomea Ochs Luft was Ram Ben-Shalom's aunt. She was the sister of his father Shmuel, who survived the Holocaust. Her cousin is the artist Willy Ochs, known by his Hebrew name Ze'ev Porat, who immortalized German sadism in his amazing illustrations and later became known as an architect. Only about a decade ago, Ben-Shalom discovered that the letter Salomea left before she too was led to the killing pits in the Tarnopol region of Galicia had become legendary in Germany. We're talking in a café in Ramat Aviv, Ben-Shalom's childhood district, as descendants of Polish ancestors. My father would say about the miraculous twists and turns that accompanied Salomea's letter that it's "a lange mayseh" (a long story). The letter documents over about 12 pages the acts of slaughter from the German occupation in summer 1941 until April 1943.
"I am still alive and want to describe to you everything that happened from April 7 until today," Salomea wrote in her letter, and Ben-Shalom describes how a German aristocrat reads the letter years later, in days when German editors and politicians tried to clean up their past and destroy evidence. "The prevailing opinion is that now it's time for 'everything.' Galicia must be free of Jews ('Judenrein')... We, in the camp, could look from our room windows and see everything. Oh, these scenes, these images. How to describe them? We ceased to be human... One sees the square filling up with an increasing number of those condemned to death. This time, the graves in Petrikow were prepared in advance... The men were stripped to their shirts and led like sheep to the slaughter on foot. It was very close. Why waste fuel for cars, why bother with the train? It's a shame. It's simpler to get rid of this harmful material on the spot."
Salomea ended her letter with a call for "revenge." The fact is that the letter fell into the hands of officers in the Red Army when they captured Tarnopol from the Germans in 1944. It was a powerful, living, and moving testimony of an eyewitness who was later murdered, and the Soviets worked constantly to instill a fighting spirit in the troops, and that fighting spirit also contained the motif of revenge. Ben-Shalom describes in detail the role of writer Ilya Ehrenburg in propaganda directed at Red Army soldiers. The slogan was "Kill a German." Salomea's letter brought to life the hate slogans against the Germans.
Action against terror
Meanwhile, the Soviets decided to send the letter by mail to the Lichtblau family living at 3 Geula Street in Tel Aviv – the address Salomea had written. But Ben-Shalom's discovery that excited him so much was that already in 1954, author Erich Kästner organized a public event in Munich intended to mark a decade since the assassination attempt on Hitler. The atmosphere in 1954 in West Germany was that the July 20, 1944, conspiracy was an act of treason. Not to mention, in the background, the major victory in the World Cup in Switzerland. At that evening organized by Kästner, Salomea's letter was read aloud. How did it get there? How, in 2005, was an exhibition presented by a Berlin artist featuring an item called "The Jewish Woman's Letter"?
The letter came to the artist from the daughter of Wehrmacht General Otto Körps. She found it in her father's estate. The Germans deleted the "revenge" from the letter, and that text served them for purposes completely opposite to the use the Red Army made of the letter during the actual days of battles. Ben-Shalom determines that "the artist" developed a fetishistic relationship toward the letter. She was unwilling to give him the copy of the letter called the "Abel-Körps version." "From this moment, the roles were reversed, and in the relationship between us, I (Ram Ben-Shalom) became the aggressor... while she again filled the role of victim. The reversal of images and roles – 'the upside-down world,' where the victim becomes the aggressor, and the victimizer takes the place of the victim – is what allowed the artist to ignore all my requests to receive the letter. Salomea's letter became her exclusive property(...) She refuses to transfer it to the victimizing, strong 'Jew,' the Jew who extracted from her the 'secret,' intimate information about Gunhild Körps" (the general's daughter).
Ram's wife is curator Yael Katz Ben-Shalom. He quotes her in his book, "The letter that survived time and place reveals Salomea's act of writing as an action fighting against terror and silencing. She does not remain silent even though her body is already mute, and she is on her way to her death. In the video work, there is a role reversal. The poetic gaze destroys the victim's words, Salomea's voice, and focuses on the German's bodily performance... presented as suffering in the face of the erased words."
Ben-Shalom's discovery is that General Körps, who kept the letter until he returned from Russian captivity, was supposedly anti-Nazi but was very excited by the storm of battles in the war. So were the senior German administrators in Tarnopol. They too were anti-Nazis; they even wanted to evade their role in organizing life in the city, in the ghetto, in the camp, in various factories. Yet they were very instrumental in the exemplary organization of Jews, masses of Jews, on the route that led them to death pits or to the gas chambers in Belzec. One of them was Franz Josef Schöning. On days when he knew that such actions were going to be carried out, after completing his bureaucratic work, he would go on vacation, on hunting trips in the mountains. Schöning was the founding editor of the important West German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
How did you get the letter?
Dora, Ben-Shalom's aunt from 3 Geula Street, received the original letter. Dora never opened the envelope. One of the mysteries that Ben-Shalom tries to crack throughout his years of research as a detective historian is how the letter reached its destination in Tel Aviv. Was it his father who brought the letter in 1946, immediately after the war, or did an envelope simply arrive by mail as an initiated operation of the Soviet Army? The one who provided him with vital information on the subject is Russian historian Ilya Altman, a man from the Red Army archive.
"Since she writes the letter in 1943 and addresses it to Geula Street in Tel Aviv, I had to find out what was happening at the time she was writing at 'Geula Street' in '43," says Ben-Shalom. "And I have a chapter where I describe the Habima Theater on the day she was writing, the theater was performing the play 'People of Russia.' Both at Moghrabi, where Habima was operating in those days, and at Edison Hall in Jerusalem, performances dealing with the war, dealing with questions of revenge, and the Soviet soldier were being shown. But not about Jews. About Soviets, not Jews! And this was within walking distance of 3 Geula Street, where it was happening."
I told Ram Ben-Shalom that I wasn't surprised that the archivist at Yad Vashem was asked to locate Salomea's letter and couldn't find it. "That was when Ilya Altman was looking for it. I remember my father's immortal sentence, 'I don't want to bury the letter in Yad Vashem's drawers.'"
"For Ilya Altman, in the Red Army archive, the letter is the crown jewel," I say to Ben-Shalom. He replies, "True."
At Yad Vashem, it's an item that someone pushed into some drawer. "My father thought something needed to be done so this letter would be recognized, would be read, would serve as testimony. That was very important to him. And luckily, I came upon the discovery that allowed me to fulfill this spiritual testament. Previously, it echoed in me that I had not succeeded. My father asked me to make something of it, and I didn't do it, I tried and didn't succeed. And this discovery in 2016, that this letter had a life of its own, allowed me to embark on this path, to expose the mystery, and ultimately to fulfill the testament.
"The initial impulse didn't come from the desire to fulfill the testament but from my curiosity as a historian. But during the journey, the testament was fulfilled. Although even now, not everything is resolved."
The existence of Dr. Altman became known to Ben-Shalom from an article by Alex Doron in Maariv. Ilya Altman explained in a meeting with Ben-Shalom in Moscow that if on the copy of the letter it says "sent," there is no doubt that the army sent the letter to Tel Aviv. The reason is simple – in Stalin's days, if you wrote such a thing and it turned out you hadn't sent it, it would end with a bullet in the back of your neck. But Altman was disappointed that Ben-Shalom hadn't brought the original copy with him; he so wanted to touch the paper and see Salomea's handwriting. Such an intimate relationship was also expressed by the German chaplain of one of the divisions of the 6th Army that fell into Russian captivity at Stalingrad, when he returned from Russian captivity in the 1950s. "Imagine, he takes sheets of makhorka (for rolling cigarettes), writes on them word for word the contents of the letter, and sews them inside his coat – knowing that this way it doesn't rustle and when leaving the USSR, they won't find it."
