Arnold Klebbs opens the door and apologizes for not hearing the knock. He was busy with carpentry. At 92, he looks excellent, completely independent, articulate, and clear-minded. He recently celebrated his birthday, but for him, the real celebration comes on May 5, the day he was liberated 80 years ago from the Birkenau camp with other survivors by the American Army. This year, he feels particularly emotional about returning for the first time to the place where his life nearly ended.

Klebbs will participate in the March of the Living as part of a special delegation including 40 survivors from Israel – survivors of death camps, children who were hidden or survived in forests – who will walk, many for the first time since the war, along the same route as the death marches, this time accompanied by their family members. The march, one of the flagship events of Holocaust Remembrance Day, will mark 80 years since Europe's liberation from the Nazi regime and the end of World War II.

"This is a once-in-a-generation march," Revital Yakin Krakovsky, deputy CEO of the International March of the Living, said. "80 Holocaust survivors from around the world will lead the way for thousands who are receiving from them the responsibility for Holocaust remembrance in future generations."

Klebbs was born in Lithuania and was eight years old when the war broke out. His mother and sister survived; his father did not. In 1944, women and men were separated, and a few weeks later, he was separated from his father. At the moment of final parting, his father whispered to him the address of their family in the United States, which he burned into his memory.

In the Kovno ghetto, young Arnold understood that Jewish lives held no value. From the window, he watched a German soldier shoot a Jewish doctor dead simply because he didn't remove his hat quickly enough. His parents dug a narrow hiding place for him beneath the floorboards, where he concealed himself when Nazis came to conduct another mass deportation operation. That's how he survived the first time.

"In the ghetto, I experienced what true despair feels like. There were 30,000 Jews there, and one day the Nazis took 10,000 and shot them. It was a miracle they didn't take us. It was clear it was only a matter of time until they would murder us." After two years, the journey to concentration camps began – eleven in total. Each posed its own threats, but the Austrian concentration camp Gunskirchen (Wels II) was the most horrific. "There was no order, the place was strewn with bodies that weren't removed. They didn't feed us, they just let us die."

He arrived at Birkenau with 128 other children from Lithuania. The group was led by a 16-year-old boy who taught them to behave like strong, tough young men in order to survive. This convinced the SS officers to keep them alive rather than sending them immediately to the gas chambers. Weeks later, the boys underwent a selection by Dr. Joseph Mengele, who sent 75 of them to the gas chambers. He interrogated Arnold and, for some reason, allowed him to continue living. That evening, the child gazed at the crematorium chimneys and knew that the smoke rising from them contained the remains of his friends.

"One of the boys in our group managed to smuggle his tefillin in his shoes, and before we went out to work, he would secretly put on tefillin. We would stand around him to hide him and warn him if someone was approaching. I witnessed someone risking his life to fulfill a commandment – that made a tremendous impression on me."

How do you survive the grief over the death of those close to you, I ask him. "You don't think about it. The hunger was so terrible that all I thought about was how to get another slice of bread. The body takes over the mind. You no longer think like a human being, but like an animal."

Another thing that helped him avoid falling into despair was his friends. There was a rare solidarity between them that often saved their lives. "For example, during one of the death marches, we walked for four days and four nights nonstop, without food or water. At one point, I was so exhausted that they linked arms and carried me. Or when we were ordered to lie on the snow and I fell asleep immediately, and when they announced it was time to get up, I didn't wake up. My friends lifted me and carried me," Arnold Klebbs said. Only 25 of his friends survived the horrors.

At the end of this march, the survivors were loaded onto cattle cars without toilets, food, or water. They traveled for a week, with Arnold scraping ice from the walls of the cars to drink. The Allies mistakenly bombed the train, and many Jews were killed. The train stopped at Mauthausen, and Arnold was separated from his friends, who stayed in a nearby tent.

"I wanted to be with them. I left the tent, and then I saw an SS officer. I ran away from him back to the tent, and he tried to shoot me, but missed. Jews from the tent hid me under a blanket, and he didn't find me. That night, the Allies bombed the neighboring tent, the one I had tried to escape to, and many were killed.

"When the war ended, I came out of the forest and didn't know where to go. I understood that if the American army was driving to the right, it meant they were still fighting the Germans, so I went in the opposite direction. I asked them for food, and they threw me chocolate, which made me very sick. We were a small group of friends who survived. The owners of a small Austrian farm gave us food and a place to sleep. The next day, we met American soldiers, who put us in the barracks of German soldiers who had fled."

Later, he joined the Jewish Brigade. "It's hard to describe how I felt when I saw a Jewish soldier with a Star of David and a rifle. They danced the hora with us around a bonfire, and protected us as if we were their children. They put us in an orphanage in southern Italy, and one day a journalist from Tel Aviv came and interviewed me. Through that article, my mother found me and came to me. When I saw her, we ran to each other. She had been liberated along with my sister. Meanwhile, my sister had fallen in love with a soldier from the brigade, and they immigrated to Israel after he was discharged."

After his mother's second marriage, the family moved to the US, to the same address his father had whispered to him. "I didn't want to go. I wanted to be with my friends who survived with me and immigrated to Israel. I had always been a Zionist, and as a child, we learned Hebrew. But they didn't ask me."

He grew up, studied dentistry, and married a German woman who converted to Judaism for him. They had two children, and after his wife died in a car accident, he immigrated to Israel.

"Every day, images come to me. I see my father standing in front of me, giving me the address in America. I see Mengele sending my friends to their deaths. But I don't dwell on it, because I move on to thinking about my children, about my life, about the luck I have, and about the fact that today I am in Jerusalem. Looking back, when I consider all the coincidences that helped me survive, I believe that God helped me. Why me and not my amazing friends? I have no answer for that. In the camps themselves, I didn't think about why I was surviving or where God was. I just wanted to survive another day."

And why is he traveling to lead the March of the Living and step again for the first time on that cursed ground? "At Birkenau, for the first time since liberation, I will be able to say Kaddish [mourner's prayer] for all the friends I saw going up in smoke. I don't need a list with their names, I remember them every day. My children are coming with me. It's important to me that they see that terrible place."

"Hope to return with my spirit intact"

"Every time I tell my story, it comes back to me at night, and then I can't sleep," Yosef Farkash explained. He is 97, born in Hungary to a poor family, the ninth of 13 siblings. In 1944, when he was 16, the country was conquered by the Germans, and he realized he had to take action.

"I heard about Kristallnacht, I heard the news, also from refugees who came to us and told of the horrors they had experienced." Shortly before Passover, Jewish teenagers were forced to build the ghetto fences, and during Passover, families were moved inside. On the first day of the Hebrew month of Sivan, everyone was loaded onto trains to Auschwitz, and from there, Yosef's journey began.

After Auschwitz, he was in the Fünfteichen camp, where he worked cleaning toxic paint cans. From there, he was transferred to the main camp, Gross-Rosen, where he had to carry a 110-pound cement bag to the second floor of a building under construction. When work was pressured, they would put two bags on his back – 220 pounds, three times more than his body weight in those days. Once, one of the bags fell from Yosef's back, and the guard threw him from the second floor. His nose was broken in this fall.

"One day, I saw an empty cement bag in the garbage dump. I made a tank top from it so I would be warmer. In the evening, I returned to the camp, and the guards saw that I was too fat. There was a court in the camp that wanted to send me to the gallows, but my defender said I wasn't yet 18, so they commuted the sentence to 25 lashes. I probably wouldn't have survived them and would have died. But then a miracle happened: moments before they started beating me, an alarm sounded. The British Air Force arrived and bombed around the camp. Everyone scattered."

In October-November 1944, the Jews were sent on the death march. "In this march, whoever couldn't continue fell. The guards shot them in the head, and they remained there. I went through everything, saw the shootings, and we continued walking, like a herd, without question. Without thoughts. It's hard to explain. We walked."

At some point, they were loaded onto a cattle train, 200 people in an open car. It was impossible to sit. There was a guard who cordoned himself off, and occasionally he would fire a burst of bullets. Yosef was wounded in the leg by one of these bullet fragments. Of course, he didn't tell anyone about his injury, because he knew they would kill him for it.

In February 1945, Yosef was transferred to Buchenwald, where he stayed until April 11, liberation day. "In Buchenwald there were more than 25,000 people. When the American army arrived by surprise, the German guards were still at their posts, and that's how they captured the camp. The rabbi of the American army gathered the Jews who were in the camp. I didn't get out of bed for four days because of the gunshot wound. I didn't eat anything for eight days, just drank. When the military doctors arrived, they carried me in their arms, like a child. I weighed less than 62 pounds."

Together with other Jews, Yosef Farkash was evacuated to Switzerland on Rabbi Schechter's children's train, where he was hospitalized for about six months. There, he joined Youth Aliyah and met Shoshana, also a Holocaust survivor. They fell in love and married in Jaffa on November 29, 1949. They had three children and adopted three more biological siblings whose mother died in childbirth. When asked what kept him alive all this time, Yosef answered that it was his belief in life, his optimism. "I always believed tomorrow would be better."

Yosef's son, Shraga, said that until 2001, they didn't talk about the Holocaust at home. "I didn't tell the children the difficult stories," Yosef explained. "I wanted to protect them. I didn't focus on the hardship, the evil; I just looked forward and tried to see the good. I wanted them to also think that tomorrow would be better."

The father's hardships were revealed to his son by chance. "In 2001, my father was sitting at my place, and I saw he had a dent in his leg. I asked him if he had been hit, and it was like Pandora's box opening. He told everything. I told him we needed to go full circle: we should go to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and to his childhood town. We scheduled a trip, and suddenly he had a severe ulcer. It was clearly mentally difficult for him, but eventually it worked out and we went."

In the early 2000s, the bombed crematoria in Auschwitz were not yet fenced off, and it was possible to enter them. Yosef crawled under the ruins and lit a memorial candle. At that moment, he told his son that his revenge on the Nazis was that he had raised a family in Israel. When they returned home, Yosef showed his children a photo from liberation day, taken by an American soldier.

Another way Yosef's children learned about his experiences during those dark years was through his grandchildren's family history assignments. They interviewed him, and he told them an age-appropriate, softer version of the events ("without drama, without horrors"), as he also did in their schools. Yosef shared his story in the "Zikaron BaSalon" project (a social initiative of informal gatherings in private homes on Holocaust Remembrance Day), at Israel Defense Forces bases, and even testified before the IDF General Staff Forum.

This year, he received an invitation to lead the March of the Living with other survivors, marking 80 years since the liberation of the camps. His son and 14 of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will accompany him. Nevertheless, the thought of returning to the camps weighs on him and stirs memories that haunt his dreams. Additionally, he has always opposed organized Holocaust education trips that take Israeli students to Poland to visit death camps and other Holocaust sites. "We don't need to send children there. The money we invest in these trips goes to the Poles, and they don't deserve it. They were worse than the Germans."

So why go? I asked. "The children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – they all want me to come. I told my son that I don't know if I can go through all this again, because even when I went to tell my life story in schools, for several days I couldn't sleep. But my children convinced me that I am the head of the tribe, and that gave me confidence.

"Physically, I'll be fine. Mentally, I need to maintain the unity of the family. Because when they all embrace me, then we're all together. They're taking me there with love, I'm not going alone. We'll see how it works. I hope that with my children's support, I'll return with my spirit intact."

"Liberation was an empty victory"

Nathan Leipciger – Nate, asked me to wait a moment while he gets a hat. "Without it, I'm just an old man," he laughed during our video call from his home in Canada. It's a Polish leather cap that Nate has worn for 25 years, every time he goes to the March of the Living. It's his trademark.

The moment he puts on the hat, there's no stopping his flow of speech. He expresses himself fluently, in elevated language, with a clear-sighted and sensitive perspective.

"October 7 changed everything for survivors, because the impossible, the unexpected, and the inconceivable happened again. It was in a different place and under different circumstances, but this evil returned. It threw me off balance. I almost sank into despair, and it took me time to get out of that state. I managed to do it because I understood that today we are not helpless like we were in 1939. Today, we are part of an amazing country that represents us, which is the homeland of all Jews worldwide. If we ever thought that we, Diaspora Jews, could disconnect from Israel, October 7 made the opposite clear to us.

"At the same time, I understood something else: that our enemies today are not acting out of antisemitism, but they seek to destroy the entire Western culture, not just the Jewish people. The attack on Israel is just the first step in this struggle."

Nate, 97, is energetic and articulate. When he was 11, the Nazis invaded and conquered Poland. His world turned upside down when he was expelled with his parents and 14-year-old sister to the Sosnowiec ghetto. His father was sent to a labor camp, and Nate took an electrician course. For the next three years, he worked as an electrician's apprentice in a factory, and in 1943, his father returned to the ghetto, and the entire family was deported to Auschwitz. Men and women were separated at the camp. In a coincidence that's hard to explain, his father knew one of the Nazi officers and asked him to remove his son from the line of those condemned to death – and so it happened.

"What are the odds of that happening?! But it did happen, and I joined my father in the concentration camp. In an instant, I became a prisoner – without a name, just a number – but alive."

Life expectancy in the camp was four months. His father intervened again, and they were transferred to work in a factory near Breslau. In January 1945, when the Nazis realized their time was limited, they forced everyone who had managed to survive in the camps on death marches, without food and water for many days. Nate and his father walked in no fewer than five such marches. Thousands died along the way.

"When we arrived at Dachau in one of the marches, I almost gave up, and my father was angry that I was considering giving up. The survival mechanism during those two years was hope. The moment you lost it, your fate was sealed. But in Dachau, just before liberation, I almost lost hope because I was physically exhausted to the point of collapse. My father said I had no right to lose hope – and I listened to him."

Miraculously, for a reason still unclear to Nate today, the camp commander allowed them to stay in the camp instead of joining another death march, and they remained there until the American army arrived and liberated them. "I felt our liberation was an empty victory. We were alive, but we understood that we might be the only ones who survived from our entire family. We had no home and no country. I was hospitalized for three months because I contracted typhus, which almost killed me. Slowly, we began the journey back to life.

"My father was one of eight siblings. He had one brother in Canada, and the rest were slaughtered in the Holocaust. I had 14 cousins – only four survived. I was very fortunate to reach Canada in 1948. There I went to school, and after two years I went to study engineering at university. I got married and had three children, 19 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren, thank God."

This year, Nate will walk in the March of the Living for the 21st time. "It's part of my life and my legacy as a Holocaust survivor. I feel it's the best way to pass on this lesson to young people, at the end of which they will deeply understand what it means to be Jewish, with our losses and victories. As the years go by, it becomes harder and harder, both mentally and physically. It takes me longer to recover from the trip, but I know it's necessary to teach the younger generation.

"Despite everything I've been through – I cannot hate, not even the Nazis. Because hatred is blind, and it prevents us from doing the right thing. We needed to bring them to trial and achieve justice. So many of them escaped. If we hate, we give up part of our humanity. That's what I say at the March of the Living. People ask me if I hate the descendants of the Nazis, and I say no. The sins of the parents do not pass to their children.

"Dealing with antisemitism in general, and the March of the Living in particular, looks different since October 7. It's more urgent, more important. The message I convey to groups has also changed. If in the past it was 'be proud Jews,' today I add 'be proud Zionists.' Zionism connects us, Diaspora Jews and Israel, religious and secular, in one common goal. We said 'never again,' and it sounds like an empty slogan – but it strengthens us. It's the only way to overcome difficulties."

The post 'I remember them every day': Holocaust survivors return to death camps 80 years after liberation appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

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."

The post A whisper from the death pits: Salomea's letter of revenge reveals unknown Holocaust history appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Hollywood icons, including Cindy Crawford, Jennifer Garner, and David Schwimmer, have participated in a touching awareness campaign by posing for portraits with Holocaust survivors in an effort to educate people about the darkest period in history.

Photographer Bryce Thompson, who has shot for prestigious fashion magazines such as Elle, L'Officiel, and Glamour, initiated the project titled "Borrowed Spotlight," featuring intimate portraits of celebrities alongside Holocaust survivors. The project will launch at the Detour Gallery in New York on April 22, coinciding with Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In addition to Crawford, Garner, and Schwimmer, other stars who joined the project include Billy Porter, George Stephanopoulos, Nicola Peltz, Barbara Corcoran, Scooter Braun, Sheryl Sandberg, Chelsea Handler, Julius Erving, Josh Peck, and several others.

"Step Up" star Jenna Dewan was paired with Risa Igelfeld, who witnessed the destruction caused by the Nazis when they invaded Vienna, Austria, in 1938. Igelfeld revealed that she survived because a soldier warned her about a Nazi plan to attack her. She escaped to England with the help of a former professor who had fled earlier and assisted her in obtaining a visa.

"This is truly an amazing and humbling opportunity to be part of such an incredible moment honoring the resilience and courage of these amazing true survivors. Meeting and listening to Risa's story was a life-changing event for me," Dewan told Page Six. "The most fun part was dancing together and hearing Risa sing," Dewan added. "The biggest challenge was hearing firsthand about the real horrors of our history that Risa went through during the Holocaust."

The exhibition will showcase portraits, survivor testimonies, and interactive elements designed to educate the public about the Holocaust. Images from the exhibition will be sold at auction, along with a photography book featuring the pictures. All proceeds will benefit "Self Help," an organization that provides services and assistance to Holocaust survivors living in New York, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Cindy Crawford also met with Nova survivors in Los Angeles, commenting on "the power of human hearts and minds."

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Eighty years after the events, new research has unveiled the identity of a Jewish informant who was coerced into betraying Jews and their Dutch protectors during the Holocaust. Karl Kaufmann, a 23-year-old Jewish student, faced an impossible choice when the Nazis threatened him with death – a choice that would lead to tragic consequences for dozens of people, including himself and his own family.

For years, the home of Rika van der Lans and Waldemar Nods in the Dutch village of Scheveningen served as a sanctuary for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. This haven of safety was shattered in late 1944 when Nazi forces raided their home, arresting Rika, Waldemar, their 14-year-old son Willy (later known as "Sonny Boy"), another Dutch citizen, and four Jews who had found refuge in their home. All were sent directly to concentration and death camps.

The revelation about Kaufmann's role emerged through meticulous research conducted by author Trudy van der Wees, who examined recently opened Dutch archives of Nazi collaborators. The discovery came while she was researching a book about Cornelis (Kees) Chardon, a Righteous Among the Nations and resistance hero who saved hundreds of Jews during World War II. Chardon, a lawyer who established an extensive network of safe houses for Jews in The Hague area, was also turned in to the Nazis and murdered in 1945 at the Wobbelin concentration camp.

Through documents found in the Dutch collaborators' archive, van der Wees uncovered the complex and harrowing reality of the period. Kaufmann's collaboration with the Nazis began after his arrest, when he was presented with what appeared to be a lifeline – cooperate by providing information about Jews hiding in Dutch homes, and his family would be spared from the death camps. According to van der Wees, Kaufmann faced a "horrifying dilemma," and his subsequent collaboration led to the betrayal of dozens of people. The Nazis' promise proved hollow – Kaufmann's family members were murdered, and Kaufmann himself was arrested in February 1944 and killed at Auschwitz two months later.

The story gained widespread attention after a Dutch production studio created a film chronicling the remarkable love story between Rika van der Lans, a 37-year-old Dutch mother of four, and Waldemar Nods, a 20-year-old student from Suriname. The film depicts van der Lans's journey from divorcing her religious husband after his affair with their housekeeper to meeting Nods and becoming pregnant with his child. When her former husband discovers the child's dark skin, he rejects any reconciliation. The couple finds support from an elderly Jewish man who offers them shelter, and later, they reciprocate by sheltering Jews during the Nazi occupation – until their betrayal.

The couple met a tragic end – van der Lans was murdered in 1945 at Ravensbrück camp, while Waldemar died in a bombing just two days before his camp's liberation. Their son Willy survived the war but passed away in 2015 at age 85, never knowing who had betrayed his family.

Eline Penewaard, Holocaust historian for CIDI (Center for Information and Documentation Israel), an organization monitoring antisemitism in Holland, emphasizes the significance of the archive's opening: "The 'Sonny Boy' affair demonstrates how crucial these records are for providing closure in countless unresolved cases."

Penewaard explains that the Nazis employed various methods to locate Jews, including offering substantial monetary rewards to Dutch citizens who would inform on Jews and their protectors. This incentive drove many to actively hunt for hidden Dutch Jews. The regime also systematically coerced Jews into becoming informants through false promises of safety for themselves and their loved ones.

"This case powerfully illustrates the razor-thin line between victims and perpetrators," Penewaard noted, "and starkly demonstrates the Nazi regime's criminality in forcing victims to become perpetrators themselves."

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In the solemn halls of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an annual ritual meant to honor the victims of the Holocaust was conspicuously absent this year. The school's traditional Holocaust Day ceremony, typically held at the iconic Powell Library plaza, was abruptly canceled amid escalating tensions and fears of unrest on campus.

Rather than a somber remembrance, UCLA was blanketed by fences and a heavy police presence – measures intended to prevent potential antisemitic protests and uphold campus safety. The jarring decision cast a pall over the university, leaving many in the school's Jewish community disheartened.

"It's disheartening," one student told Bentzi Sasson, who visited UCLA with a delegation of wounded Israeli soldiers from the "Belev Echad" organization, according to a statement issued by the organizers. "We felt compelled to stand in solidarity with our brethren enduring severe antisemitism due to their support for Israel."

For Jewish students across the US, antisemitism on college campuses has become an unsettling reality. At UCLA, the atmosphere is particularly fraught, with pro-Palestinian protests morphing from political speech into breeding grounds for anti-Jewish sentiment that has left many feeling vulnerable.

Yet even as the campus wrestled with tensions around its canceled commemoration, a powerful reminder of resilience arrived in the form of Sasson's visiting troops. The soldiers, their bodies bearing the scars of battle, had journeyed from Israel to Los Angeles on a 10-day restorative trip.

One of those troops, Shlomo Klein, recounted his traumatic experience fighting terrorists in Gaza. "I was injured on Oct. 7 in the Sufa military post," Klein said in the press release. "The terrorists came all around my base. We found a little wall, and my friend got a bullet to the neck. I put out my hand to help him, and my hand was gone."

For Klein, the visit to UCLA proved unexpectedly uplifting amidst his recovery. "The visit to the university more than strengthened the students; it strengthened us soldiers," he reflected. "Although physically we cannot fight on the battlefield, we can fight in other ways, such as strengthening the students on campus."

Rabbi Uriel Vigler, founder of Belev Echad, expressed awe at the wounded troops' determination to buoy others. "To witness the mental fortitude of these soldiers, who chose to spend their time uplifting others amidst their own trials, is truly inspiring," he said. "It speaks to the indomitable spirit of resilience that unites us all."

In the aftermath of UCLA's canceled Holocaust event, the wounded soldiers' powerful presence served as a poignant reminder that solidarity and perseverance can transcend even the deepest divides. Though the campus ritual was silenced this year, the troop offered a lesson in courage that resonated through the halls.

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The world is witnessing a deeply disturbing resurgence of antisemitism on a scale unparalleled since the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Holocaust deniers, once relegated to the fringes of society, are reemerging and propagating falsehoods.

While the historical record unequivocally establishes Adolf Hitler's direct, personal orchestration of the Final Solution and the genocide of European Jewry, a longstanding point of contention has centered on the absence of any document explicitly bearing Hitler's signature, instruction, or recorded admission linking him to the logistical planning of the mass murder campaign.

A collaboration between renowned Holocaust scholar Professor Gideon Greif and former senior Mossad agent Oded Eilam has now uncovered a crucial piece of evidence that forges a more direct connection between Hitler and the Final Solution's implementation.

Calculated obfuscation

Though Hitler's rhetoric was peppered with menacing foreshadowings of violence against Jews over the years, the documented evidence of his direct involvement and awareness of the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in the extermination camps remains largely circumstantial. The Nazi dictator meticulously distanced himself from any official record that could directly incriminate him in these monstrous crimes against humanity.

Hitler clearly grasped the grave criminal and historical implications of his policy of industrialized mass murder. He therefore left the grisly logistical details to subordinates like Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and others.

For decades, historians and researchers have debated the extent of Hitler's personal oversight and interest in the minutiae of implementing the Final Solution. The prevailing view has been that while fully cognizant of the genocide, he was not particularly invested in the operational specifics, which he delegated to his underlings.

In their meticulous examination of Hitler's extensive speeches and addresses, Greif and Eilam found that even as the dictator issued thinly veiled threats of genocide should war erupt, he conspicuously avoided any admission that such an unconscionable policy was actively underway.

The damning testimony

That remained the case until their landmark discovery of Hitler's long-overlooked Nov. 8, 1942 speech. In a departure from his typical inflammatory rhetoric, Hitler deviated from comments about the eastern front situation to make an extraordinary reference comparing the implementation of his earlier "prophecies" about the Jews to what was then transpiring:

"They always ridiculed me as a prophet. Today, many of those who laughed at that time are no longer laughing. Those who are still laughing now may also not laugh after some time... International Jewry will be recognized for all its demonic danger in all of Europe and throughout the world. We, the National Socialists, will take care of that."

"This danger is recognized in Europe, and one country after another is adopting our legislation. We see today in this great struggle only one possible and sole result – that of absolute success, and now the only question that remains is whether there are any reasons to doubt this success."

This chilling statement came in late 1942, by which time the industrialized genocide against Jews had entered its most horrific phase following the construction of the six dedicated extermination camps in occupied Poland. At the time, Hitler still delusionally believed total victory was inevitable.

By linking the "prophecies" he claims to have made about the Jews to their systematic extermination then underway, Hitler effectively directly incriminated himself for the possibly first and only time in orchestrating the unprecedented genocide. This marked a startling departure from his customary practice of maintaining arm's length separation from any implicating documentation.

The persistence of denial

Hitler's obvious determination to avoid leaving an incriminating paper trail has, perversely, provided ample fuel for Holocaust denial and revisionism by those seeking to minimize or absolve his direct culpability. Many deniers have seized on this absence of documentation to cast doubt on the extent of Hitler's involvement or even exculpate him entirely.

More insidiously, some fringe assertions even go so far as to claim the genocide was simply a Himmler- or SS-led initiative in which Hitler played no operational role, or to ludicrously allege that the death tolls were vastly inflated.

Chillingly, these pernicious denial efforts have seen a disturbing renaissance in the modern era, particularly amplified across social media following the Oct. 7 onslaught by the Hamas terror organization. A concerted disinformation campaign has sought to rewrite the narrative by denying the massacres entirely or portraying them as isolated incidents by rogue actors rather than a coordinated policy.

This makes Hitler's extraordinary November 1942 statement acknowledging the ongoing extermination of Jews as the realization of his "prophecy" all the more vital.

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At the place where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered and which became one of the symbols of the Nazi extermination machine – Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland – the March of the Living takes place once again, for the 36th time.

This was the peak of the Holocaust Remembrance Day events, which began a day earlier in Budapest. The main march is from Auschwitz to Birkenau, with the participation of 8,000 people from all over the world, including 55 Holocaust survivors.

Many participants gathered at the entrance of the Auschwitz extermination camp, draped in Israeli flags. Some are wearing shirts with the slogan "Bring them home", referring to the hostages still held in Gaza.

The March officially began, after Holocaust survivors, among other dignitaries, blew the Shofar.  "Say no to antisemitism!" they said to the crowd.

Thomas Hand, the father of former 8-year-old captive Emily Hand also participates in the March, recalling the terrifying moments of realizing his daughter was in Hamas' hands. "We got her back somehow. It was a miracle," he says.

Gabriella Karin, one of the 55 Holocaust survivors participating in the March of the Living, says she has dedicated her life to educating the younger generation about the Holocaust. "We are all the same. You don't have to love everybody, but we have to respect every person on this earth. We all have a right to be here."
This year's March of the Living has launched its first-ever university president's mission from the US and Canada, amid the sharp rise of antisemitism especially on campuses. Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman leading the group, says that "unchecked hate leads to clear and present danger," adding that the leadership of universities together with people worldwide should work to "eliminate hate and antisemitism from the world."

Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, says that today in Auschwitz – one of the major sites of the Nazi's Final Solution – we need to commemorate the 6 million who perished merely because they were Jews and stay united as a Jewish community worldwide, facing antisemitism.

Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, chairman of the International March of the Living, says the organization's mission is more important than ever, as over 90 years have passed since the Holocaust and the number of survivors is diminishing.

Jacqueline Glicksman, from Kibbutz HaShlosha, spoke with Israel Hayom and recounted her harrowing experience surviving the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, where terrorists entered her home and nearly set it on fire before she escaped. This year marks the first time she is participating in the March of the Living. Despite her traumatic ordeal, she felt she had to take part in the March this year, saying "It is precisely in this place, at the March of the Living, that I feel the State of Israel is stronger than ever."

Pastor Larry Huch, founder and senior pastor of the New Beginnings Church says "The majority of people in America love Israel and the Jewish people...one of the reasons why we came here is to make a stand, to let people know that we won't tolerate antisemitism."

Ahead of the beginning of the official ceremony, Alex Traiman, Jerusalem Bureau Chief of JNS shared his impressions of the March this year, saying it is "very special, definitely took on a totally different meaning just several months after Oct. 7." "You'd think that there will be a feeling of depression, seeing the death camps and knowing that the same hatred that fueled the Holocaust just 80 years ago is fueling the enemies of the Jewish people today," He added, "but surprisingly, I didn't find one depressed person throughout the March."

The official ceremony began with the master of the ceremony Greg Masel's words: "Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day of remembering the past, but this year, is also one of looking with trepidation and concern at the present and to the future," followed by a one-minute memorial siren in memory of the victims who perished in Auschwitz.

Israel's President Isaac Herzog spoke via video from the President's Residence in Jerusalem, saying "Gathering from across the world you say clearly here today – we remain, we live, and no matter what kind of hatred and brutality we may meet – we are, and what we stand for will remain." Gabor Gordon, chairman of the March of the Living in Hungary lit the first torch, in memory of 565,000 Hungarian Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Israeli singer Noa Kirel, a descendant of a Holocaust survivor grandfather, performed the Hungarian poet Hannah Szenes' song "A Walk to Caesarea."

Video: Noa Kirel performs at the March of the Living / Credit: March of the Living

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor said "The answer is to live, to exist, to be stronger...and to love each other," referring to antisemitism worldwide. He also mentioned the hostages still held captive in Gaza and called for their release. Holocaust survivor Daniel Louz, who endured the brutal Hamas attack on Oct. 7 lit the second torch along with other survivors, saying in tears "We who established a home and a state which was our great victory over the Nazis and antisemitism light this torch in memory of those who perished in the Shoa and in memory of those murdered on Oct.7."

The March of the Living students accompanied by author and Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger lit the third torch saying "We will always stand against the demonization of the Jewish people...if we fail to uphold this pledge, the generations to come will be marching for us." Leipciger, pointing towards the unloading ramp at the camp, said "I stood on this ramp 81 years ago. Every day could have been my death. Jewish rights are human rights," followed by Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, who lit the fourth torch.

Leonardo Farkash, who was born into a family that had lost 55 of its members in Auschwitz, and Eli Beer, founder of the United Hatzalah organization lit the fifth torch in recognition of the doctors, nurses, and relief organizations that save lives. Students from Germany, Austria, and Poland lit the sixth torch in honor of those who heroically saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Kirel performed another rendition of "Over the Rainbow", a song written on the eve of World War II. As the ceremony comes to an end, Chairwoman of KKL-JNF Yifat Ovadia-Lusky stated that the Jewish people "Are here, and here to stay," in spite of the tragedies of the Holocaust and recent events of Oct. 7.

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Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day commenced Sunday with the official opening ceremony held at the Warsaw Ghetto Square at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered remarks at the ceremony. Yad Vashem Council Chairman and Holocaust survivor Rabbi Israel Meir Lau lit the memorial torch. The event began with a prayer for the return of captives held by Hamas and the well-being of fighters, and embracing bereaved families.

The ceremony's honor guard consisted of six Holocaust survivors who lit torches. Holocaust survivor Chaim Noy gave the survivors' speech. Videos recounting the life stories of the torchlighters were screened. This year's theme was "See, there were communities and they are no more: The Jewish community and its destruction."

Video: Netanyahu delivers a message in English during his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech / Credit: Yad Vashem

Israel's Chief Rabbis  Rabbi David Lau and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef recited psalms and the Kaddish prayer. Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Perlmutter recited the El Maleh Rachamim memorial prayer. In his opening speech, President Herzog reflected on commemorating the Holocaust amid the ongoing conflict, societal rifts, and a sense of lost trust and direction. He emphasized the post-Holocaust generations' vow of "never again," stating: "We swore that the Jewish people would never again stand helpless and unprotected. Yet, in spite of it all, because of it all, the scenes of mourning on October 7 shook us all, echoing the horrors of the Holocaust in our hearts...Even for me, the descriptions of mothers silencing their infants lest their crying give away their hiding places; of children torn from their parents; and of loathsome murderers who saw the Nazis as a model to emulate, and hunted, burned, and slaughtered entire families echoed the most dreadful in our people's history."

Herzog stressed that while the October events were horrific, "This was not the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the darkest abyss in human history, by any measure...Because today, we have the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces. Although the catastrophe's effects still shake us, we do not forget that we have what our brethren who perished could only dream of – a state and army of our own."

Video: Families of the hostages protest in silence near the Defense Ministry on Holocaust Remembrance Day, May 5, 2024

Netanyahu addressed the Holocaust survivors as "an immense inspiration" and "witnesses to the rebirth after the extermination of communities." He described the connection between the past and present struggles, citing the story of a fallen IDF officer whose grandfather was a Holocaust survivor:

"Staff Sergeant Moshe Moshe Yedidya Leiter...went into battle in the Gaza Strip bearing the legacy of the Holocaust on his shoulders. When his father Yechiel asked him how he could bear such a heavy burden, Moshe would reply: 'It is the burden of generations, a burden of responsibility that gives meaning to my service in the Israel Defense Forces'...He understood that he was fighting in Gaza not just for his great-grandfather who survived the Holocaust, but for the 6 million brothers and sisters murdered in it." At one point Netanyahu also spoke in English, saying he would like to say a few sentences for the world audience. "As the prime minister of Israel the one and only Jewish state I pledge here today from Jerusalem,on this Holocaust Remembrance Day: If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone."

Back in Hebrew, he said on continuing the conflict, Netanyahu vowed: "We will fight the monsters of Hamas and complete the elimination of their capabilities...Exactly here lies the difference between the Holocaust and the rebirth – unlike the Holocaust when we were helpless, today the Jewish people have defensive power."

He addressed rising antisemitism bluntly: "Antisemitism that was once concealed is returning in all its ugliness...Today there are new allegations - committing genocide and starvation in Gaza. The truth is the complete opposite, which people believe only because we are Jews. What a moral bankruptcy – the lie has become truth, the truth has become a lie."

Netanyahu condemned the harassment faced by pro-Israel Jewish students at prestigious US universities, stating: "Like in past days, the false accusations are directed at us simply because we exist...Students supporting Israel face daily threats, insults, and harassment, afraid to wear a kippa, tzitzit, or Star of David, with bullies barging into classrooms."

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Israel's Holocaust commemorations this year have a searing significance for six elderly survivors now deeply scarred by the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 that sparked the ongoing Gaza war.

The killing and kidnapping spree by Palestinian terrorists on a Jewish holiday morning shook the sense of security of Israelis – not least, those who had witnessed the state emerge as a safe haven after the Nazi genocide.

For Bellha Haim, 86, the upheaval is especially profound. Her grandson Yotam – like her, a resident of a village near the Gaza border – was taken hostage by Hamas and managed to escape, only to be accidentally shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

The trauma drove Haim to return to her native Poland, which she had fled with her family as a child during World War II, and where she will on Monday take part of the "March of the Living" at the site of the Auschwitz death camp.

Video: Hamas killing spree haunts Holocaust survivors in 'March of the Living / Credit: Reuters

The annual ceremony is timed to coincide with Israel's Holocaust memorial day. "I never went back, and I wasn't convinced to go back," she said during a meeting with other survivors ahead of the trip. "But this time, when they told me that they were connecting the Holocaust and what I call the 'Holocaust of October 7' – because then in the Holocaust we (Jews) were not a united people, we didn't have a country, and suddenly this pride of mine that has been broken, my pride in my people and my country that was shattered in front of my eyes - I said, 'This time I will break my oath and I will go out.'"

As a teenager, Yotam had taken part in the annual Auschwitz vigil and Haim said she saw the event as a chance for communion with him and other victims of the Hamas attack. "I will go out in the name of Yotam, who marched there when he was in high school, and I will go out there to shout out the cry of the slain, of the babies, of all my good friends that I will never meet again," she said.

Arabic yelling and gunfire

Among those joining her will be 90-year-old Daniel Louz, whose hometown Kibbutz Be'eri lost a tenth of its residents to the Palestinian attackers.

In some ways, he said, that ordeal was worse for him than the European war, when he escaped Nazi round-ups in his native France although half his family perished in Poland. After he awoke to the sound of Arabic yelling and gunfire, "I was constantly busy with surviving and figuring out what to do," Louz said. "In France, as a child, I suffered all kinds of post-traumas that I've learned to cope with. But in Be'eri, it was the first time that I felt the fear of death."

A neighboring house was riddled with bullets. Louz's was untouched. He says he imagined the souls of the six million Holocaust victims steering Hamas away from him. "They probably wanted me to be here to tell this story," he said, weeping.

Other Holocaust survivors participating in the March of the Living include Smil Bercu Sacagiu, 87, whose home was hit by a rocket from Gaza, and Jacqueline Gliksman, 81, whose home was torched by a Palestinian infiltrator.

"What was left, and luckily the terrorist didn't see it, is my grandchildren," she said, referring to gold figurines on a necklace she was wearing. "That's the only thing I have left."

Before he was seized, Haim's grandson left a text message: "They're burning down my house. I smell gas. I'm scared." She said that reminded her of a Holocaust-era song in Yiddish, invoking centuries of pogroms, with the refrain "fire, Jews, fire". A veteran campaigner for peace with the Palestinians, Haim said she would no longer pursue that activism. "I'm not able to," she said. "Now what interests me is only my people."

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Q: You've served as director of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem – the world Holocaust remembrance center – for nearly 30 years. You told me before, that the preoccupation with names and the stories of the victims in the Pages of Testimony collection fascinates you. On a deeper level, what does this pursuit mean to you?

"Shimon Peres once said that people are not floating in the air like in Chagall's paintings, because every human being is tied to a specific place. For me, the pursuit of the source of the names, their place of origin, and their roots is a winning combination of history, geography, and textual research in multiple languages. Of course, the fact that we're helping people to get closure and sometimes find living relatives also contributed. Our main work is based on the page of testimony, a personal card briefly describing the identity and a short biography of the Holocaust victim. These are usually filled out by family members, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. While the page of testimony itself is printed in 14 languages, our work involves more than 30 languages."

Q: You've typed countless names into the database of victims' names. You must have encountered some unique stories.

"I worked for years at the Hall of Names desk, where people came and asked for information about their relatives. Once, a man insisted on receiving the original page of testimony, which was forbidden. He kept requesting it until I finally complied. When he had the page in his hands, he stepped aside, turned around, and I heard him recite the Mourner's Kaddish prayer inside the hall. It broke my heart. The page of testimony is a symbolic gravestone because most of the Holocaust victims did not have a grave. This is the reason our work touches the deepest chords of people's souls. To this day, we receive about 1,000 pages of testimony per month. The first one arrived at Yad Vashem in 1954."

Video: PM Netanyahu speaks during the Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 5, 2024

Q: What did early efforts to collect names involve?

"The first protocol of Yad Vashem included a recommendation on how to approach the mission of collecting names – contacting families and requesting them to report missing persons. Another channel was appealing to the archives of the extermination camps, which was, of course, an oxymoron - because there were no records kept at all. Initially, in the 1950s, registration was done by communities, and along the way, the idea of personal commemoration emerged based on the page of testimony, which incidentally is also legally valid.

In 1955, a national campaign to collect testimonials lasted over two years, with registration stations set up across the country. At one point, when organizers were unsatisfied with the public response, teams of pairs went door-to-door asking people to fill out the pages.

Years later, in 1994, we worked in the southern city of Kiryat Gat and the city of Carmiel up north, sending high school students door-to-door. We managed to collect about 30,000 names there, but one of the teams, consisting of two girls didn't return on time. We waited and waited, and they simply didn't come back. Towards evening, they returned pale-faced with tears in their eyes. We didn't understand what happened until they explained to us that the delay was caused by one family filling in more and more pages of testimony. They brought over 100 pages from one family. It was an unforgettable event. In the end, the operation in the 1950s led to the collection of about 800,000 names, and following another operation in April 1999, we collected about 400,000 more."

Q: You've worked on the collection since 1984, locating names from various populations in unconventional places. Where did you find victim names?

"We search everywhere – in schools in Poland, checking Sept. 1939 student lists, realizing the missing Jewish children were murdered. We received pages of testimony from unlikely places like Suriname in South America and Hong Kong, where Jews lived. Inevitably, there will always be someone who lost family in the Holocaust. We even got pages from Monaco, even though it's not exactly the place one tends to think of in the context of the Holocaust. But the Holocaust reached there, and several tens of Jews were sent to the camps from there."

Q: What about locating names in the ultra-Orthodox community?

"In the ultra-Orthodox sector, various forms of commemorating names have developed. In books dealing with religious subjects, there are dedications by the publisher or author to family members who were murdered in the Holocaust. We scanned tens of thousands of books for dedications. We also found many memorial plaques in synagogues with names, and sometimes names on synagogue seats dedicated to victims' memories. We photographed 99% of synagogues and study halls in Israel. In some cases, discarded memorial plaques had to be reassembled from backyards after renovations. We concluded that 65% of the names we found in synagogues were not registered in our database. This is a serious and significant source. Additionally, we attempted to locate more names in cemeteries. Roughly speaking, on one of every ten tombstones in Israel, there are names of Holocaust victims. In the absence of a proper grave for the victims, the family seeks a physical, tangible place to commemorate their memory. I think over the years we have covered over half of the graves in the State of Israel, probably hundreds of thousands of graves."

Q: You had a similar project among Jews from the former Soviet bloc. 

"We made significant efforts to raise their awareness of the importance of the subject because, in the former Soviet Union, the Holocaust was a taboo topic. They had different narratives, and almost no approval was given for commemorative actions. Before the Iron Curtain fell, we received some self-printed testimonials, smuggled out by foreign tourists."

Q: How do you feel when you discover a new name?

"The Nazis wanted to destroy the Jews, and also to annihilate their memory. Therefore, for me, every new name is another victory over the Nazis. I have a picture in my office of a machine developed by IBM and marketed in Europe in the 1930s, which served the Nazis in managing the population census of the Jews in May 1939. Today, we use similar, advanced technology, but for the opposite purpose – to preserve the memory of the Jews and to turn them from numbers into people. For me, it is another victory over the Nazis. But it is important to mention that there is great responsibility in locating the names. Our team is mostly composed of experts in linguistics and philology, proficient in several languages. Our goal is to thoroughly understand the name and interpret it in its historical context, as language changes over time. Sometimes, a single letter can alter the entire meaning. If we attempt to document the name of the victim, and we make a mistake with one letter – everything we did is worthless. That individual will not be remembered, as no one will find them due to the incorrect name."

Q: Nevertheless, errors such as duplicate names might occur, and sometimes it takes time to update names I presume. 

"True, but that doesn't absolve us of responsibility. We try to be as accurate as possible and avoid duplicate names. It's important for us to honor the victims and preserve their memory as accurately as possible, but only those who don't work make no mistakes. Just a month ago, one of the employees at Yad Vashem discovered that her uncle's name was listed with us as a victim, while he survived. It happens from time to time, and it's preferable that these are the kinds of mistakes we make."

Q: Was there a testimonial that moved you deeply?

"In 1999, we executed an extensive computerized project in which we typed more than a million pages of testimonies. One was about a woman who had been sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Her name was Bat Sheva and she was from Kavala, Greece. We had no other details except that she sold ice cream at a school. The person who filled it out was a child who bought ice cream from her, writing he didn't know anything else except that he'd never forget her delicious ice cream, tasting like the madeleine cookies in Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'. The flavors brought emotion and memories to life. We shared this story with all our typists, and I remember time standing still. It was very emotional."

Q: Do you get overcome with emotion often due to your work?

"Our team consists of about 20 people, and they are exposed to extreme emotional situations, both difficult and optimistic. But generally, these are people mainly dealing with death. Some of the team members write about 30 names of victims per day, for years. The pages of testimony also indicate how the victims were murdered, it's incomprehensible. But this work is so important because we are responsible for ensuring that the memory of these people is not erased. There was a case where an employee came to me and said she could no longer type the names of the victims, that it was hard for her, and asked to type the names of survivors instead, thus connecting to the more optimistic aspect of the work."

Q: Some of the victims were children. I suppose this makes coping more difficult and complex.

"It's painful because we have records indicating a child was murdered, but we don't have their name. There are testimonies with the name of an adult who was murdered, and it's noted, for example, that they had three children, sometimes even indicating their gender and age, but without their names. This is because distant relatives filled out the testimony page, but they didn't always remember the names."

Q: It's chilling. They lived, but no one will remember them by their names.

"It's as if they never existed. Every time I encounter such a testimony page I shudder, my heart breaks. Currently, we have no solution for this because the law of privacy in Europe applies to 100 years from birth. Maybe in another 20 years, we will be able to locate the names of the children. It's a little comfort."

Q: When you began working at Yad Vashem, you had approximately one and a half million names, with about 4 million missing. Did you ever imagine you'd gather such a vast number of names over the years?"

"I didn't dare imagine it, but I held onto hope. Now, my dream is to reach 5 million names before retiring next year. That's roughly another 100,000 names by then. Over the years, our team diligently typed countless names into the system, one by one. I've personally inputted thousands of names. Each name stirs something within us, offering a glimmer of hope for continuity. These names have become my life's mission, albeit a challenging one. Every passing day, we exhaust known and potential sources, with fewer survivors and dwindling documentation. It's a constant race against time."

Q: You rely on artificial intelligence. Could this advance lead you to uncover more names?

"Over the past year, artificial intelligence has 'learned' to scan written and photographed testimonies of Holocaust survivors, extracting additional names of victims. The technology keeps improving, allowing us to delve into testimonies provided by tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors over the years, some of whom have passed away, and extract additional names along with detailed information such as full names, birth cities, parents' names, and the last place they were seen. This technology enables us to sift through vast amounts of data and uncover thousands of names in a fraction of the time it would take us manually. However, the machine still requires further training to become more accurate. If successful, there's significant potential here for text scanning on a massive scale within a reasonable timeframe."

Q: Even with artificial intelligence, do we need to accept that some names may never be identified?

"I fear that might be the case. As of January this year, we've documented around 4.9 million names. The mythical figure of 6 million, as mentioned in the Nuremberg trials, is likely closer to 5.8 million in reality. The difficulty lies in knowing that we may never be able to document all the victims, especially in regions where sources are scarce. The issue is that people don't understand that there was never truly a list of 6 million or even 5.8 million. I've encountered people who are genuinely surprised, and astounded, that there are still around a million names of Holocaust victims missing. They ask me, 'Don't you know all the names? We always hear about the six million.' But it doesn't exist, there isn't a comprehensive list of all the victims, just as there isn't an organized list of survivors. In our database, there are over a million names of Jews whose fate is unknown. In Germany, there's currently an attempt to reconstruct the names of Jews who lived in the country between 1933 and 1945, but it's challenging because at the time the Germans certainly didn't document the names of the murdered. They simply annihilated most of them without any record. In contrast, our mission, as stated in the Book of Names, is to engrave the names of the Holocaust's Jewish victims into the world's memory. That's our mission."

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