An extraordinary moment of historical significance and personal gratitude unfolded Monday evening in Washington when Gene Simmons, the 75-year-old frontman of legendary rock band KISS, encountered Harold "Hal" Urban, a 100-year-old World War II veteran who participated in liberating the concentration camp where Simmons' mother was imprisoned as a teenager.

Their meeting during the American Memorial Day parade marked the first time the two men had met, despite their lives being forever connected by the events of May 1945. Urban, still wearing his original military jacket from the liberation, represented one of the American heroes who helped end the Holocaust's systematic murder of European Jewry.

When Simmons approached Urban during the parade, the rock star's usual theatrical persona gave way to raw emotion. Without his characteristic Kiss makeup, Simmons clasped Urban's hand and delivered words that encapsulated decades of unspoken gratitude, "If there weren't brave people like you – I wouldn't be here, and neither would my mother. I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Urban's memories of liberating Mauthausen remain vivid and traumatic even at age 100. He described the overwhelming stench of burning human remains, emaciated prisoners stumbling in confusion and terror, and the psychological trauma that proved more devastating than conventional combat. His unit buried approximately 500 corpses within 24 hours of the camp's liberation – a grim testament to the Nazi regime's systematic extermination efforts.

While Urban cannot definitively recall meeting Flora Klein, Simmons' mother, during those chaotic liberation days, both were present at Mauthausen when American forces arrived. Klein was just 14 years old, one of thousands of Jewish prisoners whose survival depended entirely on the Allied advance reaching them before the Nazi machinery of death could complete its work.

Proud 100 year old WWII (!!!) veteran, Sgt Urban, was actually one of our troops who liberated my, then 14 yr old Mother from Mathousen Concentration Camp in Nazi Germany. God Bless Our Vets! pic.twitter.com/YVaU7o5CR7

— Gene Simmons (@genesimmons) May 26, 2025

Following the war, Urban returned to civilian life, establishing himself as a farmer in Illinois and raising nine children. However, the psychological wounds from his wartime service, particularly his experiences at the concentration camps, never fully healed. "The psychologist said that when you raise a family, the nightmares subside. And when your children leave home, they return. And that's what happened," Urban reflected.

Simmons, born in Israel to Klein after her immigration following the war, grew up understanding his mother's Holocaust survival in only the broadest terms. Klein, like many survivors, rarely discussed her experiences in detail. Only in recent years has Simmons learned the complete scope of how narrowly his existence depended on historical circumstances beyond anyone's control.

"She was in the camp at age 14," Simmons explained. "She hardly talked about it at all. Now I know how close I came to losing everything."

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Dr. Tamar Katko is a historian and educator specializing in the World War II period. She heads the Secondary Humanities Teaching Track at Kibbutzim College and serves as curator of the Jewish Fighter in World War II Museum named after President Chaim Herzog.

Dr. Tamar Katko believes Victory Day over Nazi Germany, which falls on May 9, is an appropriate time to discuss the approximately one and a half million Jews who fought in World War II. Their names don't make headlines, but their magnificent history often reaches you at the Jewish Fighter Museum in Latrun, which you helped found and where you serve as chief curator. The story of Corporal Samuel Elyakim (Sam) Schwartz, for instance, is beyond comprehension.

"Schwartz came from an Orthodox Jewish family that immigrated from Hungary to the US in 1939. He didn't fit in at the yeshiva due to behavioral issues, so he found himself wandering the streets without knowing a word of English. When World War II broke out, friends from the neighborhood suggested he enlist with them."

"He volunteered for the 82nd Airborne Division and served as a paratrooper in the headquarters company of the 504th Regiment. He was trained in special forces and emerged as a brave paratrooper and commander who carried out operations in enemy territory under constant life-threatening conditions. Among other missions, he participated in battles in North Africa, the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, and in Germany. With his unit comrades, he rescued several Holocaust survivors at Dachau camp and brought them to the US for treatment after the war. For his actions, he received dozens of medals for bravery, and he is even buried with his wife in Jerusalem."

What happened to him after the war ended?

"He returned home and informed his family of his return. They looked at him, with all his uniforms and medals, and his father announced they were willing to consider taking him back into the family – only if he removed all the 'costumes' he was wearing and returned to study at the yeshiva, without hearing a word about what he went through during the war. Schwartz agreed, returned to the yeshiva, became a rabbi, and locked away all his uniforms and medals in a sealed safe. Eventually, he had four daughters, none of whom knew or heard about their father's heroism during the war."

When was his story revealed?

"When Schwartz's daughters arrived to pay condolence calls to one of the people Schwartz had rescued during the war. In the living room were photo albums, and on one of the pages, those present told about the picture of that American hero who saved Jews, a brave hero discussed even at military academies and the White House."

"One of Schwartz's daughters, Drey Chaya Hochstein, said the man in the picture looked familiar, and when she asked his name – she nearly fainted. She said it couldn't be possible because her father was also named Samuel Elyakim Schwartz, but he hadn't participated in any war. They told her to check again. Eventually, she found the safe containing his will and uniforms."

And the story branches out, because then she called you.

"She told me she tried to interest the Yad Vashem Museum in the will, but they weren't interested. That's how the uniforms and medals came to our museum. She flew to Israel and bought a separate seat for her father's uniform so it wouldn't get wrinkled. The museum in Washington offered her a legendary sum for this jacket, but she decided to bring it to us. We built an entire display case around Schwartz's uniform and story. In the end, Dale Hochstein made aliyah following her father, who is buried here, and today we're even neighbors. When people from the US military visit our museum, they're amazed – because they study his tactics, but his own family barely knew who he was."

Galloping toward death

About Polina Gelman, the Jewish woman, some have heard a bit more, but she, too, is not really a well-known figure.

"Despite her physical unsuitability due to her short height – less than 4.9 feet – and after her tireless persistence, she was accepted to a flight and navigation course and recruited to the women's regiment in the Soviet Red Army Air Force. Because of her small hands, her flight gloves slipped off every time she launched a bomb. Despite these seemingly problematic physical attributes, in 1942, she was assigned to an operational flight unit and began missions bombing German targets. She bombed force concentrations, fuel depots, anti-aircraft batteries, searchlights, bridges, vehicles, and caused significant damage to the Germans. In total, she completed 857 missions, logged 1,300 flight hours, and dropped 113 tons of bombs, earning her the Hero of the Soviet Union award."

There's also Colonel Mordechai Frizis, a Jewish fighter who became a national hero of Greece.

"At the outbreak of World War II, as a Lieutenant Colonel, he commanded a Greek battalion against the Italian attack in northern Greece, on the Albanian front. His soldiers truly admired him, and in the Kalama sector, he managed to break the Italian attack and force the Italian troops to retreat, leaving behind hundreds of dead and about 700 prisoners. Some saw this as the first victory for the Allies in World War II."

"The next day, on December 5, 1940, his unit was attacked by Italian aircraft. Although he ordered everyone else in his unit to take cover to avoid being targeted by the aircraft, he continued to command from horseback and refused to dismount while galloping and encouraging his men with the battle cry 'Aeras' (courage). During this attack, he was killed by aircraft fire. For his bravery and courage, he was awarded the Gold Medal. He became one of Greece's national heroes, with his statue erected in the main square of his hometown, Chalkis, and in the courtyard of the military museum in Kalpaki, in northwestern Greece. Twenty-five streets in various cities across Greece, including the capital Athens, bear his name."

And there are no streets named after him in Israel. The name Haviva Reik is also less well-known to the general public. Hannah Szenes, on the other hand, is known to all of us. Why is that?

"That's a wonderful question. To create memory consciousness, you need to work at it. You need to write about the subject of memory, work on embedding the memory, and promote it. But the Reik family, to answer your question, mostly from Kibbutz Ma'anit, members of Hashomer Hatzair, were modest people who didn't come from an aristocratic background like the Szenes family – and they didn't succeed in promoting the memory consciousness of Haviva Reik. Hannah Szenes's father, on the other hand, was Bela Szenes – a publicist, writer, and author. That apparently filtered through."

It's easier to promote memory consciousness that way.

"Add to that the fact that Szenes came to Nahalal and abandoned her bourgeois image. She became a country girl from Nahalal who worked in the chicken coop and cowshed, yet still wrote in hiding, because writing was perceived as a bourgeois act. Although Haviva Reik also rode Vespas in Slovakia, cut her hair, and dressed like a pioneer, her family didn't engage in promoting her memory."

"For Hannah Szenes, they held a funeral that passed through all the cities in the country, and her honor remains intact, but it's also worth remembering Haviva's activities: she organized Jewish refugees in Slovakia, created an underground network with partisans, and smuggled them to the mountains. In the end, she was caught during a struggle and paid with her life. She was fire and brimstone, yet almost nothing is known about her. That's the shaping of memory consciousness. It depends on who invests in it, and who has the desire to preserve a certain figure that serves cultural and social needs, a figure that will be remembered and become an icon."

Nordau's DNA

And here are more figures whose past we've forgotten: most of us don't really remember that Ezer Weizman or Haim Laskov also fought in World War II.

"Laskov was in the Brigade along with Meir Zorea and Israel Tal. Ezer Weizman was a driver in North Africa. You haven't heard much about it because it doesn't fit our national ethos. After Weizman heard in a telegram that his cousin, pilot Michael Weizman, the son of Chaim Weizman, was killed over the Bay of Biscay in the North Atlantic Ocean, he decided that he too wanted to be a pilot. He persisted until they transferred him to flight training."

"The first 12 generals in the IDF were from the Brigade, three IDF Chiefs of Staff came from the British Army, along with two presidents – Ezer Weizman and Chaim Herzog. Most of the commanders who shaped the IDF were World War II veterans, but this conflicts with the narrative of the Palmach, Irgun, and Lehi, whose stories are remembered by most of us."

These were more grassroots, Hebrew, nationalist organizations.

"And World War II is associated with the diaspora. It's impossible to build a national ethos of beautiful blondes and fine figures based on a diaspora story with fighters who received medals from the British Army. We needed here the image of the new Jew, the pioneer, the buddy. Rabin, for example."

What else doesn't fit the narrative?

"That in World War II, we had 1,700 people from the Jewish settlement who enlisted in the British Army and were prisoners in Greece, in German captivity. They were tortured, starved, some escaped, and some returned in waves. Among them, for instance, was Shimon Peres' father, Yitzhak Perski. What happened to all those liberated prisoners? We didn't hear about it because it didn't fit the narrative. What image does a prisoner or captive have, when our desire was to establish a state that would represent the image of the strong Jew, the sabra, the one who doesn't surrender? There are things that weren't displayed in our showcase. The Holocaust, on the other hand, was portrayed on a different scale, inconceivable, and alongside victims and crimes against humanity, there were also quite a few heroic elements of Jewish heroes."

But your claim is that we mainly remember the victims, not the male and female fighters.

"We adopted the image that a Jew is a good merchant, a good banker, scientist, writer, poet, wonderful musician, philosopher. But a fighter? That's not in the Jewish DNA."

Max Nordau and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, for example, would not agree with you.

"Nordau's 'Muscular Judaism' tried to change that perception – that is, we are not the limp Jew. And indeed, many fighters adopted this new DNA. When Jewish fighters from various armies arrived in Europe, they understood that Holocaust victims could easily have been them or their parents. It hit them hard and also shook their integration in the countries they came from, because they didn't want to be Jews in antisemitic countries. However, most of them didn't immigrate to Israel, they weren't Zionists, and therefore most of them aren't mentioned in our history."

"Nails in the Nazis' throats"

How would you characterize the nature of Jewish fighters in World War II?

"They had an urge to prove that 'we are not like you think we are.' They tried to prove it in school sports classes and outside school hours as well. This means that Jews showed they don't avoid danger, don't avoid responsibility, they're the first to charge, to take responsibility. My father, for instance, who was among the leaders of the Sonderkommando revolt, eliminated Nazis and skewered them with nails in their throats."

"Jews proved they would fulfill any mission as army soldiers. When Jewish fighters saw the sights at Auschwitz, and were subsequently the first to rush toward Berlin and conquer it, with that energy from Auschwitz, they simply wrecked Berlin, destroyed every evidence of Nazism. This doesn't necessarily characterize Jews, but it was important for them to show Jewish power, and that's how they would want us to remember it."

This raises questions for me about October 7 – how will they remember and teach the events of this terrible massacre? How will they present the hostages, the military's failure?

"The Jewish people don't like to learn from the past. We tend to skip over our history, consciously or unconsciously. We have uncracked layers regarding our relationship with the past, with our history. I hope that the memory of October 7 will be meaningful. This is an event that must enter our memory consciousness, even if it doesn't make us feel good. Fighters must understand their history to understand why they charge forward. Citizens must understand what happened here to understand why they choose to live here. And if they don't have an answer – that's a fundamental problem."

"I also deal with this in a new course I built at Kibbutzim College – 'Ceremonial Rituals: Their Place in Education and Shaping Memory Consciousness.' The course brings up the raw and unedited past, and its purpose is to look at the history of ceremonies, rituals of worship, and what they address from a community and human perspective.

"I believe that this raw completeness, the exposure to the difficult raw materials from the current war and those that preceded it, is essential to create a complete memory consciousness. To truly understand where we came from and where we're going, we must not discard anything. The antithesis to this is sweeping under the carpet, which could harm us. We will grow from this great fire that happened to us on October 7. My father always said that the soot from a burned forest is the best fertilizer. The greenest leaves grow from the most burned forests. But for that, we must not forget."

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The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum is set to showcase a collection of Disney-inspired artworks created by Holocaust survivors and victims. These rare pieces, including a Pinocchio-adorned jar buried to escape Nazi persecution and a Mickey Mouse birthday card preserved for over seven decades, offer a unique window into how Jews, especially children, found solace and expression through familiar cartoon characters during one of history's darkest periods.

For 80 years, these artworks remained hidden, some wrapped, damaged, or concealed, yet they managed to survive the journey from concentration camps and ghettos. Often the sole possessions of Holocaust survivors, they have now found their way into Yad Vashem's collections.

As part of the "relocation" to the new Shaffer collections center, which houses millions of historical artifacts – objects, documents, artworks, and photographs from countless sources – artistic treasures created by Jews during the Holocaust have been uncovered. Most of these were made by children and teenagers who expressed their emotions through works featuring characters familiar to almost everyone – Walt Disney films.

"One of the most touching Disney drawings was created in March 1941, at the height of the war, inspired by the film 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,'" curator Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, director of Yad Vashem's Art Collection, says. "Henri Kichka, father of Michel Kichka, was then a 15-year-old boy who had lost his family in the gas chambers and found refuge in the magical world of fairy tales. After the war, he returned to Brussels and collected items from the family apartment, including this drawing which he gave to his daughter Hanna, who immigrated to Israel in 1970. Hanna passed the drawing to her son Yaron, who received a dedication from his grandfather – 'To Yaron, from his grandpa.'"

Drawing to survive

Kichka was not the only one who found comfort in Disney films. Suzanne Schick was 14 when she fled Austria at the outbreak of World War II and hid in Yugoslavia with about 1,200 Jews awaiting immigration permits to Israel. On her 15th birthday, her friends prepared a gift – a box with a drawing of a ship and a Mickey Mouse greeting, which she kept close to her heart for 72 years as the last memory of her childhood, until she entrusted it to Yad Vashem for future generations.

Another item, one of the most prominent artworks created during the Holocaust using cartoon characters, is a colorful jar featuring Pinocchio. The jar was created before the war by artist Lilly Kasticher from Yugoslavia. "When the war broke out and she was deported with her family to Auschwitz, Lilly buried the jar in the ground along with documents and photographs as a hope to preserve a last memory," explains curator Michael Tal, manager of Yad Vashem's Artifacts Collection. "Lilly encouraged her fellow prisoners to write poems and draw in order to survive, and after the war, she even brought the creations to Israel inside the jar she had buried in the ground."

The collections center, spanning 63,300 square feet, includes four underground floors and an additional floor housing five of the world's most advanced laboratories for preserving paper, photographs, artifacts, textiles, and art. The center will preserve about 227 million pages of documentation, tens of thousands of artifacts and artworks, and hundreds of thousands of photographs and testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

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Candace Owens, a prominent conservative media personality, has ignited controversy with recent remarks about World War II and the Holocaust, prompting swift backlash online.

In a YouTube episode titled, "Literally Hitler. Why Can't We Talk About Him?", Owens appeared to downplay the atrocities of Nazi Germany while criticizing the Allies' post-war actions. She questioned the taboo surrounding Hitler discussions, stating, "We have been indoctrinated and we actually know nothing about the person other than the fact that we must fear him."

Owens suggested that education about Nazi Germany is a form of indoctrination, comparing it to "Soviet tactics of introducing really heavy concepts to kids while their brains are developing because you want to traumatize them." She further claimed this was done to ensure compliance with a narrative portraying Hitler as "the greatest evil that's ever happened on earth, even though factually and statistically it is not. Why is he the most evil?"

She then made controversial assertions about Allied actions after World War II, claiming they "ethnically cleansed 12 million Germans... in the exact same [concentration] camps that we then transferred the Germans into so that we could mass kill them." She described the Holocaust as "an ethnic cleansing [that] almost took place," while asserting that the Allies "actually did [an ethnic cleansing]."

Candace Owens has completely lost her mind. Blinded by Jew hatred, she's not resorted to defending Hitler. https://t.co/bQqeGn9qM4

— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) July 10, 2024

These statements drew sharp criticism from various public figures. Adam Milstein, a philanthropist, responded on X, saying, "Candace Owens has completely lost her mind. Blinded by Jew hatred, she's now resorted to defending Hitler." International human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky went further, accusing Owens of having "gone full-blown Neo-Nazi."

Owens also cast doubt on the well-documented medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, describing them as sounding like "bizarre propaganda." She said, "The idea that they just cut a human up and then sewed them back together. Why would you do that? Even if you're the most evil person in the world, that's a tremendous waste of time and supplies."

The Combat Antisemitism Movement responded to these comments on X, stating, "It is an established fact that SS officer Josef Mengele performed deadly experiments on Jewish twins during the Holocaust. Not 80 years later, Candace Owens tries to rewrite history by denying these depraved acts ever happened. Utterly repugnant." Adam Goldman, chief editor of the NYU Review, summed up the sentiment of many critics, saying it was "Hard to go much lower than this."

It is an established fact that SS officer Josef Mengele performed deadly experiments on Jewish twins during the Holocaust.

Not 80 years later, @RealCandaceO tries to rewrite history by denying these depraved acts ever happened.

Utterly repugnant. pic.twitter.com/1RdLn35wLm

— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) July 10, 2024

In her video, Owens drew comparisons between Nazi scientists and US institutions, mentioning the CIA and Planned Parenthood. She said, "We took all of those top Nazi scientists and we brought them to America. I wonder why we did that. Maybe for a little more experimentation. Have you ever heard of the CIA? If you think experimentation is unique to the Nazis, you need to wake up. You heard of Planned Parenthood? They literally tell you to abort your children if they have special needs."

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Leon Gautier, the last surviving member of the French commando unit that waded ashore on D-Day alongside allied troops to begin the liberation of France, died on Monday. He was 100 years old.

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Gautier was one of 177 French green berets who stormed the Normandy beaches defended by Hitler's forces in 1944. French President Emmanuel Macron described Gautier and his comrades as "heroes of the Liberation". "We will not forget him," Macron wrote on Twitter.

Just last month, Gautier presented a student marine commando with his green beret at a passing out parade at Colleville-Montgomery, near the spot where he had landed on Sword Beach in a hail of enemy fire at the age of 21. In a poignant moment during that ceremony, the young marine knelt on one knee to allow Gautier, who was in a wheelchair, to straighten his beret.

Gautier spoke to Reuters in 2019 at his house several hundred meters from the remnants of a German bunker he and comrades from the special forces of French Captain Philippe Kieffer had secured before pushing inland.

He recalled how he had been too young to join the army when Hitler's forces occupied France in World War Two, and so enrolled in the navy. He was on board one of the last French warships to sail for Britain to join the Free French Forces of General Charles de Gaulle as the Germans swept across the northern half of France in 1940.

Decades later he still grappled with the violence of war. "War is a misery. Not all that long ago, and perhaps you find this silly, but I would think 'perhaps I killed a young lad, perhaps I orphaned children, perhaps I widowed a woman or made a mother cry'," he said. "I didn't want that. I'm not a bad man. You kill a man who's done nothing to you. That's war and you do it for your country."

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Heinz Böhme met Ludwig Jonas all the way back in 1984. Böhme, then a doctor in his 50s, decided to organize all the art brochures and catalogs he had collected during his many trips to conferences and lectures around the world. As he was throwing out a heap he deemed unimportant, a red catalog caught his eye. 

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Böhme pulled it out of the bin. On the cover of the brochure the name "Jonas'' appeared in white, that of a fairly unknown painter at the time, and on the pages of the catalog, pictures of an exhibition held in Berlin under the auspices of the Israeli Embassy in Germany, including photographs of the artist's paintings. The unconventional way how the works were presented piqued Böhme's curiosity and made him wonder who Jonas was.

Jonas' biography revealed that he and Böhme had a few things in common. Böhme was mainly interested in the fact that Jonas - a Jew born in 1887 in Bromberg, which was in East Prussia at the end of the 19th century and is now part of Poland - studied medicine like him, but decided to abandon the promising profession in favor of developing his skills as a painter.

In 1909, Jonas joined the School of Applied Arts in Berlin, studied with some of the greatest German painters of the time, continued his studies in Paris, and after World War I, when he served as a volunteer in field clinics, became one of the most promising impressionists in Germany.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jonas fled to France. From there he immigrated two years later to pre-state Israel and settled in Jerusalem. He continued to paint and exhibit his works, but died of an illness at the early age of 55, more or less around the time Böhme discovered him and his work.

Due to WWII and the persecution of Jews, Jonas' artistic career was cut short and his name was almost completely erased. After his death, his widow Lottie established an art gallery in their Jerusalem home. She would raffle off Jonas' paintings, to encourage local art enthusiasts to visit. In the 1950s the house was demolished, and the gallery moved to another location.

After discovering Jonas' works, "I started looking for his paintings," Böhme, 91, told Israel Hayom. "To date, I have purchased about a dozen of his works. Jonas painted a great many portraits, and faces have always interested me. Perhaps because of my medical practice." It fascinated me how his art career was cut short, and I asked myself whether other artists met the same fate. 

And so, following in the footsteps of Jonas' story, Böhme began a journey of over four decades after the "lost generation" – artists whose professional careers faded in between the two world wars, because they were persecuted by the Nazis for being Jews or were political opponents of the regime. 

Böhme began to acquire the works of these artists at auctions as well as from collectors and relatives. After accumulating several hundred works, he decided to establish in his current city of residence, Salzburg, a museum where his private collection will be displayed, the Museum "Art of the Lost Generation," the only of its kind in Europe.  

His collection consists of about 600 works. Although established five years ago and located in the heart of Salzburg's old city - not far from Mozart's birthplace - this unique museum is almost unknown outside a small circle of enthusiasts. For example, it only recently hosted a senior official of the Salzburg municipality, who learned of the museum's existence from local TV. 

In his almost detective-like research work, Böhme revealed not only the works of the "lost generation," but also their life stories, which often ended in the most tragic way.

One such story is that of Rudolf Levy, who was born in the Prussian city of Stettin (modern-day Poland) in 1875 to a well-established Jewish family. He moved to Berlin, where he first worked as a carpenter before enrolling at the age of 20 at the art academy in Karlsruhe, and later at a private painting school in Munich, where he met, among others, the renowned painter of his generation, Paul Klee. Later, Levy continued his studies at Henri Matisse's studio in Paris.

In WWI, Levy volunteered in the German military and fought in its ranks on French soil. After the war, he established his own painting school in Berlin, but when the Nazis came to power he left the country. Many of his paintings were defined by the Nazis as "degenerate art" and confiscated. Levy came to the United States, but before WWII returned to Europe yet again, and when the war broke out he found himself in Italy unable to leave due to financial reasons.

Despite his friends' warnings, he continued to appear in public, and in 1943, was arrested after being captured in Florence by Gestapo agents posing as art dealers. In January 1944, Levy was transferred to a concentration camp in northern Italy, which was a transit camp to Auschwitz.

Samuel Solomonovich Granovsky, born in 1889 in the city now known as Dnipro in Ukraine, studied painting in Odesa and Munich, and in 1910 settled in Montparnasse, the artists' quarter of Paris at the time. Alongside his work as a painter, he was also a model for other painters and earned a living as a cleaner in a cafe.

Granovsky quickly became known as a talented painter, mainly thanks to his nude paintings, and he was very active in various artist circles in the City of Light. In 1942, he was arrested by the French police as part of the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup – the most extensive arrest operation of Jews in occupied France – and sent to the Drancy concentration camp, and from there to his death in Auschwitz.

Mommie Schwarz, who was born in 1876 in the Netherlands, also studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp and was considered a promising abstract painter, when he was arrested with his wife by the Nazis in Amsterdam in 1942 and murdered a few days later in Auschwitz.

And there is also the story of Martha Bernstein, daughter of Julius Bernstein, professor of physiology and rector of Halle University in Germany, and of pianist Sophia Levy.

Born in 1874, Bernstein grew up in Imperial Germany, which did not allow women to study painting in higher education institutions and state academies, but only in private schools, and where a woman choosing a career as a painter was extremely frowned upon. 

She first studied at a private school in Munich, and from there she moved to Paris, which embraced female painters from all over Europe, and she also studied at the Matisse Academy. When she returned to Berlin she joined the Secession, an artistic protest movement against institutional art, and was a significant part of the modernist movement in German art.

In 1923, Bernstein married conductor Max Christian Neuhaus, who later became the music editor of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. She was persecuted by the Nazis for being Jewish and a painter and managed to find refuge in Switzerland, where one of her two brothers lived. After the end of the war, she returned to Germany, where she died in 1955.

The case of the painter Alfred Schwarzschild is quite unusual: he was born in 1874 to a wealthy Jewish family from Frankfurt. From a young age, he showed artistic talent, and in adulthood, he was sent to study at the art academies of Karlsruhe and Munich. He began exhibiting regularly even before WWI, after which he became a highly sought-after portrait painter among Munich's elite.

His success was interrupted when the Nazis came to power. To make a living, Schwarzschild switched to painting landscape postcards. Thanks to his great talent, the Nazis allowed him to continue this activity, and also ordered postcards from him, on the condition that he would not sign them. In 1936, Schwarzschild managed to immigrate with his family to Britain. For a while, he was detained on the Isle of Man, but upon his release moved to London, where he died in 1948.

His daughter, Theodora Starker, served as a model for the most popular postcards Schwarzschild created for the Nazis. Today, aged 90, she lives in New Zealand, and has transferred her father's entire artistic estate to the Museum "Art of the Lost Generation."

"The primary goal of the museum is to rediscover the works of these artists and present them to the general public," Böhme said. "The creativity of these artists was broken during the Nazi period, and we are bringing it back to life. But what is important, beyond the exposure of the works, is the exposure of the unknown biographies of the artists – what happened to them, what they experienced, and what their fate was. My intention was not only to bring people to the museum to see these works of art, but to teach them about what happened at that time. Through the works and the stories of life, the past can be explained better, and this is our contribution to the present.

"People ask, 'How can we fight antisemitism?' This is one of the ways. To create interest in history in a different way, and not to retell what is already known. Here we create a different basis for coping: with each painting, we tell the accompanying life story, which is sometimes reflected in the painting as well, and people develop different attention. Locating the works takes a lot of time. It's painstaking. We search all over the world.

"Today we have five art historians working with us. There is a person in the US who sends me emails several times a week, with information about places where you can find works by artists from the lost generation. Some people donate works they have in their possession. Some wish to remain anonymous. In the past, these works could be purchased cheaply. Today, they already say at auctions 'If Böhme is interested in it, there is a reason for it', and the prices are rising.

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"It is important to note that we are not a Jewish museum. Most of the artists were Jews, but there are also communist artists and non-Jewish artists who were persecuted by the Nazis. We do not limit ourselves to Jewish artists, nor do we collect works of the well-known artists of the time. I am interested in what happened to the disciples of famous painters. For example, Max Beckmann. Who knows who his disciples were? They are not shown in museums and experts do not know about them. We have collected 90 works by his students, and we are planning an exhibition of them in the coming months."

Although Böhme himself prefers not to highlight this, he too belongs to the "lost generation." He was born in Leipzig in 1932, a few months before the Nazis came to power in Germany. To this day, he does not speak of his family's story during the Holocaust. 

"This collection is also intended to commemorate my family," he said. Böhme also expressed concern for the future of the collection and the museum. "Until now, I have covered all the expenses out of my own pocket. There is no support, not from the Austrian government, not from the state of the province, not from the municipality of Salzburg. This initiative, and the story it conveys, should be passed onto future generations."

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A collection of 700 jewels belonging to the wife of a billionaire businessman who grew his wealth as a member of the Nazi Party came up for auction through Christie's auction house in London on May 10.

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Anticipated to fetch $150 million, the collection was to be sold all together and one of the most sought-after pieces, the Sunrise Ruby, was said to be worth $15 to $20 million on its own.

"This sale is indecent … this sale is also to finance a foundation with the mission to safeguard the name of a former Nazi for posterity," said Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France.

The jewels were previously owned by Heidi Horten, who was married to Helmut Horten. She inherited a billion dollars upon his passing in 1987. Heidi died in June 2022.

Many of the jewels ended up fetching much lower prices than estimated. The Sunrise Ruby sold for 13 million francs ($14.6 million). A diamond ring believed to be worth as much as 3.2 million francs sold for about $1.28 million.

However, ultimately the collection did sell above its lower estimates, earning $156 million.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center called on Christie's to put the sale on hold so that further research of any connections to "Nazi-era acquisitions are completed. Don't reward those whose families may have gained riches from targeted Jews."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The post Nazi-linked jewels set record of $156M at auction appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Ex-Lebanese Justice Minister Ashraf Rifi told Lebanon's MTV in recent days that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah is like the Vichy regime of France during World War II, and that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah should stand trial for betraying Lebanon, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

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"I won't be tagged [as an enemy] by an Iranian agent. I don't need an integrity certificate from him. He needs to stand trial for his crimes against Lebanon," said Rifi, in an interview recorded and translated by MEMRI.

"We need people who are 100% Lebanese, and not agents of Iran. Who receive weapons from Iran, training from Iran, and who work for the Iranian project," he said.

"These are historical delusions that the Iranian regime lives in. It wants to restore the great Persian empire. This is a historical illusion that ended 1,400 years ago and will not ever return," he added.

"Take for example France during the Second Lebanon War. There were people who cooperated with the Nazi regime with the excuse that they were being realists. And there were other people, free people with principles, who refused to cooperate with the Nazi occupation. They extended a hand to the Allies and freed their country. I want to go in this process, more or less," said the former minister.

"We as Lebanese cannot do this by ourselves, but we cannot in any way give legitimacy to Hezbollah and its illegal weapons. Until the right moment comes from a regional and global perspective in which we can liberate the homeland as France did in the Second World War.

"I want to remind all Lebanese that those who collaborated with the Nazi occupation, the Vichy Regime of General Petain, they were all tried for betraying the homeland and here too the same will happen," he said.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Romanian officials commemorated for the first time the victims of the sinking of the Struma 80 years ago, which was carrying hundreds of Holocaust survivors from Romania.

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The ceremony took place on Tuesday in the coastal town of Constanţa, in southern Romania, from where the ship left port in 1941 with around 770 people, including more than 100 children and 10 crew members.

A Red Army submarine mistook the Struma for a hostile vessel after Turkish authorities towed it away from the dock in Istanbul and left it in international waters without a working engine or anchor. Only one person survived.

During the ceremony, which was attended by around 80 people, Romanian Rear Admiral Mihai Panait, the country's Navy commander-in-chief, and Florin Goidea, the port director of Constanţa, laid wreaths on the waters next to the wharf where the Struma set sail.

"This is the first time that Romania has officially commemorated the tragedy of Struma on its soil and it is part of the efforts of successive governments in recent years to confront the past and the events of the Holocaust era, when the half of the country's Jewish community was murdered," said Israeli Ambassador to Romania David Saranga.

The Struma was trying to carry nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Mandatory Palestine when it was sunk on Feb. 24, 1942.

It was the largest civilian Black Sea naval disaster of World War II.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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The post Romania holds first commemoration for victims of Struma shipwreck appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.