Fragments of history

A Yad Vashem team travels the country in search of pieces of family memories salvaged from the Holocaust.

By ANAV SILVERMAN
Yonatan Rosen playing his father’s violin (photo credit: YAD VASHEM)
Yonatan Rosen playing his father’s violin
(photo credit: YAD VASHEM)
Orit Noiman, the manager of the “Gathering the Fragments” project of the Archives Division at Yad Vashem, has the opportunity to go back in time every week and collect historical “items that otherwise could become lost.”
“We get around 800 phone calls every year about Holocaust-related materials,” Noiman, 40, told The Jerusalem Post Magazine during one of the trips her team made recently to Ramat Gan. While this time they went to the center of the country, Noiman and her team frequently travel to Haifa, where the largest percentage of Holocaust survivors live today.
Since the “Gathering the Fragments” project of Yad Vashem began in April 2011, in partnership with the Prime Minister’s Office National Heritage Project, the Education Ministry and the Pensioner Affairs Ministry, the national campaign has succeeded in collecting hundreds of thousands of documents, including memoirs, testimonies, letters, diaries, certificates, artifacts, works of art, video footage, and photographs from private individuals living in Israel. While Yad Vashem has a team that goes out to retrieve such historical items on a weekly basis, the Archives Department organizes central collection points twice a year in different parts of the country where people can bring their items.
“Within the span of five years, we have collected over 196,000 items,” said Noiman.
The materials are then conserved, cataloged, scanned and digitized by the Archives Division at Yad Vashem to enable online access to the materials by the wider public, including educators, researchers, curators and students.
“We want the public to have as much access as possible to information about the time period surrounding the Holocaust,” said Noiman.
Noiman, who has worked at Yad Vashem for 12 years and has been in charge of the “Gathering the Fragments” collection campaign for the past three years, said that the most challenging part of the work is the Holocaust era items that do not have much information available about them.
“Oftentimes, the second generation of Holocaust survivors do not have the necessary details about the items that they are contributing. Subsequently, we do a lot of research and investigative work on the items, and have helped solve family mysteries in the process.”
She cited several cases where the children of Holocaust survivors contacted Yad Vashem about items they found among their deceased parents’ possessions, such as a child’s lock of hair or family letters uncovered for the first time. Through further research and investigation, children of Holocaust survivors discover that their parents, who had been previously married before the Holocaust, had had a child or children in Europe whom they never knew about.
“There are children of Holocaust survivors who never knew that they had a half-brother or half-sister who were killed in Europe,” said Noiman, who noted that enough time has passed that such sensitive information can come out, as the children of Holocaust survivors examine the personal effects of parents who have passed away.
“It is painful to uncover such information, but it is important that the memories of those children be preserved,” she believes.
THE MAGAZINE accompanied Noiman and her team to Ramat Gan to visit Holocaust survivor Yonatan Rosen, 83. The conversation with Rosen, a tall man with blue eyes and a ready smile, is recorded as he shares details about the items that he is donating. Another device is used to scan items or materials that Rosen and others that she and her team will be visiting are not willing to part with.
Stepping into Rosen’s apartment, one feels as if one has entered a European home, with its French style and decorations.
Rosen and his late wife, Chana, made aliya from France in 1956, where they had spent their childhood hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust. Rosen was born Jean Rosenzweig in Strasbourg to Jewish parents originally from Poland, who had settled in the 1920s in Metz, France, where Rosen’s father was a Hebrew teacher and the chorus conductor of the synagogue. The family members, along with thousands of other Jews from the region, were forced to flee Metz in September 1939 when Germany occupied the region during World War II.
Yonatan was saved together with his immediate family – his parents and older brother, Marc – thanks to two French families, the Lalandes and Bernadacs, who helped the Rosenzweig family escape the Nazis in France, while Chana and her sister survived the Holocaust in a convent.
In November 1941, the Rosenzweigs, together with the boys’ aunt, arrived to Bordeaux and rented an apartment there, having taken refuge in several other locations previously. They became friendly with their sympathetic neighbors, Marcel Bernadac and his family, who had sons around the ages of Yonatan and Marc and went to school together with them.
Nearly three years later, in June 1944, a Gestapo agent came to the building and rang the doorbell of the Bernadacs, looking for Yonatan’s father, Max. Marcel Bernadac told the Gestapo agent that he was misinformed and that there was no one as he described in the building.
Soon after the agent left, Bernadac ran to tell the Rosenzweigs what had happened and told them to leave immediately. They successfully escaped to another village in southwestern France, just before a truck of Gestapo agents arrived and began questioning the rest of the neighbors, who denied any knowledge of the family.
The Bernadacs and Rosenzweigs continued to stay in touch even after the war for many years, and in 1993 Yad Vashem recognized Marcel Bernadac as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his role in saving the Jewish family at a risk to himself and his family.
“We have to show that we remember that there were good people during those dark times, too,” said Rosen.
He shows Noiman some family photos, documents and a postcard dated April 1942 with a Nazi stamp that was sent from his grandmother in the Piotrków Trybunalski ghetto in Poland to the address where his family was hiding in France, before she was killed in the Treblinka extermination camp.
Rosen believes that Yad Vashem is the best place to preserve his family’s history.
“I think Yad Vashem is the right place to keep such historical items,” Rosen said.
“Things get lost and you need technology to preserve history. It’s good for our nation and for those who survived the Holocaust to have a place where we can keep these important pieces of our past, so that future generations will know what we went through,” he added.
One item that Rosen will not part with is a beautiful violin made in 1924 that he learned to play as a child in France.
“This is my father’s violin,” Rosen explained.
“He never parted from this instrument once during the entire war. He would play his violin during the war and teach the children of friendly neighbors how to play to make some extra cash during those hard times,” Rosen recalled.
“My father began teaching me to play this violin when I was only four.”
Rosen, who has also saved original musical compositions that his father wrote, said that his father bought the Italian- made violin in Berlin.
“The violin is over 90 years old. It is the only thing I have left from the war.”
Moshe Rozenzweig's (Yonatan’s father’s) musical compositions and lyrics dated to 1945, following liberation (photo credit: YAD VASHEM)
Moshe Rozenzweig's (Yonatan’s father’s) musical compositions and lyrics dated to 1945, following liberation (photo credit: YAD VASHEM)
But Rosen, who has two sons, 23 grandchildren and 36 great-grandchildren, offers another reason why the violin is so important to him.
“This violin connects the past and future, because I am now teaching my great-grandson how to play this instrument.”
As Rosen plays a few notes on the historic violin, Noiman has him filmed and a colleague later photographs the violin for the Yad Vashem archive.
“It’s fascinating to hear about the past,” said Noiman after the visit to Rosen. “But what I find most amazing from these visits is to see the continuation of these stories – to see how this generation acclimated to Israel and established a strong connection to the state, in spite of everything.”
For more information, call (02) 644-3888 or email: collect@yadvashem.org.il


Related Tags
holocaust artifacts