Hershel Yoffe, his wife Gittel in 1932 311.
(photo credit: Yad Vashem)
X
Dear Reader,
As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before.
Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications,
like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations,
we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open
and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news
and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
As one of our loyal readers, we ask you to be our partner.
For $5 a month you will receive access to the following:
- A user experience almost completely free of ads
- Access to our Premium Section
- Content from the award-winning Jerusalem Report and our monthly magazine to learn Hebrew - Ivrit
- A brand new ePaper featuring the daily newspaper as it appears in print in Israel
Help us grow and continue telling Israel’s story to the world.
Thank you,
Ronit Hasin-Hochman, CEO, Jerusalem Post Group
Yaakov Katz, Editor-in-Chief
UPGRADE YOUR JPOST EXPERIENCE FOR 5$ PER MONTH
Show me later
During the Shoah, an entire world was shattered. The remaining scattered
fragments vary infinitely in size, shape and texture – from documents to
diaries, testimonies to artifacts, photographs to works of art. Despite their
wide dispersion, they can still be found in many places – government and private
archives, libraries, and even in the homes of people who went through the vortex
of the Shoah, and members of their families left behind. Each fragment tells its
own tale and, like a thread, has a beginning and an end. These threads of
information, intersecting and combining, are then woven together into a broad
and deep tapestry that depicts a multifaceted story stretching over time and
space. In this way we can reconstruct as much of the shattered Jewish world as
possible, the events that led to its destruction, and the lives that continued
to be lived while the devastation unfolded.
Since its inception, Yad
Vashem has strived to collect every relevant source of information, each of
which enlightens us in its own unique way about the six million Jews murdered
and the millions more persecuted and victimized during the Holocaust. Yet some
shards remain locked in the memories of those who were there, still waiting to
be expressed in word or art. Others languish in desk or dresser drawers,
in old suitcases, or in shoeboxes. And some are precious, kept close to the
heart and seldom shown to others. The fragments we collect have universal
meaning for us as human beings, national meaning for us as Jews, and often very
personal meaning as well.
AS A child I always knew that my grandmother
Irma, my father’s mother, had been in Auschwitz. My grandmother died in 1970,
when I was still quite young, and all I knew of what she had endured were the
disjointed bits and pieces she had told me. Among other diffuse facts, I
remember her telling me she had engaged in some sort of factory work, and that
she was together the entire time from her deportation to her liberation with her
daughterin- law. At the end of the 1970s, when I first read Raul Hilberg’s
monumental book the Destruction of the European Jews, in which he discusses
labor in Auschwitz, it seemed to me I had learned that she had probably worked
for the giant IG Farben concern.

Quite a few years later, when I was
already director of the Yad Vashem Library, I saw a fragment that told me a bit
more about her travails. It was a deposition my grandmother had written for a
lawyer to obtain compensation from the German government. When the lawyer passed
away, his family sent his entire archive to Yad Vashem. From that document I
learned that my grandmother at some point had been transported from Auschwitz to
Trautenau. It would be a long time before other fragments would come to
light.
Among the millions of documents recently made available to at Yad
Vashem by the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolson, Germany, I found
several references to my grandmother, with the help of my colleagues. She
appears on a list of women prisoners in Parschnitz, which is also known as
Parschnitz-Trautenau, dated October 1944. Directly following her on the list is
her daughter-in-law. So they were definitely together in the camp in autumn
1944. At the head of that list, it says the women were working for AEG. So now
it much more plausible that the factory work my grandmother engaged in was in
Parschnitz, not Auschwitz, and for AEG and not IG Farben. Lastly, on her
daughter- in-law’s ITS registration card, the date she (and most probably my
grandmother) reached Parschnitz is listed as August 1, 1944. According to the
card, the two were in the camp until it was liberated on May 9, 1945 – the last
day of the war in Europe.
So uncovering one thread, following others, and
weaving them together has yielded at least a tiny part of the greater tapestry.
Yet even from such a small illustration there are things we can learn. This
story illustrates that Hungarian Jewish women sent to Auschwitz, later reached
other camps, where they worked and suffered. It shows that companies
besides the infamous IG Farben concern, some still thriving today, were
complicit in their suffering.
So, especially now, as the generation of
survivors dwindles, it is of paramount importance that we dedicate ourselves to
continuing the process of gathering fragments and putting them into context. The
tools of the 21st century – the Internet, social networks, digitization and
international cooperation – offer much hope that we will enrich and expand our
portrait of events. Seventy years after the advent of the systematic mass murder
of the Jews and the coalescence of the Final Solution, it is vital that the
enriched tapestry – and the insights we draw from it – remain in constant view.
The more we further our knowledge of the Holocaust and keep it in our
consciousness, the better chance we have of molding a world free from prejudice,
hatred and crimes against humanity.
To donate Holocaust-related material
to Yad Vashem, please call [in Israel] 1800 25 7777, or email
collect@yadvashem.org.il The writer is director of the Yad Vashem Libraries,
author of Approaching the Holocaust, Texts and Contexts
, Vallentine Mitchell,
2005 and a soon-to-be published study on Hungarian Jewish forced laborers on the
Eastern Front
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>