Father Jacques (born Lucien Bunel) was a Carmelite friar and headmaster of the Petit Collège Sainte-Thérèse de l ' Enfant-Jésus. Angered at Nazi policies, Father Jacques made the boys' school in Avon, France, a refuge for young men seeking to avoid conscription for forced labor in Germany and for Jews. In January 1943, he enrolled three Jewish boys -- Hans-Helmut Michel, Jacques-France Halpern, and Maurice Schlosser -- as students under false names. He also hid a fourth Jewish boy, Maurice Bas, as a worker at the school; sheltered Schlosser's father with a local villager; and placed the noted Jewish botanist, Lucien Weil, on the school's faculty.
Informed of the Carmelite friar's activities, the Gestapo seized Father Jacques and the three Jewish students on January 15, 1944. Weil, his mother, and sister were arrested at their home that same day. On February 3, 1944, German authorities deported the boys and the Weil family to Auschwitz, where they perished. Father Jacques was imprisoned in several Nazi camps before being liberated by American troops at Mauthausen in early May 1945. Suffering from tuberculosis and weighing only 75 pounds, he died several weeks later.
In 1985 the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center, Yad Vashem, posthumously honored Father Jacques as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations." Two years later, French filmmaker Louis Malle paid tribute to his former headmaster in the film, Au revoir les enfants.
(Geheime Staatspolizei). The Nazi Secret State Police. The name was created from the first letter of the German name Geheime Staats Polizei. Established in Prussia in 1933, its power spread throughout Germany after 1936. The Gestapo’s chief purpose was the persecution of Jews and dissident political parties. Under Himmler’s direction, the Gestapo was a prime force in the murder of the six million Jews.
Concentration and extermination camp in upper Silesia, Poland, 37 miles west of Krakow. Established in 1940 originally as a concentration camp, it became an extermination camp in early 1942. Later, it consisted of three sections: Auschwitz I, the main camp; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp; Auschwitz III (Monowitz), the I.G. Farben labor camp, also known as Buna. In addition, Auschwitz had numerous sub-camps.
A camp for men, opened in August 1938, near Linz in northern Austria, Mauthausen was classified by the SS as a camp of utmost severity. Conditions there were brutal, even by concentration camp standards. Nearly 125,000 prisoners of various nationalities were either worked or tortured to death at the camp before liberating American troops arrived in May 1945.
(Gre. Entire Burnt Offering) A term used to refer to the genocidal Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews during World War II.
Zofia Zajd (now Sophie Berkowitz) is the daughter of Chaim Dawid and Doba Zajd. She was born March 3, 1920, in Dzialoszyce, Poland, where her father owned a shoe store. Zofia had four siblings: Mietek, Regina, Rozia and Fela. In 1923, her family moved to Lodz, where they lived through the first six months of World War II.
In March 1940 Zofia moved to Czestochowa to be with her fiance, Jakub Icik Berkowicz. The couple married in the ghetto one month later on April 7, 1940. Zofia was put to work in the Hasag labor camp in Czestochowa, where she remained until the end of the war.
Zofia and her brother, Mietek, were the only survivors of their immediate family. After the war Zofia and Jakub went to find their niece Celina Berkowitz, the daughter of Jakub's brother Sigmund and his wife Cutka.
Shortly before their death in the spring of 1943, Celina's parents placed her in hiding with a Polish Christian by the name of Genowefa Starczewska-Korczak. Genowefa took care of Celina, along with her own two daughters, until her husband was executed by the Germans. Afterwards she was forced to place the three girls in an orphanage in Czestochowa. Genowefa kept in close contact with the children, however, and brought them home every weekend. Celina became very attached to Genowefa, whom she affectionately called Aunt Genia, and was reluctant to leave the Starczewska-Korczak household when Zofia and Jakub found her after the war. Eventually, however, Celina agreed to go with her aunt and uncle, who then formally adopted her. The three made their way to Austria, where they lived in the Bad Gastein displaced persons camp and in Vienna, before immigrating to the United States in 1948.
The Berkowitz family kept in touch with Genowefa after the war and were instrumental in gaining her recognition by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1986.
City in western Poland (renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis), where the first major ghetto was created in April 1940. By September 1941, the population of the ghetto was 144,000 in an area of 1.6 square miles (statistically, 5.8 people per room). In October 1941, 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were sent to the Lodz Ghetto. Those deported from Lodz during 1942 and June-July 1944 were sent to the Chelmno extermination camp. In August-September 1944, the ghetto was liquidated and the remaining 60,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz.
The ghetto was a section of a city where all Jews from the surrounding areas were forced to reside. The Nazis revived the medieval ghetto in creating their compulsory “Jewish Quarter” (Wohnbezirk).Surrounded by barbed wire or walls, the Nazi ghettos were often sealed so that people were prevented from leaving or entering. Established mostly in Eastern Europe (e.g., Lodz, Warsaw, Vilna, Riga, Minsk), the ghettos were characterized by overcrowding, starvation and forced labor. All were eventually destroyed as the Jews were deported to death camps.
(Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the privately owned German industrial companies that used concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Goring Werke.
Term used to describe people driven out of their homes during times of war. The term is often used in reference to Jewish Holocaust refugees.
(Gre. Entire Burnt Offering) A term used to refer to the genocidal Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews during World War II.
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