Media Essay
Antisemitism - ID Card/Oral History
The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.
Johanna (Hanne) Hirsch
Hanne was born to a Jewish family in the German city of Karlsruhe. Her father, Max, was a photographer. When he died in 1925, Hanne's mother, Ella, continued to maintain his studio. In 1930 Hanne began public school.
1933-39: In April 1933 Hanne's family's studio, like the other Jewish businesses in Karlsruhe, was plastered with signs during the anti-Jewish boycott: "Don't buy from Jews." At school, a classmate made Hanne so furious with her taunts that she ripped her sweater. After the November 1938 pogroms the studio was busy making photos for the new ID cards marked "J" that Jews had to carry. The studio remained open until December 31 when all Jewish businesses had to be closed.
1940-44: In 1940 Hanne and her family were deported to Gurs, a Vichy detention camp on the French-Spanish border. She learned from a social worker there that a pastor in Le Chambon village wanted to bring children out of the camp. This social worker, from the Children's Aid Society, got Hanne out. Being free was heavenly. But by 1942 the German roundups reached even to Le Chambon and she was sent to hide at two different farms. The farmers were glad to help. One said, "Even if we have less, we want to help more people." In early 1943 Hanne escaped to Switzerland.
After the war, Hanne lived in various cities in Switzerland. In 1945 she married Max Liebmann and three years later she immigrated with her husband and daughter to the United States.
Item ViewBella Jakubowicz Tovey describes antisemitic remarks made as she was forced to march into the Graeben camp
Bella was the oldest of four children born to a Jewish family in Sosnowiec. Her father owned a knitting factory. After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they took over the factory. The family's furniture was given to a German woman. Bella was forced to work in a factory in the Sosnowiec ghetto in 1941. At the end of 1942 the family was deported to the Bedzin ghetto. Bella was deported to the Graeben subcamp of Gross-Rosen in 1943 and to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. She was liberated in April 1945.
Item ViewAbraham Lewent describes performing forced labor in Warsaw and increased Polish antisemitism
Like other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. US troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.
Item ViewBenjamin (Ben) Meed describes Warsaw after the German occupation in 1939 and first experiencing antisemitism
Ben was one of four children born to a religious Jewish family. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the Germans occupied Warsaw, Ben decided to escape to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. However, he soon decided to return to his family, then in the Warsaw ghetto. Ben was assigned to a work detail outside the ghetto, and helped smuggle people out of the ghetto—including Vladka (Fagele) Peltel, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), who later became his wife. Later, he went into hiding outside the ghetto and posed as a non-Jewish Pole. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, Ben worked with other members of the underground to rescue ghetto fighters, bringing them out through the sewers and hiding them on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. From the "Aryan" side of Warsaw, Ben witnessed the burning of the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising. After the uprising, Ben escaped from Warsaw by posing as a non-Jew. Following liberation, he was reunited with his father, mother, and younger sister.
Item ViewSamuel Gruber describes a German girl's reaction to learning that he was Jewish
A Polish soldier, Samuel was wounded in action and taken by Germany as a prisoner of war. As the war continued, he and other Jewish prisoners received increasingly harsh treatment. Among the camps in which he was interned was Lublin-Lipowa, where he was among those forced to build the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1942, he escaped from the Germans, spending the rest of the war as the leader of an armed partisan group.
Item ViewHanne Hirsch Liebmann describes harassment and anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany
Hanne's family owned a photographic studio. In October 1940, she and other family members were deported to the Gurs camp in southern France. In September 1941, the Children's Aid Society (OSE) rescued Hanne and she hid in a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Her mother perished in Auschwitz. In 1943, Hanne obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland. She married in Geneva in 1945 and had a daughter in 1946. In 1948, she arrived in the United States.
Item ViewLiliana Guzenfiter
An only child of middle-class Jewish parents, Liliana was raised in a mixed neighborhood of Christians and Jews in Poland's capital. Her father ran a jewelry business and was a reserve officer in the Polish army; her mother was a housewife. Liliana dreamed of going to the Sorbonne and becoming Poland's second female district attorney.
1933-39: The worst part of going to school was being harassed and called a "filthy Jew." Liliana petitioned to enter a prestigious Catholic high school where she was exempted from attending Saturday classes, but like other Jewish students, she was seated separately and shoved in the halls and staircases. After a few weeks she quit, and attended a Jewish high school until it was closed by the occupying Germans in September 1939.
1940-44: After the Jews were forced into the ghetto, Liliana became a slave laborer in the Toebbens factory. By April 1943 her family was dead and the ghetto was ablaze and in revolt. She hunkered down in her factory until the Germans came to get them on May 8. In a rage Liliana grabbed a pair of scissors, but before she could do anything a German smashed her in the head with his rifle butt. She lifted her arm to protect herself and he smashed her again and again, knocking her out. When Liliana woke up the next day she was in a dark, crowded cattle car.
Liliana survived as a slave laborer in the Majdanek and Skarzysko-Kamienna camps before being liberated in Czestochowa on January 18, 1945. She immigrated to America in 1950.
Item ViewGad Beck
Gad grew up in Berlin. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Austria. Gad's mother had converted to Judaism. The Becks lived in a poor section of Berlin, populated predominantly by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. When Gad and his twin sister, Miriam, were 5, the Becks moved to the Weissensee district of Berlin, where Gad entered primary school.
1933-39: Gad was just 10 when the Nazis came to power. As one of a small number of Jewish pupils in his school, he quickly became the target of antisemitic comments: "Can I sit somewhere else, not next to Gad? He has such stinking Jewish feet." In 1934 Gad's parents enrolled him in a Jewish school, but he had to quit school when he was 12 as they could no longer afford the tuition. Gad found work as a shop assistant.
1940-44: As the child of a mixed marriage [Mischlinge], Gad was not deported to the east when other German Jews were. He remained in Berlin where he became involved in the underground, helping Jews to escape to Switzerland. As a homosexual, he was able to turn to his trusted non-Jewish, homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places. In early 1945 a Jewish spy for the Gestapo betrayed Gad and a number of his underground friends. He was interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin.
After the war, Gad helped organize the immigration of Jewish survivors to Palestine. In 1947 he left for Palestine, and returned to Berlin in 1979.
Item ViewErnest G. Heppner
Ernest was one of three children born to a Jewish family in the commercial city of Breslau, which had one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany. His father, a World War I veteran, owned a factory that made matzah, the unleavened bread used during the Jewish holiday of Passover. Ernest was 12 when Hitler took power in 1933.
1933-39: Ernest often got in trouble at school because people called him names. "Christ-killer" and "your father kills Christian babies for Passover" were common taunts. Many thought the Nazis were a passing political fad but by 1935 their laws were menacing. Signs appeared declaring, "Jews are forbidden." In 1938, after his synagogue was burned (during Kristallnacht), his family realized they had to flee Germany. Since his family could only get two tickets, Ernest and his mother boarded a ship for Asia, leaving their family behind.
1940-44: Ernest ended up in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, the only place refugees could land without a visa. There, as a volunteer driving a truck for the British army's Shanghai Volunteer Force, he got meals and was better off than many other refugees. After Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, conditions among the city's refugees worsened--American relief funds, the refugees' lifeline, could not reach Shanghai. In 1943, under pressure from Germany, the Japanese set up a ghetto.
Ernest spent two years in the Shanghai ghetto before the city was liberated in 1945. After the war, he worked for the U.S. Air Force in Nanking, China, for several years, and later immigrated to the United States.
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