A hundred years old photo of J's family. The tall man with the modern hat is my Grandfather Dubche, his wife Anna is the beautiful lady sitting second from left, her mother is next to her. The old Jew sitting second from right is my great-grandfather Abeles, next to him with the silver headed walking stick is his brother. They were deported to Auschwitz in August 1944 and only the blond boy dressed as a sailor, Itzig, returned. He settled and died in Australia. One hundred years after, we are more numerous and wealthier than in the pic. Haman the Evil One lost this round too.
24 comments:
Am Yisroel Chai! Yes, we made it, but by the skin of our teeth. If the war had lasted a few more weeks, I don't know if my father would have made it - he was a lice ridden bag of skin and bones as it was. The war killed 90% of the Polish Jews. Whole lines were wiped out, never to be replaced. In some families, not a single soul survived. In the K family, there are fewer now than there were before the war, even though there should be exponentially more. There were 7 brothers and sisters in my father's generation. 3 were killed. Of the 4 that survived,one (the one who lived in Ra'anana) never had children again (his first family all killed), one had one child and 2 (including my father) had 2, so there were 5 to replace 7. In the next generation there was 7, of which only 1 (my son) was in the male line - he is the last male of the K family. If he has no children, that will be the end of the line.
On my mother's side there is hope. One of her great-nephews has become haredi and will surely have 10 Jewish children.
K
"One of her great-nephews has become haredi and will surely have 10 Jewish children."
All condemned to a life of poverty and ignorance as miserable as in a 19th-century shtetl. Sometimes quality (more resources for fewer people) outranks quantity.
I'm with K-nothing outranks survival.
As a matter of morbid curiosity, which I hope you will forgive, were the survival prospects of blond Jews higher, in the camps, than for their more swarthy kindred?
Is this the subterranean hypothesis you were advancing?
Anon.
That blond Jews had higher holocaust survival rates was already discussed in a blog post on GNXP.com, many years ago.
I think there was no survival differential between colors. Survival was mostly luck and stamina. If a trainload of Jews arrived on a day when there was no place in Auschwitz, all the ten thousand were sent directly to the gas chamber and burned. No selection.
K, I am comparing J family numbers around 1900 and 2012 and finding that now we are more than a hundred years ago. You are comparing 1942 (when there were about 18 millions Jews on the world) and 2012. And Polish Jews, who suffered the most. Hungarian Jews - were under Nazi rule less than a year.
If a trainload of Jews arrived on a day when there was no place in Auschwitz, all the ten thousand were sent directly to the gas chamber and burned. No selection.
That's true, but what if they managed to evade being sent to Auschwitz? What if they were hiding out in an Eastern European village?
The haredi give the only correct answer, I think , in order to correct the genocide.
A lot of mixed people are also present in eastern europe. Usually they are not counted and it's pretty difficult thing to do. As one of them I can guaranty both of the above issues. Numbers are pretty high I believe after my personal experience - doesn't mean much due to the limited area I could check and you have to be pretty intimate in order to find out such details about people. But fertility is very low.
What remains to be seen is how the haredi answer will define the future. Maybe secular society will assimilate their children.
Or - personally I'd think this is the probable evolution - zealots are coming back. From the depth of time a very old system, a demon from legends - it's almost heroic-fantasy - is now struggling to come back online. The very young among us will probably see this - if it happens. Maybe the answer, the real one but we are too blind to see it,the real counter effect of the holocaust is the rebirth of zealotry.
IHTG,
We should not be thinking about these things seventy years after they happened. What happended cannot be remade now.
I explored the idea of hiding with both my parents and they dismissed the idea. First of all, they lived en close religious families, individual action was not normally even considered. They went to deportation as a family, as a community. That was the case of my family, there are some people who did survive hiding in Budapest and wre lucky that Budapest was never deported.
Second, there was death sentence on anybody hiding Jews. People was frightened and crossed the street if they saw a policeman or a German soldier coming. Hungary was under German occupation, and Hungarians themselves (Asians! Mongols!) were on the list of inferior peoples to be exterminated, and they knew it. Their lives had no value.
The situation was much worse in Poland. Polish untermensch were already mass deported to Germany to serve as slaves, and large parts of Western POland had been depopulated and settled by German colonists. As a Jew I am interested in my people, but the Polish people were not in enviable situation. Polish people was scheduled to be enslaved and gradually exterminated. The Polish knew it. In five years of German occupation, Poland lost 15 - 20% of its population. That is nothing with 90% Jewish losses, but not for the Polish. And they never liked Jews, but who can blame them? We dont like ourselves neither. And many accepted the German propaganda that Jews were to blame for the war and all the tzures that fell on them.
One thing I admire in the Polish and the Russian peoples and is that they never talk about the fact that they were classified as subhuman by the Germans and that the Germans had established Race and Settlement organizations with the mandate of killing them all and to settle their lands with Germans. Russians talk about the patriotic war but never about the near-Holocaust that almost happened to them. It is as if they were ashamed by it. I feel we too should be ashamed by the terrible defeat we suffered in the hands of the Germans and instead of trying to remember it, we should try to delete it from history. We should talk about Mordechai Anilevich and their heroic armed resistence, not about Jews paying for one-way tickets to Auschwitz.
From the wiki about the Polish "Holocaust":
From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan laid-out by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his 1926 book Mein Kampf. The aim of this plan was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany, the so-called German Lebensraum ("living space"). Nazi ideology had viewed Slavs as a racially inferior group.[5] On August 22, 1939, on the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language".[6] Genocide was conducted systematically against Polish people: on September 7, 1939 Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy and Jews are to be killed, on September 12 Wilhelm Keitel added intelligentsia to the list, at the end of 1940 Hitler demanded liquidation of "all leading elements in Poland" and on March 15, 1940, Himmler stated All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.
I think the Polish people was lucky to survive with little losses, but they had it definitely coming. Another five years and they were done forever. Another ten years and Hungarians are no more. Unlike us Jews, they dont talk about that.
I think you already approached the subject in another post. About the great racial war called WW2.
Germans tried to wipe out the slavs. Got completly crushed. Being a rather generous and gentle man Iosif Djugasvili, the destroyer of the nazi beast, decided not to reply in kind and closed the subject. He said : "Hitlers come and go, but Germany and the German people remain."
Jewish commnunity was almost obliterated. Different memories I think for the survivors.
"the real counter effect of the holocaust is the rebirth of zealotry."
This will be a catastrophe for the Jewish people which will cause the loss or at least submersion of any good traits for which the Jewish people is known under a cover of scientific ignorance, poverty and (for all too many) squalor. People can argue the optimistic case that this won't be true, but places like Kiryas Yoel in New York offer empirical data.
In the case of the Hasid, his father (my cousin) and grandfather (my uncle) made enough money in America (in real estate) for the next 3 or 4 generations, at least, even if they all have 12 children. I kid you not. Every last one of them could sit and study Torah forever and the money would still not run out. I mean serious money.
K
K
No money last more than 3 generations.
I think the Rockefellers still have money and they are now up to maybe the 5th generation. What about the Rothschild's? Their money has lasted for centuries.
K
I have not heard of a Rockefeller since the seventies. Rothschilds are living off their name, they are neither Jewish nor much rich.
Society went through a lot of changes. Generated by the rapid evolution of the means of production. So it became meritocratic - more or less. Meritocracy is specific to the times of great change, afterwards the new elite become entranched and closes the gates for social advancements and for newcomers to obtain wealth.
I think J is right but only partially right. A more complete sentence would sound like - No money last more than 3 generations, during times of great political or economic - means of production - changes.
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was among the wealthiest people who ever lived with a net worth of $400 billion and $600 billion in today's currency. At this stage, his grandson and oldest living heir, David Rockefeller, is valued at something like $2.5 billion if we are to believe Forbes400. The next generation of heirs' shares of the family trust are in the $300-500 million range. The generation after that, now young adults, will have less. And I think that some of the family trusts liquidate on the death of the last of JDR's great-grandchildren, at which point the heirs will be able to dissipate it even faster. Even Rockefeller money doesn't last forever.
I meant "net worth of between $400 billion and $600 billion"
teo
I may admit that great fortunes may out last the 3 generation rule, but I know of no multigenerational fortunes. May be in eras of exceptional stability like feudal Britain you had landowner families (like the royal family) lasting for a few centuries, but they tended to die off and be replaced. The Rockefellers are lasting now a century, but you have no European or Asian equivalents of them.
Prof. J.,
I have never in my life heard, or imagined that I would hear, a Jew (much less a Central European Jew from a Holocausted family) talk compassionately and impartially about the suffering of the Poles and the Russians under the Germans. This is all the more remarkable because I know you to be entirely unsentimental about Easterners; your remarks don't come from nostalgia or romantic notions, but merely from lucid observation uncontaminated by partiality or preconception.
I can't find words to express how much I appreciate your remarks, but they were extremely moving and I appreciated them greatly.
-s.n.
The treatment of the Poles by the Germans had elements of well deserved irony. In the '30s, many anti-Semitic Polish Catholics fought to confine Jewish university students to ghetto benches. Others were opposed, but by the eve of the war, the ghetto benchers had won. The Germans made ghetto benches moot not only by killing all the Jews but also by closing the universities.
Catholic Poles and Jewish Polish citizens died at the hands of the Germans in about equal raw #'s, but since there were 10x as many of the former as the latter, this meant the virtual destruction of Polish Jewry but only a relatively small dent in the non-Jewish Poles (if you call 3 million dead a small dent). The end result was a pretty much Judenrein, pure Catholic Poland, so the anti-Semites got their wish (plus 40 years of Russian occupation, so be careful what you wish for).
There was (not for lack of trying by certain Poles) no official collaborationist or Quisling regime in Poland as in France or Norway - the Germans did not consider the Poles worth of any self government no matter how anti-Semitic they were.
Pre-war Poland and Poland during the war was a divided nation on the subject of the Jews, much as America today is sharply divided on certain subjects (e.g. abortion). Some of the non-Jewish Poles were firmly committed to protecting the Jewish minority, even risking their lives. Many were indifferent or certainly not willing to put themselves at risk (in their defense, if the situation were reversed, many Jews would not have risked their lives either- this is asking a lot). Others saw the Jews as an alien race in their midst and were firmly committed to the removal of the Jews from Poland. Before the war, their goal was simply to make the Jews so miserable that they would leave on their own, for Palestine or anywhere else, but once the war began, they were willing to go along with the German's more extreme (or final) solutions. One therefore cannot paint the Poles with a broad brush - there were good and bad, just as any other nationality. The best were extraordinary, even saintly. I cannot say enough about their goodness, true Christian goodness in the best sense of the word. The worst deserve a place in Hell.
I have the feeling that even much of the Polish anti-Semitism of the '30s (as well as Hungarian fascism, etc.) was copy-catted from the Germans. If Hitler hadn't been around to make anti-Semitism fashionable and even respectable, there would have been much less of it in Poland as well. Little countries like Poland, Hungary, etc. must always take their cues from the great powers. When the Russians were there, there were all sorts of Marxist-Leninists in Poland. Now you could fire a cannon clear across the land and not hit a single one.
K
Your description is incorrect.
1) The boy dressed in the sailor suit was my late father Yaakov Dovid Abelesz (known by the family as Yankele). He came to Australia in 1950. He passed away in Melbourne in 1998 leaving 2 sons and 9 grandchildren.
2) I am unsure who the girl to his right is - it may have been his sister.
3) The next boy to the right is his cousin with the same name Yaakov Dovid (known as Yankel) Abeles - who also survived the war and remarried and lived in Bayit Vegan Jerusalem. He was a bank manager and in his retirement a director of the "Hungarian" Kollel Shomrei Hachomos.
4) The girl to his right may have been Roszi (Lowy) Hoffman who arrived in Australia in 1956 and passed away a few years ago. She had a daughter Judy and 3 grandsons. (I may be mixing up the girls # 2 and 4.)
5) Is my father's brother Itzi - Yitzchok, who lived in Sydney. He died quite young around 1966-7. He had a son and a daughter. The son Michael has 3 married children living in Israel and many grandchildren.
Shlomo Boruch (Bandi) Abelesz
Melbourne
sba@sba2.com
Hi
You mean Rózsi Hoffman, my aunt.
I didnt know Yankele was a bank manager. I have been in his home in Beyt VeGan many times.
Regarding point 4, it think cant be, she was 2 years older than my mother, that is, born in 1921. Anyway, you could ask our elder relatives in Jerusalem. But do it fast.
Itzik, your uncle, helped us when we arrived pennyless in Vienna in December 1956. He sent us 100 dollars, which was a lot of money for us and allowed us to leave the Austrian army camp that had been transformed into a refugee camp. We felt very afraid in the camp, the Hungarians were talking about killing the us Jews. I heard them and told my parents.
Good to greet yoy
חג שמח
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