Twenty years ago 1200 judges convened in Vienna in the giant hall of the palace of Rothschild. All the judges of Austria. I was invited to read a lesson about the Israeli system of law.
-Ladies and gentlemen! – I began in English, ascending the tribune. - In March 1939, in that same place, where you are sitting today, stood my father. He was 35 years old, he was an activist of the Zionist movement, and he had a newborn son – that is me. And facing my father there sat Adolf Eichmann…
-Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to return to the city, where I was born. All my mother's family was annihilated in Auschwitz. Nowadays Germany helps Israel not a little, but the Jewish people never forgets that, which has been done with it. Margarita Lindenstrauss also did not forget about this till her very death, and I, her son, am here, in order to remind of it.
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Kremski does not sleep at night, by day he dozes, and only when his daughter comes to feed him and give him medications, he wakes up… ….Already for five years he does not go out, and only the balcony of his house, where before him there lived American soldiers, became his abode. He sits on a chair on the balcony, and before him there are fields, enormous fields, which during the year change colors from white to varicolored; At first it is for a long time white, afterwards it turns into green, then it becomes red from the field strawberries, then it becomes purple, and good German peasants permit to gather from the fields raspberries…
Why he has to live in old age in the land of the killers of his family and be glad, that they live with a sensation of guilt for the crimes to his people, on the whole only a people, who has participated gladly in everything…
…Twenty eight people in the Ghetto of Gomel remained in the ground forever, their neighbors killed them, with whom they lived together, learned, obliged with salt and matches. And then the boldest among them wore white bands and started to kill their neighbors, under the ruling of the valorous Germans, and for this the killers allowed to filch the belongings of those killed, but only after effective management of their economic service in the Wehrmacht and the SS…
…He has three medals, the rest of the post-war trinkets he does not avow, also those from the war he does not strongly enjoy: Three medals do not give him back Granny Cillia, Ossia, the three-month-old Chaechka, he remembers every one, he has enough of his own killed. And to those, whom until now they count killed, doubting, were there 6 millions or less, he does not listen, there are no such complete calculators, counting souls, let them rest in peace…
When he dies he wishes, they should burn him. It is true, this is not according to the Jewish law, but it seems to him, that his ashes unite with the ashes of his family, and he finds it again…
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…She is very tired. Sometimes she wishes, that this should be over as soon as only possible. But in such moments she reproaches herself with unacceptable weakness. Why on earth? The Lord is punishing him for everything, which he did. No need to interrupt the punishment meted out to him. He refused to eat and to drink. Miriam proposed to him an injection for every gulp of food. The reward was of minimal value – the injection worked no more than half an hour.
Somehow in the morning Miriam came across a neighbor. He sympathetically asked about the health of Joseph. The cries of the unhappy one were heard by them although the distance between the lots is around one hundred meters.
After that confession, Miriam did not even once talk to him, if not to count those scanty phrases, related to the treatment of the sick. He showered her with curses. He was sorry that he could not kill her, in a destruction camp or during the time of the many actions, whose participant he has been. Miriam in reply only smiled and this drove him out of his mind. Not even once did she pronounce his name – not the true one, not the fictitious one, and not the one she called him.
And only when he finally was silent after the three month of the suffering meted out to him, Miriam sent a telegram to Yaron and to Dalia: "Yossi has died. I arrange things and come back to Israel. Mama…"
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…The process of acknowledging the awareness of one's past is not simple, and, no doubt, hurts. Often it involves exposure and detection of that, which happened in reality, and in this sense the book of Vanagaite answers to the needs of people to receive true information. However, it is also a question of forgiveness and reconciliation. Reconciliation means the attempt to understand the reasons of what is going on and the factors, rousing the population to behave so fiercely. "To explain – does not mean to forgive, understanding does not mean forgiveness" – the famous British historian Christopher Browning wrote. He was one of the first, who attracted attention to it, that most of the killers were common people of the Middle Class, occupied with the most common duties, with families and children…and there, already for some months they for a while turned into monsters, and afterwards returned to their regular lives. And their majority was not even so held responsible.
However, reconciliation also means forgiveness.
…The country has to continue, to build a new future, and this is possible only by comprehending one's past. After the country is allowed to grasp its past. With difficulty I perceive books, which only pour oil into the fire and hunt people to trenches.
…Anger and rage do not resuscitate the dead. You cannot return the past. We can only try to apply the lessons of history, to avoid its being repeated in future…
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There were people – not Jews, who did not think about what was going to be, if they save a frightened black-eyed child, guilty only of this, that his parents were Jews. Such a lady was Nina Tzarovskaya, resident of Carmiel, who is now 98 years old!
She is endowed with riches: Four children, ten grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren…
One of these days she had as guests the members of the city council organization of former ghetto and concentration-camp prisoners. The old lady looks quite well given her thoroughly solid age, moreover, for us she also sang and read poems…
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If Spielberg had known about this advocate from Czernowitz, it is possible, that he would have shot a film about him. Schindler, who became world-famous owing to the creation of Spielberg, saved 1400 lives, on the account of Trajan Popovich – 20 thousand.
Only end December 2008 the city authorities have decided to put up a memorial plate about him. And you see – already for many years the memorial of Popovich stands in Israel – in Tel-Aviv, and it is recognized by the Israeli Institution of the Righteous of the World.
However, this name is almost unknown in the Bukovina, moreover in the Ukraine. From the point of view of the Soviet ideologists, an official of a pro-fascist regime could not perform an act worthy of good memory. The post-soviet ideologists, who, alas, are not very much different from the Soviet ones, by inertia keep that same opinion. Proerly, only after placing the memorial plate the people of Czernovitz acknowledged, that Trajan Popovich indeed saved the lives of 20000 of their compatriots.
Being a high official under the regime of Antonescu (the Romanian military dictator, an ally of Hitler's), Mayor of Czernowitz (1941-1942), Popovich refused to fulfil the command about the deportation of the Jews of Czernowitz to the camps of Transnistria. Nay, he convinced the authorities that he was right and obtained a change in decision: The 20000 Jews of Czernowitz remained in town.
Popovich died immediately after the war, in 1946. But he succeeded to write laconic memories, which he called "Confession". To our regret, neither into the Russian nor into the Ukrainian languages was it translated, accessible are a Romanian and English (abridged) version. But this document is worthy to be taken into the history textbooks. Confidence in his right, the gift of persuading allowed Popovich to cause the Nazi officials to refrain from mass killing. It is regrettable, that this event was exclusively for those times.
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Georg Mandel (Mantello), 1901-1992.
Hungary-Switzerland-Salvador. The diaspora in Salvador.
In 1939 Georg Mandel, the son of orthodox Jews in Transylvania, a successful financer and owner of a textile-manufactory in Budapest, was appointed emissary of Salvador in Eastern Europe. He had never been in Central America and even did not know the Spanish language, but a few years earlier he had enabled a deal profitable for Salvador - to buy weapons and this way he became acquainted with the Salvador diplomat Jose Arturo Costelianos. The latter proposed the candidateship of Mandel – Salvador could not afford to keep a large diplomatic corpus, therefore in several countries it was represented by local businessmen. And when in 1942 Mandel had to flee with his wife and child from Hungary, Costelianos, becoming the general consul of Salvador in Geneva, took him in the quality of first secretary of the consulate. Mandel changed his family name to Mantello and became the second in rank of the representative of Salvador and Switzerland.
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