13
■
Samuel Pisar was 10 years old when Stalin
and Hitler carved up his native Poland and
ignited World War II. After six years of Soviet
oppression and Nazi internment in Auschwitz
and other infernos, he escaped from Dachau
and was liberated by the advancing US Army.
At the age of 16, he was the only survivor of
his family and his school.
Pisar resumed his education in Paris,
pursued it in Melbourne, and ultimately earned
doctorates from Harvard and the Sorbonne as
well as honorary doctorates from other renowned
American, European and Australian universities.
In the late 1950s he began his professional
career at the United Nations in New York and
UNESCO in Paris, returning to Washington in
1960 to serve as a member of John F. Kennedy’s
task force on foreign economic policy, advisor
to the State Department and consultant to
committees of the Senate and the House of
Representatives. In 1961 he was made a US
citizen by a special Act of Congress, signed by
President Kennedy.
In conjunction with his prestigious legal
career, Pisar was also the founder-president of
Yad Vashem France and administrator of the
Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. He
was one of the first to urge broader economic,
cultural and human contacts as “weapons
of peace” and, as a defender of freedom
and human rights, he took up the causes of
oppressed minorities, political dissidents such
as Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, Russian
scientist Andrei Sakharov and author Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn, and succeeded in freeing many
“refuseniks” from Soviet jails.
His books, translated into 20 languages,
include Coexistence and Commerce, acclaimed
as a work that “charted an enlightened course
for the future of American and Western
policy” (Senator Edward Kennedy) and his
autobiography, Of Blood and Hope, hailed as
“a powerful testimony to faith, courage and
man’s capacity for redemption” (Il Tempo,
Rome).
Recipient of numerous international honors
and awards, Pisar was nominated and short-
listed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. On the
50
th
anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe,
French President Jacques Chirac cited Pisar’s life
and work in an historic speech acknowledging
France’s responsibility for the Vichy regime’s
crimes against Jews, and US President Bill
Clinton publicly recounted Pisar’s traumatic
adolescence and miraculous liberation on a
German battlefield.
…Thus, O great and unique God of Abraham:
It is with profound respect
for the beliefs of all,
and with malice to none,
that I bow towards the synagogues,
churches and mosques of eternal Jerusalem,
and sing for you from Yad Vashem ‑
the hallowed memorial to the innocent
martyrs
and righteous heroes of the Shoah ‑
my
fervent prayer of hope
drawn from torrents of blood and tears.
Bond with us again, Lord.
Guide us toward reconciliation,
tolerance, brotherhood and peace,
on our small, divided, fragile planet ‑
our common home.
Amen! Amen! Sela!
A Triumph of Human Spirit: Dr. Samuel Pisar
■
Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar (left) reads his text “Dialogue with God,” accompanied by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra playing Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish,”
conducted by Maestro John Axelrod (right).
14
publications
New Publications
■
The latest volume of Yad Vashem Studies
(37:1)
addresses
the subjects of children,
Betar activists and ultra-Orthodox rabbis,
and spans Poland, Israel, Romania, Ukraine
and Hungary, tracing the theme of how the
Holocaust is remembered and researched.
Contributions include: Joanna Michlic on the
postwar Jewish Children’s Home in Otwock,
children’s experiences during and after the war,
and continuity and change in child survivors’
memories; Dariusz Libionka and Laurence
Weinbaum on the Betar Zionist youth farms
near Hrubieszów in 1941 and this group’s
possible impact on
the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising; Diana
Dumitru with a two-
tiered comparative
analysis of rural
and urban attitudes
toward Jews in
Romanian-controlled
Bessarabia and
Transnistria; Isaac
Hershkowitz on the
wartime controversy over the escape of Hasidic
rabbis from Budapest in 1943-44; Yfaat Weiss
on the close relationship between Israeli writer
Leah Goldberg and her 1930s German doctoral
advisor, Prof. Paul Ernst Kahle; and review
articles by David Engel and Natalia Aleksiun
on recent important books by some of the
leading scholars in Poland.
Dr. David Silberklang is Editor of Yad Vashem
Studies.
■
Early in the Nazi occupation, Leib Reizer
escaped to Minsk, spending three months
in the ghetto before embarking on a risky
return to Grodno and his family.
In riveting prose he tells of ghetto life,
the horror of the liquidation, and his family’s
escape after he broke into the military hospital
storeroom where he worked as a carpenter,
taking pistols, rifles and bullets with him for
the partisans in the forests.
Reizer’s story has a powerful, basic
honesty to it, telling
everything in the
purest truth, hiding
nothing.
S i r M a r t i n
Gilbert concludes in
his foreword: “No
one can read this
memoir without tears
and anger: tears at
the suffering and
torments inflicted on the Jews, and anger at
the perpetrators and bystanders who had no
human decency.”
Daniella Zaidman-Mauer is Managing Editor of
The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project.
Leib Reizer,
In the Struggle: Memoirs from Grodno and the Forests
With a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert
by Gabi Hadar, Daniella Zaidman-Mauer and Dr. David Silberklang
Yad Vashem Studies, 37:1
■
The village of Chełmno lies 70 kilometers
northwest of Łódz and 130 kilometers east
of Poznan. It was in this placid setting that
the Germans established the first site for
intensive mass murder by gassing, with the
ultimate aim of annihilating the Jewish people.
Mass killings, mostly of Łódz Jews, began in
Chełmno in December 1941 and continued
until the Red Army liberated the camp in
January 1945.
Holocaust literature about Chełmno does
not give the tragedy that occurred there
the treatment it deserves. Only a few works
concern themselves with the camp’s history.
While the Germans went to great lengths
to keep the events at Chełmno secret and
conceal all traces
of the mass murder
that took place
there, the camp’s
Jewish inmates,
languishing under
the most appalling
of conditions, made
every effort to alert
the world to the
camp’s existence and
document in detail
the events that took place there. These efforts
were successful – reports about the camp
appeared during the war and are available
to researchers today. Furthermore, invaluable
supplementary documentation about the
camp’s history and the killings is contained in
the transcripts of the trials of Nazis stationed
at the camp. Both the criminals themselves
and local residents from the Chełmno vicinity
testified at these trials. Based on German and
Jewish documentation and trial transcripts,
Holocaust survivor and former director of the
Yad Vashem Archives Shmuel Krakowski now
provides us with a more penetrating look at
the horror known as Chełmno.
Chełmno - A Small Village in Europe was published
with the support of the Claims Conference, the
Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the
Adelson Family Foundation.
Gabi Hadar is Director of Yad Vashem
Publications.
Shmuel Krakowski,
Chełmno: A Small Village in Europe – The First Nazi
Mass Extermination Camp
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