Henry Schwab, a German-born Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1936. enlisted in the U.S. Army and reached the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp just days after its liberation in April 1945. “It was a day never to be forgotten, coming face to face with some of the horrors,” he recalls in a…
Tag: Holocaust
Good ship Paducah smuggled Jews to Palestine
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A recent ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Museum paid tribute to the captain and crew of the Paducah, an aging American gunship that was sold as surplus after WWII and retrofitted to smuggle Holocaust survivors through the British blockade to Palestine in 1947. The captain of the Paducah was Rudolph Patzert, a 35-year-old New York…
McVay battles Holocaust deniers on the web
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Thanks to the efforts of a former computer salesman, a town on Vancouver Island, Canada, has become Mission Control in the international war against Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis who use the Internet to spread their messages of hate and historical revisionism. Ken McVay, who is 54, had been unemployed for four months when he discovered…
Caught in a nightmarish Abyss of Despair
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Born about 1620 in Ostrog, Volynia, Rabbi Nathan Hanover and his family were among the countless Jews in Ukraine and eastern Poland whose lives were disrupted by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and the intermittent attacks that continued for years afterwards. Hanover travelled extensively over the region of devastation, speaking with many affected people and…
Peter Lande on Holocaust records
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An international expert on German Jewish genealogy told a Toronto audience recently that the vast horde of Nazi records that the Americans confiscated from Germany after WWII has finally been catalogued, making the material much more accessible to genealogists and historians. Peter Lande, who spoke to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) during Holocaust…
Jack Klajman’s Out of the Ghetto
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Jack Klajman, a 69-year-old furrier in London, Ont., has written Out of the Ghetto, a book that describes how he survived the Holocaust. The book was published recently by Vallentine Mitchell, a British publishing house, and should soon be available at bookstores in Canada. Out of the Ghetto details Klajman’s experiences as a child in…
Czech-Sudeten Jews the focus of Far to Go
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Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
Sherman’s ‘Void and Voice’
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Void & Voice: Essays on Literary and Historical Currents by Kenneth Sherman (Mosaic Press, 1998) opens with two short gem-like reminiscences, The Tailor Shop and Silver Braids, recalling the author’s grandfather and grandmother, respectively. Early in the century, Sherman’s grandfather opened Sherman Custom Tailors at College and Bathurst streets in Toronto, an establishment that brims…
A search for six of the Six Million
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Sometimes when author Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives would cry at the sight of him, so great was his resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel Jaeger. From some handwriting on the back of a photograph, Mendelsohn knew that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their daughters Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia had been “killed…
‘Garden of Beasts’ is chilling non-fiction
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William E. Dodd, the United States’ newly appointed ambassador to Germany in 1933, was a Jeffersonian democrat, a history professor working on a volume on the old American South, and a Sunday farmer with old-fashioned values who seemed so out of step with his new posting that one magazine called him “a square academic peg…
