Published in the Citizen Herald May 7, 2008
By Deb Holt
Eighth graders at Jesup Community Schools heard about the Holocaust in Nazi Germany from someone who has had an up-close and personal experience with this historical event.
Dr. Harry Brod, professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, came to Jesup to tell the students about his parents, Jews who survived the extermination of their race of people.
As a young Jew, Brod’s father hid in forests throughout World War II. After the war, he returned to his hometown in Poland, and was shot. Brod said he was not killed, but wounded.
Brod explained to the students that non-Jewish Poles had taken over the homes and businesses of the Jewish Poles in their absence. Many of them did not want to give back what they had taken, so they shot the Jewish Poles when they returned.
Brod’s father was taken to a Jewish hospital in Berlin where his mother was a nurse.
Daniel Silver, a CIA analyst, wrote a book about this official Jewish hospital; the book is titled Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis.
This was an openly functioning Jewish Hospital, consisting of a compound of seven buildings. By having the hospital in Berlin for the Jews, the Nazis were giving the impression that they weren’t really exterminating them.
“It was part of the lie,” Brod told the students. He said it was also the headquarters of “Jews in Germany,” an organization that later had its name changed by the Nazis to “Organization for German Jews.”
He said the extermination of the Jews was a question of race, not religion.
All it took was one Jewish grandparent for the Nazis to classify someone as a Jew. The Nazis asked churches to open their records so they could determine who was Jewish. Even if the family had been Christian for one or two generations, if they had a Jewish background, they could be in trouble.
“Some churches opened their records, some did not,” he said.
The Nuremburg Laws were early Nazi laws that segregated the Jewish race from other Germans during 1935. The Jews had to go to different schools, see different doctors and have separate careers.
When the Jews were moved into the ghettos, the Nazis worried about the spread of disease, so the Jewish hospital in Berlin was allowed. It was also used as a holding ground for particular people. One example Dr. Brod gave concerned a boyhood Jewish friend of a high-ranking Nazi official. He was safely held at the hospital on the officer’s order, instead of being sent to a concentration camp.
The courtyard of the hospital was used as a deportation area to the trains that took people to the death camps. They fed and cared for the Jews there, once again putting up a front for the rest of the world, even though they were sending the Jews to their deaths.
The hospital was also a prime piece of real estate, and Otto Eichman — Hitler’s second in command — wanted it under his control. So, the hospital continued to operate.
Dr. Brod said his mother had been selected twice to go to the concentration camps, but because of the relationship she was able to build with the guards over the years, she was able to bribe her way out.
Some Jews survived by being married to non-Jews.
From his father’s family of six brothers and a sister, only three survived the Holocaust.
From his mother’s family, she was the only one to survive.
Because his mother’s father was a German World War I veteran, in the beginning he was treated with some respect. Eventually, her parents were sent to a model concentration camp with no gas chambers, but they eventually died from other things there.
Brod said the concentration camps were like a society. Mail was even allowed and postcards could be sent to family from the concentration camp.
Part of Dr. Brod’s meager inheritance are postcards sent from his grandmother to his mother. His grandmother realized the Nazi guards would read the postcards; she was clever about telling her family what she needed.
For example, on one postcard, instead of writing the true date, she wrote “the 24th of cheese.” This told the family to send her cheese. Another time she signed her last name as “vegetable roots” and dated it “the 29th of onion.” Another postcard asked for “marmalade wrapped in double cellophane” on the “24th of apple,” and “large handbag.”
On October 5, she sent a postcard to her daughter that carried the secret message “birthday child.”
October 5 was Dr. Brod’s mother’s birthday.
One postcard’s return address contained his grandmother’s name followed by the word “widow.” This is how his mother learned of her father’s death.
The last postcard sent contained the secret word “away.”
Dr. Brod explained the forced death marches had begun when prisoners were marched from one camp to another as the murder of Jews was accelerated.
Dr. Brod was born in Berlin in 1951. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1953 and lived in New York. He said he grew up with all sorts of stories of the war, and each story is unique.
He told the Jesup students that there was more resistance to the Holocaust that what had been reported, because most historians worked from German war documents, which were not true. As time has gone on, more and more of these resistance stories are coming to light.
When asked why he travels to small communities, speaking to just a handful of students at a time, Dr. Brod said, “Because the stories should not be lost.” |
