Recognizing Unnamed Heroes of the Holocaust

By Dr. Guy Stern

At the end of a tour, our visitors
frequently linger before the panels
displaying the pictures and deeds of
the righteous during the Holocaust.
But one heroic group of rescuers has
never been recognized: anonymous
rescuers who performed spontane-
ous - literally within minutes - acts
of altruism. I have nicknamed them
,,
c, •
minute-men and -women.
We hear of them from unim-
peachable witnesses, the survivors,
who can recall the moments that
changed their lives, but they cannot
tell the slightest detail about the
identity of their saviors. Such a
miracle happened to our accomplished

"painter-in-residence," Samuel
Pruchno. On a foggy morning in
1945, the ailing, utterly exhausted
13-year-old Samuel was on a death
march near Dachau. He ran into a
nearby house, where the woman of the
house fed him, clothed him, and hid
him, even after her husband returned,
threatening to turn Pruchno over to
the police. She saved his life, his faith,
his talent.
Our oral history project coordina-
tor, Hans Weinmann, found many
other examples in his files. 16-year-
old Dr. Alan Brown (Braun) and his
father, who was ill with typhus, were
in a labor camp near the village of
Neuhaus in southeast Austria. Going
to the camp hospital would have

meant immediate death for his father,
so he snuck out of the camp to find
a pharmacy. There, the store owner
immediately recognized him as a camp
inmate and hid him while an SS guard
was in the store. She then gave him
some medication and bread.
A colleague of mine, Lillian
Furst, and her father escaped during
Reichskristallnacht and had secretly
moved into her uncle's apartment.
When the police came, the housemas-
ter told them a dangerous lie: "Our
building is free of Jews." The police
left; father and daughter escaped.
One final example: one of our
survivors recounts that as a teenager,
she and her mother were escaping
Germany on their way to Italy. At a

Gestapo checkpoint near the border,
all passengers had to leave the train.
She knew that her papers were not in
order and started to cry. A stranger
tried to console her. When she told
him her story, he took her arm, led
her back on the train, hid her behind
a curtain and told her to stay hidden
until the train was moving again. She
then tiptoed back to her mother — and
reached safety.
These stories must be told; they
help to demonstrate that some
goodness shone forth even during
mankind's darkest hour. Though we
do not know the names or nationalities
of those unseen heroes, we salute these
minute-men and -women as harbin-
gers of hope for a better world.

Icons of Loss: The Art of Samuel Bak

In closing, Gail said "Like the
The HMC's 25th Anniversary
Passover Haggadah where we retell
Dinner showcased honoree Gail
the story of the Exodus as if it were
Rosenbloom Kaplan, and the
happening to us, the quilts are a
announcement that our Center has
living reminder of righteousness and
been chosen to receive a sapling of the
responsibility, as if it were
Anne Frank Tree (page 1).
happening today. As we
In her remarks, Gail
continue to struggle with
described her inspiration
problems all over the
for working on the
world, we must continue
Kindertransport Memory
to remind ourselves of our
Quilt exhibit, while
Gail Kaplan & Hans Weinmann
individual responsibility of
thanking colleagues Hans
tikkun olam, to repair the world."
Weinmann and Merry Silber.
The Hon. Irwin Coder, a member
The Kindertransport Quilts tell the
of Canadian Parliament, provided
story of some 10,000 Jewish children,
the evening's keynote address,
ages 7 months to 17 years, who were
focusing on the "new manifestation
rescued from Eastern Europe and
of antisemitim." He referred to this
taken in sealed trains and boats to
new antisemitism as "sophisticated,
Great Britain, which opened its doors
virulent, and even lethal...reminiscent
to them. The completed quilts are
of the 1930s."
beautiful works of art, and document
Plans are already underway for this
the largest rescue effort of World War
year's
dinner, set for October 10, 2010.
II and one of the few bright lessons of
Save
the
date!
the Holocaust.

Samuel Bak was born in 1933 in
Vilna, Poland, and was recognized
from an early age as possessing
extraordinary artistic talent. As Vilna
came under German occupation in
1940, Bak and his family moved into
the Vilna ghetto, and
later to a labor camp,
from which he was
smuggled and given
refuge in a monastery.
At the end of the war,
his mother and he
were the only members
of his extensive family
still alive.
Bak, now 77, has
spent his life dealing
with the artistic
expression of the destruction and
dehumanization which make up his
childhood memories. He speaks about
what are deemed to be the unspeakable
atrocities of the Holocaust. He has

created a visual language to remind the
world of its most desperate moments.
Icons of Loss combines work from
two of Samuel Bak's newest series:
Remembering Angels and the Warsaw
Boy. In the Remembering Angels series
Bak deconstructs Abrecht
Durer's angel in order to
raise questions about a
civilized and orderly world
which allowed the Shoah
to occur. In the Warsaw
Boy series, he uses the
now-famous documentary
photograph of a young boy
in the Warsaw ghetto being
held at gunpoint by a Nazi
soldier as his subject. In
these paintings he explores
themes of identity, crucifixion and his
own survival.

survival to this food. After the war,
Ben tried to locate his benefactor, but
was unable to find him.
Ben and his brother
later escaped a death
march from the
city of Gleiwitz in
December of 1944,
aided by a civilian
German woman.
Ben, a retired
businessman, was
married 25 years to
his late wife Esther,
the love of his life.
They have three children, five grand-
children, and recently, their first great-
grandchild.

Ben volunteers his time as a sur-
vivor speaker. Our survivor speakers
reach out to visitors, allowing them to
connect with a real person. He says,
"At first, I did not want to be a speaker
at the Holocaust Museum because of
the constant reminder of all the bad
memories. However, I realized we, the
very few survivors who are still alive
today, are the eyewitnesses to that un-
forgettable period of atrocities perpe-
trated by human beings toward other
human beings. If we learn nothing
from history, then it will happen again
and again. And it is happening today;
Darfur, Rwanda, Sudan and in many
parts of the Middle East."

IMAGE: COURTESY O F S AMUEL BAK

Dinner Honors Gail Kaplan

On exhibit at the HMC
May 15 — August 15

hi each newsletter, we pay tribute
to one of our diverse volunteers,
without whom we could not fulfill
our mission.
Ben (Benno) Kawer was born in
1925 in Hajnowka, Poland, the son of
a hardworking logger. In 1941, when
he was 16 years old, the Germans ar-
rived in his hometown. Ben and the
other members of the small Jewish
community thought that they would
all be murdered. Instead, the Germans
gathered the Jews in the market square
while the soldiers pillaged their prop-
erty and departed.
But 22 months later, the Germans
returned and deportations began.
His parents, his beloved sister, and

his nephews and nieces perished
at Auschwitz. Ben and his brother
were saved by a miracle: they were
transferred to Buba-
Monowitz (Auschwitz
3) to work on the
construction of a fac-
tory for IG Farben.
There, they met a
Polish Catholic who
lived in a nearby
village and worked
for IG Farben as a
civilian. This person
took enormous risk
Ben Kawer
in smuggling food
and hiding it on the worksite. To this
day, Ben and his brother attribute their

isn w IN NOW J O A S31t1IOD :0.10Hd

Portrait of a Volunteer

Winter 2010

I HO IDCAUST

' rrER 3

MEMQUAL CR
ZEKELMAN FAAULY CAMPU S

