Newark Mayor Cory Booker, rear, gathers with participants at the May 1 Shoa remembrance, including, from left, Harry Ettlinger, Bob Max, Ed Bindel, Fred Heyman, Gil Lachow, and Ursula Pawel. Olga Menczer, center, holds the sign for the program. Photos by Robert Wiener
May 08, 2008
An expert on black people’s experiences in Germany during the Shoa offered the keynote address at the city of Newark’s 21st Anniversary Holocaust Remembrance.
Professor Clarence Lusane of American University spoke of the people of color who lived in Germany during World War II and the estimated 200 who survived Nazi genocide.
“They displayed human strength, moral strength, and were able to rise above evil,” said Lusane at the Paul Robeson Center of Rutgers University-Newark on May 1.
“We have this connection between blacks and Jews, between people who were in these circumstances and were fighting to survive,” he continued. “This is a history we have to tell our children and we have to tell ourselves.”
Several hundred people attended the program, at which Newark Mayor Cory Booker acted as master of ceremonies.
He lit a large candle in memory of Holocaust victims, and urged his audience to “remember the depths to which humanity can fall.
Prof. Clarence Lusane of American University says Jews and black people share a history of survival during the Holocaust.
“We remember the Holocaust and we say ‘never again.’ But we see genocide and mass murder that still takes place in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and now in Darfur and the Sudan,” said Booker. “On remembering the Holocaust we do more than mourn the victims and the tragedies of decades ago. We remember the ugly acts of genocide and racism that are not just stories from the past but still too often harsh realities in our present. They must be resisted and opposed with every fiber of our being.”
Steven Diner, chancellor of Rutgers University’s Newark campus, pointed out that the site of the memorial was named for Rutgers graduate Robeson, an African-American who was a distinguished actor, athlete, scholar, and activist.
“There is a very intimate connection between what happened in the Nazi era and the American civil rights movement,” said Diner. “The American-Jewish community quickly embraced the American civil rights movement and talked about it in its own debates and used the analog to the Holocaust to say, ‘We cannot have this in America. We have to treat people equally.’”
Summarizing a half-century of little-known history, Lusane said that some of the first Africans came to Germany in the early 1900s “after being bought and displayed in zoos and circuses.” Others came as students, teachers, workers, and diplomats. “They were mostly men who wound up marrying German women.”
After World War I, the French victors sent between 20,000 and 40,000 colonial troops from Asia and Africa to occupy a defeated Germany. “Occupying troops did what occupying troops usually do: they left a lot of children behind,” he said.
Those people built interracial communities. According to Lusane, “there was some antagonism, but for the most part, people lived together and worked together and children went to school together with less antagonism than we had in the United States.”
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, “genocide was on their agenda. However, for complicated political and historical reasons, the Germans in the central Nazi command never reached a consensus on what to do with these black folks.”
For 12 years, the Nazis debated whether to exterminate, sterilize, deport, or segregate blacks, imprison them in labor and concentration camps; or use them for propaganda — “and to some extent all of those things happened,” he explained.
Many people of African descent were sent to the camps — some to be exterminated, others to serve alongside African-American prisoners of war.
Directed by Donald Morris, the Newark Boys Choir sings “Al Shlosha,” a Hebrew song about “truth, justice, and peace.”
Other black people worked in German military industries. A few of mixed race were actually members of the Hitler Youth.
“Some people of African descent were used in German propaganda in the film industry,” he added. “The Nazis began to make films about Africa and the glory days of Germany’s control of its colonies and they needed Africans to be in these movies.”
The films became a means of survival for the blacks who performed in them.
“But it created some sense of guilt, because they survived and their friends and families did not,” Lusane said. “It also meant they were witnessing the homicides and the genocides that were happening with other people of color.”
One man who became a hero to the professor was Johnny Nicholas, an American entertainer working in occupied France. A jealous girlfriend betrayed him to the Nazis, who sent Nicholas to a labor camp.
As he watched wholesale death around him, “a guy who had no medical training whatsoever became a doctor for close to a year. Nicholas survived on ingenuity, courage, and a willingness to help people who were in the most unthinkable situations you could imagine.”
Lusane said historians are “just now beginning to document” such anecdotal experiences.
“Many of the people who survived have not had the opportunity to share them,” he said.
The United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey’s Holocaust Council and Community Relations Committee cosponsored the program, along with Rutgers and the Jerry Gottesman Edison Properties Charitable Trust.
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