Holocaust survivor Dr. Josef Eisinger, left, talks with Professor Henry Feingold, keynote speaker at the conference hosted by Drew University’s Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Photos by Elaine Durbach
November 20, 2008
There was a new note of optimism in the sometimes dark retelling of the Holocaust story at the Nov. 13 conference commemorating Kristallnacht at Drew University.
Keynote speaker Henry Feingold, a historian and author of numerous books on the American response to the Holocaust, spelled out the ways in which the Jews were excluded from “the universe of obligation” — the sense of shared humanity that might have moved other groups to protect them from the Nazis.
He warned that rhetoric of the sort coming from the president of Iran demonstrates the ongoing need for Jews to protect themselves. But he went on to say that the recent election of Barack Obama suggests cause for hope, “that the universe of obligation is growing broader,” and that this is the direction civilization is taking.
That idea was echoed by other speakers at the conference hosted by Drew’s Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study on the Madison campus. It was the center’s 16th commemoration of Kristallnacht, and the third and final event in its series “Genocide as Process,” a program funded by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. The theme was “Scattered to the Winds: Desperate Attempts by Jews to Escape the Nazis.”
At the Kristallnacht commemorative conference, Manli Ho, who described how her father illegally gave Austrian Jews visas to Shanghai, talks with Eisinger, who escaped Germany on a Kindertransport.
Feingold, professor emeritus of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and director of the Jewish Resource Center at Baruch College, differentiated between the “intentionalist” and “functionalist” views of the Holocaust.
If one accepts the first version — that the slaughter of Europe’s Jews was part of a meticulously preconceived plan — then it partially absolves the powers who failed to stop it. But taking the “functionalist” view — that the attempt to exterminate the Jews was actually an ad hoc, improvised process that showed little of the Germans’ “much- touted efficiency” — then there were “ample spaces” for rescue efforts. Such a view leaves open the question of why President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders did not do more to halt the genocide.
One offer of rescue presented a “ghoulish symmetry” to Adolf Hitler’s drive to purge the German nation of Jewish genes: The government of another murderous dictator, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, was one of the very few leaders who wanted the Jewish refugees — to “whiten” the nation. To some degree, the offer was successful, though only a few hundred went there; Feingold said visiting the country, he has seen some “sommersprossen” — freckles — on fair-skinned faces there.
Four survivors described their own experiences of dispersal to far-flung places.
Novelist Lore Segal described her flight to England with the Kindertransport and life with families kind enough to accommodate her — even if they never liked her.
Catita Edward was born in South America to parents who fled separately from Germany and struggled to make a new life in that Spanish-speaking environment.
At 15 Dr. Josef Eisinger went to England, also with the Kindertransport, but later found himself incarcerated as an enemy alien and sent to Canada, where he was held for awhile with Nazi sympathizers.
Betty Grebenschikoff went with her family to Shanghai, a far cry from the family’s comfortable life in Berlin, but still, she said, a far better fate than that of those who didn’t escape.
Speakers at the Drew conference on Kristallnacht included, from left, Mark Hetfield, Henry Feingold, Lore Segal, Dr. Josef Eisinger, Betty Grebenschikoff, Shelley Helfand, Manli Ho, and Prof. Ann Saltzman.
Saving innocent lives
For almost all refugees, the United States was the desired destination, but the battle for visas often led them on circuitous routes to that goal. Former journalist Manli Ho, now researching a book on the subject, described how her father, Chinese diplomat Feng-Shan Ho, as consul general in Vienna, handed out thousands of visas to desperate Jewish families, until he was forced to leave Austria.
He knew Shanghai was a “bogus destination,” she said, and many chose not to go there. But those who did received documents that enabled them to cross borders where they would otherwise have been turned back. Feng-Shan Ho was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2001.
Asked by a member of the audience why her father risked his career, if not his life, Manli said, “If you knew my father, you wouldn’t need to ask.” He never spoke about that time, but she knew him to have an unswerving commitment to the best in Confucian and Judeo-Christian teaching, and that he simply took for granted that he should do whatever he could to save innocent lives.
Talking after the conference, Segal, a novelist and former professor of creative writing, said sometimes she fears that in telling her story over and over, the facts might lose their impact. As she did in first novel, Other People’s Houses, she strives to bring into her description of the wartime traumas the little details — of childhood pleasure in the midst of suffering — that make it real for her audience.
What counts, she said, is staying true to the underlying reality. Kristallnacht happened just four days after her 10th birthday, and part of her mission is conveying the impact on a child’s life “when hatred is the law of the land.”
For those wanting to research the facts for themselves, Shelley Helfand, a historian with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, described the kind of material available in the JDC’s archives. The organization played a key role — and continues to — helping Jews in distress around the world build a better life.
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