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Marco Werman: Fifty years ago today a different sort of court in Israel sentenced Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to death. He’d been convicted days earlier of helping to orchestrate the extermination of millions of Jews in the holocaust.

Israeli Judge: [speaking Hebrew]

Werman: The Israeli judge presiding over Eichmann’s trial said even if the defendant did act out of blind obedience, a man who took part in crimes of such magnitude for so many years should endure the greatest punishment known to law. Eichmann was hanged the following May, the only civil execution in Israel’s history. Eichmann had fled Germany after the war and taken refuge in Buenos Aires under an assumed name, but Israeli Mossad agents caught up with him in 1960. They captured Eichmann and hid with him at a safe house for 10 days until Eichmann could quietly be snuck onto a plane to Israel. That story is told in the 1990 book, Eichmann in My Hands. It was written by Peter Malkin, one of the Mossad agents; and the book is the basis of a new play, Captors, by Evan M. Wiener. The play just ended a one month run at a Huntington Theatre Company in Boston. Wiener says he was intrigued by those tense days at the safe house.

Evan M. Wiener: There were so many details in the story that I first of all found that I didn’t know, period. And the idea of having a person, a notorious mythic almost, a murderer fugitive in your hands, literally, literally in front of you as close as you and I are now, even closer, I thought what would that experience be like on a personal level to be dealing with someone like that and having to take care of his every need. And to be in a situation where you’re not allowed to speak to him, but your curiosity will get the better of you. And so there’s so many issues involved in a grand sense in terms of the holocaust and the war, but then there’s the personal story of just two men in a room for 10 days. They’re hiding, they have this man. They not only cannot hurt him, they have to care for him. They shaved him. They took him to the bathroom. He was stripped and then redressed. He had to be fed. There was the worry that he might kill himself, that was on the table for a while. This stuff all really happened. It was an emotionally traumatic experience for every single person in there and yes, they had to deal with him in this way. And again, it wasn’t simply taking care of him, it was making sure he was in perfect shape to stand trial because they knew that the rest of the world was gonna have a standard that they had to meet. So there is all this dramatic tension involved than how they would survive these 10 days, and how they would get to this point where they make it to the glass booth, the famous glass booth.

Werman: And the glass booth is where Eichmann stood during trial in Isreal.

Wiener: Exactly, he was in a glass booth in his witness box because they didn’t want anyone to take justice into their own hands.

Werman: A lot of the details in the play come from a book called Eichmann in My Hands, by Peter Malkin, who’s the hero of your story. I mean just who was Malkin. What do you know about him?

Wiener: He was a kid who fled the Nazis at four. And he went to Palestine before Israel was a country. Some of his family didn’t get out. He lost a lot of family there. And I think he kinda grew up in the streets, and so he was always a capable and courageous person, but he also had I think this artistic streak in him. He was a person who was a strongman. That means he literally grabbed Eichmann off the road. He was the guy who had to tackle him on the road. He also was a master of disguise, which is a strange specialty that he has. And he was also an expert in explosives, which is a sideline. He was kind of a wild card within the Mossad. He was the youngest man on the team, he was the newest guy on the team, but having grown up on the streets he was not a guy who was doctrinaire about his beliefs. He was questioning orders constantly. And that’s a fascinating sort of dialogue in and of itself, conflict between him and Eichmann.

Werman: Eichmann was convicted and executed 50 years ago. The trial lasted from April ’61 through December ’61, and then he was executed in May of ’62. Remind us of the almost unanimous global criticism of Israel once these agents spirited him out of Argentina.

Wiener: Yeah, that’s interesting because you would think after the fact that at this point, we just assume that it was an absolute good, I always did — that this trial was supported, that this trial was an incredibly important event, and that obviously Argentina, if a Nazi had been found, would be very cooperative. But none of these things were true and this is one of these things that should be known. Argentina was outraged. They thought that this group of men had come into their country, taken their citizen and the rest of the world followed suit. And there’s a line in the play that talks about that. The United Nations condemned Israel, it was a unanimous vote. And The New York Times condemned Israel. And the world just felt that Israel had no right or foundation to be prosecuting someone. And remember, Israel did not exist at the time of these crimes, and also did Israel have the infrastructure judicial infrastructure to really put a proper trial together. And so some people said bring him back to Germany. And the Israelis knew if he went to Germany that they didn’t see justice being done. So yes, the world was really very angry at Israel. Essentially they had gone rogue almost.

Werman: I mean the details are extraordinary, things I didn’t know like he was dressed by Malkin in a El AL uniform, doped up and gotten through the traffic in Buenos Aires, and had him walk on a plane.

Wiener: Yeah, exactly, walked on a plane…

Werman: With no handcuffs.

Wiener: Exactly, of his own freewill, but yeah, even getting him to the plane, they brought him out into the middle of Buenos Aires. They took him into an airport. They told them he was drunk because he had been sedated and he couldn’t speak, but he was awake. They passed him through. You know, so…

Werman: Extraordinary.

Wiener: It’s kind of amazing to think that they did not put him in a box. You know, they weren’t able to do that. They had to get him on his own two feet and they had to make him look like an airline pilot.

Werman: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the trial and the sentencing of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Does the anniversary spotlight this play in any way or do you think for maybe the first time in your life, wow, this is something to think about.

Wiener: It is and I think the world did. I could be wrong, you know, because I wrote the play I get a lot of things from people, or they’ll send me emails and they’ll point it out to me. And I think people should think more about it. I mean if the anniversary alerts people to get past the catchphrases and the simple you know, sound byte history to look deeper into what exactly happened and how that trial took place, and what they were really discussing, then I think that’s very important and I think that’s worthwhile. If it takes the anniversary to do that or the play or whatever it might be then that’s great.

Werman: Playwright Evan Wiener is the author of Captors. Very good to speak with you, thanks a lot.

Wiener: Thank you very much, Marco.

Werman: We have some video clips from the play Captors and from the Eichmann trial itself, they’re at theworld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

This clip is from the Benny Brunner 1995 documentary “The Seventh Million II.” It is used with the permission of Docs Online.

A Scene from the play “Captors”

Anti-Semitic board game 'Juden Raus' (Photo: Wiener Library)

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: In mid 1930s Europe, the storm clouds of World War II were gathering and in Germany Adolf Hitler had begun his campaign of antisemitism. He was very effective at convincing Germans there was a Jewish menace. A holocaust museum in London is now displaying a chilling reminder of how that fear took hold. The Wiener Library recently relocated and it put on an exhibit in the new space: items that were formerly in storage. Among them, a board game. Think of it as a sinister version of Monopoly. Museum director Ben Barkow describes the game.

Ben Barkow: It’s called “Juden Raus” or “Jews out” and it is a bright yellow board. The board is in the form a town and you walk through the streets. You roll dice, you walk through the streets and you are hoping to land on circles which represent Jewish businesses or law firms or whatever, and the little wooden figures that you play with represent the Germans and the Jews are represented by small yellow cones, cardboard cones, with grotesque caricatures of Jewish faces painted on them. If the wooden figure lands on the Jewish circle, it “arrests” the Jew. The wooden figure goes back to his home base, puts the Jew into something called the “sammlung punktz” or the “collection point” and then goes back into the town to try to hunt down another one.

Mullins: So the more you collect. . .

Barkow: The first one to round up six Jews is the winner.

Mullins: Remind us when this game came out.

Barkow: This game was issued in 1936.

Mullins: And the timing represent what? In terms of treatment of the Jews.

Barkow: 1936, the year of the Olympic Games, two years before the November pogroms. By the mid 1930s, German society was absolutely saturated with anti-Jewish propaganda at every level. It started in the cradle. We have books for really tiny toddler, full of images of Hitler, full of messages that Jews are bad and so on. The regime was certainly trying to create a generation of willing executioners. That much is beyond doubt. So I think for a German family, the idea of the board game, maybe they thought, “Our children need to get into this mind frame to survive in this society.”

Mullins: Is it the Nazi regime that put out this board game?

Barkow: No. Interestingly, it wasn’t. It was a purely commercial product put out by a games manufacturer based in Dresden and so it demonstrates the commercial exploitation of the Nazi ideology and the Nazi antisemitism.

Mullins: So it was a commercial board game. Did people actually play it or is this kind of just a novelty?

Barkow: No. It is documented that it was a considerable commercial success and that many, many copies, possibly up to a million copies, of it sold at the time.

Mullins: And it was considered a family time activity?

Barkow: It was fun for all the family.

Mullins: I mean it was a commercial board game as you say, and it happened before the Nazi policy, the official policy of extermination. What does that tell you?

Barkow: Well, I think it points to the all-pervasiveness of their ideology and their anti-Jewish agitation on the one side and it points to, I think, the easy and cynical way in which the world of business and commerce was able to coexist and profit from this evil regime.

Mullins: We’re going to present a video of you showing how this particular board game works at theworld.org. Ben Barkow, director of the newly relocated Wiener Library in London, the world’s oldest holocaust museum. Thank you.

Barkow: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

(Photo credit: Daniel Estrin)

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By Daniel Estrin

Earlier this week Israel marked its yearly Holocaust commemoration day. A siren wailed throughout the country and traffic ground to a halt to commemorate the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Israel estimates that more than half of the world’s Holocaust survivors today live in Israel. But they are quickly dying out. This year, Israel is calling on survivors and their families to come forward and preserve their legacies before it is too late.
Israel’s national Holocaust museum and archive, Yad Vashem, has amassed the world’s largest collection of Holocaust-era documents. And still, there is a lot about the Holocaust we just don’t know.

“The holocaust is still a black hole in European history,” said Haim Gertner. “You have to know, we are still missing 2 million names of Holocaust victims.”

Gertner directs the archives at Yad Vashem. He said there are a lot of important artifacts about the Holocaust in Israel, but they are not in the museum. They are stashed in attics and closets and drawers throughout the country.

“We assume that in every house, in the hands of everyone, almost, in Israel, there are fragments of this huge event,” Gertner said.

Which is why the museum has mounted a nationwide campaign, telling Holocaust survivors and their families: Dig up your precious Holocaust-era mementos, and give them to us.

“Here it will be kept for generations to come. We have the ability to keep it here better than in your place. And here it will be connected to the rest of puzzle. In your house, it’s your personal story. Here it’s part of a huge scene,” Gertner said.
One morning this week a handful of Holocaust survivors and relatives answered the call.

Miriam Peeri Younger survived Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. She sat with a Yad Vashem archivist, clutching yellowing photos.

Tears welled in her eyes as she told the story of how a man found the photos after the war and searched for her for a year and a half. They were the precious few photos of her parents she had. She was giving the pictures to Israel’s holocaust museum, she said, so the whole world would know what happened to them. In the corner of the room, another woman told an archivist she survived the war hiding in a hole under her house. In the hideout, she watched a relative embroider a tablecloth. With tears in her eyes, the woman handed over the tablecloth to the archivist.

Haim Gertner, head of the archives, said it is not easy for people to part with their mementos. Some have only allowed the museum to take pictures – not take the objects themselves. But since the museum launched the campaign a few months ago more than 2000 people called the hotline to inquire about donating.

“I think this is exactly the last minute,” he said. “They realize they have to do it now – to collect now the documents with the story behind them – as a last minute mission. This is what they feel. It comes from them.”

There are over 200,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today. A recent study found that in Israel, about 35 Holocaust survivors die every day. In another 16 years or so, they will all have passed away.

That ticking clock has encouraged Israel to launch another initiative: the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, or Project Heart.

Its aim is to get Jews from all over the world to report any assets snatched away from their families in Europe during the Holocaust.

Anything from real estate to savings accounts to livestock.

For decades Germany has generously paid Jews reparations for stolen assets, but other Eastern European countries haven’t.

Bobby Brown, the project’s director, said restitution will take lots of time and diplomatic pressure, but Israel needs to help survivors stake these claims now, while they are still alive.

“If we don’t record this quickly it will be lost. The idea is to be able to represent real people in negotiations, in court cases, so we’re racing against time,” Brown said.

These Israeli initiatives aimed to help Holocaust survivors come at a delicate time. Survivors in Israel have long complained that Israeli authorities have neglected them. Mordechai Hareli survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and came to Israel when he was 16.

“We have been treated and viewed in a rather condescending way. You went to slaughter like sheep. You didn’t fight,” Hareli said.

For years, that was the attitude in Israel, and Israeli authorities used German reparation money more to finance Israeli institutions and build the country and less to take care of individual survivors. Today, nearly a quarter of Israel’s holocaust survivors is poor – and is struggling to pay for its rising medical bills.

Hareli said he hoped that Israel can help survivors reclaim their lost assets in Europe – if anything, so they have some extra cash to pay for the medicines they need in the last years of their life.

Peter Filkins

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Like many Europeans, the Dutch used to think of their country as less violent than the United States, in both word and deed. That’s no longer the case, after the street assassinations of politician Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo van Gogh. After Fortuyn’s murder in 2002, the political left came under fire for the tone of their verbal attacks on Fortuyn, who was a populist right-winger — something of a foreshadowing of the Tucson shootings, albeit with the politics of the accused and accusers switched.

In Germany, political discourse is far more subdued. There is, of course, a historical reason for that: hate-mongering speech during 1920s and 1930s that led to political assassinations, firebombings and the rise of the Nazis. Moreover, there are certain things in Germany that you cannot say; most famouly, you cannot by law deny the Holocaust. Also, libel law is more stringent than in the United States. Josef Joffe, the German journalist we talk to, says that as a result, German political rhetoric today is “almost boring.”

Sarah Palin’s equivalent in Germany — should such a person ever exist — almost definitely would not have used the term blood libel. With its Jewish associations it would have been beyond the pale. It was strange enough to hear it in the United States. Defending herself against charges that her own harsh language contributed to the Tucson shootings, Palin said journalists and pundits were “manufactur[ing] a blood libel.” See her video message here.

Historically, as my colleague Alex Gallafent reports, blood libel is a “false accusation that Jews murder others in order to use their blood in ceremonies.” This form of anti-Semitism goes back centuries. After the false accusation was made, more extreme rhetoric followed, often ending in ethnic violence. Sarah Palin’s use of the term seems misplaced, insofar as she is neither Jewish nor is she accused of orchestrating or relishing the death of anyone. Still, it did draw attention to Sarah Palin, which may have been the point. It meant that Barack Obama’s oratory at a memorial ceremony inTucson later that day, while receiving high marks, did not get the banner headline coverage than it might otherwise have done.

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Timothy Snyder, author of 'Bloodlands' (Photo: Ine Gundersveen)

Yale University historian Timothy Snyder has a special name for the region that lies between Berlin and Moscow: “Bloodlands.” It’s also the title of his new book, which looks at what happened in Poland, Ukraine, western Russia, the Baltics and Belarus between l933 and l945, the years when both Hitler and Stalin were in power.

“In that relatively short span of time the Soviets and the Nazis deliberately murdered a combined 17 million unarmed men, women and children,” Snyder said. “This is the central event of modern European history, or maybe even of the history of the modern west.”

It’s also the region where Soviet mass killing and German mass killing overlap. Timothy Snyder examines these atrocities through a new lens. He doesn’t just look at Soviet terror, or Nazi terror in isolation. Nor does he focus on any single nation or ethnic group. “Bloodlands” is history from the point of view of the victims.

“So Jews, and Belarussians and Poles and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who lived in this territory are all represented,” Snyder said. He added that the only way to understand what happened in the l930′s and 40′s is by studying Hitler and Stalin together.

They both targeted entire populations, and used surprisingly similar methods — nowhere more so than in Ukraine.

“It’s the place where more people than any other, at least among the countries that currently exist, die,” Snyder said.

Soviet Ukraine felt the full force of both Stalinist and Nazi violence. Between l932 and l933, Stalin deliberately starved to death more than three million Soviet Ukrainians. He also executed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and other Soviet minorities during the Great Terror a few years later.

Then, in June of l941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Ukraine’s civilian population endured more than three years of Nazi occupation. Snyder suggested Hitler intended to overthrow Stalin, and transform Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union into a giant colony of Nazi Germany.

“This was a plan which foresaw not only the total elimination of the Jews,” Snyder said, “but also the starvation by hunger of tens of millions of Slavs, and the moving around, enslavement or deportation, sometimes mass murder of tens of millions more, after the war. That’s in black and white. Those were the plans.”

Olha Matula grew up in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

“I was 13 years old and living in Kiev when the Second World War started for us,” she said.

Her family survived the Nazi occupation thanks to what she calls a series of miracles. But they witnessed scenes of horror. One of the first things the Germans did after seizing control of Kiev was round up all the Jews.

Some escaped, including Mathula’s next door neighbors. But for some reason, Matula said, an old woman was left behind. “We could hear her cry, and people in our courtyard decided two or three of them would take turns and bring her food.”

A few weeks later, German soldiers discovered the woman and took her away.

Between June and December of l941, the Germans rounded up and shot more than a million Soviet Jews. Their mass graves are still being discovered and documented.

But Snyder said other populations vanished without a trace. As the Wehrmacht tore through Ukraine towards Moscow, they captured more than three million Red Army soldiers, and deliberately starved or shot them, in blatant violation of the laws of war.

In many cases, the Germans marched the prisoners of war (POW) into open fields, surrounded them with barbed wire, and left them to die from hunger in the cold.

“These were the first German death camps,” Snyder said. “These were the first camps that were built in order to kill people in very large numbers.”

Mathula saw evidence of that. One day, she said, she saw some German soldiers herding a bedraggled group of Soviet POWs. They were walking past a field of potatoes, covered in snow.

“And those poor prisoners, probably knew, some of them were peasants; they probably knew there were potatoes or beets stored there,” Mathula said. “And they started with their hands to dig it and eat frozen potatoes. And Germans started to shoot. I witnessed that.”

Soviet POWs were victims of both Hitler and Stalin, said Timothy Snyder.

“The reason they were there to be captured was because Stalin, who thought he was a military genius, didn’t allow the generals to retreat, which meant that people could be captured.”

It’s just one example of how Hitler and Stalin’s actions reinforced each other, to the detriment of the populations trapped between them. It’s also what makes simple comparisons between Nazi and Stalinist terror difficult. Even survivors like 82 year-old Mathula struggle with that.

“Personally, I experienced more from Hitler, of course, because that touched my life,” Muthula said. “But when looking back, what my parents went through, I don’t know which one they would say was worse.”

Snyder said in terms of sheer numbers the Nazis killed more people. Most of their victims perished during the Second World War. The worst years of Stalinist terror, by contrast, were in peacetime, even before the war began.
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• More on the Pink Triangle
• Last Known Gay Holocaust Survivor Speaks Out in New Interview

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

DAVID BARON: Some six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. The Nazis also killed Poles, Gypsies, and political opponents. And they persecuted another group. Gay men. It’s estimated that 10 to 15 thousand of them from all over Europe were sent to concentration camps. Many never returned. Now, a man believed to be the last survivor of those deportations has written about his life. Genevieve Oger has his story.

GENEVIEVE OGER:  I met Rudolf Brazda in a cafe in Paris. He’s a retired roofer who lives a quiet life in Alsace, in Eastern France. Brazda is 97, but it was only two years ago that he decided to tell his story.

GERMAN SPEAKING

OGER: He was born in a Czech family living in Germany in 1913. As a young man, he lived openly as a homosexual in the Weimar Republic.

GERMAN SPEAKING

RUDOLF BRAZDA: It was a democracy in Germany at the time. There was freedom for homosexuals too. We had our own meetings. There was a dance club in Leipzig where we would often meet. There was great freedom for us. I couldn’t imagine anything else. Then we started hearing about Hitler and his bandits.

OGER: After the Nazis came to power, they toughened existing laws against homosexuality. In 1937, Brazda was convicted of debauchery and spent six months in jail. When he was arrested for a similar offense in 1941, he was ultimately sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

GERMAN SPEAKING

OGER: At Buchenwald, Brazda was forced to sew a pink triangle on his uniform. The now notorious symbol for homosexual prisoners in the camps. He became a slave laborer. But as a skilled roofer, he was later able to get an easier job maintaining buildings. He was also given extra food. That helped him survive until the camp was liberated in 1945.

GERMAN SPEAKING

BRAZDA: Tears came to my eyes when I think about it. About how terrible life was under Hitler. And now we enjoy so much freedom, I feel so happy.

OGER: When the war ended, Brazda moved to France and started a new life. He didn’t publically discuss what had happened to him. It wasn’t until 2001 that then Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, recognized homosexual concentration camp survivors, as victims of Nazism. And in May of this year, Brazda attended an unveiling of a plaque in Eastern France, in honor of Pierre Seel and other homosexual victims of the Nazis. Seel, who died five years ago, was the first French pink triangle to speak out publically. That ceremony and plaque were the result of years of work by a group called “Les Oubliés de la Mémoire.” The name roughly translates as “those memories have forgotten.” Jean-Luc Schwab is the group’s delegate for the Alsace region. He says in terms of total numbers, the deportation of homosexuals wasn’t as significant as other groups.

JEAN-LUC SCHWAB:  It’s really a very tiny fraction of the 165,000 who were deported from France. But it’s often been left out of official history. It isn’t taught or it doesn’t appear in textbooks. Partly because it is a minority figure, that’s true. But also because for a long time officials didn’t want to hear about it.

OGER: It was Schwab who first approached Rudolf Brazda about telling his story. They wrote the book together.

SCHWAB: We happen to have the chance now, having the last known witness of that time. And it’s important that his life story be recorded somewhere. And the wider issue is this case is simply that we need to know our past in order to avoid errors from the past being made once again.

GERMAN SPEAKING

BRAZDA: I think it’s good for my life story to be recorded like this. All the things that happened in that concentration camp. All the terrible things I saw there. I was so lucky and happy to get out of there alive.

OGER: Brazda says he’ll continue to bear witness, as long as his health will permit it. For The World, this is Genevieve Oger, in Paris.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

On a day when we’re remembering soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember. That can depend on the nature of historical events, whether we identify with victors or victims, with brave acts or evil ones. In Germany, memory of the past is often painful: two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall. Now, Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events. Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways. Download MP3 (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

• Neues Museum
• Berlin-based Yiddishkeit band ‘Jewdyssee’
• Berlin Wall graffiti

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  On a day when we remember soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember.  That can depend on the nature of historical events and whether we view them with pride or with shame.  In Germany, memory of the past is often painful.  Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, now Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events.  Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways.

ALISSA QUART:  Berlin is a city of odd collisions.  Collisions of architecture, 19th century buildings next to severe modern ones.  Angry graffiti on fancy stores in the former East Berlin.  People collide here too.  I was part of that briefly.  An American Jew sorting through the city, adding the fragments of my own family’s history in Europe into the mix.  Berlin’s buildings offered some clues.  This is the Neues Museum.  Neues means new in German and this museum is new, well pieces of it are.  As I walk up the museum’s giant steps, I can see strips of exploded old bricks incorporated into sturdy new ones.  The museum has been rebuilt using the ruins of the original 19th century museum building.  It was bombed during World War II and then left to decay by the East German government.  It reopened late last year.  The new structure, renovated by British architect David Chipperfield uses bits and pieces of the 1850 one.  There’s weird 19th century iron work, World War II bullet holes, walls and ceilings left chipped and stained.  I had to fight through the crowds to get through.  Olivia Zorn who works at the museum leads me around.  She points out the layers from different periods.

OLIVIA ZORN:  The idea of the conservation of this building was to show all what is preserved.  The top painting, the paintings on the pillars.  After that it was damaged in the Second World War.  And we will show all these details.

QUART: We pass the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.  It’s the best known exhibit here.  It too is surrounded by fragments of history.  Sitting under a half-conserved kitschy 19th century mural of the Roman God Hercules.  Nefertiti is very beautiful.  The Egyptians want her back now.  I am told I can’t ask about that.  The sound of a large curved horn from the Bronze Age plays next to where the horn itself is displayed.  Nearby ancient bracelets and rings are shown in dirt and sand.  Some critics and curators find the renovation of the Neues Museum annoyingly artsy.  The bullet holes and broken brick, a cliché of World War II trauma, all in clever quotations.  A more direct approach can be seen at the museum at the Wannsee Conference House.  It was at this house in 1942 that Nazi leaders planned the Final Solution, the extermination of Europe’s Jews.  Among them, many in my own family.  The museum is stark and the house unchanged.  Tapes featuring the voice of Adolf Eichmann play in a corner of one room.  I had forgotten that cigarettes and cognac were served during the planning of the Final Solution.  The Neues Museum, of course, is aiming for a more self-conscious vision of German history.  Art historian Benjamin Buchloh thinks the result is remarkable, incorporating fragments like corny 19th century wall paintings.  Those reminders of the past hint at how the history of Germany’s heroic fantasies about itself long preceded Fascism.

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH:  They really give us a sense of the intensity with which Germans in the 19th century desired to remake themselves in the image of the Greco-Roman culture.  That type of imagery that is still left in the museum reminds you of that.  So as you go through the museum, as you look at the collection, you start thinking about the history that necessitated and formed the collections and the museum architecture itself.

QUART: Buchloh is also impressed that the Neues rebels against a typical new museum building.  Many new museums aim to invoke jaw-dropping awe, sometimes at the expense of the art they’re showing.  And the Neues engages you more than those buildings do, says Susan Howe, an American poet who has been writing about the Neues.  That’s because the museum doesn’t try to be a shiny new place that has all the answers.  This museum is purposefully incomplete.

SUSAN HOWE:  This building represents a feeling of no final intentions, or a museum that is open, open to the sky literally.

QUART: I, too, have long believed places and histories are more fractured than they appear.  I think that’s what the museum is saying as well.  In Berlin and in so many other cities, the best thing any new structure can do is disown the past and honor it as well.  The Neues Museum does this by retelling the past in fragments, while still cherishing Nefertiti.  For The World, I’m Alissa Quart, Berlin.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

This week’s podcast is a compilation of items from the radio show. First, the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII: Marco Werman interviews Svetlana Savranskaya of The National Security Archive at The George Washington University about Russian memories of WW2. You may remember Savranskaya; she helped us consider the parallels between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 in HWGH#10. In another story pegged to the 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, The World’s Laura Lynch reports on a reunion of Holocaust survivors in London. And finally, in a footnote to HWGH #19 (about Gabon’s President Omar Bongo), The World’s Marco Werman tells us about the musical career of Bongo’s son and successor, Ali Ben Bongo. >>> Click here to join the “How We Got Here” Facebook Group Page.

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Construction has just started in Warsaw on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It will not simply be a museum about the Holocaust. The museum team wants to focus more broadly on centuries of Jewish life and achievements in Poland. Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska has our story. Her report was produced with the help of Feet in Two Worlds, a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

There’s a new Jewish museum being built in Warsaw. It’s not a Holocaust remembrance musem. It’s dedicated to the centuries of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska has the story.

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World. A history museum is under construction is under construction in Warsaw. That’s hardly surprising. The Polish capital has an especially rich past. But this museum is different. It’s devoted exclusively to the history of Jews in Poland. That history nearly ended during the Holocaust. This museum will look past that tragedy to the centuries of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Report Ewa Kern Jedrychowska says the museum comes as dialogue is opening up about the complicated Polish-Jewish relationship.

[SOUND OF CANTOR CHOIR]

EWA KERN JEDRYCHOWSKA: A choir of cantors and a song of thanksgiving at the ceremony to start construction for the museum earlier this summer. In the small crowd of guests was New Yorker Zygmunt Rolat who survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland.

ZYGMUNT ROLAT: I think that too many of my Jewish compatriots here confuse the horrible experiences during the war, the Holocaust, with the very long history of the almost millennium of Jewish coexistence in times good and bad.

JEDRYCHOWSKA: After the war Rolat immigrated to the US. Now this successful businessman and philanthropist is raising money to support the new museum in Warsaw. Rolat belongs to a small but growing group of Jews who are trying to rebuild Polish-Jewish relations both in the US and in Poland. Part of that is for discovering Jewish history.

ROLAT: The fact is that when Spain, when Portugal, was expelling their Jews, Polish kings, Polish nobles, were receiving Jews not only with open arms but granting them special privileges.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Until World War II started Warsaw was a center of Europe’s Jewish community. At that time every third citizen of this city was Jewish. The museum will stand where the Jewish district once was located just next to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial. Inside visitors will see interactive reconstructions of a Jewish home and a synagogue. They will learn about the first Jewish merchants who arrived in Poland in the Middle Ages, the spread of Hassidism, the role of Jews in the development of Poland’s industry, and Jewish cultural contributions.

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: We really want to capture the quality on an everyday basis.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett walks around the future site of the museum in Warsaw. She’s a professor at New York University and head of the core exhibition planning team.

KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: The way we put is this: We’d like to communicate the lived experience of what it meant to a Jew in Poland across this enormous period. What was Polish about it? What was Jewish about it? What was unique about it? What did it share with those non-Jews among whom Jews lived?

JEDREYCHOWSKA: In the museum the Holocaust will be just one of seven galleries. The controversial post-war years will conclude the exhibit. Under communism the Polish government led an anti-Zionist campaign which forced tens of thousands of the remaining Polish Jews to leave the country in 1968. But now Poland’s chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich says the situation is different. The Polish government is a strong ally of Israel and Schudrich says Poles have a new attitude.

MICHAEL SCHUDRICH: While there are anti-Semites in this country there’s even a larger number, and that group is growing faster, of people opposing anti-Semites – the anti-anti-Semites.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Still problems remain. Right-wingers, including Father Tadeusz Rydzyk who runs a radical and notoriously anti-Semitic radio station, continue to attract listeners especially older Poles. The restitution of Jewish property confiscated during World War II is still an unresolved issue. For their part many Jews still cannot forget that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

ERIN EINHORN: I had always been told that Poland was a country of anti-Semites.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Erin Einhorn, a 36-year-old American writer lived in Poland for a year researching the story of her mother who survived the Holocaust because she was hidden by a Polish family near the southern city of Krakow. When she arrived in 2001 Erin recalls she was afraid of hostility. Instead she found that many younger Poles were fascinated by Jewish culture.

EINHORN: You’d walk into a restaurant and there’d be Jewish music playing and there were these klezmer festivals and people studying Yiddish and you’d go to synagogue services and there’d be young Poles there just curious to see what the service would be like and just really expressing an interest and feeling that this was their way of showing tolerance for Jews.

[SOUND CLIP OF PRAYERS AT SYNAGOGUE]

JEDREYCHOWSKA: This is evening prayers at Warsaw synagogue. Poland is in the midst of what some call a Jewish renaissance. Twenty years after the collapse of the communist regime and more than 60 years since the end of World War II many Poles are looking for their Jewish roots – roots that used to be dangerous, sometimes deathly dangerous, to acknowledge. No one knows how many Jews live in Poland toady but everyone agrees the community’s growing. Changes like these have made the construction of the museum possible. But not everyone supports it. Some Poles worry that they will be shown only in a negative light. Many Jews are nervous that anti-Semitism will be white-washed. Again Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: When we present the museum and people learn more about it, they become very enthusiastic. I’ve even heard individuals say I’m converted.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: When Poland was still ruled by communists, Zygmunt Rolat used to take his family there to show them where he grew up.

ROLAT: I think that it is very important that my children, my grandchildren, and for that matter all Jewish children and as a matter of fact not just Jewish children but young people in Poland in the world should know, should know and should learn and should be very proud of the long, long Jewish experience in Poland.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: For The World I’m Ewa Kern Jedrychowska.

SHARP: That report was produced with the help of Feet in Two Worlds, a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.