Augusta Chiwy (Photo: Clark Boyd)

Sixty seven years ago today, the Battle of the Bulge, the largest and bloodiest battle of World War II, began in the Ardennes area in Belgium. The town of Bastogne was at the heart of that fight. Through the years, many stories of heroism emerged from Bastogne, but none quite like the one military historian Martin King tells of a 4’ 8” volunteer nurse who was born in the Belgian Congo.

King says that to fully understand her story, you have to understand the battle. So, he drives me around Bastogne in his battered Ford minivan.

At one point we pass a memorial commemorating Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division — the guys made famous by “Band of Brothers.”

Before long, King and I leave the van and go on foot through the trees. The temperature drops, as cold rain and sleet begin to fall.

King tells me that these are the very woods where Easy Company was dug in back in December 1944. The ground is still marked by deep craters.

“What I find remarkable,” King says, “is that 67 years after the fact, you can still quite clearly see the foxholes here.”

Originally from Scotland, King has lived and worked in Belgium for thirty years now. He’s interviewed countless veterans, and co-authored a book called “Voices of the Bulge.”

This, he tells me emphatically, was the scene of some of the most ferocious front line action in the Battle of Bulge. But he says to get the real flavor, you have to imagine it with two feet of snow, the ground frozen solid, and the fog so think you can’t see five feet in front of you.

“And the Germans,” he notes, “would have been a few hundred yards away.”

The German shelling and bombing of Bastogne were horrific back in December, 1944.

Allied medical supplies and personnel were hard to come by. Some locals, though, volunteered to help as nurses.

You might remember that in HBO’s “Band of Brothers” mini-series, there’s a scene set in Bastogne.

In it, a white Belgian nurse chats with an Army medic outside an aid station. They’re discussing another volunteer, a black nurse.

“Where’s she from? The black girl?” asks the medic.

“From the Congo,” answers the white nurse.

It turns out that “the black girl from the Congo” is not a fictional character. Her name’s Augusta Chiwy, and hers is one of the great untold war stories, says historian Martin King.

“The Snow! Oh, the Fog!”

“Augusta’s story is the most incredible thing I ever heard,” King tells me.

“You can take the hero story – he did so much that day, and shot all those people, and he had big guns. But this, to me, had something else. It had a humanity that I’d never come across.”

Augusta Chiwy was born in 1921 in the Belgian Congo. Her father was a white veterinarian, originally from Bastogne. Her mother was Congolese.

At the age of nine, her father brought her to live with relatives in Bastogne.

Then, at age 19, Chiwy went to study nursing in the city of Leuven.

In December of 1944, her father invited her home to Bastogne for Christmas.

“The snow, oh, the fog!” Chiwy recalls.

When she arrived in Bastogne, the town was firmly in American hands and the front was some miles away. A few days later, though, the German advance left Bastogne surrounded.

Chiwy and her family stayed in town, hiding in the basement like many other residents.

And then, a few days before Christmas, there came a knock at the Chiwy’s door. It was US Army medic Dr. John Prior, known as “Jack.”

“Jack Prior arrived at the house,” Chiwy says, “and he told me that he had no one left, that his ambulance driver had been killed.”

So, Chiwy volunteered as a nurse, working at the makeshift first-aid station in town. When her own clothing became bloody, she even donned a US Army uniform.

Then, she volunteered for something much more dangerous.

“The Germans Had it Zeroed”

Every fifteen minutes, chimes ring out from the US war memorial that stands on the top of Mardasson Hill outside of Bastogne. The sound is meant to remind visitors of the sacrifices made by American soldiers.

Not 200 yards away from the memorial is a field which was very much the front line back in December, 1944.

Chiwy, Martin King tells me, jumped onto the back of a two and half ton Army truck with Dr. Prior and two litter-bearers. They drove from Bastogne to this spot.

And there, King says, Chiwy risked everything to help the wounded US soldiers.

“She was actually running out into this field,” King says. “And the Germans had it zeroed. They were hitting it with 88s, and mortars and heavy machine gun fire.”

“And Augusta tells me that the ground was being raked up around her as she was trying to retrieve the bodies.”

There were other hazards for Augusta Chiwy besides the intense gunfire, though.

Bastogne had been, until recently, under German occupation. “If the Germans captured her,” King says, “they would have shot her immediately as a collaborator.”

And the fact that Chiwy was black, King notes, would not have helped matters when it came to the Germans.

“It was an incredible risk,” says King.

“We Heard Something Screaming Towards Us”

On Christmas Eve 1944, the aid station in Bastogne where Augusta Chiwy has been working iwas hit by a German bomb.

More than two dozen US soldiers, and Renee Lamaire, another volunteer nurse, were killed.

You can find the spot where the aid station stood not far from Bastogne’s main square. It’s now a Chinese restaurant.

Outside, a plaque commemorates those who died when the aid station was bombed. Renee Lamaire is mentioned, but not Augusta Chiwy.

King tells me that some books about the Battle of the Bulge say Chiwy died in the explosion.

But historian he didn’t buy it, and he was so intrigued by the story that he went looking for her.
A few years back, a contact in the Belgian army told King that Chiwy was still alive. Eventually, King found her living comfortably in a retirement home just outside Brussels

Slowly, he got her to tell the story of how she survived that bomb blast in Bastogne.

In a documentary made a few years ago, Chiwy remembers the night the aid station was hit. She was sipping champagne with Dr. Jack Prior in a building next door.

“So a bottle of champagne was opened, a glass was passed around,” Chiwy says on the video.

“And I don’t remember if he finished filling the glass, but we heard something screaming coming towards us, and then big bang and all the windows were blown out.”

Chiwy was blown through a wall, but survived. After the explosion, she simply got up and started helping Jack Prior tend the wounded.

She continued to volunteer until the Germans were pushed back, and the siege of Bastogne ended.

“You Embody What is Best and Most Kind in All of Us”

For years, Augusta Chiwy went for long stretches of time without speaking about her war experiences. Martin King says that today, she’d probably be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But the more King coaxed out of her, the more he realized Chiwy should be honored for her service.

He wrote letters to the US Army, and to the Belgian King.

It has finally paid off.

Earlier this year, Chiwy was honored by King Albert II of Belgium.

And earlier this week, the US Army did its part for Augusta, now “Lady” Chiwy. In a ceremony in Brussels, Chiwy was given the US Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service.

Colonel JP McGee, who currently commands the “Bastogne Brigade” of the 101st Airborne Division, presented the award to her.

“M’aam, you embody what is best and most kind in all of us,” McGee said.

“It is an honor to share the stage with you and to be able to say on behalf of US veterans everywhere — thank you. The number of lives that you touched is incalculable. There are men and women in America who would never have a father or grandfather if you hadn’t been there to provide them basic medical care.”

During the ceremony, Augusta Chiwy smiled, blew kisses and waved to her family in the audience.

Afterwards, amid the applause, I asked her if she was happy to be honored, almost 70 years after the fact.

“Yes,” Chiwy told me. “See, I’ve had a good life. I’ve got my children, and my grandchildren.”

“And,” she added, pointing to her head with a smile, “I’ve still got my marbles.”

As historian Martin King told me: “America honors its heroes. It just needs to be reminded sometimes who those heroes are.”

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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.

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”

Previous Updates: (12 p.m.)
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou is in Germany pleading his case for a bailout. In a speech, he told a group of German businessmen that it wasn’t just a rescue, but “an investment to move Greece to the future.”

Papandreou also hailed Greece’s “superhuman” efforts to cut its debt levels.

The prime minister is in Germany for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss his country’s progress in cutting its budget deficit.

Papandreou said the current debt crisis provided a “unique opportunity to launch important reforms that Greece badly needs to become competitive again.”

UPDATE: (1:35 p.m.)
Germans do not appear to be in a giving mood right now. The economy is strong, there’s a trade surplus, and unemployment is low. They want it to stay that way, and think that giving the Greeks billions of Euro isn’t necessarily the way to do that.

But not everyone agrees. “Germany seems to think that it can drink from the well, but it never has to put anything into it,” says Peter Morici, an economics professor at the University of Maryland. Instead of helping the Greeks, Morici says the Germans are “giving them lectures in Teutonic austerity.”

“Essentially the Germans are saying, ‘Buck-up,’ and march through the Great Depression again.”

UPDATE: (2:40 p.m.)
CLARK BOYD: I also spoke today with Johan Van Overtveldt, author of a forthcoming book called “The End of the Euro.”

He told me that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s in a tough spot. European politicians here in Brussels criticize her for not getting Germans to understand the importance of taming Greece’s debt problem. But at the same time, her party has been on the losing end in several regional elections in the past month.

Overtveldt says those electoral losses are “expressions of public sentiment that Germany is much too lax towards Greece and other countries which Germans consider to be over-spending countries.”

They once were displayed in Poland’s National Museum and we want you to tell us where that museum is located.

These paintings were stolen by the Nazis, part of Hitler’s mass looting of art, much of it from Jewish victims.

The fate of these two oil paintings took a surprising turn. They were recently seized from auction houses in New York.

Last night they were returned to the Polish president. So name the Polish city where the paintings will return for public exhibit.

The answer is Warsaw, where Poland’s National Museum of Art will exhibit the recovered works. Anchor Lisa Mullins finds out more about the case from Poland’s Consul-General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka.

• Slate article

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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.

KATY CLARK: Here in the US, when things get hot, you’re likely to reach for a Coke or a Pepsi. A Fanta? Not so much. But Fanta’s right up there with the big boys in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Brian Palmer wrote about the foreign Fanta phenomenon in Slate. He’s in New York. So Brian, can you give us an example of just how big Fanta is overseas. What piqued your interest in this story?

BRIAN PALMER:  In most of the world Fanta is the 2^nd or 3^rd leading soda. By comparison in the US, its 8^th and that is after a very heavy marketing push by the Coke company since 2001. We got onto the piece because last week Kenya had a referendum on a new constitution and the New York Times covering the story noted that the voting was so peaceful in comparison to the 2007 elections that street vendors who had stayed home three years ago were able to kind of walk up and down the lines hawking Fanta to people waiting to vote. And it seemed so odd to us that it wouldn’t be Coke. Cause here in the US, if you are hawking anything to someone, its water or it’s Coke.

CLARK:  So, it’s got to be more than just personal taste. I mean why is Fanta so big overseas and not here?

PALMER: A lot of this has to do with the marketing of Fanta. When Fanta was first, when Fanta had its first modern incarnation in the mid-50s, Coke executives were really hesitant to push it in the United States because the actual Coca-Cola product had such a strong position in the market. So they pushed it a lot harder abroad than the did here and it kind of limped along for about 30 years or so in the United States until the mid-1980s when they basically just took it off most of the US market. They kept selling it in places where there were large immigrant populations where people would recognize the drink from their home countries. And then it was just not really available in the US again until 2001 when they rereleased it and went on a big marketing campaign and many people who kind of go to movies are used to seeing the Fantanas singing to them in theaters.

CLARK: Well, for those who need their memory jogged a little bit, a Fanta it’s sort of this very sweet orange drink in an orange can?

PALMER: It can come in a can or a bottle, but it is, in the United States, a very sweet and syrupy drink. The Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to talk about its recipes very much, but most people discern a very obvious difference between the abroad Fanta and the US Fanta. The abroad Fanta typically seems a little bit crisper and a little lighter and a little less sweet than the US version. Some people blame this on the fact that corn syrup is more common in US soda than it is abroad. But there’s no way of knowing exactly how different the recipes are unless the Coke Company’s ready to talk about it.

CLARK: And Fanta has a really interesting history. Tell us a little bit about who made it, where it came from.

PALMER: During World War II, or actually just prior to World War II, Coca-Cola had a very bustling operation in Germany and they seemed to have not much of a problem operating under the Nazi regime there. When an American executive, who had been running the company, left in 1938, a German executive named Max Keith took over the German operations. Keith was never a Nazi himself, but engaged in a lot of behavior that suggested an enthusiasm for Hitler and his regime. In the 30s he held company conventions in which the Coca-Cola logo was displayed side by side with the Swastika and he led Coca-Cola executives in a triple Sieg Heil in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Once Pearl Harbor happened, the US wasn’t so happy about Coca-Cola shipping their syrup to German bottlers. And when that flow ended, Keith had to do something to keep the company going. They were no longer affiliated with the US parent company, but they still had a bunch of bottling factories going in Germany. So what he did was, he just kind of scratched together whatever he could find. It was, the original Fanta recipe included whey, which is a kind of milky runoff from cheese production. The pressings from cider, so this is the fibrous apple remains after they press the juice out of them, and just whatever scrap fruits he could get from Italy. He called the ingredients the leftovers of leftovers. And he had a little competition in the company to name it. He told them to let their imaginations run free when they thought of a name. And the word imagination in German includes the word fanta, and one of the executives seized on it and that’s where the name came from.

CLARK: And you write that the original Fanta was a Nazi product, but more precisely I guess it would be a product of the ingenuity of German businessmen operating under a Nazi Germany.

PALMER: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s not only the ingenuity of the businessmen who are operating in Germany, but also German consumers who didn’t always drink Fanta the way we drink it now. When nutrients kind of were running short in the later stages of the war, Fanta was actually a crucial source of calories for Germans. Many of them used it as a base for soups.

CLARK:  That’s amazing. Well, Brian Palmer is a writer with Slate. He joined us from the studios of the Radio Foundation in New York.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  This Sunday Ukrainians celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.  There will be parades, military bands and speeches marking the heroism of the Red Army soldiers who defeated Hitler’s Army.  But one group of Ukrainians has never been included in the Victory Day Parades.  During the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, more than two million people, most of them women and children, were sent to Germany and Austria as slave laborers.  Reporter Brigid McCarthy has the story of one former slave laborer, a 76-year-old woman in Kiev.

BRIGID MCCARTHY:  Inessa Merchevska is a classic Ukrainian beauty, clear blue eyes, an unlined complexion and feathery white hair.  She spent her entire life in Ukraine, except for two years during the Second World War  Inessa was eight years old when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941.  Her father was sent to the front.  Inessa and her mother stayed in Nazi occupied Kiev.  She says they never had enough to eat.  The Germans intentionally starved the local population and shot anyone they caught stealing food.

INTERPRETER:  And then there was that awful when they said to all the Jews, please gather all your belongings and your families.

MCCARTHY: She saw Kiev’s Jewish residents, more than 30,000 of them, being marched in a long column towards Babi Yar.

INTERPRETER:  And they thought they were going to be taken out somewhere.  But they were just shot.

MCCARTHY: And then one day, the Germans rounded up everyone in her neighborhood and packed them into trains.  They were taken to a prison camp in western Germany, near Dusseldorf.  It was an area under heavy allied bombardment.  During the day the prisoners repaired train tracks destroyed by bombs.  At night, Inessa and her mother slept together on a narrow cot in the barracks.  Their only food was thin soup of rotten vegetables once a day.

INTERPRETER:  People were swaying with hunger.  Teeth were falling out.

MCCARTHY: The Germans kept threatening to send Inessa and the other children away to another camp where the Nazi’s did medical experiments.

INTERPRETER:  But my mom said she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere.  One day they came, and said they were going to take the kids away.  She hugged me and said she wouldn’t let me go.

MCCARTHY: The camp commander pulled Inessa and her mother apart and said he would hang her mother for disobeying orders.  The next morning the commander took all the prisoners outside to see the hanging.  It was Inessa’s 11th birthday.  Inessa’s face reddens as she tells this part of the story.

INTERPRETER:  And another woman from the barracks came and told the commandant that it was my birthday.  So he turned to me and said, I’m going to give you a gift you won’t be able to compare with anything.  So he gave me my mom for my birthday.  They didn’t hang her.

MCCARTHY: Not long after, the allies bombed the camp barracks.  Inessa and her mother ran away.  They hid in the German countryside trying to avoid capture by the police.  Eventually, a kindly German widow took them in.  They were living with her when they heard the news that the war had ended.  The widow pleaded with them to stay with her, but Inessa’s mother was determined to go back to Kiev and find her husband.  It was not a nice homecoming.  Soviet authorities had given her apartment to someone else.  They learned that Inessa’s father had died during the war and they faced arrest.  Historian Tetiana Pastushenko says Soviet dictator Josef Stalin considered Ukraine’s two million slave laborers collaborators.

INTERPRETER:  In the criminal code of the Soviet Union, any crossing of the border, any contact with the enemy or the foreigner, qualified as betrayal of the mother land and punished with anywhere from 10 years of prison and beyond.

MCCARTHY: So Inessa and her mother lived on the fringes.  For decades they couldn’t tell anyone, even their closest friends, that they had been taken to Germany.

INTERPRETER:  its inside and you want to tell someone.  And it’s kind of a very heavy weight.  I did have a lot of complexes from going through it and not being able to talk about it.

MCCARTHY: Historian Tetiana Pastushenko has been collecting oral histories of forced laborers, like Inessa, partly because her grandmother was one too.

INTERPRETER:  More globally, if you really want to study a war, you shouldn’t study the heroes, you should study the victims.  Because if you study them, then you will see what this war was really like and what it was all about.

MCCARTHY: Inessa Merchevska doesn’t consider herself a victim.  She’s a proud Ukrainian and even prouder grandmother.  But, she’s bothered by the fact that Ukrainians know very little about this part of their history.  She spends much of her time today speaking about it elementary schools and universities.  And, she gives them copies of her memoir, which she wrote a few years ago.  It’s called, “He Gave Me My Mom”.  For The World, I’m Brigid McCarthy in Kiev.

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• BBC coverage
• Country profile: Latvia

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World.  The wounds of World War II are still deeply felt in the Baltics.  That was evident in Latvia today.  Veterans there gathered to commemorate a 1944 battle.  They placed flowers at a monument honoring troops who had died defending Latvia against Stalin’s Soviet invaders.  Meanwhile, police kept protesters at bay.  The annual ceremony angers some in Latvia because the troops being commemorated fought in two Waffen SS divisions on the side of Nazi Germany.  The BBC’s Damien McGuiness is in Latvia’s capital, Riga.

Damien, it seems most people would oppose any commemoration of soldiers who fought with SS uniforms.  Now, what’s the controversy?

DAMIEN MCGUINESS: It’s generally controversial because it’s used as an excuse by extremists on both sides to vent their own prejudices, if you like.  On the one hand, you have Latvian ultra-nationalists, who say it’s the chance to express anti-Russian feelings by reminding the world of the Stalinist oppression they’ve suffered in the past.  On the other hand you have Russian extremists, living in Latvia perhaps, who mourn the loss of the Soviet Union and say it’s a good opportunity to paint Latvians as Nazi collaborators and Fascists.  But it is important to stress that both of these are very extreme views, and most people here in Riga would probably recognize that the Latvian veterans were simple teenagers during the war, and for the most part were forced to fight in Hitler’s army.  They were conscripted by force.  So people don’t necessarily begrudge the fact that these elderly veterans now have a chance to mourn their comrades who died in battle.

WERMAN: Now, Damien, you spoke with 86-year-old [PH] Vitzvaldez [PH] Latsis, one of the so-called Latvian Legionnaires who was conscripted to fight with the SS, as a 19-year-old – he was a teenager.  Here’s what he said when you asked him whether he and the troops he fought supported Hitler and sympathized with the Nazis.

[PH] VITZVALDEZ LATSIS: We were not for Hitler, but we were against Stalin at this time.  Forty or 50,000 of my [SOUNDS LIKE] raw comrades have given their life for independent Latvia during the Second World War; [SOUNDS LIKE] thus it’s very important for me.

WERMAN: Damien McGuiness, is that how most Latvians justify this commemoration – it’s not about supporting Hitler; it’s about opposing Stalin.

MCGUINESS: Well, it has to be remembered, really, the suffering which Latvians underwent in the years before the Nazi invasion.  In the early ‘40s, Stalinist troops invaded Latvia and Stalin deported tens of thousands of Latvians.  Most of them died in Siberian gulags.  Now, this is a very painful episode of Latvia’s history, and it’s hard to forget this.  So for most soldiers, faced with the prospects of the Russians invading again, they felt their only choice was to fight Stalin.  And if that meant on the side of Hitler, then so be it.  However, it is also true that in the early ‘40s, that some of those veterans had indeed previously served as police officers.  And there is evidence that some of the Latvian police officers in the early 1940’s did collaborate with the Nazis.  So really, as we said, there are many shades of gray in how that episode of Latvia’s history is looked at.

WERMAN: Damien, I have to ask you this.  How much is this annual event about Nazi revivalism in Latvia?  I mean, how much anti-Semitism is there today in Latvia?

MCGUINESS: One of the parties which supports this event is the [SOUNDS LIKE] Fatherland and Freedom Party.  This is a far right party.  Now, they don’t have anti-Semitic policies; they don’t have racist policies.  But they have very nationalistic policies.  They don’t have much else to offer the electorates.  So what they do every year, they support this issue, they support this event.  They want to appear to voters to be nationalistic.  They don’t have much else in the way of policies.  They don’t tell you how they’re gonna fight the economic crisis.  But they do say they’re very patriotic.  And that can be, among certain parts of the population here, a vote-winner.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Damien McGuiness in Riga, Latvia.  Very good of you to join us today, Damien.  Thank you.

MCGUINESS: Thank you, Marco.

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.

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.