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Photo By David Sorcher
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"The Miracle Torah" preserved in the Skirball Museum
at Hebrew Union College, escaped Nazi desecration,
according to Racelle Weiman, director of the Center
for Holocaust Education.
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More than half were gassed upon arrival.
Of the 1,000 Jews shipped April 20, 1943 from the Neudorf labor camp, 543 stayed at Auschwitz just long enough to be stripped, forced into gas chambers and burned in ovens. Within hours, the assembly line of death had turned 543 human beings into smoke and ash.
Of the approximately 300 men and 150 women admitted to the camp, only 30 survived World War II. Werner Coppel, retired Cincinnati businessman, concentration camp prisoner 117013, is one of them.
"I just made the cut," he says.
Coppel opens a large text, Auschwitz Chronicle, which details everything that's known about daily existence -- would anyone call it "life?" -- in the concentration camp. Thanks to the German bureaucracy's penchant for recordkeeping, even about mass murder, much is known about Auschwitz.
Thumbing through the tome, Coppel points to the few sentences describing the shipment of Jews on which he rode into hell.
"That was my deportation," he says.
Reminded that it was Adolf Hitler's birthday, Coppel remembers the day for other reasons.
"It was the first day of Passover that year," he says.
On the day Jews celebrate deliverance from slavery in Egypt, Coppel, now 77, arrived at Auschwitz. In a drawer in the study in his Kennedy Heights condominium, he keeps the registration form attesting to his term as a slave of the Nazis. The top line on the form gives the reason for his incarceration: "Schutz Haft."
"You talk about irony -- the reason I am arrested is 'protective custody,' " he says.
To learn about the Holocaust, you must first put aside reason and logic. Hatred does not respect such niceties. This phenomenon -- carefully organized slaughter -- is the function of an altogether different sort of understanding, involving spiritual truths and the stench of burning human flesh.
Thus, when Coppel and three fellow Auschwitz survivors gathered for a Sabbath dinner in Florida a few years ago, their behavior would make sense to no one who hadn't shared what they had endured.
"Of the 1,000 who were on that train, 30 of us survived," he says. "Six live in the U.S. I keep in touch with everybody. Four of us got together. We were all in the same cattle car. That is closer than brother and sister. We had a Shabbat dinner. We had a great time, laughing about what happened. It would take a psychiatrist to explain."
'Pure filth, pure venom'
Racelle Weiman would like to explain; she's made a career of trying. Her journey toward understanding, however, isn't about dates and decrees.
"I'm very interested in Holocaust education, which is completely different from Holocaust studies," she says. "I don't want to know the who, what, where, when. I want to know why. I want to know how we can be a moral society post-Holocaust. How do we believe in God post-Holocaust? I stand in the room and I lose my breath when I have to talk about the Final Solution."
Weiman has to talk about the Final Solution because it's her job -- she is director of the two-year-old Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College. If you wonder why there has to be such a center more than half a century after the last camp was liberated, consider the events of a single day last week in Greater Cincinnati -- Nov. 7, 2002.
· In the chapel at Hebrew Union College, Jews gather to remember Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," the officially sanctioned 1938 pogrom that marked the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust.
· Across the street, at the University of Cincinnati, the Muslim Student Association has invited Norman Finkelstein, best known for denying the scope of the Holocaust, to speak. He's the author of The Holocaust Industry.
"Pure filth, pure venom, denying the Holocaust," Coppel says.
· In Bond Hill, civil rights activists gather to demand justice on the second anniversary of the killing of Roger Owensby Jr., an unarmed African American choked to death in police custody.
· In Oxford Township, four teen-agers are arrested for burning a cross on the lawn of a family that includes biracial children.
"When people say, 'Why do people do this?' I have to say I don't know," Weiman says.
But she wouldn't have you take her answer literally, for she does have some ideas about why people "do this" -- torment minorities, even to the point of butchering children. The answer lies in a wooden box atop her desk. Inside is a belt buckle bearing the words "Gott Mit Uns" ("God Is With Us") and beneath them a Nazi swastika.
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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The use of cartoons in "Shouldering the
Responsibility" makes lessons of the Holocaust
accessible to children, according to Pulitzer Prize
winning cartoonist Jim Borgman.
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The belt buckle belonged to an unknown German soldier during World War II. Weiman got it from Paul Rosenblatt, an American soldier who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp -- he was Weiman's father.
If the notion of God endorsing mass murder seems primitive, we ought not be so sanguine about human progress. Something else happened in Greater Cincinnati Nov. 7: Reporters received a press release from a Christian minister planning a picket later this month in Lexington, Ky. The headline declared, "God Hates Fags."
"To teach the Holocaust is to teach how people are value-less," Weiman says. "You can make gas chambers for people who have no worth. The more I study the Holocaust, the more I'm convinced hate speech leads to violence."
The misuse of language is a favorite theme for Werner Coppel, one of the 457 Neudorf slave laborers "admitted" to Auschwitz, as though the camp were a kind of health spa; as if the lie in the ironwork at its entrance -- "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Will Make You Free") -- were a guarantee for its inhabitants; as though his surviving the selection for the gas chambers were the equivalent of being picked for an athletic team.
"They were very good with euphemism," Coppel says.
In Nazi parlance, "resettlement" meant shipment to a concentration camp. "Protective custody" meant starvation and torture. "Special treatment" meant death.
Growing up in Nazi Germany, Coppel saw firsthand what it meant when the state identified certain groups of people as a problem and their death a "final solution." Perhaps that's why he's so sensitive about the use of language.
"Nobody is born with hate and prejudice," he says. "It is learned. If we look at our language, we use expressions like, 'Oh, you're an Indian giver' or "You gypped me.' Or a policeman in a cruiser using the N word. So I'm using my story in the schools to teach students, 'Don't use words like this.' "
Coppel is the keynote speaker Saturday in a program at Northern Kentucky University, one of dozens of lectures he gives each year at schools from elementary through university level. After 25 years of school presentations, he has a regular shtick, asking kids to raise their hands if they've ever heard certain racial slurs.
"Everybody raises their hand," Coppel says. "Then I ask, 'How many did something to stop it?' Nobody raises their hand. So I tell them what I do: 'I say, "I cannot make you stop using that word. But don't do it in my presence." Let me tell you, it works.'
"In the circles I travel, nobody dares to use those words. In my tiny way, I make the world a better place."
'The idea caught on'
Coppel is on the board of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, which shares his forward-looking spirit. They have more important things to do than inculcate guilt. They want much more -- they want it to never happen again.
Weiman is convinced the work must begin at a much younger age and with greater gravity than Holocaust education gets now. She says she's met college graduates who, visiting the center, learn for the first time about the liquidation of 6 million Jews.
"I interviewed seven or eight talented college graduates," Weiman says. "All of them graduated from schools in this area. None of them had any knowledge about the Holocaust. There is no mandated education."
Only six states require the Holocaust to be included in public schools' curriculum, and Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky aren't among them, according to Weiman.
"Ohio recently, by a lot of pressure, recommended it," she says. "That means, 'We think it's important, but not enough to give any money for it.' "
The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education is working to fill the void, introducing Hughes High School students to survivors and giving workshops to teachers who want to know how to teach the Holocaust.
The question is more than a minor pedagogical challenge. A fine line separates truth and trauma.
"I stay away from the bloody stuff, unless someone asks a direct question," Coppel says. "A few weeks ago somebody asked me, 'Did you ever see anyone killed?' It was a direct question, so I answered it. I said, 'I saw 25 people hanged.' "
"The only things many people know is the gruesome black-and-white images of piled-up bodies that make them not want to know any more," Weiman says.
To make the Holocaust accessible, the center personalizes it, pulling back from the inevitable temptation to reduce the massacre to a matter of statistics. The exhibition "Mapping Our Tears," now under construction, records the stories of Holocaust survivors and liberators living in Greater Cincinnati. The multi-media exhibit will use an attic motif to tell the tragedy of the Jews of Europe.
Weiman contrasts the exhibit with Schindler's List, which she says is a great film.
"But it's not a great Holocaust film, because you don't remember one single name or face from the Jews," she says. "They're things. You remember the villains. The Jews became nameless, faceless. 'Mapping Our Tears' is the opposite.
"We want to show who the people were. These 70-year-old people were teen-agers in the Reich. They were the slaves. Now they can talk about what their dreams were, what their lives were."
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Photo By David Sorcher
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Rabbis return a Torah scroll to the ark after a service
commemorating the victims of Kristallnacht. The ark is
from a discontinued synagogue in Poland.
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The center's current exhibit, "Shouldering the Responsibility," uses cartoons to make the Holocaust something more than a horror story. The exhibit tells the story of Josef Motschmann, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Franconia, Germany.
Motschmann uncovered his town's role in the persecution of Jews during the Nazi era. In the face of official disapproval, he restored an ancient Jewish cemetery and a synagogue that had been turned into a warehouse.
"Shouldering the Responsibility" is a series of placards that tell Motschmann's story in a combination of photography, cartoons and simply rendered history. Motschmann becomes "Josef," a spectacled grown-up moppet whose balding curls make him approachable in an Absentminded Professor kind of way.
Heike Schade, who teaches German at Sycamore High School, took her students to see the exhibit and to write poems about it.
"This exhibit talks to you and makes you think," she says. "For them, it's German history personalized and coming alive. It's personal, it's stimulating."
"Shouldering the Responsibility" tells about a 13-year-old girl killed by the Nazis, but the thrust of the exhibit is Motschmann's courage many years later, making his townsmen acknowledge their past. He got villagers to retrace the steps of the Jews expelled from the town for shipment to concentration camps.
That kind of zeal for justice can be just as effective as the state-sanctioned hatred behind Nazism.
"We have synagogues in Germany that were saved because the idea caught on," Weiman says, "just like the idea of destroying them caught on."
Saying yes, saying no
Myrtis Powell, retired vice president of Miami University, has no apparent link to the horrors of the Nazi era. But she drove from Oxford for the opening of the "Shouldering the Responsibility" exhibit.
"You might ask why an African-American woman who was raised Presbyterian would be interested," she says. "Hate has no boundaries. This exhibit is something I think all of us can use, regardless of age or denomination. The story of Josef Motschmann shows what one person can do. It shows the changes that are possible in one's self and one's community."
Henry Blumenstein of Cincinnati knows full well what one person -- or, in his case, one couple -- can do. His videotaped story, part of the "Mapping Our Tears" exhibition, recounts the day the Gestapo came to his home in Holland.
"My grandmother took me and shoved me into the closet," Blumenstein says. "She said, 'Don't breathe!' The next thing I knew, she was taken, gone. I never saw her again. I was 6 years old."
Blumenstein is alive today because a Dutch Catholic family with 11 children took him in, treated him as a son, hid him from those who would kill him. He tells about hiding, hearing the head of the household lie at gunpoint to collaborators who suspected him of hiding Jewish children.
"The right thing to do supersedes fear," Blumenstein says.
Next month Blumenstein, Weiman and a camera crew will visit Holland to tell the story of the family who saved him from death.
"Mapping Our Tears" won't tell everything survivors endured.
"We don't tell everything," Weiman says. "There are experiences so private, so horrible, that we don't tell."
Blumenstein's survival is a useful example of the Holocaust Education Center's goal -- to remember the terror but also to inspire children for the future.
"There are very powerful moments," Weiman says. "You see not only the power to survive but also that there's a good person who said 'Yes' to someone who needed help. This is the kind of thing I'm trying to promote -- the caring even in the worst of times. People can throw you in gas chambers. Or there are these high moments, these acts of courage."
In Indiana lives a man named Bill Meijer, for example. At age 11, in occupied Holland, Meijer served as a messenger for the Dutch Underground, carrying messages that, if he were caught, would cost him his life. He wasn't Jewish. He didn't do it to earn his family's approval.
"It was against his father's wishes," Weiman says.
For Meijer, a bicycle became a vehicle of righteousness. When the exhibit opens, so simple an instrument will become, for children, a symbol of what anyone can do in the face of injustice.
"Now the bicycle becomes something more than entertainment or transportation," Weiman says. "It becomes a lifesaver."
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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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An antique radio will be part of "Mapping Our Tears"
telling the story of local survivors and rescuers.
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One cannot understand the Holocaust without knowing both Coppel's and Meijer's stories, according to Kenneth Ehrlich, dean of Hebrew Union College.
"The Holocaust is an example of human nature at its worst and at its best," he says. "It teaches us what can happen when human nature goes awry. It also teaches us incredible courage and what can happen when one person stands up and says 'No' in the face of everybody else being against them."
'Ignore them'
Ehrlich sees cause for hope. Organized mass murder can happen anywhere, he says, but it won't happen in the United States.
"I think people will stand up and stop them, in part because of the lessons learned through the Holocaust," he says. "The lessons of the Holocaust have strengthened democracies, so that I hope people are more sensitive now, more aware of some of the dangers of prejudice and where it can lead."
And yet the Muslim Student Association invited none other than Norman Finkelstein to plead the case of the Palestinians last week -- a choice of speakers so vexing that Weiman can see it only as a deliberate affront. At a service commemorating Kristallnacht, when Germans were encouraged to burn synagogues and Jewish businesses, she reminds her fellow Jews of the importance of keeping the memory alive.
"Today's the time to remember the fire that has to be put out right here as we speak," she says. "Today a Holocaust denier is speaking at UC."
Finkelstein declines comment after his speech at UC. Asked to respond to accusations that he's anti-Semitic, he walks away from a reporter.
"I'm sick of that question," he says.
In the days preceding his appearance, Weiman was fairly sick about what she saw as the tepid response from the community.
"I'm deeply distressed," she says. "There are kids who want to go and take signs and protest. They're being told to stay away, to not draw attention to the crazies. If someone denied slavery occurred or said African Americans came here voluntarily, there would be an uproar."
Finkelstein isn't the only problem Weiman sees.
"Last week we were hit by a barrage of commercials on the radio by a supposedly legitimate person running for Congress," she says.
Jim Condit Jr., candidate in Ohio's Second District, ran a series of radio ads asserting that Israel is waging a "holocaust" of its own against the Palestinians and that "Israeli operatives" were behind the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. Condit, who in the past has argued that Jews control the abortion industry, is a well-known Cincinnati anti-Semite.
"Bin Laden's agents don't control the big media, but people who love Israel first and America second do," one ad said.
Condit had almost no chance of winning the race against incumbent U.S. Rep. Rob Portman. But federal law forbids broadcasters from turning down commercials for candidates for federal office -- and that, according to Weiman, explains the real reason for his candidacy.
"He's running for this impossible office because it gives him an opportunity to say these things," she says. "We have wonderful laws to protect minority views instead used to allow hate speech."
Both Ehrlich and Weiman say the Holocaust Education Center plans to collaborate with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, still under construction, to promote tolerance and respect for minorities.
"Jews form alliances with other groups to accomplish this goal of social justice," Ehrlich says. "We always have and we always will. The lesson of the Holocaust, what we've learned, is not to remain silent."
But Weiman is plainly distressed by the lack of response to Finkelstein and Condit. Perhaps, she says, people find it too uncomfortable to take on their polite version of bigotry.
"So many people have gone the Cincinnati way: Let's just ignore them," Weiman says. "Cincinnati has to go through self-criticism and change. It's the discomfort they're afraid of. I want the discomfort to happen."
'Every idolatry'
Werner Coppel knows the discomfort that surrounds discussion of the Holocaust. He recently spoke at a high school attended by a German exchange student.
"When I was finished, I see the girl sitting in her seat crying," he says. "I didn't want to hurt that girl, but I have to tell my story. I went over to talk to her. I said, 'I would advise you to be proud of your culture. But don't forget that culture also produced Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler.' Her response really surprised me.
"She said, 'You didn't do anything wrong. I only was thinking about my grandfather.' She may have seen her grandfather's SS uniform. She may have heard somebody talking about it."
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By Jason Kidwell
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Don't let racial slurs go unchallenged, Auschwitz
survivor Werner Coppel tells schoolchildren;
dehumanization begins with language.
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But Coppel is as adamant in opposing prejudice against Germans and African Americans as he is in denouncing prejudice against Jews. When he moved to Cincinnati's West End in 1949, four years after World War II ended, his German accent marked him for hatred among Americans. He didn't put up with it, whatever the cause.
"Nobody thought I was Jewish," he says. "They thought I was German. But I don't step back. If you walk away from it, it gets bigger. If you stand up to it, you contain it."
Hundreds of books have examined the Holocaust, recording the experiences of survivors, documenting atrocities and examining the upbringing of those who committed them. Weiman, who has spent a quarter of a century studying the effort to exterminate her people, says the Holocaust is unique in human history because of its purposeful effort to liquidate an entire demographic group.
"As horrifying as it is to say, in all slavery up to that point, all of the slaves had value," she says. "You put them up for sale, you charged $5,000. This is the exact opposite. This was set up to kill the slaves, to kill all the Jews."
The Nazis weren't the only, or even the first, to practice genocide. The U.S. military slaughtered Native Americans in the 19th century. The government of Turkey killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians early in the 20th century.
What, then, is so distinctive about the Jewish Holocaust? For Weiman, the answer inevitably involves theological concepts. The Holocaust, she says, destroyed our idols.
"Why this? Because it knocks down every single idolatry that we believe in," she says. "The first idolatry is education. We used to believe if you had education, you weren't rednecks, you weren't bigots. Well, the Holocaust was done by doctors and engineers. There was open bidding by architects for how to build gas chambers. When we use this word 'education,' all we're doing is making skilled people. We're not making good people."
The second idolatry is religion, according to Weiman.
"Nazism didn't necessarily come out of Christianity," she says. "The acceptance of Nazism came out of Christianity. Only in 1965 did the Catholic Church put out 15 lines saying anti-Semitism is not a good thing and you cannot blame the Jews for the death of Christ."
Children visiting the Skirball Museum at Hebrew Union College convinced Weiman it's important to talk about anti-Semitism; they were asking disturbing questions after learning of the slaughter of the Jews.
"The innocent questions children ask: 'Do they get saved before they die?' " Weiman says.
The third idolatry unmasked by the Holocaust is the definition of "worth," Weiman says.
"The Nazis decided which art is valuable," she says. "Jazz, for example, and any art with a black or Jewish motif was considered decadent. Even the way we idolize beauty -- that's where this racial nonsense came from. What is a successful person? What is a successful nation?"
In part to answer that question, Henry Blumenstein will return to Holland next month. The grandchildren of the couple who saved him from death know little about their good deeds during the Holocaust.
"Somebody left you in your own family something like this," Weiman says. "That's a treasure. That's an inheritance."
Blumenstein knows he, like Coppel, can only tell his story; those who hear it must then shoulder the responsibility for the future.
"I will tell them what happened," Blumenstein says. "What they do with it is up to them."
Breaking the ring
Werner Coppel is already booked for school appearances for most of spring 2003. He's never accepted payment for talking to students.
He has an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the College of Mount St. Joseph. At the ceremony honoring him, a former student approached him.
"She said, 'You taught me something. You taught me to question God and not lose faith,' " Coppel says. "I was raised very orthodox. I changed through my experiences. I do believe in God. I belong to temple. I go to religious services. But I question God.
"In our religion, you pray to God, thanking him that you came out of a bad situation. I have a problem with that. Wouldn't it be so much better if I have a prayer, 'Thank you God for saving me from Auschwitz,' instead of 'Thank you, God, for saving me out of Auschwitz'?"
Coppel shared a barracks at Auschwitz with a fellow teen-ager, Elie Wiesel, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize. On the death march Wiesel describes in Night, Coppel escaped after four years in Nazi camps.
"Escaping was the dumbest thing I could have done," he says. "A boy went up to see what they were shooting at. He said, 'They're not liquidating us. They're only shooting at one who escaped.' I looked and I ran, instinctively. You don't make that decision. You just go. I spent the next week in the snow in the woods with nothing to eat."
That "dumbest" decision led Coppel to the town where he met his wife, Trudy. In March 1946 they married, the first public Jewish wedding in Berlin since the end of the war. From that marriage came children and grandchildren and the phrasing that Coppel uses to define his mission.
"I use my grandson's words: 'Stand up against hate and prejudice, even if it doesn't affect you,' " Coppel says.
In the same box that holds the belt buckle, Weiman has a small fragment of brick from the Eagles' Nest, Hitler's retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A few years ago she visited the site with Lani Guinier, the woman President Clinton appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights, only to withdraw the nomination under pressure.
While visiting Hitler's former home, Weiman and Guinier happened upon a makeshift memorial to the dead German dictator, a collection of rocks arranged in a circle.
"Lani and I totally disassembled the ring of stones," Weiman says. "It was a moment of childish empowerment."
If that simple act seems pointless, it's the kind of thing that gives hope to those who have seen what happens when hatred goes unchallenged.
"The Holocaust is the result of indifference," Henry Blumenstein says. "Nobody cared." ©
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