Category: Modern History

First published in The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-story-of-little-lulek-and-us-all/, as well as in Tribune Juive ( Paris, France) and The Jerusalem Connection Report ( Washington, D.C.).

Some half of a year after the Shining Souls was presented at the European Parliament in January 2017, we met and talked with Rabbi David Lau, the current Chief Rabbi of Israel, now the 39th generation of the Lau rabbinic dynasty. We were discussing the event in Brussels, and I did show to Rabbi David the brochure with the text about his father. He was deeply moved. And I was also deeply moved by his love for his father and their family. Deep, warm, human, very quiet, not manifesting, noble love. I still remember that moment with a huge gratitude to the Creator for being able to witness such pure and sincere human emotions. 

The person next to Rabbi David who was reading the text while Rabbi David was full into emotions, was not aware of those details. He was asking Rabbi David if that had had the place, and Rabbi David who could not quite talk, was only nodding to him. The man felt silent and was sitting for a long time deep in his thoughts amidst lots of activities around us. 

I’ve met Rabbi David on several various occasions in Israel before, and I knew that he is a very thoughtful and deep person, and very compassionate and humane, as well. Inna Rogatchi (C). Portrait of Ashkenasi Chief Rabbi of Israel David Lau. Fine art photography. Limited Edition. 2017.

Recently, I was deeply impressed by his reaction, his stand, and everything he did and stated in the wake of the tragedy in Meron. As we all know, there were different reactions. But Chief Rabbi David Lau who happened to be in Meron at the time of the disaster, was gentle, compassionate, understanding, fair, intelligent, wise and honest – just like his father. 

I will never forget one photograph of so many that we all saw from the place of the tragedy. The Chief Rabbi of Israel was crying stepping a bit aside in Meron, so unpretentiously, so humanly that it went straight to the heart. “This is what the real Rabbi is about” – said my husband. I cannot agree more. 

These days, we are thinking on the Second World War again, on Holocaust, on all its victims. We have been doing it for 76 years already, and it still feels as if it had happened yesterday. Because of the magnanimity of the crime? Because of the unspeakably cruel violation of so many innocent souls? Or because the eyes of little Lulek witnessing his mother taken in that horrifying track are still there, at the scene, the whole  life after, day and night?Inna Rogatchi (C). Kotel II. Fragment. Crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 45 x 60 cm. 2020. Private collection, London, the UK.

There were so many little Luleks, so many fathers murdered, so many mothers taken, so many little sisters, like the one of Elie Wiesel’s, were thrown in the fire, alive, so many of young Minas, like my great-aunt, were murdered in a cold blood, along with all those women, and men, and children, and elderly, and those who were not born as yet, as their pregnant mothers were exterminated. 

Of course, we all are Holocaust survivors.  Rabbi Yisrael Lau is absolutely right on that. For us to remember that, to comprehend that, and to live accordingly, on so many levels, it is needed that we would be reminded by people like him, in all his characteristic intellectual honesty  and that special humane shining of the Lau family. 

We need to see little Lulek’s eyes, in the 38th, and the 39th, and the following generations of this extraordinary rabbinic dynasty that has not been interrupted, against all odds, for it has the purpose which they are carrying on in this unmanifested, highly intelligent, deeply understanding, very moving, noble and quiet way. As real Rabbis should. Inna Rogatchi (C). The Thread. Rabbis Lau in 37th, 38th and 39th generations. Fine art collage mounted on Inna Rogatchi’s Kotel original drawing. 60 x 60 cm. 2021.

I think I know why little Lulek was saved in the Churban. I have no slightest doubt about it. Only unlimited gratitude. 

May 2021

‘All the Jews are Holocaust Survivors’

‘To tell you the truth, all the Jews of the world are Holocaust survivors’ – said legendary Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, 83-year old, in his speech on the 76-th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I always thought this way, ever since I learned about Holocaust in my early age. Holocaust lived in our family, as it lived in the families of everyone we knew, and those we did not. 

It was personal, and it was not personal at the same time. It was and is cosmic. Both, that crime and that survival. 

When I was younger, I could not understand how on earth some people who survived in the Shoah did not tell their children what they had come through. I had that marginalised, insensitive attitude until I have read the devastating books of Aharon Appelfeld when I finally realised that there had been  such horror that many people simply could not start to recall it. By the time I’ve come to this conclusion, I learned about the Shoah a lot, methodically, professionally, from the first-hand witnesses. Still, each story is a revelation. Because of a simple fact: it was a living soul to be subjected to the worst of nightmares. Inna Rogatchi (C). Landscape of Jewish Memory. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre l’alcool, perle le blanc on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2017.

While my grandmother was always speaking on her murdered young sister Mina, my grandfather always clinched his jaws in a lead-like silence regarding his mother and father and the other relatives annihilated in the Shoah. While my mother spoke often about her murdered aunt and uncle, my father kept silent and was getting white while thinking of his aunt and her murdered family. 

But they all were present in our lives, always, day and night. Their souls were living under the same roof with us. 

Although it took too long for me to fully understand the reasons of silence of those of the Jews who could not open up on the Shoah, I always thought in awe of those who did. Because such an opening means a repetition, and everything evoked by it.  Elie Wiesel, who we had an honour to know, for many decades was unable to say a word about his little sister whose terrible death he had to witness, himself being just a 16-year old youth. Such a giant trauma the Shoah was for so many Jewish people that the horror that they lived through was still actively blocking their ability to narrate for decades. Just to think about it.Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of Holocaust. Triptych. Part II. Child. Oil, Indian ink, black and white cotton paper, burn paper on cardboard. 70 x 50 cm. 1991-1992. Permanent Art Collection, Jewish community of Dnepr, Ukraine.

My husband Michael who drew and painted only handful, but quite powerful Holocaust-evoked images during his long artistic career, always are thinking on the little boy whose mother was taken from him in the truck. He was just seven. That boy was waiting for sixty eight years for being able to describe that heart-wrenching scene that he bore with him all his life. As Elie Wiesel bore the similar scene of murder of his mother and little sister in the front of his 16-year old eyes. 

Very rarely in our life, including tragic personal circumstances, I saw my husband crying. But it was the case while he was reading that book of that boy written almost seven decades after the events that the boy was made to witness at the age of seven. The name of this book is Out of the Depths, and its author is Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. 8-year old Lulek, future Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, with fellow Buchenwald survivor Eleazar Schiff on arrival to the port of Haifa, aboard the RMS Mataroa, July 15, 1945. Courtesy: Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.

Because of the several extremely powerful photographs with that small boy survivor that has become the part of the documented legacy of Holocaust, because of that extremely powerful book, but mainly because of symbolic role of that child, Rabbi Yisrael by Providence has become as if existing in two images, two characters in our perception. The one is of the distinguished Rabbi who is widely respected and whose authority is overpassing many factions and groups inside the Jewish world and outside it. And the other one is of that boy, small Lulek, who has become the one of the most tangible, most powerful symbols of humanity, yes, deeply wounded, but ultimate humanity which prevailed evil.  

The presence of little Lulek

I am positive that distinguished Rabbi Lau who was also the Chief Rabbi of Israel, and who is the Chairman of Yad Vashem, is able to maintain his superb and towering spiritual, intellectual and human qualities all his great life  due to the fact that in parallel with him, Lulek in and just after the camps, always there. Even I can feel Lulek’s presence, what to say about Rabbi Yisrael himself. 

That Lulek boy, what a destiny he has. He was the one whom American Rabbi Shacter had noticed being in the deepest shock possible, behind the pile of corpses in Buchenwald on the day of the American liberation of the camp in April 1945. Rabbi Schacter was the first American Rabbi entering the liberated Buchenwald, in the hour after the American troops had entered it. If not that boy, with that special expression in his eyes, Rabbi Shacter might lose his mind, he said himself, out of what he saw entering the camp. But in Lulek, he embraced life, and kept sane. 

Yet before that, the soldier of the Soviet Army who was a prisoner in Buchenwald, did care for Lulek, was feeding him, protecting him, saving him. That soldier warmed and sheltered a small Jewish boy and wanted to adopt him. But it was also Lulek who was keeping the soldier willing to live, because the soldier in captivity had a purpose to survive to protect the child he wanted to adopt. Years and decades after the war, Lulek always remembered the soldier. The soldier always remembered Lulek. Chief Rabbi Lau was able to identify the soldier’s name, Fedor Michailichenko, and his whereabouts, Rostov-Don in southern Russia, years after Fedor’s passing. Still, Rabbi Lau has visited the place and met with Fedor’s daughters who told him how their father has lovingly remembered Lulek all the years of his life. Inna Rogatchi (C). Ghetto Waltz I. Crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 45 x 60 cm. 2019.

Lulek could not be adapted by the Soviet Army soldier, because he with his brother Naftaly, a real hero who did save his small brother in the camps, and who was the only surviving member of a large Lau family along with Lulek, were about to be sent to their relatives to Palestine, their uncle and his family. 

I saw Rabbi Yisrael and heard him speaking many times in my life, fortunately, in Jerusalem and New York, in Warsaw and Tel-Aviv, on different occasions and at different venues. I remember all of those meetings, because we all were lucky to be in the presence of a great man. Ten years ago, I was honoured to be present at the launching of the English version of Out of the Depth book at the Jewish Book Fair in London where Lord Rabbi Sacks was presenting Rabbi Lau’s extraordinary memoir. 

Arguably the best public speaker in the modern Jewish world, Rabbi Jonathan who never had any kind of difficulties at his brilliant public speeches, simply had to do it that time very slowly, with many pauses in between his deeply emotional words, and we all standing around, grasped for extra air every time during each of those many pauses. I always was deeply impressed by dear Rabbi Jonathan’s attitude to the Shoah. He had taken it to the very bottom of his kind heart, and it was always extremely personal for him. Michael Rogatchi (C). Final Solution. Oil on canvas. 88 x 68 cm. 1994.

Of all these encounters, I will never forget the meeting with Rabbi Yisrael in his office when from the first second my eyes were completely magnetised by one picture of Rabbi’s wall, and there are many of them there. But this one which is situated closest to the Rabbi’s chair was special. It was his father, the last Rabbi of Piotrkow Tribynalski, the city in Poland which has its special role in the history of Holocaust. It was in that very place that the first Jewish ghetto of the Second World War had been established as early, as in October 1939. As many, as 25 000 people were cramped in there, with 22 000 of them, the entire Jewish community, from the city itself. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau was their last Rabbi. With all of them, in its entirety, he was exterminated in Treblinka. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, the last Rabbi of Piotrkow Tribunlaski in Poland, father of Rabbi Yisrael meir Lau. Courtesy: Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.

Rabbi Moshe Lau was the Rabbi in the Lau family in the 37th generation. Just to think about it. The line was not interrupted throughout all the tremendous turmoil of the history of Jews in Poland during about one thousand years. With Rabbi Moshe being murdered by the Nazis, and his two sons both in young age, being in the Nazi concentration camps, the danger of breaking the silver thread was imminent. When I read about the history of the Lau family, and compared it with what I knew of the family’s tragedy in the Shoah, I thought so very often: “How absolutely awful it could be if such a special, strong  line of Rabbis which never exists on its own, but is predestined to be for important purposes and missions, could be interrupted, ended , G-d forbid. It was so close to that because of the Shoah”. 

I always feel proud for the entire Jewish people due to the fact that Rabbinic dynasty of Lau has sustained. I feel that it is an important fact not only in the history of one family, but for us all. It is the statement of our prevailing and our humanity. And this statement had been possible because of little Lulek and his heroic brother Naftali.

So, when I saw the old photograph of Rabbi Moshe Lau next to his son’s chair over the Chief Rabbi of Israel desk, I could not think about anything else, frankly. Rabbi Yisrael did notice it, as he always does, and told me, gently but proudly: “It is my father”. – “I know, dear Rabbi Yisrael” – I responded – “ I know this photograph, and I think that your father’s soul feels very happy that the dynasty is preserved”. We smiled, quietly. Both Rabbi Shlomo, murdered in Treblinka, and little Lelek were in the room with us at that moment, we all knew it. 

Rabbi Yisrael, as I know first-hand, is always honest about the lessons of the Holocaust – which is none, frankly. “I am afraid people did not learn about Holocaust”, he said to us once. I cannot agree more with Rabbi Yisrael, but to hear it from the person of his destiny was hardly bearable. 

Shining Souls

Naturally, Rabbi Yisrael has become the one of the central characters in my Shining Souls project which is paying tribute to Holocaust heroes, Jews and non-Jews. Inna Rogatchi (C). HATIKVAH. Homage to Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Shining Souls project. Original art panel. 70 x 50 cm. 2017.

My highlight next to the artwork dedicated to Rabbi Yisrael Lau was this: 

On April 11th, 1945, an hour after the liberation of Buchenwald, the American officer had bumped into a small shy inmate boy who was hiding behind a giant pile of corpses. “What’s your name?”, – the officer who happened to be the US Army Chaplain Rabbi Herschel Schacter, asked the boy, with his own heart pumping as mighty, as it never did before. “Lulek”, – the boy said quietly. “Come with me, Lulek, my boy”, – said the officer taking the surviving 7-year old by hand tightly. The officer did not ask Lelek about his parents. He did correctly. They and the entire family of Lelek, except his elder brother Naphtali who heroically saved him in the hell of the camps, were murdered. Additionally to the brother, it was the Providence that saved that boy, prompting him to continue uninterruptedly the noble dynasty of thirty seven generations of Rabbis of the Lau family, and to eventually become the Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel known as the outstanding public figure to the whole world. The sons of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau are continuing the Rabbinic Lau dynasty today in its 39th generation. Am Israel Chai!’  

FIRST PUBLISHED in The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/walking-for-sarah/, as well as in Tribune Juive ( Paris, France) and The Jerusalem Connection Report ( Washington, D.C., the USA)

Soon after the publication of my essay in Israel, France and the USA, I’ve got the message from a good man in Paris who wrote that he will be coming to the demonstration that he knew will be organized — on April 25th — with his son, and that they, the Jews in Paris and France, are ‘feeling so underpowered in this system’. I felt acute pain for the talented, intelligent, hard-working Jewish people of France at that bitter moment, doubly so thinking of all the history of their inherited pain. 

Today, I feel much better, and I know that my French Jewish friends do as well. We all will be marching together in those massive rallies on Sunday, April 25th. There are so many of us for Sarah and her family. 

For the first time during the last four years since the horrific murder of the innocent, nice, kind Jewish teacher in Paris in April 2017, we all would feel a bit of some consolation while fighting in real-time and many real places for her honor and in her memory. 

There were many protests for Sarah Halimi before: after her terrible murder in 2017, after that extremely shameful verdict of the examination litigation body in Paris in January 2020, after that unheard mockery of justice in upholding the verdict after April 14th this year, 2021. 

But never before, in the period of just one week, these protests have been transformed into the global massive movement for decency, real concern for human life, and outright opposing the evil, white on black.  Or as it is on the Marching for Sarah protests, white on blue, with a bit of read. 

This is the main outcome of the committed in cold-blood, arrogance and never-dying anti-Semitic hate capital injustice in France: our all global conscious, active and articulated resistance to that. 

This is what solidarity is about. 

The protests are organized under the united slogan “ Sans justice pas se Républic”, “There is no Republic without justice’. 

All French Jewish organizations, many of the leading synagogues and congregations are united in this unprecedented expression of indignation and solidarity. 

To my serious satisfaction, I saw many messages from Arab people in France who were sending their solidarity with Sarah Halimi’s family. It is a decency that speaks at the moments like that, not race. 

We all will be coming to those rallies on Sunday, April 25th, in Paris, London, Tel-Aviv and elsewhere. Our people and those who have solidarity with us, just did demonstrate our guts, our heart, and our determination to fight the evil and those scoundrels who cover for it. 

In another surreal development, the judge called Anne Ihuellou who has committed that outrageous mockery of justice in the decision not to prosecute Sarah Halimi’s murderer on the ground that he used drugs before committing the crime, has demanded police protection for herself on the ground ‘of hostile attitude towards her from the Jewish community of France’. I am convinced that it is the Jewish community of France who is absolutely entitled of the police and any other possible protection from ‘the judges’ like that.

We now know about so many massive protests to be organized for Sarah Halimi – but for some reason, we have not heard about anything in the place which is geographically much close to Paris than Miami. I mean Brussels, the heart of the European democracy, and the seat of its governing bodies. We also have not heard anything, so far, from the EU, EC, and the European Parliament officials. I have heard that there is even a special high-ranking official whose cosmic salary is paid for her alleged fight against anti-Semitism. Just recently, we’ve heard that a huge budget of 2 billion euros has been allocated to fight anti-Semitism in the European Union. Probably, it all is misinformation – as there is virtually zero in everything which has to be done in real actions and deeds by all those hyper-inflated with officials and their salary bodies — and nothing, ever, done.  It feels that in the case of anti-Semitism, EU authorities responsible for that are placed in somewhere like Amazon jungle without internet and being not informed on anything. Pathetic inadequate mannequins. Poor European tax-payers, too.

When I was writing my previous essay a week ago on April 16th describing the utter shame cause by an unparalleled case of injustice in France, my heart was bleeding. My only consolation during those hours were the photographs from the first protests in Paris which were held just immediately after the scandalous decision of the Court of Cassation, on April 14th and 15th. When I saw how many people came there, and what good faces they had, I was a bit consoled that Sarah is remembered and loved, and that the pain of her family is shared. 

There can not be two more different erevs Shabbat, as it has been in between the previous Shabbat, on April 16th, and the current one, on April 23d. Sarah Halimi rally poster. Credit: B’nai Brit France. With kind permission.

A week ago, we felt deep pain and utter indignation, after hearing on the simply unbelievable insult of justice and common sense, after the French Court of Cassation upheld the previous scandalous decision in the case of the vicious murder of Sarah Halimi, the Jewish French teacher and physician in Paris back in April 2017. According to that surreal decision, the monster who murdered Sarah, now a 31-year-old Islamist from Mali, has been freed of prosecution on the ground that before the premeditated murder he smoked cannabis. This upheld verdict will go to the annals of history staining the reputation of France for good.

Inevitably, such scandal and insult have caused a storming reaction. I was one of those who protested publicly.

Immediately, I started to receive letters, notes, reactions, feedback, questions from all over the world, from Jerusalem and London to New York and San-Paolo. People were not only justly outraged. They wanted to act. Many of them have asked me: “what can be done, additionally to writing the letters of protests to the French judiciary and to the office of the President of France? Would it be the demonstrations in New York? What kind of protest will there be in London? Whom from the officials should we protest? We would like to act”.  

I felt very grateful. And encouraged. I am in constant touch with my French Jewish friends and colleagues who are working like lions and lionesses and who are fighting for Sarah Halimi’s honor and dignity of her poor family as attacked Jews always did, being focused, brave and unstoppable. Because, once and again, if we would not defend ourselves, nobody else will. Nothing has changed with that regard, does not matter what horrors might occur towards the Jews.

I have interconnected my French friends with those many other people worldwide who wanted to act in protesting that screaming injustice that had happened in France towards Sarah Halimi. 

During this past week, French President Macron has reacted in time and better than he did previously, in a more articulated way. Not only he personally expressed his clear concern over the fresh shame of France, but his chancellery has issued a special statement about it, an official document. And I think, president Macron meant what he stated. 

The Israeli authorities were not silent either: the Foreign Ministry of Israel has made a strong statement, the leading media in Israel and in the Jewish world has been quite clear in our all united and severe condemnation. Sarah’s family started to realize that they are supported not only by the united Jewish community of France, but now by the international brethren as well. This is important. 

In an absolutely just move, the family of Sarah Halimi is about to submit the case of the murder of a Jew to Israel’s jurisdiction, as it is prescribed by two articles in the Israeli criminal code. With all my heart, I do hope that the case will be accepted and that the state of Israel will officially request the extradition of the beast who has murdered Sarah Halimi, in accordance with the existing French-Israeli treaty on the matter. I do hope that Sarah Halimi and her family will get justice. It is just impossible that the forces of darkness will celebrate their evil cause on the account of Sarah’s life and her unpunished murderer. 

But today, most of all,  I am thinking about so many people in France and abroad who are preparing to march in protest of that colossal injustice the coming Sunday. One week ago sharp, we were discussing with my brave French friends two demonstrations on the coming Sunday, April 25th, in Paris and in Israel. 

Today, just in the matter of a week, we know about ten massive protests all over France, in all of the country’s big cities, as well as three major rallies in the USA, and also in London and Tel-Aviv. Sara Halimi international rallies. Credit (C) Alan Skorsky. With kind permission.

My heart is pumping when I am reading the information and seeing the posters for the forthcoming protest marches: Paris, Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Deauville, Montpellier in France, most of them at the same day and the same time, April 25th, Sunday, at 14.00, at the main squares of all those cities, and next to the courts, as well. In New York and Los Angeles, the rallies went on Thursday, April 22nd. In Miami, London and Tel-Aviv, they will be organized on the same day and time as Paris.

 

This is what solidarity is about. 

The protests are organized under the united slogan “ Sans justice pas se Républic”, “There is no Republic without justice’. 

All French Jewish organizations, many of the leading synagogues and congregations are united in this unprecedented expression of indignation and solidarity. 

To my serious satisfaction, I saw many messages from Arab people in France who were sending their solidarity with Sarah Halimi’s family. It is a decency that speaks at the moments like that, not race. 

We all will be coming to those rallies on Sunday, April 25th, in Paris, London, Tel-Aviv and elsewhere. Our people and those who have solidarity with us, just did demonstrate our guts, our heart, and our determination to fight the evil and those scoundrels who cover for it. 

In another surreal development, the judge called Anne Ihuellou who has committed that outrageous mockery of justice in the decision not to prosecute Sarah Halimi’s murderer on the ground that he used drugs before committing the crime, has demanded police protection for herself on the ground ‘of hostile attitude towards her from the Jewish community of France’. I am convinced that it is the Jewish community of France who is absolutely entitled of the police and any other possible protection from ‘the judges’ like that.

We now know about so many massive protests to be organized for Sarah Halimi – but for some reason, we have not heard about anything in the place which is geographically much close to Paris than Miami. I mean Brussels, the heart of the European democracy, and the seat of its governing bodies. We also have not heard anything, so far, from the EU, EC, and the European Parliament officials. I have heard that there is even a special high-ranking official whose cosmic salary is paid for her alleged fight against anti-Semitism. Just recently, we’ve heard that a huge budget of 2 billion euros has been allocated to fight anti-Semitism in the European Union. Probably, it all is misinformation – as there is virtually zero in everything which has to be done in real actions and deeds by all those hyper-inflated with officials and their salary bodies — and nothing, ever, done.  It feels that in the case of anti-Semitism, EU authorities responsible for that are placed in somewhere like Amazon jungle without internet and being not informed on anything. Pathetic inadequate mannequins. Poor European tax-payers, too.

When I was writing my previous essay a week ago on April 16th describing the utter shame cause by an unparalleled case of injustice in France, my heart was bleeding. My only consolation during those hours were the photographs from the first protests in Paris which were held just immediately after the scandalous decision of the Court of Cassation, on April 14th and 15th. When I saw how many people came there, and what good faces they had, I was a bit consoled that Sarah is remembered and loved, and that the pain of her family is shared. 

First published in The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-dreyfus-legacy-of-france/, as well as in Tribune Juive ( Paris, France), and the Jerusalem Connection Report ( Washington, D.C., the USA)

The mockery of justice in the case of neglected murder of Sarah Halimi   Sarah Halimi murdered by Islamist fanatic in Paris in April 2017. Commons Images Library.

First, the disclaimer to make: I do like France very much. Its culture, its landscapes, its distinct style and charm.  I grew up with admiration of France’s intellectual and cultural might, and it is an integral part of who I am. 

I also have a family connection to France, and it places me on the inner level of appreciation. 

Additionally, we have many wonderful family-like friends in France who are an organic part of my husband’s and mine lives. 

And then comes the part of history. As sorry as I am to say it, the fact is that the history of France is nasty all the way, from the early settlements on the banks of Seine to the shocking news of the mockery of justice that we are stunned to see today. 

The more one studies the history of France, the more chilled one is. I will not provide the full catalog of it because the list would be too long, and because the subject of this essay is not the observation of France’s shortcomings from a historical perspective. 

The subject of this essay is boiling indignation. 

In April 2017, a wild 27-year old monster from Mali intruded via balcony into the apartment of 65-year old teacher Sarah Halimi, the mother of three children, widow of a well-known psychologist, renowned for her kind and widely appreciated work in her school. Nice, kind, quiet, very likable woman. 

The intruding monster attacks the woman who is three times older than him. He beats her severely leaving twenty-two — twenty-two — fractures in her small body. He screams ‘Allahu Akbar!’ attacking his defenseless victim. Then he throws her from the high Paris third floor balcony, to her death. He screams “ I killed the Shaitan!’. 

As it has been chronicled in multiple, including official sources, the police did not appear in time despite many repeated emergency calls from many alarmed people. When the police appeared, they did not storm the apartment. They were waiting for the enforcement, they have explained later. 

What happened next is too well-known to the Jewish people in France — and it is stunning to the outside world. Many of the French media were reluctant to report the crime as it was. Three months passed before a word ‘anti-Semitic’ was added, extremely reluctantly, to the qualification of the crime, after enormous pressure by the Sarah Halimi’s family, the Jewish community of France and many intellectuals, all Jewish, who just could not allow themselves to be silent. 

The killer, who had a long criminal record, was put in a mental clinic, and was posed as ‘unfitted to be tried’. Did he have a history of mental disorders? He did not. 

Two years passed before the next juridical move had had a place, after a very pale one-phrase comment by President Macron saying that ‘even if him ( the killer) would be seen by the judge as unfitting for a trial, the trial, a judicial proceeding has to have a place’. Not the tone we used to hear from the Presidents of the French Republics. Not the tone which we used to hear from this very President, as a rule. 

In 2019, the examining magistrate made its

verdict: the killer was not criminally responsible. The reason? Because “ before the killing, he smoked cannabis”. Black on white, in the decision made in July 2019. 

Half a year later, in December 2019, this utterly scandalous decision was upheld by the Paris Court Appeal.  

Naturally, Sarah Halimi’s family appealed after that insult of common sense.  Their appeal took two years to have proceeded. 

Now, in April 2021, two years after the appeal, and four years after the horrific killing, the Court of the Cassation, the highest instance of the French legal system, has upheld the initial verdict. The animal who killed an innocent woman has been verified as having no criminal responsibility for wild murder just because he smoked cannabis before attacking his victim. 

Certainly, with this action, France has contributed to the world practices of litigation in the most shocking way possible. 

When back in 2019, responding, very reluctantly, to the mounting pressure of justified outrage over the intent negligence of the French police and then legal authorities to this unspeakable crime,  President Macron extremely cautiously uttered that just one carefully constructed phrase on the necessity of some legal proceeding of the case of murder,  some of those in charge, namely the case prosecutor Francois Molins and judge Chantal Arens from the Court of Cassation, supported by the top French judge, the head of the Union of the main judges of France Katia Dubreuil, unleashed a fountaining reprimand against him. How dared the President to interfere into the sacred independence of the French court system? Oh yeah. 

I have had a personal experience with this decision-making at the French courts and that omerta of silence all over it when I was publicly defending my distinguished colleague, internationally renowned French historian George Bensoussan. Today George along with his colleagues, including many of our personal friends, is fighting for the dignity of Sarah Halimi and against the cruel absurdity of this unique French legal system which has proven, once and again, on its high selectiveness, from the Dreyfus Affair and to this day. 

APR 16, 2021, 7:22 PM

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The mockery of justice in the case of neglected murder of Sarah Halimi   Sarah Halimi murdered by Islamist fanatic in Paris in April 2017. Commons Images Library.

First, the disclaimer to make: I do like France very much. Its culture, its landscapes, its distinct style and charm.  I grew up with admiration of France’s intellectual and cultural might, and it is an integral part of who I am. 

I also have a family connection to France, and it places me on the inner level of appreciation. 

Additionally, we have many wonderful family-like friends in France who are an organic part of my husband’s and mine lives. 

And then comes the part of history. As sorry as I am to say it, the fact is that the history of France is nasty all the way, from the early settlements on the banks of Seine to the shocking news of the mockery of justice that we are stunned to see today. 

The more one studies the history of France, the more chilled one is. I will not provide the full catalog of it because the list would be too long, and because the subject of this essay is not the observation of France’s shortcomings from a historical perspective. 

The subject of this essay is boiling indignation. 

In April 2017, a wild 27-year old monster from Mali intruded via balcony into the apartment of 65-year old teacher Sarah Halimi, the mother of three children, widow of a well-known psychologist, renowned for her kind and widely appreciated work in her school. Nice, kind, quiet, very likable woman. 

The intruding monster attacks the woman who is three times older than him. He beats her severely leaving twenty-two — twenty-two — fractures in her small body. He screams ‘Allahu Akbar!’ attacking his defenseless victim. Then he throws her from the high Paris third floor balcony, to her death. He screams “ I killed the Shaitan!’. 

As it has been chronicled in multiple, including official sources, the police did not appear in time despite many repeated emergency calls from many alarmed people. When the police appeared, they did not storm the apartment. They were waiting for the enforcement, they have explained later. 

What happened next is too well-known to the Jewish people in France — and it is stunning to the outside world. Many of the French media were reluctant to report the crime as it was. Three months passed before a word ‘anti-Semitic’ was added, extremely reluctantly, to the qualification of the crime, after enormous pressure by the Sarah Halimi’s family, the Jewish community of France and many intellectuals, all Jewish, who just could not allow themselves to be silent. 

The killer, who had a long criminal record, was put in a mental clinic, and was posed as ‘unfitted to be tried’. Did he have a history of mental disorders? He did not. 

Two years passed before the next juridical move had had a place, after a very pale one-phrase comment by President Macron saying that ‘even if him ( the killer) would be seen by the judge as unfitting for a trial, the trial, a judicial proceeding has to have a place’. Not the tone we used to hear from the Presidents of the French Republics. Not the tone which we used to hear from this very President, as a rule. 

In 2019, the examining magistrate made its verdict: the killer was not criminally responsible. The reason? Because “ before the killing, he smoked cannabis”. Black on white, in the decision made in July 2019. 

Half a year later, in December 2019, this utterly scandalous decision was upheld by the Paris Court Appeal.  

Naturally, Sarah Halimi’s family appealed after that insult of common sense.  Their appeal took two years to have proceeded. 

Now, in April 2021, two years after the appeal, and four years after the horrific killing, the Court of the Cassation, the highest instance of the French legal system, has upheld the initial verdict. The animal who killed an innocent woman has been verified as having no criminal responsibility for wild murder just because he smoked cannabis before attacking his victim. 

Certainly, with this action, France has contributed to the world practices of litigation in the most shocking way possible. 

When back in 2019, responding, very reluctantly, to the mounting pressure of justified outrage over the intent negligence of the French police and then legal authorities to this unspeakable crime,  President Macron extremely cautiously uttered that just one carefully constructed phrase on the necessity of some legal proceeding of the case of murder,  some of those in charge, namely the case prosecutor Francois Molins and judge Chantal Arens from the Court of Cassation, supported by the top French judge, the head of the Union of the main judges of France Katia Dubreuil, unleashed a fountaining reprimand against him. How dared the President to interfere into the sacred independence of the French court system? Oh yeah. 

I have had a personal experience with this decision-making at the French courts and that omerta of silence all over it when I was publicly defending my distinguished colleague, internationally renowned French historian George Bensoussan. Today George along with his colleagues, including many of our personal friends, is fighting for the dignity of Sarah Halimi and against the cruel absurdity of this unique French legal system which has proven, once and again, on its high selectiveness, from the Dreyfus Affair and to this day. Inna Rogatchi in discussion with George Bensoussan. Memorial de la Shoah. Paris. April 2015. Courtesy (C) The Rogatchi Foundation.

In the way, as only real life can teach us, the mockery trial of George Bensoussan which I have called ‘a modern-day Dreyfus Affair’ had happened just three weeks before the horrific murder of Sarah Halimi. 

In the light of Sarah Halimi’s murder that has no criminal responsibility in modern-day France, Bensoussan absurd trial has to be called ‘modern Dreyfus Affair One’, and denial of justice to the victim Sarah Halimi and her family has to be called ‘modern Dreyfus Affair Two’. Congratulations to France with this growing list of shame. 

Exactly as in the case of a distinguished historian who was tried for several years for a quote, I believe that the people who were responsible for all premeditated mockery of policing and law in the attack, torture, and murder of Sarah Halimi, and for the consequent lenience of the investigation and the travesty of courts, should be named, with personal responsibility — moral, yes, at very least — to be bored by every one of them in that outrage that has tarnished the reputation of France for good. 

Those who were late in arriving at the location of the ongoing crime. Those who decided not to storm the apartment. Those who never interrogated the animal who murdered an innocent woman. Those who have authorized his move to the mental clinic. Those who kept him in the mental clinic obediently. Those who did not investigate. Those who were late to investigate. Those who obstructed justice. Those who came out with the verdict of ‘not bearing criminal responsibility’. Those who did upheld this verdict twice. Those who were and are silent in violating their professional duties in the media. Those who were and are ignorant at the National Assembly and the Senate of France. Those who were and are indifferent at the multiplied human rights organizations. 

All above applied to the murder committed independently of a racial element in this tragic story. Double tragic because of how the crime has been treated in France. 

Under the French law, so utterly independent, usage of drugs is an aggravating circumstance of a crime. This way, not the perverted one applied out of blue and against the existing law by the French judges who were ruling on the murder of Sarah Halimi. So what on earth has made them to pervert the law of the country in which they are enjoying their supreme independence? 

Probably, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ screams of the 27-year old Islamist fanatic on drugs torturing and murdering 65-year old teacher? Probably, ‘I killed Shaitan!’ screams of him after throwing her body off the third-floor balcony? Probably, his criminal history as a serial offender? 

To qualify the attack as ‘an anti-Semitic’ took three months and a battle, and it was never established as a racial motivation in the investigation of the case – which is another aggravating circumstance under the existing French law. 

The family of Sarah Halimi is not alone in their nightmare-like four-years battle against the wall of stunning negligence. In France, the Jewish community is fighting consistently against this screaming racial anti-Semitic crime. The French intellectuals are on the right side of this surreal barricade, as well. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in France is fighting along. Some people from Israel are joining the protests. But there are many more public organizations and institutions in France and outside it which can intervene. 

I have also a revelation to make: one does not need to be Jewish to defend a Jew. Just like Emile Zola did. And many like him. I call those people Shining Souls. Demonstration in Paris after the verdict of the Court of Cassations. Paris. April 2021. Credit: SIPA.

After the original Dreyfus Affair, after the copycat Dreyfus Affair of the trial of George Bensoussan, in face of the third Dreyfus Affair of denying justice to brutally murdered Sarah Halimi, one cannot help but be appalled by the reality of legally verifying a sheer absurdity and institutionalizing it through the legal system upholding it on the top of it. This is the essence of what had happened in the perverted justice applied by the French police and legal system to the case of the murder of Sarah Halimi. When one of the protesters has said that with that verdict Sarah Halimi has been murdered twice, he was dead right. And as outrageous as it is, there are more cases like that in the modern history of France.

The people, with the names and official positions, who all, in a large quantity, neglected two aggravating circumstances of premeditated murder, did not oversee it by chance. They all did it consciously. They all did it on purpose. They all knew exactly what they were doing. 

That’s why I believe that we all who are protesting this yet another Dreyfus Affair, now in the XXI century, ought to know their names. All of them. 

And I also would like to hear, on record, in the public domain, their all, each of them personally, explanation, in their all official capacities, in replying on this one question: “Why did you decide to ignore two aggravation circumstances of premeditated murder of Sarah Halimi on April 4th, 2017?”. I would like to have all those people to give a detailed reply to this one question. I would like to publish their all’ replies next to their photographs, and the official positions they hold. This publication would be France’s other ‘J’Accuse…!’. Obviously, the original one was not enough.

Does somebody still remember, by the way, that the Paris police had never – this is never — investigated the arson at the house of Emile Zola which killed the writer and a great man in September 1902, almost four years after publishing “J’Accuse…!” in the act which preserved which was left of the reputation of France in the Dreyfus Affair? That the coroner has refused to make the existing expert report and has, just one man, declared Zola’s death of natural causes? That nobody ever challenged that verdict of one man at a minor police position in that mighty, huge, and oh-so-frighteningly independent legal system of France in the case of the death of the famous writer known as the conscience of the nation? And this is given the well-known fact that after the publication of  ‘J’Accuse…!” Zola had received numerous death threats due to his honest position and incredible bravery all four years preceding his weird death? Oh well. 

And even when half of a century later, some glimpses of truth had appeared in one modest investigative report in Liberation in 1953, it was orchestrated in the way of a possible personal vendetta of just one too eager anti-Dreyfus zealot. Well, it might be sobering – and timing – to remember that at the time of that fatal arson, Emile Zola has completed his novel Vérité summarising the Colonel Dreyfus case, the shame of the century for France as it was known, completely justified. The second volume of the novel called Justice Emile Zola was unable to complete. He was dead laying on the floor of his Paris apartment desperately trying to reach the window to open it. He suffocated. It is a natural cause as it was seen by the French police and legal system in 1902. 

The same as torturing, causing 22 fractions, terrible beating to death, and throwing a woman from the balcony bears no criminal responsibility as it is seen by the French police and legal system in 2021. 

This phenomenon is called ‘Dreyfus Legacy of France’, and it is absolutely impossible to accept it. 

First published in The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/two-alexes-a-family-reminiscence/, as well as in Tribune Juive ( Paris, France) and The Jerusalem Connection Report ( Washington, D.C., the USA)

The story of two Alexes appeared to me from old photographs, new documents, all kinds of papers, maps, clips, and fact leads of my ongoing art historical research with regard to the art looted by the Nazis during World War II, and on my family history as well. This time, the scene of the events is Paris in the early 1940s, and thereafter, when the war was just over. 

My research has brought me to the heart of the Paris 8th arrondissement, to the street which runs in parallel with Boulevard Hausmann starting from the Place Saint Augustin and ending at the Champs Elysees. It is rue la Boetie, the very heart of central Paris. The street was also very much the heart of the French art life in the last century. Businesses, storages, houses of the leading art dealers were situated there. Wildenstein, Bernheim, Rosenberg, the creme a la creme of the French, Parisian and actually the world art dealers had been living and working on this street which I came to research in close detail. 21, rue la Boetie, former house and business of art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Photo: Inna Rogatchi.

There is more in such kind of research than a topography in its literal meaning. The stones of the buildings on rue la Boetie, as the stones of the buildings at any place, does keep the energy of the people who were living there, and some of it could be felt even decades on. 

Coming out of the dramatic events from 80 years back, the destinies of two Jewish Parisian boys have resurfaced in front of me, in both striking and thoughtful parallel. Two Alexes of the same age and with a similar background, they both were thrown into the fire of the Kurban, as the Holocaust survivors were calling the Catastrophe for many years after it had happened.  Both boys took their stand with a great bravery and determination.

One boy was Alex Rosenberg, the son of the world-famous art dealer who was the principal dealer of Picasso, and a major collector of post-Impressionists. The other was Alex Bujanover, the son of well-known doctor Simcha Bujanover and the second niece of Gustav Mahler, Eleanor Rose. Alex Bujanover was my uncle. Both boys were born in 1921, Alex Rosenberg on March 5th, and Alex Bujanover on September 27th. Both boys started to study in Sorbonne, Alex Rosenberg studied classics, Alex Bujanover medicine. Both Alexs’ university years were cut very short. 

They were both nineteen in 1940. 

Three months before the Nazis marched into Paris, almost all of the Paul Rosenberg family had left the capital. The dealer’s brother was staying ( he died in 1947 after all that he, his family and his brethren went through) , and Paul’s son Alex went to England to fight against the Nazis. He did it bravely, fighting with the French 2nd Armoured Division of the Free French Forces during the all years of the war in  the world’s different locations. 

Doctor Bujanover’s family did not leave Paris. They were in Resistance. Alex’s mother, my great-aunt Eleanor was helping the Resistance in a big way despite mortal danger for herself and the family. The couple’s just 15-year old daughter Eleanor ( the name went down in that family for its women in one generation after the other) was very active in Resistance youth, the same as her a bit older brother. At a certain stage, towards the end of 1942, Alex has become too close to real danger, and he had to escape via the Resistance route to Switzerland. I found the documents about it at the US Holocaust Museum Archive in Washington D.C. 

Shortly after Alex’s run, in December 1942, his aunt, the first cousin of his mother with whom they were very close, the daughter of the legendary concertmaster of the Vienna Opera and Philharmonic Orchestras Arnold Rose, Alma was betrayed to the Nazis on her way to freedom. Alma was kept at Drancy for about a year while the family tried desperately to free her from there, in vain. Alma was sent to Auschwitz in 1943.  I wrote about the saga of my family here. 

I have learned that Alex’s run from the Nazis was very daring. It was very uneasy, as he clearly had a Semitic outlook. He managed, and later would prove his bravery under very daring circumstances after the end of the war, with so many tragedies still unfolding years after the pact of the Third Reich’s capitulation.Alexandre Alex Bujanover in Paris. the second part of the 1930s. Courtesy: The Rogatchi Archive.

In his turn, Alex Rosenberg knew that the family’s house on 21, rue la Boetie, was confiscated by the Nazis almost immediately after the fall of Paris, in three days, actually, with everything that Paul Rosenberg did not manage to hide or relocate. He also knew that in their house, where his father used to work for the pride of France and its culture for decades, the Nazis and their local collabos ( the name for the Nazi collaborators in France) has set one of the most outrageous organizations, L’Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives  ( IEQJ) , the nest of the vile anti-Semitism in occupied France. There was a special — and intent — insult added to a standard proceeding of the Nazi robbery, with regard to the Rosenberg family.

Meanwhile, Alex Bujanover was extremely worried for his family who spent the first two years of the occupation in Paris before they managed to relocate to the Bordeaux area.  

During the rest of the war, both Alexs were each fighting against the Nazis and for their families and brethren, Alex Rosenberg as a soldier in the British forces, Alex Bujanover as a doctor. 

More than four years later after running for their lives, Paul Rosenberg’s son Alex was just 23 when he was re-entering Paris with the Allied Forces in August 1944 as a victor and as a lieutenant. Alexandre Alex Rosenberg, with his comrade in arms, at the camp de Delville, 1944. Credit: Free France History. With kind permission.

In one of the most colorful episodes of WWII in France, lieutenant Rosenberg was informed about the Nazi-organised train leaving Paris and heading towards Germany. It was the last train leaving for Germany, and it was full of looted art. The train number was 40 044. 

The train was loaded with about 150 large crates with the art looted by the Nazis in France. In an unbelievable sprint, Alex Rosenberg, who was given a car and soldiers to accompany him, was chasing that train and stopped it north from Paris.

The episode was described accurately in the astonishing book by Rose Valland Le front de l’art published in 1961. Valland, who died in 1980, is a very special person in the history of World War II and the looted art, and her amazing story is a subject of its own. Referring to just one episode,  it was that woman who was personally confronting Göering with her first-hand testimony on him as a banal low-life looter at the Nuremberg Trial. 

After the publication of Rose Valland’s book, Hollywood took interest in lieutenant Rosenberg’s chase of the German train number 40 044 in August 1944. The outcome of it is The Train film released in 1964 with Burt Lancaster in the leading role. Initially, the film should be directed by Arthur Penn. Interestingly, Lancaster who was calling shots at that production succeeded in firing the great director just a few days before the shooting would start. The reason? Penn was really interested in the art-line of the script and the Rosenberg family’s drama. Lancaster wanted action. The result is a rather clumsy film, and a very Hollywoodish tale that is really difficult to watch to the end out of its shallow boringness. 

In real circumstances, not a Hollywood version of life, when Alex started to open the crates loaded in the train, in two of them he saw the artworks which were looking upon him in their family’s apartment and in his father’s gallery as long as he knew himself.Inna Rogatchi (C). Cry of Heaven. In Memory of Six Million. Original drawing. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, crayons Luminance on white cotton paper. 60 x 40 cm. 2019.

At the same time, Alex Bujanover has become a doctor at the DPC ( Displaced Persons Camp) after the war. As it comes from my research, it was Biberach camp that was under the French jurisdiction after the end of the war.  The place is in the middle between Munich and Stuttgart. When I was trying to locate the former DP Camp, I learned that the place was demolished in the 1960s. I guess, they were only too eager to erase the place of the former sanatorium in which the camp had been located, instead of preserving it as a memorial and, importantly, educational center. 

 It is well known that medical conditions at the Displaced Persons Camps were extremely challenging, with a widespread of highly contagious diseases. During the first two years after the war, as many as 850 000 people, mostly after the Nazi camps, were living there. In Biberach, there were more than 400 of them on average, with people coming and going for over two years. Biberach DP Camp, in between 1946 and 1947. Credit: Commons Images Open Archive.

Once I have met a nice person in the United States, educated, thoughtful, versed in all kinds of knowledge man. Somehow, his behavior was a bit distinct. Thoughtful a bit too much, shy a bit too much, static a bit too much. I never asked a question, but his wife thought that it would be useful to let me know, at a quiet moment, that her husband was the person who  ‘ was reportedly the first child ever born at the DPC, you know’. I did know. I loved this man. And I remember his rounded face, with his childish eyes, and that shy inner expression, all the years since we met for the first time in Boston, now it is some of them years after his passing, sadly. 

After the end of war, and that famous chase of the train 40 044 from Paris to Germany, Alex Rosenberg joined his family in New York in 1946. Joining and later continuing the business with his father, Alex has become a very senior art dealer himself, the founder of the Art Dealers Association in America. 

In a dramatic turn, Alex Rosenberg died prematurely, being just 66, in 1987. It happened in London, suddenly, during his visit to reunite with his fighting unit during WWII. Seemingly, that meeting, and the circumstances it evoked in his memory, turned out far too emotional and difficult to sustain.

Unlike Alex Rosenberg, Alex Buyanover did not live long enough to see his friends in Resistance for commemorations. As a matter of fact, he did not live long at all. Alex died in 1948, being just 27, of typhus which he had contracted at the DP camp on his doctor position there. His mother never recovered from that tragedy, yet another devastating blow of the Holocaust in our family. The line of very good doctors Bujanovers has come to its abrupt and forced end with the death of my just 27-year old uncle at the Displaced Persons Camp in 1948. Inna Rogatchi (C). Memories. Stop-Cadre II. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle le blanc on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 2017-2021.

As we all know, there are things in life which are hardly explicable. In one such phenomenon, I always have those two same-aged, same-named Parisian Jewish boys from families of a similar background to Alexes, together in my head. They were so very much alike. And the destinies of their families, too. 

Despite the French state returning that confiscated house on 21, rue la Boetie to Alex Rosenberg’s father Paul, he could never live there. He just cannot, and I understand him completely. I was always, and still am, terrified to think about the fact that German Nazi officers during the occupation of Ukraine, one of them major, as we know, were living in my paternal grandparents’ apartment in Ukraine. It was the apartment of Alex Bujanover’s uncle, my grandfather Elijah.

Not only the three Nazis were living there for three years, in the Bujanover apartment where my father and his brother grew up, but they also seized all those very special, unique large-size mechanized toys, models of car, ship, and the other things which my talented engineer grandfather created and produced by his able hands for his sons, my father Isaac and uncle Leonid. 

It might sound a bit loony, but I am often thinking about who in Germany, which children in which cities were playing with my father’s car, and ship, and all those marvelous things, some of which I have on the family’s photos after the three Nazis did return to their homes if they did return. Hopefully not.

I cannot get it out of my mind, and I know that it will always be there, in the back of it: which German kids were sitting inside that great car, and ship which were made by the Jewish engineer for his Jewish sons? I really want to know it. 

One more thing. This family reminiscence of two Alexes, two Parisian Jewish boys, had reminded me on how, being so young and inexperienced, they were so brave and so determined. I am looking into their both’ crucial years between 1940 and 1947 with grateful pride. In my head, I am reconstructing the process of sudden, emergency-like development of the character of those two boys. I can almost feel how steeled has become their inner will, which one would not recognize immediately in two well-bred boys from affluent families who had a  serene trouble-free upbringing before the war. 

I am thinking, and thinking again, on how courageous those two Alexes were, despite all the horrors that they were facing so suddenly and so shockingly. How helpful both of them has become to the others, at the time of an ultimate calling. How devoted they proved to be to their families, to our people, to everyone under the attack.

No Hollywood ever would be able to show the subtlety and the power of that dramatic transformation of the inner capacity of goodness inside our Jewish boys into the uncrushable fighting power and determined resistance to evil. This is why we prevailed. 

As sad as I am for not being able to know my uncle Alex who would be as great a doctor, like his father, and over the premature death of Alex Rosenberg who might live well more than 20-plus years unless his heart had been too worn up by the Nazi war, I am very proud of both of them, and of many other Jewish boys with similar destinies.

But most of all, I am limitlessly grateful to that heritage of goodness that defines the best of our people and that makes them victors, even in their premature death. Inna Rogatchi (C). Two Alexes art collage. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 50 cm. 2021.

April 2021

Edward and Wallis Simpson meeting Hitler. Germany, 1937.

Missing Part of the Guide for TV Interview Watchers

“Racism drove us out of UK” – a quote from the recently carefully planned and calculated interview by a very fitting each other couple to Oprah. 17 millions Americans watchers, probably more, are in shock and full of sympathy, naturally. 

The Labour MPs in Britain have jumped on the horse and have demanded an official probe into the racism at the Palace. Of course. Racism claims are a hot commodity nowadays.

Perhaps, those sympathisers have to be educated a bit who is the person who has stated the line so somber-like and self-convincingly. That still young man is the person who sixteen years ago was featured all over the UK and in some US media as well, on the front pages. He was going to party, with a Nazi bandage on the sleeve of his white shirt. And it was not an isolated case. There were reports on Heil saluting by the same person, too. So he knows something about racism, it seems. British media covers, 2015. (C) Wiki Commons Image Library.American coverage , New York Post, 2015. (C) Wiki Common Images Library.

To compare the person’s actions and his words in this case and at this time leads to only reaction: it is simply hilarious. Whoever chooses this kind of outfit for a dressing party is declaring who-he-is. Period. And he is somber-like mentoring his family now choosing to shame them world-wide, for the profit, in that utterly hypocritical exercise for dumb and dumbest.

Next to him is a thriving former barmaid, former B-movies participant ( actress is a profession, so it has to be a distinction) who is having a moment of her life and enjoying every millisecond of it. 

The image of the woman on the screen is renewed to the smallest detail: the hair, the dress, every single gesture rehearsed thoroughly. As it happened, it all is a blatant appropriation: the hair, the dress, and gestures too.

Just somebody in a huge Oprah team who was preparing the show, had to read something about the person whose hair, dress and gestures they were appropriated for never-made-it actress on the bench opposite Oprah. Because they have put themselves, their subject, their mighty hostess, and the whole show, actually, in real jeopardy with that choice. Wallis Simpson, 1936. (C) Wiki Common Images Library.

Because – as it was noted in the British press yet before the interview – the copy-catted image was of Wallis Simpson, American socialite who has persuaded Edward VIII to marry her by the price of abdicating. Which was, actually, a blessing for Britain, as it turned out, because having undeterred pro-Nazi sympatizer on the throne at the time of the Second World War would make the job of Winston Churchill much harder. He would prevail anyway, of course. 

It would be highly recommended to consult some historian in order not to put the entire operation in such utter embarrassment for those who were responsible in the Oprah team before reviving the Wallis Simpson image 80 years after many of her notorious public and private statements and her multiplied allying with pro-Nazi figures literally everywhere she went. It would be so obvious to read, to learn, to think, to make this probably seen as unnecessary for them exercises of putting one plus one, before copiously cloning and putting in front of multi-million audience today  a person who produces all these lines and hints on racism being 100% in the appropriated image of disgusting personage of the modern history known as Wallis Simpson. So much meticulous effort of all sorts to revive the image of whom?

Just for Oprah team – and for those among the huge international audience who have no clue about who Wallis Simpson was: she was the person who has publicly stated that ‘France has lost ( to the Germans) because it has been infested inside”; she was the person who did choose as the host for her scandalous wedding with abdicated Edward the Portuguese banker who was known to the MI-6 as devoted Nazi sympatizer, appropriator of looted by Nazi art,  and who was close friend and business partner of dictator Salazar. 

She was the person who with her husband ran in 1937 to Germany to meet Herr Adolf and to lick his rare part enthusiastically, forgive me a small slip off the protocol. The Simpson and Edward visit to Germany and their cheerful and cordial  meetings with Hitler are very well documented. Just one of many existing photos of the tour  voila: 

Edward and Wallis Simpson meeting Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937. (C) Wiki Commons Image Library.

She was the person who has organised the luxury marine tour for her-beloved-self and her husband on a board of an yacht of Alex Wenner-Gren, their good friend and associate and at the same time close personal friend – and business associate of Herr Göring, Hermann Göring. Furious Churchill managed to avert the public disaster with that would be sun-bathing of still Royal couple on the yacht of a pro-Nazi person who was actually banned by the British and American authorities during the WWII for his pro-Nazi activities and dealings with the Third Reich.

Substantial part of these activities were banking manipulations subsidising Nazis via Wallis Simpson’s one of the best and closest friends Wenner-Gren’s bank domesticated  where? In the Bahamas, indeed. In the Bahamas where Simpson’s third husband Edward was put by the British Crown to be the Bahamas governor during 1940-1945. One might wonder why on earth did he step down from that so convenient position on March 16, 1945 when the the Nazi Germany’s utter defeat was imminent? One might, but none of the British historians do not. 

I am not going further into that man’s personal relations and existed – before masterly retrieved by the able British ( and it happened, Kremlin) agent immediately after the end of WWII  – highly incriminating letters between him and Hitler. But it is well-known that they did exist. 

My point with regard to that stunningly mean exercise on the TV screen aired with such publicity is that the guide for this show for massive TV audience, especially in the States, clearly misses the part in which the audience would be reminded on the episode of the Nazi entertainment costume happily picked up by member of the Royal family who is now making such blatant statements on racism which in his words ‘drove him and his family out of his country’, and about the record of the openly and proudly pro-Nazi American socialite whose image has been picked up for appropriation by another American who is a parody even of a socialite. The audience has its right to know about these historical facts, to make their conclusions.

But of course, this kind of missing part of a guide for TV audiences does not generate such dizzy profit. As we know from history, including the modern one, decency hardly does. That’s why throughout long historical records it is regarded as a luxury. Royals or not. 

Bar-Mitzvah in front of the Auschwitz entrance

And even there, Pat’s works which I presented, were perceived by the people who know every detail of what has happened to the inhabitants of Brehow Ghetto, with deep emotions. Because when someone , 70 years later, re-lives a tragedy on the level of a certain child, a certain mother, a certain boy, with such a passion, asking loudly all those questions which had been answered never, it reverberates in people’s hearts powerfully. 

 Comparison of Pat’s coloured oil works and prints made in 2011-2014 with black-and-white photos from the original album works in a stricken way. Pat’s art is metaphorical – photos are documental. Pat’s works are picking up some one-two-three people from the photos – photos fixes groups as they were. Pat’s works manifesting hyperbolised details, such as a children doll, a girl bow, oversized yellow star on the Rabbi’s coat – photos are not magnifying anything like that, they show us a cold view of a butcher before his methodically applied butchery would start any minute from the stills taken. The contrast is colossal.  It shows the very essence of the Nazi butchery of human beings in uniquely magnifying glass of compassion which becomes conviction. 

Our committee has decided to start to work with good colleagues at Yad Vashem and go on for the publication of a special brochure, publishing all forty Pat’s art works next to their prototypes from the original The Auschwitz Album, with her – and ours – commentaries.

Eight months later, in Nomver 20202, the first brochure in this format has been ready, thanks to focused and devoted work of Dr Shelley R.Neese who took upon herself to implement our ideas, in memory of her great teacher, Pat Mercer Hutchens. In the end of the past, so difficult because of the pandemic year, 2020, 500 catalogues comparing Pat’s artistic interpretation with chilly black-and-white photos from the Auschwitz Album went to the Faculty of Arts at Liberty University for our pilot educational Art & Holocaust course there. We are having plans for expanding the program world-wide. Cover of the Auschwitz Album Re-Visited Catalogue published in November 2020. Credit and permission: Shelley R.Neese, The JerUSAlem Connection.

Forty Personal Stories

I knew Pat well. I felt her as a family member. She was a close friend. She was a fighter, and a straightforward strong American girl from Louisiana, that type of made of steel ( outwardly) Southern American girl with strongest and noble convictions, immense will, and mighty spiritual drive. She was sharp and fair. Inwardly, she was very subtle, finely feeling and subduedly expressing  herself as a gentle soul who knew what a nuance was about in an organic way of implementing it. 

I also knew, being helping her in her last project as its curator, in what hurry she was. The Auschwitz Album has 56 pages with 193 photos on them. Originally there were more, but Lilly Jacobs who found the album in the pocket of the left SS-coat on very chilling day of January 27th, 1945, in one of the Auschwitz barracks, and who kept it in her attic in the US until 1980s , gave some photos to the people who did recognise their family members in that terrifying document of the Shoah. Page from the catalogue with Little Rose of Hungary art work, the artist’s comment, and the corresponding photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

Pat has told me several times how hurried she is. “You see, my dear, there are about 200 photos in the album. I did just a bit of them. I know that I would not be able to do them all, but I am trying to work hard, to do as many as I could”. She was hoping to make seventy of her artistic interpretation  out of 193 in the album. She managed to do 40 of them. Catalogue page with Ben-Aron art work, the artist’s comment and prototype photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

In the recently published art brochure, the catalogue of her last art and humanist project, there is a quote from Pat’s thoughts with regard on that ordeal which she willingly adopted as her last mission in life: “Horrifying as they are, these group photos revealing mass tactics of de-humanisation make it harder to see each person as a suffering individual. My purpose is to zoom in, take two, three or four, and search for a more personal story. It is my prayer that observers will think about each man, woman, and child pictured in the album separately. That was my goal in the heart-wrenching process of painting. Often, I dreamt of trying to bring one of the children back to life. My heart tells me that if I had gone through such an appalling, de-humanising experience, it might bring some small shred of hope to know that perhaps someday, somewhere, someone would know—and let the world know what happened. That is the goal of my life work as an artist; to create monuments of remembrance through art. I am grateful to God for giving me the honour, strength and compassion to paint each precious person”. 

It was written by a mortally-ill over 70-year old woman artist who knew that her days are numbered and who went through an exhausting chemotherapy process at the same time while working on her last project which has been also emotionally powerfully drenching out. Catalogue page with Rabbi Leib Weiss art work, the artist’s comment and photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

Seven years on Pat’s passing, I am thinking of my elder friend ( Pat and Jim are the generation of my parents),  on her selflessness, and her focusing on the tragedy of Jewish children, women, elderly, Rabbis, anyone who has perished in the Shoah. I am thinking of her vision, her approach to see individuals in all those six-plus million victims of the Shoah, with one and a half million children among them. She tried to see and recognise every single person in those 193 photos from the only photographic evidence we have of what was happening inside Auschwitz.

Because only if one would be seeing them individually, they would be recognised and remembered. If we will be looking not on an unidentified child or elderly, but on Little Emma, Ben-Aron, Rabbi Weiss, we would start to comprehend the horror and enormity of that unspeakable crime which has been committed against them and our people. Each of them. Six million and more, individually. With the name. With the place. With the face, if possible. And this is exactly what Pat Mercer Hutchens has done in her last art project which goes far beyond art and gets into the orbit on applied universal humanism, being positioned high there. 

It is very encouraging to me, who was named after my young aunt Minna Chigrinsky who was murdered in the Shoah in October 1941 along with her aunt and uncle being just 18, that many kids in schools in several countries and many students in several American and European Universities would be studying and understanding the Shoah as a personal stories having in front of them the catalogue of the Re-Visiting Auschwitz Album by my dear friend Pat Mercer Hutchens and being able to compare it with the original photos from that horrendous document which is kept at Yad Vashem. I know that this way, people’s understanding of the Shoah will get personal. As it should be. 

* * * * 

The booklet can be ordered here. All funds from it goes to the Holocaust Educational Fund. 

January 2021

The scale of the Shoah prevents us from perceiving it in a whole. Human psyche’s self-defence mechanism is evoked, often blocking us from absorbing it in its enitre shocking volume. We know its methodic plan and idea. We also know the incomprehensible outcome of it. It comes as facts of history. But what connects us with our brethren perished in that unspeakable crime is the way of personal identification with real people from those six – and in all likeness, more – million murdered Jews. That’s why many of us randomly  adopt one Jewish person from the Yad Vashem data-base every January 27th, to identify with that Polish girl, or that Hungarian boy, or that Lithuanian woman. My husband and I are doing it annually, and we treasure that somber but also warm and personal moment when a face and a name appears on our screens and we are able to commemorate the taken lives of more than six million souls while identifying with just two of them, each for one of us. Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Shoah. Indian Ink on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 1992. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

Another day, I saw some photos of a nice American Jewish boy whose family has chosen for his bar-Mitzvah a very moving Yad Vashem program in which Jewish boys can conduct their bar-Mitzvah with adopting a Jewish boy murdered in a  Shoah who had no chance for that. There is one thing when a Jewish boy chooses to put his tefilin for the first time in front of the Auschwitz entrance. It is a symbolic and conscious  gesture. 

It gets disarmingly different when the same boy is doing it in the name of a 2-year old Hungarian Jewish boy with a name and surname, knowing the circumstances of his annihilation. I cannot imagine more formatting experience in upbringing of the kids whose families had the heart and thoughtfulness of choosing this kind of bar-Mitzvah for them.  

When the Shoah gets personal, it gets under our skin for good. 

Presence of Little Emma

A year ago, on previous annual commemoration of the International Holocaust Day in January 2020, I penned the story about such a personal journey into the depths of the Shoah by several people in different generations. The story can be read here. 

I wrote there about dear friend, late American artist Dr Pat Mercer Hutchens who, after learning on contracting cancer at the age of 74, have decided to dedicate the last three years of her life to scrupulous research and the artistic visualisation of the images on terrible photographs from The Auschwitz Album, well-known document. As a matter of fact, the Album which is preserved at Yad Vashem from 1980 onward, is the only existing photographic evidence from inside the largest Nazi factory of death. Inna Rogatchi (C). That Kind of Forest. Watercolour, wax paster, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle de jaune on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 30 x 40 cm. 2021. Ghetto Waltz series.

I also wrote in that essay a year ago about  several types of interconnections, between the Shoah witnesses and its victims and their families and those passionate souls as Pat’s who were as if translating the emotional trauma of the Shoah for us today; and also about generational interconnections in between the Pat’s students and their children, the way through which the compassion is preserved and alive, thus assuring the memory of the innocent souls murdered,  and also strengthening the personal qualities of all, especially young generations, involved. 

A month after publishing that essay, in early March 2020, I went to the USA in what happened to be my last trip before the pandemic that has grounded us all. Many things during that memorable visit were connected with Pat’s memory, her legacy and how to transfer it to the next generations. We have had a special ceremony of our The Rogatchi Foundation Humanist of the Year 2019 Award in memory of Pat Mercer Hutches for her husband, legendary American hero, Brig. General ( Ret) Jim Hutchens, meetings of the educational committee on Pat’s artistic and historical legacy, collegial encounters at the US National Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington D.C., among the other things. 

I was encouraged to see the eyes of young generation, from 10 to 20 year old ones, during the ceremony near Washington D.C. where they were listening to speeches and our re-collections  on how the active, creative, spiritual, passionate memorialising of unknown to her victims of the Shoah has marked the last years of Pat’s life, how she , while battling the cancer, bravery immersed herself into sharing the destinies, actually, the very last hours and minutes of the boys and girls, women and elderly, Rabbis and mothers from the Brehow ghetto in Hungary, which was a collecting point from several towns in the region. How this established American artist, sixty seven years after the collapse of the Hungarian Jewry, decided and carried on re-living the terrible end of their lives with those people. 

It was very quiet in the audience during our ceremony at the speeches part of it when we were recollecting what Pat and Jim did and why. And I would remember the eyes of a few youngsters present there with a hopeful feeling of preservation not only of memory, but the interest towards it. All his life, Elie Wiesel was deeply troubled by the indifference he witnessed first-hand before, during and after the Shoah. Many other survivors would share both publicly and privately the same never answered question and piercing pain on that paralysing, incomprehensible indifference surrounded Shoah and emboldened it in the most desperate way.  

The eyes of those youngsters at our ceremony near Washington D.C. in early March 2020 when we were discussing, remembering and reflecting on the Hutchens family attitude and their life-long efforts to share the tragedy of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in their post-life, were telling to me that these very people would not be indifferent. I do think that it is a vital outcome of the efforts of the people like General Hutchens and his wife artist Pat Mercer Hutchens, their living and growing up legacy. 

Thanks to a generosity and great hearts at the right place of Amy and Bill Zewe who were hosting our ceremony near Washington D.C., it has become a wonderful, warm, meaningful, loving  and memorable event. 

There was one spot in Amy and Bill’s house which was a kind of a magnet to every single person who entered it prior to the ceremony. When I saw it once and again, I decided  to get closer there to find out what makes the place attractive to everyone to stop there, and groups of guests to stay there for a while. When I got close, I was overwhelmed. My favourite artwork of Pat, which is also on our wall as I’ve described it in my previous essay on the topic, Little Emma was there. People were as if being pulled next to that wonderful, and so very special work. Pat Mercer Hutchens (C). Little Emma. Authored original archival print signed by the artist. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

I said: “ It is on mine wall as well”, and was about to continue with “It makes two of us”, meaning Amy and myself, while people staying next to Little Emma started to respond: “ It is on my wall as well” – said Shelley Neese,  historian and writer, President of The JerUSAlem Connection, – “ and on the wall of my in-laws, too”. – “It is on my wall, too” ,  -‘ and mine’ – said both daughters of Pat and Jim Hutchens. – “ It is on my wall, as well”, – said two more guests of the ceremony. ‘So we have a Little Emma club here” – I concluded, being deeply impressed by the choice of all those people, their solidarity, their sentiments which  I would never know about unless we all happened to be at the same time at the same place next to that so special for each of us work of our all dear friend.

I still remember that episode as vividly as it happened right now. And I  remember the eyes of all those smiling women around Pat’s Little Emma, these eyes transmitting deep, non-declarative compassion that little Emma and all of those little Emmas  were devoid of in the awful end of their brutally abrupt lives. 

I also thought of what one artistic work made by a wise heart is capable of, in generations. 

Blue Hills of Virginia

During my last trip before the pandemic, we were travelling through extraordinarily beautiful blue hills of Virginia, a magic place with special people living there, so rich in history from the beginning of the American story 244 years back till today.  We approached a huge campus of Liberty University and were greeted into its giant Faculty of Arts. We have had an important working meeting there, to discuss the further development of the Pat Mercer Hutchens artistic legacy. 

After doing a lot of research and thinking, Pat has decided to donate all 40 originals of her oil on canvas works of her Re-Visiting The Auschwitz Album collection to the Faculty of Arts of Liberty University. She has told me shortly before her passing that it was not her immediate and first decision, neither was it spontaneous one. She realised that those 40 originals are a central part of her legacy, and she wanted to make sure that it will go to the right address, she said. 

With over 70 thousands students attending Liberty University, and many of them taking also different art courses there, with their facilities, and the attention of the Art Faculty’s head,  known sculptor, professor Todd Smith, Pat’s decision seemed to be the right one. 

Pat’s works were presented at the special exhibition at the University Gallery, all forty of them, in a spacious, professionally lit inviting space. While we were there, students and visitors were coming in constantly, chatting and smiling when entering and being completely silent and crying, staying for a long time next to every single of those 40 tragedies on canvas. Pat’s canvases from this collection are not too big, but they are extremely intense, and one needs an extra strength to meet with them, with all those children and women, and elderly, for the first time. Also, there is one thing to see separate prints, and  it is totally different to have that mass of human suffering reflected in deep oil, alive, all around you. Such immersion results in a long-lasting impression, staying with the artist’s message in her dramatic, even desperate canvases, with you for a long time. And yes, nothing can replace a physical seeing the art works, all other experiences are different stories, providing different impressions. Dr Shelley R Neese and prof. Todd Smith at the Auschwitz Re-Visited exhibition of the works by Pat Mercer Hutchens. March 2020. the Art Gallery of Liberty University, Virginia. Photo (C) Inna Rogatchi. The Rogatchi Archive.

During our many-hours meeting at and around Pat’s exhibition, the first one after her passing away in 2014, six years on, we were discussing with Shelley R. Neese and professor Todd Smith how to develop her artistic and historical legacy, how to make it ‘work’ in different ways and forms. 

Since the first moment when I saw the Pat’s works from that heart-rendering collection for the first time back a decade ago, in 2011, I was of an opinion that this kind of art , with the artist’s personal comments, is the one of the best possible ways to teach Holocaust in schools, to bring that element of colours, the accents on humanistic details as adequate and natural for children’s attention. I saw that collection-in-making as the right way to start a conversation on the Shoah with children between 10 and 15, to introduce it  to them in the terms of simple, organic compassion, to make the beginning of the explanation of inexplicable.  I did what I could in that direction, with our Foundation working on several programs and projects of Pat’s The Auschwitz Album Re-Visited in several European countries. 

Now, when our Educational Committee was working on further tasks regarding Pat’s legacy, we thought on the most appropriate way of presenting her works and thoughts to the next level, the university students. I remembered that in many of my lectures on Pat and her re-reading of the Shoah in pictures, I combined her works with corresponding black-and-white originals from the album at Yad Vashem. It always worked, at any audience. I did it in Finland, the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine. Especially poignant was my experience in Budapest,  at my presentation at the Holocaust Remembrance Centre, during the international conference on Raoul Wallenberg. There, a big gallery is dedicated to the tragedy of the Brehow Ghetto, with all material from The Auschwitz Album and more available is presented in graphic and extremely saddening detail. The light in that gallery only makes it harder to see all those faces, their homes, their streets, that open wound stilled in time. 

Modern History Perspectives series

“Jewish tradition commands us to tell the truth to the power” – Elie Wiesel to President Reagan at the public ceremony in the White House, April 19, 1985. 

A Nazi for the Office. Or rather not

Just over a decade ago, which is not that long a time by the standards of political development, I was very busy. In my capacity of a senior foreign affairs adviser for the members of the European Parliament, including the EU-the UK- the US- and Israel public diplomacy, I did initiate the process examining the possibility of expelling from the EP the one of its new members, British open Nazi who, among his other public racist activities, was bragging openly of having two Rottweiler dogs, ‘one named Anne and the other Frank’. During the several months’ process, I was often wondering: why on earth nobody else bothered to try to block that bastard’s membership at the European Parliament? Why on earth it was considered as acceptable to have an open and active Nazi as the member of the highest political pan-European body? Democracy had nothing to do with it. Ineptness had. 

We did everything possible under the legal realities of the European Parliament at the time, including issuing a special inner-EP memorandum protesting the situation and signed by a number of MEPs. That document which although had no decisive legislative power to expel the Nazi from the European Parliament in the XXI century, did raise the question of moral unacceptability of the openly pro-Nazi personalities as the members of the European Parliament as such, with all legally possible points following our claim, including appeal against the owner of two  Rottweilers’ membership in any EP committee. 

As we found out, at the time, during the seventh term of the European Parliament (2009-2014), the EP lacked necessary legal instruments to unseat a member selected by a member-country although everyone at all the levels of the giant pan-European institution had completely agreed with us and with the justification of our demand. As a result, the humanoid in question was not made a member of any important committee, and contrary to all his steroid-energetic efforts, was listed as a member of just one the EU delegation to the non-EU member country of the least importance. 

Because of our articulated stand, the open Nazi was effectively muted since the day one of his term at the EP for all five years there. After his hanging around in Brussels, he was expelled even from his own racist party back home in the dispute of financial matters. 

During my involvement in that important process, I was threatened seriously and multiple times. Those people breeding the Rottweilers with such names, are real bandits and are connected with professionals in the field. My husband was also contacted, repeatedly, with strong recommendations to convince his wife ‘to retreat from her annoying activities, or else’. ‘What is she gaining personally in this campaign?’ – was one of the arguments of the people who pressured us persistently. I gather that their question might be even genuine. How could they understand, really? 

At a certain stage, a close friend, one of the Queen barristers, got so worried for my safety, based on his own information, that he demanded that the corresponding security authorities would be briefed on the escalating situation. The situation was taken under scrutiny and tight control. And I was wondering again: how on earth it was I who needed protection from the Nazi and his trained dogs, metaphorically too, almost 65 years after the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany worldwide? I still wonder. 

Praising Hitler next to the Capitol

I remembered that decade-back episode vividly now, watching the painful unfolding of that unbelievable-but-true last turn of events preceding the change of the US Administration in Washington D.C.

Just next to the Capitol where I am visiting regularly and so very often during last three decades, a newly elected Congresswoman from Illinois with no trace of intelligence on her face whatsoever was screaming in that typical abrasive provinciality manner addressing the huge crowd that we saw a bit later in their incredibly stupid and clearly criminal action, indoctrinating them that ‘Hitler was right…’. As  it is known and recorded, her full phrase was ‘Hitler was right on one thing: who has the youth, has the future’.   But I am not interested in anything that this moronic creature pronounced after the beginning of her phrase in her capacity of an elected Member of the US Congress, “Hitler was right…”  in front of the US Capitol. Neither do I interested in her apology, as stupid and as provincial as her speech at the rally on December 6th, 2021 was. I am convinced that a creature like that shall be dismissed from the Congress, and that there is existing legislation that allows it. Plus there has to be bipartisan demand of her to resign. Now. 

This was an unpardonable precedent which has to be addressed further than it has been done by now, with all the just storm risen in the media and by many Jewish organisations, both Americans and international ones. That Congresswoman’s escapade has nothing to do with the First Amendment, or democracy , or anything else from the category of applied American domestic policies. It has everything to do with sheer racism and unwarranted Nazi glorification and thus has to be cut off instantly. That message, its phrasing, and more importantly what is behind it, is a menace. There are  consequences of such statements, always.  

And – in the first place, really – the outgoing US President, or anyone else, for that matter, from any side of the US political spectrum – should not have this kind of humanoids as their supporters, not to speak as the representative of their party at the highest US legislation body. It is always screamingly counter-productive, to say the very least. 

Many of us know from history about both awful and shameful pro-Nazi rally in February 1939 in New York when 20 000 people gathered at the Madison Square in support of the Nazis – this is after the Kristallnacht, mind you. It is also sobering to remember how The New York Times covered the Holocaust, with its unimaginable 6 mentioning of Jews as the primary victims of the Shoah in just 24 front-page articles dedicated to the theme during all six years of the Second World War, from September 1, 1939 until September 2, 1945. It stands in history as the one of the most shameful phenomenon of the public response to the ultimate global tragedy and the crime of unheard scale by the leading American media. 

One could expect that with having all terrible Holocaust-related data available in so many ways and forms nowadays, those who are seeking to become a statesman or stateswoman, would know what is permissible to state publicly and what is not. But as we are seeing it, they do not care.  What is also important and worrisome, they are not dismissed or rebuked by the leaders at whose rallies they are rallying. Rallying for what? – we all have the right to ask. For applying some of Hitler lessons? Seriously? 

I firmly disagree with followed regular laments that the Hitler-praising Congresswoman ‘needs more and better Holocaust education’, and alike. Give me a break. This kind of creatures are immune to any education on Holocaust, and the other topics of humanity. It is simply naive to lull oneself with this kind of suggestion. This kind of person should never be accepted to run a party ticket to any office. And the core of the problem is in the fact that she and alike were accepted and then promoted at the huge rallies.  There are highly problematic representatives of the Democratic party as well, as we all know and fighting against it for years by now. But this ‘Hitler was right…’ bomb-shell was dropped by the fresh Republican representative.

That Hitler admirer farmer-turned-Congresswoman was not rebuked by none of the top bosses of the Republican party. More, the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership ‘ thanked her for her ( apologising) statement’, with not an inch of anything beyond it. Great. And telling. 

Out of my long personal active experience in international public diplomacy, I have to say that such a muted reaction would be absolutely impossible under any previous US Administration from the end of WWII onward. And this fact alone is disturbing, to say the least. 

Leaders and their Legacies 

The breeder of the Rottweiler dogs that he called Anne and Frank, was from the country which was the earliest, selflessly brave and decisively anti-Nazi fighter during the six devastating years of the Second World War. Prior to the war, from the end of the 1920s and until mid-1930s, in that country, the United Kingdom, there were also quite strong pro-German sentiments among the certain part of the British establishment, and enough pro-fascists movements and small parties, none of which came to power, however. 

That country – and the entire world, as it happened – was extremely lucky with having a leader at the most daring hour of the XX century history whose brilliant mind was combined with ultimately and unwavering strong will, and who did bring the honour to that country and relief to mankind, becoming the first and the principal opposer, global-wise, to the evil of Nazism.  If not for  Sir Winston Churchill, the entire course and the ultimate result of the Second World War could be tragically different. One should always remember that.  

Sir Churchill hated Nazism unequivocally. He did it being not only an extremely well-educated person with genuine strategic thinking and broad vision, but also because he had a highly developed sense of decency as a prerequisite for anything else in the vast array of his activities. Decency is not only one of life-saving vitamins. It is a vital component of the  preserving legacy,  especially if it is a legacy of a politician or public figure. 

In the wake of  the recent outrage at the US Capitol conducted by a delirious rabble of jerks, there are some important aspects, out of many,  that I think is necessary to emphasise. It is astonishing to unparalleled degree that a statesman, not to say the president of a country, can allow himself to exercise such utter irresponsibility as to call people ‘to walk down to the Capitol’, not to mention him saying to the multi-thousand rally that “I will be going with you’ having a zero intention to do so. For the record: political affiliation has nothing to do with this. Personal qualities and choice of behaviour do.

It is pathetic – although expected – that the president of the leading country in the world does not bother to get the basic legal proceedings of his country, to allow to himself to pressurise and bully, all publicly, his own Vice President and senior figures of his party whom he repeatedly and publicly calls ‘weak ones’, instigating the chain of escalating public bullying them, already after the amok at the Capitol Hill,  by the same rabble of the same delirious jerks, with ‘Hang Mike Pence’ hashtags that Twitter allows, incomprehensibly, and with  mass threatening senior  politicians in public places days on after the assault of the Capitol.

As if directly from a third-rate movie, the  Vice-President of the USA with his family had had to hide in a protected bunker while hearing the mad crowd screaming ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, in that idiotic inciting hateful ‘lock-em’up’ motion, with Number One not bothering to check on how safe is his Vice-President. To revoke personally the access to the White House to the Vice-President Chief of the Cabinet? What scheme is this? Where this came from? From  a fourth-rate movie? The world being totally dumbfounded is watching how that wilder-than-wild scenario unfolds. And there is seemingly no limit to this show of disgraceful incompetence. 

In a sharp contrast, it was Vice-President Pence who did demonstrate to his country and the world that there are leaders in the USA today who know what decency is and who live by that. I have a honour to know Mike Pence for over 20 years, and can attest to his honourable and very able conduct, on any of many of his governing positions and in various situations  always. To attack this man and to instigate the marginalised mob to do it in their wild way is indecent. 

But most disturbingly, to me, is the utterly disappointing fact of harbouring all those lowlives whom we all saw on our TV and other screens on December 6th, 2021 at the Capitol vulgar, stupid, and cheap assault, and incorporating them verbally, in a repeated motion,  into the range of ‘great American patriots’. 

Is that scumbag in Camp Auschwitz hoodie ‘a great American patriot’? So many people are indignant about that hoodie, but for some reason, not many have mentioned that the black hoodie has its back, and that there is one more sign on that back, namely ‘Staff’. Nazi supporter during the assault of the US Capitol, Washington D.C., January 6, 2021. Open Internet Library.

Does it differ from an owner of Anne and Frank  Rottweiler dogs? Not, it does not. Does it differ from ‘Hitler was right..’ screams earlier the same day at the nearby place? No, it does not. Is it acceptable? Absolutely not. Should it be overseen, let it go, written it off for ‘wing-off’ ones? Those who are accepting such positions in their understanding of loyalty are self-deluding themselves badly. They are shielding themselves from common sense and from both intellectual honesty and human integrity.  

The same as it is absolutely unacceptable to incorporate into the rank of supporters all those whom the world had a shock to see in that show of imbeciles ramming the Capitol: the Nazis, the QAnon, Proud Boys, all those wacky ultras of various breeds. How on earth these kinds of creatures have become acceptable by the president of the United States and those of his advisers who gave their go-ahead of usage of these kinds of organisations and creatures who are its members?  

Telling the Truth to the Power

When watching that third-rate real-life movie from the US Capitol during its assault on January 6th, 2021, I was thinking about our dear friend and teacher Elie Wiesel. I know that his son Elisha and his entire family which is very small, because of the Shoah, were in-tuned, as well, in an emotional way. I was thinking that thanks to Heaven that Elie does not see Camp Auschwitz moron and other alike roaming the US Capitol. I simply cannot imagine what Elie Wiesel would feel at such a moment.

And I also remembered how in the spring 1985, Elie, without thinking on political surviving code and maneuvering, has decided to come to to see and to speak directly with President Reagan to discuss with him face to face the very troubling decision of Reagan who gave into the pressure of German Chancellor Kohl to visit the military Bitsburg cemetery of German soldiers, including some Waffen-SS members,  during his official visit to Germany to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in May 1985. The truth is that the Reagan Administration was not told by the German side initially that there were members of Waffen-SS buried at the Bitsburg cemetery. Reagan agreed to visit. Then the truth unfolded, to the horror of many. But there was the only one who did confront the president of the USA directly and openly about it, Elie Wiesel. 

Only Wiesel’s family and close friends know quite turbulent events around that his meeting  with President Reagan. We know that Elie was seriously thinking about ignoring, rejecting  the ceremony at the White House honouring him with the Golden Medal of the US Congress in the protest against a planned Reagan visit to Germany with that outrageous symbolic visit to the German military cemetery ahead. I also remember how Elie did recall in our conversations that in the end, he decided to go to the ceremony at the White House  – primarily for the opportunity for him to speak with President Reagan face to face before accepting the medal.  It was not an easy decision for him, I know that first-hand. 

I also heard the insights on that episode from inside the Reagan team, among whom I have many good friends and colleagues.  The Reagan Administration, as any US Presidential Administration, was divided on many things, including the inflammatory episode with the visit to Germany in May 1985 and with regard to Elie Wiesel’s lonely, I emphasise, and brave stand on that. Some of the Reagan White House team petty apparatchiks  were trying to cut planned Elie’s speech to an insulting mini-version of it. They were overcome with normal people in a higher positions within the Administration. Then the ceremony was moved from the planned big hall with capacity of accommodating 300 people to the smallest possible room in the White House with capacity of accommodating 40 people maximum, in a pitiful understanding of  ‘a possible damage-control’ preventive measures. 

Elie did not care how many people would attend the ceremony honouring him at the White House. As I know it from him personally, all he cared about was an opportunity to speak with President Reagan one to one, to see him in the eye, as Elie has put it. 

Their meeting lasted about a half an hour which is a lot by the White House protocol and which was three times longer than planned. 

Elie Wiesel was unable to change the very wrong visit of President Reagan’s visit to the German military cemetery in Bitsburg. But he succeeded in amending the President’s agenda for his commemorative visit to Germany with Reagan visiting the site of Bergen-Belsen first, prior to his visit to the cemetery that Chancellor Kohl was so extraordinary pushy about visiting it along with the US President. That Reagan’s unplanned – for some reason, let me put it this way – visit to Bergen-Belsen prior to the German military cemetery has put a proper balance in place, at least. 

I know that Elie wanted very much and tried very hard to convince President Reagan to visit the Bergen-Belsen site only. Reagan excused himself for his inability to do so after he gave his personal word to Chancellor Kohl. Elie Wiesel speaking at the White House ceremony in presence of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush Sr. April 19, 1985. Credits: White House Television Office. The Reagan Library. The Rogatchi Archive.

Importantly, Elie Wiesel did see President Reagan in the eye. And yet more importantly, President Ronald Reagan saw in the eye of Elie Wiesel too – which I do think, and always was thinking this way since the time I heard about it from Elie just five years after the event – was a very healthy thing to do. 

During that eye to eye conversation, Elie Wiesel was simple in his phraseology, as he always was. I remember some of it: “ Mr President, the issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them. For I have seen the SS at work. And I have seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my family.”  

And during his short speech during the public ceremony in overcrowded very small room, Elie Wiesel did remind to President Reagan, Vice-President Bush Sr and everybody else present that ‘Jewish tradition commands us to tell truth to the power’. Exactly so.

It was an unforgettable lesson of humanity to politics. I know that Ronald Reagan did remember it until the end of his life. And so shall anyone else who would like to leave the legacy of decency. 

This is another important point, the legacy. While watching that impotent cheap show at the Capitol, I was thinking that with these vulgar scenes of trashed chaos, the legacy of the 45th President of the USA will be sealed for good. And there is nothing that can be done about it. Surely enough, the following issue of The Economist appeared in a day or two exactly with this verdict on its cover. The cover of The Economist magazine. January 9-15, 2021

As far as I can see it, the President and those who had assisted him in such an ill way, has caused irreparable damage by overseeing the inclusion of these surreal elements into the rank of his supporters.   Irreparable damage that has crossed, to the large extent, some of his serious achievements both domestically and internationally. 

One does not deal with Nazis. One does not rely on the support of a Staffer at Camp Auschwitz. One does not support scums praising Hitler. How grotesque it is to be  in necessity to state the obvious.  At this level, in this context. How terrible it all is for all decent conservatives who are terrified on what unfolds in front of our eyes. 

In the Talmud, there are two leaders of the Jewish nations regarded as the most important and the best ones, Moses and David. Why? Because both of them, according to the great Baal Haturim, ‘were faithful shepherds who put the fate of the people before their own, and therefore the people had faith in them” (Baal Haturim Chumash, Shemot, The ArtScroll Series, 2000 ).  

Leadership is not about personal success. It is about one’s country, one’s people. It is the social mutual pact with society conducted with mutual respect. Leadership is not about slogans. It is about the ability to convince – not to push, to convince the majority or necessary qualified number of people in the society to follow your agenda wilfully and consciously. To be able to convince a qualifying amount of society, one has to be able to respect.  It is about sharing, not imposing.  It is not an intuition for a deal. It is very difficult, and often quite ungratifying work. It is not about ‘I’, it is about ‘you’. Some people might be surprised, and some maybe even laughing, but it is also about modesty. And decency. And dignity. What a fantasy list.

The only glimpse of some hope in the outcome of the disgrace at the Capitol lays in a prospect that after that shocking show, some leaders world-wide would think more carefully on what their legacy would become like. 

Escalating Damage

The damage that has been done by the real-life drama on the top of the US power at the moment of the transition of power in the beginning of 2021 will be the long-lasting one, sadly. This damage is multilateral, dangerously. The Republican party is damaged very seriously, with the prospect of debilitating schism inside the party being quite real. The conservatism movement in general in the world that traditionally relied on the might of the US Republican party is damaged powerfully, as well. Conservatism as a world-view is undermined, even if briefly so, having a blow of stupidity and irresponsibility into its face, with  people with conservative views being marred by association, so to say, both consciously and gaining on purpose by the opposers, or even subconsciously, or automatically, as a way of associative thinking. 

The status of the American state, the leading country in the world, is changed now, being diminished seriously, with years in need for recovering it. 

The ugly demonstration of jerks storming the seat of power has become a precedent instantly – thus, the damage has a potency to become an international one. 

Incomprehensible, but true. Depressing, but real. Unacceptable, but done. This is what happens when kitsch gets dangerous. 

Memory Stones series 

Never Again what?  

There are two schools of thinking on the matter of the way of commemoration of our tragic Jewish past in the parts of the world where Jewish life has been eradicated during Holocaust so efficiently. According to one school, everything ruined should be restored, for the sake of historical fairness if not for any other sake. The representatives of the  other school are more pragmatic and they are asking: who will be praying in those restored giant synagogues? Is it good and proper if they will be staying empty? 

I can see the points in both opinions, actually. Normal human logic prescribes to restore the objects which were destroyed. But normal human logic also wonders on who will be going there. The fact is that that unspeakable sadness which has become the overwhelming, ever-lasting constant after the Shoah is still in effect, 75 years on, three generations after the end of the Second World War. Will it ever go away? No, it will not. Such is the character of the crime committed against the Jews in Europe. Michael Rogatchi (C). Shtetl Memories IV. Homage to Devilspiel novel by Grigory Kanovich. Mixed technique. 50 x 40 cm. 2020.

In those places which were not made if not entirely Judenfrei, but quite close to that, the vicious goal has been almost achieved to the chilling effect, with the consequences palpable to this day. Eradication of Judaism in the vast part of Europe has been successful to a stunning proportion. 

This change is qualitative. It has to be admitted and understood as it is. Without these irrelevant ‘never again’ chants. Never again what? It is never again already: never again Volozhin, Mir and all this myriad of great yeshivas will be teaching Jewish boys in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and all the places where they were flourishing. Never again there won’t be charming self-sufficient life streams in all thousands of shtetls all Eastern and Central Europe however modernised it all could be with time. Never again hundreds of Jewish professors will be teaching thousands of students all over in Poland, Germany, France and any other places. Never again Jewish musicians will bring that brilliance to their home countries all over Europe. Never again millions of Jewish people, substantially more than six million, will be living all over the places they lived during centuries enormously and indisputably enriching European economy, trade, science, industry, culture, everything. It. Will. Never. Happen. Again. Period. 

So, how to commemorate the life and the people which had been destroyed in all this unspeakable cruelty with all this barbarian enthusiasm? 

Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street  

On Monday, October 19th, 2020, a new sculpture was unveiled right on the street of Vilnius. The place is  the corner of  Lidos and Kedainiu streets, the one of the entrances into the Vilnius Jewish ghetto. Some people with whom I am speaking today, are calling it, fully organically for themselves, ‘former Jewish ghetto’. I understand what they mean. For me, the Vilna Jewish ghetto, as any other our ghetto anywhere in the world,  is always in present tense. I just feel like that. But there are some ghettos in which the air is an open wound. Vilna ghetto is just like that, for me, my husband and some of our friends. Romualdas Kvintas (C). The Water-Carrier. Bronze. 2010. Unveiled in Vilnius on October 19, 2020. Courtesy: Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

So, the  street has its new street-walker, the one casted in bronze, of a human figure size. His face is beautiful. He looks up. Many of us do. And did, always. Such a habit.  The shape of his figure brings us a hundred years back, at very least. There is a well-known photograph of a similar figure, alive man, from a Vilna street taken in 1922. The minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, a known friend of Israel, Linas Linkevičius, has referred to that picture in his tweet about the recent event. There is another similar picture from Vilna taken five years earlier in 1917, which exists on the archival postcard in the collection at Beit Hatfutsot, The Museum of Jewish People in Tel-Aviv. Archive photo of water-carrier from Vilnius. 1922. Courtesy: The Library of Congress, the USA. No reproduction restrictions.

In a nice ceremony organised by the City of Vilnius and Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, and supported by the Embassies of the Netherlands and Germany, gathered 30 people, the maximum permitted by the corona restrictions. The ceremony commemorated the second anniversary of the death of the author of that soulful sculpture, The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger in Yiddish, Romas Kvintas, the outstanding Lithuanian sculptor who passed away so tragically and so early in October 2018. I have written about Romas and his input into the our commemoration process before, just after his death, in connection with his sculpture of Leonard Cohen which is also on the street of Vilnius. 

Romualdas Kvintas and his Way of Memory

In a paradoxical phenomenon, due to the number of reasons, the outside world beyond culturally sophisticated and advanced, but laconic behaviourally countries, such as Lithuania or Czech Republic, do not necessarily know enough about big artists and cultural figures there, as it ought to. Romualdas Kvintas, or Romas as he was  known to his family and friends, is one of those artists. He is widely known and appreciated in Lithuania, but not that much outside it as he should have been.  

There are millions of tourists who are coming to Vilnius annually, all of them are seeing Romas’ sculptures in bronze all over the city, and the same is the case outside Vilnius, all over Lithuania. Kvintas was a Master: top professional who worked very fast, but always  in a great fashion, a deep person, soulful thinker, he produced his sculptures with love and understanding. Rare love and rare understanding. His works are the rare case when a bronze and stone figures communicates with a viewer in a special way and conveys palpable emotions. Sculptor Romualdas Kvintas ( 953- 2018). Courtesy: (C) Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

Kvintas knew precisely not only what and whom he was sculpting , but also why. His tributes to the leading Jewish figures of Lithuania, which are – importantly – are also the leading figures in the entire Jewish heritage, are works of love, and for that, our appreciation of Romas Kvintas’ contribution in the process of living memory will last forever. 

In the case of The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, the story which was told to me by Romas’ widow Egle Kvintiene tells that Kvintas was working on a big project which included possible numerous sculptures, bas-relieves, and other possible sculpting creations which would be placed all over the territory of the former Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, as a sign of commemoration to the people and culture which had been whipped off from the Jerusalem of the North for good. 

‘Romas has finished the 3D model of this Water Carrier ten years ago, in 2010, and then, sadly, there was not enough interest to place the sculpture. There were various ideas regarding the suitable place, but it ended nowhere at the time. But now, fortunately, it is not just placed in the ( Vilnius) down-town, it stands at the place which was the one of the entrances of the  ( Jewish ) ghetto. You cannot make it more symbolic”, – Egle has told me. Indeed. 

Lasting Gift of Friendship

It was largely thanks to two notable personalities in Lithuanian culture, both close friends of Romualdas Kvintas that his charming, warm, evocative Der Vasser-Treger had been erected on the Vilnius street now, ten years after its creation and two years after its creator’s death. Romas’ widow Egle has told me with warm gratitude that former long-term principal of the Vilnius Academy of Arts Audrius Klimas  and well-known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songlaila had put forceful effort in order to make the Water-Carrier standing in the street of the former Ghetto in Vilnius. 

The one of the leading Lithuanian designers, professor Audris Klimas himself has navigated me through the details of the story behind the erection of this new sculpture in Vilnius: it has to be finished, casted in bronze ( a very good work has been done by Martynas Gaubas and Rimantas Keturka ), and importantly, a prominent and suitable place has to be found, with getting all the necessary permissions and funding. “ Fortunately, we in Vilnius, as in many European capitals,  do have a special ongoing program for public art, and this is within this program that the City of Vilnius decided in support of our application of The Water Carrier project” – professor Klimas has told me. Good for the City of Vilnius and for its Mayor Remigijus Simasius who decided this way and who is consistent in  his policy in this regard. Ceremony of unveiling The Water Carrier sculpture in Vilnius. 19 October 2022. Photo : (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water Carrier project, Lithuania.

I personally would like to see more decisions like that in so many European cities which do have this program, and which do have so many reasons for statues like that, from Barcelona to Prague and from Paris to Krakow, but so far, we haven’t to see this kind of sculptures on the streets of those and so many other cities. So many others.   

Unveiled on the sad second anniversary of Romas Kvintas’ passing, his Water-Carrier stands now just next to a new stylish building resolved in the style of the historical epoch of the architecture of Vilnius downtown.  The building is authored by another close friend of Kvintas, known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songaila. I was  told that Romas used to work with his architect friend closely in anything regarding many architectural decisions for his sculptures, during many years. 

I am thinking of that so special gift of friendship. What would we all do without it, without our friends? In the case of truly important for Vilnius work of Lithuania’s best sculptor, it is solely thanks to the love, memory and devotion of his friends  that his memory has been honoured in the way which has become a cultural and historical lasting commemoration. 

Inspiration In Parallel Worlds – and Time

Kvintas’s widow and his friends did share with me the background and source of inspiration for Romas while he was working on his Vaser-Treger. “ Romas got the inspiration for his sculpture from that famous Moyshe Kulbak’s  poem, Vilno”, – tells Egle. “ Yes, it was exactly from that canonic Kulbak’s poem that the personage for this sculpture came to Romas’ mind’ , – mentioned also prof. Klimas.

More precisely, Kulbak’s image comes from these lines that back in 1926 he dedicated to the city he loved:

You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania

Old grey writing – mossy, peeling.

Each stone a book; parchment every wall.

Pages turn, secretly open in the night,

As, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier,

Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars.

At the earlier stage of this special project, it was discussed a possibility to engrave the quote from Kulbak’s poem on the sculpture’s initially planned base under the figure in eight languages. Now, the Water-Carrier ‘walks’ straight on the street, so there is no basement, but anyone can read the whole story about the sculpture, its author, Kulbak and his poem in an efficient way of sharing QR-code on a smartphone from a wall nearby the sculpture.  

Moyshe Kulbak is the one of the leading names in the group of superbly talented Litvak poets, writers, artists and musicians from the first third of the XX century. He was the star even in such a star-made group, and his Vilno poem, the source of Romas Kvintas idea and inspiration for his Der Vasser-Treger, has become a canonic one, far beyond the circles of Yiddish and Jewish cultures. Poet Moyshe Kulbak ( 1896 – 1937). Open Sources Archive, The Water-Carrier Project.

After torturous interrogations, along with more than 20 other Jewish writers Moyshe Kulbak was murdered by the NKVD in Minsk on 29th October 1937. Almost all his family perished tragically in the Minsk ghetto a few years later. His wife was a prisoner of Gulag for over 10 years, and his youngest daughter Raya who was found by Kulbak’s survived brother after the Second World War in one of the orphanages in Soviet Union, is living with her family in Israel nowadays. 

There has been the most interesting twist of synchronised inspiration that has occurred with regard to this symbolic Der Vaser-Treger figure almost a century ago. Looking into some historical material, I found the poster of the performance played at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York 86 years ago, in December 1936.  Poster for Der Vaser-Treger play performance at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York, December 1936. Courtesy (C) American Jewish Historical Society. Permitted for reproductions in cultural and educational publications.

The play which is Der Vasser Trager, had the Water Carrier as its central personage, and there were even Lithuanian personages in it, like  Jewish merchant from Lithuania and some others. The author of the play was  Jacob Prager who lived before the Second World War  in Warsaw, in close proximity to Vilnius. According to my research supported by some YIVO documentation, Prager was known for  creating some of characters in his plays from the poems popular at the time. 

As Moyshe Kulbak wrote his Vilno poem ten years before the Prager’s play was performed  in New York, and as he was a cult figure among Yiddish intelligentsia both in Lithuania and Poland, Prager definitely knew that poem well. My guess is that his Der Vaser-Tregger theatrical hit in the mid-1930s in New York with the main character of Simcha Vaser-Treger was quite likely inspired by Kulbak’s poem, as well, the same as Romas Kvintas sculpture 80 years later. And what a painful irony turned it out to be the Water-Carrier’s name in the play. Simcha means joy in Hebrew, and it was very popular given name among our people always, before the Shoah yet more so. 

One of my great uncles, a renowned doctor, was Simcha too. He survived by hiding in France, but his son, also a doctor, as his father, did not. Simcha’s son Alexander who escaped just after the occupation from France to Switzerland in an extremely daring escape and who tirelessly treated his brethren in the DPC in northern Italy, was infected by typhus and died aged 29.

The resemblance of the Water-Carrier on the Yiddish Art Theatre poster of 1936 and the bronze sculpture on the street in Vilnius today is remarkable. Yet, Romas Kvintas never saw it. We all, Kvintas’ widow and his friends, and I and my husband  just love the fact of this incredible spiral of creative inspiration and humanity that whirled  around the globe and time in this special Water-Carrier small figure. 

Enlightening Memory and the Drama of an Orphaned Street

The first reaction that I have heard to the appearance of a bronze Jewish Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street from the residents of the city was from a 40-something IT-manager, who is not Jewish. He lives in the house on the street with a sculpture. This modern Lithuanian man has said: “ I am glad that every day I will be going to work and to return home walking next to this figure of that water-carrier. I am glad because the figure and everything that is behind it does remind us about the Vilnius where we all have come from. And this is enlightening memory”.  I was glad to see such a normal human reaction. 

Of course, I am fully aware of the situation regarding the ongoing struggle around recognition of guilt with regard to the local collaborators of the Nazis in Lithuania.  I know about the continuing efforts of those who strive to revise the factual history of the Shoah in Lithuania – and many other European countries – to insist that some of the collaborators should be regarded as national heroes by Lithuania. 

I know about smashed memorials to the victims of the Holocaust and about flowers and candles next to the outrageous memorial desks to the people who would be justly treated as military criminals in Germany and many other countries. I am in Lithuania often and am following the situation there closely. My and my husband’s families are Litvaks. We do care. 

Very much as in the case with the sculpture in the Vilna street, my thought was that there are so many European countries that had had all the reasons in the world to name the one of years to honour their noble Jewish sons and daughters, and to mint some memorable collectible coins as  so well deserved by never delivered tribute to their memories , from  to , and from to. 

The erection of the Jewish symbolic figure in the centre of Vilnius has revived the conversation about the topic which is still hot in Lithuania today. Some people, again, not Jewish ones,  have observed with this regard: “ Despite all those memorial plaques, at the Holocaust spots including ( like in Paneriai forest) , we still cannot admit our guilt. We just need conscience and courage to do that, but we still lack it”. 

What is important here is that those are reactions and thoughts of ordinary people, not politicians, not public figures. It is the reactions of these people which always tells about the real ‘temperature’ and conditions of a given society. 

There are also those from Lithuanian public today who have mentioned with regard to the Water-Carrier: “It is the message for those who want and who can understand”. Exactly so. At the unveiling ceremony of Romualdas Kvintas’ The Water Carrier sculpture. Photo: (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water-Carrier Project.

From that perspective, the words of Bonnie Horbach , the Ambassador of the Netherlands in Lithuania who was actively and kindly supporting the Water-Carrier project, the words that she said at the opening ceremony in Vilnius are the words of so natural human attitude:

“We all share the history of what happened here in the Second World War, and we all have a responsibility to investigate that history, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s only then that we can understand what happened at that time. The statue of the Water Carrier is a constant reminder of the promise we made to acknowledge the inconvenient truth to ensure such a history will not repeat itself” ( Ambassador Bonnie Horbach, Opening remark at the Water-Carrier sculpture unveiling ceremony, Vilnius, Lithuania, October 19, 2020). 

Elie Wiesel’s one of the most often used phrases in his both speeches and writings was ‘and yet, and yet’.  This phrase said in Elie’s voice so many times still sounds in my head. When the subjects were those which dear Elie had to cover for over 70 years – just imagine – there always were ‘and yet, and yet’, and more of ‘and yets’. 

Remembering our dearest friend, and especially at the times when I deal with this ever present in our conscience – and sub-conscience – theme of my annihilated people, I am saying Elie’s  ‘and yet’  again when thinking on Vilna Street and its new inhabitant, the Water-Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, Jewish man named Simcha, with all that piercing irony in that naming just before the WII that one just cannot invent. 

And yet, a few days after unveiling the sculpture, I received  another photo of it from my Lithuanian friends. Arunas Kuliskausjas (C). Yesterday in Vilnius. 2020. With kind permission of the author.

One of international Litvaks, dear friend, reacted in the way that resonates with every single Litvak world-wide, I am positive on that: “ Where are you, Jews? I brought some water for Shabbes dinner…”. 

The original capture of the work by its author, known Lithuanian photographer Arunas Kulikauskas, says it all, to me. It is simple: “Yesterday in Vilnius”. 

All the years after the extermination of the Lithuanian Jewry, the streets of Vilna were depressingly, very sadly blank-empty, despite any number of people walking there, for the Jews who remained. It was always the case, all the years from 1945 onward. There is such sadness from a dust of memories on the walls, in the air, under your feet, such a tangible  heart-ache  when you are walking there and looking into the inner court-yards, such helplessness, such never going away pain. This is the Jewish Vilna legacy after the Shoah,  permanently so.  

This sepia photo portrays it exactly. Before, until October 19th, 2020, these streets with its street lights were completely orphaned for us, Jews. They were orphaned for 75 years. From now on, at least our Simcha , Der Vaser-Treger is there, standing for all of us. More far more importantly, for all of them. 

Aciu, dearest Romas for thinking of us and making your Water Carrier as real, as one can make real a soul in bronze. Aciu, dear Audrius, Alvidas, Remigijus and all those who did help Romas’ Water Carrier to stand up there now, to make this street of Vilna a bit less orphaned. Just a bit.

Family Reflections on Yom HaShoah

The essay is an excerpt from Inna Rogatchi’s forthcoming book on her personal search into the dramatic saga of her Mahler- Rose-Bujanover family.

I grew up with those photos. The photos from distant beautiful fairy-like life: Tuileries Garden, Paris, elegantly dressed woman, her children surrounded by birds and flowers in a totally other dimension of life. Are those my uncle and aunt? And the elegant madame is my great-aunt? How interesting, I thought. It would be nice to speak with them, I thought. Which language should we use? My French is not so good, my German is inoperable although I do understand quite a lot of it because of Yiddish, but I do not think they have ever used it. Well, English will do then. We should be fine, I thought. Simcha Bujanover and Eleanor Rose family and their son Alex in Berlin in the 1920s and in Paris in the 1930s. (C) Inna Rogatchi archive.

I was late to speak with my great-aunt. I did locate her a few years after her passing in London in the early 1990s. Our family used to think that she was staying  in France after my great-uncle, quite famous doctor Simcha Bujanover’s death there in Aix-en-Provence the late 1970s. I was surprised to find out that today doctors in Europe are still using my grandfather’s brother Simcha’s book on gynaecology and paediatric studies published in 1921 in Berlin. 

I like to look at the only photo of Simcha we had, the one on which he is most probably in Zurich where he studied, with my other great-uncle Chaim Bujanover, before the start of the Great War. Back to Ukraine, in 1918 Chaim was decapitated by Ukrainian Petljura animalistic gang on his way home after the date with his fiancee. Chaim and Simcha ( sitting ) Bujanover brothers in Zurich, before the Great War. (C) Inna Rogatchi Archive.

By the time I established that Simcha’s wife Eleanor Rose-Bujanover had relocated to London, I could only gather parts of facts and memories about her and her family. And what an illustrious family it was. Performing violinist, Eleanor was a niece of Arnold Rose, famous violinist, the concertmaster of Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for over fifty years and the co-founder and leader of the great Rose Quartet, eternal gem of the world music heritage. Arnold was married to Justine Mahler, the sister of great Gustav. Eleanor Rose in the 1920s in Berlin. Rose Family Archive.

The other co-founder of the Rose Quartet was Arnold’s brother Eduard, the one of the great cellists of his time. They were four great Rose brothers, coming to the top of the Western music from Jassy in Romania, all born Rosenblums. Jassy was quite a place to be born for an art-affiliated Jews. The place is known traditionally as the Cultural Capital of Romania, with a huge and thriving Jewish community there in the past, the community which needed as many as 127 synagogues in the second part of the 19th century. Jassi is known in the Jewish cultural history as the place of  both the first ever Yiddish newspaper and first ever professional Yiddish theatre appeared. Notably, brilliant Naftali Hertz Imber happened to write the text of Hatikvah while being just there in the course of his never-stopped journeys. The Rosenblum-turn-Rose family was moved to Vienna some seven years before that important fact of Jewish history.  The main reason for the move is understood to be a strong musical talent demonstrated by all four Rose brothers. In Vienna they mastered their talent to shining brilliance. 

In a significant inter-mingling of Rose and Mahler families, two of the Rose brothers, Arnold and Eduard married two of Gustav Mahler’s sisters, Justine and Emma. While Eduard and Emma were staying in Weimar, Arnold and Justine were  living and working in Vienna where Arnold was perceived as the most famous of great Viennese musicians, ‘The God of the Violin’, as Oscar Kokoshka called him.  Oscar Kokoschka (C). Still-Life. Watercolour. 1942. The artist created this work as his gift to Arnold Rose in 1942. Kokoschka’s inscription on the art work reads: “To the god of the violin, in your winter of exile”. Courtesy: The Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rose Collection , Music Library, University of Western Ontario, Canada – The Mahler Foundation.

Arnold’s aristocratic admirers collected money secretly to acquire a stunning gift for his 50th birthday, Viotti Stradivarius. What a celebration it was there and then in Vienna in 1910, to laud the great Maestro. It was the year of Gustav Mahler’s death, too. Mahler’s death masque was staying with Justine and Arnold for 32 years, all the years of Justine’s life and four more, until Arnold gave it to Mahler’s daughter Anna in London in 1942. 

After receiving that extraordinary Viotti Stradivarius,  Arnold handed his previous great instrument, Guadagnini violin built in 1757 that he bought in the Netherlands in 1924 to his daughter Alma to perform on it. 

My great-aunt Eleanor, the daughter of Arnold and Edward’s brother Alexander, was quite close to Arnold and Justine’s family and their daughter Alma, her first cousin. Alma probably is the most well-known member of the Rose-Mahler-Bujanover family today, due to a couple of films, plays and books about her, all rather subjective and biased, as it happened, sadly. She was a notable violinist before the Second World War, and died tragically in Auschwitz. She was 38 at the time. 

Her mom, Mahler’s caring sister, died six years before her daughter, in her own house, in Vienna. Justine died of heart attack that has stricken her immediately after the Anschluss, when her great husband was unceremoniously kicked out of his job, and they were about to be kicked off their superb house. Justine’s heart could not take it, but at least she did not witness what her husband tragically had to endure.  

Arnold and Alma were whisked from Vienna by two British highly placed gentlemen who were admirers of their music and who were simply noble people. But when in London, elderly Arnold and his daughter were practically left on their own in the extremely daring time from 1938 onward. Alma, trying to earn some money to sustain her elderly father and herself was going back and forth from London to the Netherlands to play anywhere possible as long as it was possible. One time in a banality of evil applied to daily life in early 1940s Europe, her trip to Amsterdam had happened to be one way. There was no way back. 

She was living in hiding, in three different places over two years between 1940 and 1942, with the noble help of Dutch people. Marye Staercke who  with her husband Paul was helping Alma with her second lodging, said in her interview to Richard Newman in a noisy cafe in Amsterdam back in 1983 simply and plainly: ”Our duty was to help anyone who did need the help”.   

I am a big proponent of documentary materials and in particular footage and recorded oral history. No transcript would relay personal recollections in the way a person does it by him- or herself. So listening to the only publicly accessible live interview of the person who hid Alma Rose for 16 months between August 1941 until December 1942 brings the sense of the events alive to me. 

As it had happened with many creative women during the Second World War with the Final Solution-in-progress, many of them got panicking and were trying to hide, to run, to disappear feverishly, being extremely nervous, quite understandably. In several tragic cases I know personally, it fired back. Alma’s case happened to be the one of them. She contacted the people in the Dutch Resistance and asked them to smuggle her to safety. In such operations, it was accustomed that somebody from Resistance would accompany the person on the run. In Alma’s case, it was a young Dutch man. After a very daring journey via France, with constant passing from one underground contact to another,  and never being sure of anything and anyone, both of them have finally boarded a train from Dijon to Switzerland. The safety was literally around the corner.

Alma and her travelling companion who all his remaining life was refusing to come with his real name publicly, were arrested on that train just before it would start to move, in December 1942. It is assumed that they were  denounced by the French agents of the Gestapo who infiltrated the French Resistance. As we know, it was quite wide and pretty efficient infiltration.  The last photo of Alma Rose taken by Paul Staercke in Amsterdam in December 1942 just shortly before Alma’s attempt to run to safety. Photo courtesy: Staercke family archive. The copy of the photo is shown in the Richard Newman’s Alma Rose. Vienna to Auschwitz book, 2000. Newman received the photo on his request from Marye and Paul Staercke in the 1980s.

After several weeks of harsh interrogations in the Gestapo prison in Dijon, in a known proceeding, Alma was transported first to Drancy, and was registered there as entering in January 1943 under the number 18547.  Before the Nazis were taken over the operation there (it was run for them by the French until the summer of 1943), terrified friends from the Netherlands tried every possible way to delay her further transportation from Dancy to the East, meaning Auschwitz. I saw the documents in which it is said that the French top musicians have informed famous and known as being in excellent terms with the Nazis pianist Alfred Corrot about Alma’s desperate situation hoping that ‘he would take it close to his heart’. There is no evidence that he did. 

As it is believed by her family and historians who were looking into  some episodes of that tragic saga, Alma’s destiny was sealed with Eichmann’s decision to take Drancy under the German control and operate it completely.  Eichmann chose his compatriot Alois Brunner to be his envoy there and his personal deputy at the Drancy in June 1943. The Nazis were repeatedly dissatisfied with how inefficiently French were doing the job, and insisted that the quota for the transports to the East should be fixed even if it meant to fill the transports with non-Jewish French whoever would be suitable for it: communists, Resistance members, Maki. 

Brunner acted in his and Eichmann’s ‘small clerk’s way’: in his new capacity, he arrived at Drancy in mid-June 1943, set up a small table in an unremarkable room there, and methodically personally interrogated all prisoners at the Drancy during four days, non-stop. With this round done, Brunner disappeared for some while. 

In three weeks sharp, Brunner sent Eichmann a report on completion of a new Judentransport with 1000 Jews, asking for Eichmann’s written approval of the order. Four weeks sharp from the day of his appointment to the position of Dancy Nazi supervisor, Brunner sent off Convoy Number 57 to Auschwitz with one thousand Jewish people in it. Alma was among them. The family believed that being Viennese, Brunner must have known who Alma Rose was.

Of that one thousand people on the convoy 57, thirty men and twenty two women survived. And that unremarkable Brunner, the butcher of Viennese and Salonica’s entire Jewry, plus an exterminator of the Drancy, lived until at least 2001 being well in Syria and Egypt, dealing arms and being military adviser to nice rulers of those countries in various periods of time. Why Brunner was allowed to live at least to 89 and to die of a natural cause is the one of the biggest mysteries, to me. 

Transported to Auschwitz, Alma was soon made the leader of the female orchestra there. She died under still unclear circumstances in April 1944. 

After her death, her bow with a black ribbon on it was on display on the wall of the female orchestra barrack in Auschwitz. During the days of mourning Alma, Mengele entered the barrack, went towards the wall, and stayed there looking at Alma’s bow for a long time. The players of the female orchestra who happened to be inside at the time, were astounded. 

* * *

In a few weeks after that weird episode, Elie Wiesel’s family, arrested and transported on Shavuot 1944, was brought to Auschwitz. It has been a month since Alma’s death. Elie did tell later on that he was surprised to see that the one of the top-officers whom he later identified as Mengele, was walking around the platform sorting the people unloaded from the trains – to the left and to the right, to be spared for the time being, and to be eliminated immediately, – by a bow. A violin bow!  – emphasised Elie being ever surprised on that odd scene . 

Elie was an aspiring violinist himself, he came to the death camp carrying his own violin, that’s why that bow in Mengele’s hands grabbed his attention and was imprinted in his memory for good. Elie’s violin was soon crushed physically and with a laugh by one of the Polish or Ukrainian capos when Elie being prompted by his father went to the Nazi who was responsible for an orchestra and asked to be taken in there. Ellie did not like to join that orchestra, he was not in a mood to play, to put it mildly. But his father who did care for him, especially after they were left alone after Ellie’s mother and young sister were murdered on the arrival, following Mengele’s gesture by that bow , was trying to save his young son. He knew that people taken to the orchestra were fed better, so it was a higher chance for his beloved son to survive. 

Elisha Wiesel begged his son to try to get himself to the orchestra. But the local capo did not believe that the youth could be an able violinist, and then, what a pleasure it was for him to crush a violin by his dirty boot. So, Elie had no chance to join the one of the Auschwitz male orchestras, but he did remember that bow in Mengele’s hand instead of his usual whip. Inna Rogatchi (C). Reading Elie Wiesel. Watercolour, Indian ink on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 40 x 40 cm. 2018-2019. Ghetto Waltz series.

It was an Alma’s bow. I am positive on that, due to the chronology of the events, Ellie’s first-hand detail, and the  Mengele and many Nazis’ perverted attitude towards the music. For some reason, not many people know till today that the favourite by Eichmann himself his own nickname among the  close circle of his lackeys was ‘Maestro’. That ‘Maestro’ loved to play a violin, or pretend to do so, and at some stage did have somebody’s Stradivarius to torment it. 

They did many behavioural details similar, those evils in human disguise. Long before Mengele and many others on that platform in Auschwitz were having a pleasure  tending a whip in their gloved hands, Hitler was known to walk with a whip on Berlin streets, to the terrified surprise of many there yet in early 1930s, according to the first-hand memories of the Bonhoeffer family members. 

I am sure that Mengele has decided the destiny of Elie Wiesel’s family, his mother and sister, as so many others, by pointing them towards the death with Alma Rose’s bow. I was tracing the Rose family’s violins for years, and was able to do it. Except that bow. That bow. 

* * * 

Alma did not take her Guadagnini on the run with her. She left it with a trusted friend in Amsterdam. The instrument came to that man with a hand-written notice from Alma: “Not to be lost”. Alma friends from her dramatic years in the Netherlands observed later on that she was attached to that violin incredibly.  She also wrote a will. As it happened, she did it a bit over 3 weeks before her arrest. It is a two-phrase will, literally, appointing two of her close friends, in succession, ‘to organise her funeral and to dispose of her belongings’.  The biggest treasure of which was her and her father’s Guadagnini. Inna Rogatchi (C). Alma Rose Guadagnini 1757 violin. Milan. Presentation material. (C).

That violin was brought to poor 82-year Arnold Rose, a great violinist of Vienna, to his London lodging, in the Autumn of 1945, with no words articulated. No words were needed. About the same time, he had also received from another person Alma’s wrist watch and her mother Justine Mahler’s precious pearls necklace. The decent woman who was with Alma at Drancy and whom Alma trusted her family belongings shortly before being sent on the Judentransport convoy 57, returned the Alma’s possessions to her friends in Amsterdam.

Arnold died soon after receiving back his own Guadagnini on which his daughter would not play anymore. 

I traced the life of that beautiful instrument built by a great Italian master in Milan in 1757. It is a story of its own. The Alma Rose Guadagnini violin, as it is known officially now, after being with Arnold’s pupil and great violinist, the concertmaster of Metropolitan, Felix Eyle from 1947 to the end of his life in 1988, nowadays is  a property of a well-known musician who prefers not to be named. The Arnold’s great Viotti Stradivarious built in 1709 nowadays belongs to the collection of the original rare instruments of the National Bank of Austria. Special committee there decides on their instruments’ loans to leading musicians. 

As it happened, Alma Rose should not have run in the first place, the same, as Nathalie Kraemer who made the same mistake at the same time in 1943 in France. The family who hid Alma exclaimed in despair soon after the end of the war: “Nobody ever came here to check on her! She would be safe if she would stay with us!” It is heart-wrenching to know it. And it was like that for Eleanor, Alma’s first cousin and completely devastated Arnold, her father who lost his wife, his beloved daughter, his work, his music, his house, his life. 

He also lost his brother Eduard who co-founded the Rose Quartet with him back in 1882. In Weimar, Eduard suffered the same destiny as his brother in Vienna: being the first cellist in the Weimar State Orchestra, he was kicked off his work at the first opportunity. He lived alone in their house after the death of his wife Emma in 1933, the other sister of Gustav Mahler, and was thrown out of it unceremoniously by the Nazis, placed in the infamous Ghetto House in  Weimar, and eventually taken to Theresienstadt in 1942. During his last years, over 80-year old Eduard was summoned to Weimar Gestapo many times for long humiliating interrogations. Somebody there have had a special pleasure to torture an elderly musical legend. Eduard Rose was murdered in Therezin in 1943. He was 83 years old.Eduard Rose, eminent cellist murdered in Tereziensdadt in 1943 in the age of 83. Courtesy: The Mahler Foundation.

The Rose Quartet was playing with phenomenal success for fifty five years. There never would be anything like that in the history of music. 

* * * 

I will not be speaking with my uncle Alexander either. In the photos, Alex looks exactly like my other uncle Leonid, the brother of my father Isaac. Alex became the doctor, like his father Simcha, my grandfather’s brother. He was a good, promising doctor and a brave young man. He ran from occupied Paris to Switzerland successfully, I found the traces of him illegally crossing the border, in several archives. As soon as the war was over, Alex went to one of the DCPs, Displaced Persons Camps, to treat thousands of people gathered after the Nazi camps there. He contracted the typhus from some of his patients and died in 1948. He was 28 years old. His mom, Eleanor Rose never came to terms with Alex’s death. She was positive that her beloved son could have been saved. “It was after the Shoah, after!” – she used to exclaim in defiance, according to the people who were talking with her years after the war, already in the 1980s. Eleanor Rose in her flat in London in the 1980s. Courtesy: Rose family archive.

* * * *

All these years after the war and piled with terrible news of fallen members of once brilliant musical dynasty, Eleanor was looking for one record. The record. She knew that father and daughter Rose, her uncle and cousin, recorded the elegant J.-S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor back in 1928. As it happened, it is the only known record of Alma Rose. She played on her Guadagnini for the record, and her father Arnold played on his Viotti Stradivarius. There are few records of Arnold surviving, and some of the Rose Quartet, but this record of Arnold and Alma of 1928 is the only one known.Arnold and Alma Rose in 1927 , a year before making that only known record of them playing together and only known record of Alma Rose. Courtesy: The Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rose Archive.

Eleanor tried every way and person she knew to find the record, with no much luck. It truly was – and still is – an extremely rare record to find. 

Eleanore Rose died of heart-failure in her ripe age in 1992. On the day of her funeral, the post arrived at her flat in London. In a small envelope, there was the record she was desperately looking for so many years. Austrian geologist  turned music historian and archivist and living in Germany, Wolfgang Wendel did find the record and sent it to Eleanor. It just did not make it in time.   Inna Rogatchi (C). Arnold & Alma Rose original record. Fine Art Photography Collage. 2012. Presentation material (C).

Mr Wendel kindly sent the record  to me too. Initially, I could not listen to it. It was too painful. For years, I’ve trained myself to listen to the unique record, bit by bit. 

What is also amazing is that my husband Michael, independently, did paint that very piece of Bach’s music which happened to be his favourite music by the great composer. Michael Rogatchi (C). J.-S. Bach. Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. Oil on canvas. 120 x 100 cm. 2007. Private collection.

So now, that one melody and two violins, and so many human lives around it are living in its own world keeping on the memory of the part of my family alive – and remembered. 

On the eve of Yom HaShoah this year, we have made it a focus of our Special Art Bulletin of The Rogatchi Foundation Culture for Humanity Global Initiative. It can be read, watched and listened to here. 

My husband and I are very honoured to be able to maintain a memory of the brilliant musicians who did enrich the world’s culture in an important way and who were destroyed so cruelly in such matter-of-fact fashion of that diabolical Nazism machinery. 

I am honoured to remember them, but I feel so desperately sorry for them. As for everyone of our six, and most likely more millions, our Shoah toll, with more than a third of our murdered people still remaining nameless. So indefinitely sorry. Inna Rogatchi (C). Cloud View II. Fragment V. Crayons a encre, crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on watercolour 350 mg paper. 42 x 59 cm. 2019-2020. Ghetto Waltz and The Songs of Our Souls series.

No speeches would ever amend the damage and crimes committed. But a melody played by two people, a father and a daughter, superb musicians from a great family in the history of a world culture, played by two of them 92 years ago, almost a century back, is alive. Despite anything. This is a miracle which is the secret of Jewish survival. And this is unbeatable by any evil. 

I guess I was able to speak with my exterminated relatives, after all. It is an indescribable feeling. It is only up to music to relate it. 

The essay is an excerpt from Inna Rogatchi’s forthcoming book on her personal search into the dramatic saga of her Mahler- Rose-Bujanover  family. 

April 2020.