Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother - Hardcover

Goldman, Stan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1640120440 ISBN 13: 9781640120440

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Stanley A. Goldman is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the founding director of the Loyola Center for the Study of Law and Genocide. He co-anchored a national program on CBS Network Radio during the months of the O. J. Simpson trial and has spent over two years as a regular contributor on CNBC. Goldman has spent more than ten years as a full-time employee of the Fox News Channel as the network s on-air legal editor, as well as a news correspondent, analyst, and occasional host.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

?Stanley A. Goldman is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the founding director of the Loyola Center for the Study of Law and Genocide. He co-anchored a national program on CBS Network Radio during the months of the O. J. Simpson trial and has spent over two years as a regular contributor on CNBC. Goldman has spent more than ten years as a full-time employee of the Fox News Channel as the network’s on-air legal editor, as well as a news correspondent, analyst, and occasional host.
 
 

?Stanley A. Goldman is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the founding director of the Loyola Center for the Study of Law and Genocide. He co-anchored a national program on CBS Network Radio during the months of the O. J. Simpson trial and has spent over two years as a regular contributor on CNBC. Goldman has spent more than ten years as a full-time employee of the Fox News Channel as the network's on-air legal editor, as well as a news correspondent, analyst, and occasional host.
 
 

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Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream

The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother

By Stanley A. Goldman

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Stanley A. Goldman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-64012-044-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface, 
Part 1. Malka's War, 
1. "Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream", 
2. "Salvation through Labor", 
3. A Minor Clerical Error, 
4. A Führer of Industry, 
5. The Children of Luck, 
Part 2. The Jew Who Met Himmler, 
6. The Last Party of the Third Reich, 
7. Meeting Himmler, 
8. Appointment with the Executioner, 
9. Trading for Jewish Lives, 
10. A True Believer, 
11. The Count of the Red Cross, 
12. The Buses Were White, 
13. Time Brings on All Revenges, 
Part 3. Living with Survival, 
14. There Was No Returning, 
15. Memory, 
16. The Last Chapter, 
Postscript, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

"Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream"

August 24, 1944 / Auschwitz

On August 23, Nazi control of both Romania and Greece had been overthrown. On August 25, the German garrison in Paris would surrender. The hegemony of the Third Reich was rapidly shrinking, but Stalin had just ordered his army to halt its advance into Polish territory, where Auschwitz was located, so that German soldiers and local Polish resistance fighters could continue to kill each other, thereby diminishing both of the Soviet Union's rivals for future control of the nation.

There was no one to rescue or offer hope to my mother. Her name was Malka, and she was one of a thousand young Polish Jewish women who waited. They had arrived in the camp a week before on one of the Lódz Ghetto transports. Having been processed together, they were now supposed to die together. Five hundred women ahead of Malka were led into a chamber and did not return. Now at the front of this bewildering line, she was next. Years later, her closest friend, who sat in that line with her, described to her own daughter what it had been like: "We were shaved. We were naked. We're not crying. We didn't know what crematorium means. You don't know where you're going. So I ask a woman guard and she says — 'You see the chimney with the smoke, you are going to come out there.'"

These waiting women were still alive while most of their friends and loved ones had already been murdered or died from the deprivations or diseases that plagued their subjugated population. In the ghetto from which they had recently arrived, none had escaped malnutrition as they lived under the daily threat of selection for transport to unknown destinations like this camp. Interviews with the survivors of the group confirmed that, until they were actually there, they were unaware that a journey to Auschwitz was a sentence of death. Such knowledge had been successfully kept from the isolated Jews of Lódz.

If it had not been for her father growing homesick in America, Malka would not have been subject to a regime whose central creed called for her execution. Just after the end of World War I, hoping to eventually send for the rest of his family, my maternal grandfather, Samuel Repstein, traveled to New York City, where his eldest son had already settled. Even with the company of his firstborn, this new life was just too different. In his Polish shtetl (small town), Biala Rawska, seemingly untouched by the passage of time, he had been a respected tailor of men's suits who knew and was known by everyone. Lonely for home, he abandoned the dream and left his adult son in America and returned back across the Atlantic. Neither in the metropolis of New York nor in the shtetl of Biala Rawska was the danger to the entirety of European Jewery obvious in those first years of the twentieth century. A quarter of a century later, my grandfather's choice cost the lives of eight of his children and all of their descendants. Other than her eldest brother in America, my mother was the lone survivor of her entire family.

What the German Knew

As a seventeen-year-old bride, Malka, who was the ninth of ten children, moved from the village where she had grown up to the nearby city of Brzeziny, where her new husband was able to obtain work in the city's flourishing garment industry. In the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews had begun a migration to this city and its surrounding areas, making it a center for the tailoring of men's suits and coats. Like the other women in her community, Malka expected her life would be lived there as homemaker and mother, and eventually grandmother.

Within a few days of their September 1, 1939, assault on Poland, the Germans bombed and invaded Brzeziny. By the beginning of 1940, the entire Jewish population was crowded into a small section of the city and then circled by barbed wire. The Germans put the Jews of this ghetto of tailors and seamstresses to work making military uniforms. Useful laborers were compensated with the barest subsistence of food. It was in this ghetto that Malka, her first husband, and their young son and daughter spent the first half of the war.

The lives of the Brzeziner Jews paralleled closely those of the Jews living in the nearby and much larger ?ód? Ghetto, twenty-one kilometers away. Conditions were harsh, and life was terrifying for these Jews, who could be pulled from their homes or randomly stopped on the streets by guards to be "beaten or humiliated." The occupants were forbidden, under penalty of death, from venturing outdoors unauthorized after 4:00 p.m., with soldiers patrolling daily to ensure proper order and that no one dared to attempt escape.

The Germans burned the town synagogue and then blamed the fire on the congregants and their rabbi. As punishment for the ghetto's alleged crimes of smuggling in food and other essentials, ten residents were selected and executed. One tragic innocent, who had the misfortune of being one of the ten, announced from the gallows that he was dying for his community. He was right.

With each new atrocity perpetrated by their captors, the Jews hoped that they had experienced the worst the Germans had to offer. How much suffering were human beings capable of inflicting upon others? No matter how horrific their conduct, however, the cruelty of the Nazis never stopped growing ever more unimaginable.

In the early part of 1942, Malka was walking with her seven-year-old son Archie when a German officer stopped them. The soldier simply looked down at the handsome little boy and asked if he was a Jude. When my mother answered that he was, the officer put his hand on my half-brother's golden blonde hair and remarked that it was a shande (a shame). Only later would Malka understand that the German had likely known a truth that she and the other Jews of Brzeziny were yet to learn: the fate awaiting the youngest amongst them.

About fifteen years later, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother and I began boarding a crowded bus heading eastbound down Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. As I got on just ahead of her, the harried and inattentive driver closed the door between the two of us and started to drive off, leaving my mother behind. She screamed and, running frantically down the street, pounded on the glass door until the bus stopped. She dragged me off and, while crying uncontrollably, did two things, neither of which she had ever done before, nor would ever do again — She spanked me until I cried from the pain, and when she had...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1640120440
• ISBN 13: 9781640120440
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland