From Ukraine to America: 4 Families
HOLOCAUST
BAR AND NOWY DWOR
Nowy Dwor from 1939-1945
Nowy Dwor is the town my grandfather Abraham Gilfenbain left in 1908.
No family history of Ashkenazi Jews can omit the Shoah. It obliterated most of the religious Jews in the world. Our children are Jewish, but not very. Many of our charming customs are gone. Who today gives Shalach Monas on Purim? Builds a Sukkah to eat in? Dances with the Torah on Simchas Torah? Lights Havdalah to end the Sabbath? Yiddish, the language of Jews for 1000 years went up the smokestacks of the Camps or died in the mass Jewish graves of Ukraine.
I don't know what happened to Koshewita or Maiden, other places my forebears came from, but I do know what happened to the Jews of Bar and of Nowy Dwor.
The story of what happened to Nowy Dwor is horrifying. The account given here is by Morton Knecht, an eyewitness to what he narrates. Below is the link to the website with Knecht's account. His site also has a link to the Knecht family tree in Nowy Dwor.
The NowyDwor travails prove beyond any refutation Daniel Goldhagen's
claims in his well researched book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Not only did the Germans inflict horrors on Jews willingly, but they did it with great glee.
Many people are quick to remind Jews that Gypsies, homosexuals, and assorted others were also in the camps, but millions of Jews were killed without going to the camps, and the horrors they underwent were often even worse than what happened at Auschwitz. Frankly, gassing was highly preferable to what the Jews of Nowy Dwor experienced.
Also, none of the German victims were treated with even a fraction of the cruelty that Jews were subjected to, in the camps or out. The Germans, firm believers in anti-Jewish myths that had been preached to Christians since the 4th century, had added a new twist to antisemitism in the 19th century. Before then, Christians were content if Jews got baptized. Then they were no longer instruments of the Devil. However, in Germany, for a century before Hitler, churchmen and scholars claimed that Jews were inherently evil and the only thing to do with them was to wipe them off the face of the earth. This belief was rife in Germany long before Nazism. Hitler was preaching to the choir when he proposed genocide.
Note, I am NOT saying that Germans today would react as Germans did in the 1930's and 40's. I do know that many younger Germans are themselves horrified at what happened, and are are willing to accept Goldenhagen's research. Also, I don't know if Germans today are any more antisemitic than any other Christian people, including Americans. Many of the old myths are still believed wholeheartedly today.
What happened in Nowy Dwor is history, but it was only one of many towns that had such a fate. It serves as an example of what Germans were capable of doing and that they went further than Cossacks ever did in Ukraines. It is also true that Poles, Ukrainians, and others in German occupied territory helped in the slaughter, but the sorts of things recounted here, the glee with which the Germans acted in Nowy Dwor was a German affair. Poles and Ukrainians killed, but they didn't, so far as I can find out, make Jews eat their own feces, for instance. Ironically, the Poles today miss having Jews. They flock to Jewish style delis and even have Jewish festivals.
Click on the link below http://www.knecht.ca/history/nowydwor.html
Schadenfreude and the Holocaust:
In my blog, which is all about language, http://smarthotoldlady.blogspot.com, I have two posts on how one's language can influence you. In one, I showed how Yiddish has the word kvellen meaning 'to take joy in another's accomplishments,' Just by learning that word as a child, I knew it was right to rejoice in another's good fortune. The Germans, however, have a word Schadenfreude which means 'to take joy in another's misfortune.' I was careful to note that everyone, even Jews, are guilty of this, but the fact that Yiddish--and English for that matter--don't label that feeling with its own words shows that it isn't a nice or an expected feeling. I've noticed that when Americans do admit they were glad something bad happened to someone else, they often say things like, "I know it's not nice to feel this way, but..." However,in German, the word is not only there,with is not a negative term. It is okay to rejoice in another's sufferings. It is expected that you would.
Later, after reading an article on studies of Schadenfreude in people in people other than Germans, it occurred to me that the Holocaust was a wonderful venue for the Germans to feel glee in Jewish suffering. Actually, the article in Scientific American Mind posited that Schadenfreude may explain genocide and other atrocities. So, I did a post on Schadenfreude and the Holocaust. This was before I read Goldenhagen's book. The link here to Morton Knecht's story shows the degree to which the Germans bathed in Schadenfreude..
The town my father grew up in had a mixed population of Jews and Christians. It wasn't a shtetl, but a dorf. It was large enough to have a railroad landing there. For the most part, Christians and Jews lived peacefully side by side, even pasteuring their livestock together in a commons. My father's family kept chickens, cows, sheep, and geese, all for consumption of course.
My grandmother fled from Bar in 1919 during the Russian Revolution, as did so many other Jews. As my father said, "Whether it was the Reds or the Whites, their enemies were the Jews." Killing Jews was apparently sport for the Cossacks and others with guns and sabers. When she crossed the Rumanian border, she knew she'd never hear the voice of her parents and siblings again, a hard fate for someone so steeped in family. Fortunately two of her brothers did make it to America, the Seidman brothers, Benny and Sam.
When the Germans came to Bar in 1941, they rounded up Jews from all the surrounding town and packed them into Bar, creating two ghettoes for the purposes. They had about 15,000 Jews there all told. Then, rather than transport them to Auschwitz or one of the 10,000 other camps in Poland and Germany, they would round up Jews, take them to an isolated spot andmake them dig deep ditches. Then they made them take off their clothes, take off their rings and other jewelry, and stand by the ditch. The Germans then opened fire on the victims. Not all who fell had received a fatal shot. This didn't bother the Germans. They didn't bother shooting survivors lying amidst the corpses. They just let those Jews unfortunate enough to be still living die slowly, often suffocating when the Germans bullldozed earth to cover the corpses. There were two such massacres in Bar, in 1941 and 1942, but this scene was repeated all over Ukraine.
When my grandmother lived in Bar, and the Pogroms of the early 20th century visited there, the Christians shielded my Bubbie and her children, pretending they were part of their households. However, after two decades of dehumanizing Soviet rule, the Ukrainian Christians who had once been so compassionate, marched with the Nazis, helped round up the Jews and often themselves acted as firing squads.
This is not to say there was no antisemitism in Bar before the Revolution. Of course there was. I recounted one horrific incident on the page Ostrach Stories. Ant-Jewishness was preached by the Orthodox Church. However, compassion and friendship still existed then and was extended to Jews, although Jews did know they had to be subservient to the Christians. They were not on an equal footing by any means.
Bar today