Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces of WWII and the Holocaust
I have been reading articles and books about the Holocaust as well as seeing feature films and documentaries for a very long time. While growing up I knew very little about the Holocaust, when my U.S. Army officer husband and I were stationed in Munich, Germany, in September 1970, only 25 years after the end of WWII, I found myself living among the remnants of that history.
In fact, it was on November 9, 1970, while sitting in our Army quarters in Munich reading a book about the history of the Jews, that I learned about the planned Kristallnacht pogrom that had taken place in Nazi Germany (including annexed Austria and the Sudetenland) on the night of November 9, 1938, before the start of WWII on September 1, 1939.
I am NOT an amateur historian. What I am is someone who, because of my early background in copy editing, pays special attention to dates and checks for the possibility of errors.
In recent months I have read more and more books and articles and seen more and more feature films and documentaries about WWII and the Holocaust (thanks partly to the lockdowns and partly to subscriptions to streaming platforms Jewzy.tv and Chaiflicks.com). And this is what I have found:
Excluding Holocaust scholars and other historians who know a great deal about both WWII and the Holocaust, those of us who believe we know a great deal probably do not.
Here is one recent example of this:
I am reading “My Name Is Selma: The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbruck Survivor” by Selma van de Perre. In this memoir I learned that what I thought I knew about Westerbork – the large Nazi transit camp in the Netherlands that served as a departure point for the death camps in Eastern Europe – was incomplete.
I had just assumed that the Nazis built the camp. Then I learned in “My Name Is Selma” that the Dutch built the camp to house the stream of refugees pouring in from Germany and Belgium before the start of WWII. Apparently because the Netherlands had stayed neutral in WWI, the country seemed as if it would be a safe haven from the Nazis. In order to house this large influx of refugees, the Dutch government built Westerbork, which was then taken over by the Nazis when the Germans invaded the Netherlands.
And consider the case of the yellow Stars of David we have seen in picture after picture of Holocaust victims:
Also in her memoir Selma van de Perre says Dutch Jews were not required to wear yellow stars until May of 1942, which was two years from when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940.
Yet yellow stars were not the only identification Jews were made to wear. Elsewhere there were different identification “badges.”
As an example of this, according to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “In December 1939, German authorities required Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement (which included Krakow) to wear white armbands with blue Stars of David for purposes of identification.”
Watching the 2020 documentary SHADOWS OF FREEDOM on Jewzy.tv, I learned about “the virtually unknown story of the Jewish/French resistance in Algiers that had a significant impact on WWII.”
I looked at the date of Operation Torch – November 8, 1942 – the date the Allies invaded French North Africa.
In the 1980 film THE LAST METRO that I just re-watched (“In occupied Paris, an actress married to a Jewish theater owner must keep him hidden from the Nazis while doing both of their jobs.”) I noted that the date on the newspaper announcing that the Nazis had moved into Vichy France was November 12, 1942.
Aha, I said to myself. When the Allies landed in French North Africa, the Allies were close to Vichy France. That must be why the Nazis immediately moved into the supposedly “free zone.”
I feel as if I am putting together pieces of a massive puzzle. The more I learn, the more cause and effect I note between the moving elements of WWII and the Nazi goal of exterminating all of Europe’s Jews.
And now I am working with international film director Aaron Ozlevi to share the account of the Struma, the WWII refugee ship sunk by political machinations. Aaron and I are exploring many of the conflicting “facts” of this historical saga.