A Son’s Memoir of His Father’s Experience in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

March 30 2016

In A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, the Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg attempts to reconstruct the years his father spent in the Łódź ghetto and in Auschwitz as well as his life—and that of the author’s mother, also a Holocaust survivor—following the liberation. André Aciman writes in his review:

[T]he strength of this short book, [which] is so reminiscent of the best of W.G. Sebald, [is that it] is a reflective work that seeks to meditate upon the enduring and still-menacing shadows that clouded the lives of [Rosenberg’s] parents as he was growing up with them. It is more about the shadows—if we can continue to call them this—than about the camps themselves. In fact, and despite appearances, the real subject of A Brief Stop is not the father but rather the son who is seeking to retrace his father’s steps and who goes, like Telemachus, on what could easily be called a pilgrimage on the road from Auschwitz.

To do this, Rosenberg, who is an established writer and reporter in Sweden, needs to chronicle and capture the atrocities his father faced during the war. But what he is ultimately seeking to understand and to chronicle is growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. This is about the Holocaust that is passed on, the Holocaust that colored his childhood whenever he heard Polish or Yiddish spoken either by his parents or by their minuscule circle of friends, or when his parents happened to drop a few hints about a past he couldn’t even begin to fathom, because what he had to work with was never the hard truth but the scars and shavings of the truth, because those who knew the truth were themselves unable to speak, much less live with the truth, because, let’s face it, they couldn’t understand it themselves.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Arts & Culture, Holocaust, Holocaust remembrance, Holocaust survivors, Sweden

The Purim Libel Returns, This Time from the Pens of Jews

March 14 2025

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Book of Esther, Nazi Germany, Purim