"The time is now 4 p.m. The cannon fire hasn't ceased for the last 20 hours. Artillery shells explode every second, and the shrapnel falls like a hail of steel. Whistling, bombardments, the noise of machine guns and the thundering of the airplanes overhead reverberate in the air and increase our terror. Our ears and heads ache. We can't hear each other talk. Only boom, boom, boom! Another pillar of fire and smoke. Roofs are billowing smoke. A row of houses in the center of town is engulfed in flames. Suddenly, a terrible noise followed by groans and screams – houses have collapsed in the old city, and we run to save those who have been buried alive under the debris. Suddenly the skies darkened – a cloud of smoke descended on the city."
So wrote Mira Zabludowski on 15 September 1939, in a diary in which she recorded the first months of the occupation of Warsaw. Mira found herself in the eye of the storm during a visit to her parents, the lawyer and jurist Dr. Simcha-Simek Zabludowski and his wife Elisheva (née Kronstein). Although Mira managed to leave Poland and return to her home in Eretz Israel in late November 1939, her parents were murdered in the Holocaust.
The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, marked the beginning of WWII. To mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, Yad Vashem recently uploaded a new online exhibition that presents the fate of Jewish families, such as the Zabludowskis, in the Holocaust beginning in 1939. The stories are based on items from the Yad Vashem Archives and its collections, which Holocaust survivors and relatives of the victims have given to Yad Vashem to keep for posterity. The exhibition shows the unfathomable gap between life before the Holocaust and the fate of Jewish people during it.
The exhibition also presents the story of the Majers from Belgrade. Refael Majer was a rabbi, shochet (ritual slaughterer) and cantor in Belgrade. He and his wife Rivka, née Almozelino, had eight children, and their daughters were married and had children of their own. After the Germans occupied Belgrade, the Majers did not sense that they were in danger. The older ones among them remembered that the Germans had behaved appropriately during WWI and said, “We’ll make it through this like we did then.” Less than a year after the German invasion, however, 90 percent of the Jews of Belgrade had been annihilated, including most of the Majers.
One of the photographs on display in this exhibition captures a happy prewar moment, showing the extended family dressed for a holiday. Of the 21 people in the photograph, one died before the war, 19 were murdered during the Holocaust and only one survived: Isabella Baruch, Refael and Rivka’s daughter.
The story of Marga Schwarz is one of the exhibition’s most poignant stories. Marga was born in Villingen, Germany and had two younger brothers, Heinz and Manfred. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, the Schwarz family’s house and the prayer hall in their home in Villingen were destroyed. Marga’s father Hugo was imprisoned for three months, and then released and returned to his family, whereupon he decided to get the children out of Germany. In April 1939, the three children boarded a train to Switzerland, and were sent to different foster families. Hugo, his wife Irma (née Oberndorfer), his mother Bertha and his sister Julie were deported to the Gurs detention camp in France. Until July 1942, Hugo and Irma corresponded with their children in Switzerland and sent them small presents that Irma made in the camp. Marga’s autograph book is on display in the exhibition, as are her parents' dedications to her before she left for Switzerland:
“To my beloved Marga, the honest, faithful and true. [These are] three virtues that will grace you in your lifetime. Oh, my dear child, you will make your parents happy with these. From your loving father.”
In August 1942, Hugo and Irma were deported to Auschwitz, and Julie was deported there on 16 September. All three were murdered, and Bertha died in Gurs. After the war, the three Schwarz children immigrated to Israel.
This online exhibition is generously supported by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 90.
