“Circle of Freedom” is the theme of the Day of Remembrance in the Miami Valley slated for Thursday, April 19, at Beth Abraham Synagogue in Oakwood. The speaker is Henry Guggenheimer.
Born in Germany, Guggenheimer was barred from attending public school by Nazi edicts and got his early upbringing in a Jewish orphanage. On Nov. 9, 1938, he was in the orphanage when the rampage of destruction known as the “Night of the Broken Glass” or “Kristallnacht” took place. The Nazis, who coordinated attacks against Jews, synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses, closed the orphanage.
Half of the children were able to get out of Germany, he says, and the rest perished in the extermination camps. Guggenheimer’s mother signed him up for the Kindertransport to England — a rescue mission in which 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia left their parents to escape the Nazis. He was 12 years old.
“Two weeks before I was to leave for England, Mom and I received our visa to come to the United States,” he says.
“My mother was short in stature but was a giant in courage, wisdom and determination. In the beginning, her life here was not easy. She worked as a seamstress, housekeeper and cook. She is my hero and inspired me to do good and love this country.”
“Hidden Children: Surviving the Holocaust” is the theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial event at Sinclair Community College. The program looks at the problems faced by persecuted children who were hidden or protected by non-Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe and also consider today’s young people who suffer bullying because they are different.
The featured speaker is John Koenigsberg of Columbus, who was born in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1937, and was hidden with a Catholic family in a village during the last few years of the War. The conditions were primitive — no bathroom, no electricity, no running water. But his hosts, he says, were kind and treated him like their fifth child. After the war, he and his parents were reunited.
“The Germans were picking all of our relatives up and sending them to concentration camps so my parents decided we’d have a better chance of survival if we split up,” Koenigsberg explains, adding that Holland lost more than 80 percent of its total Jewish population. His father worked for the resistance movement, sabotaging German installations; his mother, a nurse, hid with a family.
Because children who were sickly were not being taken at the time, his quick-thinking parents who worked in a hospital rushed their son to an operating room for surgery.
Koenigsberg, 75, says he still can’t believe the courage it must have taken for his parents to give up their only child, not knowing if they would ever see him again. And he insists one person can make a difference in the world: the Catholic family that took him in would have been sent to the death camps if they had been discovered.
Other character traits that enabled the family to survive, he says, were perseverance, a positive attitude, a total work ethic, a love for family and a strong will to live.
At a Temple Israel brunch in Dayton on Sunday, April 22, Kahn will be the featured speaker. He’ll talk about a friend, Erich Kohlhagen, who spent 77 months in Nazi concentration camps.
After witnessing the torching of his vocational school on Kristallnight, he returned home to see the Nazis throwing all of his family’s belongings from the balcony into a fire that raged below. Crowds stood in front of the apartment cheering.
“Then I heard my father’s screams — he was on the floor being beaten by the Nazi beasts, who were shouting profanities,” Kahn remembers. “He was bleeding from his head, his arms, and his shirt was soaked in blood. The Nazi SS trooper grabbed my violin while holding me by my shirt, and pulled me through the hall to the balcony. There, he practically threw the violin and bow at me and ordered me to play. With tears running down my cheek, I played from memory tunes that I had learned. I thought I was playing the violin at my own funeral.”
If you’ve visited the Holocaust exhibit at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you’ve seen the violin donated by Robert Kahn of Dayton.
“That violin represents my soul,” says Kahn, who lives in Butler Twp. “It embodies all the memories I have — the sadness, the happiness, the trauma.”
Kahn believes a Holocaust survivor’s perspective can offer inspiration and hope for those going through desperate situations. Among the life lessons he learned from being tormented as a teen:
• Even under trying conditions of persecution, it is important to maintain hope.
• From agony and despair comes inner strength and the will to survive.
• A religious upbringing and the belief in God brings hope when the civilized world seems to have abandoned you.
• Anguish and despair can create abnormal strength and a colossal will to live.
• Human rights, tolerance and understanding of others are goals that are still and always worth striving and fighting for.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or MMoss@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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