15th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest Brochure

This document is a program for an event held at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service on May 1, 2002, featuring Professor Elie Wiesel. The program includes an "Order of Exercise" outlining the welcome, introduction, address by Elie Wiesel, and closing remarks. It provides a detailed biography of Elie Wiesel, highlighting his work as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Holocaust survivor, author, teacher, and advocate for human rights and peace. It mentions his various academic positions, awards, and literary works such as "Night." The program also features a section on the Thomas J. Ernst Family, who sponsored Professor Wiesel's visit, detailing their philanthropic activities and biographical information for Thomas J. Ernst, Joanna Valgenti Ernst, Joseph Ernst, and Benjamin Ernst, emphasizing their backgrounds and contributions, particularly in areas of civil rights, education, and humanitarian efforts. The document also includes text from an older honorary degree conferral by Georgetown University to Elie Wiesel.

This document is the program and information booklet for the "Freedom & Solidarity Forum," held in Caen, France, on June 4-5, 2014. The forum commemorates the 70th anniversary of D-Day and Operation Overlord, bringing together political, business, and thought leaders from American, Canadian, and European nations. Organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in France, the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union, and the Caen-Normandy Memorial, the event aimed to discuss the legacy of D-Day and the Marshall Plan, strengthening transatlantic relations. Key topics included the legacy of Overlord in terms of freedom and solidarity, shared economic growth, freedom, security and transparency, reinventing the transatlantic economic alliance, and rethinking the economy of the future. The program details keynote speeches by prominent figures like John Kerry and Elie Wiesel, panel discussions, and receptions held at significant historical sites in Caen, such as the Abbaye-aux-Hommes and the Caen-Normandy Memorial. It also includes information about the organizing bodies, partners, and an honorary committee of notable ambassadors and leaders. The document emphasizes the historical significance of Normandy and Caen as a "City of Memory" tied to the WWII liberation.

Lili Altschuler was born September 30, 1928 in Lodz, Poland to a well-to-do, non-observant Jewish family. Before the war she was educated in a private Jewish school. Lili describes the change in atmosphere in 1937-38, the prohibition against kosher slaughter and the Polish Jewish citizens being expelled from Germany and forced to return to Poland (‘38).

In 1939, just before the Lodz Ghetto was formed, Lili and her parents fled to relatives in a suburb of Kielce, called Opatow. She describes the hardships and restrictions that ensued and describes and encounter with Volksdeutsche in which she was injured. Her father, fearing the reality of the deathcamps, bought their way into the slave labor camp Skarazysko Kamienna, run by HASAG. They worked in a munitions factory. She describes the scant daily rations, the lack of medical treatment, and the cruelty of Ukrainian guards and also Jewish Kapos’ cruel behavior. She also describes some resistance in the camps: the formation of small singing and reading groups.

In the summer of 1944, she and her parents were deported to a munitions factory in Czestochowa. She describes slightly better conditions there. On January 16, 1945 the Germans attempted to deport everyone to a location farther away from the Soviets. After the men were sent off in trains, the Germans fled, leaving the women on the train platform. They were liberated by the Soviets that night. She and her mother stayed for a time in Czestochowa, then returned to Opatow, then Lodz to look for surviving family members.

Her grandparents perished in the Lodz Ghetto. Her father was sent to Buchenwald and later liberated by the Americans in May 1945. They were reunited in Lodz and later went to Stuttgart, Germany through Czechoslovakia with the help of the Zionist group, Brihah1 and UNRRA. They came to the United States via a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart in 1948.

Luba Kozusman Margulies, born in Novogrod, Poland in 1915, was raised in Ostrog after her parents were killed in a pogrom. She talks about her family history; her life and education in both Ostrog and Lemberg (L’vov), where she studied to become a midwife, and experienced antisemitism, including a violent encounter with Polish members of the Hitler Jugend.

She describes life in Tarnopol - where she moved after her marriage in 1940 - under both Russian and German occupation, when the killing of Jews started in 1941. She describes mass murders of Jews by both Germans and Ukrainians, roundups of Jews, especially rabbis, and her work in hospitals in Tarnopol and later the ghetto. She gives a detailed description of life in the ghetto, which existed for less than a year and was liquidated in 1942, including surviving, attempts by Jews to construct escape bunkers, activities of the Judenrat, and forced labor. Luba and her husband were in a forced labor group that worked outside of the ghetto.

She relates several episodes of preparing hiding places, hiding in sewers with other survivors, repeated attempts by Germans to flush out and kill Jews by various means. Luba and her husband escaped, were caught and put into a labor camp. She believes that Untersturmführer Rokita, the head of this labor camp, ordered the massacre of these Jews. Luba graphically describes their escape from the labor camp, hiding in a hole in the ground and in the home of a non-Jewish man for weeks, scavenging for food, being hunted by Germans, and instances of help by non-Jews.

After liberation by advancing Russian soldiers March 24, 1944, they fled to escape conscription. They lived briefly in Tarnopol, in Brzezany with other survivors, and in Walbrzech in the home of a German-Christian family. Luba and her family went to a Displaced persons camp in Wetzlar, near Stuttgart, Germany. She came to the United States with her husband and two daughters in October, 1949. The interview concludes with several sad vignettes about the fate of some children in the ghetto who were taken from their parents and also includes a poem written by Luba’s husband, in Yiddish and English.

Interviewee: MARGULIES, Luba Kozusman Date: October 20, 1981

Betti Frank, née Koppel, was born in Zutphen, Holland. Her parents had a butcher shop. She briefly describes pre-war life. Betti and her brother belonged to Hehalutz, a Zionist youth group. Betti describes life after the German invasion, including registration of Jews, roundups, Razzias, raids, and collaboration by some Dutch people. The Dutch police arrested her father, sent him to a Dutch concentration camp and then to Mauthausen where he was killed. Betti describes how later the Dutch police came back for the rest of the family: Betti and her mother were taken to a building owned by the Jewish community which had been converted into a hospital for older Jews. She describes the round up of elderly and sick Jews in the community. Her brother was deported to Westerbork. She found out after the war that he was killed in Auschwitz.

In April 19431, Betti and her mother were deported to Vught concentration camp with all Dutch Jews who did not live in Amsterdam. She describes in great detail their arrival, the horrible conditions in Vught and a separate children’s camp where her mother worked as a nurse, Appells, extreme cruelty and constant terror. She also describes contact with non-Jewish prisoners and an offer to her by Hehalutz members to escape with false papers which she turned down to stay with her mother. Her mother was eventually deported along with the children and she never saw her again. Betti was then assigned to a slave labor group working for the Philips company together with non-Jews making radios and welding. She talks about how the SS tried to deport this group to Auschwitz several times and how they were saved by working for Philips. Finally in June they were sent to Auschwitz arriving June 6, 1944. She describes in great detail their brutal reception, processing, conditions and cruel treatment from Jewish Kapos. After 10 days, Betti, with the group selected by Philips, was transported out of Auschwitz to a factory in Reichenbach to work with German civilians. From there, the workers were sent to Lanowice concentration camp, and later forced on a death march to Trausenau, Czechoslovakia in February 1945, then forced on rail cars to a small camp near Port of Westfalen close to the Dutch border. Betti describes in detail their deportation to and working conditions in several camps: a salt mine in Braunschweig, Magdeburg; Lüneburger Heide, where they had to dig trenches at the front; and finally a small camp in Hamburg. She describes brutal living and working conditions, cruel behavior by German civilians, and some acts of compassion in great detail. She talks about some of her survival strategies and how she saved her life by following her instinct.

After the end of World War II, the prisoners were transported to Denmark under the auspices of Folke Bernadotte. They were sent to either Malmo or a “holiday” camp near Göteburg in Sweden, depending on their physical condition. Betty again worked for Philips. After a stay in Holland, she emigrated to Israel on March 12, 1950.

Bess Freilich, née BashaAnusz, born in1928 in Pruzany, Poland, was the eldest of eight children in a religious Jewish family. Her father was a poor butcher, but she attended private Hebrew school. Her family lived in harmony with Polish neighbors (to whom her grandfather lent money with little or no return).

In 1939 under anti-Zionist Russian occupation, her Hebrew school was closed and teachers were sent to Siberia. Fearful of arrest, Bess burned her Hebrew books and then went to a public Jewish school where a communist curriculum was taught in Yiddish.

When the Germans invaded in June, 1941, the local population swelled from 3000 to 15,000 as Jews were brought from other towns to the Pruzany Ghetto. Food shortage was acute, and Bess often slipped through the ghetto walls to trade clothing for potatoes or steal potato peels from a German kitchen. She describes in detail the ghetto evacuation, when her grandfather was shot before her eyes, in January 1943.

Bess describes in detail the three day train trip in cattle cars to Auschwitz, arrival, brutality of the guards, and atrocities committed there including her six-year old brother’s murder for picking up snow for their mother to eat. Bess saw her mother fall from a blow to her head and later learned that she was burned in an open pit. Her older brother and father were sent to work in a crematorium as Sonderkommandos.

Bess was sent to Birkenau and then to Budy, a camp she describes as hell, where about 400 girls, ages 14 - 25, pushed heavy wagons uphill to build an artificial mountain. Some were forced to strip, dance and sing and then were shot. Some were eaten by dogs. She vividly describes suffering from typhus and lice infestation of a breast wound from beatings. Left unconscious in a morgue, she was returned to Birkenau, where she was saved from death several times, twice by German guards.

After passing three Mengele selections and seeing her father briefly in the men’s camp in Auschwitz where she worked picking weeds for soup, she was evacuated on a death march, January 18, 1945. She recalls thousands left dead in the snow before they reached Ravensbrück. They were then left in the woods near Malchow. At liberation, she weighed 67 pounds and could not retain food eaten for months afterwards.

Returning to her home town, she was taken by the Russians to a camp and questioned as a suspected German spy. Finding nothing of her home in Pruzany and threatened with transfer to Siberia, she fled to Lodz where she met and married another survivor. She found her father in Munich, spent two years in Feldafing DP camp and came to the United States in 1949.

She was unable to speak about her holocaust experience until the time of her interview in 1981.