Letter from Bill Clinton to Elie regarding a controversial speech on Gaza

This is a typewritten letter dated November 4, 2010, from William Jefferson Clinton to Elie Wiesel. Clinton expresses his delight in Wiesel's anticipated participation at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting. He highlights CGI's significant growth and impact, noting that its projects have reached a value of $63 billion and benefited nearly 300 million people worldwide. Clinton emphasizes that the annual dialogues help strengthen their approach and build on progress. The letter concludes with a thank you for Wiesel's friendship and support, signed by Bill Clinton.

Pearl Herling was born in Budapest, Hungary August 24, 1924 to a religious upper middle class family. Her father was in the wholesale textile business. She describes her family history and pre-war life, antisemitism and discrimination against Jews which peaked in 1938. She also describes the increasingly harsh restrictions against Hungarian Jews between 1940 and 1944 and the creation of ghettos (“Yellow Star Houses”), labor battalions, and cruelty exhibited by Hungarian Nazis. Her father disappeared and never came back. Pearl gives detailed descriptions of her many efforts to stay alive: she never wore the mandatory yellow star, avoided transport to a labor camp, posed as a Gentile using false papers she typed herself, through a bluff managed to get herself and all the people in her building into one of the Swedish “safe” houses established by Raoul Wallenberg and also obtain Schutzpasses. Just before this building was raided, she managed to join her sister at a labor camp in Kelenföld, run by Hungarian Nazis. She describes an incredible vignette of how she, her sister, and her sister’s two young children avoided a roundup, then got papers classifying them as refugees in Russian-occupied Hungary. Her mother and other family members survived under the protection of the head of a German labor camp. She describes her family’s continued struggle living in Budapest posing as non-Jews using false papers, starvation, and near escapes from detection. She refers to a special transport of Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland and a failed attempt to exchange Jews for trucks. She witnessed a death march from Buda. She met and married her second husband while both were posing as non-Jews, and relates how difficult it was for him to get his son back from a Catholic family that sheltered him. Pearl was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. She gives a very extensive and graphic account of her experiences in Hungary under Russian occupation, and many attempts to flee. She also mentions Russian soldiers raping women. Pearl details her husband’s flight from Soviet authorities while she was running two businesses. She describes her own harrowing attempted escapes from Budapest-- one with her sedated infant, another when she was separated from her seven-year old step-son and got arrested, and her final escape to Vienna using an Israeli passport. Pearl and her husband survived in Vienna for two years but experienced discrimination. They emigrated to the United States in 1950.

Bernard Katz writes to Professor Elie Wiesel, apologizing for a delayed response to a letter from the previous August. Katz explains that he initially had doubts about his ideas for the Paris Conference, believing them to be utopian and based on an unrealistic assessment of human nature, leading him to decide not to pursue the matter further. However, he was encouraged by a newspaper report on Wiesel's conference, which indicated its success and that participants had made practical proposals. Katz finds this development very interesting and extends his congratulations and best wishes to Wiesel for his venture.

Steffi Schwarcz, néeBirnbaum, was born March 17, 1928 in Berlin, Germany. She was sent to England on March 15, 1939as part of the Kindertransport, with her younger sister and 11 other children. This group was sponsored by Dr. Schlesinger, an English Jew. She briefly mentions her early life, Kristallnacht, and thegeneral atmosphere in Berlin. Steffi describes leaving her parents and the journey to England. The children were put up in a hostel in Shepherd's Hill, Highgate. In September 1939, thechildren were evacuated and dispersed. Steffi and her sister were sent to the home of a young Christian couple in Cuffley, Middlesex. She contrasts the respectful attitude of the foster parents with the pressure to convert put on the Jewish children by the headmistress of the KingsleyBoarding School in Cornwall, run by the Church of England, where the sisters were sent in January 1940, by the Jewish Refugee Committee. A local woman intervened on behalf of Jewish children in boarding schools. She enabled them to remain Jewish, observe the Jewish holidays in her home, and to get a Jewish education. Steffi mentions that Jewish girls older than 16 were sent to the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. Steffi discusses in detail the long-term emotional effects of the Nazi era and the stay in English boarding schools on herself and her sister. She now lives in Israel with her husband and daughter.

Sophie Roth, née Parille, born in Zloczow, Poland, was one of four children in a religious family. She refers to the German bombing and invasion in 1939, and the killing of doctors and teachers by Germans, aided by Poles and Ukranians. She worked in forced labor camps in Lazczow and Kosice until 1942, when she was shot and lost a leg. A Polish teenager, whom she tutored, travelled to Lemberg to obtain a prosthesis for her. She describes hiding in a fish barrel and then in a Polish peasant’s stable with her family, in exchange for money, jewelry and the deed to their house. She details near-starvation and suffocating subliminal existence under a manure pile with nine other people. Forced to leave by their sadistic “benefactor”, her family found shelter in an unheated basement of a Polish teacher, Elena Sczychovska, and her husband, who was the local police commandant. Fourteen people were sheltered there during the last year of the war. She mentions the hostility of neighbors when her family returned to their home. In 1947, she married a Hebrew teacher who lost his religious faith and his entire family. She remained a believer, attributing her survival to God’s miracles. A daughter was born in Paris in 1952 and the family emigrated, aided by HIAS and by Jewish Family Service in Philadelphia. She reads several poems, recalling horrendous Holocaust memories, into the interview. Interviewee: ROTH, Sophie Date: March 9, 1988