Germans to share at Holocaust service

Two German diplomats are taking part in a Jewish temple’s community Holocaust remembrance service Sunday with a sense of personal responsibility to make sure the extermination of people never happens again, anywhere.

The murder of 11 million people by Nazi Germany occurred over 70 years ago during World War II, but with fewer survivors of concentration camps still alive, it becomes harder to remember the unequaled horror in the interest of combating bigotry in today’s world, said Rabbi Ken Aronowitz of Temple Emanu-El. “It still goes on,” he said, referring to neo-Nazis and other hate groups.

He hopes the community will come to the Yom Hashoah service at the Pali Highway temple, to be attended by representatives of various faiths, Gov. David Ige and Mayor Kirk Caldwell. Musicians will perform, and candles will be lit in honor of the 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews killed, he said. (Although an international remembrance day, originated by the United Nations, is celebrated Jan. 27, Israel established its own memorial day to follow Passover.)

It starts at 7 p.m. with a multimedia presentation of “A Light in the Darkness: The Kindertransport,” about the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution to England before the outbreak of World War II. It will be narrated by Denis Salle, the Hawaii-based honorary consul of Germany. Special guest Stefan Schlueter, the German consul general in San Francisco, will introduce a photo exhibit, “The German Roots of Zionism,” now touring the U.S.

In an interview at Temple Emanu-El this week, both diplomats spoke of the weight of responsibility — as opposed to national “guilt” — they carry as Germans to never allow the Holocaust to be repeated anywhere. Schlueter said, “It’s not that you need to be revengeful, but every day, somehow I’m reminded of the Holocaust. It’s not history; it’s actually your everyday life.”

Schlueter, who oversees seven states including Hawaii, said he would not call himself a “proud German, but I am proud of how we deal with our history after World War II.” For decades “there was this horrible silence on the part of perpetrators as well as the victims, but fortunately we’re overcoming that,” he said. Salle, born in the 1960s in Germany, also remembers when the prevailing attitude was “we don’t want to talk about it; I had nothing to do with it.”

But, Schlueter said, in the 1970s and ’80s, young people started digging into archives to find out what happened to Jews in their own villages, and more people began talking and then teaching about it. “It was like a whole wave; it was an absolutely mind-boggling experience for many,” he said. Nevertheless, “we’ve seen in the last decades, internationally and in Germany, an ignorance about the Holocaust which ranges from outright denial to simply ignorance that you didn’t know what happened,” Schlueter added.

He is proud that more and more Jewish survivors and their descendants, however, have applied for German passports and citizenship (taken away by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler). He believes this to be “an acknowledgement of the way we treated our past. … Whenever I hand over a certificate of citizenship to one of the descendants, to me this is a little victory over Hitler,” Schlueter said. Salle agreed: “For us it’s a great honor; they want to be part of Germany again. It’s part of reconciliation.”

Aronowitz said that while the service will reflect on “the worst in humanity,” it also recognizes the “incredible lifesaving effort” of people who risked their lives for the Kindertransport, the exodus of children escaping without their parents from several European countries from 1938 to 1939. “It’s sad that in many instances these children were the only members of their family to survive,” he added.

Salle said the Kindertransport is not well known, but a heart-wrenching story that he has long wanted to publicize. Salle’s stepfather had become friends with a key person, Hannah Bergas, who helped rescue 65 Jewish children five years before the Kindertransport started. When Hitler seized power in 1933, progressive headmistress Anna Essinger saw the danger to her Jewish students and arranged to relocate 65 children to a school she would found at Bunce Court in Kent, England. Bergas was Essinger’s vice principal and the surrogate mother to the students during the school’s 15 years of operation in England.

In 1938 the British government agreed to the Kindertransport, and the two women were instrumental in settling hundreds of the refugees as they arrived in England, taking 10 into their school. Salle’s stepfather stayed in contact with Bergas until she died in 1987, leaving him a journal and many photos taken at the school. Salle once met Bergas in 1981 and also interviewed two former students who live in Germany and England.