Arcata resident Ursula Osborne and her siblings were spared from the Nazi invasion when her parents sent her to England. Last year, Osborne translated the memoir of Holocaust survivor Heinrich F. Liebrecht, a family friend, and is working to create several copies of a scrapbook given to her mother and father to pass down to the younger generations in her family. The scrapbook contains dozens of photographs and calligraphy depicting a number of people who lived in a place referred to as "The Oasis," the former home of a rich Jewish family, the Warburgs, that was opened to the Jewish community in Hamburg, Germany. Osborne researched photographs of the musicians and intellectuals who visited the home, as well as Liebrecht's wife, Elisabeth Hertz, who made the scrapbook along with artist and calligrapher Friedrich Alder. She went on to try to find out what happened to them during the Holocaust. Osborne, who had relatives who also died in camps, received Liebrecht's book in 1996 after he had already died. "I cried a lot," she said about reading it the first time. "Then I read it again and I cried again." She decided to translate it for a woman who was helping her in her archive work, but quickly realized that there may be greater public interest in it. "I think it would make really good supplemental reading for students of religion, history, political science and genocide," she said.
Papua New Guinea RPCV Ursula Osborne née Solmitz decided to translate "Not To Hate But To Love That Is What I Am Here For" for a woman who was helping her in her archive work, but quickly realized that there may be greater public interest in it
Views of the Holocaust: Memories of Nazi rule in Europe still strong after 70 years as Humboldt County residents give testimony to high school students
John Driscoll and Donna Tam/The Times-Standard
Posted: 04/11/2010 01:30:20 AM PDT
Leon Berliner was 5 years old when the Nazis began to bomb his hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, in May 1940.
He lived in his grandfather's house near the Central Railway Station, a target for German bombers, and it was clear that his family would have to flee to evade the coming Nazi invasion. There was a particular sense of urgency for the family because they were Jewish.
"From that morning on, there were five years of darkness in a sense," Berliner told a group of Eureka High School students in Jennifer Dean-Mervinski's class on Monday.
Today marks Holocaust Remembrance Day in the United States, part of the National Days of Remembrance, which includes a reading of the names of men, women, and children killed during the Holocaust at the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Much of Berliner's history in Europe was recently written by Academy of the Redwoods student Kai Neander, part of an effort to preserve stories of people who lived through the Holocaust and are still alive.
The account written by Neander about Berliner is part of the California State Assembly Holocaust Memorial Project arranged by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin of Palo Alto. Each year, assembly members of each district are asked to locate a Holocaust survivor and a student to write about them. The Assembly then holds a floor ceremony. This year it will be on April 19.
Berliner and his sister Elvire made for the outskirts of Antwerp with
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their mother Golda Chariton that May day in 1940. They jumped aboard a train, packed into a cattle car for two days. Chariton was cut by a rusty nail on a board, and quickly developed blood poisoning. They got off the train in Dieppe, France, to find a hospital. Chariton was treated by hospital staff, but just a few days later the family was kicked out of the facility as the Germans advanced on Dieppe.
As they headed to the train again, Luftwaffe airplanes began bombing Dieppe, including the hospital they'd just left. They hunkered under a train car to take shelter, looking back at the burning remains of the hospital.
"We don't know if anybody survived," Berliner said. "We only knew that we survived. Why? Because we were Jews."
The three made it into rural France to stay at a farmhouse owned by relatives. But in the late summer, France surrendered to Germany, and French government trucks began rounding up Jews and others to bring to concentration camps. Recebedou in Southern France was the first camp the family was taken to, and it was there that Berliner's long blond hair was shaved off.
Over the course of two years, they were moved several times. In the Rivesaltes camp in the French Pyrenees, Berliner's mother hatched a plan to escape, as news of Nazi death camps began to go around.
Chariton had befriended a one-armed man who offered to help them escape Rivesaltes, and one night the four of them snuck through the fence and fled. But Berliner said he was holding up the others, and that the one-armed man left them behind.
"I was slowing them down something terrible," Berliner said.
Chariton soon turned herself in to the authorities, and the family was brought back to the camp.
Chariton was later able to get the Swiss Red Cross to take her daughter, but not her son. So one night Chariton arranged for a young nurse to distract a gate guard, and Berliner slipped out and ran. A pickup truck loaded with carrots stopped to pick him up, and Berliner jumped in and hid in the pile of carrots.
Berliner never saw his mother again. He eventually was taken in, along with other children, by a Catholic orphanage. Berliner was transferred from one family to another until the war was over, when his aunt claimed him and brought him back to Belgium. In 1948, the 13-year-old took a Liberty ship to the United States. He became a citizen, was educated, served in the U.S. Army, and married his wife Diane. The couple moved to Humboldt County in 1971, and now runs the music store Berliner's Cornucopia in downtown Eureka.
Berliner is now 75. Only recently he learned that his mother was gassed at the most infamous of all Nazi death camps, Auschwitz.
Asked by students Monday what he thought of those who deny the Holocaust, Berliner's brow furrowed with frustration.
"I would not have believed that, in my lifetime, the death of 6 million could be erased," Berliner said.
But as some Holocaust deniers work to rewrite history, others work to keep it intact.
Arcata resident Ursula Osborne and her siblings were spared from the Nazi invasion when her parents sent her to England. Last year, Osborne translated the memoir of Holocaust survivor Heinrich F. Liebrecht, a family friend, and is working to create several copies of a scrapbook given to her mother and father to pass down to the younger generations in her family.
The scrapbook contains dozens of photographs and calligraphy depicting a number of people who lived in a place referred to as "The Oasis," the former home of a rich Jewish family, the Warburgs, that was opened to the Jewish community in Hamburg, Germany.
Osborne researched photographs of the musicians and intellectuals who visited the home, as well as Liebrecht's wife, Elisabeth Hertz, who made the scrapbook along with artist and calligrapher Friedrich Alder. She went on to try to find out what happened to them during the Holocaust.
One page was dedicated to a girl they nicknamed "Shirley of the Temple" because of her curls and smiling face. Osborne said she, her sister and her mother did not survive the camp they were sent to.
Another photograph shows a young Liebrecht at a train station in Berlin.
Liebrecht's memoir, "Not to Hate But To Love That is What I Am Here For," illustrates his experience during the Holocaust, during which he was beaten and interrogated in camp. His wife Elisabeth committed suicide after their young daughter was killed in a gas chamber.
Osborne, who had relatives who also died in camps, received Liebrecht's book in 1996 after he had already died.
"I cried a lot," she said about reading it the first time. "Then I read it again and I cried again."
She decided to translate it for a woman who was helping her in her archive work, but quickly realized that there may be greater public interest in it.
"I think it would make really good supplemental reading for students of religion, history, political science and genocide," she said.
Eureka resident Marianne Pennykamp agreed.
She, too, was able to escape before being sent to a concentration camp and said Liebrecht's memoir is one of the most gripping camp survivor stories she's ever read.
"That book helped me to walk in the shoes that I've never been able to before," she said.
John Driscoll covers natural resources/industry. He can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll@times-standard.com.
