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Joseph S. Kutrzeba | |
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Born | Arie Fajwiszys October 11, 1927 |
Died | January 24, 2013 85) New York, United States | (aged
Nationality | Polish-American |
Alma mater | Yale Drama School |
Occupation(s) | theater producer and director |
Spouse(s) | Valerie M. Hageman (1955–1959); Michaela Lacher (from 1979) |
Children | Karen Janina |
Parents |
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Joseph S. Kutrzeba (born Arie Fajwiszys October 11, 1927 – January 24, 2013) was a Polish-American theater producer and director.
Kutrzeba was born on October 11, 1927 in Łódź, Poland. He was the son of Israel Fajwiszys, a composer, and Malka (Hakman) Fajwiszys, both of whom perished in the Holocaust, along with their daughter, Kutrzeba's sister. Israel Fajwiszys was born in 1887 in Yampil, [1] Ukraine. Having graduated from a music conservatoire, he led the choirs of the progressive synagogues in Brody and Tarnów. After studying in Vienna, he was also the leader of the Kraków Tempel Synagogue choir. He came to Łódź from Lviv in 1922 and he became a teacher in both girls' and boys' schools of the Jewish Secondary Schools Society. He was the co-organiser of a singing society "Szir". After the outbreak of World War II he moved to Warsaw, where he volunteered to help an underground military organisation. In the ghetto, with Kutrzeba, he organised a children's choir. Kutzreba's father Israel wrote the music to the poem M'khol Masada by Yitskhok Lamden. In 1937 Israel's girls' chorus won first prize in an all-Poland choral competition. Later in the Warsaw Ghetto, he would lead the children's choir in performances of the song recounting the Jewish resistance and sacrifice under Roman rule. [2]
During the ghetto uprising he was caught and transported together with his daughter to the extermination camp in Poniatowa in the Lublin area, where he was murdered. [3]
Kutrzeba was a member of a teenage resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He escaped and met a priest, Reverend Stanisław Falkowski, who gave him the patriotic Polish name of Joseph Kutrzeba. He found him work as a cowherd with neighboring farmers and helped him get Catholic ID papers. In 1977 Falkowski was honored by Yad Vashem, the international Holocaust heroism remembrance authority. The story of Kutrzeba and Falkowski's fifty year friendship was told in the documentary "Messengers of Hope: The Hidden Children of the Holocaust", produced by Jeff Kamen, Jonathan L. Kessler and Joseph Kutrzeba.
Kutrzeba wrote in his memoir in May 1994: "During the first days of September 1942, at the age of 14, I jumped out of a moving train destined for Treblinka, through an opening (window) of a cattle car loaded to capacity with Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Wandering over fields, forests and villages, at first in the vicinity of Wołomin, and later of Zambrów, I found myself, in late November, in the area of Hodyszewo (near Łomża). Throughout my wandering, the peasants for the most part were amenable to put me up for the night and to feed me—some either suspecting my origins or pressing me to admit it." [4]
He attended L.M. University in Munich, Germany (B.A. equivalent) and at age 19 was the winner of the top literary prize for a World War II short story sponsored by the Polish Combatant Association in London.
Kutrzeba came to the United States in 1950 and served with the U.S. Army in the Korean War (5 decorations; 2 battle stars) and graduated from Yale Drama School in 1956 on 3 scholarships (M.F.A) and N.Y.U (Ph.D.) in 1974.
He was the founder and producer of Queens Playhouse at Flushing Meadow and produced 10 plays.
He was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for best producer of the rock opera The Lieutenant. Kutrzeba remarked that the reason he decided to produce The Lieujtenant was "The show meant a lot to me on human values. I think the theme is one of cardinal importance to our times: The concept of obedience versus exercising one's own conscience." [5] He won the Bronze Award in the International Film and TV Festival in New York for the documentary film "Children in the Holocaust" with Liv Ullmann, 1980 (English and Polish versions). He produced Helena: the Emigrant Queen, 1996 at La Mama and Kosciuszko Foundation. He is the author of the book The Contract: A Life for a Life. [6]
Kutrzeba was married twice, the first time to Valerie M. Hageman, from September 1955 to 1959, with one child, Karen Janina. He was married again on January 14, 1979, to Michaela Lacher.
He recorded his oral history on May 18, 1995, for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum [7]
Kutrzeba died on January 24, 2013 in New York, at the age of 85.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi), with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. From the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the prisoners of the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the ghetto.
Adam Czerniaków was a Polish engineer and senator who was head of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Council (Judenrat) during World War II. He committed suicide on 23 July 1942 by swallowing a cyanide pill, a day after the commencement of mass extermination of Jews known as the Grossaktion Warsaw.
The ghetto uprisings during World War II were a series of armed revolts against the regime of Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1943 in the newly established Jewish ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe. Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos in which they forced the Jews to live. The new ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them. In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources.
The Ringelblum Archive is a collection of documents from the World War II Warsaw Ghetto, collected and preserved by a group known by the codename Oyneg Shabbos, led by Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum. The group, which included historians, writers, rabbis, and social workers, was dedicated to chronicling life in the Ghetto during the German occupation. They worked as a team, collecting documents and soliciting testimonies and reports from dozens of volunteers of all ages. The materials submitted included essays, diaries, drawings, wall posters, and other materials describing life in the Ghetto. The archive assembly began in September 1939 and ended in January 1943; the material was buried in the ghetto in three caches.
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Situated in the city of Łódź, and originally intended as a preliminary step upon a more extensive plan of creating the Judenfrei province of Warthegau, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht. The number of people incarcerated in it was increased further by the Jews deported from Nazi-controlled territories.
Following the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after World War I and during the interwar period, the number of Jews in the country grew rapidly. According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16 percent, to approximately 3,310,000, mainly through migration from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919 and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic grew by nearly half a million, or over 464,000 persons. Jews preferred to live in the relatively-tolerant Poland rather than in the Soviet Union and continued to integrate, marry into Polish Gentile families, to bring them into their community through marriage, feel Polish and form an important part of Polish society. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.
Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several distinct types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit, and destruction ghettos, as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings.
Simcha Rotem was a Polish-Israeli veteran who was a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw and served as the head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which planned and executed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis. He was one of the last two surviving Jewish fighters in the Warsaw uprising and the last surviving fighter from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Ghetto Fighters' House, is a Holocaust museum founded in 1949 by members of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot.
Henryk Woliński (1901–1986) was a member of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, specifically the Armia Krajowa (AK), where he reached the rank of colonel. He was the head of the "Jewish Department" in AK's Bureau of Information and Propaganda. His codename was "Wacław". He was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. He himself harbored in his apartment over 25 Jews for a period going from a few days to several weeks.
Henryk Iwański (1902-1978), nom de guerre Bystry, was a member of the Polish resistance during World War II. He is known for leading one of the most daring actions of the Armia Krajowa in support of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, however later research cast doubts on the veracity of his claims. For his assistance to the Polish Jews Iwański was bestowed the title of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 1964.
Israel Gutman was a Polish-born Israeli historian and a survivor of the Holocaust.
The Grossaktion Warsaw was the Nazi code name for the deportation and mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto during the summer of 1942, beginning on 22 July. During the Grossaktion, Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups, marched through the ghetto, and assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square for what was called in the Nazi euphemistic jargon "resettlement to the East". From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka.
Nathan Rapoport (1911–1987) was a Warsaw-born Jewish sculptor and painter, later a resident of Israel and then the United States.
Henryk Hechtkopf was an artist, painter, and illustrator.
Frumka Płotnicka was a Polish resistance fighter during World War II; activist of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) and member of the Labour Zionist organization Dror. She was one of the organizers of self-defence in the Warsaw Ghetto, and participant in the military preparations for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Following the liquidation of the Ghetto, Płotnicka relocated to the Dąbrowa Basin in southern Poland. On the advice of Mordechai Anielewicz, Płotnicka organized a local chapter of ŻOB in Będzin with the active participation of Józef and Bolesław Kożuch as well as Cwi (Tzvi) Brandes, and soon thereafter witnessed the murderous liquidation of both Sosnowiec and Będzin Ghettos by the German authorities.
Rokhl Auerbakh was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. She wrote prolifically in both Polish and Yiddish, focusing on prewar Jewish cultural life and postwar Holocaust documentation and witness testimonies. She was one of the three surviving members of the covert Oyneg Shabes group led by Emanuel Ringelblum that chronicled daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she initiated the excavation of the group's buried manuscripts after the war. In Israel, she directed the Department for the Collection of Witness Testimony at Yad Vashem from 1954 to 1968.
Shmuel Krakowski, Samuel Krakowski or Stefan Krakowski was an Israeli historian specializing in the Holocaust in Poland. After surviving the Holocaust, Krakowski worked for the intelligence and security services of the People's Republic of Poland. Later he became a Director of the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel.