Walter Ziffer (born 5 March 1927) is a Czech-American author, engineer, and Holocaust survivor. [1] He is the author of multiple books, including Confronting the Silence: A Holocaust Survivor's Search for God, and has spoken regularly throughout western North Carolina about his experiences in the Holocaust. [1]
Ziffer was born in Těšín, Czechoslovakia. In 1942, as a young teenager, he was seized from his home and taken to a Jewish Ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic. Soon after arriving in the Jewish Ghetto, he fell in love with a blonde girl named Lydia, and spent nearly all of his free time with her. After a few weeks of being together, Lydia told Walter that she and her family were going to attempt to flee the ghetto and seek asylum in the Soviet Union. Before she left, she gave him a golden pendant from her necklace engraved with the words "I love you". Days after Lydia's escape, members of the Jewish community informed Ziffer's father that Lydia and her parents had been killed. [2]
Soon separated from his family, Ziffer was sent to seven Nazi concentration camps throughout the war. [3] In his book Confronting the Silence: A Holocaust Survivor's Search for God, Ziffer tells many stories about his time in the camps. During his time in a camp in Brande, located in Silesia, Poland, he was favored by an inmate commander named Pompe. [4] This commander provided him with extra bread that had been stolen from other inmates. He was forced to do things like clean up dead bodies within the wash barracks. Some of his engineering skills dated from his time while enslaved working in factories. [2]
At the age of 18, he was finally liberated by Soviet troops and eventually was able to reunite with his parents and some of his siblings. He returned home and apprenticed as a mechanic, then years later moved to the U.S. with only five dollars to his name. [3] After immigrating to the United States, Ziffer received an engineering degree from Vanderbilt University, two master's degrees from the Graduate School of Theology of Oberlin College and a doctorate in theology from the University of Strasbourg in early Christian history, Biblical Hebrew and comparative religion. [5] [3] He worked as an engineer for General Motors. [3]
In Ziffer's later years, his work mostly revolved around his teachings and lecturing at various higher education institutions and writings regarding Christianity's views towards Judaism, and guest lecturing about his experiences in the Holocaust. [1] He published The Birth of Christianity from the Matrix of Judaism: From Jewish Sect to World Religion in 2006 and The Teaching of Disdain: An Examination of Christology and New Testament Attitudes Toward Jews in 2017 regarding historical points of intersection between Christianity and Judaism which caused negativity and hatred.
In his personal memoir, Confronting the Silence: A Holocaust Survivor's Search for God, he expands upon his conviction that he does not believe that God or a higher power saved him from death during the Holocaust, but rather that it was pure luck that he survived the seven concentration camps to which he was sent. He once said in an interview, "I cannot subscribe to their view of attributing my survival to God's protection. I do not and wish not to see me singled out in some way by God from the rest of world Jew[s], of whom one-third perished by Hitler and his henchmen during the Holocaust. How could God make me survive while one and a half million innocent children went to their death without God intervening on their behalf?" [6]
Holocaust theology is a body of theological and philosophical debate concerning the role of God in the universe in light of the Holocaust of the late 1930s and early 1940s. It is primarily found in Judaism. Jews were killed in higher proportions than other groups; some scholars limit the definition of the Holocaust to the Jewish victims of the Nazis as Jews alone were targeted for the Final Solution. Others include the additional five million non-Jewish victims, bringing the total to about 11 million. One third of the total worldwide Jewish population were killed during the Holocaust. The Eastern European Jewish population was particularly hard hit, being reduced by ninety percent. While a disproportionate number of Jewish religious scholars were killed, more than eighty percent of the world's total, the perpetrators of the Holocaust did not merely target religious Jews. A large percentage of the Jews killed both in Eastern and Western Europe were either nonobservant or had not received even an elementary level of Jewish education.
Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent-child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver. His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating due to dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah, known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. It is held on the 27th of Nisan, unless the 27th would be adjacent to the Jewish Sabbath, in which case the date is shifted by a day.
Leo Baeck was a 20th-century German rabbi, scholar, and theologian. He served as leader of Reform Judaism in his native country and internationally, and later represented all German Jews during the Nazi era. After the Second World War, he settled in London, in the United Kingdom, where he served as the chairman of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. In 1955, the Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry was established, and Baeck was its first international president. The Leo Baeck Medal has been awarded since 1978 to those who have helped preserve the spirit of German-speaking Jewry in culture, academia, politics, and philanthropy.
The Pianist is a 2002 epic biographical war drama film produced and directed by Roman Polanski, with a script by Ronald Harwood, and starring Adrien Brody. It is based on the autobiographical book The Pianist (1946), a Holocaust memoir by the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, a Holocaust survivor. The film was a co-production by France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland.
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt was a Holocaust survivor, writer of mémoires, and public speaker, who at the age of 16 escaped from the Sobibór extermination camp during the uprising staged by the Jewish prisoners in October 1943. The escape was attempted by about 300 inmates, many of whom were recaptured and killed by the German search squads. Following World War II Blatt lived in Communist Poland until the Polish October. In 1957, he emigrated to Israel, and in 1958 settled in the United States.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Marcinkonys or Marcinkańce Ghetto was a small Jewish ghetto established during the Holocaust in Marcinkonys. It existed from around November 1941 to November 1942 and housed 300 to 400 Jews.
Eliezer Berkovits, was a rabbi, theologian, and educator in the tradition of Orthodox Judaism.
The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.
HKP 562 was the site of a Nazi forced labor camp for Jews in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the Holocaust. It was centered around 47 & 49 Subačiaus Street, in apartment buildings originally built to house poor members of the Jewish community. The camp was used by the German army as a slave labor camp from September 1943 until July 1944.
Jewish resistance under Nazi rule took various forms of organized underground activities conducted against German occupation regimes in Europe by Jews during World War II. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, Jewish resistance was defined as actions that were taken against all laws and actions acted by Germans. The term is particularly connected with the Holocaust and includes a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed, as well as both passive and armed resistance conducted by Jews themselves.
Janowska concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government. The camp was named after the nearby street Janowska in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic.
Joseph Schleifstein is a Polish-born American who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Holocaust at the age of four. He was hidden by his father in a large sack, enabling him to avoid detection by SS guards when arriving at the camp. Other prisoners helped his father keep him hidden and Schleifstein survived until the Americans liberated the camp. After World War II, Schleifstein and his parents emigrated to the United States. He did not discuss his wartime experiences for decades, even with his children. His case gained publicity in 1999 with the anniversary of the 1997 movie Life is Beautiful; it was discovered Schleifstein's story was an inspiration for the script. This led to a search for him and an eventual newspaper interview.
Kurt Bruno Pompe occupied important positions in several forced labor camps for Jews in Silesia during World War II, part of a network of over 160 camps run by an SS organization, Dienststelle Schmelt. The existence of this group of camps is largely unknown to the general public.
The Lutsk Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established in 1941 by the SS in Lutsk, Western Ukraine, during World War II. In the interwar period, the city was known as Łuck and was part of the Wołyń Voivodeship (1921–1939) in the Second Polish Republic.
Jacob Gens was the head of the Vilnius Ghetto government. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked at several jobs, including as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
"Like sheep to the slaughter" is a phrase which refers to the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths during the Holocaust. It derives from a similar phrase in the Hebrew Bible which positively depicts martyrdom in both the Jewish and Christian religious traditions. Opposition to the phrase became associated with Jewish nationalism due to its use in Josippon and by Jewish self-defense groups after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. During the Holocaust, Abba Kovner and other Jewish resistance leaders used the phrase to exhort Jews to fight back. In postwar Israel, some demonized Holocaust survivors as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter" while armed resistance was glorified. The phrase was taken to mean that Jews had not tried to save their own lives, and consequently were partly responsible for their own suffering and death. This myth, which has become less prominent over time, is frequently criticized by historians, theologians, and survivors as a form of victim blaming.
During World War II, some Jewish men and women in concentration camps faced sexual violence, due to wartime discrimination, antisemitism, and genocidal conditions among other reasons. This discrimination happened both inside concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and also outside of the camps. This sexual violence and discrimination happened not only in Germany but throughout Europe in areas that the Germans occupied during the war. Outside of concentration camps, sexual violence happened in many places, including but not limited to Jewish people's homes, Jewish hiding spaces, in public, and at killing sites.
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