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Shanghai, as a place of refuge, saved approximately 17,000 to 18,000 German and Austrian Jews. For one city, this was extraordinary. (Britain took in 70,000 Jews by September 1, 1939 and another 10,000 during the war; Australia took 8,200; South Africa, 3500; Canada, 4000; India, 5000.) When the flow of refugees to Commonwealth countries became a trickle during the war, the significance of Shanghai was much enhanced.
During 1938 and 1939, Jews made the journey to Shanghai via Poland and Russia or by sea, on German and Italian liners. For two years, the seldom-cited diplomat-rescuer Dr. Feng Shan Ho issued life-saving visas to nearly 2000 Jews who requested them from the Chinese Consulate in Vienna, facilitating their escape without permission from either the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin or his superiors in the Chinese government. In 1990, Dr. Feng Shan Ho finally wrote his memoirs, Forty Years of my Diplomatic Life. Born in 1901, he died in 1997.
As a result of this extraordinary migration, Claudia Maria Wiener was born in Shanghai in 1948. (Not all the Jews who made it to Shanghai had Ho-issued visas. Her parents didn’t.) She was baptized an Anglican in Shanghai and immigrated to Canada in 1949 with her parents. She attended UBC and the University of Calgary, completed her doctorate in philosophy and became a journalist under her married name, Claudia Cornwall.
In 1988, Claudia wrote to her uncle in Austria, asking for a photo of her father, Walter Wiener, who had left Vienna in October of 1938, to escape Nazism by emigrating. Walter sailed from Italy on the Conte Rosso to Shanghai where he found work as a financial journalist.
A Christmas card arrived for Claudia in January of 1989. In it, was a photo taken in a garden, showing her father at the age of three or four. "I took the picture out of the card and laid it down, thinking I would frame it and hang it on my bedroom wall." There were also two women in the garden. Claudia began to read her uncle's message offering warm wishes and news about his family. But he also had some more startling information. "The lady standing up was our mother," her uncle wrote, "who died in a concentration camp."
Claudia called her mother, Lore, to ask whether she knew the story.
"Yes," she answered.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" Claudia asked.
"If I have to choose between my loyalty to Daddy and my loyalty to you, " her mother told her. "Daddy comes first. He never wants to talk about it. But now the Pandora's box is open."
But by then, the trauma of those years had ebbed some and Claudia found that her parents were willing to speak about what happened. Her paternal grandparents, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust, and her father and his brother escaped to Shanghai. The Wieners had kept diaries, letters, and other documents in a large black trunk. Though Claudia spoke some German, she had never read the contents because the old German script was difficult to understand. Her mother helped her to translate them. One of the most exciting “finds” was the diary of her maternal grandfather, Willy Frensdorff. Claudia proceeded to piece together her family's origins, making research trips to Germany and Austria to interview remaining family members and visit archives.
Willy Frensdorff, a naval engineer from Bremen, had been incarcerated in Sachsenhausen for three weeks, even though he had converted to Lutheranism and married a non-Jewish wife, Melitta. Six months after his release from the camp, he fled to Shanghai, sailing away on the Sharnhorst. In 1940, his wife and daughter joined him. But Melitta was unable to handle the heat and foreign environment of Shanghai. She returned to Germany, survived the war and eventually reunited with her daughter in Canada.
In Shanghai, Lore, a trained dressmaker, met Walter Wiener in March,1941. In December, sixteen days after the Japanese had taken control of the International Settlement in Shanghai, Lore Frensdorff married Walter Wiener. Details of that era can be found in David Kranzler's Japanese, Nazis and the Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, (1938-1945).
The end result of Claudia Cornwall's curiosity and research was Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Douglas & McIntyre 1995) which received the Hubert Evans Prize for best non-fiction book in B.C. Cornwall's comments in a review she wrote about Barbara Kessel's book Suddenly Jewish (Brandeis University Press, 2000) express her awareness that her own story is far from unusual:
"At first, I thought that I was the only person in the world who had made such a discovery. But I quickly found out this was not so. I kept meeting people who had similar experience or who knew someone who did. Once when I was interviewed on TV about my 'finding', a cameraman, quite literally, was jumping up and down with excitement. As I left the studio, he told me that he had just learned that his father was Jewish. I fell into conversation with a Jehovah's Witness who came to my door and found out that her mother had uncovered Jewish roots. Several years ago, Madelaine Albright rather famously discovered her Jewish family in the Czech Republic. And recently I read that Elvis Presley may have been Jewish. Sometimes I wonder, is everyone Jewish?"
BOOKS:
Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer. Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982.
Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 1995) $22.95 978-1550541151
The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue, 2009) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998 (Mother Tongue, 2011) $29.95
Catching Cancer: The Quest for Its Viral & Bacterial Causes. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), $36 9781442215207; e-book, $35.99 9781442215221
Battling Melanoma: One Couple's Struggle from Diagnosis to Cure (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) US $38 978-1-4422-4515-0
British Columbia in Flames: Stories from a Blazing Summer (Harbour, 2020) $26.95 978-1-55017-894-4
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
*
Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Douglas & McIntyre, 1995) $22.95 978-1550541151
Selected by the American Library Association as one of the year's best books, Claudia Cornwall's Catching Cancer: The Quest for Its Viral & Bacterial Causes (Rowman & Littlefield $36) profiles groundbreaking cancer researchers and describes a link between infections and cancer. "For years, we've thought cancer was the result of lifestyle choices, environmental factors, or genetic mutations," says Cornwall. "But pioneering investigators have begun to change that picture. We now know that infections cause 20 percent of cancers, including liver, stomach, and cervical cancer, which together kill almost 1.8 million people every year. While the idea that you can catch cancer may sound unsettling, it is actually good news. It means antibiotics and vaccines can be used to combat this most dreaded disease. With this understanding, we have new methods of preventing cancer, and perhaps we may be able to look forward to a day when we will no more fear cancer than we do polio or rubella." Catching Cancer features Cornwall's interviews with Nobel Laureates, Harald zur Hausen, Barry Marshall, Robin Warren, as well as other notable scientists, taking the reader inside the research labs to describe discoveries that are altering medical approaches to the confounding disease.
Reader's Digest bought the worldwide (non-exclusive) rights to publish an excerpt from Claudia Cornwall's Battling Melanoma: One Couple's Struggle from Diagnosis to Cure (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). The jacket copy for this fine work cannot be improved upon:
"In June 2013, Gordon Cornwall's melanoma went metastatic and spread to his brain. He and his wife, Claudia, thought it was 'game-over.' But his oncologist encouraged them to look for a clinical trial that might work for his form of melanoma. After embarking on a continent-wide search, they found a study in Texas with spots for just two more patients. They scrambled to get Gordon enrolled, and in August 2013, three days after he had his first infusion, he was astonished to see a lump on his shoulder softening and shrinking. Three months later, in November, a CT-scan revealed that all his tumors had disappeared.
"This story of one couple's battle to beat melanoma illustrates how a new treatment, immunotherapy, can defeat even aggressive forms of the disease. It also shows how patients can access the most advanced therapies by enrolling in clinical trials. Claudia describes Gordon's case and learns from conversations with eminent researchers. She paints a portrait of an illness that is difficult but not impossible to combat. With vivid firsthand accounts from their diaries, as well as Claudia's intimate narrative of the ups and downs of cancer treatment, this book will be a ready resource for melanoma patients and their families. It demonstrates how they can fight the disease medically as well as support each other emotionally and physically."
The review periodical Booklist states:
"Melanoma, a term derived from the Greek for 'black tumor' is a cancer of the skin that is difficult to cure if not caught at an early stage. Canadian Cornwall shares her husband Gordon's struggle with malignant melanoma. Diagnosed in 2012, the tumor appeared as a pimply growth on his left arm and metastasized to other sites, including his brain. She describes the multiple doctors who treated him and their occasional differences in medical opinion. Cornwall concludes, 'It seemed that no one person had a monopoly on the truth or the best course of action.' She details the many scans, biopsies, and surgeries Gordon undergoes along with radiation treatment. Paramount is his participation in a clinical trial with an investigational immunotherapy drug which proves highly effective for Gordon and is later approved by the FDA. Cornwall paints the fight against cancer as truly a team effort. Worry and uncertainty accompany the disease, but standing in its way are the bulwarks hope and love. Cornwall's passionate account highlights the importance of diligence and persistence, hunches and luck."
With a foreword by Tyee editor David Beers, Claudia Cornwall's At the World's Edge-Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998 (Mother Tongue $29.95) is tribute to beat poet and painter turned Renaissance man Curt Lang who met Malcolm Lowry as a teenager and befriended poets Al Purdy, Peter Trower, John Newlove, and Jamie Reid; artists Fred Douglas, David Marshall, and Roy Kiyooka; and musicians Al Neil, and Glenn MacDonald. A street photographer in the early 1970s, he later built boats and fished in the Prince Rupert vicinity. In his forties, he was awarded two patents, and started several companies, within the high-tech industry. He also developed hardware and software for the railroad industry that today is used all over North America. At the World's Edge includes Lang's unpublished photographs of Vancouver, as well as previously unpublished drawings, paintings, and poetry. Claudia Cornwall draws on conversations during her (and her husband's) twelve-year friendship with Curt. 978-1-896949-17-8
Her first book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, was a fantasy for children. In 2009, she co-authored The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue $34.95) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
*
July 22nd, 2022 BCBookLook.com story by Claudia Cornwall
“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.” — Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands
He poses on a patch of dirt in a grove of trees. His hair is short, his head shaved a couple of inches above his ears. He looks straight ahead, doesn’t smile, and holds his hands behind his back. He wears polished boots and an SS uniform with a lightning bolt insignia on his right collar.
I had been trying to learn more about this man for decades. In the beginning, I knew him only as Unterscharführer Arlt. With a rank similar to that of a sergeant’s, he commanded a squad of ten men in the Waffen-SS, stationed in Minsk. The picture of him that arrived at my home in North Vancouver recently was a grainy copy of a photo. Still it made an indelible impression.
My search started nearly 30 years ago when I wrote Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family’s Jewish Past (D&M, 1995). In the book, I described how I discovered that three of my grandparents were Jewish and that two of them (my father’s parents, Rudolf and Regine Wiener) died in the Holocaust. I think my parents, Lore and Walter Wiener, kept the truth from me mostly out of fear that even in Canada, antisemitism was a threat. Three months after they arrived in Vancouver in 1949, a deportation order was issued because they were “not in possession of a proper immigrant visa.” At a hearing, both my parents were asked, “What is your racial origin?” The order was eventually revoked, but the experience was not reassuring.
When I gave readings from my book and talked to people in the audience, I realized that my story was not unique. The Holocaust was over, but many people were still in hiding. I discovered details my parents did not know. Rudolf and Regine Wiener were part of a group of 994 Jews deported from Vienna on May 5, 1942. Their journey began on a third-class passenger train. Then 250 kilometres from their destination, they were transferred to a cattle car. On May 11 at 10:30 in the morning, my grandparents reached Minsk, their final stop. They were taken to a nearby forest and shot.
I also determined that Unterscharführer Arlt led the platoon that killed them. In the UBC library, I located a copy of Unsere Ehre Heisst Treue (“Loyalty is my Honour,” an SS motto). The red leather volume contained SS activity reports. One dated May 17, 1942 confirms that a transport came to Minsk a few days earlier. It is signed “Arlt.” No first name. Below the signature is typed “SS Unterscharführer.”
Arlt stated that on May 4 his group of men started supervising the digging of a hole. He also related, “On May 11 a transport of Jews (1,000 head) from Vienna arrived in Minsk and was taken immediately from the railway station to the pit. The squad was positioned right next to the pit for this purpose.”
As I read Arlt’s report, I imagined the members of the transport holding hands — so many of them, they would have formed a line nearly half a kilometre long. It was harder to think about what actually happened that day: the relentless shooting; the bodies piling up in the pit; the screams. Were my grandparents together at the end? What were their last words? And what about Arlt and his men? What did they do when they were finished? Drink themselves into a stupor? Sleep?
A long chain of commands culminated in the death of my grandparents. Arlt was not the only person responsible. But he was at the end of the chain. Thus, he held a unique significance for me and I wanted to understand his background. Why was he in that forest killing people who had done him no harm? Was Arlt ever investigated for war crimes?
For many years, I couldn’t answer these questions. My book was published in 1995, but I kept looking to see if anything new had emerged about Arlt. In 2013, my cousin in Vienna emailed me to say that Waltraud Barton, whose relatives were also killed near Minsk, was starting a project to commemorate the people murdered there. I wrote to Waltraud hoping she could shed light on the mystery surrounding Arlt. She replied, “This Unterscharführer Arlt is mentioned in some documents. I also tried to find out what happened to him after WW2, but without any success.” She suggested I approach the Austrian Research Agency for Postwar Justice but it couldn’t help either.
Then I came across a historian in Portugal who had written extensively about the deportations and death camps in eastern Europe. He recommended the German Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg, Germany. A staff member informed me that Arlt’s first name was Gerhard. He was born in March 1912 and died in action in February 1944, in Estonia, close to the Russian front. I had always wondered whether he escaped to South America. Now I knew why he had seemed to vanish.
The archivist in Ludwigsburg also put me in touch with another archive in Berlin that houses the SS personnel records. It sent me more reports, memos and — unexpectedly — that picture of Arlt.
In some ways, Arlt was unremarkable. In a short biography that he penned by hand and signed, he recounts that he was born in Gotha, a small medieval town in the centre of Germany. His father, a saddler, was also born there. Arlt left school at 14 and apprenticed as a house painter. He finished his training in 1929 when the Great Depression started. Like millions of Germans, Arlt couldn’t find work for a long time, not until 1936, when he got a job in a factory. He stayed there until the the Second World War broke out in 1939 and the army called him up. He concluded, “In 1940, I joined the Waffen-SS and am still a member today.”
A series of memos in the Berlin dossier revealed that in November 1942, Arlt’s thoughts turned to marriage and to a young woman called Edith Lux. She was just 19, ten years younger than he was and also lived in Gotha — a few steps away from Arlt’s home. For members of the SS, getting married was not simple. Arlt needed to prove that Edith was not Jewish. He supplied the names of two neighbours to vouch for her and sent off an application.
Six months later, on June 4, 1943, Richard Hildebrandt, head of the Race and Settlement Office, wrote back: He needed another guarantor. Hildebrandt did not explain why, although “Lux” is sometimes a Jewish name, so that could have been the reason. Two days later, Arlt responded: “Request that the approval for marriage be sent quickly as I am on leave between June 9 and June 24. I would like to marry while I am back home and therefore, ask that the approval be sent quickly.” His impatience with the bureaucracy is palpable. We all know what that is like. Documents had been lost. Wheels turned slowly. He needed to resend the results of a medical exam and photographs.
I don’t know whether Arlt’s request was granted, but, as I had learned, eight months after Arlt asked for his marriage to be expedited, he was dead on an Estonian battlefield.
That’s why I couldn’t find any prosecution records. However, Joseph Skowranek, one of the men in Arlt’s squad, mentioned him to German police in Krefeld in 1967. This was in the course of an investigation about another former officer in the Waffen-SS. Skowranek was chillingly matter of fact when asked what happened when trucks carrying Jews arrived in Maly Trostenets, a village outside Minsk: “The victims were taken out of the vehicle and then led by the individual shooters to the grave. There they were killed by a shot to the neck.” After reading that the SS shot thousands of Jews in a forest near Minsk, I assumed it was done firing-squad style, with rifles at a distance. Instead, it was up close and personal, an act of perverse intimacy.
Skowranek said that at the end of April or the beginning of May 1942, Arlt drove a truck carrying his platoon, as well as six political prisoners, both men and women, to a forest ten kilometres outside Minsk. The prisoners were forced to dig a grave. When they were done, Arlt ordered his men to burn the prisoners alive. Skowranek protested, saying, “We can’t do that. I would rather shoot the people first, before they are burned.”
My stomach churned as I absorbed this. Arlt’s idea was so cruel, even a fellow member of the notoriously cold-blooded SS was shocked. In the end, Arlt backed off and Skowranek was not punished for objecting to an order. This was not as unusual as you might think. Doris Bergen notes in War and Genocide:
“To this day no one has found an example of a German who was executed for refusing to take part in the killing of Jews or other civilians. Defense attorneys of people accused of war crimes have looked hard for such a case because it would support the claim that their clients had no choice. The Nazi system, however, did not work that way. There were enough willing perpetrators so that coercive force could be reserved for those deemed enemies.”
Martin Cüppers, in Wegbereiter der Shoa, (Pioneers of the Holocaust), maintained Arlt’s group murdered at least 21,000 people between April 22 and Sept. 25, 1942. The squad killed partisans and political prisoners, Jews from the ghettos in and around Minsk, and those like my grandparents who were brought there to be murdered.
Arlt was not a weird loner or outsider. Rooted in his and his father’s community, he wanted to marry the girl who lived around the corner. When he needed someone to vouch for her, he asked his neighbours. His circle was tight-knit. Ordinary individuals created the Holocaust. They were people with wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, friends and neighbours. They worked, were sometimes unemployed, had struggles, as we all do. But they did monstrous things. They were part of a vast machinery of destruction in which, as Cüppers wrote, the “organized annihilation of people had become routine.” Nonetheless, Arlt could have objected. Arlt made a decision; he said “Yes.”
My grandparents were buried in a mass grave. A year and half later, the Germans disinterred the corpses of the tens of thousands of people they had slain near Minsk. In an effort to conceal the atrocities, the Nazis forced Russian prisoners of war to burn the bodies. My grandparents’ bones were pulverized and scattered in a forest, their final resting place irretrievable.
The impulse to honour our dead is old. Archeologists tell us that early humans placed gifts beside corpses and marked their graves as long as 40,000 years ago. But I couldn’t turn to these ancient rituals. Perhaps that is why I felt compelled to tell Rudolf and Regine’s story and search for the man in charge of killing them.
I received three pictures of Arlt: two head shots and one of him amongst the trees. I stared at the photos for a long time. Did Arlt’s file contain them because of his request to marry? Is that why I stumbled upon them? I was not looking for images. Did not anticipate finding them. But through the medium of photography, I looked at the man Rudolf and Regine saw shortly before their death over 80 years ago. I could put a human face to the deed. I thought, “I can come no closer to the truth than this.” My quest finally came to an end.
During 1938 and 1939, Jews made the journey to Shanghai via Poland and Russia or by sea, on German and Italian liners. For two years, the seldom-cited diplomat-rescuer Dr. Feng Shan Ho issued life-saving visas to nearly 2000 Jews who requested them from the Chinese Consulate in Vienna, facilitating their escape without permission from either the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin or his superiors in the Chinese government. In 1990, Dr. Feng Shan Ho finally wrote his memoirs, Forty Years of my Diplomatic Life. Born in 1901, he died in 1997.
As a result of this extraordinary migration, Claudia Maria Wiener was born in Shanghai in 1948. (Not all the Jews who made it to Shanghai had Ho-issued visas. Her parents didn’t.) She was baptized an Anglican in Shanghai and immigrated to Canada in 1949 with her parents. She attended UBC and the University of Calgary, completed her doctorate in philosophy and became a journalist under her married name, Claudia Cornwall.
In 1988, Claudia wrote to her uncle in Austria, asking for a photo of her father, Walter Wiener, who had left Vienna in October of 1938, to escape Nazism by emigrating. Walter sailed from Italy on the Conte Rosso to Shanghai where he found work as a financial journalist.
A Christmas card arrived for Claudia in January of 1989. In it, was a photo taken in a garden, showing her father at the age of three or four. "I took the picture out of the card and laid it down, thinking I would frame it and hang it on my bedroom wall." There were also two women in the garden. Claudia began to read her uncle's message offering warm wishes and news about his family. But he also had some more startling information. "The lady standing up was our mother," her uncle wrote, "who died in a concentration camp."
Claudia called her mother, Lore, to ask whether she knew the story.
"Yes," she answered.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" Claudia asked.
"If I have to choose between my loyalty to Daddy and my loyalty to you, " her mother told her. "Daddy comes first. He never wants to talk about it. But now the Pandora's box is open."
But by then, the trauma of those years had ebbed some and Claudia found that her parents were willing to speak about what happened. Her paternal grandparents, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust, and her father and his brother escaped to Shanghai. The Wieners had kept diaries, letters, and other documents in a large black trunk. Though Claudia spoke some German, she had never read the contents because the old German script was difficult to understand. Her mother helped her to translate them. One of the most exciting “finds” was the diary of her maternal grandfather, Willy Frensdorff. Claudia proceeded to piece together her family's origins, making research trips to Germany and Austria to interview remaining family members and visit archives.
Willy Frensdorff, a naval engineer from Bremen, had been incarcerated in Sachsenhausen for three weeks, even though he had converted to Lutheranism and married a non-Jewish wife, Melitta. Six months after his release from the camp, he fled to Shanghai, sailing away on the Sharnhorst. In 1940, his wife and daughter joined him. But Melitta was unable to handle the heat and foreign environment of Shanghai. She returned to Germany, survived the war and eventually reunited with her daughter in Canada.
In Shanghai, Lore, a trained dressmaker, met Walter Wiener in March,1941. In December, sixteen days after the Japanese had taken control of the International Settlement in Shanghai, Lore Frensdorff married Walter Wiener. Details of that era can be found in David Kranzler's Japanese, Nazis and the Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, (1938-1945).
The end result of Claudia Cornwall's curiosity and research was Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Douglas & McIntyre 1995) which received the Hubert Evans Prize for best non-fiction book in B.C. Cornwall's comments in a review she wrote about Barbara Kessel's book Suddenly Jewish (Brandeis University Press, 2000) express her awareness that her own story is far from unusual:
"At first, I thought that I was the only person in the world who had made such a discovery. But I quickly found out this was not so. I kept meeting people who had similar experience or who knew someone who did. Once when I was interviewed on TV about my 'finding', a cameraman, quite literally, was jumping up and down with excitement. As I left the studio, he told me that he had just learned that his father was Jewish. I fell into conversation with a Jehovah's Witness who came to my door and found out that her mother had uncovered Jewish roots. Several years ago, Madelaine Albright rather famously discovered her Jewish family in the Czech Republic. And recently I read that Elvis Presley may have been Jewish. Sometimes I wonder, is everyone Jewish?"
BOOKS:
Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer. Vancouver: Nerve Press, 1982.
Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 1995) $22.95 978-1550541151
The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue, 2009) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998 (Mother Tongue, 2011) $29.95
Catching Cancer: The Quest for Its Viral & Bacterial Causes. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), $36 9781442215207; e-book, $35.99 9781442215221
Battling Melanoma: One Couple's Struggle from Diagnosis to Cure (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) US $38 978-1-4422-4515-0
British Columbia in Flames: Stories from a Blazing Summer (Harbour, 2020) $26.95 978-1-55017-894-4
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
*
REVIEW
Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past (Douglas & McIntyre, 1995) $22.95 978-1550541151
Selected by the American Library Association as one of the year's best books, Claudia Cornwall's Catching Cancer: The Quest for Its Viral & Bacterial Causes (Rowman & Littlefield $36) profiles groundbreaking cancer researchers and describes a link between infections and cancer. "For years, we've thought cancer was the result of lifestyle choices, environmental factors, or genetic mutations," says Cornwall. "But pioneering investigators have begun to change that picture. We now know that infections cause 20 percent of cancers, including liver, stomach, and cervical cancer, which together kill almost 1.8 million people every year. While the idea that you can catch cancer may sound unsettling, it is actually good news. It means antibiotics and vaccines can be used to combat this most dreaded disease. With this understanding, we have new methods of preventing cancer, and perhaps we may be able to look forward to a day when we will no more fear cancer than we do polio or rubella." Catching Cancer features Cornwall's interviews with Nobel Laureates, Harald zur Hausen, Barry Marshall, Robin Warren, as well as other notable scientists, taking the reader inside the research labs to describe discoveries that are altering medical approaches to the confounding disease.
Reader's Digest bought the worldwide (non-exclusive) rights to publish an excerpt from Claudia Cornwall's Battling Melanoma: One Couple's Struggle from Diagnosis to Cure (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). The jacket copy for this fine work cannot be improved upon:
"In June 2013, Gordon Cornwall's melanoma went metastatic and spread to his brain. He and his wife, Claudia, thought it was 'game-over.' But his oncologist encouraged them to look for a clinical trial that might work for his form of melanoma. After embarking on a continent-wide search, they found a study in Texas with spots for just two more patients. They scrambled to get Gordon enrolled, and in August 2013, three days after he had his first infusion, he was astonished to see a lump on his shoulder softening and shrinking. Three months later, in November, a CT-scan revealed that all his tumors had disappeared.
"This story of one couple's battle to beat melanoma illustrates how a new treatment, immunotherapy, can defeat even aggressive forms of the disease. It also shows how patients can access the most advanced therapies by enrolling in clinical trials. Claudia describes Gordon's case and learns from conversations with eminent researchers. She paints a portrait of an illness that is difficult but not impossible to combat. With vivid firsthand accounts from their diaries, as well as Claudia's intimate narrative of the ups and downs of cancer treatment, this book will be a ready resource for melanoma patients and their families. It demonstrates how they can fight the disease medically as well as support each other emotionally and physically."
The review periodical Booklist states:
"Melanoma, a term derived from the Greek for 'black tumor' is a cancer of the skin that is difficult to cure if not caught at an early stage. Canadian Cornwall shares her husband Gordon's struggle with malignant melanoma. Diagnosed in 2012, the tumor appeared as a pimply growth on his left arm and metastasized to other sites, including his brain. She describes the multiple doctors who treated him and their occasional differences in medical opinion. Cornwall concludes, 'It seemed that no one person had a monopoly on the truth or the best course of action.' She details the many scans, biopsies, and surgeries Gordon undergoes along with radiation treatment. Paramount is his participation in a clinical trial with an investigational immunotherapy drug which proves highly effective for Gordon and is later approved by the FDA. Cornwall paints the fight against cancer as truly a team effort. Worry and uncertainty accompany the disease, but standing in its way are the bulwarks hope and love. Cornwall's passionate account highlights the importance of diligence and persistence, hunches and luck."
With a foreword by Tyee editor David Beers, Claudia Cornwall's At the World's Edge-Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998 (Mother Tongue $29.95) is tribute to beat poet and painter turned Renaissance man Curt Lang who met Malcolm Lowry as a teenager and befriended poets Al Purdy, Peter Trower, John Newlove, and Jamie Reid; artists Fred Douglas, David Marshall, and Roy Kiyooka; and musicians Al Neil, and Glenn MacDonald. A street photographer in the early 1970s, he later built boats and fished in the Prince Rupert vicinity. In his forties, he was awarded two patents, and started several companies, within the high-tech industry. He also developed hardware and software for the railroad industry that today is used all over North America. At the World's Edge includes Lang's unpublished photographs of Vancouver, as well as previously unpublished drawings, paintings, and poetry. Claudia Cornwall draws on conversations during her (and her husband's) twelve-year friendship with Curt. 978-1-896949-17-8
Her first book, Print-Outs: The Adventures of a Rebel Computer, was a fantasy for children. In 2009, she co-authored The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue $34.95) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
*
July 22nd, 2022 BCBookLook.com story by Claudia Cornwall
Picture of a killer
“The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.” — Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands
He poses on a patch of dirt in a grove of trees. His hair is short, his head shaved a couple of inches above his ears. He looks straight ahead, doesn’t smile, and holds his hands behind his back. He wears polished boots and an SS uniform with a lightning bolt insignia on his right collar.
I had been trying to learn more about this man for decades. In the beginning, I knew him only as Unterscharführer Arlt. With a rank similar to that of a sergeant’s, he commanded a squad of ten men in the Waffen-SS, stationed in Minsk. The picture of him that arrived at my home in North Vancouver recently was a grainy copy of a photo. Still it made an indelible impression.
My search started nearly 30 years ago when I wrote Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family’s Jewish Past (D&M, 1995). In the book, I described how I discovered that three of my grandparents were Jewish and that two of them (my father’s parents, Rudolf and Regine Wiener) died in the Holocaust. I think my parents, Lore and Walter Wiener, kept the truth from me mostly out of fear that even in Canada, antisemitism was a threat. Three months after they arrived in Vancouver in 1949, a deportation order was issued because they were “not in possession of a proper immigrant visa.” At a hearing, both my parents were asked, “What is your racial origin?” The order was eventually revoked, but the experience was not reassuring.
When I gave readings from my book and talked to people in the audience, I realized that my story was not unique. The Holocaust was over, but many people were still in hiding. I discovered details my parents did not know. Rudolf and Regine Wiener were part of a group of 994 Jews deported from Vienna on May 5, 1942. Their journey began on a third-class passenger train. Then 250 kilometres from their destination, they were transferred to a cattle car. On May 11 at 10:30 in the morning, my grandparents reached Minsk, their final stop. They were taken to a nearby forest and shot.
I also determined that Unterscharführer Arlt led the platoon that killed them. In the UBC library, I located a copy of Unsere Ehre Heisst Treue (“Loyalty is my Honour,” an SS motto). The red leather volume contained SS activity reports. One dated May 17, 1942 confirms that a transport came to Minsk a few days earlier. It is signed “Arlt.” No first name. Below the signature is typed “SS Unterscharführer.”
Arlt stated that on May 4 his group of men started supervising the digging of a hole. He also related, “On May 11 a transport of Jews (1,000 head) from Vienna arrived in Minsk and was taken immediately from the railway station to the pit. The squad was positioned right next to the pit for this purpose.”
As I read Arlt’s report, I imagined the members of the transport holding hands — so many of them, they would have formed a line nearly half a kilometre long. It was harder to think about what actually happened that day: the relentless shooting; the bodies piling up in the pit; the screams. Were my grandparents together at the end? What were their last words? And what about Arlt and his men? What did they do when they were finished? Drink themselves into a stupor? Sleep?
A long chain of commands culminated in the death of my grandparents. Arlt was not the only person responsible. But he was at the end of the chain. Thus, he held a unique significance for me and I wanted to understand his background. Why was he in that forest killing people who had done him no harm? Was Arlt ever investigated for war crimes?
For many years, I couldn’t answer these questions. My book was published in 1995, but I kept looking to see if anything new had emerged about Arlt. In 2013, my cousin in Vienna emailed me to say that Waltraud Barton, whose relatives were also killed near Minsk, was starting a project to commemorate the people murdered there. I wrote to Waltraud hoping she could shed light on the mystery surrounding Arlt. She replied, “This Unterscharführer Arlt is mentioned in some documents. I also tried to find out what happened to him after WW2, but without any success.” She suggested I approach the Austrian Research Agency for Postwar Justice but it couldn’t help either.
Then I came across a historian in Portugal who had written extensively about the deportations and death camps in eastern Europe. He recommended the German Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg, Germany. A staff member informed me that Arlt’s first name was Gerhard. He was born in March 1912 and died in action in February 1944, in Estonia, close to the Russian front. I had always wondered whether he escaped to South America. Now I knew why he had seemed to vanish.
The archivist in Ludwigsburg also put me in touch with another archive in Berlin that houses the SS personnel records. It sent me more reports, memos and — unexpectedly — that picture of Arlt.
In some ways, Arlt was unremarkable. In a short biography that he penned by hand and signed, he recounts that he was born in Gotha, a small medieval town in the centre of Germany. His father, a saddler, was also born there. Arlt left school at 14 and apprenticed as a house painter. He finished his training in 1929 when the Great Depression started. Like millions of Germans, Arlt couldn’t find work for a long time, not until 1936, when he got a job in a factory. He stayed there until the the Second World War broke out in 1939 and the army called him up. He concluded, “In 1940, I joined the Waffen-SS and am still a member today.”
A series of memos in the Berlin dossier revealed that in November 1942, Arlt’s thoughts turned to marriage and to a young woman called Edith Lux. She was just 19, ten years younger than he was and also lived in Gotha — a few steps away from Arlt’s home. For members of the SS, getting married was not simple. Arlt needed to prove that Edith was not Jewish. He supplied the names of two neighbours to vouch for her and sent off an application.
Six months later, on June 4, 1943, Richard Hildebrandt, head of the Race and Settlement Office, wrote back: He needed another guarantor. Hildebrandt did not explain why, although “Lux” is sometimes a Jewish name, so that could have been the reason. Two days later, Arlt responded: “Request that the approval for marriage be sent quickly as I am on leave between June 9 and June 24. I would like to marry while I am back home and therefore, ask that the approval be sent quickly.” His impatience with the bureaucracy is palpable. We all know what that is like. Documents had been lost. Wheels turned slowly. He needed to resend the results of a medical exam and photographs.
I don’t know whether Arlt’s request was granted, but, as I had learned, eight months after Arlt asked for his marriage to be expedited, he was dead on an Estonian battlefield.
That’s why I couldn’t find any prosecution records. However, Joseph Skowranek, one of the men in Arlt’s squad, mentioned him to German police in Krefeld in 1967. This was in the course of an investigation about another former officer in the Waffen-SS. Skowranek was chillingly matter of fact when asked what happened when trucks carrying Jews arrived in Maly Trostenets, a village outside Minsk: “The victims were taken out of the vehicle and then led by the individual shooters to the grave. There they were killed by a shot to the neck.” After reading that the SS shot thousands of Jews in a forest near Minsk, I assumed it was done firing-squad style, with rifles at a distance. Instead, it was up close and personal, an act of perverse intimacy.
Skowranek said that at the end of April or the beginning of May 1942, Arlt drove a truck carrying his platoon, as well as six political prisoners, both men and women, to a forest ten kilometres outside Minsk. The prisoners were forced to dig a grave. When they were done, Arlt ordered his men to burn the prisoners alive. Skowranek protested, saying, “We can’t do that. I would rather shoot the people first, before they are burned.”
My stomach churned as I absorbed this. Arlt’s idea was so cruel, even a fellow member of the notoriously cold-blooded SS was shocked. In the end, Arlt backed off and Skowranek was not punished for objecting to an order. This was not as unusual as you might think. Doris Bergen notes in War and Genocide:
“To this day no one has found an example of a German who was executed for refusing to take part in the killing of Jews or other civilians. Defense attorneys of people accused of war crimes have looked hard for such a case because it would support the claim that their clients had no choice. The Nazi system, however, did not work that way. There were enough willing perpetrators so that coercive force could be reserved for those deemed enemies.”
Martin Cüppers, in Wegbereiter der Shoa, (Pioneers of the Holocaust), maintained Arlt’s group murdered at least 21,000 people between April 22 and Sept. 25, 1942. The squad killed partisans and political prisoners, Jews from the ghettos in and around Minsk, and those like my grandparents who were brought there to be murdered.
Arlt was not a weird loner or outsider. Rooted in his and his father’s community, he wanted to marry the girl who lived around the corner. When he needed someone to vouch for her, he asked his neighbours. His circle was tight-knit. Ordinary individuals created the Holocaust. They were people with wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, friends and neighbours. They worked, were sometimes unemployed, had struggles, as we all do. But they did monstrous things. They were part of a vast machinery of destruction in which, as Cüppers wrote, the “organized annihilation of people had become routine.” Nonetheless, Arlt could have objected. Arlt made a decision; he said “Yes.”
My grandparents were buried in a mass grave. A year and half later, the Germans disinterred the corpses of the tens of thousands of people they had slain near Minsk. In an effort to conceal the atrocities, the Nazis forced Russian prisoners of war to burn the bodies. My grandparents’ bones were pulverized and scattered in a forest, their final resting place irretrievable.
The impulse to honour our dead is old. Archeologists tell us that early humans placed gifts beside corpses and marked their graves as long as 40,000 years ago. But I couldn’t turn to these ancient rituals. Perhaps that is why I felt compelled to tell Rudolf and Regine’s story and search for the man in charge of killing them.
I received three pictures of Arlt: two head shots and one of him amongst the trees. I stared at the photos for a long time. Did Arlt’s file contain them because of his request to marry? Is that why I stumbled upon them? I was not looking for images. Did not anticipate finding them. But through the medium of photography, I looked at the man Rudolf and Regine saw shortly before their death over 80 years ago. I could put a human face to the deed. I thought, “I can come no closer to the truth than this.” My quest finally came to an end.
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Three Artists
summary
In her incarnation as a literary Florence Nightingale, Mona Fertig has set about rescuing the reputations of little-known B.C. artists-such as her father, George Fertig, who died unheralded in 1983-and sculptor David Marshall. Her next three candidates for revival are Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen.
As Molnar is the only one of trio still living, his self-portrait graces the cover of Fertig's second volume in her Unheralded Artists of B.C. series, The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue $34.95) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson respectively.
Frank Molnar (1936- ) fled from Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and went to the USA where he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1962 he arrived in Vancouver and later met artists David Marshall, Peter Aspell, Georg Schmerholz, Elek Imredy and Jack Akroyd. In 1969 he became one of the first art teachers at Capilano College where he taught life drawing and artistic anatomy for almost 30 years. His students included Charles Van Sandwyk, Cori Creed and Will Rafuse. Today he continues to paint and lives in Vancouver with his wife Sylvia.
Jack Hardman (1923-1996) was born in New Westminster and studied art in Western Washington and at UBC. He married B.C. poet Marya Fiamengo in the 1950s. A sculptor and a printmaker, he was an assistant to Cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko in 1957. Hardman taught many art students in Burnaby in the '60s, and from the mid '70s through the '80s he was the Director of the Burnaby Art Gallery. His friends included artists Joe Plaskett, Jim Willer, Joy Zemel Long, David Marshall and Peter Paul Ochs. He lived in Burnaby where he died in 1996.
LeRoy Jensen (1927- 2005) spent his childhood in China, Japan and Vancouver. He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, as well as with the French cubist Andre L'Hote in Paris. In 1954 he returned to Vancouver to paint and forged a friendship with artists Jack Hardman, George Fertig, David Marshall and Peter Aspell. He was a founding member of Greenpeace and later a member of the Victoria-based Limner group. In 1982 he moved to Salt Spring Island with his family, where he fought for social environmental causes and continued to paint the human condition, especially women, until his death in 2005.
Next year we'll see the release of Fertig's long-in-the-works study of her father and his art, in tandem with the first retrospective exhibition of George Fertig's work at the Burnaby Art Gallery.
978-1-896949-02-4
