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Among the Canadians who could say they owe their life to the World War II diplomat Carl Lutz, the so-called Swiss Schindler, is the Vancouver physician and author Gabor Mate. At age one, he was brought by his mother to the Glass House, a factory in Budapest that served as a safehouse for Jews. There his mother was able to arrange to have her infant transferred to relatives already in hiding. This mother-son pair was ultimately reunited in Canada. The Glass House was one of numerous "safe houses" Lutz was able to establish wherein Jews could claim diplomatic immunity but, in fact, there were actually several other diplomats in Hungary who were taking similar measures to safeguard Jews. These included the Spanish Charge d'Affairs, Angel Sanz Briz, who saved the lives of Sepharic Jews and became the subject of a dramatic film by Luis Oliveros, The Budapest Angel.
By October of 1944, the Nazis were making raids on Jewish homes in Hungary. The Danube was strewn with Jewish corpses. Operating from the Swiss embassy, the Vice-Consul Carl Lutz negotiated with the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, to enable him to issue "protective letters" for Jews to emigrate. More than 2,000 Jews received temporary sanctuary in a former glass factory, living in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions, hoping to be processed. Another survivor, thanks to the interventions of Carl Lutz, was Andras Spiegel, who changed his name to Andrew Simon and became the producer for the long-running CBC Radio program Cross Country Check-up. "I thank him for my own life and my parents' lives," said Simon in 2018. "All the thousands of Jews he saved." Carl Lutz has been credited with saving the lives of between 40,000 and 60,000 Jews but he is far less known as a saviour than the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the German businessman Oskar Schindler and Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania.
Charlotte Schaille's Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (Columbia University Press 2017), co-authored with Agnes Hirschi, has recounted Carl Lutz's Holocaust rescue operations, as verified by Jewish eyewitnesses in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States. As the head of the foreign interests division in the Swiss legation in Budapest, it is estimated that Lutz -- with the help of his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, Moshe Krausz, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zurcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement -- issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses as annexes of the Swiss Legation during World War II, between March 1944 and February 1945. Born in London near the outset of World War II, Schaille's co-author Agnes Hirschi was raised in Budapest and spent two months in a bomb shelter with the Lutz family. Her mother Madga married Carl Lutz in 1949 and so he became Agnes' father in Switzerland. Yad Vashem accorded Carl Lutz "righteous among the nations" status in 1964.
Charlotte Schallie has also co-edited After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (University of Regina Press 2020). Along with "new" Holocaust survivor stories, purportedly some of the last in living memory to be collected, this composite volume combines Jewish scholarship, activism and poetry with perspectives on Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada as well as internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II. As an Associate Professor and Department Chair in the department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Charlotte Schallie is an expert in contemporary German, Austrian and Swiss culture and literature; as well as diasporic, transnational and postcolonial literature. Her research interests include post-1945 diasporic and transcultural writing/filmmaking, memory studies, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, as well as teaching and learning about the Holocaust.
At the outset of 2020, Schallie developed a new dialogical-reflective pedagogy in Holocaust and Human Rights education to foster new collaborations and intercultural exchanges. Schallie's project entitled "Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education" expands upon a literary form that was first explored in B.C. by David Lester with his graphic novel, The Listener, in 2011. Specifically, she has instigated collaborations for new, Holocaust-themed graphic novels. "If you read a graphic novel," she told CBC's All Points West, "it is as if you're watching and reading a movie at the same time. Visual storytelling in graphic narratives is especially effective for life stories and memories of survivors who were children during the Holocaust, as images often tend to be so deeply imprinted in a child survivor's memory." Under Schallie's direction, graphic novelists have been paired with four survivors: Emmie Arbel of Kiryat Tiv'on in Israel; Nicole and Rolf Kamp in Amsterdam, Holland; David Schaffer of Vancouver. After his family was deported to Transnistria, Schaffer survived the Holocaust as a boy in Romania. Miriam Libicki, a graphic novelist based in Vancouver, is paired with him. Her own grandfather, also a survivor, died three years prior to the project and she regrets not have learned his Holocaust story.
"We have fewer and fewer survivors left," Miriam Libicki told All Points West, "and I think it's really important to have the stories first and to not only have them as documents, but to know what the survivors themselves think is important about their stories, what they care about, what are the lessons or the facts they want future generations to take from this story."
BOOKS
Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (Columbia University Press, 2017) With Agnes Hirschi; Unter Schweizer Schutz. Zeitzeugen berichten. Zurich: Limmat Verlag, 2020.
After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (University of Regina Press, 2020). Co-edited with Helga Thorson and Andrea van Noord
But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (UTP, 2022) $29.95 9781487526849. Edited by Charlotte Schallié. Illustrations by Barbara Yelin, Gilad Seliktar and Miriam Libicki.
[BCBW 2022] HolocaustLit
CAPTIONS
Charlotte Schallie (left), Holocaust survivor David Schaffer and graphic artist Miriam Libicki at Schaffer's home in Vancouver on Jan. 3, 2020. (Mike Morash/University of Victoria)
Sample of a pass issued by Carl Lutz. Carl Lutz (with glasses).
But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust Edited by Charlotte Schallié. Art by Barbara Yelin, Gilad Seliktar and Miriam Libicki
(UTP/New Jewish Press $29.95)
Review by Beverly Cramp
The troubles for David Schaffer and his family began in 1939 when he’d barely started grade two. His teacher came to the Schaffer home to tell them that David, a prize-winning student, could not go back to school. As an ally of Nazi Germany, the Romanian government was expelling Jewish children from state-run classrooms.
Less than a year later, Schaffer’s family and great-grandmother were ordered to leave their comfortable house because Jews were no longer allowed to live in rural areas. “In the morning we had a home and a nice garden,” says Schaffer. “By that night, we owned only what we could carry on a horse cart.”
The horrors grew. Forced into a ghetto, the family was ordered to board a train by soldiers with bayonets. “Sick people on stretchers had to be dragged there,” says Schaffer who remembers his frail and confused great grandmother, on a makeshift rickshaw, asking, “Why did you bring me here?” She couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
At their first stop in the town of Atari, Schaffer’s family was put in a room of a looted house with smashed windows. A previous occupant, who had clearly been wounded, had written “They are killing us” in Hebrew on the wall in his blood.
Later, a forced march. David Schaffer’s great grandmother had to be left behind as she could not walk. Even though soldiers said his great grandmother would be taken to a nearby asylum, Schaffer knew what it meant. “The reality is we left her in the ditch near the road. She knew. That was the end of a life. One of the six million.”
Schaffer’s father realized they had to get away, and the family snuck into the forest that night, wandering lost. They united with another Jewish family on the run and eventually found a farmer’s summer kitchen, where they were allowed to stay. But with little food or warmth, they grew weak. David gathered wood sticks to barter for milk and bread in the nearby village.
Foraging was dangerous as many areas were out of bounds to Jews; they could be beaten, even killed, if caught. David’s father was once bashed in the head with a rifle butt, splitting his ear down the middle. But they continued to resist and break rules to get food.
“I have a problem with the word resistance,” says Schaffer years later. “The sad truth is that whoever stood up or actively resisted was immediately killed. Instead, many people resisted by transgressing the rules … we resisted because we wanted to survive … living through the horror was resistance.”
Eventually, Russian soldiers freed Romania from the German army. A relative gave the Schaffer family shelter until they found an empty house to stay in as it still wasn’t safe to return to the house they were forced to leave in 1940.
David Schaffer’s harrowing story, titled “A kind of resistance” and illustrated by Vancouver-based Miriam Limbicki, is one of three graphic stories in But I Live. The other illustrated stories concern two Jewish boys, Nico and Rolf Kamp, who were hidden from German soldiers in thirteen different Amsterdam homes, titled “Thirteen Secrets” and illustrated by Gilad Seliktar of Israel; and Emmie Arbel, who survived in not one but two concentration camps in the title story, illustrated by Barbara Yelin, who lives in Munich, Germany.
The use of graphic narratives allows the survivors’ stories to seamlessly shift from an elder relating their story where it is plain to see how the Holocaust has impacted them all their life — to when they were a wide-eyed child faced with unspeakable terror, as reflected in Emmie Arbel’s story. At one point, illustrations show the artist, Yelin walking with Arbel to find a coffee shop where they could sit down and talk. Arbel’s favourite café is closed, and it’s hard to find another one she likes. As Arbel tells Yelin, “that’s too crowded for me. … I told you, I don’t like to be among many people... And I need to sit near the door with my back to the wall.”
Then the next panel depicts decades earlier as women and children are lined up at a concentration camp. “I remember us standing for hours,” says Arbel, now drawn as a little girl with shorn hair, “… and mother fainted.”
Arbel continues: “You know, even as a child, you learn quickly how to survive. I knew I must stay standing. I should not do anything. Because I knew if I’d go to her they would shoot me. And I was afraid. I was so afraid she was dying.”
Here the art shifts back to Arbel as an older woman sitting at her desk, playing solitaire on her computer. But she is still remembering that horrible day. “So I stayed standing, she says to herself.”
The graphic narratives in But I Live are powerful and relate the Holocaust stories in profound and intense ways that words alone cannot. Created for middle readers, this book is suitable for adults too.
The combination of child Holocaust survivor stories as told to illustrators and completed as graphic narratives was the brainchild of UVic professor Charlotte Schallié. She noticed that her thirteen-year-old son, who was resistant to reading, was taking an active interest in graphic novels. And Schallié was also interested in telling Holocaust survivor stories in new ways. “I felt we need to find some new approaches to testimony collections, telling the story of the Holocaust in a richer, deeper way,” she says.
“It is very important for us that graphic novelists are not just illustrators but are actively co-creating the history with the survivors. Visual storytelling in graphic narratives is especially effective for life stories of survivors who were children during the Holocaust, as images often tend to be deeply imprinted in a child survivor’s memory.
“The multiplicity of experiences is expressed through graphic style, color, and even the individual accents of the speakers. Each unique voice and experience is framed and represents one less voice lost to time.”
Many others participated in this collaborative book project over a three-year period, such as Holocaust and human rights education professionals, historians, student teachers, high school teachers, librarians and archivists.
In addition to the book, all the work from the project, such as drafts of drawings, and film and audiotapes of interviews, is preserved at UVic’s libraries “for future researchers to consult,” says Schallié. “The stories of the survivors, however, live on through this publication.” 9781487526849
Beverly Cramp is publisher of BC BookWorld.
[BCBW 2022]
By October of 1944, the Nazis were making raids on Jewish homes in Hungary. The Danube was strewn with Jewish corpses. Operating from the Swiss embassy, the Vice-Consul Carl Lutz negotiated with the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, to enable him to issue "protective letters" for Jews to emigrate. More than 2,000 Jews received temporary sanctuary in a former glass factory, living in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions, hoping to be processed. Another survivor, thanks to the interventions of Carl Lutz, was Andras Spiegel, who changed his name to Andrew Simon and became the producer for the long-running CBC Radio program Cross Country Check-up. "I thank him for my own life and my parents' lives," said Simon in 2018. "All the thousands of Jews he saved." Carl Lutz has been credited with saving the lives of between 40,000 and 60,000 Jews but he is far less known as a saviour than the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the German businessman Oskar Schindler and Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania.
Charlotte Schaille's Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (Columbia University Press 2017), co-authored with Agnes Hirschi, has recounted Carl Lutz's Holocaust rescue operations, as verified by Jewish eyewitnesses in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States. As the head of the foreign interests division in the Swiss legation in Budapest, it is estimated that Lutz -- with the help of his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, Moshe Krausz, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zurcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement -- issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses as annexes of the Swiss Legation during World War II, between March 1944 and February 1945. Born in London near the outset of World War II, Schaille's co-author Agnes Hirschi was raised in Budapest and spent two months in a bomb shelter with the Lutz family. Her mother Madga married Carl Lutz in 1949 and so he became Agnes' father in Switzerland. Yad Vashem accorded Carl Lutz "righteous among the nations" status in 1964.
Charlotte Schallie has also co-edited After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (University of Regina Press 2020). Along with "new" Holocaust survivor stories, purportedly some of the last in living memory to be collected, this composite volume combines Jewish scholarship, activism and poetry with perspectives on Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada as well as internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II. As an Associate Professor and Department Chair in the department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Charlotte Schallie is an expert in contemporary German, Austrian and Swiss culture and literature; as well as diasporic, transnational and postcolonial literature. Her research interests include post-1945 diasporic and transcultural writing/filmmaking, memory studies, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, as well as teaching and learning about the Holocaust.
At the outset of 2020, Schallie developed a new dialogical-reflective pedagogy in Holocaust and Human Rights education to foster new collaborations and intercultural exchanges. Schallie's project entitled "Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education" expands upon a literary form that was first explored in B.C. by David Lester with his graphic novel, The Listener, in 2011. Specifically, she has instigated collaborations for new, Holocaust-themed graphic novels. "If you read a graphic novel," she told CBC's All Points West, "it is as if you're watching and reading a movie at the same time. Visual storytelling in graphic narratives is especially effective for life stories and memories of survivors who were children during the Holocaust, as images often tend to be so deeply imprinted in a child survivor's memory." Under Schallie's direction, graphic novelists have been paired with four survivors: Emmie Arbel of Kiryat Tiv'on in Israel; Nicole and Rolf Kamp in Amsterdam, Holland; David Schaffer of Vancouver. After his family was deported to Transnistria, Schaffer survived the Holocaust as a boy in Romania. Miriam Libicki, a graphic novelist based in Vancouver, is paired with him. Her own grandfather, also a survivor, died three years prior to the project and she regrets not have learned his Holocaust story.
"We have fewer and fewer survivors left," Miriam Libicki told All Points West, "and I think it's really important to have the stories first and to not only have them as documents, but to know what the survivors themselves think is important about their stories, what they care about, what are the lessons or the facts they want future generations to take from this story."
BOOKS
Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (Columbia University Press, 2017) With Agnes Hirschi; Unter Schweizer Schutz. Zeitzeugen berichten. Zurich: Limmat Verlag, 2020.
After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era (University of Regina Press, 2020). Co-edited with Helga Thorson and Andrea van Noord
But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (UTP, 2022) $29.95 9781487526849. Edited by Charlotte Schallié. Illustrations by Barbara Yelin, Gilad Seliktar and Miriam Libicki.
[BCBW 2022] HolocaustLit
CAPTIONSCharlotte Schallie (left), Holocaust survivor David Schaffer and graphic artist Miriam Libicki at Schaffer's home in Vancouver on Jan. 3, 2020. (Mike Morash/University of Victoria)
Sample of a pass issued by Carl Lutz. Carl Lutz (with glasses).
But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust Edited by Charlotte Schallié. Art by Barbara Yelin, Gilad Seliktar and Miriam Libicki
(UTP/New Jewish Press $29.95)
Review by Beverly Cramp
The troubles for David Schaffer and his family began in 1939 when he’d barely started grade two. His teacher came to the Schaffer home to tell them that David, a prize-winning student, could not go back to school. As an ally of Nazi Germany, the Romanian government was expelling Jewish children from state-run classrooms.
Less than a year later, Schaffer’s family and great-grandmother were ordered to leave their comfortable house because Jews were no longer allowed to live in rural areas. “In the morning we had a home and a nice garden,” says Schaffer. “By that night, we owned only what we could carry on a horse cart.”
The horrors grew. Forced into a ghetto, the family was ordered to board a train by soldiers with bayonets. “Sick people on stretchers had to be dragged there,” says Schaffer who remembers his frail and confused great grandmother, on a makeshift rickshaw, asking, “Why did you bring me here?” She couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
At their first stop in the town of Atari, Schaffer’s family was put in a room of a looted house with smashed windows. A previous occupant, who had clearly been wounded, had written “They are killing us” in Hebrew on the wall in his blood.
Later, a forced march. David Schaffer’s great grandmother had to be left behind as she could not walk. Even though soldiers said his great grandmother would be taken to a nearby asylum, Schaffer knew what it meant. “The reality is we left her in the ditch near the road. She knew. That was the end of a life. One of the six million.”
Schaffer’s father realized they had to get away, and the family snuck into the forest that night, wandering lost. They united with another Jewish family on the run and eventually found a farmer’s summer kitchen, where they were allowed to stay. But with little food or warmth, they grew weak. David gathered wood sticks to barter for milk and bread in the nearby village.
Foraging was dangerous as many areas were out of bounds to Jews; they could be beaten, even killed, if caught. David’s father was once bashed in the head with a rifle butt, splitting his ear down the middle. But they continued to resist and break rules to get food.
“I have a problem with the word resistance,” says Schaffer years later. “The sad truth is that whoever stood up or actively resisted was immediately killed. Instead, many people resisted by transgressing the rules … we resisted because we wanted to survive … living through the horror was resistance.”
Eventually, Russian soldiers freed Romania from the German army. A relative gave the Schaffer family shelter until they found an empty house to stay in as it still wasn’t safe to return to the house they were forced to leave in 1940.
David Schaffer’s harrowing story, titled “A kind of resistance” and illustrated by Vancouver-based Miriam Limbicki, is one of three graphic stories in But I Live. The other illustrated stories concern two Jewish boys, Nico and Rolf Kamp, who were hidden from German soldiers in thirteen different Amsterdam homes, titled “Thirteen Secrets” and illustrated by Gilad Seliktar of Israel; and Emmie Arbel, who survived in not one but two concentration camps in the title story, illustrated by Barbara Yelin, who lives in Munich, Germany.
The use of graphic narratives allows the survivors’ stories to seamlessly shift from an elder relating their story where it is plain to see how the Holocaust has impacted them all their life — to when they were a wide-eyed child faced with unspeakable terror, as reflected in Emmie Arbel’s story. At one point, illustrations show the artist, Yelin walking with Arbel to find a coffee shop where they could sit down and talk. Arbel’s favourite café is closed, and it’s hard to find another one she likes. As Arbel tells Yelin, “that’s too crowded for me. … I told you, I don’t like to be among many people... And I need to sit near the door with my back to the wall.”
Then the next panel depicts decades earlier as women and children are lined up at a concentration camp. “I remember us standing for hours,” says Arbel, now drawn as a little girl with shorn hair, “… and mother fainted.”
Arbel continues: “You know, even as a child, you learn quickly how to survive. I knew I must stay standing. I should not do anything. Because I knew if I’d go to her they would shoot me. And I was afraid. I was so afraid she was dying.”
Here the art shifts back to Arbel as an older woman sitting at her desk, playing solitaire on her computer. But she is still remembering that horrible day. “So I stayed standing, she says to herself.”
The graphic narratives in But I Live are powerful and relate the Holocaust stories in profound and intense ways that words alone cannot. Created for middle readers, this book is suitable for adults too.
The combination of child Holocaust survivor stories as told to illustrators and completed as graphic narratives was the brainchild of UVic professor Charlotte Schallié. She noticed that her thirteen-year-old son, who was resistant to reading, was taking an active interest in graphic novels. And Schallié was also interested in telling Holocaust survivor stories in new ways. “I felt we need to find some new approaches to testimony collections, telling the story of the Holocaust in a richer, deeper way,” she says.
“It is very important for us that graphic novelists are not just illustrators but are actively co-creating the history with the survivors. Visual storytelling in graphic narratives is especially effective for life stories of survivors who were children during the Holocaust, as images often tend to be deeply imprinted in a child survivor’s memory.
“The multiplicity of experiences is expressed through graphic style, color, and even the individual accents of the speakers. Each unique voice and experience is framed and represents one less voice lost to time.”
Many others participated in this collaborative book project over a three-year period, such as Holocaust and human rights education professionals, historians, student teachers, high school teachers, librarians and archivists.
In addition to the book, all the work from the project, such as drafts of drawings, and film and audiotapes of interviews, is preserved at UVic’s libraries “for future researchers to consult,” says Schallié. “The stories of the survivors, however, live on through this publication.” 9781487526849
Beverly Cramp is publisher of BC BookWorld.
[BCBW 2022]
