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"I received a comb today. What a luxurious and civilized feeling it is, to be able to use one again."
*
The clarity and intelligence of Simon Schochet's writing makes his only book, Feldafing, a hidden gem for those who seek to appreciate the pain and resilience of spirit that was required to survive the Holocaust.
In this brief excerpt, he recalls a woman who arrived at the camp for displaced persons called Feldafing, in 1945, when she was in her early twenties, heavily pregnant. The equanimity of Schochet's tone is masterful and riveting.
"Despite her condition and ragged clothing, she was immediately noticed, for she had long brown, thickly-plaited hair and an unusually luminous and spirited face. She lived in a room with a few elderly women, and shortly after giving birth, when her body resumed its normal proportions, she took off and left Feldafing for Munich. Since then, she is often spoke about by the men who have seen her in Munich, mostly with the Americans, riding about in their cars and dressed in American clothes, high heels and heavily made-up. They call her 'Kurva' (whore) and then praise her beauty, and with a mixture of anger, jealousy and pity, condemn her for not having found a husband amongst us instead of running about with the American soldiers.
"Only today I heard the story of this young woman from one of the men who was in hiding with her in a little Ukrainian village during the war. A group of well-to-do Jews were hidden by a Ukrainian in an abandoned barn. Among them was this young beauty with her fiance. The war dragged on, and the money used to buy their safety drained away. At last when there was little left, the Ukrainian farmer demanded a new sort of payment in exchange for his protection. It was the young woman. She was to be placed at his disposal, to save the others. She consented.
"They were liberated by the Russians and followed the troops westward in order to leave that swinish place. After a few days of the pilgrimage towards greener and freer pastures, the girl's fiance disappeared. Shortly thereafter, she left the group and was lost in the chaos despite a desperate search by the others who had shared in her grief and were alive because of her. Her fellow captive had tried to communicate with her when he had met her in Munich, but she had refused to recognize him.
"'And so,' said the man who was telling the story, 'don't call her a kurva. The world is a kurva.'"
*
Born in Poland of Jewish parents in 1926, Simon Schochet was a prisoner in Dachau, where all his family perished, before he was sent to Feldafing, in Bavaria, the first all-Jewish, DP [Displaced Persons] camp in the U.S.-controlled portion of post-war Germany.
Opened by the U.S. Army, near the town of Tutzing, in May of 1945, Feldafing was created as an emergency measure to accommodate Hungarian Jews from liberated cattle cars near the Tutzing railway station. Some of the Nazi personnel who had deliberately delayed the embarkation of the train with its doomed prisoners (from the Mittergars, Muldorf Wald Lager (Ampfing) and Muhldorf-Mettenheim concentration camps) were accorded lenient treatment by the Americans.
In Feldafing, using the voice of an anonymous narrator, Simon Schochet recalled his experiences in the camp serving as a teacher of English and History for his fellow concentration camp survivors, all of whom were attempting to adapt to post-war life. A progressive educational mandate for Feldafing was encouraged by Army's Civil Affairs commander, First Lieutenant Irving J. Smith, a Jewish soldier and peacetime attorney. Feldafing benefited from separate visits in 1945 by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in September and David Ben-Gurion in October. In 1946, Feldafing boasted several newspapers, its own magazines, theatre troupes, an orchestra and its own camp court system for 4,000 Jews. By the time control of the facilities was shifted from the U.S. military to the German government in 1951, the population of Feldafing had dwindled to 1,500 Jews.
Schochet immigrated to the U.S. where he taught history, married, had two children and worked as a commodities broker. He remained obsessed with trying to unravel the truth about a massacre that occurred in April of 1940 in Katyn, Poland. Specifically, he wanted to uncover the extent to which Jews had been victimized in the mass murder by Soviet troops. Eventually, in his paper entitled 'An attempt to identify the Polish-Jewish officers who were prisoners at Katyn', Schochet identified approximately 800 Polish Jewish officers who were murdered. He used a list of names compiled by the historian Adam Moszynski and another compiled by German investigators in April of 1943.
The tragic story of the Katyn massacres remains little-known. It was the government of Nazi Germany that announced the discovery of mass graves in April of 1943. After Stalin's administration completely denied all responsibility, the USSR claimed the Nazis had killed the victims until 1990. This was known as the Katyn Lie.
The religion of the soldiers was not noted on either the Officers' Almanacs or the list compiled by the Germans, but Schochet painstakingly estimated there were at least 700, and perhaps as many as 800, Jewish officers in the three internment camps of Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkov whose internees were killed. He was able to identify 262 names of Jewish officers from the Kozielsk internment camp alone, about five percent of the officer population. The lone reference to Jewish faith was the name of Major Baruch Steinberg, Chief Rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces, who was originally imprisoned at Starobielsk. He was among the first to be massacred, on April 9, 1940. But not all Polish military prisoners and intelligentsia were killed by the Soviets. The Polish historian Zibigniew Siemaszko calculated that between 20-25% of all Poles deported by the Soviets from Eastern Poland to the camps and settlements in Siberia were Polish Jews.
On October 14, 1992, Rudolf Pikhoya, chairman of Russia's Archives Commission and a personal envoy of Boris Yeltsin, delivered to the Polish President Lech Walesa, a rare parcel containing forty-two, previously secret documents about the Katyn massacres of April and May, 1940 when approximately 22,000-to-26,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia were killed by Soviet Security Services, specifically NKVD. This Soviet verification of responsibility for a hitherto denied mass extinction under Stalin would have come as no surprise to the sophisticated researcher and little-known author Simon Schochet, who contributed his research materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and died in 2011.
Schochet's very readable yet little-known memoir was one of the final books published by Cherie Smith, who had started November House in 1969, as a 36-year-old mother of two. Her publishing company was named November House after the month in which she was born. As one of the five founding members of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., Smith released twenty-one titles before closing up shop in 1983. In 1984, she founded (and became the namesake for) the Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver and she later turned her hand to writing her own family memoir, Mendel’s Children (University of Calgary Press 1997), a history that charts the course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over 100 years.
Cherie Smith's grandfather Solomon Steiman was sent to Viatka in the Urals, 450 miles north-east of Moscow, in 1914, as a political exile. His wife and family later joined him there. Born in Latvia in 1898, Cherie's father Iser Steiman was sent to Canada in 1912 when he was 14. His experiences as a teacher in northern Manitoba, starving and freezing, are recounted in Mendel's Children. As a physician he started King Edward Hospital in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, where he married Laura Shastky. Their daughter, Cherie, was born November 13, 1933. She died of cancer on July 13, 1999.
BOOKS:
Feldafing (November House 1983)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTO: Simon Schochet, upper left, with his fellow teachers at Feldafing in 1948.
*
The clarity and intelligence of Simon Schochet's writing makes his only book, Feldafing, a hidden gem for those who seek to appreciate the pain and resilience of spirit that was required to survive the Holocaust.
In this brief excerpt, he recalls a woman who arrived at the camp for displaced persons called Feldafing, in 1945, when she was in her early twenties, heavily pregnant. The equanimity of Schochet's tone is masterful and riveting.
"Despite her condition and ragged clothing, she was immediately noticed, for she had long brown, thickly-plaited hair and an unusually luminous and spirited face. She lived in a room with a few elderly women, and shortly after giving birth, when her body resumed its normal proportions, she took off and left Feldafing for Munich. Since then, she is often spoke about by the men who have seen her in Munich, mostly with the Americans, riding about in their cars and dressed in American clothes, high heels and heavily made-up. They call her 'Kurva' (whore) and then praise her beauty, and with a mixture of anger, jealousy and pity, condemn her for not having found a husband amongst us instead of running about with the American soldiers.
"Only today I heard the story of this young woman from one of the men who was in hiding with her in a little Ukrainian village during the war. A group of well-to-do Jews were hidden by a Ukrainian in an abandoned barn. Among them was this young beauty with her fiance. The war dragged on, and the money used to buy their safety drained away. At last when there was little left, the Ukrainian farmer demanded a new sort of payment in exchange for his protection. It was the young woman. She was to be placed at his disposal, to save the others. She consented.
"They were liberated by the Russians and followed the troops westward in order to leave that swinish place. After a few days of the pilgrimage towards greener and freer pastures, the girl's fiance disappeared. Shortly thereafter, she left the group and was lost in the chaos despite a desperate search by the others who had shared in her grief and were alive because of her. Her fellow captive had tried to communicate with her when he had met her in Munich, but she had refused to recognize him.
"'And so,' said the man who was telling the story, 'don't call her a kurva. The world is a kurva.'"
*
Born in Poland of Jewish parents in 1926, Simon Schochet was a prisoner in Dachau, where all his family perished, before he was sent to Feldafing, in Bavaria, the first all-Jewish, DP [Displaced Persons] camp in the U.S.-controlled portion of post-war Germany.
Opened by the U.S. Army, near the town of Tutzing, in May of 1945, Feldafing was created as an emergency measure to accommodate Hungarian Jews from liberated cattle cars near the Tutzing railway station. Some of the Nazi personnel who had deliberately delayed the embarkation of the train with its doomed prisoners (from the Mittergars, Muldorf Wald Lager (Ampfing) and Muhldorf-Mettenheim concentration camps) were accorded lenient treatment by the Americans.
In Feldafing, using the voice of an anonymous narrator, Simon Schochet recalled his experiences in the camp serving as a teacher of English and History for his fellow concentration camp survivors, all of whom were attempting to adapt to post-war life. A progressive educational mandate for Feldafing was encouraged by Army's Civil Affairs commander, First Lieutenant Irving J. Smith, a Jewish soldier and peacetime attorney. Feldafing benefited from separate visits in 1945 by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in September and David Ben-Gurion in October. In 1946, Feldafing boasted several newspapers, its own magazines, theatre troupes, an orchestra and its own camp court system for 4,000 Jews. By the time control of the facilities was shifted from the U.S. military to the German government in 1951, the population of Feldafing had dwindled to 1,500 Jews.
Schochet immigrated to the U.S. where he taught history, married, had two children and worked as a commodities broker. He remained obsessed with trying to unravel the truth about a massacre that occurred in April of 1940 in Katyn, Poland. Specifically, he wanted to uncover the extent to which Jews had been victimized in the mass murder by Soviet troops. Eventually, in his paper entitled 'An attempt to identify the Polish-Jewish officers who were prisoners at Katyn', Schochet identified approximately 800 Polish Jewish officers who were murdered. He used a list of names compiled by the historian Adam Moszynski and another compiled by German investigators in April of 1943.
The tragic story of the Katyn massacres remains little-known. It was the government of Nazi Germany that announced the discovery of mass graves in April of 1943. After Stalin's administration completely denied all responsibility, the USSR claimed the Nazis had killed the victims until 1990. This was known as the Katyn Lie.
The religion of the soldiers was not noted on either the Officers' Almanacs or the list compiled by the Germans, but Schochet painstakingly estimated there were at least 700, and perhaps as many as 800, Jewish officers in the three internment camps of Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkov whose internees were killed. He was able to identify 262 names of Jewish officers from the Kozielsk internment camp alone, about five percent of the officer population. The lone reference to Jewish faith was the name of Major Baruch Steinberg, Chief Rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces, who was originally imprisoned at Starobielsk. He was among the first to be massacred, on April 9, 1940. But not all Polish military prisoners and intelligentsia were killed by the Soviets. The Polish historian Zibigniew Siemaszko calculated that between 20-25% of all Poles deported by the Soviets from Eastern Poland to the camps and settlements in Siberia were Polish Jews.
On October 14, 1992, Rudolf Pikhoya, chairman of Russia's Archives Commission and a personal envoy of Boris Yeltsin, delivered to the Polish President Lech Walesa, a rare parcel containing forty-two, previously secret documents about the Katyn massacres of April and May, 1940 when approximately 22,000-to-26,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia were killed by Soviet Security Services, specifically NKVD. This Soviet verification of responsibility for a hitherto denied mass extinction under Stalin would have come as no surprise to the sophisticated researcher and little-known author Simon Schochet, who contributed his research materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and died in 2011.
Schochet's very readable yet little-known memoir was one of the final books published by Cherie Smith, who had started November House in 1969, as a 36-year-old mother of two. Her publishing company was named November House after the month in which she was born. As one of the five founding members of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., Smith released twenty-one titles before closing up shop in 1983. In 1984, she founded (and became the namesake for) the Jewish Book Festival in Vancouver and she later turned her hand to writing her own family memoir, Mendel’s Children (University of Calgary Press 1997), a history that charts the course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over 100 years.
Cherie Smith's grandfather Solomon Steiman was sent to Viatka in the Urals, 450 miles north-east of Moscow, in 1914, as a political exile. His wife and family later joined him there. Born in Latvia in 1898, Cherie's father Iser Steiman was sent to Canada in 1912 when he was 14. His experiences as a teacher in northern Manitoba, starving and freezing, are recounted in Mendel's Children. As a physician he started King Edward Hospital in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, where he married Laura Shastky. Their daughter, Cherie, was born November 13, 1933. She died of cancer on July 13, 1999.
BOOKS:
Feldafing (November House 1983)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
PHOTO: Simon Schochet, upper left, with his fellow teachers at Feldafing in 1948.
