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SLYOMOVICS, Susan
Vera Hollander was born in 1926 in the village of Bushtyna, on the Tisa River, now part of western Ukraine. She survived the Auschwitz, Plaszow and Markkleeberg camps with her mother, Gizella Elefant Hollander. Upon liberation, they disagreed about applying for the post-World War II Wiedergutmachung ("to make good again") reparations.
The varying attitudes to restitution gave rise to How to Accept German Reparations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) by Vera's daughter, Susan Slyomovics. The title is misleading. It's one of the more engaging academic books you'll ever come across largely because Slyomovics writes so well and her two female subjects are so interesting.
We learn, for instance, that Gizella bought cemetery plots wherever she lived, each time imaging her temporary residence as permanent. First, there was the family plot in the hometown cemetery in Bishtine, former Czechoslovakia. Only once did Vera ever succeed in dissuading her mother Gizella from buying a place to buried with her name on it—that was in Prague from 1945 until 1948. She went on to purchase plots in Budapest, Havana, Montreal, Brooklyn and, finally, Netanya, Israel. There she now rests next to the second of her three husbands.
Gizella persisted in presenting herself as younger than she was. She would toss her head and say, "Raboyne shel oylam [Master of the Universe] knows my age and that’s enough for me." She later claimed this approach saved her life when she passed through the selection process at Auschwitz, chosen for work detail with her daughter Vera instead of being sent to the gas chambers.
Whereas as there some twenty monuments to the Holocaust in Montreal's Jewish cemeteries, it wasn’t until 1987 that a major Holocaust memorial monument was erected in Vancouver’s Orthodox Jewish cemetery (actually located in New Westminster. The cost of commemorating a murdered ancestor’s name was only $200 in 1987. "In my photograph taken during family visits to the dead," writes Slyomovics, "my mother gestures to her father’s name, Samuel Hollander… My maternal grandfather’s grave is nowhere on earth, yet his name is inscribed everywhere my mother resides."
Such are the deviations from the subject of reparations that can be found in Slymomics' fascinating study of her mother and grandmother under the guise of an academic work.
Vera studied medicine at Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia where she met her husband, Josef Slyomovics, a Czech furrier and veteran of the Czech Brigade that was attached to the British Army during WW II. After the Soviet takeover over Czechoslovakia in 1948, they fled to a DP camp in Salzburg, Austria where their son Peter Slyomovics, was born. Canada granted the three of them immigration and they arrived to Montreal in October 1948.
Vera's involvements with B'nai Brith led her to become the organization's vice-president in 1957. As chair of public relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, she worked with anti-racist and anti-hatred groups. She moved with her family to Vancouver in 1969. She co-founded the CJC's Holocaust Committee and worked to teach youth the importance of respecting diversity. In 2002, Vera Slyomovics received the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award.
Interviewed by Robert Krell in 1981 for VHCS archives, Vera Slyomovics described hiding in a church, then giving herself up to the Gestapo so she could join the Mateszalka ghetto to be with her family. She proceeded to describe her Auschwitz experiences, including the selection process and "showers."
Transferred to forced labour at the nearby Plaszow camp, near Krakow, Vera received help from other prisoners before being transferred back to Auschwitz. She further described the cruelty and abuse from female guards, conditions at the camp, and how she and her mother helped each other.
Later transported to Markkleeberg, seven km. south of Leipzig, Vera was one of approximately one thousand Jewish women and 250 French, female resistance fighters who did forced labour in a factory. Collectively, they were subjected to a death march to Theresienstadt. During a bombing, some of the former members of the French underground helped her escape the deadly transport with her mother. They returned to the original camp where they were liberated by American troops.
In her interview, Vera recalled a chance meeting in Australia with the Jewish kapo (prison camp guard) who tattooed her identity number onto her arm. She also discussed her own number and tattoo; her identity as a survivor; why she did not feel survivor guilt or a need for revenge; her experiences watching Holocaust films and Holocaust-related television programmes; the shortcomings of such depictions; her Jewish identity; the importance of Israel; her horrific experiences with her children; and her motivations for rendering testimony.
Vera Hollander died on January, 25, 2014. Her daughter, Susan Slyomovics, received her Ph.D at the University of California Berkeley in 1985. As a professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, Susan Slyomovics has written and edited various books including The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village about the former Palestinian village called Ein Houd. It received the 1999 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 1999 Chicago Folklore Prize. In it she examines how and why two villages — Jewish Ein Hod and a renewed Arab Ein Houd — continue to exist in dynamic opposition.
In her How to Accept German Reparations Slyomovics examines differences between German reparations and French restitution for Algerian Jewry; then raises the even thornier issues as to whether or not reciprocal reparation models ought to be made morally and financially applicable for victims of contemporary conflicts between Israel and Palestine.
"When human rights violations are presented primarily in material terms," she writes, "acknowledging an indemnity claim becomes one way for a victim to be recognized. At the same time, indemnifications provoke a number of difficult questions about how suffering and loss can be measured: How much is an individual life worth? How much or what kind of violence merits compensation? What is "financial pain," and what does it mean to monetize concentration camp survivor syndrome?"
After the Holocaust, Germany created the largest sustained redress program in history, amounting to more than $60 billion. Unlike her daughter Vera, Gizella Elefant Hollander accepted German reparations money as soon as it was offered in the 1950s and died in Netanya, Israel, in 1999, at ninety-six, living for more than fifty years on her monthly stipend of approximately $600.
BOOKS:
The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Daughter and mother, Prague, 1946
BOOKS:
Vera Hollander was born in 1926 in the village of Bushtyna, on the Tisa River, now part of western Ukraine. She survived the Auschwitz, Plaszow and Markkleeberg camps with her mother, Gizella Elefant Hollander. Upon liberation, they disagreed about applying for the post-World War II Wiedergutmachung ("to make good again") reparations.
The varying attitudes to restitution gave rise to How to Accept German Reparations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) by Vera's daughter, Susan Slyomovics. The title is misleading. It's one of the more engaging academic books you'll ever come across largely because Slyomovics writes so well and her two female subjects are so interesting.
We learn, for instance, that Gizella bought cemetery plots wherever she lived, each time imaging her temporary residence as permanent. First, there was the family plot in the hometown cemetery in Bishtine, former Czechoslovakia. Only once did Vera ever succeed in dissuading her mother Gizella from buying a place to buried with her name on it—that was in Prague from 1945 until 1948. She went on to purchase plots in Budapest, Havana, Montreal, Brooklyn and, finally, Netanya, Israel. There she now rests next to the second of her three husbands.
Gizella persisted in presenting herself as younger than she was. She would toss her head and say, "Raboyne shel oylam [Master of the Universe] knows my age and that’s enough for me." She later claimed this approach saved her life when she passed through the selection process at Auschwitz, chosen for work detail with her daughter Vera instead of being sent to the gas chambers.
Whereas as there some twenty monuments to the Holocaust in Montreal's Jewish cemeteries, it wasn’t until 1987 that a major Holocaust memorial monument was erected in Vancouver’s Orthodox Jewish cemetery (actually located in New Westminster. The cost of commemorating a murdered ancestor’s name was only $200 in 1987. "In my photograph taken during family visits to the dead," writes Slyomovics, "my mother gestures to her father’s name, Samuel Hollander… My maternal grandfather’s grave is nowhere on earth, yet his name is inscribed everywhere my mother resides."
Such are the deviations from the subject of reparations that can be found in Slymomics' fascinating study of her mother and grandmother under the guise of an academic work.
Vera studied medicine at Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia where she met her husband, Josef Slyomovics, a Czech furrier and veteran of the Czech Brigade that was attached to the British Army during WW II. After the Soviet takeover over Czechoslovakia in 1948, they fled to a DP camp in Salzburg, Austria where their son Peter Slyomovics, was born. Canada granted the three of them immigration and they arrived to Montreal in October 1948.
Vera's involvements with B'nai Brith led her to become the organization's vice-president in 1957. As chair of public relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, she worked with anti-racist and anti-hatred groups. She moved with her family to Vancouver in 1969. She co-founded the CJC's Holocaust Committee and worked to teach youth the importance of respecting diversity. In 2002, Vera Slyomovics received the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award.
Interviewed by Robert Krell in 1981 for VHCS archives, Vera Slyomovics described hiding in a church, then giving herself up to the Gestapo so she could join the Mateszalka ghetto to be with her family. She proceeded to describe her Auschwitz experiences, including the selection process and "showers."
Transferred to forced labour at the nearby Plaszow camp, near Krakow, Vera received help from other prisoners before being transferred back to Auschwitz. She further described the cruelty and abuse from female guards, conditions at the camp, and how she and her mother helped each other.
Later transported to Markkleeberg, seven km. south of Leipzig, Vera was one of approximately one thousand Jewish women and 250 French, female resistance fighters who did forced labour in a factory. Collectively, they were subjected to a death march to Theresienstadt. During a bombing, some of the former members of the French underground helped her escape the deadly transport with her mother. They returned to the original camp where they were liberated by American troops.
In her interview, Vera recalled a chance meeting in Australia with the Jewish kapo (prison camp guard) who tattooed her identity number onto her arm. She also discussed her own number and tattoo; her identity as a survivor; why she did not feel survivor guilt or a need for revenge; her experiences watching Holocaust films and Holocaust-related television programmes; the shortcomings of such depictions; her Jewish identity; the importance of Israel; her horrific experiences with her children; and her motivations for rendering testimony.
Vera Hollander died on January, 25, 2014. Her daughter, Susan Slyomovics, received her Ph.D at the University of California Berkeley in 1985. As a professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, Susan Slyomovics has written and edited various books including The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village about the former Palestinian village called Ein Houd. It received the 1999 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 1999 Chicago Folklore Prize. In it she examines how and why two villages — Jewish Ein Hod and a renewed Arab Ein Houd — continue to exist in dynamic opposition.
In her How to Accept German Reparations Slyomovics examines differences between German reparations and French restitution for Algerian Jewry; then raises the even thornier issues as to whether or not reciprocal reparation models ought to be made morally and financially applicable for victims of contemporary conflicts between Israel and Palestine.
"When human rights violations are presented primarily in material terms," she writes, "acknowledging an indemnity claim becomes one way for a victim to be recognized. At the same time, indemnifications provoke a number of difficult questions about how suffering and loss can be measured: How much is an individual life worth? How much or what kind of violence merits compensation? What is "financial pain," and what does it mean to monetize concentration camp survivor syndrome?"
After the Holocaust, Germany created the largest sustained redress program in history, amounting to more than $60 billion. Unlike her daughter Vera, Gizella Elefant Hollander accepted German reparations money as soon as it was offered in the 1950s and died in Netanya, Israel, in 1999, at ninety-six, living for more than fifty years on her monthly stipend of approximately $600.
BOOKS:
The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Daughter and mother, Prague, 1946
BOOKS:
The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
Women and Power in the Middle East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) -- Co-editor
The Living Medina in the Maghrib: The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture, and History (London: Frank Cass, 2001) - Editor
The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
Fatna El Bouih, Talk of Darkness (University of Texas Press, 2008) – Co-translator (Arabic)
Making Peace: Reparations and Human Rights (Left Coast Press, 2008) -- Co-editor
Waging War and Clifford Geertz in Morocco (Routledge, 2010) - Editor
Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (Indiana University Press, 2013) - Co-author
