Dan Hadani, a 100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Still Remembers

Dunek Zloczewski lost everything he had in the Holocaust: his daily routine, his entire family, and his faith in humanity. Along the way, he survived Auschwitz, Mengele's selections, harsh labor, and a death march. He built a new life for himself in Israel as Dan Hadani - a photographer and journalist with an important role in documenting the country's history. For decades, he repressed his memories of the Holocaust and only began telling the story of that part of his life at the age of 92.

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Left: Dunek Zloczewski during his youth in the Lodz Ghetto around 1941. Right: Dan Hadani during a visit to the National Library of Israel, 2024. Photo: David Peretz

Not long ago, Dan Hadani, a veteran journalist and photographer came to visit the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, the new home of the enormous collection of photographs he amassed over his long career. The Dan Hadani Collection is a photographic archive that covers almost every event in the history of the State of Israel during a critical period – from the late 1960s until the year 2000. The archive was handed over to the Library in a meticulously organized state. This was his life’s work, and to maintain its relevance as well as the photos themselves, Hadani decided to transfer the archive in its entirety to the National Library, where the majority of the photos would be made accessible digitally on the NLI website.

In August 2024, Hadani celebrated his 100th birthday. He is sharp, his stories are fascinating, and he has many to tell. He’s had a successful career as a photographer and journalist, but his life story is extraordinary, even aside from that: It includes a happy childhood, as well as years spent in a ghetto, in labor camps, and in an extermination camp, before later creating a new life in Israel, where he reinvented himself more than once. Hadani is a special man. You would never know he was 100 years old from his sharp thinking and eloquence. He has a realistic outlook and doesn’t waste time on regrets or asking questions about the past.

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Dan Hadani at the National Library of Israel, 2024. Photo: David Peretz

What Might Have Been

Twice, Dan Hadani’s family found themselves en route to the Land of Israel, equipped with the necessary certificates granting entry. In 1925, when Dan was still a baby, his family was on its way to a ship bound for Mandatory Palestine. At the port, they happened to meet a good friend of his father’s who had fled there previously and returned. He told them about pogroms by Arabs against the Jews settling in the Promised Land. He made them swear they’d return to Poland and not risk their lives, and that’s exactly what they did. The second time was in 1936. Once all their belongings were finally packed up, Dan’s father Kalman contracted a serious gallbladder infection and their trip was canceled.

We asked Hadani how he felt about his family nearly saving themselves from the awful fate of European Jewry during World War II, and whether he felt sad or angry that in the end, this did not come to pass. He responded decisively, “That was our fate.”

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The only family photo Dan Hadani has with his parents and sister. The photo was taken from a copy of the certificate they were given to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. His mother sent it to her friend already living there, and that is how it was saved and reached Hadani years after it was photographed

Dan Hadani was born just over a hundred years ago, in 1924, as Dunek Zloczewski, in Lodz, Poland. His nuclear family comprised four people – himself, his sister, and their parents. His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. “I grew up in a Jewish and very Zionist home. My father, Kalman, was active in the Poale Tzion party, and as a child, I often went with him to training sessions for groups that were headed to Israel,” he recalls. His mother, Lea, had come from a German-speaking family. Dan and his sister Sabina, who was three years older, knew German fluently, a fact that would save their lives on more than one occasion later on. At the center of their home was a large sewing table where both parents, experts in the craft, used to work. From them, Dan learned about the integrity, professionalism, and love that were part of the work and atmosphere in the home where he grew up. It was a home full of life, warmth and love. When he reminisces about life before the war, he pictures his mother, who used to wait for him every day as he returned from school. They used to prepare lunch together. He learned how to cook by watching what she used to do. To this day, every time Hadani cooks, he is reminded of his mother.

His father Kalman was a special man: an expert craftsman, an active Zionist, and a volunteer for the “Linat Hatzedek” organization which offered first aid to the needy, particularly during nighttime hours. The organization’s offices were housed in their local synagogue. Together, Hadani and his father collected stamps and cultivated an extensive collection that included stamps from all over Europe, including Nazi Germany. The magnificent collection was left behind in Auschwitz along with the rest of the family’s belongings that had been packed in suitcases and confiscated when they were taken from the ghetto in 1944.

The Pogroms Were Just the Beginning

When Hadani tells the story of his childhood in Poland, antisemitism is an inseparable part of it. One example took place one Saturday, during the family’s usual walk to the large public park where he used to play chess. A pogrom broke out suddenly, instigated by Polish hooligans targeting local Jews. Many of those who weren’t killed or injured by the rioters were crushed in the panic as a mass of people rushed toward the park’s exit gate. Hadani and his family weren’t targeted directly because they didn’t appear visibly Jewish, but they were nearly trampled by the fearful mob, managing to get away by the skin of their teeth.

“There was a great deal of antisemitism everywhere,” he says. “More than once, I was accused of killing Jesus, as if thousands of years hadn’t passed.” Growing up in a home that was a place for social, business, and political gatherings, he heard stories of exploitation and fraud that some Jews bragged about. He remembers one story about a tailor who was proud of how he managed to sell a suit he was eager to be rid of to a Polish man. The suit was several sizes too large for him. Every time the Pole looked in the mirror, the tailor pulled the suit in a different direction. Hadani’s parents condemned that sort of behavior, and he developed an aversion to any type of dishonesty.

The Early Days of World War II

Ten days after Poland was conquered by the German army, the Nazis reached Lodz and word spread that they would kill all Jewish men of certain ages. That day is burned into Hadani’s memory. Together with his family, he tried to flee toward Warsaw, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews, without success. The Germans quickly took control over the masses of people trying to flee. Hadani’s family were not visibly Jewish and spoke excellent German, and so they managed to escape the abuses, but that was the first time Hadani witnessed the Nazi barbarism, which still haunts his nightmares to this day: “They undressed elderly Jews, left them with only their tzitzit and beat them in their private parts. They killed people indiscriminately on the sides of the roads,” he recalls, “In my mind I can still see one incident that took place there – a group of three Germans was standing around one Jew, and with tweezers, they removed the hears on his head one by one so that all that remained was the shape of a swastika. It was total sadism and it was there I understood – people are animals.”

For Hadani’s parents, who had great appreciation for German culture, it was extremely difficult to cope with the actions of the Germans, whom they had always seen as a cultured and civilized people. What they saw in those days broke their hearts. Hadani’s father, Kalman, was never himself again and he ultimately died of that heartbreak in 1942, as he lay starving and ill in the Lodz Ghetto.

Hadani doesn’t remember much from the family’s four long years in the Lodz Ghetto, aside from how his father wasted away and died. “We were in survival mode, every man for himself,” he says. “When I moved to Israel, they asked me why we didn’t do anything. How can you explain that you were on an island, cut off ftrom the world?! The Germans slowly got us used to the fact that this was our reality.”

He remembers suffering from hunger in the ghetto, though his family tried to discreetly grow some vegetables on their improvised patio. Food rations were meager – one slice of bread for breakfast and one for dinner. “I am sure my parents took food from their allowance and gave it to me and my sister. I have no proof of this, but I felt it.” He also cannot forget those who took their own lives by throwing themselves on the ghetto’s electric fence. Like most residents of the Lodz Ghetto, he and his sister needed to work for the German army. The only pictures he has from those years are from the factory where they worked making boots for the German soldiers.

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Dunek Zloczewski on the left, in the factory where he made boots for the German army in the Lodz Ghetto, circa 1941
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A photo taken in the boot manufacturing plant in the Lodz Ghetto, circa 1941. On the far left with the yellow patch is the night shift manager. Above him is Hadani’s sister Sabina Zloczewski, and above her is Dunek Zloczewski (today, Dan Hadani)

Dr. Mengele’s Selections

Hadani has written extensively about the nightmarish journey from the ghetto to Auschwitz, on a website that he himself set up: “I didn’t want to write a book because I think more people will read it this way,” he explains. Until that moment, throughout all their time in the ghetto, his mother and sister were never apart from him. In the utter chaos upon the train’s arrival at the platform, he was immediately separated from them. His mother was murdered that day. As far as he was able to clarify, his sister was murdered a few months later in one of the labor camps. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the whole family and miss them. I wasn’t even able to say goodbye to my mother or sister.” Unlike his family, Hadani went through several different labor camps and survived. In each camp, he says miracles, coincidences, luck, and wits helped him stay alive.

After a few weeks in Auschwitz, Dr. Mengele conducted a selection. To prevent any chance of an uprising by the prisoners, the abuse began days before. “We were naked and needed to do frog jumps for hours. Whoever wasn’t up to it received fatal blows.” They were organized into groups of five for the selection by Dr. Mengele, who tended not to speak but merely lift his finger to point at whoever needed to leave the row and join those headed for immediate extermination. When he got to Hadani, Mengele pointed in his direction. Hadani asked in fluent German, “Do you mean me?” Mengele responded, “Keep standing, dog.” The man behind Hadani, the last in the group of five, was out of luck that day and murdered in that very same selection.

Whoever passed the selection was chosen for harsh labor at the factories at the Braunschweig camp, which were converted during the war to create German tanks. The cold temperatures during the winter of 1944 were so extreme that many people’s toes froze. “People would be woken in the night by rats biting them, which they only discovered when the rats moved from the frozen flesh to the living flesh, then the person would wake up screaming. It was awful,” Hadani describes. With luck and resourcefulness, he had found pieces of an empty cement bag made out of several layers of paper, and he used these to wrap his feet and protect them from the cold and the rats.

A few days later, he was transferred to a labor camp in a neighboring town. One of the managers there, Meister Haler, under whom Hadani worked, was a member of the Nazi party. Haler was known for his barbarism and even the other Germans feared him. “I worked on the night shift, from 6 PM till 6 AM, just like that Meister, and he showed me what I needed to do, how to raise a 42 kilo hunk of iron, bring it towards the lathe at a certain angle, and bind it to its place so that the lathe would process it to the desired size. I remembered how he held the iron at a special angle and I did it exactly the way he did.”

Thanks to his quick absorption, Hadani understood what was required of him. Even though he had never before worked in a technical profession, and he only weighed around 40 kilos at the time, within a few days he managed to produce quite a good yield. Because of his fluent German, the two were able to converse, and during his long night shifts, Meister would tell him about his life and how he ended up in the Nazi party. “Once, he even brought me a slice of bread. Who ever heard of such a thing? Or even some cocoa substitute that they had in the canteen, which they called Alsace-Cacao. It was unbelievable!” Small moments like that gave him strength and hope during the hardest days.

“I rejoiced but I didn’t know why”

Hadani was transferred to harsh labor in several different camps. On the way to one of them, he was forced to join in a death march, which he survived. Towards the end of the war, he was at the Ravensbrück concentration camp as part of a group that was to be exchanged, possibly with German prisoners of war. The SS officers forced the group to walk through the forest towards another camp. “I was sure that they’d murder us there,” he says, “but no, there were cabins that belonged to the League of Nations there where they handed us parcels of food and cigarettes. Here, too, the young man’s hard-earned wisdom saved his life. “You need to remember, we’re talking about people who had been starving for months and years. To suddenly stuff yourself with that kind of food could be dangerous. I understood that. I simply knew it to be true.” The other starved camp prisoners ate ravenously and suffered severe diarrhea. Some never recovered. “I knew, for example, that I should get rid of the canned meat and keep the dry biscuits, which I ate slowly.”

When he saw the American soldiers enter the camp gates to liberate him, he was too exhausted to stand up. “I rejoiced, but I didn’t know why,” he says. After a few days regaining his strength, he gradually began to understand that he was once again a free man. Yet with that understanding, and upon his return home to Lodz, he knew that he had no one left in the world. He was on his own.

In the house where they had lived in the Lodz Ghetto, there was a small storeroom where he found the few photographs he still has of himself and his family from their time there. These were photographed in secret, practically the only tangible reminder of his life back then. From there, he ended up in the displaced persons camps. He can’t forget the rivalry he witnessed between the various groups of survivors: “If there, in the camps, people from Poale Tzion couldn’t speak with people from Beitar, and there were so many arguments and so much tension, and we were all Holocaust survivors, how could we possibly run a country?”

Although he had other options, it was clear to Hadani that he would fulfill his parents’ unwritten will, realize their Zionist dreams, and go live in Israel. He was accepted to join a maritime training course taking place in Italy, without knowing a word of Italian or any of the other people. However, Hadani passed the course with flying colors, and the day after he landed in Israel, he enlisted in the newly formed Israeli Navy. “The hardest thing was the way we – the Holocaust survivors – were treated by the tsabarim [native-born Israelis]. They treated us like idiots, asking things like ‘Why didn’t you object?’ How can you possibly explain to well-fed people what it means to suffer years of starvation?”

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Original notebook in Hadani’s handwriting, which he kept from his maritime course in Italy

In Israel, it took him some time to adjust to his new life. “Even when I was a soldier in the army, I was hungry. After all, I didn’t have a home to go to or anyone else in the world. I would stay on the army base even during vacations when I was on leave so that at least I had something to eat and somewhere to sleep.” Hadani served in the IDF until he was honorably discharged at forty years old, at the rank of major. He then he began a new career as a newspaper photographer, establishing the IPPA press agency and even writing news articles. For someone who had never learned Hebrew in any organized manner, he felt a sense of pride and triumph over the horrible circumstances of his early life.

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Dan Hadani during his years as an officer in the Israeli Navy. From a private album

“I am among the only ones who can still speak about it”

What was going through his mind at the end of World War II, when he was only 21 years old? What did he feel when he discovered that he was left all alone in the world without a single relative, with barely any mementos from before the war? Hadani has very few photographs in his possession from his childhood and youth, barely any souvenirs of all his family relatives who perished. Perhaps that’s why he became a such a curious documentarian and cataloger over the years, organized and meticulous, keeping records of everything that happened in the young country.

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Dan Hadani at work, during a visit to Egypt during the 1977 peace talks. From the Dan Hadani Archive, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, the National Library of Israel

For years, Hadani didn’t speak about what he went through during the Holocaust. “I didn’t want to reopen the wound. I occupied myself with surviving and was also embarrassed to speak about it, because of how the native Israelis treated me,” he explains. It was only once he turned 92 that he first agreed to return to Poland, and that was when the floodgates opened. Ever since, he has spoken to anyone willing to listen. He also made sure to upload his story from the Holocaust period to his website, which he built himself at the age of 99. “I understand that I need to speak about it and I am among the only ones who still can! Even if it isn’t easy for me. It takes me back to the past, and I have nightmares about it.”

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Dan Hadani at the National Library of Israel, 2024. Photograph by David Peretz

When Hadani is asked about October 7, he responds, “For me, that was a Holocaust day. One day! I woke up in the morning and listened to the radio, I heard what they were saying and immediately shut it off. I thought it couldn’t be. But then I was curious and turned it back on and remembered – this is how the Holocaust felt.”

Hadani came to tell his story as part of the Zikaron Ba’salon (“a memory in the living room”) Holocaust commemoration initiative, at the National Library, which houses his vast and monumental archive of photographs. At the Library and in its online catalog, the collection is accessible to all. “I get some satisfaction from knowing that the huge archive of photos that I worked on all my life is being kept safe at the National Library. It gives me pride to know that something will be left after me.”

Dan Hadani’s life arguably contains more than one life story, and he hopes that the country that he dreamed of and was so happy to serve and be part of will continue to be faithful to the same values that guided him throughout his life.

You can watch this special interview held with Dan Hadani in Hebrew at the National Library. Auto-generated English subtitles are available:

The Undercover Operation to Rescue the Crown of Damascus

The incredible story of how a priceless Hebrew manuscript written nearly 600 years ago was smuggled out of Syria and eventually brought to the National Library of Israel

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Judy Feld Carr

Had someone predicted decades ago that Judy Feld Carr would help to smuggle an invaluable, centuries-old book out of Syria — to say nothing of delivering thousands of the country’s Jews from a dictatorship to freedom — “I’d tell you you’re mad,” the Toronto resident said in a telephone call in the waning days of 2024. “I taught the music of the Catholic church of the 14th century. If you could tell me how that [leads] to Syria, you’re better than me!”

Feld Carr utilized similarly colorful language when asked whether she has any Syrian heritage.

“Are you kidding? My father was from Russia, my mother was from Brooklyn, Ashkenazi, and I grew up in northern Canada,” she said.

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Judy Feld Carr and the Damascus Keter she helped rescue from Syria, photographed by Orah Buck in Toronto, 1993

Yet Feld Carr, a musicologist by training, became indispensable in facilitating the smuggling of the book, an artistic Hebrew manuscript of the Bible, from Syria to Canada and on to Israel in 1993.

This particular book was originally written in Italy in the 15th century. It was transferred to Spain shortly afterwards, but after the edict of expulsion the book made its way to the Ottoman Empire. It was sold among the communities of Jewish exiles and eventually ended up in Damascus.

It is one of twelve Hebrew manuscripts that have come to be known as the Damascus Keters. Today the Keters are part of the National Library of Israel’s permanent exhibition, “A Treasury of Words,” where culturally priceless works reside. The word keter is Hebrew for “crown.”

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The Damascus Keter that Judy Feld Carr helped rescue

Feld Carr first learned of the Damascus Keter in July 1993 while in Jerusalem with her husband, Don Carr — the couple had an apartment in the city — when they met a curator at the Israel Museum as the renowned Aleppo Codex was being restored.

The curator asked Feld Carr if she knew about the Damascus Keter or had any ideas for getting it out of Syria. Feld Carr called Shlomo Gal, a senior Mossad official, at his home on a Friday afternoon. He berated her, urging her instead to continue bringing Syrian Jews to freedom. (Harold Troper’s 2007 book about her, The Rescuer: The Amazing True Story of How One Woman Helped Save the Jews of Syria, can also be found at the National Library.)

Feld Carr recalled that she heard “from my underground sources” that the Keter resided in a shul in Damascus. That launched her quest to bring it out of Syria, since she understood that the Jewish community there would soon be almost non-existent. “The issue was to find it and get it out. My husband said, ‘You’re crazy. How can you get it?’ That was July. In September, I had it,” Feld Carr said.

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A page from the Damascus Keter that Judy Feld Carr helped rescue

How did she do it? During two phone calls and subsequent e-mails, Feld Carr provided few names or details, but did say she worked her contacts in Canada’s foreign ministry and communicated with the Damascus Jewish community’s chief rabbi, Avraham Hamra. Feld Carr said she “paid nothing to anybody to get out the Keter.”

A Middle East specialist in the Canadian government agreed to be the conduit, she said. On a visit to Damascus, he passed Hamra on a street. Hamra surreptitiously handed off the Keter, and the man put it in his raincoat and continued on. The man then visited at least one other Arab country before returning to Canada, the Keter resting in a black shopping bag. Feld Carr went in November to Ottawa, where they met in the man’s office and then headed to lunch.

That’s when Feld Carr first saw the book and held it. It seemed too modest to be the heralded Keter. “I showed disappointment,” she conceded. “ ‘This is what it is?’ It was small” — about 11”x14” — “on the thinnest vellum paper.”

She went on to the Israeli embassy to see Itzhak Shelef, the ambassador. She didn’t have an appointment. He held the book and “was sobbing like a baby,” she recalled. “He said, ‘This may be the Damascus Keter.’”

Feld Carr flew back to Toronto and asked a photographer to come to her home to take pictures of the Keter — without a flash, outdoors. She mailed the photographs to the Israel Museum. After Gal saw the pictures, he “sent me a lovely written message that it was the Keter,” she said.

Hamra, on a visit to Toronto, visited Feld Carr. She gave him the Keter and urged him to donate it to the National Library when he moved to Israel in 1994, which he did.

The text of this particular keter is arranged in two columns, each with 36 lines. It features quadratic Sephardic script, with the text of the Masorah arranged in beautiful geometric patterns around the biblical text.

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A page from the Damascus Keter that Judy Feld Carr helped rescue

Interestingly, the Book of Esther is known here as the Book of Ahasuerus, named after the Persian king featured in the story (Xerxes, אחשורוש).

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The Book of Ahasuerus, instead of the Book of Esther

Hamra later sought to retrieve the Keter and took the case to court in Israel, but the decision in 2020 went in favor of the NLI. The dispute led Hamra to cut off contact with Feld Carr. Hamra died in 2021.

“He was like a brother — that’s how close we were,” she said. “I lost his friendship.”

Feld Carr said she has no regrets.

“The Keter is here for eternity, in terms of Jewish life,” she said. “The book is where it should be. It has to be in the library.”

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Another one of the twelve Damascus Keters, currently on display as part of the National Library of Israel’s permanent exhibition – “A Treasury of Words

Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].

October 7, Mariampol, and Me: Living in the Shadow of Trauma

When Sharon Taylor first heard the term “intergenerational trauma,” she was oddly filled with a sense of relief - finally, a phrase that could describe the familiar anxiety that had always been there. Here, she shares some of her own family history, the kind of history that is familiar to many of us.

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Jews being deported from their homes during the First World War, 1914-1915, the National Library of Israel collections

On October 7, 8, and 9, I mostly sat in front of the television. In my pajamas. Safe in my suburban American home, the horrific images were painful to watch. Still, I couldn’t move. I needed to bear witness, to see so that I could tell. And throughout those three agonizing days, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling about the viciousness and gleeful display of barbarity. None of this is new. I’ve been here before.

A couple of years ago, I first heard the term “intergenerational trauma,” a mental health condition where the shadow of extreme trauma is passed down through the generations. I know this sounds odd, but a sense of relief washed over me, and I dashed to my computer to investigate its full meaning. Finally, a name for these nebulous feelings of anxiety and vulnerability that are so easily triggered. But where did it start?

As an adult, I’ve felt compelled to uncover my family’s almost lost stories, particularly, the stories of the strong women who changed our family’s destiny. Research is my time machine, transporting me into the past to walk along the paths my ancestors traveled. As a Jew, most of the time it’s a dark journey.

All four of my grandparents were naturalized Americans before the start of World War II. But there was something in the shadows of our history, the faces missing at our Passover Seders, faces that belonged to my grandparents’ siblings and their children, great-aunts, uncles, and cousins murdered by the Nazis. The trauma cut so deep that their names were never mentioned. I’m still looking for the names of many of my family’s Holocaust victims, but this search led me to an earlier trauma. Its similarity to October 7 is striking.

According to the family tale, between 1913 and 1921, my maternal grandmother’s sister Dora brought our family to America. None of my maternal grandmother’s immediate family died in the Holocaust. No trauma there.

That’s what I thought. In the beginning.

Digging deeper into the history of Austrian Galicia and Mariampol, the little town where they lived, (known today as Mariyampil, Ukraine), I discovered that my family’s final years in Mariampol were defined by almost constant violence. Winston Churchill dubbed the First World War’s Eastern Front, “The Unknown War.” Before starting my research, it was certainly unknown to me. And yet, somehow, the trauma experienced by my family at that time lives within me, as integral to me as my sense of taste or smell.

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An Austro-Hungarian cavalry force moves through a town in Eastern Europe during the First World War. The National Library of Israel collections

Researchers are just beginning to explore how what happened, and what didn’t happen, during and immediately after the First World War, became the foundation for the destruction of European Jewry during the Shoah a generation later.

My ancestral shtetl Mariampol had the misfortune to be situated on the front lines during much of World War One. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Austrian Galicia started, on September 9, 1914, London’s Daily Telegraph reported, under the headline “Murderous Girdle of Fire,” that Russian General Brousilloff’s army “completely defeated the Austrians . . . at Mariampol . . .” My great-grandmother Hudia survived the “Murderous Girdle of Fire” in Mariampol. Like the other members of my family that survived the war in Mariampol, her wounds were on the inside. For the rest of her life, she was terrified during thunderstorms.

We know from recent news what Russian bombardment and occupation looks like. Destroyed towns, slaughtered civilians, abducted children, followed by starvation, and during World War I, there was also cholera, typhoid fever and dysentery.

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Jews being deported from their homes during the First World War, 1914-1915, the National Library of Israel collections

It was even worse for the Jews. Added to this litany of suffering, homes and businesses were looted and burned, and Jews across the region were murdered, and subjected to torture, and rape.

To understand my family story, I began searching for histories and first-hand accounts of what happened in Jewish communities surrounding Mariampol. My search revealed a history of mass suffering that looked a lot like October 7.

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The Jewish cemetery in Buchach, photographed in 1995 by Boris Khaimovich, the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, digitally available on the NLI website

Ethnographer S. Ansky traveled the area as an aid worker. He recorded in his diary how he was told that in the nearby town of Buchach, 40 “girls” were raped. In Burshtyn, 19 miles northwest of Mariampol, one source records that “…women were raped in the presence of their husbands, parents, and children.” When the Russian Army finished their looting, murdering, and raping, they typically burned the town’s marketplace and Jewish homes. In Buchach, Russian soldiers let the Jewish section of the town burn for three weeks.

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The market square in Buchach, photographed in 1995 by Boris Khaimovich, the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, digitally available on the NLI website

In Tlumach, the Russian army rounded up all Jewish males between the ages of 10 and 70. They were marched out of town and on the first night, were forced to surrender their clothing to keep them from escaping. After marching over 90 miles under Cossack whips and rifle butts, the men were forced to dig trenches for the Russian army.

Like in nearby Tlumach, my great-grandmother Hudia’s nine-year-old son, Nathan, was taken captive by the Russians. The family sat Shiva for Nathan and continued to mourn him for the next three years. Nathan’s return to Mariampol three years after his abduction was remembered as a miracle. His return was announced when a neighbor ran up to the family’s doorway shouting in Yiddish, “There’s a red-headed soldier coming up the road.” Did I mention that my grandmother’s brother Nathan had red hair? October 7, children in captivity, and Mariampol collide, the painful past and the painful present swirling within me.

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The Maryampoler Sick and Benevolent Association helped support the town of Mariampol following the First World War. This photo of the association’s 30th anniversary event was taken in Brooklyn in 1930. The author’s relatives are seated on the left, behind the sign for table 3, including her great-grandmother Hudia, who can be seen on the far left. Photo courtesy of Sharon Taylor

Looting, torturing, murdering, raping, burning, and taking captives was more than just war. As we witnessed on October 7, this was intended to inflict the maximum amount of pain and humiliation on a specific group of people, my people. As in most pogroms, no one came to rescue the Jews, and no one was punished. The war and the brutality directed at the Jews simply rolled on.

In 1915, the battlefield returned to my ancestral town, and in fierce fighting, Germany took control of Mariampol for its ally, Austria-Hungary. The victory was short-lived. The following summer, Russian Cossacks attacked and once again occupied Mariampol. Cossacks and Jews in the same sentence is almost never good.

This isn’t “Intro to World History.” This is my history, suffering passed down from one generation to the next. It is wrapped around my chromosomes and expressed in every aspect of my life, in how I think, and in how I feel.

World War One ended in November of 1918 and was optimistically dubbed “The War to End All Wars.” It was a hopeful time. But for my family still in Mariampol, the suffering continued. In December of 1918, a leading Jewish aid organization sent a desperate “Cablegram” to its headquarters in New York, “Tenthousand [sic] war orphans are left penniless . . .” In Grodno, Poland, aid workers resorted to creating clothes for orphans from donated flour sacks.

Fighting continued as Poland, Ukraine, and the Soviets battled for control of Galicia, the region that had been the easternmost province of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s hard to imagine, but during the conflicts that followed World War One, the suffering of the region’s Jews intensified.

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The ruins of the Great Synagogue in Brody, Eastern Galicia, photographed in 2011 by Vladimir Levin, the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, digitally available on the NLI website

By this time, many of the region’s Jewish towns were struggling to survive. Synagogues, study houses, Jewish schools, and mikvehs had been desecrated or destroyed in the war. People were living in cellars, or in the few structures that escaped the shelling, the looting, and the fires. Jews in the affected towns were totally dependent on foreign aid to survive. This included Mariampol. And things were about to get worse.

In September of 1920, Ukrainian hetman Symon Petliura and his militias passed through Mariampol during their struggle to create an independent Ukraine. Pinkas Hakehillot Polin, published by Yad Vashem, describes what happened in Mariampol that September: “. . . four Jews were murdered, including a pregnant woman, and 16 were injured. The hooligans raped four women and five girls (including two young girls) . . .The Jewish town did not recover from its destruction…” My family was there, and the wounded, raped and murdered were their
friends, neighbors and relatives.

Mariampol wasn’t the only town decimated by Petliura’s militias. In her book, Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921, academician Irina Astashkevich, used the term “carnival of violence” to describe the intentionally public cruelty, and unbridled viciousness of what happened in Jewish communities across Ukraine at that time. In those pogroms, as in most of the pogroms that our European ancestors experienced, no one was punished. The perpetrators brushed themselves off, had a good laugh, and went on with their lives as our ancestors wrapped their wounds and buried their dead. And the women who were raped? In keeping with the mores of the time, they kept their mouths shut and their anguish to themselves.

A short time later, after witnessing that no one came to the aid of Europe’s Jews and that there weren’t any consequences for the perpetrators of the World War One era pogroms, the Nazis replicated their murder and barbarity on an industrial scale.

This brings us back to intergenerational trauma, to wounds on the inside that can be passed down through the generations. The pogrom in Mariampol that my great-grandmother Hudia experienced in 1920 looked a lot like October 7. That day, which should have been a joyous celebration of Simchat Torah, I sat paralyzed in my pajamas in front of my television.

And I was also in Mariampol, watching the carnival of violence, live and in color in my living room. I wasn’t alone. Instead of dancing with the Torah in synagogue, Jews around the world were thrown back into their own Mariampols, watching the carnival of violence with me.

Kafka’s Secrets: The Missing Page of “The Castle”

A page torn from the manuscript of Franz Kafka’s "The Castle" has been revealed for the first time. What is written on that missing page? Who tore it out? Why would anyone want to keep it hidden?

הטירה קפקא

A portrait of Franz Kafka and an AI-generated castle

Franz Kafka passed away from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1924, leaving behind a note addressed to his best friend, Max Brod.

Kafka’s “will”, which was found on that note, was unequivocal: Brod was to collect all of his writings and burn them. He was not to leave a trace behind. However, when the moment came, Brod betrayed Kafka. Though Kafka’s suffered from low self-esteem and did not think much of his own writing, Brod recognized Kafka’s genius from the very first time they met as university students. Not only did Brod not burn the manuscripts – he began editing them and preparing them for publication.

One of these was the manuscript that would become the novel The Castle, a story that would change the way we write about and describe modern life. Had it not been for Brod’s intervention, it would have vanished into oblivion.

Just as Brod and Kafka were intertwined in life, so too were their archives – both of them eventually arriving at the National Library of Israel, after a lengthy legal saga. Among the many items now being revealed to the public for the first time in the exhibition “Kafka: Metamorphosis of an Author“, is a rare page containing a scene that was omitted from The Castle, shedding further light on this influential work.

חתימתו של קפקא על הצוואה הראשונה שכתב.הספרייה הלאומית, ארכיון מכס ברוד צולם על ידי ארדון בר חמא, בתמיכתו האדיבה של ג'ורג' בלומנטל, ניו יורק.
Kafka’s first will.The Max Brod Archive at the National Library of Israel, photographed by Ardon Bar-Hama, with the generous support of George Blumenthal, New York.

Behind the Castle Walls

The plot of The Castle focuses on K., a land surveyor who is sent to take up a post in a tiny village nestled in a mountainous landscape. The village is located at the foot of a high castle that manages all the bureaucracy of the village and its surroundings but is completely inaccessible to the villagers.

K. tries to figure out who he needs to speak with in order to carry out his duty but finds himself running around between various strange functionaries– from the village council chairman to a clerk named Klamm, and to the other villagers who are all completely disconnected from what goes on in the castle but are eager to offer their own speculative interpretations. K. becomes increasingly convinced that he must approach the castle, but his ideas are not well-received by the villagers, who believe that the people in the castle must be justified in their actions and should not be disturbed with trivial matters. K. continues to try, in vain, to understand what exactly he is expected to do, why he was sent to this village, and who he is supposed to speak with in order to understand these details.

דמות רוכבת על סף תהום, צוייר על ידי פרנץ קפקא, הספרייה הלאומית, ארכיון מכס ברוד, צולם על ידי ארדון בר חמא, בתמיכתו האדיבה של ג'ורג' בלומנטל, ניו יורק.
A figure riding on the edge of a cliff, drawn by Franz Kafka, the Max Brod Archive at the National Library of Israel, photographed by Ardon Bar-Hama, with the generous support of George Blumenthal, New York

The Wheels of Bureaucracy Grind Slowly

A torn page found in the archives describes a scene that was omitted from the Kafkaesque plot of The Castle. In this scene, K. arrives at the home of the village council chairman, who is there lying in bed because he is ill. The chairman delivers a speech about the importance of bureaucracy, which cannot make mistakes because the entire bureaucratic system is designed to facilitate the best possible decision being taken. And if it does not produce the best decision, the oversight office is there to ensure that the bureaucratic mechanism continues to grind on. Or, in Kafka’s sharp words, the purpose of bureaucracy is to continue striving toward the most correct decision, but never actually reach it:

Then K. said, as he rose and held in his hand the crumpled letter from Klamm: “I wish I had enthusiastic supporters or enthusiastic enemies up in the castle, but unfortunately, there is no one from whom I can hear an unequivocal ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And even so, I must find such a person. You’ve already given me a few ideas about how I can do so.”

“I had no such intention,” the village chairman said to K. with a laugh, as he shook hands in farewell. “But it was very nice to talk with you. It really eases my conscience. Perhaps we will meet again soon.”

“It’s safe to assume that there will be a need for me to come,” K. said, bending down toward Mitzi the cat. He cautiously reached out to pet her, but Mitzí backed away with a small meow of fear and hid under a pillow.

The chairman petted Mitzi lovingly. “You’re always welcome,” he said, perhaps to help K. cope with Mitzí’s behavior, but then he added, “Especially now, when I am ill. When I recover and can return to my desk, we can assume that my official work will require all my attention.”

“Do you mean to say,” K. asked, “that you weren’t speaking with me officially even today?” The chairman replied, “Of course I wasn’t speaking with you officially. You could call it a semi-official conversation.”

“You don’t appreciate unofficial matters enough, as I’ve already said, but you also underestimate official matters,” the village chairman said. “An official decision is not like this bottle of medicine that sits here on the table. You can’t just take it and get your answer. A true official decision requires countless small considerations, deliberations, and checks. That requires years of work by the very best clerks, even if in some cases, the clerks already know at the start what the final decision will be.

And will there even be a final decision? That’s why there are oversight offices, to prevent the possibility of one appearing.”

“Well, fine,” said K., “everything is exceptionally organized, who could doubt that? You described it in such an enticing manner that now I can’t help but make every effort to learn about it to the finest detail.”

K. left after saying goodbye to the staff, and as he did, a wave of whispers and hushed laughter was heard behind him.

He returned to the inn. In his room, he found a surprise: The room had been thoroughly cleaned. Frieda had worked diligently and greeted him with a kiss on the threshold of the door. The room was well-ventilated, the stove was emanating heat, the floor had been washed, the bed was made, and the servants’ belongings, including their pictures, were gone. A new picture was now hanging on the wall above the bed.

K. approached the new picture hanging on the wall.

עמוד של כתב היד מהרומן "הטירה", 1922, הספרייה הלאומית, ארכיון מכס ברוד, צולם על ידי ארדון בר חמא, בתמיכתו האדיבה של ג'ורג' בלומנטל, ניו יורק.
A page from the manuscript of the novel The Castle, 1922, the National Library, Max Brod Archive, photographed by Ardon Bar-Hama, with the generous support of George Blumenthal, New York

“We believe that the person who tore out the page was Max Brod himself,” says Stefan Litt, curator of the Humanities Collection at the National Library of Israel. “Because it was torn out at a very early stage. You can understand why—the scene is a bit subversive and strongly criticizes the bureaucratic apparatus.”

The scene not only describes the futility of the bureaucratic system as a whole but also criticizes the oversight mechanisms that are supposedly there to prevent mistakes but in reality, only feed into the inefficient process that crushes and tramples the average citizen.

“The reason why this scene wasn’t included in the final work,” says Litt, “might be that Brod was trying to ensure the draft remained faithful to the final product, and therefore, this page was torn out of Kafka’s notebook.”

Despite the attempts to erase it, the torn page and the omitted scene were preserved in the archives, and are now being displayed to the public for the first time, as part of the unique exhibition entitled “Kafka: Metamorphosis of an Author” at the National Library. The exhibition showcases rare handwritten items, drafts and letters by Franz Kafka, an author who changed the very face of Western literature.