Tag: Gaza

But

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Hungarian Jews on a death march in Hieflau, Austria, on April 8 or 9, 1945. The photograph was taken in secret from an attic window.

Sometimes it’s a single detail that hits home: a little girl’s pink shoe, for instance, with remnants of the delicate fabric still intact, unearthed among the hundreds of worn-down shoe soles and other objects found in the course of an archaeological excavation on the grounds of the former Liebenau camp in Graz, Austria. The site has since been paved over, covered in large part by housing settlements and a youth center, kindergarten, and sports field. The tour guides’ voices could barely be heard above the basketball game underway on a nearby court; in this vibrant residential neighborhood of Grünanger, the loud cries and laughter of everyday life suddenly seemed jarring and alien.

“Resettlement Camp V” was founded in 1940 for “Volksdeutsche” or ethnic Germans, who were relocated from the Baltic states and other parts of Europe and the Soviet Union, often involuntarily. It consisted of 190 barracks built to accommodate 5,000 inhabitants. A year later, as the war raged on, forced laborers and prisoners of war were brought here to toil under unimaginably harsh conditions in the nearby Steyr-Daimler-Puch works, which manufactured machine parts for the armaments industry. In April of 1945, the camp became a temporary stopover for Hungarian Jews on a two-hundred-mile-long death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp after the “Southeast Wall” they’d been building, Hitler’s defensive strategy of anti-tank trenches and fortifications intended to halt the advance of the Red Army along the Hungarian border, failed and they were “evacuated.” Over a period of several days, six to seven thousand exhausted and severely undernourished slave laborers arrived on foot. They had already been on the road for a week and had been given nearly nothing to eat; in Graz-Liebenau they were forced to sleep outside, on the bare ground. They received a bowl of watery soup and a single slice of bread. Those who were too sick or weak to continue were forced to lie face down in shallow trenches, where they were shot from behind, in the neck.

In May of 1947, the British occupying forces had the mass graves exhumed. A trial, verdicts, and executions followed. After that, the matter was repressed and forgotten. More than sixty years would pass before historians began investigating the site in earnest; some of the older locals still knew where the buildings once stood. A series of excavations undertaken during the construction of a power plant uncovered rubble and building foundations, personal belongings, and human remains bearing evidence of war crimes. Already a politically sensitive issue, the area became a point of contention; it was eventually declared an archaeological site requiring the oversight of specialists during any future construction projects or excavations.

The tour of the Liebenau camp was intended as a prelude to a theater performance, but the weather proved uncooperative: taking our seats on benches arranged around the open-air stage, there came a cloudburst so sudden and dramatic that it felt like a logical reaction to the devastation and destruction we had been contemplating moments before. We ran for cover; the rain was pelting down at angles that rendered our umbrellas superfluous. As I made my way home in the storm, I wondered if history is ever past, or if we’ve ever properly understood the factors that can lead to fascism and genocide. Read more »



Monday, March 4, 2024

On War: A St. Patrick’s Day Offering

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My 1985 photo of the priest who helped me to sneak into Armagh Jail, Father Raymond Murray: Jail chaplain, with former inmate Catherine Moore.

I arrived in Ireland in the mid-1980s to cover the seemingly intractable bloody conflict colloquially known as “The Troubles.” I studied up on materiel: Armalite rifles, homemade fertilizer bombs, the plastic bullets protestors ducked. And on the glossary of local politics: Loyalists were mostly Protestants who wanted to remain British citizens; Republicans were mostly Catholics who yearned for a united Irish nation. I interviewed people on both sides of the conflict but more women than men. I wanted to make their voices heard in the United States.

I was taken by one issue that had already created international headlines—the strip searches of female political prisoners.

But the stories I read did not quote the women who were being strip searched. They quoted politicians and  sociologists instead of the women themselves. The stories said the policy was routine, part of the process of getting inmates out of civilian clothes and into prisoner uniforms. Not true. This was actually a well-conceived British military psychological operation to humiliate the women, a technique intended to “break” the women.

I decided that the only way to write about this was to getting inside the 100-year-old stone walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Armagh—and to talk to the women directly.

But to get in, even to speak to only one woman, I had to lie. I could not say I was a reporter. I had to say I was a cousin, visiting from the states. The Northern Ireland Office, run by dutiful Protestant colonists controlled by the British, kept the press out. Perpetrators of abuse do not like publicity. Now, as St. Patrick’s Day approaches, and two larger wars rage—wars that unlike the one in Ireland threaten us all—my mind keeps racing back to what is better known as “Armagh Jail.” Read more »

Monday, December 11, 2023

For My Jewish Refugee Family, Brooklyn Was The Promised Land

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My refugee grandfather, Isaac Siegel, in his New York City  watchmaking shop, on St. John’s Place in Brooklyn, probably in the 1940s. The black and white sign on the wall behind his head is an advertisement for an accountant—my father, David Fischkin, who was his son-in-law. Family photo.

In 1919, after a brutal anti-Semitic pogrom in a small Eastern European shtetl, my grandfather knew that his wife and three young children would be better off as refugees. He prepared them to trek by foot and in horse-drawn carts from Ukraine to the English Channel and eventually to a Scottish port. Finally they sailed in steerage class to the United States. My grandfather was a simple watchmaker—and one of the visionaries of his time. Europe, he told his tearful wife, was not finished with murdering Jews, adding that things were likely to get much worse. And so, my grandmother became a hero, too. She said farewell to her mother and sister, knowing she would never see them again. In Scotland, she descended to the lower level of a ship with her children—my mother, the eldest, was seven years old. My grandmother traveled alone with her children. My grandfather was refused entry to the ship. He had lice in his hair. He arrived in the United States weeks, or possibly months, later.

My grandfather, Ayzie Zygal of Felshtin, Ukraine became Isaac Siegel of Brooklyn, New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. In his later years he spent summers in the Catskill Mountains, always asking to be let out of the family car a mile before reaching Hilltop House, a bungalow colony. My grandfather wanted to walk that last mile along the local creek. It reminded him of the River Felshtin. He never regretted coming to America.

My grandparents died, in Brooklyn in their early sixties. My grandfather had been poisoned by the radium he used on the paint brushes in his shop to make the hours glow. He licked them, with panache, to make them sharper. My grandmother had a heart condition, exacerbated by diabetes. They were both gone before I turned three.

They had lived much longer than they had expected they would in 1919.

I was told my grandfather left Europe to save his family’s life. And because my mother narrowly escaped death. I was told he did not believe there would be any more miracles. Read more »

Monday, November 13, 2023

On War And Autism

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle
Children in Gaza who have autism enjoyed a day at the beach in July. Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle

Our elder, adult son, Dan Mulvaney, has non-speaking autism. For the most part, Dan has a good life. He lives near us—his mother and father—in a lovely group home on Long Island in suburban New York and often surfs the Atlantic Ocean off Long Beach. During quiet moments when Dan is out at sea, waiting with his surf instructor for a great wave to bring him to shore, I watch from the beach.

Since October 7, I also worry about his compatriots in autism—younger and older—in Israel and in Gaza.

Dan may not speak but he does have his own way of communicating. He has given me permission to write about him here and to relate that he is well informed about world events. He is a devoted viewer of CNN, in particular.

Dan also knows that surfers call the big waves “bombs.” Once in a while a word or two springs from his mouth, sometimes a sentence. Recently, bobbing on his board at the “break” where the waves rise from the ocean in their final push to the shore, he told his instructor they should: “Wait for a bomb.”

There are no real bombs in Long Beach, New York. Before Dan was born I lived and worked in Belfast. I know about bombs. Read more »

Monday, October 16, 2023

When I Worked for Fox News

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

I once wrote a political column for Fox News. My point of view was liberal and at times decidedly leftist.

This is true-true and not fake news.

The notorious Fox was then a media baby, albeit an enormous one. At its American launch in 1997, it already had 17 million cable subscribers. Millions of Americans looking for a conservative alternative to CNN and company.

Two years later I was hired, as a freelancer, to write an opinion column for a nascent website: Fox News Online. Back then, the television screen ruled. The website was an experiment, to see if the Internet was real. I was told I could opine as I wished, as long as the facts backed me up and I was not libelous or incoherent. A cartoonist was assigned to illustrate my words.

When I was first approached about writing this, I thought it was a practical joke. A dear friend and former newspaper colleague showed up one morning in our family backyard and told me to stop calling her every morning with my take on national and world events. “Write it,” she said. “I will pay you. Two hundred bucks a column once a week. Eight hundred a month.”  Not a lot for Fox News, even then. But I needed the money. Needing money is one of my hobbies. Read more »