ZGram - 4/1/2003 - "Misleading title: 'Memories caught on the brink of extinction'"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

January 4, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I am having server trouble again.  This ZGram, sent yesterday, 
bounced.  Now I shall try again.

These past few months, I have felt a growing respect for the 
reporting the Guardian has done.  We in America are now dealing with 
such a bland and pussyfooting press in our country we welcome what 
comes out of Europe.

However, the article below infuriates me!  Here you have the story of 
a sixteen year old Jewish teenager who signed execution orders - 
while kwetching about hostility at a dance!  And what is the slant of 
the story?  More wailing and complaining about the poor fate of the 
Jews!

Had the WWII German soldiers caught this murderous creature and 
executed her, there would have been no end to yammering to this day. 
Get real! 

A lot of the terror that befell not only the Ukraine but all of the 
Soviet Union was due to Jewish executioners.  Why not say that in the 
article below? 

And ask yourself:  What in the name of common sense does this tale of 
horror have to do with the alleged "Holocaust"?

[START]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,867784,00.html

Memories caught on the brink of extinction

Internet archive rekindles family life in the shtetls, the eastern European
Jewish villages razed in the Holocaust

Ian Traynor in Vienna
=46riday January 3, 2003
The Guardian

Basya Chaika and her mother Rachel pictured in Russia in 1931

At the age of 16 Basya Chaika played God, deciding who should live and who
should die. The year was 1943. The place was Konotop in Ukraine, in Stalin's
wartime Soviet Union.
The Jewish teenager was a zealous communist sitting on a military tribunal
which dispensed execution orders for "traitors of the motherland".

"I was very radical and uncompromising," Mrs Chaika recalled. "I had to sign
death sentences more than once. Such a responsibility really changes a
girl's character ... When my friend and I turned up at the dance, people
fled. People tried to kill me. My poor mother cried a lot because of me."

Mrs Chaika reflects on her teenage years as a communist hanging judge in a
pioneering web project which aims to recreate the shtetl (small Jewish
communities in eastern and central Europe) while its elderly survivors are
still able to recount their lives during the cruelest of European centuries.

Combining oral history with family snapshots and old Jewish community photo
albums, the Centropa project is also unearthing valuable records of once-
vibrant but now vanished Jewish communities in central Europe. For example,
there are scores of long-forgotten early photographs from the Jewish ghetto
of Opole, now in Poland.

In the nick of time


The idea for the Centropa project occurred to Edward Serotta three years ago
while he was sitting in the forlorn offices of the shrunken Jewish community
in Arad, Romania. He stumbled across "the library of lost pictures", a box
of hundreds old photographs of local Jews who had died and whom no one
remembered.

Intrigued and inspired by the discovery, Mr Serotta broadened his research,
to give names and biographies to the faces peering out of the old sepia
snaps. He now has researchers and interviewers working in 11 countries from
the Baltic to the Balkans combing the region to talk to elderly Jews in a
=A31.3m project for which the internet is the perfect vehicle.

Ten years ago tit would have been technically impossible, as the web was in
its infancy, and in 10 years' time most of the people recounting their life
stories will be dead. So the Witness to a Jewish Century is a timely
cyber-museum giving a voice to the last generation of east European Jews who
survived the Holocaust.

Since the collapse of communism and the opening of Soviet-controlled Europe
there has been an explosion of historical research in the region. In Russia,
Belarus and Ukraine, where for decades Jews denied their creed for fear of
persecution, there are about 300,000 Jews, usually elderly, alone, and
living in poverty on handouts and food from American Jewish charities.

Begun in September with support from charities and the Austrian government,
the project already has more than 600 family snapshots and 65 family
histories recounted in painstaking and often poignant detail. A further
2,000 pictures and 300 family histories are waiting to be scanned,
processed, and transcribed in Mr Serotta's offices in central Vienna.
Ultimately, and funds permitting, the aim is to put 1,000 family histories
on the web alongside 100,000 pictures drawn from private collections.

Unequalled archive


"We find these people, we ask them to sit down and have a cup of tea and
tell them their life story is important," said Mr Serotta, an American
photographer and writer who has built up a personal and unequalled archive
of 50,000 pictures in 15 years of research.

While the Holocaust inevitably looms large in the reminiscences, the idea is
also to chronicle and illustrate Jewish life in the region before the second
world war as and the regeneration of certain Jewish communities since the
revolutions of 1989.

Mr Serotta recalls an interview with Susana Hacker in Novi Sad, Serbia, in
1999. "You're the fourth group of people to come to talk to me. But you're
the only one who asked how we lived," she said. "Everyone else just asked
how we died."

"All our interviews get sucked into the Holocaust, but that's not the raison
d'etre," Mr Serotta said.

While Basya Chaika was fighting the Nazis and sentencing "traitors" to death
in wartime Ukraine, Judit Kinszki was 10 years old in the Budapest ghetto,
the daughter of middle-class Anglophile parents trying to survive the war.

Her father Imre was a prominent self-taught photographer in pre-war Hungary
whose education suffered from anti-Semitic restrictions. He died on a Nazi
march to Germany in 1944. Her brother Gabor was murdered in B=FCchenwald.
Hoping to find him, Judit and her mother would go to Budapest's main railway
station, Keleti, which was famously photographed by her father.

"Every time I talk about my father, I feel I learn something new," she
recalled at the age of 68. "He was so sweet and gentle. It was impossible
not to love my father."

Now a "sweet Jewish grandmother" in Kiev, according to Mr Serotta, Judit is
satisfied that her granddaughter Katya, a philosophy student, is able to
enjoy a level of freedom which she herself was always denied.

"Neither in my childhood, nor in the rest of my life, did I have such
freedom. But I also understand what a dear price was paid for this freedom."

[END]