Holocaust-Gedenken: 72 Zeugnisse des Überlebens

Die Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden macht Gespräche mit Überlebenden online zugänglich. Diese sollen Zeugnis ablegen von ihrem Leben.

Unter dem Mahnmal in Berlin sind die Interviews zu sehen. Bild: dpa

„Es ist keine große Ehre, ein Überlebender zu sein. Es war auch nicht mit viel Vergüngen verbunden, ein Überlebender zu werden.“ Diese Sätze sagt Zvi Harry Likwornik. Der heute 80-Jährige wuchs im jüdisch geprägten Czernowitz auf, das damals zu Rumänien gehörte und heute ein Teil der Ukraine ist. Schon als Siebenjährigen zwangen die Nazis ihn zuerst in das Ghetto der Stadt und deportierten ihn und seine Familie bald darauf nach Transnistrien. Sein Vater starb im Ghetto Berschad an Entkräftung.

182 Minuten und 26 Sekunden erzählt Zvi Harry Likwornik aus seinem Leben. Das gefilmte Interview ist Teil einer Dokumentation der Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. 2007 haben die Mitarbeiter des Stelendenkmals damit begonnen, Überlebende der Schoah zu Wort kommen zu lassen. Am Montag stellte Stiftungsleiter Uwe Neumärker das Ergebnis vor.

72 Interviews sind so entstanden, die man ab sofort im Internet unter www.sprechentrotzallem.de anschauen kann, die aber natürlich auch in der unterirdischen Ausstellung zu sehen sind. Die Überlebenden sollen nicht erklären, was ohnehin nicht zu erklären ist. Sie sollen keine neuen Fakten abliefern, sondern Zeugnis ablegen von ihrem Leben vor der Katastrophe, während der Schoah und danach.

Die Stiftung versteht die Veröffentlichung als Teil ihrer pädagogischen Arbeit. Denn so viel ist klar: Die Zeugen der Schoah sterben langsam aus. Viele der letzten Überlebenden sind in ihren Neunzigern. Es wird schon bald niemanden mehr geben, der vor Schulklassen oder an Gedenkstätten davon berichten kann, was ihnen damals angetan worden ist.

Er habe versucht, „jedes Detail im Kopf zu behalten“, sagte am Montag der 1929 in Mährisch Ostrau geborene Yehuda Bacon auf der Pressekonferenz der Stiftung. Bacon wurde im Alter von 13 Jahren in das Ghetto Theresienstadt gesperrt, später kam er nach Auschwitz. Heute lebt er in Israel und erinnert sich gerne an die „guten Menschen, die nach dem Krieg geholfen haben“. Das Ziel seiner Mitarbeit an den Interviews beschrieb Bacon so: Er wolle „irgendwie dazu beitragen, dass sich solche Dinge nicht wiederholen“. Diesen Satz könnten wohl fast alle der Befragten unterschreiben.

Seit Montag steht das Videoarchiv der Holocaust-Überlebenden so gut wie ungekürzt im Netz. Es sind 220 Stunden, 43 Minuten und 57 Sekunden höchst individueller Schicksale zusammengekommen. Die Frauen und Männer wurden zwischen 1913 und 1942 geboren, der Älteste unter ihnen war zum Zeitpunkt des Gesprächs 98 Jahre alt. Die Stiftung hat vor allem nach Menschen gesucht, die eine gewisse Nähe zum deutschen Sprachraum haben, sei es, weil sie etwa aus den deutschen Ostgebieten stammen oder in deutschen Sprachinseln – wie Zvi Harry Likwornik in Czernowitz – aufwuchsen. So sind diese Lebenszeugnisse gerade für deutsche Schulen interessant.

Anders als bei ähnlichen Projekten verzichteten die Macher darauf, die Interviewten mit einem Fragekatalog zu konfrontieren. Nicht einmal einen Notizblock hatten sie dabei, sagte Projektleiter Daniel Baranowski. Die Menschen sollten ohne einengendes Korsett frei erzählen – was ihnen gelungen ist.

Um die Selbstzeugnisse für den Zuschauer zu erschließen, sind die Interviews mit Begleittexten versehen. Man kann auf einzelne Lebensstationen springen und erfährt zum Beispiel etwas über den Heimatort des Erzählers.

■ Die Interviews im Internet: (nach Anmeldung)

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[roterstern1]

New Hope For Those Who Suffered

The second group includes many Jews who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, like 84-year-old Sonya Barula. She lives with her dirty-white poodle Dollie in a run-down Jerusalem apartment she can barely afford. Barula lived through part of the siege of Leningrad, when Nazi troops cut off almost all supplies to the city during World War II.

"People ate leather," she remembers. "People ate glue. They boiled it into soup or into jelly. All the dogs, cats, horses."

Bombs fell constantly, there was no heat save from what could be burned. Her family escaped over the lake near the city that, when frozen in the deep Russian winter, provided the only way out.

Barula is among the 80,000 Israelis who are survivors of what in Russian is known as the katestropha — the catastrophe — but not of ghettos or camps. Israel's new support for Holocaust survivors will offer this group about $1,000 a year, plus full coverage of medications, and psychological support.

But she is worried about rent, and grateful for a program run by a private charity, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, that gives her about $70 a month to supplement her shopping.

"There has been millions of dollars invested in memorials and museums in order to fulfill that promise that the world never forget," she says. "And that's important, because we have to remember. We have to pass it on to the next generation. But the fellowship believes this is our final opportunity to help the individuals who were affected by the Holocaust."

If any help from Israel comes to Yulia Feuerman, she says it will be too late.

"Far too late. The only people still alive were children then. I was 10 years old. Now I have one foot in the grave," she says. "They should have thought of this earlier."

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/may/13/poverty-among-holocaust-survivors-hits-a-nerve-in/

[roterstern1]

She doesn't understand why that date was ever approved. Kalinsky suggests Israeli leaders were focused on other issues in the 1950s — building a new and relatively poor country that needed a strong military.

"That was maybe right for those days," Kalinsky says. "Now when the Holocaust survivors are old and their needs are so high, this is the time to try and to make the changes."

In the early days of their country, many Israelis also had mixed feelings about Holocaust survivors.

"We saw the Holocaust survivors as a very weak population," says Nava Ein-Mor, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1945, the year World War II ended. "We were very different from them. We were strong, and we were not going to allow ourselves to be in that position."

It was a defense mechanism, she says, a condescending attitude to protect against confronting such horror.

[roterstern1]

A Complicated Law From The 1950s

If the parliament approves, Israel's new program will beef up cash stipends, simplify some of the bureaucracy that may have kept survivors from applying for assistance in the past, and offer additional support such as counseling.

It aims to make amends for an old law — perhaps an old attitude — that now seems unfitting.

That law stipulates that money Germany gave to Israel more than half a century ago can only be offered directly to survivors who arrived in Israel by 1953.

Holocaust compensation is complicated. Take Feuerman's case, for instance. For the past decade, she has received about $400 a month from the German government under an agreement with the Claims Conference, a group of Jewish organizations that negotiated financial payments for Holocaust survivors.

But she has not been eligible for financial assistance from Israel because she immigrated here a decade after the 1953 cutoff date.

[roterstern1]

A recent survey by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel found that one in five Holocaust survivors had to choose between food and other necessities over the past two years.

Now, the government wants parliament to approve just more than a billion shekels a year — or more than $300 million — to help Holocaust survivors, including those in poverty, during in the final years of their lives.

The survey findings weren't an enormous surprise. Government statistics show one-fifth of all Israelis are poor by the same definition.

But Rony Kalinsky, CEO of the foundation that did the study, says Israelis don't want Holocaust survivors in particular to live out their lives this way.

"They expect the country to give them all the help they need to live in dignity for the last years," he says.

[roterstern1]

hier wäre BENs text, die Kommentare kann ich nicht öffnen:

Yulia Feuerman stays dry-eyed telling many of her experiences during World War II.

When she was 10, Feuerman was separated from her mother and two sisters by Nazi soldiers in their small town in what is now western Ukraine. They were sent to a concentration camp. Feuerman, her father and two remaining siblings went into hiding with other Jews — but were eventually found by the Germans. Her father and brother were shot and killed. A Christian family took Feuerman in, pretending she was their daughter to protect her.

But it's when she remembers a spring walk with that family that she finally cries. They passed a pear tree in bloom, she remembers. The last time she'd sat under its blossoms, she had been with an aunt and cousins as they stitched items for a dowry.

"They were all gone," she says, choking up. "Just the tree remained, like a memorial."

The Israeli government doesn't want Yulia Feuerman to die poor. She is one of nearly 50,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel — a quarter of the 200,000 total — whose incomes put them below the poverty line.

[roterstern1]

wilkommen genosse, wir freuen uns dich in der kommune zu haben. schick mir deine daten an roterstern@yahoo.org

kann die kommentare auf kpbs nicht oeffnen, bitte schick sie.

sorry-no english

regards

roter stern