Clarence Schwab: An Essay from the Book “God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes, Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors” (Jewish Lights Publishing)
http://www.jewishlights.com/page/product/978-1-58023-805-2
CLARENCE SCHWAB IS A FRIEND AND E-PAL….THIS IS HIS ESSAY FROM: God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors
Edited by Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Prologue by Elie Wiesel
At our weekly Shabbat dinner, my wife Pam and I ask our children Zachary and Eleonora, and ourselves, two questions: “Did an opportunity present itself to you this past week to help someone or protect someone from a bully?” and “What questions did you ask, or want to ask, in school?”
The first question encourages ethical action; the second, thinking for oneself and speaking one’s mind.
I am the son of a young Holocaust survivor and the grandson of a rescuer. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered twenty members of my immediate family. When I was about eleven years old, my parents, both born in Latvia, began sharing with me my father’s and other family members’ experiences during World War II. And my grandfather and mother started telling me how my grandfather helped save the lives of tens of thousands of Jews.
The circumstances of my father’s survival and my grandfather’s insistence on coming to the aid of others have always inspired me.
I tell my children how in late April 1945 my father, George Schwab, then 13 years old and severely undernourished after a week on a barge with just half a loaf of bread and little drinking water, was forced on a march in Germany. During the previous four years, he had survived the Libau ghetto and several concentration and labor camps. Utterly exhausted, he no longer cared and just wanted to lie down. One of his fellow prisoners, Jule Goldberg, himself in acute pain from an injured, swollen, leg bitten by an SS guard’s dog, took my father by the neck of his ragged prisoner uniform, saying “You are coming with me.” This one selfless act saved my father’s life. Surreally, British troops liberated them only hours later.
What matters most, I tell my children, is not someone’s appearance, or intelligence, or strength, or wealth, but whether, when presented with an opportunity to do so, that person helps another in time of need – even or especially at personal cost or risk.
My grandfather, Hillel Storch, a successful businessman in Riga, came to Stockholm in July 1940 on a six-day business visa just as the Soviets invaded Latvia. As a stateless refugee who did not speak Swedish, he nonetheless managed to bring his wife and young daughter — my mother — from Soviet-occupied Latvia to Stockholm the following year. However, he could not save other family members, and his early attempts to rescue other Jews from the Nazis also failed. Realizing the enormous resources needed for large scale rescue efforts, he established and headed the Swedish Section of the World Jewish Congress, became a representative of the Jewish Agency’s rescue committee, and established contacts with Swedish and US government officials.
In April 1944, he and a few like-minded Swedish Jews conceived a mission to aid Hungarian Jewry. They identified a young, well-connected Swede named Raoul Wallenberg who was prepared to go to Budapest and issue protective papers. They then persuaded US officials to support such an effort and Swedish officials to grant Wallenberg diplomatic immunity, supplied names of Hungarian Jews through early 1945, and supported the mission financially.
In an attempt to alleviate the horrendous conditions in Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt and other Nazi concentration camps, and despite enormous obstacles, my grandfather arranged for about 80,000 food parcels to be delivered to inmates in those camps starting in late 1944, thereby saving many lives.
In March 1945, he successfully negotiated with Heinrich Himmler, through Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, not to carry out Hitler’s orders to blow up the concentration camps in Germany and kill remaining inmates. Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross, Kersten and others updated my skeptical grandfather who wanted to make sure that Himmler kept his promise. After my grandfather’s death in 1983, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme recalled that as a 17-year-old boy he had witnessed my grandfather’s first meeting with Kersten and that “it is a well known fact that many Jews were saved from the concentration camps at the last minute, and that Storch played an important role in that respect.”
Jule Goldberg, who saved one life, and my grandfather’s actions which helped save thousands make me appreciate the true nature of ethical behavior. It is in order to nurture such instincts in myself and my family that I developed the two questions we discuss each Friday night.
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