Obituary: Eve Kugler, Child Survivor of the Holocaust and Educator, 94

 

First in the U.S., and later in her adopted home of England, Kugler became a devoted memory-keeper for the victims of the Holocaust, speaking indefatigably to schoolchildren, traveling with students and others to Nazi concentration camps, and offering herself as a living witness to the dangers of ethnic, religious, and racial hatred.

“Her story is both exceptional and symbolic of a larger movement of children who survived the Holocaust and who have sought to bear witness,” said Laura Hobson Faure, the chair of modern Jewish history at Université Paris 1 and the author of Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children Who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2025). (See upcoming book review in this blog.) Through her book about her family’s Holocaust history, Shattered Crystals, her website, her many public speaking engagements with students in the UK, and through her participation in the March of the Living, Eve educated thousands of young people about the history and lessons of the Holocaust. In 2019, Eve was a recipient of the British Empire Medal.

After World War II broke out in 1939, Kugler’s father was arrested in France because of his German nationality. With no means of supporting her daughters, her mother entrusted Kugler and her sisters to the Children’s Aid Society - the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) - which put them in several children’s homes while employing her as a cook. In 1941, the U.S. government granted permission for a group of refugee children to enter the country. The U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, working with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker aid group, began arranging transports with the help of OSE. In total, about 320 refugee children were evacuated from France in 1941-1942 via Spain and Portugal to the U.S., said Hobson Faure. Kugler and her sister were on the second transport. 

Kugler said that she remembered nothing of the journey through France and Spain and across the Atlantic Ocean, and that any detailed memories of her childhood began with her arrival in the U.S. The refugee children wore lanyards with numbered cards - Kugler was Number 24 - and were placed with foster families. In the following years, Kugler lived in three homes, her sister in four. “They were difficult and lonely years for me,” she wrote in a memoir, Shattered Crystals (C.I.S. Publishers: Lakewood, NJ, 1997), co-authored with her mother Mia Amalia Kanner.

“Emotionally damaged and traumatized by the Holocaust, I came to America with a hidden disability,” she continued. “With the best will in the world, the members of my foster families had no way of grasping the reasons for my deep unhappiness. How could they comprehend my feelings of isolation, my realization that I was different from other children. How could I explain to them my awful, never-ending feelings of guilt at having been saved at the expense of others, those unknown children who, the day before departure, became too ill to travel?”

In her 40s, Kugler begin to address what she described as a form of “amnesia” surrounding the traumatic events of her childhood. The experience of writing her memoir with her mother allowed her to better understand her family’s story. She started speaking at schools, synagogues, and other venues, committing herself to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. Kugler’s death came one day before she was scheduled to participate in the International March of the Living (MOTL), an annual gathering at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. “I feel grateful and somewhat guilty,” she once told an interviewer, “for having survived.”

MOTL Global CEO Scott Saunders said, “Eve had been a part of the March of the Living UK since the very beginning. She was a wonderful, inspiring lady who taught all of us the resilience and positivity of life. She was my friend, my mentor and i and the whole March of the Living family will miss her.” Eve’s legacy will live on in the hearts of minds of the thousands of young people who were privileged to hear her testimony first hand on the March of the Living and in many other educational programs and settings. May her memory always be for a blessing.

Read the May 7, 2025 Washington Post obituary.

Read the April 23, 2025 MOTL article.

(Image Credit: Sam Churchill, motl.org.)

Bergen-Belsen Survivors Mark the 80th Anniversary of Camp’s Liberation

Survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and their families have gathered at the site in northern Germany to officially commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by British troops. Representatives of victims’ associations and the military took part in the ceremony along with the British deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. During the second world war, Soviet prisoners of war and later Jewish prisoners were held at the camp under extremely hostile conditions. According to the foundation responsible for the upkeep of the camp as a memorial site, about 20,000 prisoners of war and at least 52,000 concentration camp prisoners died there, including Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist, and her sister, Margot.

Accompanying about 180 British Jews, including survivors and their relatives, the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, read a psalm. Lola Hassid Angel, 88, from Greece, described the camp in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month as “an abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe”.

At the ceremony, another survivor, 100-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, from Germany, recalled being taken half-dead by train from Auschwitz to Belsen. “I found myself lying amid the dead and the living on a wagon in Bergen-Belsen. Our bodies were tipped out. Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought now I’ll finally be freed by death, but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us. They later told me I’d weighed 29kg [4st 8lb].”

At the time in April 1945, the Guardian (London) reported that a senior medical officer with the British army had witnessed thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases on entering the camp, calling it “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen.

“There was a pile - 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and 4ft high - of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the curbstones as back rests,” the correspondent David Woodward wrote. Accounts from the camp by soldiers and journalists were spread around the world and proved more shocking in many ways than other discoveries of death camps to the east, such as Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, as they had either been demolished to hide evidence of the crimes committed there, or emptied of their inmates, who, like Weinberg, were sent on death marches.

At Belsen, the camp construction and the evidence of what had occurred there remained intact. Some of the Nazi soldiers involved in the death machine were still on site. The large number of prisoners and the conditions at the camp led to mass outbreaks of dysentery, typhus, and malnutrition, leading to about 500 deaths a day, most during the final weeks of the war. A documented 14,000 survivors died by the end of June 1945, many of whose digestive systems had been unable to cope with the food they were given after the liberation of the camp.

Every year, about 250,000 people visit the Memorial and over 1,000 groups take part in guided tours, study days, and projects here.

Read the April 27, 2025 the Guardian article.

Marian Turski, Holocaust Survivor Who Warned Against Silence, 98

 

Marian Turski was a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and two death marches as a teenager and later became a resolute memory-keeper, civil rights advocate. and journalist, gathering testimony from other Holocaust survivors while warning younger generations against silence and indifference. For decades, Turski was among Poland’s most prominent living Holocaust survivors, recounting his story - and those of other Polish Jews he interviewed - while speaking out against hate and reminding the world of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. He battled against historical amnesia. 

Turski studied history at the University of Wroclaw and later traveled to the U.S. on a scholarship, joining the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists in Alabama for the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Just before his death, he returned to Auschwitz to address world leaders and European royals and warned in his speech against “a huge rise in antisemitism.” He said he felt a duty to confront neo-Nazis, including some he said he encountered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the 1960s, and to combat historical lies and revisionism, notably through an open letter he wrote to Mark Zuckerberg in 2020, urging the Facebook chief executive to ban Holocaust denial from his social media platform.

Turski and his parents were incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto, an open-air prison and forced-labor site that eventually had 210,000 people, before being sent to the camps in 1944. Separated from his family, Turski was selected for forced labor at Auschwitz, the concentration and death camp complex in the south of German-occupied Poland. In January 1945, in what would be the waning months of the war in Europe, he and other prisoners were forcibly evacuated ahead of approaching Soviet forces, ordered on a death march toward the German interior.

Turski went on a second death march, this time to Theresienstadt, also known as Terezín, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. When liberated by the Allies, he had contracted typhus and was near death, weighing 70 pounds. Unlike other survivors who immigrated to the U.S. or the British Mandate of Palestine, soon to become Israel, Turski stayed in Poland, where an estimated 90% of the country’s Jewish population had perished in the Holocaust. Among the dead were several dozen of his relatives, including his brother and father, who had both been killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “I wanted to build a new society, to rebuild the country,” Turski recalled.

He became a member of the Polish Workers’ Party and served as an organizer, recruiting young people to the communist cause. While working as an editor at Polityka, a popular center-left newsmagazine, he grew disillusioned by the communist regime, accelerated when government officials waged an antisemitic campaign in 1968 and when Polish forces participated in a Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia later.

Turski published testimony from Holocaust survivors and worked with groups including the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland. To fill a “vacuum” of Jewish life in the country, he helped spearhead the creation of the POLIN Museum, showcasing 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland. 

Into his 90s, Turski served as a member of the International Auschwitz Council, which advises the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and as president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a survivor-led advocacy and education group that promotes awareness of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million people were murdered, including nearly 1 million Jews.

“Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,” Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a tribute. Turski, he added, “was a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict, and understanding over hostility.”

At a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, he urged the gathered dignitaries to remember that “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky” but “began with small forms of persecution.” He went on to cite what he called “the 11th Commandment”: “Don’t be indifferent.” “Do not be indifferent when you hear lies, historical lies,” he said. “Do not be indifferent when you see the past is stretched to fit the current political needs. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against.”

Read the February 20, 2025 Washington Post article.

(Photograph courtesy of the POLIN Museum.)

102-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor is Vogue Germany’s Cover Star

A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered at Auschwitz is the cover star for the July/August edition of Vogue Germany. Margot Friedländer, née Bendheim, was born in Berlin in 1921. According to a brief bio on the website of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Friedländer spent the early part of the war with her mother and younger brother Ralph after her parents separated. They had plans to flee the country but in 1943 her brother was arrested by the Gestapo. Their mother confronted the Gestapo, which led to her being deported to Auschwitz with her son, where they were both murdered. But before leaving, she left behind a message for her daughter that read: “Try to make your life.” Friedländer, then just 21 years old, went into hiding but was ultimately betrayed by “catchers” and was sent to Theresienstadt camp in the then-Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944, according to the museum.

Kerstin Weng, head of editorial content at the magazine, said that the theme of the issue was love, featuring their “favorite pieces, favorite people.” The front of the collector’s issue includes the word “love” written by Friedländer, as well as her signature. The multi-page piece, which includes numerous shots of Friedländer, covers a range of topics, from growing up in Nazi Germany to her commitment as a Holocaust survivor today. The collector's issue of Vogue Germany is available on newsstands from June 22.

Friedländer met her future husband, Adolf, while in the Nazi concentration camp, and married him soon after liberation. The pair emigrated to the US in 1946 and lived in New York for more than six decades. But in 2010, following her husband’s death aged 88, Friedländer moved back to Berlin. Ever since, she has been campaigning as a Holocaust educator. Her tireless efforts have earnt her numerous awards, including the Federal Cross of Merit First Class.

Friedländer told Vogue Germany that she was “appalled” by the growth of right-wing populism and the rise of antisemitic attacks. When addressing the issue of society becoming more polarized, she said: “Look not toward what separates us. Look towards what bring us together. Be People. Be sensible.” Grateful for the opportunity to pass on her message, she said: “You will carry my story onward. That this never comes to happen again.”

Read the June 20, 2024 CNN.com article.

Yehuda Bauer, Preeminent Historian of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, 98

 

Bauer, who fled Nazi Europe shortly before World War II and became one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust, combined academic rigor with humanity as he confronted an unfathomable event and sought to discern its meaning for the future. As a young Israeli historian, he did not set out to become an authority on the Holocaust, or the Shoah, another term used to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Over the next half-century, Dr. Bauer wrote dozens of books that helped form the foundation of modern understanding of the Holocaust and antisemitism. He had lost his extended family in the slaughter, and his work served, in part, to document what had befallen them and so many other victims of Nazi persecution. But he did not regard it as his role simply to “memorialize” the dead, he wrote in his book Rethinking the Holocaust (2001). Instead, he wrote, “I ask questions about what happened and why.” That line of inquiry led him to move beyond existing Holocaust scholarship, which relied in large part on the Nazi bureaucracy’s paper trail and centered on the perpetrators. No true understanding of the Holocaust would ever be reached, Bauer maintained, without studying the victims.

In books including They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust (1973), Bauer challenged a pernicious notion circulating at the time that Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Citing diaries, correspondence, and oral histories, he showed that the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 - when hundreds of Jewish fighters mounted the best known revolt against the Nazis - was far from the only act of insurrection by Jews in ghettos or elsewhere. He also highlighted on the everyday efforts by Jews to retain the dignity that the Nazis tried to strip away.

Bauer wrote extensively about the American response to the Holocaust, including in the book American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945 (1981), and was among scholars who argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unfairly condemned for what critics regarded as his insufficient efforts to stop the Holocaust as it was in progress. Later, Bauer had the painful experience of observing the emergence of pseudo-historians who sought to deny that the Holocaust had occurred or to suggest that the killing had been more limited than was generally understood.

Bauer taught for years at Hebrew University; served as an academic adviser to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped found the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He explored topics including the founding of the state of Israel and the nature of modern antisemitism. His final books included The Jews: A Contrary People (2014). Bauer’s honors included the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honors, bestowed on him in 1998. He spoke critically of Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of using the Holocaust for nationalistic purposes and as a “tool for politics.”

Read the October 22, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the entry on Bauer in the Jewish Virtual Library.

Lily Ebert, Who Kept Holocaust Memory Alive on TikTok, 100

Ebert, a Hungarian-born Auschwitz survivor who devoted herself to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, including on TikTok, where she drew millions of viewers with her testimonials. She also wrote a best-selling memoir, Lily’s Promise.

The title of Ebert’s book referenced a pledge that she made to herself on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, as a 20-year-old prisoner at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, in 1944. Her mother and her two youngest siblings had been sent directly to the gas chamber. Beneath the heavy smoke from the crematorium, Ebert vowed that she would “tell the world what had happened” not only to her “but to all the people who could not tell their stories.”

Ebert spoke to students, to historians, to politicians, and to journalists. In February 2021, her TikTok account started and it made her an unexpected social media celebrity. In one video, she showed the tattoo branded on her arm upon her arrival at Auschwitz, number A-10572. The TikTok account attracted 2 million followers. In 2023, Ebert was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III in recognition of her efforts to educate the public about the Holocaust. 

In Auschwitz, she wrote, “a pall hung over everything, blocking out the sun. The foul smell that had choked us on our arrival, the most sickening and overwhelming smell I had ever experienced, was getting stronger and stronger. Not far away was a tall chimney, smoking furiously, with flames emerging red and bright.” “What kind of factory is that?” she asked another prisoner. “What are they making here? What’s this horrible smell?” “They’re burning your families there,” the woman replied. “Your parents, your sisters, your brothers. They’re burning them.”

After Ebert’s death, King Charles offered his condolences, as did British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In a statement recalling Ebert’s vow to speak of what she had witnessed, Starmer said that she had kept her promise “in the most remarkable way,” and that now “we must keep our promise to her” by carrying forward the memory of the Holocaust.

Image Credit: Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Read the October 11, 2024 Washington Post article.

Ben Stern, Holocaust survivor who challenged neo-Nazis, 102

Stern, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, nine Nazi concentration camps, and two death marches, helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s. He also spoke to hundreds of audiences about Antisemitism and prejudice. Stern, a Polish-born Jew, lost his parents, his sister, and six of his seven brothers in the Holocaust. He evaded the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi camps and was marched for weeks before his liberation in 1945.

In the US, Stern established a chain of laundromats across Chicago and settled with his family in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish community and an estimated 6,000 Holocaust survivors.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin, announced plans for a rally in Skokie. In a legal battle that ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Stern joined other activists to try to stop them.

The neo-Nazis were represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose principal lawyer faced death threats for arguing that even speech as abhorrent as that of neo-Nazis must be defended if the First Amendment protection of free speech is to last. The neo-Nazis won their legal proceedings because their speech was rules to be protected under the First Amendment. But they canceled their rally in Skokie, partially because they were faced with a massive counter-demonstration organized by Jewish groups and activists including Stern, who had written letters to the editor, appeared on television, gathered petitions, and rallied people to the cause.

Stern later spoke to hundreds of audiences about his experience in the Holocaust. He also protested anti-Muslim bigotry in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.

Stern once talked with Ira Glasser, who, after becoming executive director of the ACLU in 1978, had strongly defended its representation of the neo-Nazis in their petition to gather in Skokie. Scheduled to speak together on a panel in California, Stern and Glasser met at the airport and Stern extended to him a hand and said, “We’re not going to agree, but we’re going to be friends.” “There was no meeting of the minds,” Glasser later commented. “His agony was too imprinted on his soul by what happened to him. And I remember thinking that if I were in his [place], I would probably be taking the same position.” Stern’s defiance, Glasser said, had been “heroic.”

Stern and his daughter wrote his 2022 memoir, Near Normal Man: Survival with Courage, Kindness and Hope (Redwood Publishing). She also produced a documentary based on the book, which is available on YouTube. 

*****

Read the March 12, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the February 5, 2023 Berkeleyside article.

 Book Review

A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

Elie Wiesel, fwd. Little, Brown and Company: 2009. Pp xvi, 228. $24.99.

This memoir by the late Thomas Buergenthal (1934-2023), a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague as well as in several other human rights courts, tells how his survival of Auschwitz which he entered at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp influenced his long career as a stellar human rights lawyer and advocate. As the Amazon book description concludes: "A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all."

"It was more than luck and the good for­tune of his ​“Aryan” fea­tures that enabled him to sur­vive the war — it was his strength, wis­dom, and enor­mous faith that he would one day sur­vive and be reunit­ed with his parents. Amaz­ing­ly, Thomas was reunit­ed with his moth­er short­ly after the war and then moved to the Unit­ed States and began a career as lawyer and then as a judge. He has ded­i­cat­ed his career to fight­ing against the human rights vio­la­tions that he expe­ri­enced as a child."

*****

Sources:

(1) Amazon book description.

(2) Read the book review in ReformJudaism.org.

(3) Read the December 22, 2011 Jewish Book Council book review.

(4) Photo courtesy of Amazon.com.

 Obituary: 

Thomas Buergenthal, Human Rights Lawyer, 89

Buergenthal was an international law jurist and human rights defender who was as a boy one of the youngest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as a three-day Nazi death march to Sachsenhausen, Germany. He had a major role in establishing international jurisprudence's framework, stemming from U.N. declarations since the 1960s often called the “International Bill of Human Rights.” In 1992, the U. S. ratified the core document, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 

As a justice of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979-1991), Buergenthal judged cases about allegations of rights abuses by U.S.-allied governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras against leftist guerrillas and their supporters. One case, the disappearance of suspected government opponents in Honduras, led to new interpretations of the burden of proof. Buergenthal and the other judges decided that it could consider the overall pattern of disappearances, setting a “rebuttable presumption” of government involvement. Authorities would now have to prove they had no role in a specific incident, rather than relying on a lack of evidence to exonerate them. In 1993, Buergenthal was part of a U.N. commission that found Salvadoran military officers responsible for so-called “dirty war” crimes, including the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. 

Buergenthal was vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal, which examined requests made by the families of Holocaust victims seeking assets deposited in Swiss banks until 1945. Tens of millions of dollars were estimated to be in accounts hidden from heirs by Swiss banking laws. He also wrote a memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (See Interesting Books in this issue). He also served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, honorary president of the American Society of International Law (2001-2009), and as a law professor. 

*****

Sources:

Read an article about Buergenthal in the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Read the June 3, 2023 Washington Post obituary.

Read the June 2, 2023 New York Times obituary.

Photo courtesy of the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.