Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff is traveling this week to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, visiting key sites in Poland and Germany to honor those lost in the Holocaust and renew a pledge to “Never Forget.”
As the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, Emhoff has made countering the recent global scourge of antisemitism a key priority. The goals of this trip abroad will build on that, senior administration officials told reporters before his departure, focused on Holocaust education and remembrance, as well as combating antisemitism worldwide.
“There will be many events focusing on honoring the victims of the Holocaust, and having a second gentleman educating the public on the true nature of the Holocaust. You will see the second gentleman push back against Holocaust denial, distortion and disinformation, and educating the next generation about the Holocaust,” a senior administration official said.
Emhoff, the official added, “will be meeting with and working with our European partners, both those in and out of government to strengthen our efforts to combat the rise in antisemitism and to deepen our relationships with these European partners as we take on the challenge together.”
The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which has tracked incidents of US antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault since 1979, found 2,717 incidents of antisemitism in the US in 2021, up a significant 34% from the previous year. And in recent months, there have been multiple incidents of incendiary antisemitic incidents in the public sphere, including tweets from Kanye West, a link posted by Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving to a video filled with antisemitic tropes, a sign over a major Los Angeles bridge and other troubling views shared by political figures.
The second gentleman has a packed schedule of events aimed at highlighting Jewish history and the Holocaust, and combating antisemitism, though officials cast the trip as “more of a listening session” than focused on “big policy deliverables.”
On Friday, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Emhoff is set to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial and Museum in Poland, where he will receive a tour, then participate in a candle-lighting and wreath-laying. He will also attend the commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz, per his office.
On Saturday, Emhoff will visit Schindler’s Enamel Factory museum, a key site commemorating the Holocaust, and attend a roundtable on antisemitism in Krakow.
“The goal here is to hear directly from experts, religious leaders, and academics on their work in Poland to promote tolerance, education, and inclusiveness. And throughout that, the second gentleman will be signaling to them our eagerness to work with them and that we are with them in their fight,” the official said.
He is also set to meet with Ukrainian refugees and United Nations officials at a UN community center.
On Sunday, he will tour Krakow’s Jewish quarter and then visit historic Jewish sites in Gorlice, Poland, before traveling to Berlin.
In Berlin on Monday, Emhoff joins a Convening of Special Envoys and Coordinators on Combating Antisemitism, where he will be joined by US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt. He is later set to visit Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum and the Museum of Jewish Life.
On Tuesday, he will participate in a roundtable with interfaith leaders.
“Interfaith dialogue has been an area of focus for a second gentleman. And the basic idea is here, which he will be speaking about throughout the trip, is that we know that Semitism is not only a threat to Jews, it is often accompanied or the precursor to other forms of hatred and intolerance, including against other ethnic or religious minority groups or immigrants. So we view this engagement as about building coalitions across all groups to combat hate in all its forms,” the senior official said.
Emhoff will meet with Ukrainian refugees at the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue. He will also visit multiple memorials, including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where he will meet with “a small group” of Holocaust survivors.
The trip takes on special significance for Emhoff, whose “great grandparents (fled) persecution from what is now Poland at the beginning of the 19th century,” the senior official said.
“That is a pretty incredible moment for him to return as an American Jew, as the first second gentleman, as the first Jewish spouse of the president or vice president, and work on these issues,” the official said.
Emhoff has previously warned of an “epidemic of hate facing our country” as he convened a roundtable on antisemitism at the White House last month.
“We’re seeing a rapid rise in antisemitic rhetoric and acts,” Emhoff said at the start of the roundtable. “Let me be clear: words matter. People are no longer saying the quiet parts out loud – they are literally screaming them.”
In addition to the roundtable, as second gentleman, Emhoff has met with students to discuss domestic antisemitism, hosted a virtual Seder, lit the menorah and affixed a mezuzah outside the entrance of the vice president’s Naval Observatory residence.
The Department of Justice has arrested a 36-year-old Florida woman after she allegedly committed a “years-long scheme” to defraud an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor of his life savings. The department said that over the course of more than four years, Peaches Stergo took over $2.8 million from the survivor.
Stergo was arrested on Wednesday, with U.S. Attorney Damian Williams saying she “maliciously” drained the unnamed Holocaust survivor’s savings so “she could become a millionaire through fraud.”
According to the DOJ, Stergo met her victim on a dating website between 2016 and 2017 when he was living in Manhattan. It was at the beginning of 2017 that she then asked him if she could borrow money to pay for her lawyer “who she claimed was refusing to release funds from an injury settlement,” the department said. But bank records allegedly showed that she never received settlement funds.
That was just the beginning of a series of lies, authorities said.
Prosecutors say that Stergo repeatedly demanded that the 87-year-old give her money to prevent her accounts from being frozen. Over the course of that time, he wrote 62 checks totaling more than $2.8 million, the DOJ said, adding that she also used a fake email account and created fake letters and invoices that appeared to be from an employee of TD Bank.
That email account, according to the indictment, was used to “repeatedly assure the victim, over the course of months, that he would be repaid if he continued to deposit money” into her bank account.
It wasn’t until around October 2021 that the man she defrauded told his son what had happened.
Stergo was able to use that money to purchase a home in a gated community, a boat and multiple cars, as well as take “expensive trips,” and purchase gold coins and bars, Rolex watches and designer clothing, prosecutors alleged. Meanwhile, the Holocaust survivor has since had to give up his apartment, the DOJ said.
“Stergo forged documents and impersonated a bank employee in exchange for a life of fancy trips, Rolex watches, and luxury purchases,” Williams said. “Today’s arrest reemphasizes this Office’s commitment to seeking justice for victims of financial frauds.”
The woman, from Champions Gate near Orlando, has been charged with one count of wire fraud, which the DOJ said has a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Whoopi Goldberg is again receiving criticism for her false claims about the Holocaust. In an interview published with The Sunday Times of London on Saturday – the sixth day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah – the actor and “The View” co-host reiterated her claims that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally” about race.
Goldberg first made the public statements on an episode of “The View” about 10 months ago, saying at the time that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather, “inhumanity to man.”
She later apologized and was suspended from the show for two weeks for her comments.
But she is now sticking to her claims.
In the interview with The Sunday Times, Goldberg – whose real name is Caryn Johnson and goes by a self-given name she has said comes from a Jewish relative – said there is division about whether Judaism is a race or a religion. That’s when the interviewer noted that to the Nazis, it was a race, hence the Holocaust, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 6 million Jews.
“That’s the killer, isn’t it” Goldberg responded. “The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They’re Nazis. Why believe what they’re saying?”
The yellow badge Jewish people were forced to win during the Holocaust.
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
The interview then mentioned the Nazi-era laws that specifically targeted Jewish people. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime issued more than 400 decrees and regulations against Jewish people in the first six years of his rule. The legislative actions started with limiting Jewish people’s participation in public life and within a few years, the Jewish population was segregated from other Germans and forced to identify themselves as Jewish.
And it wasn’t just forced upon those who practiced the religion. According to the Memorial Museum, it was also those who had Jewish grandparents, even those who had converted to Christianity.
Despite this, Goldberg insisted the Holocaust “wasn’t originally about race.”
“Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision,” she said, later adding, “… you could not tell a Jew on a street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I’d taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked.”
The interviewer wrote that Goldberg then pondered whether a Jewish person is still part of the Jewish race if they are no longer practicing their religion. And when the interviewer asked whether race can be more about skin color, Goldberg responded, “Well, it’s not in its official… when you look it up.”
But at its core, the Nazi focus was on pushing the idea of the “Aryan” race, a false racial identity that was adopted by Hitler to classify a superior group of people that mostly excluded those who were Jewish, as well as those who were Black or Roma and Sinti, according to the Memorial Museum.
And Hitler himself called Judaism a race, saying in one of his first major statements that “Jews are definitely a race, and not a religious belief.” In that same statement, he called Jewish people an “alien race” and said that antisemitism must have “the ultimate aim” of “the irreversible elimination…of all Jews.”
Excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s letter on ‘the dangers currently presented by Jewry to our nation’ from 16 September 1919.
This text is one of the first major statements made by Hitler with regard to the Jewish question. pic.twitter.com/t56oHRWm2w
Goldberg’s comments swiftly received criticism, including from 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Lucy Lipiner.
“Whoopi Goldberg continues to use the Holocaust as her punching bag. We told her that her comments harm us and she simply doesn’t care. I survived the Nazis and the Holocaust, so I’ll be damned if I let a comedy has-been, peddling a fake Jewish name get the better of me,” she tweeted.
Video game director Luc Bernard said that Goldberg needs to be forced “to go to a Holocaust memorial and learn about the Nuremberg laws.”
A grand jury indicted two men – one of whom is Jewish and a descendant of a Holocaust survivor – in connection with an online threat last month to attack a synagogue in New York City.
Christopher Brown and Matthew Mahrer were both indicted on charges of conspiracy and weapons possession. Brown also was charged with a felony count of making terroristic threats as a hate crime, and possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, among other charges.
Mahrer, who previously made bail, appeared on Wednesday in Supreme Court in New York, with family members present. He is Jewish and his grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, defense attorney Brandon Freycinet said in court, adding that his client would not want to harm his own people.
Both defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges on Wednesday. Brown faces up to 25 years in prison and Mahrer faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge.
The two were arrested by Metropolitan Transportation Authority officers as they were entering Penn Station in Manhattan on November 19, according to NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell.
The suspects allegedly possessed a firearm, high-capacity magazine, a military-style hunting knife, a Nazi swastika arm patch, a ski mask and a bulletproof vest, officials said.
“A horrific tragedy was averted thanks to the diligence, hard work and coordination between my Office and our local, state and federal law enforcement partners,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement Wednesday. “The increase in antisemitic attacks and threats cannot and will not be tolerated. Manhattanites and all New Yorkers should know that we continue to vigorously prosecute hate crimes every day and are using every tool at our disposal to address hate and bias.”
New York state leads the nation in antisemitic incidents, with at least 416 reported in 2021, including at least 51 assaults – the highest number ever recorded by the Anti-Defamation League in New York. There were 12 assaults reported in 2020, the ADL said in an audit last week.
A total of 2,717 antisemitic incidents were reported last year across the nation – a 34% increase compared to 2,026 in 2020, according to the ADL. The ADL has been tracking such incidents since 1979 – and its previous reports have found antisemitism in America has been on the rise for years.
The indictment comes the same day that Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, held a roundtable on antisemitism at the White House during which he warned of an “epidemic of hate facing our country.”
A statement of facts from the prosecution and the criminal indictment offer a timeline of the men’s actions and allege that they drove from New York to Pennsylvania to get a firearm.
The documents state Brown sent out a series of disturbing tweets from November 12 to November 17, including one saying, “Gonna ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die.”
Call records show Brown and Mahrer communicated with each other on the phone, and on November 18 they went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the documents state. Surveillance footage showed that Brown was wearing a backpack that police later found contained a knife, a Swastika armband and a ski mask, the documents state.
The two men then met with a third person and, in a recorded phone call with a prison inmate, said they were driving to Pennsylvania to get a firearm, the indictment states. Brown sent Mahrer $650 and Mahrer then sent $700 to this third person, the documents say.
Later that night, surveillance footage shows Brown and Mahrer walking into the Upper West Side building where Mahrer lives, the documents say. Mahrer is seen on video wearing a camouflage backpack that police later recovered; the backpack contained a firearm, a large-capacity ammo feeding device and 19 rounds of ammunition, according to the documents.
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or anti-Semite. And so it’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen and we need to avoid those kind of empowering the extremes,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from it.”
Trump had dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate last Tuesday with both Fuentes and rapper Kanye West, who himself became engulfed in controversy after repeating antisemitic conspiracy theories and making other offensive claims last month.
The Anti-Defamation League has identified Fuentes as a White supremacist and he has been banned from most major social media platforms for his White nationalist rhetoric. Fuentes was present on the grounds of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has promoted Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about fraud in the 2020 election. The House select committee investigating the events of January 6 issued a subpoena to Fuentes in January.
Trump’s meeting with the two figures has drawn intense criticism in recent days, with Hutchinson saying on Sunday: “Well, I hope some day we won’t have to be responding to what former President Trump has said or done. In this instance it’s important to respond.”
Hutchinson, a former US Attorney in Arkansas, is term-limited and leaving office in January. He’s currently mulling a 2024 White House bid, and he used Trump’s controversial meeting to note his own record on such issues, telling Bash, “the last time I met with a White supremacist it was in an armed standoff. I had a bulletproof vest on. We arrested them, prosecuted them and sent them to prison.”
During last week’s dinner, Trump was engaged with Fuentes and found him “very interesting,” a source familiar with the dinner said, particularly Fuentes’ abilities to rattle off statistics and data, and his familiarity with Trump world. At one point during the dinner, Trump declared that he “liked” Fuentes.
Trump acknowledged the dinner in a post on Truth Social Friday stating: “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
Trump repeated later Friday that he “didn’t know” Fuentes and had offered West business as well as political advice.
Robert Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II who played a feisty prisoner of war in the improbable 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” has died. He was 96.
Clary died Wednesday of natural causes at his home in the Los Angeles area, niece Brenda Hancock said Thursday.
“He never let those horrors defeat him,” Hancock said of Clary’s wartime experience as a youth. “He never let them take the joy out of his life. He tried to spread that joy to others through his singing and his dancing and his painting.”
When he recounted his life to students, he told them, “Don’t ever hate,” Hancock said. “He didn’t let hate overcome the beauty in this world.”
“Hogan’s Heroes,” in which Allied soldiers in a POW camp bested their clownish German army captors with espionage schemes, played the war strictly for laughs during its 1965-71 run. The 5-foot-1 Clary sported a beret and a sardonic smile as Cpl. Louis LeBeau.
Robert Clary as Corporal Louis LeBeau in “Hogan’s Heroes.” This scene was initially broadcast on September 17, 1965.
CBS via Getty Images
Clary was the last surviving original star of the sitcom that included Bob Crane, Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon as the prisoners. Werner Klemperer and John Banner, who played their captors, were both European Jews who fled Nazi persecution before the war.
Clary began his career as a nightclub singer and appeared on stage in musicals including “Irma La Douce” and “Cabaret.” After “Hogan’s Heroes,” Clary’s TV work included the soap operas “The Young and the Restless,” “Days of Our Lives” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
He considered musical theater the highlight of his career. “I loved to go to the theater at quarter of 8, put the stage makeup on and entertain,” he said in a 2014 interview.
He remained publicly silent about his wartime experience until 1980 when, Clary said, he was provoked to speak out by those who denied or diminished the orchestrated effort by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews.
A documentary about Clary’s childhood and years of horror at Nazi hands, “Robert Clary, A5714: A Memoir of Liberation,” was released in 1985. The forearms of concentration camp prisoners were tattooed with identification numbers, with A5714 to be Clary’s lifelong mark.
“They write books and articles in magazines denying the Holocaust, making a mockery of the 6 million Jews — including a million and a half children — who died in the gas chambers and ovens,” he told The Associated Press in a 1985 interview.
Twelve of his immediate family members, his parents and 10 siblings, were killed under the Nazis, Clary wrote in a biography posted on his website.
In 1997, he was among dozens of Holocaust survivors whose portraits and stories were included in “The Triumphant Spirit,” a book by photographer Nick Del Calzo.
“I beg the next generation not to do what people have done for centuries — hate others because of their skin, shape of their eyes, or religious preference,” Clary said in an interview at the time.
Retired from acting, Clary remained busy with his family, friends and his painting. His memoir, “From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary,” was published in 2001.
Robert Clary, then 87, paints at his house in Beverly Hills.
Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
“One Of The Lucky Ones,” a biography of one of Clary’s older sisters, Nicole Holland, was written by Hancock, her daughter. Holland, who worked with the French Resistance against Germany, survived the war, as did another sister. Hancock’s second book, “Talent Luck Courage,” recounts Clary and Holland’s lives and their impact.
Clary was born Robert Widerman in Paris in March 1926, the youngest of 14 children in the Jewish family. He was 16 when he and most of his family were taken by the Nazis.
In the documentary, Clary recalled a happy childhood until he and his family were forced from their Paris apartment and put into a crowded cattle car that carried them to concentration camps.
“Nobody knew where we were going,” Clary said. “We were not human beings anymore.”
After 31 months in captivity in several concentration camps, he was liberated from the Buchenwald death camp by American troops. His youth and ability to work kept him alive, Clary said.
Returning to Paris and reunited with his two sisters, Clary worked as a singer and recorded songs that became popular in America.
After coming to the United States in 1949, he moved from club dates and recording to Broadway musicals, including “New Faces of 1952,” and then to movies. He appeared in films including 1952’s “Thief of Damascus,” “A New Kind of Love” in 1963 and “The Hindenburg” in 1975.
In recent years, Clary recorded jazz versions of songs by Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim and other greats, said his nephew Brian Gari, a songwriter who worked on the CDs with Clary.
Clary was proud of the results, Gari said, and thrilled by a complimentary letter he received from Sondheim. “He hung that on the kitchen wall,” Gari said.
Clary didn’t feel uneasy about the comedy on “Hogan’s Heroes” despite the tragedy of his family’s devastating war experience.
“It was completely different. I know they (POWs) had a terrible life, but compared to concentration camps and gas chambers it was like a holiday.”
Clary married Natalie Cantor, the daughter of singer-actor Eddie Cantor, in 1965. She died in 1997.
The horrors of the Holocaust were met with various forms of resistance. Some insurgents fought back by smuggling food and weapons into Jewish ghettos. Tonight, we’ll tell you about a very different kind of resistance group nicknamed the Paper Brigade. Made up mostly of writers and intellectuals living in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, the members risked death, smuggling artwork, books and rare manuscripts – hiding them in underground bunkers. Today, 80 years after the Paper Brigade fought back against cultural genocide —their heroics are still unfolding. There’s an active search-and-rescue mission underway in Vilnius, where troves of hidden material continue to be uncovered, discovered and recovered.
Jonathan Brent: My intention is not to seize it and take it and bring it someplace. It’s to open it up so the public can see it
Jon Wertheim: Put it out there.
Jonathan Brent: And put it out there in the world.
Jonathan Brent is the executive director of YIVO, an institute based in New York which houses 24 million Jewish cultural artifacts.
This past spring, we met him in Vilnius, where the YIVO Institute originated in 1925 and where some of its collection has been unaccounted for since World War II. We looked on as Brent examined documents in a storage closet at Lithuania’s national library.
Jon Wertheim: This is very much an active investigation.
Jonathan Brent: Yes, this history is not over.
Jonathan Brent
Beneath the hill of three crosses, Vilnius wears its history with grace. But its beauty masks a dark chapter. Today the city is mostly Catholic, but before the second world war Vilnius was almost half Jewish – and a magnet for artists, musicians, poets and dramatists from all over Eastern Europe. They wrote, mostly in Yiddish, the German-Hebrew dialect of Eastern European Jews.
Jonathan Brent: Most people in America know nothing of the great flourishing of Jewish culture that took place in this city.
Then in the summer of 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania. Many of the local citizens collaborated with the Nazis and within six months, 50,000 of the 70,000 Vilnius Jews were killed.
Jonathan Brent: One of the worst slaughters during the Holocaust. Some 90% to 95% of the Jewish population of Lithuania was murdered brutally, cruelly, sadistically.
Jon Wertheim: Not often in [the] camps I gather?
Jonathan Brent: Shot burned. Hideous.
The Nazis were also determined to extinguish the Jewish culture. And, in Vilnius, there was no place more central to Jewish culture than YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, a Smithsonian of sorts, part museum, part library, part university. Its archive was as varied as it was massive. Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein sat on YIVO’s original board; Marc Chagall, who painted Vilnius’ synagogues, opened its art wing.
Jon Wertheim: It strikes me someone had an unhappily prescient sense of all this, that you’re creating this collection and capturing this history right before other people are
Jonathan Brent: Wipe it out, yes.
Jon Wertheim: Trying to erase it–
Jonathan Brent: Well, the Jews have had– quite a bit of history that prepared them for that eventuality.
Rescued artifacts
After the Germans’ invaded Vilnius, a special squad of Nazis commandeered YIVO’s headquarters with designs of looting the art and rare books and burning everything else. But the Nazis needed help assessing what was valuable, so they rounded up 40 Jewish writers and artists mockingly nicknamed the Paper Brigade to sort through rooms upon rooms housing YIVO’s collection. But the Paper Brigade had other ideas. They set aside the most significant manuscripts and art, including a sketch by Picasso, and organized a smuggling operation back to the ghetto. Homemade diapers sewn into their pants concealed the contraband from the Nazi guards. They had ten hiding places, the largest was underneath a house, 60 feet down and accessible only through a sewage tunnel.
Jon Wertheim: you’ve said that some people resisted by taking up arms, or by smuggling food or medical supplies. And this was a form of resistance also?
Hadas Kalderon: Yes, because they knew that if they are not going to survive the Jewish people would have their culture again to remember.
Hadas Kalderon is the granddaughter of Avrom Sutzkever, an avant garde poet in Vilnius in the 1930s. During the war, he became one of the leaders of the Paper Brigade.
Hadas Kalderon: It was a nickname, the Paper Brigade. people in the ghetto laughed at them. “Oh, you’re smuggling papers? Smuggle food. We need food.”
Jon Wertheim: What was the response to that?
Hadas Kalderon: You have to understand that poetry, literature, and culture was part of their soul.
Kalderon grew up listening to her grandfather’s war stories, so we invited her to meet us in Vilnius from her home in Israel. We retraced Suztkever’s smuggling route and she told us about the night her grandfather barely escaped the Nazi guard at the gate of the Jewish ghetto.
Hadas Kalderon
Hadas Kalderon: He was knocked down. And the papers came out of him. And he took the gun, the guard, and said, “what you’re not allowed to take anything in– anything.”
He says he told the guard that the papers were needed for kindling.
Hadas Kalderon: And he let him in.
Among the items Sutzkever concealed, the original writings of Sholem Alecheim, known as the Mark Twain of Eastern Europe, whose stories inspired “Fiddler on the Roof.”
In 1944, the Soviets liberated Lithuania and reclaimed the country as part of the Soviet Union. Only eight of the 40 members of the Paper Brigade had survived the war.
Hadas Kalderon: This is an unbelievable picture of them coming back to see what can be saved.
Armed with a homemade wheelbarrow and shovels, they dug up the treasures from their hiding places.
Jon Wertheim: Your grandfather put himself at huge risk doing this. Did he ever discuss with you whether it was worth it or not?
Hadas Kalderon: he felt that if he survived than he has a mission to be the deliverer for the dead, for the stories, for the cultural. So that is the point of living.
But with the Soviets now controlling Lithuania, Jewish life again came under assault. Everything the Paper Brigade risked their lives to protect was endangered for a second time.
Jonathan Brent: These treasures that connected you today with a past of 700 years ago gave you a sense of your own history and the value of it and importance of it. And the Soviets wanted desperately to destroy that and make you a Soviet citizen.
Jon Wertheim: Another form of erasure.
Jonathan Brent: Yes, absolutely
Avrom Sutzkever and others began a 2nd secret operation. They stuffed their suitcases with books and enlisted couriers, redirecting materials to YIVO in New York City, where the institute had relocated during the war. The rest of the material was assumed destroyed. But Antanas Ulpis, a brave Catholic librarian, took up the cause in Vilnius. Risking his own life, Ulpis hid whatever was left behind in this empty Catholic church.
But for almost 50 years, remnants of vilnius’ Jewish life vanished. And the city’s Jewish past was not discussed.
Vilnius University Professor Mindaugas Kvietkauskas grew up Catholic and would become Lithuanian’s minister of culture.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas: My knowledge about Jewish history and culture and the Holocaust was very vague when I was a teenager.
Jon Wertheim: you weren’t taught about the Holocaust in school.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas: No. No. I had to discover this legacy by myself.
He was 17 when he finally chanced upon faded Yiddish inscriptions in the old section of town. As his curiosity grew,he studied Yiddish and says he became intoxicated by the culture that it encompassed.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas: Yiddish literature for me is this nexus of poetry, of beauty, and human destinies. It is full of voices of survivors, of victims, and also of heroes who tried to rescue this culture, this community against the evil of totalitarianism.
Kvietkauskas heard whispers in Vilnius about a hidden literary bounty, but it wasn’t until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 90s that Jewish culture could emerge from hiding. Kvietkauskas was invited inside the 18th century Catholic Church, where Ulpis, the brave librarian, had hidden the books. Through the years, Ulpis had created a book sanctuary, with literary works rescued and concealed from the Red Army, floor to ceiling under the dusty baroque arches. The church is now empty and awaiting renovation. But we asked Kvietkauskas to take us there.
And show us where the books were hidden – underground, in the confessional. Even in the bellows of the 18th-century organ.
Jon Wertheim: I’m just trying to picture you walking into this unexplored Book Palace.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas: Some of those books had blood stains, some of them had inscriptions made by the readers who most probably were killed.
Today, these books are slowly bringing legacy back to life so says Jonathan Brent, who became YIVO’s director in 2009.
Jonathan Brent: The materials that YIVO had collected represented a body of materials which if it were wiped out would leave an absence that could never be filled in. And it would lead to total cultural deprivation for those Jews who might survive.
The literary equivalent of Easter eggs, the rescued artifacts keep popping up in Lithuania. It’s all triggered a familiar custody battle. The Lithuanians argued for the trove to stay in Lithuania, YIVO’s executives insisted the material be reunited with its collection in New York, fearing the documents would continue to deteriorate, Brent brokered a deal, YIVO would fund the preservation now and iron out ownership details later.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim and Stefanie Halpern inspect materials preserved by by the Paper Brigade
Stefanie Halpern: These are fragments of books that were scooped out of the burnt rubble of the YIVO building brought here to New York preserved in these boxes.
YIVO’s director of archives in New York, Stefanie Halpern, just completed a seven-year, $7 million project overseeing the cataloging and digitizing of the Paper Brigade’s entire collection.
Jon Wertheim: Do we know if the Paper Brigade preserved this?
Stefanie Halpern: They did.
Stefanie Halpern: And these are the surviving pages. It’s not the full manuscript that we have. Only about a dozen or so pages.
As new works are discovered voices from a century ago are amplified. Consider the works of Avrom Sutzkever, who now, years after his death, is coming to be appreciated as a towering 20th century poet. His 1946 memoir was published in English just last year.
Hadas Kalderon: They are learning Sutzkever in many, many universities, not just in Lithuania, also in the United States, and in Canada, and in China, and in Japan.
Lithuania is now home to only 4,000 Jews. But it’s on account of the Paper Brigade and continuing discoveries, that the country is starting to reckon with the Nazi atrocities and its uncomfortable history. Even schools are now starting to teach about how Lithuania’s Jews died—and how they lived.
Jon Wertheim: Do you know the phrase CPR? Strikes me you’re really bringing it back to life.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas: I hope so. But we still– lack wider recognition in our– in– in our society. In the course of last 20 years. [The] mentality of our society became more open towards different versions of its own past.
And in the process, Lithuanians have started learning about how, an unlikely group of resistance fighters both Jewish and Catholic took the ultimate risk to assure arts and letters would survive.
Produced by Julie Holstein. Broadcast associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Stephanie Palewski Brumbach.
When Alice Grusová was a baby, her parents left her on a train station bench, with no idea of what would become of her.
It was June 1942 and this was the last desperate act by Marta and Alexandr Knapp to save their daughter as their attempt to escape what was then Czechoslovakia ended in disaster.
The couple had fled Prague, but when their train drew in to Pardubice, eastern Bohemia, Nazi soldiers boarded in search of fleeing Jews.
Grusová – her married name – never saw her parents again. They were arrested andsent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where they were later deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Her brother from her father’s previous marriage was also killed there.
It might have been their infant daughter’s fate too, had it not been for their high-stakes gamble. This year, Grusová celebrated her 81st birthday – as well as her 60th wedding anniversary with husband Miroslav. Living in Prague, they have three sons, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
This, she had always felt, was the sum total of her family, but earlier this year the retired pediatric nurse traveled to Israel where she reconnected with her Jewish heritage and met her only surviving first cousin – as well as a wider family she didn’t know existed.
“I was most shocked when I found out, when I was 80, that I have such a large family,” she said in an emotional video call with CNN.
“I am just sad this didn’t come earlier,” added Grusová, who has battled cancer, hepatitis and a spinal surgery.
The reunion occurred thanks to the efforts of a curious woman 5,000 miles away in South Africa, during the initial stages of the pandemic. The incredible story has now been shared by online genealogy site MyHeritage.
With so much of life on hold, Michalya Schonwald Moss delved into her family history on MyHeritage. She had always known her family had been decimated in the Holocaust, but nothing prepared her for the discovery that 120 of her relatives were murdered at Auschwitz.
Yet out of the unimaginable darkness, a tiny and most unexpected ray of hope emerged. With the help of professional genealogists in both the Czech Republic and Israel, she unearthed the incredible tale of one survivor: Grusová.
Having been found on the station bench, the one-year-old girl was initially placed in an orphanage. Grusová, who has no memory of her parents, was later moved to Theresienstadt.She recalled: “There was a nice woman who was taking care of us. I only remember glimpses from that time.
“And then I remember when I got sick with typhoid and the workers there had to protect me from the Germans.
“I remember they were telling me to be silent or the bad Germans would come and kill us.”
Incredibly, she survived and after the war was reunited with her mother’s younger sister Edith – or Editka as she calls her – who survived Auschwitz by being transferred to a labor camp.
Her voice cracking with emotion, Grusová recalled her aunt, who like many Nazi camp survivors had her identity number tattooed on her arm.She said: “She was so beautiful, she was slim, she had the tattoo. But I didn’t understand that at the time.”
At first, the pair lived together in Czechoslovakia, but in 1947 her aunt emigrated to what was then Palestine. For reasons that remain unclear, Grusová was left behind and put up for adoption.
“I was six when my aunt left Czechoslovakia and I came to my new parents,” she said. “As a child, I was very sad that my aunt left. I didn’t understand why she didn’t take me with her.
“I was in contact with her for a while. She got married and had a son, whom I last saw in a picture when he was two years old.” But the correspondence with Edith petered out, and in 1966 “we lost each other,” she said.
Grusová never knew what happened to her aunt – until her son Jan, who speaks English, translated a surprising email his parents received from Schonwald Moss in 2021. He and his wife had spent years trying to trace his mother’s cousin, without success.
But with the help of professional researchers, Schonwald Moss had not only uncovered Grusová’s incredible tale but had also found that cousin – Edith’s son, Yossi Weiss, now 67 and living in the Israeli city of Haifa.
Weiss and Grusová “met” online last year, alongside other members of the newly discovered family tree. Weiss had known nothing of his cousin and his own life had been blighted by tragedy – having lost both his mother and his son to suicide.
Over the summer, Grusová flew to Israel with her husband, their son Jan and his wife Petra to meet Weiss and members of his wider family, including Schonwald Moss, who had traveled from South Africa for the occasion.
Grusová told CNN: “They wanted to meet me and come to visit me, but my cousin has cancer and he can’t travel.
“I was scared of the long journey at my age,” she said. “Now I am so pleased I went. I am just sad this didn’t come earlier.
“If it wasn’t for Covid, I would have never found out I have such a big family.”
Grusová – who speaks neither Hebrew nor English – communicated with her new-found relatives via an interpreter. Together they visited her late aunt’s grave, the Theresienstadt museum and the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem, where she recorded her personal testimony and was also filmed for an Israeli news channel.
Simmy Allen, head of international media at Yad Vashem, was there at the time. He told CNN that it was a “very emotional gathering,” adding: “The idea that the family was uniting and different sides of the family were really discovering their roots and coming to Yad Vashem to solidify that, so that their ancestors have a place that will remember them in perpetuity.”
Grusová said: “My family increased in size a lot. And Michalya keeps finding more and more relatives.”
Weiss told CNN he had known little about his mother’s earlier life and was unable to explain why she left his cousin behind when she moved to what was then Palestine.
“From the little bit she told me I knew she worked in a factory and she came back to the city after the war and she was lucky to survive,” he said. “I knew she was married before and her husband was killed on the Russian front but I didn’t know the chapter of finding Alice.”
Of their reunion, he said: “I made sure I had private time with Alice.
“We opened up the issue of my mother coming to Israel and Alice staying behind and agreed that things were complicated.”
The question will forever remain unanswered, though Weiss has tried to make sense of it. “My mother was a Holocaust survivor coming back from the camps at the age of 25 and had just lost her husband. Alice was five. My mother couldn’t provide her home, school, food and everything,” he said.
Perhaps she thought her niece would have been better off with adoptive parents, he added.
“It hurts me on a personal level because sometimes I fantasize about ‘what if,’” he said.
Grusová felt similarly: “Of course I thought about what my life would have been. As a child, I was very sad that my aunt left. I didn’t understand why she didn’t take me with her.”
“My cousin tried to explain,” she added. “She was young, her life was saved by a miracle. I am not blaming her for anything.”
Of the reunion with Grusová, Weiss said: “She wanted very much to see my mother’s grave. It was very important to her and part of the closure.”
Being at Yad Vashem with Grusová when she recorded her testimony was particularly poignant, he said. “It was very emotional and not easy for anyone.”
Schonwald Moss agreed. “It was one of the most extraordinary, intimate, emotionally healing experiences of my life,” she told CNN.
The family is now in talks with Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation, which plans to record Alice’s video testimony in the new year.
“To discover that one family member had survived that we never knew about, and that she was still alive and living in Prague, was as if we had found a living ghost. And then to discover her story was especially heartbreaking,” said Schonwald Moss.
“By having her anew in our lives, she’s taught us what living looks like. Everyday is a repair for our family. And thanks to Alice and the sparkle in her eyes and the love she emanates, we have become a family again.”
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Prominent figures are under heat after comments of anti-semitism.
It has been particularly apparent through American rapper Kanye West and basketball player Kyrie Irving.
Both celebrities have faced consequences for the comments.
Businesses have cut ties with the rapper, including Adidas. West was even escorted out of Sketchers headquarters after showing up unannounced.
Kyrie Irving, a point guard for the Brooklyn Nets was issued a five day suspension last week for his past anti-semitic comments.
Nike has severed ties, and many people believe other business partnerships of his could now be in jeopardy.
These types of comments can be dangerous, and according to the anti-defamation league, 2,717 incidents of anti-semitic behavior were reported in 2021. That was a record.
Experts said it’s important to teach your children about what these actions can lead to.
This week marks the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht known as the “night of broken glass”, where more than 7,000 jewish businesses were damaged by attackers.
This was one of the events that led to the Holocaust.
A local West Michigan author, Danica Davidson, recently released a book “I Will Protect You”. It is a story of twins who survived the Holocaust.
The book aims to reach the younger generation and educate those who know little about the historic event.
You can purchase it at local bookstores and online.
FILE – Hannah Pick-Goslar, then 69, childhood friend of Anne Frank, is interviewed by the Associated … [+] Press at her Jerusalem apartment, Israel, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 1998. Hannah Pick-Goslar, one of Jewish diarist Anne Frank’s best friends, has died at age 93, the foundation that runs the Anne Frank House museum said Saturday, Oct. 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma, File)
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Hannah “Hanneli” Pick-Goslar, a towering child-witness to the Holocaust whom Anne Frank described in her diary as her best friend, has died at home in Jerusalem, age 93, two weeks before her 94th birthday. Mrs. Pick-Goslar tirelessly lectured, wrote, and gave interviews about her years in exile in Amsterdam, her own time in the concentration camps and her friendship with Anne, providing an essential, intimate picture of the work and life of the young writer, the lone creator of one of the most famous journals in the world.
Like her friend Anne, Hannah Goslar was incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen. Unlike her friend, Mrs. Pick-Goslar survived Bergen-Belsen with her sister Gabi, was re-interred by the Russians and released into US Army care before her 1947 emigration to Israel. There she studied, became a pediatric nurse, married TK Pick, and had a large family, including, today, 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren whom she with bracing wit described as “my answer to Hitler.”
By 1957 she was on her first trip to the United States to lecture about the Holocaust and her friendship with Anne. Essentially, for the following 65 years , she never stopped what can only be described as her global public-speaking tour, especially in education of the young — a few short months before her death she was lecturing French and German students via Zoom. Over decades of this illuminating work, she served as the inspiration for books, articles, films and most recently, the 2021 Netflix adaptation of her life, My Best Friend Anne Frank.
Mrs. Pick-Goslar’s was a deep relationship with the preternaturally gifted young writer. They met early in exile, at approximately four, on a shopping trip to the local grocery. It was a felicitous encounter for them both. Both were daughters of upper-middle-class German Jews whose fathers had managed, in the early going of the Thirties, to get their families out of the red-hot center of Nazism only to land in Amsterdam. Hannah “Hannali” Goslar was from Berlin. Anne was from Frankfurt.
Hannali’s father, Hans Goslar, had been the head of the German Press Bureau and an advisor to the German interior ministry, which, as a central planning and intelligence-gathering agency of the Holocaust and the war effort in general, remains one of the many bleak ironies surrounding these two girls. Obviously, as the Nazis took power in 1933, Hans Goslar was not wanted in that post.
Hannah Goslar happened to move into into Merwedeplein 33 with her parents, just two doors down from the Frank family residence at Merwedeplein 37. As Mrs. Pick-Goslar describes it, on the first day of classes at Montessori school, her mother was not at all sure how Hannah would take it. Anne recognized her from across the way, ran up, and embraced her. Obviously, both girls had grown up speaking German, not an especially desired language in Amsterdam of the day. Now they would be growing up together in exile, speaking Dutch.
The friendship deepened dramatically over the school years, according to Anne’s diary and to Mrs. Pick-Goslar’s many accounts. Inevitably, the girls were separated by the Nazis — in July 1942, as Otto Frank devised the plan to create and shelter in what’s called the Secret Annex, the warrenlike suite of rooms in his office building that today is known as the Anne Frank Huis, or Anne Frank House. The legend the Franks created in the community to throw the Germans off the scent was that they had successfully escaped to Switzerland.
And that legend is what Hanneli Goslar thought had happened to her friend Anne for years, until the fateful day in February 1945 when, by then a teenaged inmate in Bergen-Belsen herself, she discovered that there were Dutch people interred in a separate section of the camp. The inmate populations were separated by barbed wire stuffed with straw — to reduce communication, the punishment for which under the SS administrators could be death. Hanneli’s first communication through this fence was with a woman who knew the Franks and more specifically, knew the Frank sisters, Anne and Margot. Suddenly, after a couple of days of requesting contact, Hannah Goslar was speaking with Anne. Both girls burst into tears.
Things were not going well for Anne, or her sister Margot, who had come down with typhus. Hannah Goslar laboriously put together a package of rations and socks, which she tossed over the fence to Anne the next night. It didn’t work — another inmate took the package and refused to give it to Anne. So, Hannah Goslar put together a second package, and tossed that to Anne the next evening. It worked. Mrs. Pick-Goslar relates that they saw each other three or four times, but that the Germans then moved the prisoners on the other side to another part of the camp.
According to Dutch records, Anne Frank died sometime in March 1945, but new research by the Anne Frank Huis indicates that she died some weeks earlier, in February, shortly after her last meeting with Hannah Goslar.
Of the several passages in her journal devoted to Hannah Goslar, arguably the most illuminating, generous, and loving one is Frank’s entry upon learning, in hiding in 1943, of Hannah Goslar’s arrest by the Germans. It goes like this:
“Hanneli, you’re a reminder of what my fate could have been. I hope that you live to the end of the war and return to us.”
Hannah Pick-Goslar did exactly that, and then spent a long life returning that gift of friendship to her friend Anne.
and, after emigrating to Israel in 1947, became a pediatric nurse. She leaves behind a large family, including 11 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren, describing them as “my answer to Hitler.”
A native of Berlin whose father, Hans Goslar, was the head of the German Press Bureau and an advisor to the German interior minister until the Nazis took power in 1933, Hannah “Hanneli” Goslar was four when she and her family were forced to move to Amsterdam. Her father and mother happened to move into into Merwedeplein 33, just two doors down from the Frank family residence at Merwedeplein 37. Hanneli Goslar and Anne Frank first met as they went grocery shopping with their mothers in the neighborhood, and later at the Montessori school, where, on the first day.
Hannah “Hanneli” Goslar
With her father, Hans Goslar and and her sister Gabi, Hannah Goslar was interred in Bergen-BelsenShe was a towering eyewitness to the inner machinery of the Holocaust
Mrs. Pick-Goslar met Anne and the Frank family
Mrs. Pick-Goslar had leaves a large family behind, among them, 11 grandchildren and
Netflix
A native of Berlin whose father, Hans Goslar, was the head of the German Press Bureau and an advisor to the interior minister until the Nazis took power in 1933, Goslar was four when she and her family were forced to move to Amsterdam. As fate would have it, the Goslars moved just down , as fate would have it. . worked for the
This week, we traveled to Poland to help commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews revolted against their Nazi oppressors, who had forced them to live behind barbed wire walls in horrific conditions.
We also participated in the March of the Living, an annual two-mile walk from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, where Nazis brought Jews from all over Europe to be starved, humiliated, terrorized and murdered in gas chambers.
For both of us, this trip was intensely personal.
I thought I knew what was in store for me visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had been there some years back when I was working on a report for CNN about my family history – I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. I had heard my parents, both Polish Jews, speak of their painful experiences surviving the war. But I never knew my grandparents because all four of them were rounded up by the Nazis and killed during the Holocaust.
But this time was different. As our expert guide showed us the Auschwitz gas chamber, I mentioned that I had learned a few years earlier that my dad’s parents were killed at Auschwitz. Our guide said that Polish Jews were largely killed in the very gas chamber we were standing in. He pointed out the gas chamber and the adjacent crematorium, where their bodies were burned and the remains then discarded in a pit. It was the first time I realized that I was standing right where my paternal grandparents had been murdered. Tears came to my eyes.
My father had told me much about my grandparents, Isaac and Chaya Blitzer. They were very religious and truly wonderful people who had lived and raised their six children nearby. I wish I had known them.
I never knew my mother’s parents, Wolf and Chaya Zylberfuden, either. My mom always spoke so lovingly of them. They were rounded up elsewhere in Poland and sent to a labor camp, where they were forced to make ammunition for Nazi soldiers. The conditions there were awful, and they soon died of typhoid fever, which was spreading around the area.
I proudly carry the names of my two grandfathers – Wolf Isaac Blitzer.
And now a new generation is carrying on the lessons of the Holocaust. At the annual March of the Living, thousands of people – Jews and non-Jews, young and old – come from all around the world to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to honor and remember those who were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. They also come to learn and then to educate others about the horrors of the Holocaust.
On this visit, I learned more and deepened my understanding of what my grandparents, parents and their siblings endured during the Holocaust. And as I did, I kept thinking about how important it is for all of us to educate ourselves about this horrible history to make sure we never forget. It is especially vital today in light of increasing antisemitism and Holocaust denialism. As the child of Holocaust survivors, it is hard to comprehend that there are truly evil people out there spreading lies that none of this ever happened.
That’s why I was so moved by what I saw during our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I had never been to Auschwitz before. I was never actually sure that I wanted to visit this place that represented the depths of hell for the 1.1 million people murdered by the Nazis there, including my own great-grandparents.
I am now so glad that I went.
Since I was a little girl, I have heard about the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, not just from the history books but also from my own grandfather Frank Weinman, who along with my grandmother Teri Vidor Weinman, were among the few to escape.
They miraculously got to America in October 1941, thanks to Frank’s brother Charles, who was living in Chicago and had convinced his boss to put up the exorbitant sums of money the America government then required for Jewish refugees like my grandparents to get US visas to flee Nazi persecution.
Grandma Teri and her family were Hungarian Jews, and her parents, Rudolph and Matilda Vidor, along with her sister Magda, were safe from Hitler’s wrath until 1944, when he invaded Hungary.
Before visiting Auschwitz, I knew that they had been killed there.
But having our expert guide tell my brother David and me exactly where and how was numbing.
We saw a freight train exactly like the one they were shoved into with little to no water or food, traveling for days from Hungary to camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. We stood on the train tracks the Germans built to bring them into Auschwitz-Birkenau.
We saw what was left of what was likely the gas chamber where they were murdered and informed that because of their ages – both were in their 50s and not considered strong enough for hard labor – they probably were killed within a hour of arriving.
It was a lot to take in, and it will take a while for my brother and me to process it all.
But for both of us, our immediate takeaway was one of defiance – that our mere existence is proof that Hitler did not succeed in his quest to annihilate our family just because we are Jews.
For years, not knowing exactly when or how her parents were killed, my Grandma Teri chose April 19, the day of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited on the anniversary of a loved one’s death.
This week, my brother and I got to say Kaddish just steps from where they died.
Some 10,000 people from all over the world gathered last week in Poland for the annual March of the Living, a 2-mile walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where Nazis murdered over a million civilians – mostly Jews – during World War II.
One of the most famous marchers was Meek Mill, a 35-year-old African American rapper from Philadelphia without any prior connection to the atrocities that happened there.
“I always stand on anything that condemns racism, but now that I had an education, I’ll definitely spread the word to people in my culture about what I’ve seen and what I felt at that concentration camp today,” Mill told CNN during the march.
Mill is a friend of New England Patriots owner and philanthropist Robert Kraft, whose Foundation to Combat Antisemitism is in the midst of a $25 million national campaign, #StandUpToJewishHate. The effort, identified by a blue square emoji, includes paid television ads that share stories of antisemitic incidents in the US, which are on an alarming rise.
Data from the Anti-Defamation League traces a spike in recent incidents against Jews to repeated, hateful comments by rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, who is unapologetic about his pro-Hitler, anti-Jewish language.
“We are two different artists. We represent two different things,” Mill said.
Mill said he “wasn’t educated to even know right from wrong” when Ye was making his remarks.
“But I know a lot of the things he was saying was wrong because it sounded like hate,” Mill said. “Now that I’m educated to a small degree, because I’m at the beginning point, just, you know, spreading the word for humanity. Pushing the cause.”
Kraft got to know Mill during the rap artist’s 12-year legal fight stemming from an arrest on gun and drug charges when he was 19 years old.
The two were introduced by a mutual friend, according to a Kraft spokesperson, and Meek would occasionally reach out to the Patriots owner for some friendly advice. When Meek was incarcerated, Kraft visited him in prison, and the two stayed in touch and have remained friends.
Mill’s case helped spur activism among many high-profile figures, including Kraft, on the issue of criminal justice.
“It’s important for me to learn humanity’s history,” Mill said. “But I think it’s also important for me to support Robert, all my Jewish friends, everyone that always supported me. Robert supported me at a very high level. When I was going through what I was going through, he learned my lifestyle. He learned my cultures, where I come from, my background.”
Mill said he went to Auschwitz to “see this for myself and learn about it for myself,” describing what he saw there as “terror, pain, something you can’t really explain.”
“He’s a man who’s very caring, and it’s very important to him to build bridges between people of the Jewish faith and people of color in America,” Kraft said of Mill.
“He’s a sensitive man who has gone through some difficult situations where he wasn’t treated fairly. And I think for him to understand the culture of our people, what we’ve gone through and how many of the experiences are similar – where people, for no good reason, just stand up and hate,” added Kraft.
Mill not only toured Auschwitz and took part in the March of the Living, but he also participated in events around the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland. The popular artist has nearly 25 million Instagram followers and said he now intends to use his megaphone to make sure his fans understand that all hate – whether racism against Blacks or antisemitism – is rooted in the same ignorance and cannot be tolerated.
“Through my music, I always use my platforms. I come from the ghettos of America – from the streets. That’s what I started talking about because that was my lifestyle,” Mill said.
“But through education and learning more and seeing more, I think I would be able to deliver some things that will touch on moments like this and be able to express and tell a story about what I witnessed and what I’ve seen.”
