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[MUSIC PLAYING] MINDY RATNER: More than 70 years have passed since the end of the Second World War. But a dozen years or more before that, the seeds were sown for what would become the unparalleled slaughter of Europe's so-called undesirables. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party would target many groups, though there were no people more despised by Hitler than the Jews of whom millions would die of starvation, disease, acts of violence, and ultimately, a policy of genocide.

Hitler didn't live to see his dreams realized. But it wasn't for lack of trying there are many places throughout Europe that are judenfrei, that is free of Jews, including the town in Germany where my mother was born. Every survivor of the Holocaust has a unique and often extraordinary story. There are fewer in number with every passing year. And they're no longer young. But their recollections of living through that devastating time are still vivid. Memories and music are shared for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I'm Mindy Ratner. And this is Kaddish, Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words. The music with which we begin is a meditation on the traditional Kaddish prayer. It was written by Gideon Klein, a Czech born Jewish composer who died in concentration camp in January 1945. He was 25 years old.

[VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYING]

The late actor Theodore Bikel.

THEODORE BIKEL: When the Nazis came in, Nazis took over Austria on March 12, 1938. At the time, I was 13 years old, old enough to remember everything. It was the most bloodless takeover in the history of Central Europe. Not one shot was fired. They simply came in and took over.

[VIOLIN MUSIC]

So happened that we lived on a major thoroughfare in Vienna and everything passed under our windows, all the hardware that never fired anything. And after the hardware opened, limousines with, in one of them, Goering, and then a few limousines behind that, the ogre himself with a little mustache.

Our neighbors had their windows wide open, and they were hailing and hailing all over the place. And they wore swastika armbands. And there were swastika flags. And you kept wondering where they sewn overnight, in one night, or had they been there all along in preparation and anticipation.

The schools didn't reopen for a couple of days. When they did, I went back to school. I was in high school then. And there was a general assembly, and the principal of the school made a little speech in which he said, and I remember it as clearly today as it was then, he of course said it in German, he said, if in the first exuberance of joy over the reunification with our German brothers, excesses should happen, we will not be inclined to prevent them.

A clear invitation and sure enough, when we went back to class, boys from the older grades came and wanted the Gentiles in our class to point out which were the Jews. And they pushed us into the hall, and we were beaten bloody, and came home, my father started to cry. And we ran, my father ran from consulate to consulate, embassy to embassy, trying to get a permit, a visa. We even began to study Spanish in case we get into South America.

And then the miracle happened was that the British government, which was administering Palestine under a League of Nations mandate gave a limited number of entry certificates to the Jewish community in Vienna, who in turn distributed it to people who had seniority in the Zionist movement. My father was at the head of the labor Zionist list. OK, we're allowed to leave. What can we take? One suitcase each. Nothing else.

And we left. My father, my mother, and I, leaving behind all our things that were put in a big warehouse that was marked a property of the enemies of the Third Reich. In charge of that was a Gauleiter. And left behind, of course, our-- my grandmother as well, my mother's mother, the certificate didn't cover her. She took it into her head that she had to make sure that we had to have our books and our other things. But the books was the most important.

And so she went and petitioned this Gauleiter to release our stuff. And of course, he said no. And then she sat in the anteroom of that office every single day from the time they opened the door until they closed. And she cried, and the Gauleiter finally said, get that old Jewish woman out of my sight. I'm going to sign off on anything she wants. Just get her out of here. And he did, he signed off. He released our stuff. And she somehow managed to find some firm that would pack up all our things and ship them from Nazi Germany to Palestine, to a nascent Jewish nation.

Later, we also got her a release just in time, a month before the war, the Second World War started.

MINDY RATNER: Another notable Jewish artist who fled to Palestine was composer Paul Ben-Haim. He left his native Germany in 1933, the year the Nazis took power. In 1936, the same year that Bronislav Huberman established the Palestine Symphony, which the New York Times described as an orchestra of exiles, Paul Ben-Haim wrote this.

[PIANO MUSIC]

This is Kaddish, Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words.

PAUL BEN-HAIM: My name is Victor Vital. My Hebrew name is Haim. I have, as first name, my grandfather's name that the tradition about giving names to the children in Greece. That is followed from Jews and from Christians. I was born in a city called Patra.

MINDY RATNER: In Germany and Austria, ostracism, discrimination, and acts of violence against Jews began immediately. But in Greece, occupied first by the Italians and later the Germans, the situation was different. In spite of the occupation, Greek compatriots gave the country's Jewish population a fighting chance.

PAUL BEN-HAIM: And we survived because we left the city and we went to the surrounding villages where everyone where we went knew that we were Jews. But thanks, God, everyone tolerated that, and everyone helped us to survive in those places, in the mountains, also, they were the resistance.

When the pact between Italy and Germany was broken in 1942, about, the Germans invaded and occupied all Greece. At that time, my mother's relatives, with their families, about 90 people, who lived in Salonika were being taken by the Germans to the concentration camps. They sent us a note to go away from the city and hide as much as possible. And God bless my father's memory, immediately, the next day after the Germans came to the city, we left. We started to prepare for our departure from Patra.

Through my father's friend, chief of police, whose name was Marinakis I mentioned the name Marinakis because Marinakis is one of those that we call righteous. Gentiles among the hundreds of them that we've met in our wandering that they helped us to survive.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NISA MOSSER: My name is Nina Mosser. And I was born in 1946, right after World War II. And my parents, Mary and Sven Bock, my father was Danish, my mother Welsh, lived in Denmark throughout the occupation during World War II. And their role there was that as of righteous Gentiles, they're often called. But there were a lot of people who were not Gentiles who also helped Jewish people escape.

My parents were part of the Danish underground and helped Jewish people escape through Denmark to Sweden and to freedom. What they did was, as part of the underground, was to provide somewhere for Jewish people who were escaping from Austria and Germany, mainly, I think. But I think there were some Russians too actually but they were coming through Germany and to Denmark on their way to Sweden.

And the two groups of people that my parents spoke of mainly were a doctor and his wife, Dr. Mrs. Speaker, who became lifelong friends. And then another theater director called Sokolnikoff. And his secretary. And I can't remember what her name is. And I think they believe-- I believe they ended up in the United States. The Speakers became life long friends of my parents and moved to Denmark, I think, because of their experience with my parents and with other people in Denmark who helped them escape.

MINDY RATNER: There were many Danes who stepped up to the challenge of helping desperate refugee Jews. Small acts of kindness and courage were done quietly without fanfare, and frequently without the knowledge of others.

NISA MOSSER: My parents in the apartment building they lived in, there was another couple living just across the corridor. Very good friends of theirs whom we remained very good friends with. And it wasn't until the day the Germans left and Denmark was free that my parents came out of their apartment with their armbands on and the Jensens came out of their apartment with their armbands on, and neither couple knew that the other couple was in part of the underground.

I think that Denmark was this tiny little country that felt like it had to assert its identity and say it was not German, and also, they really kept these secretive ties that they did not talk about what they did, even did their best friends. They just didn't talk about it. And that really kept them safe.

I'm very proud of my parents. I am very happy that I can continue to speak about them and of what they did.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MINDY RATNER: I'm Mindy Ratner. And you're listening to Kaddish, Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LUCY SMITH: My name is Lucy Smith. I was born in Poland in 1933.

MINDY RATNER: Lucy Smith, as a child, hid with her mother in her native Krakow, her father having fled with other men to the city of Lemberg mistakenly assuming that women and children would be safe. Over time, Jewish children were prohibited from going to school and Jewish homes and businesses were confiscated. The Nazis also began murdering Jews they might happen to find in hiding. No one was safe.

Lucy Smith related a story in which two uncles and the father of a friend were snatched by the Gestapo, taken out into the street and shot.

LUCY SMITH: And then they came to our house, the same Gestapo. And I was doing homework for the tutor. And it happened to be beginning German. So one of those Gestapo men stood behind me, and the other went to the kitchen where my mother was. And the one that stood behind me was pleased seeing that it is German, I guess. And he started to talk to me.

And also, I was paralyzed with fear because I knew what they did just a week ago. So I held the pen. There was one of those pens that you dip in ink and couldn't put it down or up. And I just couldn't move. So eventually, he left and went also to the kitchen. And there was one of those heroic things that my mother used to do. This other guy put a gun to her head and told her, if you don't give me your valuables, you will Die.

And my mother, instead of protesting or whatever she said, we are all going to die. And when your time will come, you will regret it as much as I do now, and she reached him. He put his gun away. And then the other came in, and all that they took was silverware in a kind of package that my mother got for her wedding. But I still have some of it because it was being washed and stayed in sink. So--

Because of the way that my mother approached those guys, she was absolutely wonderful during occupation. She also was crazy. And so the family didn't trust her. And they all were killed but her. So--

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

MINDY RATNER: This is Kaddish, Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words. I'm Mindy Ratner. Martin Goldsmith's professional life has revolved around classical music and radio. He was well into his adulthood when he began to delve into the story of his German-born Jewish family of which his parents were the only ones to survive the Holocaust. He's written about them and also about his paternal grandfather Alex and uncle Helmut, who left Germany together on a sea voyage of desperation and notoriety.

MARTIN GOLDSMITH: The SS St. Louis was one of the prides of the Hamburg America Line. It was an immense ship, and through a series of circumstances in May of 1939, the German government, the Nazi German government came upon a way of elegantly kicking more than 900 Jews out of the country. This was still part of German history when there were a number of solutions being devised to what was called the Jewish problem.

These solutions would eventually, of course, culminate in the final solution devised in early 1942. But these were still interim solutions. And one of the solutions was to just get as many Jews out of Germany as possible. And on May 13, 1939, more than 900 Jews boarded the ship St. Louis in Hamburg and left the country along the Elbe River to the North Sea and across the Atlantic. The plan being to disembark in Havana, Cuba.

But a series of power plays in the Cuban government made it impossible for more than just a handful of people to disembark the ship when it arrived in Cuba. Negotiations took place over the next several days. They eventually broke down. And the ship weighed anchor and sailed north to the Coast of the United States. And for the next several days, the ship plied the waters off Miami, Captain Gustav Schroeder of the St. Louis implored the Roosevelt administration for permission to land in Miami.

That permission was never granted. The ship then sailed north and east. Gustav Schroeder also implored the Canadian government for permission to land. That permission also was not granted. So the ship sailed back to Europe. Luckily, a deal or at least, at the time, it seemed, luckily a deal was struck with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee of New York City whereby the Jews on board the St. Louis could disembark in one of four countries, England, France, Belgium, or Holland.

My relatives, my grandfather, and my uncle disembarked in France. They then spent the next three years being sent from one French camp to another, before being sent to their deaths in Auschwitz in August of 1942.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

Actually before the deal was finally hammered out, Gustav Schroeder, the captain of the St. Louis, who is a remarkable story in himself, a very diminutive man standing about 5'3" inches tall, but he looms very, very large in the history of that era, his plan was rather than sail the ship back to Hamburg where he knew the returning Jews would get anything but a warm welcome from the Nazi government, Captain Schroeder's plan was to run the ship aground off the Coast of England and then get the English Navy to ferry everybody to shore and safety in England.

In retrospect, that would have been actually the best solution. Those who got off in England obviously were spared. But the other three locations France, Belgium, and Holland were all overrun by the Nazis in 1940. And so many of the former passengers of the St. Louis, again, including my grandfather and my uncle were captured by the Nazis and eventually murdered.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

MINDY RATNER: Martin Goldsmith's parents were both professional musicians. His mother would maintain a lifelong career as a violist. Like all Jews who worked in the arts in Germany, they were banned from cultural institutions of any kind. But then there was established the Yiddish Kulturbund, the Jewish cultural association with branches all across Germany. And that's where Martin's parents met.

The Kulturbund presented concerts, plays, lectures. To attend, to perform, even to work the box office, you had to be Jewish.

MARTIN GOLDSMITH: One of the very interesting things about the Kulturbund was its director, a man by the name of Kurt Singer. He was actually a neurologist, a conductor. He was the liaison between the Kulturbund and the Nazis. He, no doubt, extremely naively was under the false impression that if the Kulturbund would prove itself as an artistic institution, that would somehow make an impression upon the Nazis.

And as more and more of the members of the Kulturbund realized what was going on out there in the mean streets of Germany and made arrangements to emigrate elsewhere, Dr. Singer would go to them and say, how can you be thinking of leaving? We're thinking of you as singing the lead role in Traviata next month or we would like you to be the cello soloist in the Dvorak Concerto next month. How can you leave? We are building this great Jewish theater here in Germany.

I interviewed a dancer for the Kulturbund in the research for my first book. And she recalled to me how Dr. Singer, whom everybody was slightly afraid of, was just convinced that the Kulturbund was the future of Jewish art in Germany. And as it happened, after 1942, Dr. Singer was sent to Terezin or Theresienstadt where he died in the winter of 1944-'45.

MINDY RATNER: Many Jews were sent to the Theresienstadt start internment camp before being shipped off to die by extermination. The Nazi's final solution, one of these was the Czech born Ilsa Herlinger Weber, a poet and composer of German language songs for Jewish children. She wrote dozens of poems during her confinement with her husband and young son, Ilsa Weber and her son were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz in October 1944. Her husband would live another 30 years.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

MANNY GABLER: In 1937. My parents ran from Germany to Italy where I was born in 1938. And subsequently, they ran to Shanghai, which is the only place you could go without a visa, without any paperwork. And all the other countries around the world closed their doors to any refugees. So they had no place to go.

MINDY RATNER: The expression, any port in a storm, took on special meaning for the parents of Manny Gabler. Their extraordinary journey began with escape from Leipzig. And just in time, the Gabler family and tens of thousands more found refuge on the other side of the world, still facing starvation, disease, acts of Japanese aggression, and Allied bombs.

MANNY GABLER: The Americans, in 1945, they sent 100 B-29s to bomb Japanese installations in Shanghai. And some of their bombs missed, and they hit the Hongkew ghetto. And there were 31 refugees that got killed. And the streets were, like, littered with bodies. My dad came and picked me up from school. And he had my brother on his shoulders, and me in his hand, and we walked home with all the concussions, and the fires, and the smoke. And it was a horrible picture.

One thing, I think, was in my favor was the fact that I was a child. So I wasn't an adult enough to see the tragedy of what was happening. Today, I'd be in tears.

MINDY RATNER: The Gabler family, now four in number, remained in Shanghai after World War II ended. And the Civil War between the nationalists and communists in China resumed. The family arrived in the United States when Manny was 10 years old. He wouldn't return to his childhood refuge for nearly 50 years.

MANNY GABLER: What was really thrilling, when I went back in 1998, we hired a guy and I brought all my papers with me, which my dad at great risk had carried with him all over the world. And it had all of our history. And he brought that with him. So I took these papers with me. And I said, ask your aunts and uncles and grandparents where these streets are now because, like what was Ward Road when the British owned the place, it was now Tongshan road.

And so she said, OK, I'll take you there. And I started to walk around. And I recognized the building called Old Musha Temple, which was the last Jewish temple in Shanghai that the Chinese had set aside as a monument. And I went in there because I recognized that building. I said I went to Hebrew school there. And we walked in and Mr. Wong, who was like in his 70s, I told him why we were there. And I want to see where I grew up, and where I went to school, and all of that.

And he said, do you remember where you were living. And I said, well, after the war, my parents had a one room-- just an efficiency room. So he says, what was your father's name. And I said Simon. And he pulls out a little red book, and it was a directory of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. And my father's name was in there. And it was 18 Tangshan Road, number 50. And Mr. Wong said I live there. I was number 12.

So he took us there and showed us his home. And then he walked us over to number 50. And I walked up to the door, and the nail holes from the Mezuzah were still in the door frame. And the door frame-- the door frame hadn't been painted in 50 years. And I realized at that moment, which was like the most profound moment in my life that I knew at that moment who I was.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROBERT FISHER: So this is what I think we should learn. The learning, to me, is first that the most dangerous people is not your enemy. I thought I want to kill you. So that's very simple. You know that. The words will be say it's not my business. And they are became a part of the murders. The involuntary. My name is Robert Fish. And I was born in Budapest in 1925.

MINDY RATNER: Robert Fish was finishing high school as the Germans advanced on the Hungarian capital. Because he was Jewish, he was prohibited from attending university. So he studied art. His parents meanwhile sent his brother away to Switzerland where he could get an education. The family business was taken from them, and soon, much of the Budapest Jewish community would be deported rapidly, methodically. Robert Fish was sent to a work camp, the whereabouts of his parents was unknown.

ROBERT FISH: On January 17, 1945, few months, three or four months before the war is over, we had to start a so-called dead march. And I don't want to go into detail, but you can imagine what does it mean to walking from the west part of Hungary over Austria for the mountains region. And then sometimes, four or five days, we walk without any food sometimes, four or five days, three, four, or five days, we didn't get any water.

Anyone who was not able to walk, sit down, and they shot them so that only 120 of us survived of that three months of all of us. Of course, I was 19 years old.

MINDY RATNER: After three months of walking, typhoid struck the dwindling group. Another 29 men who were ill were promised medical care. Instead, they were taken to the edge of the village and shot. Robert Fish and the others who remained were marched first to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and then to the extermination facility at Gunskirchen.

ROBERT FISH: And then eventually on May 4, 1945, American liberated me. That time I was in almost barely able to walk. And if they would come two, three days later, I wouldn't be in life. That was my story. But I would like to make an emphasis on something else. Always was some German who tried to help us. And this is very important.

I want to make to you clear that if you look at the Holocaust as a German-Jewish issue, then it's a very, very-- that's a very narrow minded way of looking at it. It was the French people. The Norwegian people, the Hungarian, and so forth, all had to put the Jews on the train and put them to take them to Auschwitz. And this is what I would tell you about my experience.

When the war was over, I was-- hated the German, hated that passionately. I don't have to tell you that until the first time a German came, who was hungry, what should I do? If I do the same thing that most of them did that, what will be the difference? I had to remember my father, who, by the way, I'd be later on I learned he was also killed. And they gave him food. It was not an easy decision for me. But that's what I learned from it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And I think, to me, I learned six more major things from my experience. One is the compassion, the second is the value of equal treatment, or the third thing is the value of the children. The fourth thing is humor. I take humor seriously. The fifth thing is that I learned from the Holocaust that it is the fact that I enjoy everything what I get from life. Today is the day when you have to make a decision and you can do something.

And then you also should have a principle, a principle, which is you want to live for, and the sixth thing is remain humane even in humane circumstances. And that's, to me, the most important.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MINDY RATNER: The time of remembering is incomplete without the recitation of the traditional Kaddish prayer whose title and Aramaic text are a reminder to sanctify the name of God. It occurs in various places within the daily liturgy. But it's most often associated with the Jewish rituals of mourning. The recitation of Kaddish requires the presence of a minyan, a quorum of 10 at the very least, so its deep meaning exists both on a personal and a communal level.

Kaddish concludes with a prayer for peace. In 2009, the Polish born Krzysztof Penderecki composed a Kaddish, the fourth and final movement of which is a setting of the ages old text.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

Kaddish, Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words has been a production of Minnesota Public Radio.