JW3

Leon Greenman

The year is 1994. A brick has been thrown through Leon Greenman’s downstairs window. He receives the message that someone’s out to kill him. He’s 83 years old and lives alone. No family.

The glass is repaired, but the house is covered in wire mesh panels for protection. It looks like a prison. The irony isn’t lost on Leon. 50 years earlier, he’d been behind wire as a slave labourer in the Nazi concentration camps. Leon was the only English survivor of Auschwitz.

Born into a Jewish family in London, Leon found himself in Holland when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He was deported to Birkenau along with his wife Else, and two year old son, Barney. Else and Barney were gassed to death on arrival.

Leon was subject to forced labour, hunger, beatings, medical experiments and death marches. He made a promise to God that if he survived the camps, he would tell the outside world what happened. Only a few months after his liberation from Burchenwald, he was giving a public lecture about his experiences – likely the first ever talk by a Holocaust survivor in England.

Words weren’t enough. Leon became active in the British anti-fascist movement, demonstrating against The National Front, and later the British National Party. When a spate of racist killings culminated in the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, Leon led a march of thousands calling for the closure of the BNP headquarters.

His prominence made him a target for pro-Nazis and the far right. But they never succeeded in silencing him. Leon was convinced that all racism and prejudice had to be combatted. It was the same poison, which had led to the death of his family. If people knew how he’d suffered, then they’d be sure not to let the Holocaust happen again.

Leon died in 2008. Today, society is divided. There’s such extreme polarisation, on almost all fronts. Moderation is met with disapproval. And freedom of speech is fundamental, but it’s laced with anger and impurified by hate. The future is uncertain.
Is freedom at risk?

Leon’s message of tolerance and empathy is the only way forward. We need to do better to understand each other. To understand our differences. It might be challenging. But it’s up to us to keep Leon’s flame alive.

Joshua.

Ludwig Berwald, 1883 – 1942

Ludwig was my grandmother’s uncle. Born in 1883 in Prague to Jewish parents, he grew up speaking German and Czech. He was a curious and serious boy, with two siblings, a brother and a sister. His father Max owned a book shop. Ludwig studied mathematics at LMU University Munich, which is the same university I went to, and earned his PhD in 1908.

Health issues interrupted his career and in September 1915 he married Hedwig Adler, 8 years older than him and also from a Jewish family from Prague. They never had any children.

Back in Prague, Ludwig became a professor of mathematics at the University. A few years later, his existence was reduced to be Nr.816 on deportation transport C.

He was a reserved, artistic and musical person. Ludwig was tall, thin and wore glasses. His friends gathered in his study for tea and discussions, and Ludwig loved travelling, collecting photos, politics, history and he published 54 papers in differential geometry – the last one on the day before the deportation.

My great great uncle was one of the first to be dismissed from work in 1939 after the Nazi takeover. He tried to secure visas for himself and Hedwig to escape, writing to universities and colleagues in the UK, the US and other places. None of the efforts succeeded and Ludwig and Hedwig were deported from their Prague home to Lodz Ghetto on Oct 22, 1941. They could have avoided this deportation train with a medical certificate but chose not to.

In the ghetto, the conditions were unimaginable and Ludwig and Hedwig died from starvation within a few weeks of eachother, in spring 1942.

They never had a dignified burial, but their bodies were put in an un-known mass grave. That’s why I chose soil as something that is connected to Ludwig’s murder – him, Hedwig and members of our extended family are in unknown mass graves.

Sara.

Rebecca Groen Soberski

Rebecca Groen Soberski was my maternal grandfather’s grandmother. Born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam in August 1871. She was murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942.

Unfortunately, we know very little else about Rebecca. We have scraps of information, which include an anecdote, several dates and locations, and details of family members, including the professional career of her husband, Leendert Groen.

Rebecca was one of eight children and got married when she was 23. She had three children and several grandchildren. She and Leendert moved several times, eventually settling back in Amsterdam in 1936, where Leendert died in April.

Rebecca spent the last few years of her life a widow, staying in Amsterdam, but she had some family nearby, both in the city and the coastal town of Haarlem, where my grandfather grew up.

The absence of information about Rebecca underlines the theme of my installation. I wish to return a semblance of life, colour, experience, to her memory. Hopefully, by the end of the exhibition’s run, we have returned some freedom, or agency, to her memory. We can try and shift her memory from that of a faceless victim, to a human being who had 71 years of life.

Part of this means we have filled a book with new connections, as visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to write to Rebecca.

Jack.

Klara Biro (Frank)

Klara was my great-great grandmother, my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother. She was born in 1907 to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. Her father and grandfather owned a shop in Andrassy Avenue. She had two younger brothers called Gyorgy and Miklos. Their father died shortly after coming home from serving in WW1. He left his book collection and his love of reading to his children.

As a young girl Klara lived through the communist terror of 1919, and the fascist terror of 1919 – 21. Due to rising levels of antisemitism, she and her family were forced to covert to Calvinism. In the 20s she went to art school and studied bookbinding. I learnt bookbinding in her honour, I hope she would be proud of me.

After graduating she married a Catholic doctor who was abandoned by most of his friends and family after being framed for malpractice. She was one of four people who believed him and stuck by his side.

What I really admire about her, is that she lived in an age where most people thought the only way of surviving is to be selfish, yet she chose to be kind, compassionate and selfless.

In the 1930’s she and the doctor moved to a remote, impoverished area near a village called Pahi. Here, they provided food and medical treatment for free. They even opened a library so poor people could come in and educate themselves. They had two daughters, Judit (my great-grandmother) and Eva. During the Holocaust a Forced Labour camp was established next to their house. (No one in the village knew that Klara was Jewish). She smuggled in letters and food for the men in the camp. If she was caught, she would have been executed.

Her youngest brother Miklos was called up to Munkaszolgalat – a form of military forced labour. He died in the Soviet Union in 1943, he was only 28 years old, his body is probably still in a mass grave in Russia. Her husband died in the same year and she struggled to provide for her children.

In the winter they ran out of firewood and she had to burn her library to keep themselves warm. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to watch her father’s books burn.

One of the books she chose to keep was the ‘First Hungarian Cookbook for Religious Israelite Households’. If anyone would have found it on her, she and her daughters would have been sent to a concentration camp alongside 440,000 other Hungarian Jews.

In 1944 she hid 2 brothers who ran away from the forced labour camp, again, risking her life.

She survived the war and lived a long life. She lived in a selfish and cruel age, being persecuted for who she was.

BUT she CHOSE to not comply with what her environment was demanding of her and she always remained herself – who was Jewish, kind, compassionate and brave. Staying true to who you are, even when it may cost you your life, is one of the highest levels of Freedom, I think.

In an age when the world is so polarised and our identities are hijacked by social media and politics, her story brings a lot of HOPE.

Zsofia.