This is the story of Marga Steinhardt. She was born in a town in central Germany in 1927. She was a young child when Hitler came to power. Friends urged her parents to leave Germany for France or Palestine or the United States, but her father didn’t believe the warnings. He thought they were exaggerated.
“I remember overhearing talk between my parents, and my father said, ‘You worry too much. It’s not going to get that bad. Hitler talks a lot. The world will not tolerate for Hitler to do what he’s saying he’s going to do.’ He just couldn’t believe it. Even later, when we were already deported, he would not accept that there were mass killings. He’d say, ‘Have you seen it? Can you prove it?’ ”
When they finally sought an exit visa, there were 27,000 people ahead of them. No one wanted them anyway. The world closed its doors to Jews.
Marga and her family went through the worst of the Holocaust. Labor camps, concentration camps, forced marches.
The story she tells is a microcosm of the experiences of European Jewry, most of whom perished (including every member of my family who had not migrated to the United States in the 19th or early 20th centuries).
The same day that I read her story, I responded to someone who asked why the public was so unmoved by 400,000 COVID deaths.
Typically people are unmoved by mass deaths. A number like 400,000 or six million deaths does not touch people’s emotions. The story of one person’s suffering does. The particulars matter. People remember Anne Frank because they know her story. Read Marga’s story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People react to news of atrocity naturally with unbelief. I recall how I reacted to the stories of Pol Pot coming out of Cambodia. While my friend, Erica was cuddling in a tree in cambodia, a one-year-old in her parent’s arms with Khmer Rouge soldiers prowling under the tree, I was thinking that all these tales were just more exaggerated anti-communism. Things could not be that bad, could they? Growing up means learning you are wrong. My father’s generation starred at pictures of the death camps in utter disbelief. They had heard but still could not believe their eyes.
This is why we need to tell these stories. This is why we need to have real journalists who write the hard stories of people in Tibet and Myanmar and Syria…and the United States.
Roy,
I visited Cambodia in 2019. Our group toured the killing fields. We saw bits of cloth on the ground that floated up from the soil whenever there was a heavy rain. There was a museum with glass walks lined with thousands of skulls. There was a large tree where Khmer Rouge would slam the heads of babies, to kill them. Locals had covered the tree with Buddhist wrist bracelets as a memorial. We visited a high school that had been turned into a torture center. Every one who was brought there was photographed. The walls are lined with pictures of terrified men, women, youths.
I taught some of the Cambodian refugees. Many of them were deeply traumatized.
I am a big fan of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS. What interests me are the incredible stories of survival, sometimes stories of infamy and the history. This past week the show focused on two Jewish survival stories through the families of Andy Cohen, TV personality and Nina Totenburg,a journalist. Totenburg’s father was a concert violinist so he was able to enter the US under an artist’s grant. Her father managed to get a couple of other family members out, but the rest perished in the camps. Like Ms. Steinhardt, some survivors suffered from long term PTSD. The US and many other countries were no friend to European Jews fleeing for their lives.
Diane Thanks for sharing. I re-watched “The Piano” last week.
“And now the thoughtful soul to solitude retires.” (The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayydin)
I always get them mixed up, too, but I think you mean the Pianist. (The Piano is the excellent movie with Holly Hunter and The Pianist is the excellent movie with Adrien Brody.)
NYC Public YES!!! you are quite right . . . I meant “The Pianist” and was imagining Adrian Brody at the piano when I wrote it. Thanks for the correction! CBK
Diane: That story you sent out is an unreal story. We visited Riga about 20 years ago when we were on a cruise to the Baltics. The ship was the first major cruise ship to visit Riga. I had worked to find a guide who specialized in Jews. It turned out he was out of town when we arrived so his college student sister. The family had been Jewish at some point but due to the Germans and then the Russians, the family was no longer considering themselves Jewish. The visits in the old ghetto area and other relics were unreal. She took us to the cemetery in the forest where the Nazi’s had executed hundred of Jews when they were there to attend a funeral. Then we went to a building which used to be a hospital but had been given to the Chabad. They had turned it into a Jewish children’s day care and pre school. We were allowed in the building. They apologized that it was just past lunch and all the children were sleeping for a nap. We went in there to see the kids and they all on mats sleeping…and we began to cry. The guide and the educator asked what was wrong: we said Hitler is dead and all these beautiful children are obtaining a Jewish education right by the forest where Nazi’s killed so many Jews. It was at this point our guide started crying saying that by avoiding her religion, she had made a mistake. Do we know of any of our relations making it out of Europe or surviving? Walter “Sandy” Silvers
I have mentioned before about Stolpersteine monuments in Germany. A number of the people in my hometown who were rounded up were sent to Riga and murdered there.
Hitler did a thorough job of ethnic cleansing. None of our European fabily survived. None in Bessarabia. None in Poland. All exterminated. I just finished reading Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He describes his life in a concentration camp in excruciating detail. Very powerful.
It’s sick and sad that we so lack imaginations that when we read about 800,000 people killed in war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, the number just whooshes over our heads, even though each of these people was a universe, just like you and me.
Our politicians react to events. They scream on television that we should “bomb them back to the stone age.” They debate whether we should or shouldn’t, the strategic advantage or disadvantage.
But in every case, if we do it, civilians will die. Babies. Toddlers.
And that’s the real measure, isn’t it? The one that is never talked about in these debates. How many deaths of babies is this worth?
That’s a pretty high bar, isn’t it?
But we would rather not think about that.
In the early 2000s, when more than one million Americans were dying annually of cancer (today it’s 606,000-plus) I posed the following philosophical scenario to my colleagues. “If we know this many people would die this year and we knew who they would be, it would be optimal if they would all die on the same day. That’s the only way the country would understand this issue.” Got a lot of confused looks at the time, many more calls and messages since that I was onto something. When lots of people die at once, it sells. When they die in private, in “quiet desperation,” it doesn’t.
And yet we have people who deny these very well documented events who are more than willing to believe even more fantastical conspiracy theories.
This coming week we shall witness, horrified, members of Congress and the Senate arguing that we should move on and forget those, including the vile criminal Trump, who incited a murderous mob to carry Nazi symbols and slogans and Confederate flags into our Capitol.
This is what complicity looks like, folks.
Oops. The trial begins February 9.
Victims of the Holocaust: ~6 million Jews; ~7 million Soviet civilians, many Jews; ~3 million Soviet POWs; around 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians; 312,000 Serb civilians; ~250,000 institutionalized people with disabilities; ~250,000 Roma; ~1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses; ~70,00 persons deemed to be “asocials”; unknown number of homosexuals, likely in the thousands or even tens of thousands
This coming week we shall witness, horrified, members of Congress and the Senate arguing that we should move on and forget those, including the vile, seditious criminal Trump, who incited a murderous mob to carry Nazi symbols and slogans and Confederate flags into our Capitol. As data is gathered, the toll of the insurrection mounts. A policeman killed by the mob. Four others dead. Two more police dead from suicide after the event. One policeman who lost an eye from being beaten during the insurrection. Many others severely beaten, some with severe long-term consequences.
Watch those Apologist Congressional Reps and Senators. This is what COMPLICITY looks like, folks.
How did those atrocities happen? A lot of people chose to look away, as Repugnican House and Senate members–Cruz, Hawley, McCarthy, Greene, Boebert, Gaetz, Rand Paul, and so many others, will be telling the nation to do over the next couple weeks.
My grandmother ordered her family not to wear the yellow star. She didn’t get into trouble for this because the wife of Budapest’s police chief had been a client of hers before the war. When the trains started to go to concentration camps (mostly to Auschwitz) from Hungary in the spring of 1944, my grandma realized (without knowing where the trains went exactly) that more was needed to be done so she sent my 10 year old mom and her 2 year old brother to live in a windmill in Northern Hungary. In the fall, a kind neighbor reported the two kids to the local authorities and the police went up from Budapest and escorted the kids back. Luckily, by then the trains stopped going to Auschwitz at the order of Hungary’s governor. By then over 400,000 Hungarian Jewish people were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, by far the largest number of victims from any nation in those two camps. But my mother and my uncle were not among them!
A good friend of mine also got lucky: he was also two years old when he was put on a train with his mother that was supposed to go to Auschwitz but the order not to allow any more trains to go arrived just when the train was about to leave the railway station.
The remaining time of WWII managed to provide more events. Like a neighbor, who was taken to the Danube river to be shot along with many other Jewish people, including kids, got “only” shot through the jaw and after jumping into the icy river, she survived and came back and hid with my family for a while.
Then of course, there was the bombing of Budapest, and one of the large apartment buildings next to ours got hit and couple of my mother’s friends who lived there, disappeared.
In another 6 story apartment building next to ours, only a single Jewish woman survived, the others were all taken away to camps (probably to Auschwitz-Birkenau) and never returned. But she never ever talked about how she managed to return. This lady was a kind, always happy woman, as was my grandmother. I lived next door to my grandmother for 27 years, but I never saw any signs of bitterness in her.
I meant to write 400 thousand, not 400.
My mom never told me about this stuff until I told her 3 years ago that I was going to visit Auschwitz with my kids. Then she made me promise not to talk to her about that visit and that I wouldn’t show her any pictures I took.
Thank you for sharing, Máté.
speduktr Me, too. I really didn’t know what to say from having been so moved by the experience of reading Mate’s note. No words . . . .
Terese Steinhardt was my grandmother’s first cousin. Terese Steinhardt’s father was Isaac Katzenstein who was a brother to Johanna Rothschild née Katzenstein, my grandmother’s mother.
I met Terese exactly one time shortly after my mother’s passing in May, 1962. She came to visit us in the Bronx and the first thing she did after sitting down was to take off her shoes. As a 12 year old, I was horrified to notice her feet were missing toes. She quickly explained she had lost her toes during the war due to frostbite. After she left, my grandmother explained how she lost her husband and son, but she and her daughter Marga survived.
I never met Marga and most likely doesn’t know of my existence. Marga is my second cousin once removed, and her two daughters would be my 3rd cousins.
I am David Westheim and live presently in Sayreville, NJ. Perhaps you can pass this note on to Marga or her two daughters.
Sincerely yours,
David Westheim
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