Finding family out of ashes of the Shoah

SUZANNE BELLING

They had no idea that they were cousins – sharing the same German-Jewish grandparents –   who were separated through the Nazi period.

Louise also didn’t realise that this man was also world renowned as the leader of the team that discovered the “12^th cave” at Qumran on the Dead Sea this year, a site where further Dead Sea Scrolls were once stored.

Louise, associate professor in the department of English and in the Programme in Cultural Studies at the university, eventually met him in person earlier this year when her mother, South African community stalwart Marlene Bethlehem gave a talk in Lower Saxony, Germany, on Holocaust Memorial Day this year.

In her capacity as president of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC), Bethlehem was invited to address an audience of 1 200, including refugees and 500 Jews in Germany. Gutfeld, at this stage knew of his South African cousins but had never met them, when he got an invitation to attend Bethlehem’s talk in Germany.  He was in the audience when Marlene gave her speech.

Marlene recently told this story at a meeting at Waverley Shul, under the auspices of the Johannesburg Jewish Women’s Benevolent Society. She is an honorary life vice-president and a past chairman of the JWBS, as well as a former national chairman and president of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.

Reminiscing on her family who were killed – and some who survived the Holocaust -Bethlehem said she was taught not to focus on the six million who perished, as the number was too difficult to comprehend, but rather to concentrate on individuals. She chose to speak in Germany about her own family, including her aunt and uncle Yehudit and Reinhold Gutfeld and their son, Yossi (Oren’s dad).

Yehudit’s parents – Marlene’s grandparents – left Lithuania for fear of pogroms, moving to Koenigsberg in East Germany (Yehudit’s father fought for the Germans in the First World War).

In 1933, the family moved again, with seven of the eight children – only the newly-married Yehudit remaining behind. Three of the children, including Marlene’s father, came to South Africa.

Yehudit and Reinhold left it too late to escape the Nazis, managing to move to Belgium and then to Marseilles in the south of France, but they were rounded up by the Germans and sent to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris, from where they were deported to Auschwitz where “both were murdered on arrival”.

But before they left, they had contacted the French underground and, through the co-operation of a sympathetic station master, arranged to have their six-year-old son Yossi and his friend Simon Haas thrown from the train at a small French village. There, they were taken in by a Catholic family, Joseph and Emilienne Argoud, with whom they lived throughout the war.

Yossy went on to live in Israel, where his son Oren was born. Marlene visited Yossi 25 years ago in Israel and he passed away five years later. She hadn’t met his son.

During her visit to Germany earlier this year, she told those at the Waverley Shul, she was able to watch the famous Shabbaton Choir from London. Their performances were led by Rabbi Lionel Rosenfeld, who on hearing Bethlehem’s story, and the name of Simon Haas, who escaped with Yossi, he “put his head in his hands and told me Simon had become a renowned cantor in London”, said Marlene.

She and her daughters were invited to the office of the Mayor of Hannover Stefan Schostock.

“When I commented on the beauty of his office and surroundings, he was unenthusiastic, revealing that it had been built by Nazis and modelled on Hitler’s office!

Bethlehem was also invited to bring a message from the Foundation to the Lower Saxony Parliament. She also met with the prime minister of Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil.

Bethlehem also was there to lay a wreath at Bergen Belsen. “We thought it was inappropriate to have lunch there, but, in keeping with the mood, we were given dry bread and soup.

“It was pouring with rain and snowing, which we had to endure for five hours, thinking of those who had to live under those conditions for much longer.”

• The flagship of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture is the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship which trains young Jews from all over the world, including several South Africans.