War, Erasure, And The Politics Of Culture In Sudan

BY LARISSA-DIANA FUHRMANN

This article examines contemporary cultural erasure in Sudan. It highlights resilient Sudanese efforts and international collaboration, positioning cultural heritage as essential infrastructure for truth-telling, reparations, and inclusive post-war nation-building. It advocates for urgent policy integration to counter polarization and historical revisionism for a plural future.

Two millennia of inhabitation by indigenous groups, immigrant and diaspora communities, and many others who made the land their home have shaped Sudan’s cultural legacy along the two Niles. Today, over 120 languages connect Sudan’s territories and diasporas, exemplifying the country’s immense diversity as the result of its complex history. However, contemporary legislation, such as the “Strange Faces Law,” questions who is truly Sudanese, leading to the arrests of people suspected of being from Darfur or Kordofan based on their facial features and skin tone. As such laws polarize the country and the Sudanese Civil War ravages it, Sudan must act against them to preserve national unity.

In April 2023, the war in Sudan erupted in the capital, Khartoum, between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by General Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa (Hemedti), and the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Former President Omer Al Bashir integrated the RSF into the SAF in 2018, but the RSF retained operational autonomy, funded by gold mines under its control. The RSF itself evolved from the militia Janjaweed, infamous for atrocities committed in Darfur since the 1990s. The escalation of the rivalry between al-Burhan and Hemedti has led to the current violent conflict. Thus far, combatants have deliberately targeted health and education systems, and essential services have collapsed.

The conflict ranks among this century’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and yet, international intervention remains limited, forcing Sudanese-led initiatives, such as the Emergency Response Rooms and Community Kitchens, to carry the burden of humanitarian response with minimal resources and a heavy reliance on volunteer work and donations from the diaspora. The limited array of international responses focuses on immediate needs such as medical care, shelter, food, water, sanitation, and education. As a result, the significant and often irreversible damage to Sudan’s cultural heritage and artistic community receives less attention and support. This overlooked destruction and subsequent inaction, however, fuel cycles of violence and erode community cohesion, positioning policies that safeguard Sudan’s cultural heritage on a broader scale as a prerequisite for post-conflict recovery.

Mapping the Damage: Tangible and Intangible Losses

Destruction and theft of cultural heritage have a long history as deliberate strategies to exert power in Sudan. Such policies of erasure and marginalization trace back to colonial-era policies where Khartoum, as a central hub of administration, utilized them to oppress and ostracize Darfuri, South Sudanese, and other peripheral histories.

Today, the RSF targets archives, libraries, and museums as tools to control memory and legitimize their dominance, often under the pretense of revenge against the Khartoum elites who have long sidelined the rest of Sudan. UNESCO’s risk and damage assessment and Sudanese-led initiatives confirm that out of 139 at-risk heritage sites—museums, world heritage sites, archeological sites, and important private collections—ten museums and cultural centers have been looted, stolen from, and vandalized in the past 1,000 days. However, due to present-day access constraints, especially in areas where active fighting continues, significant data gaps create an incomplete picture of damage. Satellite imagery, crowdsourced reports, and diaspora efforts are beginning to fill these information gaps, suggesting the true scale of damage far exceeds current estimates.

For example, RSF forces looted the National Museum in Khartoum in June 2023. A video circulating on social media shows fighters entering the bioarcheology lab of the museum, opening storage containers with mummies, and claiming the mummies were victims of the dictatorship of al-Bashir. The director of the National Museum, Dr. Ghalia Jar Al-Nabi, reacted to the viral clip, stating that she is “worried about where else they might have gone in the museum that no one filmed, and what else they are going to do.” Director Ikhlas Abdellatif of the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) accused RSF forces of smuggling artifacts to Chad and South Sudan for sale to art dealers and private collectors. Some artifacts have resurfaced on platforms such as eBay.

Additionally, the destruction of institutions such as the National Recording Office in Khartoum, which held unique documentation dating back to the mid-19th century, has resulted in the loss of vast amounts of data. Erasure of records prevents the uncovering of continuities of violence perpetrated by colonial powers, past abuses of power by Sudanese governments, corruption, or even legal precedents, effectively erasing the historical basis for current legal and social rights.

Sudanese cultural heritage faces threats not only through active displacement and destruction, but also through targeted violence against artists, musicians, poets, archivists, and other cultural workers. The yearly parade in Omdurman on the day of the Prophet’s birthday exemplifies events that have not been celebrated since the outbreak of the war. Smaller religious and linguistic communities in places including the Nuba Mountains and Darfur risk outright extinction amid mass displacement and death, with over 50 Sudanese languages at risk. Unlike traceable artifacts, these losses erode irreplaceable networks, transmission chains, and social spaces. Policy must therefore target both material safeguards and living practices to rebuild and restore cultural infrastructure.

Sudanese-Led Preservation Efforts

Several initiatives demonstrate that targeted local engagement and international collaboration can effectively combat cultural erasure in Sudan. They provide policy models that should be better supported by international donors.

Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH) is an initiative funded by the British Council and run by Sudanese archivists and cultural workers who conduct research, create maps, and curate exhibitions. They collaborate with vulnerable communities in Sudan and in exile to document their culture and help build resilience. The SSLH is one of the only groups currently dedicating its efforts to safeguarding intangible heritage on a global scale. Similarly, Blue Shield Sudan, established in December 2024, constitutes the first nationally coordinated cultural protection body founded during the Sudanese conflict. Led by Professor Intisar El-Zein Soghayroun, it connects various initiatives in Sudan that defend cultural identity.

In a more decentralized way, neighborhood committees, women’s groups, and youth groups have recorded stories from community members. Local radio stations, podcasts, and social media channels run by Sudanese creators have served as the vessels of this preservation, broadcasting oral histories and music as acts of resistance. Examples include private initiatives that contribute to the archiving of knowledge and raising of global awareness, such as Omer Al Tijani’s “Sudanese Kitchen” cookbook and Hana Baba’s “Folktales from Sudan” podcast.

Individually, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and performers document and preserve wartime life, atrocities, flight routes, and stories, as well as life in exile. Artists have employed street art and graffiti, as well as digital art, to commemorate massacres and disappeared persons in Sudan. These initiatives have revealed the potential and power of Sudanese art to connect the diverse population and overcome the ongoing crisis. They ultimately contribute to fostering community and preserving cohesion in a country increasingly torn apart by war.

These efforts, from nationally coordinated heritage protection such as the SSLH to grassroots storytelling, such as the podcast and book project, illustrate a diverse and community-driven movement resisting Sudan’s cultural destruction. They show how creative resilience and civic solidarity can preserve plural identities during active conflict and with minimal resources. Building on these examples, it becomes clear that integrating cultural preservation efforts into policy frameworks is not only valuable and possible but also necessary.

Importantly, Sudan acceded to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and has recently joined the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Second Protocol on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. These actions strengthen Sudan’s legal and institutional framework for protecting cultural property and create a base for international collaboration to counter illicit trafficking. As such, they enable a greater cooperative breadth within which cultural preservation initiatives can be coordinated and integrated, and ultimately constitute the legal foundation of any future policy.

Why Prioritize Culture: Rationales for Policy Integration

The widespread destruction and displacement in Sudan have created a critical threat to tangible and intangible heritage. While much has been destroyed, scaling Sudanese-led efforts, such as Sudan Memory and SSLH, will support long-term holistic recovery. International donors, UN agencies, and regional bodies should integrate cultural safeguarding into their humanitarian and reconstruction frameworks. These actions should become a core element of post-conflict resilience.

Effective steps could include deploying cultural emergency response teams. Composed of expert units for on-site urgent recovery, stabilization, or excavation of artifacts or sites, such teams would support the data-mapping of endangered sites. Their deployment with coordination clusters, humanitarian working groups like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, local NGOs, or civilian initiatives networks, would cement preservation as a key function of operations.

As the effectiveness of deployments would face the constraints of distance and active conflict, funding for “low-tech, low-visibility” tools like digitization kits, secure cloud storage, and training and micro-grants for community archiving could supplement the capacity for preservation in empowering existing local networks to scale their proven practices. Cultural workers and artists should be recognized as critical civilian responders. Offering training programs in artifact restoration techniques, documentation, and conservation would help build durable skills that remain within Sudan, irrespective of international partners’ willingness to invest in broader initiatives. Donors such as UNESCO and national authorities like the NCAM can facilitate partnerships with museums, universities, and digital preservation institutions to provide knowledge exchange and emergency technical support.

Finally, a coalition of international and domestic actors should implement fast-tracked emergency protection measures to prevent further looting. Temporary relocation, digital “mirroring” (rapid 3D digital replicas of artifacts produced for safe virtual access), or “cultural protection corridors” (secure pathways like humanitarian corridors linking sites for monitored movement) for endangered materials and personnel would reduce the prevalence of trafficking. Such measures should, however, be tempered by binding return and ownership guarantees to avoid their exploitation. Supporting monitoring initiatives between cultural institutions and international observers of these processes could further coordinate disparate initiatives.

Conclusion

Lasting culture counters the serious threats enabled by targeted cultural destruction, including historical revisionism, polarization, and weakened social cohesion. Examples such as Afghanistan and Iraq show how heritage demolitions and bans on cultural or religious practice serve to erase collective memory and undermine diverse identities. Conversely, in Sudan, shared narratives, mourning rituals, and cross-community dialogues via cultural practices soften polarization, trauma, and cycles of revenge, forming a foundation for reconciliation and transitional justice after prolonged conflict.

Today, warring factions in Sudan use cultural erasure to silence resistance and diverse voices. Funding preservation now will determine who gets remembered, whose suffering remains legible, and which futures seem viable. Preserving Sudan’s cultural artifacts and traditions amid war does not merely serve a nostalgic purpose. It ensures any political settlement rests on plural memory, rather than silence, amnesia, or erasure.

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‘I Saw The Horrors’: How Australian Journalists Bore Witness To The Holocaust

The day after Kristallnacht, Berlin, November 1938. Public doman, via Wikimedia Commons

BY FAY ANDERSON

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM 

STUDIES, MONASH U NIVERSITY

In the dying days of World War II, startling news about “horror camps” in Germany began to emerge, as Western war correspondents accompanied British and American forces advancing towards Berlin. During the liberation of the camps, soldiers and journalists, including 15 Australian journalists and two artists, encountered thousands of dead. Some victims were in locked rail cars; others were piled in mounds or tossed into pits. Traumatised survivors wandered about the camps, while those too weak to walk remained in stifling huts as their Nazi captors fled.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp on January 27 1945. It is timely, as we commemorate, to reflect on what was known and believed at the time.

As living memory of the Holocaust fades, we need to continue to strive for an accurate reckoning of what took place and account for how it was reported. This obligation is perhaps all the more compelling in the wake of Israel’s relentless and remorseless destruction of Gaza in response to Hamas’ horrific attacks on October 7 2023, which has complicated and perhaps clouded cultural memory of the Holocaust.

Understanding how the press covered the Holocaust illuminates the role of journalism and its contemporary importance. It is not only about looking back.

The Australian press offers a unique dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust. It reveals things about journalism’s complicated engagement with the Nazi’s campaign of extermination, the political and cultural context of the 1930s and 1940s, the comforting myth that emerged after the war that the press “did not know”, and how the Holocaust has influenced modern journalism.

Personal stories were treated as credible. The idea of objectivity was challenged. The importance of visual evidence became widely accepted.

The pre-war coverage

The Australian press coverage of the Third Reich in the 1930s is strikingly reminiscent of how authoritarian figures are characterised today. Hitler was underestimated. He was an object of press fascination and the butt of bemused ridicule.

Throughout the decade, the Australian press published accurate accounts of Hitler’s brand of racial hatred and aggression. It reported his venomous antisemitism and intimidation, the Nuremberg Laws and expropriation decrees, the exodus of Jews and their status as refugees, the infamous pogrom on November 9 and 10 1938 known as Kristallnacht, and the proliferation of concentration camps, a reality in Nazi Germany since 1933.

And yet the coverage was inconsistent, entirely dependent on the will of editors. Widespread coverage did not necessarily translate into empathy or protest.

This was the era of the Immigration Restriction Act – the “White Australia Policy”. A narrow sense of what constituted an Australian national identity informed a discriminatory immigration program predicated on exclusion. The political, cultural and racial values underpinning Australian society complicated the nation’s response to Jewish persecution.

Australia’s discriminatory legislation was hardly unique, but the ambivalent pre-war treatment of Jewish victimisation reflected entrenched anxieties about race. The dehumanising language that has infected current debates about refugees and “border control” in Australia has its antecedents in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jewish refugees were conceived as a problem and a threat. Jewish migrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, were regarded as clannish and overly “political” (either covertly communist or innately Zionist) and simply not “white” enough. Sections of the national press staunchly defended the national immigration policy, echoing entrenched grievances and pandering to xenophobia. Other editors frequently echoed the pervasive political belief that Jewish refugees and all non-white migrants threatened social cohesion.

In response to the tumultuous events in Germany, several news editors began to campaign (with qualifications) for a relaxation of the restrictive immigration policy. But other publications continued to defend the restrictions, calling on the government to “halt unrestricted Jewish influx”.

Accounts of Nazi terror

Unlike the racial policies and persecution of the 1930s, the mass extermination of the Jews during the war was not committed openly. Despite the secrecy and military priorities, the Australian press published fragmented but frequent wire accounts of “Nazi terror”. Deportations, enforced slavery, executions, ghettos and the establishment of concentration and extermination camps all featured in the press.

The number of articles in Australian daily newspapers recording the killing of Jews increased dramatically in the second half of 1942, after the London-based Polish government-in-exile released a shocking report they had received from the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Labor Party in Warsaw. The report documented the slaughter of 700,000 Jews and stated that “mass extermination” had begun.

The frequency of such articles revealed an editorial willingness to focus on the Jewish plight, despite the fierce competition for news space as the war against the Japanese intensified. Some news outlets, including small regional mastheads, diligently published extensive and accurate coverage of the persecution of Jews throughout the war.

Other publications, however, failed to maintain continuous coverage, despite the agonising enormity of events. Relying for the most part on wire accounts rather than journalists’ eyewitness reports, the news did not always generate sustained interest.

Godfrey Blunden, an Australian war correspondent accredited with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, was based in the Soviet Union for 16 months. He insisted that his reports on the murder of the Jews in Russia be read and believed.

Blunden suspected there was a resistance to acknowledging what was happening, within the newspaper industry and the wider public. But if the Australian public in Sydney and Melbourne paid close attention, the evidence of the Jewish fate was unambiguous.

Liberation reports

On 22 July 1944, Soviet forces reached Majdanek near Lublin, Poland. The Soviets had invited a phalanx of journalists and photographers, including James Aldridge, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald, to witness the liberation. It was another six months before Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

It is striking that, while the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has taken on an epochal significance, the event was not regarded as especially significant at the time. The absence of Western journalists and the resistance to acknowledging the Soviet role in the liberation meant that most major newspapers provided only vague details. Many reports were buried in the inner recesses of newspapers or not published at all, suggesting to the public that the revelations were not of central significance and possibly unreliable.

By late April 1945, however, the revelations of the “Final Solution” were no longer deemed secondary by Australian news organisations. Western war correspondents and photographers descended on the newly liberated concentration camps and the newspapers published their harrowing dispatches. The News in Adelaide published Ronald Monson’s searing report under the headline “I saw the Horrors of Belsen camp”.

What can the reporting of the liberation of the camps tell us about the Australian press? The overwhelming preoccupation in the eyewitness accounts was the insistence that the testimony had to be both believed and remembered, and that their role provided moral clarity. It was also apparent that these first-hand accounts by Western journalists were privileged and accepted.

Historians have tended to focus on the impact and representational ramifications of the visual coverage of the concentration camp horrors. But the textual reports were crucial and would have a lasting influence. In Australia, it ushered a new style of journalism: personal and intimate, subjective and emotional. Journalists did not just relate news of the camps; they became central to the story as first-person narrators, eyewitnesses to a vast and terrible crime against humanity.

Another dimension of the reports was the journalists’ self-awareness in recognising the limitations of their professional craft. Although they were cognisant of the Nazi extermination campaign, most had not viewed the physical evidence. They were forced to process their trauma as they gathered information. Reporting difficulties were compounded by a male-dominated work culture that extolled stoicism and emotional detachment.

Objectivity, the cherished principle of reporting practice, was challenged by the camps. Here is the noted war reporter Osmar White (best known for his vivid rendering of Australia’s military campaign in New Guinea), after visiting Buchenwald and moving among its “living dead”:


I cannot now, or ever will be able to write objectively about what I have seen. One cannot observe war for three and a half years as a newspaperman and remain either a sentimentalist or be super sensitive of spectacles of human suffering. Yet what I saw today moved me to physical illness.

Journalists accepted and at times embraced the Australian brand of journalistic swagger. But their humbling experience of the camps encouraged a gentler, more empathetic form of reporting, one that allowed the survivors’ humanity to emerge.

Other accounts, however, seemed to revel in the horror and reduce the victims to anonymous caricatures. The immense linguistic and representational challenge of communicating a crime as big as the Holocaust was one thing; the tendency to minimise, distort and even deny the known facts was another.

In Australia, there is evidence that some news outlets recognised the camps as the terrible consummation of an incremental anti-Jewish policy. Yet doubts about the revelations of the Nazis’ extermination campaign persisted. Brian Penton, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, was moved to issue a damning editorial in April 1945, headlined “You Must Believe It Now!”. Significantly, some newspapers presented the graphic concentration camp photographs as the ultimate proof of the Nazi atrocity, though photographs of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau would not be published in Australian newspapers until the Nuremberg trials began in November 1945.

For all the prejudices and insecurities that infiltrated the national reckoning with the Holocaust, the Australian coverage compares favourably to that of the British and American press. In Australia, there was not a pervasive tendency to universalise or conflate the Jewish plight with other populations – a tendency that negated the fact that Jews were systematically targeted.

Postwar coverage

Australian coverage of the Holocaust was marked by numerous examples of tenacious reporting and courageous editorial commitment to publishing the truth. But it was also marred by degrees of editorial indifference, denial and disbelief, and the selective and self-serving exercise of memory.

The most disturbing example was the myth, propagated by some Australian newspapers at the time, that the annihilation of European Jewry was something of a surprise. The press were inconsistent for most of the war in their treatment of the genocide. Arguably a greater failure was the coverage of the victims after their liberation from the camps.

The treatment of the revelations in Australia varied according to the editors. Some, like Brian Penton, published frequent accounts on the brutalities committed against Jews. Others treated these as isolated incidents, burying such reports or, worse still, omitting the Jewish experience entirely. The evidence and memories were distorted in the postwar debates in Australia about Jewish migration.

Jewish persecution did not cease with the end of the war, nor did the survivors’ suffering end with their liberation. Unfortunately, the robustness of the Australian coverage of the long ordeal did not extend to its aftermath. The documented atrocities quickly faded from public consciousness. The survivors’ stories and faces seemed paradoxically to be confined to the moment of their liberation.

The sensational war trials refocused attention on the Jewish plight, but were quickly forgotten and overtaken by other events. News practices and priorities, which relegated the Holocaust to old news, diminished the Jewish fate and diluted public sympathy.

This, in turn, influenced attitudes to Jewish refugees at the very time the federal Labor government was launching Australia’s postwar immigration program. The partial obfuscation of Jews as the key targets of the Nazi regime was useful to those who sought to exclude Jewish migrants. Widespread resistance to acknowledging the extent of their mistreatment led to the revival of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, uncomfortably redolent of Nazi sentiment.

Access and reporting

Nonetheless, as the years passed, the liberation of the concentration camps became one of the defining memories of the war for the journalists themselves. Holocaust consciousness and the journalists’ pride in their role as witnesses to the truly calamitous events had taken hold by the 1970s. There was also a growing acknowledgement of the Jewish people’s immense contribution to Australia.

Tragically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year will be marked in Australia in the wake of the horrifying Bondi Beach massacre, and amid increased and emboldened antisemitism and online disinformation.

The Holocaust had a profound influence on Australian journalism and, more specifically, the coverage of genocide. But in one way, it did not change reporting. The representation of crisis and conflict in the media continues to be determined by who does the seeing and who does the telling. More importantly, it is shaped by the political agendas of editors and media owners, and by politics itself.

If journalists are silenced or denied access, and if press organisations refuse to cover a story (or if they provide a skewed rendering), humanitarian crises become a secondary story at best. This is seen most recently and starkly in Gaza today, with Israel’s tight control of the conflict’s narrative by limiting entry into Gaza itself, preventing independent journalism and regaling journalists with carefully curated versions of events.

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Stalin’s Postwar Terror Targeted Soviet Jews – In The Name Of ‘Anti-Cosmopolitanism

A plaque in Russia commemorates the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose leaders were executed in August 1952. Adam Baker/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

BY WENDY Z. GOLDMAN

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Many Americans know of Josef Stalin’s Terror of the late 1930s, during which more than 1 million people were arrested for political crimes, and over 680,000 executed.

Fewer know about the repressions that began after World War II and ended with Stalin’s death in 1953. Much like the repressions of the 1930s, they involved fabricated plots, arrests, coerced confessions and purges. Unlike the Terror of the 1930s, they were accompanied by a wave of state-sponsored antisemitism – including the purge of Jews from multiple occupations and unwritten quotas that limited their professional and educational opportunities.

The abolition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on Nov. 20, 1948, and the arrest and execution of its members was central to this postwar assault. The committee’s elimination was accompanied by an “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign emphasizing Russian nationalism, Soviet patriotism and anti-Westernism. In certain ways, the campaign served as the mirror image of anti-communist and jingoistic propaganda in the United States at the time.

“Rootless cosmopolitan” became code for “Jewish,” and dismissals swept the arts, sciences and media. The Ministry of State Security arrested Jewish industrial leaders for sabotage and, in 1953, fabricated “the Doctor’s Plot,” which accused a group of predominately Jewish doctors who treated Kremlin officials of trying to assassinate Stalin and other party leaders.

The very idea of an antisemitic campaign following the massive Soviet losses in World War II presents an enigma. Of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, almost 2 million were murdered by the Nazis on Soviet soil. Why would Soviet leaders, who fought a bitter and costly war to defeat fascism, choose to attack the very group that the Nazis tried to annihilate?

My forthcoming book, “Stalin’s Final Terror: Antisemitism, Nationality Policy, and the Jewish Experience,” addresses this difficult question.

Clashing with the state

The Soviet state created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1942 to aid the war effort at home and abroad. Its chairman, Solomon Mikhoels, was a renowned Yiddish actor and director of the State Yiddish Theater – one of the many cultural and scientific luminaries who led the committee.

The committee made an enormous contribution to the war effort, sending thousands of articles about fascism, the Jewish war experience and the Red Army for publication in the foreign press. Mikhoels and writer Itsik Fefer toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and Great Britain, where they were welcomed by rapturous crowds and raised millions of dollars.

In 1943, as the Red Army began liberating Soviet territories from German occupation, the committee was inundated by letters from surviving and returning Jews. Committee leaders tried to help people reclaim their homes, to distribute foreign aid and to identify and commemorate sites of Nazi war crimes. They wrote to Stalin suggesting the creation of a Jewish national republic in Crimea to replace destroyed communities in Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia.

But the state deemed these unsanctioned activities expressions of “bourgeois Jewish nationalism.” Some Communist Party leaders even insinuated that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was being used by spies, and advocated its elimination.

The minister of state security, V.S. Abakumov, convinced Stalin that Mikhoels was spying for Jewish organizations in the United States, but Mikhoels was too well known at home and abroad to be arrested. In January 1948, Mikhoels was lured to a house on the outskirts of Minsk, crushed by a truck and dumped on a deserted road.

The murder, disguised as an accident, signaled a turning point in the government’s policy toward Soviet Jews. In November 1948, the government abolished the committee as “a center of anti-Soviet propaganda.” Fifteen of its leaders were arrested over the following months. The state shuttered the Yiddish publishing house, press, theaters, literary journals and writers association, and arrested hundreds of Yiddish cultural figures.

Unbowed in court

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s leaders were charged with bourgeois nationalism, treason and espionage. Tortured in prison and kept in cramped, freezing cells, they were forced to confess.

The Ministry of State Security hoped to stage a public show trial, but as soon as the physical coercion stopped, the defendants began to retract their confessions and write letters of protest. The evidence was based on these extracted confessions, and the state feared an international outcry.

After the group had already spent more than two years in prison, the case was reopened. M.D. Riumin, the new head of the investigatory unit, was intent on showing that the defendants directed Jewish nationalist organizations that infiltrated the government at every level. After new interrogations, an indictment was drawn up, sent to Stalin and approved by the Politburo.

A secret trial began in May 1952. Despite being physically broken, the defendants presented a powerful rebuttal.

Solomon Lozovskii, an old revolutionary and former deputy foreign minister, shredded the state’s accusations. Historian Iosif Iuzefovich retracted his confession and told the court that after numerous beatings, “I was ready to confess that I was the pope’s own nephew, acting on his direct personal orders.” Boris Shimeliovich, the director of a leading Moscow hospital, testified that he had received over 2,000 blows to his buttocks and heels. Even the chairman of the court began to doubt the charges.

Yet the defendants were convicted. Thirteen of the 15 were executed on Aug. 12, 1952. The executions were later commemorated as “The Night of the Murdered Poets, though only five of the victims were poets. Solomon Bregman, a labor leader, died in prison; Lina Shtern, a renowned scientist, was sentenced to exile.

After Stalin’s death, the defendants were exonerated. The case only became public, however, in 1988, when the country began a full reckoning with the Stalin era.

The final Terror

How do we explain this final Terror?

Jews had benefited enormously from the revolution in 1917, which eliminated czarist oppression, granted them equal rights and opened new educational and employment opportunities. They entered professions and held leading posts in the Communist Party. They were considered an official nationality, like Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Armenians and hundreds of other groups in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Yet after the war, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s efforts to help Jewish survivors and commemorate the Holocaust were not acceptable to the state, which minimized the singularity of Jewish wartime experiences. The government identified advocacy solely on behalf of Jews, either at home or abroad, as "bourgeois nationalism” or Zionism.

Amid the intensifying Cold War, the government sought to mobilize popular support by resurrecting Russian nationalism, once an anathema to socialist revolutionaries. It reestablished many czarist discriminatory policies, creating obstacles to Jewish advancement and education. Despite the government’s initial support for the new state of Israel, it blocked the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from participating in Jewish international organizations, which it viewed as a conduit for Western spies and Jewish nationalism.

Some historians believe that Stalin was preparing a larger Terror, including the deportation of the Jewish population, but his plans were disrupted by his death in 1953. Others disagree, asserting a lack of evidence.

Yet one point is worth pondering: Using the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Riumin aimed to build a larger case that would have targeted Jews in every institution for treason. He never succeeded, however, in staging a public trial or launching a wider hunt for enemies throughout the government.

The courage of the defendants thwarted Riumin’s venomous ambition. They testified bravely about their abuse and exposed the falsity of the charges. Revolutionaries committed to the struggle against fascism, they held firm to the end.

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Can The World Prevent A Genocide In Sudan?

A woman from El Fasher at a displacement camp in the Darfur region of Sudan in late October. Mohammed Jammal/UNICEF/AP

BY PHILIPP KASTNER

SENIOR LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL LAW,

THE UN IVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Two years ago, a power struggle erupted between two factions of Sudan’s military. Today, this conflict is spiralling out of control, with thousands being killed in what a United Nations report has called “slaughterhouses”.

Last week, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling Sudan’s army, captured the city of El Fasher, the last hold-out in the western Darfur region held by the military.

Soon after, reports of ethnically motivated massacres emerged. The World Health Organization said 460 people were killed in just one incident at the city’s hospital. Witnesses described widespread executions and sexual violence targeting certain ethnic groups.

A UN fact-finding mission found already last year that both sides in the conflict have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Rights groups and analysts are now sounding the alarm about a possible genocide taking place. Some say the killings are reminiscent of the start of the Rwanda genocide in 1994, which killed a staggering 800,000 people.

The atrocities are also following the same troubling pattern as in Darfur 20 years ago, which killed an estimated 300,000 people.

Back then, celebrity activists such as George Clooney helped put Darfur on the map. It became a major foreign policy issue in the United States, Europe, Africa and elsewhere. The genocide in Rwanda was still relatively fresh in people’s minds. The slogan “never again” was still taken somewhat seriously.

The global attention eventually led the International Criminal Court to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for allegedly directing the campaign of mass killings in Darfur, the first sitting head of state to be indicted.

Sudan is now home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Hundreds of thousands have been killed since 2023, 12 million people have been displaced and 21 million people face what the UN calls “high levels of acute food insecurity”.

Yet, compared to the early 2000s, the international community has been largely silent.

Why global attention matters

It would be tempting to say the wars and suffering in Gaza and Ukraine have overshadowed Sudan in the minds of global leaders and concerned citizens alike. But this does not mean the world can’t do anything.

Global awareness did not solve anything by itself in Darfur 20 years ago, but it was a first step. It led to the eventual deployment of a peacekeeping mission by the United Nations and the African Union.

The mission was too small and limited, but it showed that international peacekeepers can still have a positive impact in the 21st century. They can monitor ceasefires, implement disarmament programs, protect civilians and prevent further escalations of violence.

More attention – and pressure – also needs to be placed on the external actors supporting both sides in the current conflict. These countries are pursuing their own strategic interests in Sudan and consider the power struggle a chance to increase their influence in the region and exert control over Sudan’s natural resources.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are backed by Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Russia. The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has been accused of funding and providing weapons to the Rapid Support Forces in clear violation of an arms embargo.

While these countries deny arming both sides, rights groups say a flood of weapons has nonetheless entered the country. The United Arab Emirates, in particular, is accused of covertly supplying drones, howitzers, heavy machine guns and mortars to RSF fighters in Darfur.

The United Arab Emirates has only just started to distance itself from the RSF following the recent atrocities in El Fasher.

What’s needed to bring peace

A ceasefire must urgently be agreed to, so humanitarian corridors can be opened to allow aid organisations to do their work.

All outside military support to the warring parties must end immediately. The current arms embargo is too limited and has been poorly implemented – it needs to be strengthened.

And more sanctions should be imposed, especially on the perpetrators reportedly responsible for international crimes. In January, the Biden administration levied sanctions on the RSF commander and several UAE-based companies supporting him – these must now be expanded.

This would make it more difficult for Sudan’s lucrative gold trade to continue to be used by both sides to sustain the war.

For the peace to hold in the long term, both sides must also agree on a mechanism to disarm or integrate the RSF fighters into the regular forces.

Establishing some form of justice and reconciliation process can also contribute to preventing further violence. This sends a clear signal that committing crimes will not be rewarded. It can also help communities heal and give peace a better chance.

Nothing of this sort has really happened in Darfur over the past couple decades. Instead, political actors continued to exploit and aggravate ethnic tensions. The RSF, in particular, has recruited fighters from the infamous Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur atrocities in the early 2000s.

A further complication is the increasing fragmentation of the situation, as the Sudanese Armed Forces and RSF are not perfectly integrated armies. They do not have centralised control over their various coalitions of fighters.

This means that while getting the leaders to agree on a ceasefire is important, it may not be sufficient.

As a result, peace initiatives must include local agreements with individual rebel leaders and smaller factions of fighters, which can greatly increase the security of the population in particular areas.

To be clear, lasting peace does not come from some miracle peacemaker. In fact, nothing tangible came out of previous attempts at peace talks aimed at ending the conflict this year.

But this is where other actors can play an important role. The United Arab Emirates, for example, may now feel pressured to exert a more positive influence on the RSF and urge it to come to the negotiating table. The same applies to Egypt and the Sudanese Armed Forces.

And a more comprehensive plan then needs to be worked out, ideally through an international organisation like the United Nations or the African Union, with the goal of empowering the people of Sudan to make their own political decisions.

Sudan is a stark reminder that making lasting peace takes huge efforts. The devastating situation in the country demands the world keep trying.

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BOOK REVIEW: A Personal Ad Saved His Father From The Nazis. That Was Just The Start.

At age 11, the author’s father fled Austria and, thanks to an ad in The Manchester Guardian, found a foster home in Wales.Credit...via Julian Borger

BY SYLVIA BROWNRIGG

In October 1938, soon after Robert Borger arrived at the Welsh home of his new foster parents, a teacher friend of theirs offered to take the 11-year-old refugee for a walk. “He went along, pale and trembling,” his son Julian Borger writes, reconstructing his father’s early days in Britain after a fraught exit from Austria. Robert Borger admitted later that he had been sure the man intended to kill him.

His foster parents, the Bingleys, removed their teakettle’s whistle, as the sound reminded Bobby of the violent mobs of SA Brownshirts and Hitler Youth who had recently chased him through Vienna’s streets. Borger’s riveting book is filled with such vivid details, as he recounts seven Jewish children’s escapes from Austria after the Anschluss, “the original catastrophe” in their lives, when Hitler’s troops marched into their country and were met with ecstatic crowds welcoming the new regime. Through painstaking research the author, a Guardian writer and editor, has traced the paths of his young subjects, whose parents placed ads in the same paper, then called The Manchester Guardian, in the hopes of finding British sponsors.

Borger’s book has a personal angle. It was only in 2021 that, seeking to explore his father’s history, he first read the following words in the Aug. 3, 1938, archive: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse, Vienna 3.”

The tragedy that opens Borger’s narrative is not, however, Kristallnacht or Robert’s own father being sent to Dachau; it is, rather, Robert’s death by suicide in 1983.

As Julian and his family reel, it falls to him as the eldest sibling to make some of the necessary calls. When he reaches Nans Bingley, who continued to be “a kind, calm, grandmotherly presence” in their lives, her response is stark: “Robert was the Nazis’ last victim. They got him in the end.”

Decades later, the author recalls that perceptive remark as he uncovers episodes from Robert’s early years, the Nazi theft of his father’s successful business and Robert’s subsequent train departure with his mother, who found a position in England as a domestic servant.

Borger’s painstaking search for others listed in the ads leads him to correspondents in Israel and California, New York and the Netherlands. Folding in these other experiences, largely gleaned from exchanges with the survivors’ children, broadens and deepens Borger’s poignant account.

These heartbreaking ads — “FERVENT prayer in great distress. Who would give a Home to a grammar school scholar aged 13: healthy, clever, very musical” — appeared amid the mundane surround of a daily newspaper. Like all the ads, a Boy called Fred’s “was on the second page, alongside the listener’s guide to radio programs, which that day included some new film music by Arthur Bliss.” (This was before the lifesaving Kindertransport, started in November 1938; throughout “I Seek a Kind Person,” the reader is reminded of an earlier Britain, which took to its post-imperial heart the mission of rescuing at least some asylum seekers.)

Each harrowing story has its own specific surprises of circumstance or geography. We’re taken as far afield as Shanghai, the outpost of resilient Jewish refugees who established a “Little Vienna” loosely governed by the Japanese, until the Nazis arrived to turn the place into a ghetto.

There are those whose ads did not yield placements, but who were able to attain a visa for the United States. One teenager named Gertrude, who was passed repeatedly among foster families in Britain, later wrote agonizingly about “a slow orphanhood,” the period of uncertain years during which she hoped to be reunited with her beloved parents. Their deaths were confirmed only at war’s end, when Gertrude received a letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Encountering Holocaust stories, we never lose the primal shock of the before scenes of normalcy and thriving, contrasted with the after of danger, threat, flight, loss. Perhaps this form crystallizes how possible such catastrophic change always is; certainly it is employed by countless dramas, including Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt,” whose Viennese characters and their fates have several echoes in these pages.

Julian Borger’s haunting, revelatory book exists in the shadow of a parent who, like many survivors, spoke little about his past. Part of Borger’s task is to illuminate that anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering.

As Gertrude, who later became Yehudith and moved to Israel, expressed it in a line Borger uses as his epigraph: “I feel as though half of me is fighting the other half by trying to forget, rather than remember, and I realize that is probably what I have been doing all my life.”

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American Liberators Of Nazi Camps Got ‘A Lifelong Vaccine Against Extremism’ − Their Wartime Experiences Are A Warning For Today

American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5, 1945, as photographed by prisoner Francesc Boix. Sgt. Harry Saunders is standing on the left fender. Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial

BY SARA J. BRENNEIS

ANDREW W. MELLON

PROFESSOR OF SPANISH,

AMHERST COLLEGE

When American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Austria 80 years ago this May, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.

The Spaniards hung a banner made from stolen bed sheets over one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it read: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”

Both American servicemen and Spanish survivors remember the camp’s liberation as a win in their shared fight against extremism, my research on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. They all understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute millions of people and imperil democracy across Europe.

World War II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence have no modern equivalent. Nevertheless, extremism is now threatening democracy in the United States in recognizable ways.

As the Trump administration executes summary deportations, works to suppress dissent, fundamentally restructures the federal government and defies judges, experts warn that the country is turning toward authoritarianism.

As a scholar of the Mauthausen camp, I believe that understanding how American soldiers and Spanish prisoners experienced its liberation offers a valuable lesson on the real and present dangers of extremism.

‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’

In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a forced labor camp in Austria, with an international prisoner population. My research shows that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, including 60% of the roughly 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.

The Spanish prisoners were committed antifascist resistors sent there in 1940 and 1941. Known as Republicans or Loyalists, they had fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and Adolf Hitler in World War II.

The young men with the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army who liberated Mauthausen would never forget the moment they discovered the camp. It was May 5, 1945, just days before the war ended in Europe. A platoon led by Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was repairing bridges in this tucked-away corner of Austria when a Swiss Red Cross delegate alerted them to a large Nazi concentration camp nearby.

Mauthausen’s international survivors were among the Nazis’ last prisoners to be freed.

George Sherman was a 19-year-old tank gunner from Brooklyn when his patrol found Mauthausen. He was Jewish and had read about the Nazi camps in Europe in the Army’s newspaper.

Still, seeing a concentration camp with his own eyes was alarming.

“The piles of bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral history recorded for the University of South Florida in 2008. So did “these people walking around like God knows – skeletons and whatnot.”

Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, also remembered the moment he saw the Mauthausen survivors. They were men and women of all nationalities.

“The live skeletons, the people that were in the camp, it was indescribable, it was such a shock,” he said in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral History Collection in Vienna.

One of the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a camera from the SS in the chaotic moments before the camp’s liberation. Boix photographed Sgt. Saunders rumbling into the concentration camp on an armored car.

Saunders kept that photograph for the rest of his life. It captured a moment of clarity for him.

“When we liberated Mauthausen, we really knew then why we had to stop Hitler and why we really went to war,” he said in the interview.

Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the 11th Armored Division, was 20 when he helped to liberate Mauthausen. He turned 100 this year. We met in mid-March 2025 and discussed his wartime experience.

“What I saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell told me.

The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.

‘Starved and crippled but alive’

The American liberators toured the gas chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.

Maj. Franklin Lee Clark saw the dead stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took photos to document it.

Soldiers from the 11th Armored Division directed locals to bury the men and women murdered by the Nazis. The local Austrians claimed they had not known about their town’s concentration camp. But a farmer who lived nearby had been upset about all the dead bodies visible from her property. She filed a complaint asking the Nazis either to stop “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”

The American liberators made sure that the townspeople could no longer look away from the murderous rampage carried out in their backyards.

While Boix was taking photos of American soldiers during liberation, the soldiers were taking photos of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.

On the back of one snapshot, a Signal Corps soldier typed out his impressions of their message: “I really know what that word (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. They were Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (remember the Loyalists?). They had men and women in this camp. Starved and crippled but alive.”

After Mauthausen was liberated, the freed Loyalists set to work documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Along with his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen victims and their Nazi captors. Using the Nazis’ own typewriters, they spent two weeks listing the names and personal details of Spanish victims of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.

The result was page after page of evidence they handed over to American war crimes investigators and the International Red Cross.

Boix, meanwhile, gave the Americans hundreds of photo negatives he had rescued from the camp’s photography lab.

Boix later testified about these images in the war crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and murder their victims in Mauthausen and then photograph the bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic evidence of their crimes.

He “could not keep those negatives because it was so dangerous,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in various places until the liberation.”

A lifelong vaccine against extremism

For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was a lifelong vaccine against extremism.

They witnessed how a fascist leader tore the world apart. They saw with their own eyes the death and destruction of political extremism.

When I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the United States is going down a dangerous path.

“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell told me.

As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:

“This is the lesson we have to learn: It could happen here.”

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BOOK REVIEW: 'ROAD TO VALOR'

BY JOEL FREEDMAN

Shortly after the Nazi occupation of Italy in September 1943, Italian Maj. Mario Carita and his men ingratiated themselves with the Nazis by zealously pursuing Jews and anti-Fascists and by turning the torture of suspected enemies of the Nazis and Italian Fascists into a grim science. Carita’s headquarters in Florence was known as Villa Triste (House of Sorrow), so named because of the screams of tortured victims emanating from it.

In July 1944, famed bicycle racer Gino Bartali, who had won the Giro d’Italia in 1936 and ’37 and the Tour de France in 1938, had good reason to be worried when he was summoned to appear at Carita’s headquarters. Had Carita learned that Bartali had hidden a Jewish family, had led Jewish refugees toward the Swiss Alps, and that he used his bicycle to carry forged documents that gave fake Christian identities for Jews on frequent arduous bicycle rides between Florence and Assisi? Bartali concealed these documents in the hollow tube under his bicycle’s seat.

Bartali feared not only for himself. He feared that under torture he might betray Luigi and Trento Brizi, a father-and-son team who used their Assisi print shop to manufacture the forged documents; Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, the archbishop of Florence; the Rev. Rufino Niccacci; and others involved with Jewish rescue endeavors.

Bartali had not revealed to his beloved wife Adriana that he was involved in such endeavors. Nevertheless, would Carita retaliate against Bartali’s family if he broke down under torture?

Aili and Andres McConnon, the sister-brother authors of “Road to Valor,” explain that prior to interrogation, “Most prisoners, including Gino, were first dragged downstairs, to the subterranean cellars. Before their eyes could adjust to the dim shadows, their senses were assaulted by the sour smell of old blood and rancid sweat. Their feet crunched as they walked on the floor soiled with a mix of coal debris and blood. Carita liked to terrify his prisoners in advance of their interrogation, and among the first shocks, as their eyes began to focus on the inferno they found themselves in, was the array of medieval torture tools. There were thick whips, rods of steel, pincers, manacles, not to mention the primitive carpentry tools used to tear off earlobes of recalcitrant victims. In one room was a heavy wooden triangle, where Carita would splay and tie prisoners and then beat them until their flesh hung in bloody ribbons from their bodies. In another area, medical equipment stolen from hospitals was used to administer electric shocks to prisoners.”

This was what Bartali faced when he was led into a room to wait for Carita. Of course, he was petrified. While he waited, he noticed some letters addressed to him that had been placed on a table, which Carita’s squad apparently had intercepted. Bartali wondered how he could possibly respond if these letters had incriminated him for protecting the Goldenberg family or for transporting forged documents.

The authors describe what happened next. “Carita burst through the door. He was a force to behold, with his frog-like mouth and hooded eyelids covering his cold, lizard-green eyes. The major launched into a tirade against the Catholic religion, hoping to provoke the cyclist from the get-go. Gino struggled to stay calm.”

Carita read aloud a letter from the Vatican that thanked Bartali for his “help.” He accused Bartali of sending weapons to the Vatican. Bartali told Carita that “those letters refer to flour, sugar and coffee that I sent to people in need. I didn’t send arms. I don’t even know how to shoot! When I was in the military, my pistol was always unloaded.”

Carita had Bartali thrown into a cell for three days to listen to the screams from prisoners being tortured to secure information or to elicit admissions of guilt. On his third day at Villa Triste, in the interrogation room with Carita and three of his henchmen, Bartali stuck to his honest claim that he never sent weapons to the Vatican. Carita apparently did not know about Bartali’s other activities.

Carita was about to torture Bartali when something amazing happened. One of Carita’s henchmen sided with Bartali. “If Bartali says coffee, flour and sugar, then it was coffee, flour, and sugar. He doesn’t lie.” Bartali looked closely at this interrogator. He then recognized Olesindo Salmi, who had been Bartali’s military supervisor when Bartali was in Italy’s army, and who had permitted Bartali to use a bicycle instead of a scooter to perform his military duties.

As astonished as Bartali was by Salmi’s intervention, he was even more astonished when Carita relented. The authors explain that Bartali’s fame “had certainly helped save his skin, but Carita was also distracted by bigger worries than Gino. The allies were moving closer to Florence by the day.” (Carita would flee from Florence before the liberation. He would travel to northern Italy, where he was killed in May 1945 when Allied soldiers tried to apprehend him.)

After the war, Bartali once again won the Giro d’Italia in 1946 and the Tour de France in 1948. At the age of 40, Bartali stopped racing as a result of road accident injuries.

“Road to Valor” is the first book ever written about Bartali in English and the only book written in any language to explore, in depth, Bartali’s heroism in saving Jewish lives during World War II.

After the war, Bartali did not say much about his endeavors on behalf of Italian Jews. He explained that “If you’re good at a sport, they attach the medals to your shirts and then they shine in some museum. That which is earned by doing good deeds is attached to the soul and shines elsewhere.”

Bartali died on May 5, 2000. In September 2013, 13 years after his death and a year after “Road To Valor” was published, Bartali was recognized posthumously as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem for his endeavors to help Jews during World War II.

Space does not allow me to fully explore Bartali’s professional career as a road cyclist. I’ll just quote one excerpt from “Road to Valor” that described the challenges that awaited Bartali when he entered the Tour de France in 1938: “Even the most exuberant recognized there were many reasons to remain cautious. First, there was a question of competitive endurance. With thirty-one stages fit into just twenty-six days, Gino would face a punishing schedule of races. Second, there were the mountains. For the first time in his career, Gino would face both the Alps and the Pyrenees in the same race. Finally, there was the unavoidable issue of distance. At more than 2,740 miles, the Tour was by far the longest race in which Gino had ever competed — and this distance would come just one month after he had raced some 2,300 miles around Italy.”

Thirty years ago, I purchased a 1960s Grand Prix bicycle at a yard sale for $5. I refer to it as “my Cadillac.” With the help of the good people at RV&E Bike and Skate store in Canandaigua, over the decades I have pedaled my bike thousands of miles around Canandaigua. Although I am fond of my bike, I never named it until I read “Road to Valor.” My bike now has a name: Gino, in honor of Gino Bartali.

It was when the authors began studying some of the historic Tour de France greats that they became fascinated by Gino Bartali. They explain that, “In a sport that celebrates endurance, he endured longer than most others, winning the Tour at twenty-four and then again at thirty-four. When we delved deeper and learned about the ways he used his bicycle between those victories — to help save lives during World War II — we discovered how rich and multifaceted his life had been and realized that his story needed to be shared with a much wider audience.”

Aili and Andres McConnon’s “Road to Valor” is a thoroughly researched, inspirational, fast-paced book that achieves all that the authors intended to accomplish.

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Holocaust Survivor Wants You To Know How Nazis Took His Brother’s Life. And How An Angel Saved His

Manfred Goldberg displays a photograph of himself with his mother Rosa and younger brother Herman. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

BY DANICA KIRKA

LONDON (AP) — Manfred Goldberg was just 13 years old when — stripped to his skin and shuffling toward an SS guard at a Nazi labor camp in Latvia — a man leaned over his shoulder and whispered the secret that saved the young Jew’s life.

“If he happens to ask you your age, say you are 17,’’ the man told him.

Goldberg followed the advice and the guard directed him to the group selected for slave labor. It was only later that he realized that the younger prisoners were sent to die because the guards believed anyone under 17 was too young to work profitably for the Nazi war machine.

“I sometimes think of that man as an angel who was sent to save me,’’ Goldberg said. “I never saw him again.’'

Monday’s ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is more than a moment to remember some 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. It is a reminder that the number of survivors is dwindling, leaving fewer and fewer people to bear witness to the Nazi genocide at a time when Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise.

“I’m only a drop in the ocean,’’ he said in an interview at the Jewish Care Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in London. “But I’ve made up my mind that as long as God gives me the strength, physical and mental, to continue doing it, I have committed myself to keep on doing it. So that’s why I’m here at age 94, speaking to you.”

This is his story.

Nazi rise

Manfred was born in Kassel, a city of about 220,000 in central Germany. Just 3 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he didn’t realize how the country was changing until he enrolled in the Jewish primary school nearby.

By then, the Hitler Youth, an organization that was outwardly similar to the Boy Scouts but was used to indoctrinate children in Nazi ideology, had begun to spread hatred of the Jews.

“They lay in wait of us sometimes, to ambush us and assault us or curse us,” Goldberg said.

The children had been warned: Run or face more trouble.

As the Nazis systematically excluded Jews from public life, they first tried to deport Goldberg’s father, then threatened to send him to a concentration camp. Manfred’s mother, Rosa, pleaded for time to get him a visa to emigrate.

She heard diplomats at the British Embassy in Berlin might help, so she traveled 200 miles to see them. There she found Frank Foley, a British secret agent whose embassy job was cover for his spying activities and who ultimately authorized visas for more than 10,000 Jews to escape Germany.

“I believe he was a man with a heart,’' Goldberg said.

Foley gave Goldberg’s father an emergency visa and told his mother that the rest of the family could follow in the coming weeks. But 10 days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. The family was split apart.
Wearing the star

As war raged, Germany stepped up anti-Jewish laws.

Jews were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star outdoors, and could only buy food in certain shops. When the shops ran out, Jews were out of luck.

One day, Goldberg’s mother told him to put on his bookbag, which covered the star on his jacket, and go with her to a non-Jewish bakery. Standing across the street, she gave him a handful of coins and told him to run into the shop, ask for a loaf of bread, put the money on the counter and grab the bread before anyone could stop him.

“I was 7 or 8 years old. I just did as she asked me to,’’ he said. “But in retrospect, I realize how serious the situation must have been. She probably would have been going hungry, but she couldn’t bear to see her children suffer hunger.’'

Then in 1942, the Nazi regime embarked on what it called “The Final Solution,” the systematic execution of European Jews.

When the SS pounded on the door of the Goldbergs’ modest flat, they gave his mother just 10 minutes to pack a suitcase. After three days and three nights on a train without food or water, Manfred, his younger brother, Herman and their mother found themselves in Riga, the capital of Latvia, beginning a nightmare that would take him to five camps over the next three years.

Becoming a number

Manfred lost his name. He became No. 56478.

Soon they arrived at a sub-camp known as Precu, where Goldberg and his mother were put to work. But Herman was too young and stayed behind in the camp when Manfred and Rosa went out to work. The SS came and took the children away. Manfred never saw his brother again.

“The next morning, both my mother and I had to line up and go to work as though nothing untoward had happened,” he said. “The mourning took place internally, but if we had refused to go to work, we would have lost our lives.”

Only months later, Goldberg faced the same fate as his brother when the unknown benefactor whispered in his ear.

As the Nazis began to lose ground on the Eastern Front, they moved their prisoners west to keep them out of Russian hands and continue the killing.

Goldberg was moved to Stutthof, a camp near the Polish city of Gdansk whose front gate became known as the Gateway of Death because so few inmates left alive. More than 60,000 people died at the camp due to typhus, lethal injections and, beginning in June 1944, after they were gassed with Zyklon B, the same compound used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

But there was one last horror to come.

With the war in Europe drawing to a close, the Nazis continued to drive the inmates west toward central Germany.

Goldberg and his mother were marched to 25 miles northwest, where hundreds of prisoners were herded onto barges and held offshore for days without food or water. When the SS guards disappeared, the stronger prisoners ripped up planks and used them as oars to paddle the massive boats back to shore.

But just as the inmates landed, the guards returned. First they shot those too weak to escape, and then rounded up those who had made it to shore, including Goldberg and his mother, and started marching them back to Germany.

Then a British tank column arrived.

“Suddenly our armed guards, who moments earlier had still been killing people for not keeping up to speed, turned and ran away in the opposite direction, away from us,’’ Goldberg recalled. “People were jubilant. We’re not under guard. We’re free! We’re free! ... You cannot imagine the joy we felt.’’

After being reunited with his father in England, Goldberg forged a career as an engineer, married and had four children.

For more than 50 years, he refused to tell his story.

He wanted his children to have normal parents, unburdened by the weight of the Holocaust. But about 20 years ago, when he was in his 70s, his synagogue asked him to take part in a remembrance service. His wife, Shary, encouraged him to remember: Who will tell your story when you are gone?

He never looked back.

“Silence never helps the oppressed,’’ Goldberg said. “It always helps the oppressors.”

The best revenge

The living room of Goldberg’s home in London is a testament to all that matters to him, a gallery filled with pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a lifetime of family gatherings. To stand in the room is to see a man who is celebrating the miracle that he was allowed to live.

But there’s also another picture.

It’s a painting of a chubby-cheeked boy with a checkered bowtie and the hint of a smile on his lips. Hung beside the front door, just where it can be seen every time Goldberg steps out into the world, it’s the picture of another boy who didn’t get that chance.

Herman.

Associated Press digital producer Nat Castaneda in Copenhagen, Denmark contributed to this report.

Newly Discovered Photos Of Nazi Deportations Show Jewish Victims As They Were Last Seen Alive

Jewish Germans assemble for deportation in Breslau, Germany, in November 1941. Courtesy of Regional Association of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, CC BY-SA

BY WOLF GRONER

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF 

LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES

The Holocaust was the first mass atrocity to be heavily photographed.

The mass production and distribution of cameras in the 1930s and 1940s enabled Nazi officials and ordinary people to widely document Germany’s persecution of Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities.

I co-direct an international research project to collect every available image documenting Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as euthanasia victims, in Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. The most recently discovered series of images will be unveiled on Jan. 27, 2025 – Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In most cases, these are the very last pictures taken of Holocaust victims before they were deported and perished. That fact gives the project its name, #LastSeen.

A few of the images we’ve tracked down were taken by Jewish people, not Nazi officials, offering a rare glimpse of Nazi mass deportations from a victim’s perspective. As descendants of survivors help our researchers identify the deportees in these images and tell their stories, we give previously faceless victims a voice.

A growing archive

The #LastSeen project is a collaboration between several German academic and educational institutions and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in the United States. When it began in late 2021, researchers knew of a few dozen deportation images of Jews from 27 German towns that had been gathered for a 2011-2012 exhibition in Berlin.

After contacting 1,700 public and private archives in Germany and worldwide to find more, #LastSeen has now collected visual evidence from 60 cities and towns in Nazi Germany. Of these, we’ve analyzed 36 series containing over 420 images, including dozens of never-before-seen photo series from 20 towns.

Most photographs of Nazi mass deportations from local archives published in our digital atlas were taken by the perpetrators, who documented the event for the police or municipality. That has heavily shaped our visual understanding of these crimes, because they display victims as a faceless mass. When individuals were depicted, it was most often through an antisemitic lens.

We have, however, obtained a handful of images taken from a victim’s perspective. In January 2024, the #LastSeen team shared newly discovered photographs showing the Nazi deportations in what was then Breslau, Germany – today Wroclaw, Poland.

They were sent to us for analysis by Steffen Heidrich, a staff member of the Regional Association of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, who came across an envelope titled “miscellaneous” while reorganizing his archive. It contained 13 deportation photographs – the last images taken of dozens of Jewish victims before they were transported from Breslau to Nazi-occupied Lithuania and massacred in November 1941.

Jewish resistance

Many of these pictures in this series show a large, mixed age group of men and women wearing the yellow star – the notorious Nazi-mandated sign for Jews – gathering outside with bundles of their belongings. Some are taken from a peculiar angle, from behind a tree or a wall, suggesting they were snapped clandestinely.

Given the deportation assembly point for the Breslau Jews, a guarded local beer garden, our researchers knew that only a person with permission to access that property could have shot these pictures.

For these two reasons, we concluded that an employee of the Jewish community of Breslau must have documented the Nazi crimes – most likely Albert Hadda, a Jewish architect and photographer who clandestinely photographed the November 1938 pogrom in Breslau.

Hadda’s marriage to a Christian partially protected him from persecution. Between 1941 and 1943, the city’s Jewish community tasked him with caring for the deportees at the assembly point until their forced removal.

These 13 recently discovered pictures constitute the most comprehensive series illuminating the crime of mass deportations from a victim’s perspective in Nazi Germany. Their unearthing is testimony to the recently rediscovered widespread individual resistance by ordinary Jews who fought Nazi persecution.

Documenting Fulda

Our project has also identified new deportation photos taken in the German town of Fulda in December 1941, during a snowstorm.

Previously, historians knew of only three pictures of this deportation event. Preserved in the city archive, they show the deportees at the Fulda train station during heavy snowfall.

We discovered two new images of the same Nazi deportation, apparently taken by the same photographer, in a videotaped survivor interview in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles.

In 1996, the Shoah Foundation interviewed Miriam Berline, née Gottlieb, the daughter of a successful Orthodox Jewish merchant in Fulda. At the end of the two-hour interview, Berline held two photographs up to the camera. They clearly show the same snowy deportation in Fulda.

Berline, born in 1925, escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. She did not remember how her family obtained the images but recalled the photographer as Otto Weissbach, a “wonderful” man who had helped Fulda’s Jewish families.

Our researchers investigated and learned his name was Arthur Weissbach, a non-Jewish neighbor of the Gottliebs. The factory he owned still exists. Descendants of Jewish families have since confirmed that he kept valuables for them and took care of elderly relatives who stayed behind.

Weissbach’s niece said he was a passionate hobby photographer. Since Weissbach kept contact with survivors after the war, he might have given the images to the Gottlieb family. Today, the family’s copies are lost, but their existence is preserved in Berline’s video interview at the USC Shoah Foundation.

The pictures show the Jews at the Fulda train station on Dec. 9, 1941 – revealing how Nazi deportations happened in plain view.

The day before, Jewish men and women from around Fulda had been summoned and spent the night at a local school gym. In the morning, they were taken to the train station and forced by police to board a train to Kassel, in central Germany, and then eastward onto Riga, in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

In total, 1,031 Jews were deported from Kassel to Riga. Only 12 from Fulda survived.
Identifying the deportation victims

It is difficult to identify the people in the photos we discover. So far, we’ve published 279 biographies in the digital atlas.

In the future, artificial intelligence may help us identify more people from the photos in our collection. But for now, this process takes exhaustive research with the help of local researchers and descendants of survivors, whose names are known from archived transport lists.

Families often struggle to recognize individuals in these images, but sometimes they have family photos that help us do so.

Take, for example, this posed family portrait of two young girls. They are Susanne and Tamara Cohn.

Relatives of the Cohn family had this photo. It, along with data from the local Nazi transport list, established that two girls photographed in one of his Breslau deportation shots were the daughters of Willy Cohn.

Cohn, a well-known German-Jewish medieval historian and high school teacher in Breslau, kept a detailed diary about the persecution of the town’s Jews from 1933 to 1941. It was unearthed and published in the 1990s.

This photo, below, may be the last picture ever taken of his children with their mother, Gertrud.

Gertrud, Susanne and Tamara Cohn, Breslau, November 1941. #LastSeen Project, CC BY-SA

New insights

The #LastSeen research project is generating new insights into the history of Nazi mass deportations, new methodologies for photo analysis and new tools for Holocaust education.

In addition to the digital atlas, which has been visited by more than 50,000 people since its launch in 2023, we have developed several award-winning educational tools, including an online game that invites students to search for clues, facts and images of Nazi deportations in an artificial attic.

In workshops for teachers and seminars with students, #LastSeen teaches the history of Nazi deportations and demonstrates how historical photo research works. In Fulda, for example, high schoolers helped us locate the exact places where the photographs were taken.

Those pictures will be published in our atlas on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025. A public commemoration in Fulda will feature the local students’ contributions.

Depending on fundraising, we hope to extend the #LastSeen project beyond Germany. Collecting images from all 20-plus European countries annexed or occupied by the Nazis will help us better understand these crimes and advance research and education in new ways.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE