Iris Bork-Goldfield

Refuge From a Nazi Blitz

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By Steven Kurutz, Photographs by Winnie Au (New York Times, April 1, 2025)

Steven Kurutz traveled to Muncy, Pa., where Malcolm Barlow gave him a tour of his farmhouse.

In November 1940, four children showed up after dark at a stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. They arrived by car down a long dirt driveway. The headlights illuminated the tall elm trees surrounding the manor house, and the rooms inside were lit up brightly.

Brian, Susan, Sheila and Malcolm Barlow, ages 12 to 5, had just endured the blackout of the London Blitz, the German bombing during World War II.

To protect her children, Violet Barlow, their mother, had placed them on a boat from England to Canada, a 3,000-mile journey. The children then took a train to New York City, where they spent several weeks in immigration limbo, and then got on another train to the small town of Muncy, Pa.

Awaiting them was Margaret Brock, who owned the farmhouse and country estate called Muncy Farms, dating to 1769 and set on more than 800 acres of fields and woods along the Susquehanna River.

Muncy Farms was once part of a 7,000-acre estate. The original stone farmhouse dates to 1769.

Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. “It was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie à la Mode,” he said. “A very British dinner.”

If Muncy Farms remains fresh in Malcolm’s mind today, it is because he never really left. Margaret didn’t just provide the children a meal that night and a respite from the war. In an unusual twist of events and decisions that Malcolm and his siblings would never fully know or understand until they were adults, they never returned to England. Mrs. Brock became their guardian and she bequeathed them the estate.

At 89, Malcolm is still in the rambling, 11-bedroom farmhouse, as the last surviving sibling. Muncy Farms — even as Malcolm worked and raised a family elsewhere for four decades — became his forever home.

“It is the heart and soul of my dad,” said his daughter, Cricket Barlow, who grew up visiting the property with him. “His world is the farm.”

He is the devoted caretaker of the property and the keeper of tales so intriguing that they motivated his brother Brian to pen a memoir.

Malcolm relishes showing the farm off to guests, as I learned when I visited Muncy Farms, which is in Lycoming County, near Williamsport, and sits well back off the main road down a tree-lined lane that crosses an old iron railroad bridge.

One cold afternoon in January, Malcolm welcomed me into the center and oldest part of the farmhouse. Tall and bald, with a friendly, patrician manner, Malcolm in his green wool sweater and gray slacks appeared the perfect country gentleman. He led the way through a long, wood-paneled library and into the dining room, where he had prepared a lunch of tuna fish salad on a bed of lettuce followed by raspberry shortcake for dessert.

Over the next few hours, Malcolm told the story of his family’s life in England before the war, and of coming to Muncy Farms and learning its long history.

Malcolm said he was born into the finer things: The Barlow family lived in a rented manor house near the coast in Suffolk, England, with five maids and a governess to watch the children. The money came from Violet, whose father ran a toiletries company. She drove a Rolls-Royce. But the outbreak of the war stripped the Barlows of their wealth, as it did to many European families.

In his self-published memoir, “Only One Child,” the eldest of the Barlow children, Brian, describes how the family moved to a small cottage that was once an infirmary for his boarding school after the British Army commandeered their house for a living quarters.

The children’s father, Horace, had a friend in the American consulate, and the family relocated to London with hopes of securing U.S. visas for the four youngest children. A fifth child, Derrick Steedman, born by Violet’s previous marriage, was 17 and nearing military age, so by government policy had to stay in England.

The imperative to get the children to safety became more urgent in September 1940, when the Germans started the relentless bombing. As air-raid sirens wailed and fiery explosions rocked the city nightly, the Barlow family hid in a basement shelter.

The children were sent out of harm’s way through the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, which placed several hundred refugee minors with American families to live out the war safely overseas. The group’s chairwoman was Eleanor Roosevelt.

Margaret Brock and her husband Henry, who were childless, pledged to support up to five European children through the evacuee program.

Henry and Margaret Brock, wealthy socialites, agreed to take in European refugee children during the war.

The Brocks met under unusual circumstances: Margaret Burgwin, a socialite in Pittsburgh and daughter of a banker and lawyer, was doing prison welfare work. Henry Brock was in prison.

The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family of bankers and industrialists, Mr. Brock was involved in a car accident in Philadelphia in 1923 that killed three pedestrians. The case became a society scandal in the press.

Mr. Brock served three years and two months before he was pardoned by the Pennsylvania governor. And Margaret Burgwin quickly became Mrs. Brock. “PROMINENT PHILADELPHIAN, JUST RELEASED FROM PEN, TO WED PITTSBURGH GIRL,” one headline read in June 1926.

The newlyweds moved to his family’s property, Muncy Farms.

The stone farmhouse was built by Samuel Wallis, a wealthy landowner and rumored British spy during the Revolutionary War who amassed a 7,000-acre estate. In 1806, Muncy Farms was bought by Robert Coleman, an industrialist known as the “iron king” who became Pennsylvania’s first millionaire, and a forebear to Mr. Brock. Thereafter, the estate was passed down in the Brock family, though it shrank in acreage over the generations.

Henry and Margaret undertook a major renovation of the manor house, importing a massive breakfront from a European castle and hand-painted Chinese wallpaper. They filled the home with antiques and art acquired on travels, and hired a local farmer and gardener to make the property a working farm.

Framed charcoal portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Brock hung over Malcolm’s shoulders on the dining room wall as he spoke of them admiringly.

He never met Mr. Brock.

In fact, when Malcolm and his siblings arrived that dark night in 1940, Mrs. Brock was grief-stricken.

Three weeks before the Barlow children were due in Muncy, Mr. Brock died suddenly of appendicitis at age 54, leaving Mrs. Brock a grieving widow to care for this brood of strangers.

Malcolm said Mrs. Brock was a generous, optimistic person, despite her personal trials. The children called her “Aunt Peg” or “my guardian.”

As the baby, Malcolm was doted on by Mrs. Brock, with good intentions but to the possible detriment of his older siblings who also needed the attention. Brian and Susan, fraternal twins, were 12 when they made the life-changing journey, and Sheila was 10 — they’d had fuller lives in England, and felt the loss of leaving more keenly.The four Barlow siblings as they appeared on arriving at Muncy Farms. Malcolm is the boy in short pants.

The four Barlow siblings as they appeared on arriving at Muncy Farms. Malcolm is the boy in short pants.

“My oldest sister, Susan, always felt we should go back to England,” said Malcolm, adding that she had an unhappy adulthood until late in life.

Instead, Mrs. Brock adopted them, and the Barlows became Americans. She paid for their educations in boarding schools and later universities. Brian served in the U.S. Army, married and had three children and became a schoolteacher in the Philadelphia area. Susan, who never wed or had children, worked as a librarian at a private school, also near Philadelphia. Sheila worked in the 1950s for the New York fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo before marrying and starting a family in Miami.

Malcolm served in the Navy and attended Trinity College.

In 1961, Mrs. Brock, dying of leukemia, called the four Barlows back to Muncy. In her will, she wrote that if it wasn’t a financial burden, they should keep the farm, as an anchor in America.

It was not as glamorous and fortuitous as it sounded. “We inherited this huge farm and had no cash,” Malcolm, who was 25 at the time, said. “We were land poor.”

Holding on to the estate for decades hasn’t been easy. Initial attempts to farm the land and raise cattle were hindered by drought, a barn fire and bad financial decisions. And there were differing levels of interest in the farm among the siblings.

Malcolm kept his day job: He worked as an executive for a pharmaceutical firm that became GlaxoSmithKline, now GSK, and settled in Philadelphia with his wife, his daughter Cricket and his son Peter. But in 40 years, he never bought a house there, and he returned to Muncy Farms every chance he could.

‘Rejuvenation’

Muncy Farms is a magnificent property, inside and out, fit for the black-tie affairs that Malcolm still throws every Christmas, as he has for decades.

The farmhouse is divided into three areas, the oldest, middle section and east and west wings. Malcolm resides in the original part of the house. John Schaeffer, Malcolm’s 69-year-old nephew, Sheila Barlow’s son, lives in the west wing. The two men otherwise share the house.

Like Malcolm, Mr. Schaeffer came to Muncy Farms as a child. After Mrs. Brock died, his mother returned to settle the estate and regroup after a divorce. When Cricket Barlow got divorced in 2015, she stayed with Malcolm for a year while she got her life back together.

“That’s when I really appreciated the farm as a place of rejuvenation,” Cricket said. “I understood why Mrs. Brock said, ‘If you can keep the farm, you will always have a home.’ It felt like home for me.”

As a young banker in New York and Washington, D.C., Mr. Schaeffer used to drive up to Muncy on weekends. “This valley was all farms — no mall, no car dealerships like today,” he said. “Very pastoral. That is a hard thing to get out of you.”Today, Malcolm and Mr. Schaeffer are co-owners of Muncy Farms. They lease the fields to grow corn and soybeans and rent out four houses on the property for additional income, building on the agriculture business that Malcolm and his three siblings began when they partnered with a local man to run the farm profitably and allow them to maintain the estate.

Susan was the first sibling to die; her share passed to the remaining three. Then Malcolm and Sheila bought out Brian’s share before he died in 2014. When Sheila died in 2020, Mr. Schaeffer inherited his mother’s portion.

Malcolm and Mr. Schaeffer, both divorced and retired, no longer have the demands of career and family, allowing them full-time allegiance to Muncy Farms.

A Mother’s Decision

The uncle and nephew were talking in the unlit dining room. It was originally a summer kitchen, and never wired for electricity. Today, dinner parties held there are lit by candelabra and sconces. “It’s like eating in the 1700s,” Malcolm said.

Mr. Schaeffer excused himself and Malcolm offered a guided tour of the rest of the house. Framed family photos were arranged atop a grand piano in the library.

One photo, dating to the 1970s, was a group portrait of all five Barlow children, including Derrick. He became a glider pilot during the war and was present on D-Day. Though Derrick made his home in England, he visited his half-siblings in America on several occasions, including at Muncy Farms.

On a nearby bookshelf sat a double picture frame — one side was a black and white photo of Mrs. Brock, the other a photo of Violet Barlow, Malcolm’s mother.

It seemed an appropriate time to address a mystery: How did a temporary arrangement for the siblings become permanent? Under the refugee program, evacuated children who came to America returned home to their families after the war.

In Brian’s memoir — and in Malcolm’s telling — there are several explanations.

Though the many letters that Violet and Horace Barlow wrote to their children at Muncy Farms did not reveal it, the couple’s marriage came apart during the war. Too old to serve in the military, Horace was unable to find a job or useful role for himself and grew further depressed at the dissolution of his marriage. In 1943, he died by suicide. The children did not learn of his cause of death until years later, from letters sent to Mrs. Brock by their aunt.

By 1944, Violet was living alone in a London hotel and working for an organization similar to the American Red Cross. She also became a military driver, an exciting job that liberated her from the traditional gender roles of wife and mother.

There were other circumstances to consider. Violet, in her letters to Mrs. Brock, makes clear she believed the children had a better future in America.

For Malcolm, at least, being separated from his birth mother was not a wounding outcome. “I never had much association with my mother,” he said, citing the nannies and lack of physical affection shown by his birth parents. “She was a bit of a stranger.”

After the war, Violet visited her children at Muncy Farms and befriended Mrs. Brock. In one more twist, while crossing the ocean aboard a ship, she met an American man and married him and ended up living in Connecticut.

Returning the photos of the two women to their place on the shelf, Malcolm said, “Aunt Peg became my mother.”

Of all the estate’s residents, going back to the 1700s, Malcolm has now lived there the longest.

It will be up to a future Barlow family member to steward the property as Malcolm has — or perhaps sell and move on.

The Nasty Girl (1990)

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Last fall, when my colleague Petra Sertic and I put together the GRST film series for this spring, I didn’t know how frighteningly timely and relevant Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl from 1990, would be.  Currently, one might say that we are “ruled” by a government whose need to erase or rewrite history is one of its defining traits.

The film is loosely based on the true story of Anja Rosmus in Passau, Germany, but is—according to Verhoeven—applicable to any German town. After entering a high school students’ writing contest, the protagonist Sonja (Lena Stolze) ends up researching her town’s involvement with the Third Reich. While the town has always praised itself for having resisted Nazi influence, Sonja discovers that many locals had collaborated with the Gestapo and were active members in the Nazi Party. Sonja’s effort to uncover the truth is met with strong resistance from townspeople who did not want their shameful past as Nazi collaborators or enablers to come to light, and it takes all her courage to overcome the many obstacles. 

Trailer: https://youtu.be/bgosz69fxz0?si=wOc5DKxhpKC9r_Fc

As Children, They Fled the Nazis Alone. Newly Found Papers Tell Their Story.

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Just under 10,000 Jewish children fled to Britain from Europe from December 1938 to September 1939. Not much was known about their journeys, until recently.

Claire Moses

By Claire Moses

Reporting from London

Published March 19, 2025Updated March 20, 2025 New York Times

When Hanna Zack Miley boarded a German train in July 1939, she did not know that the journey would permanently change her life.

She was 7 at the time, about to travel to Britain without her parents. She remembers saying goodbye to them on the platform of the train station in Cologne, Germany. “They told me it was a nice trip, and I believed it,” Ms. Miley, an only child, said. “I think they were trying to make it easy for me. I was the apple of their eye.”

As her short legs took her up the steep steps of the train, she wanted to take one more look at her parents. “I turned around, and I saw that they were crying,” Ms. Miley said. “It must have been awful for them.”

In that moment she realized that this was not, in fact, a nice trip.

She never saw her parents again.

Ms. Miley, 93, now living in Phoenix, Ariz., is one of almost 10,000 Jewish children who were part of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that helped minors flee Nazi Germany to Britain, via the Netherlands, between December 1938 and September 1939.

Over time, many details have been lost about this part of Holocaust history. But in the fall of 2024, Amy Williams, a researcher, unearthed a trove of information about the mission: lists of names and other identifying information about most of the children and chaperones who made the journey to Britain, tucked away in the vast archives at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

For Ms. Miley and many descendants of people who were part of the Kindertransport, the emergence of the lists has helped shed light on a murky period in their family history and offered a sense of connection to others who were affected. For researchers, the findings provide a key puzzle piece, offering new information about the families and rescue organizations involved in the mission.

“I was always told, from when I started my work, ‘These lists don’t exist, they were destroyed,’” said Dr. Williams, who was doing research for her third book about the Kindertransport when she discovered the documents. “And they’re not.”

The lists she found were used by Dutch border guards to determine which children from other European countries should be let through to Britain and which should be sent elsewhere.

A majority of the children on the Kindertransport, which was funded largely by Jewish communities in Germany and Britain, arrived by boat, traveling from Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. From there, they boarded trains to Liverpool Street Station in East London. Refugee organizations helped to match them with foster families.

The Kindertransport has long been taught as a feel-good story, researchers said, but the mission itself was a complicated affair. The British government, for example, only allowed children to come into the country without their parents, deeply traumatizing many of them. The children had to be healthy, and they had to be from Nazi Germany (which included Austria and parts of the Czech Republic) rather than from other parts of Eastern Europe.

Dr. Williams also found documents that helped reinforce the story of how the Kindertransport ended. While many have suggested that it was the start of World War II in September 1939 that ended the mission, the British refugee organizations operating the Kindertransport actually had decided that no more than 10,000 children could come to the country because of the difficulty of housing them.

“The story is much more complex than the way we want to portray it,” said Laura Hobson Faure, a professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1 who wrote a book about Jewish children who fled to France during the Holocaust.

“It’s not a feel-good story,” Dr. Hobson Faure said. “It’s a story, though, that did save lives.”

While thousands of children were rescued from the Nazis, many of them were traumatized by the experience and never saw their family members again. At the same time, several children of Kindertransport survivors said that their parents always felt a deep loyalty to Britain for the role it played in their survival.

Ms. Miley had long known that thousands of other German children had also been on the Kindertransport, but she said that seeing her name in black and white on an official list gave her a sense of belonging. “Suddenly, it wasn’t me alone,” she said.

Through Dr. Williams’s research, Ms. Miley has connected with the descendants of other children on the Kindertransport. Among them is Richard Aronowitz, 55. His mother — Doris Aronowitz, who died in 1992 — was on the same train as Ms. Miley in July 1939.

For Mr. Aronowitz and other descendants of the Kindertransport children, the lists of names, dates and numbers have led to complicated emotions. “It gave me much more of a profound context,” Mr. Aronowitz said in an interview last month. But, he added, “I don’t think there’s ever any closure.”

Some learned information about their parents or grandparents for the first time through the lists. For others, the documentation serves as a harrowing piece of evidence of the atrocities their parents survived, and an explanation of why so many of them grew up without grandparents or extended family.

“It’s that last, final parting document,” Dr. Williams said. “It really sealed people’s fates.”

For researchers, the discovery of the lists may provide new insight into how the Kindertransport was organized and how desperate parents came to their decisions.

“The Kindertransport has never been investigated so much from the continental point of view,” said Andrea Hammel, a professor at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the author of a book about the Kindertransport.

For Bobby Lax, whose father came to Britain on the Kindertransport, the documentation helped fill gaps in his family’s story. He found out that his father first went from Berlin to the Netherlands before being sent to Britain, leaving his brother and parents behind in Amsterdam, never to see them again, Mr. Lax said.

“While I had discovered most of my dad’s story, it’s absolutely overwhelming to see these original lists,” Mr. Lax, a filmmaker living in Tel Aviv, said. “There’s something incredibly empowering about that. It’s the final piece of the puzzle to me.”

More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Ms. Miley a renewed sense of grief. “One of the big losses when you’re taken away from your family so suddenly,” she said, “is that you don’t know the personality of your parents.”

On the other hand, she said, she feels gratitude. The discovery has helped give her “a deeper thankfulness for the gift of life,” Ms. Miley said. “My name and details on that list were the means of my escape.”

Bonhoeffer and the German Resistance to Fascism–Lessons for Today

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Weds., Mar. 5, 202512:00 – 1:30 pm EST (US)Zoom Webinar
Bonhoeffer and the German Resistance to Fascism – Lessons for Today
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German theologian and opponent of the Nazi regime was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of WWII. A brilliant thinker and writer, he became famous after his death. In this webinar, experts and family members discuss what Bonhoeffer’s work and his historical role in a collective endeavour, and its current appropriations and distortions can teach us – about authoritarian strategies and human images, and about the concept of resistance.
Click here for more details and to RSVP

About the Event

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German theologian and opponent of the Nazi regime was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of WWII. A brilliant thinker and writer, he became famous after his death. In the last decade, Christian nationalists and right-wing evangelicals have reinterpreted his legacy, portraying him as a solitary saint and instrumentalising his persona for their own ends. This has sparked a fierce debate, especially in the context of the campaign for the recent feature film “Bonhoeffer. Pastor, Spy, Assassin”. In this webinar, experts and family members discuss what Bonhoeffer’s work and his historical role in a collective endeavour, and its current appropriations and distortions can teach us – about authoritarian strategies and human images, and about the concept of resistance.

About the Speakers

Arnd Henze, German television journalist at WDR, writer, and Protestant theologian. He has worked as a foreign policy editor and reporter for German public television, has traveled to numerous conflict zones, and produced several award-winning documentaries. Henze is also an appointed member of the 13th general synod of the Protestant Church in Germany and gives lectures and participates in social-ethical debates on topics such as war and peace, climate protection, democracy, and anti-Semitism. Henze has written and spoken widely about Bonhoeffer and the role of the church in democracy. His 2019 book on the church and democracy, Kann Kirche Demokratie? Wir Protestanten im Stresstest, deals with the anti-democratic legacy of Protestantism and its current susceptibilities to authoritarian temptations. Following a series of talks in New York, Washington, and Yale on “Weaponizing Bonhoeffer” he initiated a broadly discussed transatlantic Op-Ed of Bonhoeffer scholars and Church leaders against the distortion and misuse of Bonhoeffer by Christian Nationalists.

Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser, born 1952, writes on relationships between Technology, Society and Nature. As a grandson of Ursula Schleicher, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sister, and Rüdiger Schleicher, who was also executed as a resistant against the Nazis, he co-initiated a statement of the Bonhoeffer family against the misuse of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy by the far right, especially in the last US election. Earlier last year, he also co-initiated a widely published statement of German resistance descendants against the misuse of the resistance legacy by the far right in Germany. Ruggero grew up in Italy and studied physics in Switzerland. In the seventies, he organised the international press campaign in the Baby Bottle case against Nestlé and joined the environmental movement. For five decades he worked as a journalist, consultant, researcher, diplomat and entrepreneur in various European countries, focusing on energy, transport, climate and innovation policy. A strong commitment to sustainability, human rights and historical perspective keeps him active. 

Rose Girone, Oldest Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 113

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She fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with her husband and baby only to be forced into a Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. Still, she would often say, “Aren’t we lucky?”

Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting. Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would often say. Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home in North Bellmore, N.Y., on Long Island, on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113. Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children. There are about 245,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors alive around the world, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which supports survivors. “This passing reminds us of the urgency of sharing the lessons of the Holocaust while we still have firsthand witnesses with us,” said Greg Schneider, the organization’s executive vice president. “The Holocaust is slipping from memory to history, and its lessons are too important, especially in today’s world, to be forgotten.” “Rose was an example of fortitude,” he said, “but now we are obligated to carry on in her memory.”

Rose Raubvogel was born on Jan. 13, 1912, in Janow, Poland, to Klara Aschkenase and Jacob Raubvogel. The family later settled in Hamburg, Germany, and started a costume business. She married Julius Mannheim in 1938 in an arranged marriage. The couple moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) that year, not long before Mr. Mannheim and his father were arrested and sent to Buchenwald. A year later, now with an infant, Ms. Girone received a document written in Chinese from family members who had escaped to England. It appeared to be a visa for safe passage to Shanghai, but “it could have been anything,” Ms. Bennicasa said; the family later learned, she explained, that it could have been a fake document. Mr. Mannheim’s father agreed to hand over his shipping business plus a payment to the Nazis in exchange for their release from the concentration camp. With the visa, Ms. Girone, her husband and 6-month-old Reha set sail for Japanese-occupied Shanghai along with 20,000 other refugees.

Mr. Mannheim had a small taxi business at first, while Ms. Girone made money by knitting clothes. But once Japan declared war in 1941, Jews were rounded up into a ghetto. Ms. Girone had to beg the ghetto’s overseer for a place for her family to live, and the only arrangement they could manage was an unfinished, rat-infested bathroom in a house. The family of three would live there for seven years. Mr. Mannheim had to abandon his taxi business and turned to hunting and fishing, while Ms. Girone continued to sell her knitwear. She eventually made friends with other refugees, including a Viennese Jewish businessman who helped her turn her knitting into a business. It would be a lifeline for decades to come. By 1947, Ms. Girone’s mother and grandmother had already made it to the United States, and they sponsored the family to join them. Ms. Girone secretly stashed $80, and the family set off that year for San Francisco, where they lived for about a month before taking a train to New York. Within a few years, Ms. Girone had divorced Mr. Mannheim, and she and Reha bounced from furnished room to furnished room around Manhattan, where she “scrimped and saved” while working at knitting stores, Ms. Bennicasa said. Ms. Girone eventually saved enough to open a knitting store with a partner in Rego Park, Queens, and she opened a second store in Forest Hills, where “we actually had a real apartment, not just a furnished room,” Ms. Bennicasa recalled. Ms. Girone would continue to work and teach knitting until she was 102. In 1968, Ms. Girone married Jack Girone, who died in 1990. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Bennicasa, she is survived by a granddaughter, Gina Bennicasa. Gina Bennicasa remembered her grandmother’s frequent sayings, including “Growing old is fun, but being old is not fun.” One stood out among the rest: “You have to wake up and have a purpose.”

NYT published February 28, 2025 written by Remy Tumin.

Marian Turski, Who Refused to Forget the Holocaust, Dies at 98

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From influential platforms, Mr. Turski, an Auschwitz survivor from Poland, warned the world of rising antisemitism and the perils of indifference to it.

Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who returned to his native Poland after World War II to give voice to fellow victims of the Nazis and their collaborators, warning the world in writings and speeches about the dangers of indifference to racial and ethnic injustice, died on Feb. 18 at his home in Warsaw. He was 98. His death was announced by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which he had helped to establish and where he had been chairman since 2009. Speaking in 2020 at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where he was shipped from the Lodz ghetto when he was a teenager, Mr. Turski sounded an alarm about what he called “a huge rise in antisemitism.” “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky,” he said in a Polityka magazine podcast. “It began with small forms of persecution of Jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. That is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended.” “The 11th Commandment is important: Don’t be indifferent,” he asserted. “Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against. Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.” He added, “If you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants.” Mr. Turski’s father and younger brother were killed at Auschwitz, and he lost 37 other relatives in the Holocaust.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell University, a son of Holocaust survivors and the author of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz” (2025), said Mr. Turski had exemplified “those members of the survivor generation who, instead of turning inward and wallowing as they might easily have done in their suffering, devoted himself to the future, to making sure that nothing like the horrors he and European Jewry experienced in the Holocaust would happen again to anyone else.” Only weeks before his death, Mr. Turski returned to the camp where he had been a slave laborer to attend a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of its liberation, in January 1945, by the Soviet Army. “We have always been a tiny minority,” he said, referring to himself and his fellow survivors. “And now only a handful remain.” For decades, Mr. Turski was a dominant sermonizer among them. He served as a firsthand witness to wartime atrocities as a columnist for the weekly Polityka magazine, where he went to work in 1958; as chairman of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland from 1999 to 2011; and as the editor of three volumes of eyewitness accounts, titled “Jewish Fates: A Testimony of the Living” (1996-2001). “Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,” Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement. He described Mr. Turski as “a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict and understanding over hostility.” Mr. Turski was born Mosze Turbowicz on June 26, 1926, in Druskininkai, a city that was part of Poland then and is now in Lithuania. His father, Eliasz Turbowicz, a coal trader who came from a family of rabbis, had planned to emigrate to Palestine but remained in Europe because of a recurring lung ailment, a result of a wound sustained while serving in the Russian Army during World War I. Mr. Turski’s mother, Estera (Worobiejczyk) Turbowicz, was a clerk. Mosze attended Jewish primary and secondary schools in Lodz, but once the Germans invaded in 1939, Jews were confined to the Lodz ghetto. He helped support his family by tutoring in Hebrew, Latin and Polish and working in a smokehouse, where he butchered horse meat. He also joined the Communist resistance. Two weeks after his parents and younger brother were deported, in August 1944, he was shipped out on one of the last transports from Lodz. He figured his chances of surviving were better at Auschwitz-Birkenau than in the ghetto, which the Nazis were obliterating. His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany; she survived the war and died in 1988. Mosze’s experience, too, was one of harrowing survival: deployed from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to do roadwork; forced to join a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp ahead of the Soviet advance; and sent to a camp at Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he caught typhus and shriveled to 70 pounds before the camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.

After the war, he returned to Poland as a committed socialist. Given the antisemitism in the country, a Communist official suggested that he adopt a non-Jewish name; he chose Marian Turski. He earned a degree in history from the University of Wroclaw. After joining the Polish Workers’ Party, Mr. Turski became a committed Communist official: He enforced censorship, imposed crop quotas on farmers and presided over a fraudulent referendum that consolidated Polish territory recovered from the German occupation — all, he would later say, in the interests of promoting Polish nationalism and socialism. In 1965, while studying and lecturing in the United States on an eight-month State Department scholarship, he participated in a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Years later, when President Barack Obama, at a ceremony in Warsaw, asked Mr. Turski what had motivated him to march, he replied, “Simply out of solidarity with all those who fought for their civil rights and against racial divisions.” In the late 1960s, he soured on Soviet Communism because of the government’s official policy of antisemitism and Moscow’s opposition to political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That “accelerated my transition from being a Pole with Jewish origins to an awareness of being a Pole and a Jew simultaneously,” he said. While he suppressed his wartime memories for years, Mr. Turski returned to Auschwitz in the 1970s, a trip he would make more than once. In 2020, he urged Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, to ban Holocaust deniers from his social media platform. Mr. Zuckerberg eventually did so that year. Mr. Turski’s wife, Halina (Paszkowska) Turski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, had escaped the Warsaw ghetto, served as a messenger for the resistance and later worked as a sound engineer for filmmakers. She died in 2017. He is survived by their daughter, Joanna Turski, a flutist; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

“Soft-spoken, an intellectual giant, he remained in Poland so that his voice resonated as closely as possibly to the abyss,” Professor Rosensaft, of Cornell, said. “He could tell people, ‘I have seen this,’” he added. “It is now going to be our task — the following generations — to make sure the authentic memory of the survivors becomes ingrained in our consciousness. We cannot replicate the voice of the survivors, but we can make sure that the questions they asked, the warnings they raised, remain ingrained in our consciousness.”

NYT published on February 25, updated on February 27, writen by Sam Roberts.

Open Letter from Marc Elias to Elon Musk

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Elon Musk recently posted on his site that another lawyer and I are “undermining civilization.” He goes on to ask if we suffered childhood trauma and concludes by suggesting we are suffering from “generational trauma.” This is my response.

Like Marc Elias’s grandfather, writes a colleague of mine, his grandmother arrived in the United States at the turn of the last century in a similar fashion and for a similar reason. His and hers and many of ours are among the countless immigrant stories that form our nation’s fabric. Elias’s powerful letter resonates not just as personal history but as a vital reminder of why defending democracy matters.

Click HERE for the open letter.

Marion Wiesel, Translator, Strategist and Wife of Elie Wiesel, Dies at 94

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A fellow survivor, she was a literary and political adviser who helped her husband gain recognition as a singular moral authority on the Holocaust.

Marion Wiesel, who translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, including the final edition of his magnum opus, “Night,” and who encouraged him to pursue a wide-ranging public career, helping him become the most renowned interpreter of the Holocaust, died on Sunday at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 94.

The Wiesels met in the late 1960s and married in 1969. By then, Mr. Wiesel had achieved wide acclaim. “Night” — a memoir about his teenage experience at Auschwitz and a tortured spiritual reckoning about the meaning of the Holocaust — came out in 1960, originally translated from the French by Stella Rodway. Mr. Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize and his numerous encounters with world leaders still lay decades away. Friends, relatives and writers all attributed the moral stature he achieved partly to the quiet influence of Marion. “In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant,” Joseph Berger wrote in “Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence” (2023), a biography. By nature, Mr. Wiesel was a reader of literature, a chess player and an observer of Jewish rituals. Into his early 40s, he led the intense but unworldly life of a passionate intellectual. For days he might not sleep. He often forgot to eat meals. He abstained from alcohol. He took trips abroad without notice and could not be reached. Mrs. Wiesel, too, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Following their marriage, she changed the rhythm of Mr. Wiesel’s days and expanded his sense of possibility — without altering his moral temper. Her most obvious impact on his career was through translation. He was an eloquent, powerful speaker of English, but he cherished his command of French, which dated from his days as a young refugee. Mrs. Wiesel shared her husband’s cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating his writing from French to English, ultimately working on more than a dozen of his books. None was more important than her 2006 translation of “Night.” In his biography, Mr. Berger, a former reporter for The New York Times, wrote that of the 10 million copies that the memoir had sold, three million came after her translation. It was heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and in the following years it became a widely assigned book in high schools — a concise literary work of moral instruction, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Animal Farm.” Mrs. Wiesel also advised and coached her husband as he made public appearances — including frequent TV interviews with Ted Koppel on ABC — and became a voice in world politics. Using money from Mr. Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Mrs. Wiesel took the lead in managing the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. The initiative reaches hundreds of children every year. Mr. Wiesel’s other public activities included serving as the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Perhaps no single moment of his political career is so vividly recalled as his plea to Ronald Reagan, issued in the White House alongside the president and in front of TV cameras, not to visit the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of the SS are buried in what was then West Germany.“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Mr. Wiesel said. “Your place is with victims of the SS.” Those remarks had an editor: Mrs. Wiesel. “There would not have been a Bitburg speech without Marion’s conviction,” the couple’s editor, Ileene Smith wrote in an email. She called Mrs. Wiesel her husband’s “most trusted adviser.” “As his translator from the French,” she added, “Marion pored over every sentence of Elie’s work with astonishing insight into his interior world, his literary mind.” Mary Renate (also sometimes spelled Renata) Erster was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1931. Her father, Emil, owned a furniture store. He and Mary watched from a street corner as Nazi troops took over Vienna.

A long flight ensued. Her mother, Jetta (Hubel) Erster, carefully guarded jewelry and silver candlesticks that she would barter over years of repeated escapes. During a brief period in Belgium, Mary attended school. She announced to her classmates that she had shed her first name — which was inspired by her mother’s love of Americana — and that from then on she would be called Marion. “It was an emotional turning point — my first step toward freedom,” she wrote in an unpublished reminiscence. The family spent time at Gurs, a French concentration camp, then fled to Marseille, where they narrowly avoided detection thanks to the protection of neighbors. Jetta had a relative with Swiss citizenship, and the family managed to smuggle themselves into Switzerland in 1942. The family arrived in the United States in 1949. Marion attended the University of Miami but mainly lived in New York City, where she worked at a bra factory and as a saleswoman at a department store. She wound up having a creative career of her own. She edited “To Give Them Light” (1993), a collection of Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry before World War II. She also wrote and narrated “Children of the Night” (1999), a documentary about children killed during the Holocaust. She married F. Peter Rose in the late 1950s and had a daughter, Jennifer. While her marriage was falling apart, she met Mr. Wiesel. They discussed French literature on their first date. He fell in love.

In addition to their son, Mrs. Wiesel is survived by her daughter and two grandchildren. Mr. Wiesel died in 2016. The Wiesels’ relationship was not solely an experience of Holocaust remembrance. Mrs. Wiesel also had the ability to convince her philosophically inclined husband that he would, for example, enjoy going to a Broadway cast party at Sardi’s restaurant. Back when Mr. Wiesel was single, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered Lubavitcher rabbi, wrote him a personal plea to marry and have children, suggesting that the propagation of the Wiesel line would be a repudiation of the Nazis. Mr. Wiesel was unconvinced: He did not want to bring more Jews into the world. “I changed his mind,” Mrs. Wiesel told Mr. Berger. “I told him he would be happy.”

NYT Published Feb. 2, 2025, updated Feb. 23, 2025 by Alex Traub.