Tag Archives: Bukovina

The Mixture of Peoples in Bukowina


Größere Kartenansicht

Wissenschaftliche Beilage der Leipziger Zeitung
N° 87. Donnerstag, den 23. Juli 1891

Im Völkergemisch der Bukowina.
Ethnographische Studien von Fritz Racher.

Nach der Geschäfte Drang und Mühen winkt endlich wieder ein freier Tag, den ich dazu benütze, meine Kenntnisse von Land und Leuten zu bereichern, und dierin bietet wohl kaum ein Ländchen der Erde vielseitigere Gelegenheit, als das Land der grünen Buchen, die gesegnete Bukowina. An einem herrlichen Morgen besteigen wir den flinken Zauberwagen, der uns in Zeit von wenigen Stunden das Leben und Treiben 10 verschiedener Volksstämme vor Augen zu führen im Stande ist, möge mich der freundliche Leser auf dieser Rundfahrt begleiten. Das Gefährt rollt in nördlicher Richtung von dannen, Schloß und Dorf Waszkoutz [Vășcăuți: 47.9692655,26.022749] liegen bald fern hinter uns, der Weg schlängelt sich durch die Weidenbrüche des Sereth, die diesen Fluß auf seinem ganzen Laufe in weiter Ausdehnung umrahmen, und in einen eigenartigen Landschafts-Charakter sehen wir uns da versetzt. Continue reading →

Book by Hedwig Brener – Just published!

From: Hartung-Gorre
Sent: Friday, March 06, 2015 3:09 PM
To: Brener, Hedwig
Subject: “Begegnungen mit Menschen und Städten” sind fertig
Liebe Frau Brenner,
gerade sind die fertig gedruckten Bücher aus der Druckerei eingetroffen.
Das Buch ist sehr, sehr schön geworden.
Mit herzlichen Grüßen und Wünschen zum Wochenende
[Google Translation:
The final printed books have just arrived from the printers.
The book is very, very nice.
With warm regards and wishes for the weekend,]
Ihre
Renate Gorre und Woflgang Hartung-Gorre
Hartung-Gorre Verlag
Inh.: Dr. Renate Gorre
Saentisblick 26
D-78465 Konstanz
Fon: +49 (0)7533 97227
Fax: +49 (0)7533 97228
www.hartung-gorre.de3866285248
Zum neuen Buch von Hedwig Brenner
„Begegnungen mit Menschen und Städten“
von Christel Wollmann-Fiedler, BerlinAuf  Menschen zugehen zu können ist eine Gabe, mit ihnen zu sprechen, von ihnen zu erfahren, eine Bereicherung des Lebens. Sich Jahrzehnte später an diese Begegnungen zu erinnern, eine Gnade!
Hedwig Brenner, die Erfinderin dieses neuen Buches, durchstreifte Städte vor unendlich vielen Jahren, begegnete zufällig in Parks und auf Plätzen alten Bekannten oder Unbekannten, die zu Freunden wurden. Die Schilderungen in diesem Buch sind nicht erfunden, erlebt und aufgeschrieben wurden sie von einer kommunikativen weltoffenen sechsundneunzigjährigen alten Dame, einer Czernowitzerin, eben Hedwig Brenner, wie bereits erwähnt. Geboren wurde die Schriftstellerin 1918 in der Bukowina, im deutschsprachigen Buchenland, das einst bis zum Ende des 1. Weltkrieges zur Donaumonarchie gehörte, dann zum Königreich Rumänien kam, 1945 gar zur Sowjetunion und seit 1990 zur Ukraine gehört. In einer liberalen jüdischen Familie wuchs Hedwig Brenner auf, ließ sich von der Vielfalt der Kulturen in ihrer Heimatstadt inspirieren. Auch sie erlebte die Diskriminierung und Verfolgung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in der Nazizeit, kam ins Getto in Czernowitz, überlebte die Gräuel, verließ die Heimat und nahm die Erinnerungen mit. Erst vor dreißig Jahren ist sie in der 3. Heimat, im Heiligen Land Israel, angekommen.
Neugierig und wissbegierig ist Hedwig Brenner seit der Kindheit, wie sie selbst zugibt, beobachtet mit Verve. Diese Beobachtungen und Begegnungen erzählt sie uns in ihrem neunten Buch. Reisen war, nein, ist ihre Leidenschaft. Erst vor einigen Monaten besuchte sie Berlin, hatte Lesungen, traf auch hier wiederum Menschen, die irgendwann ihren Weg kreuzten  und neue kamen hinzu.
Seinerzeit in Ploiesti im rumänischen Petrolgebiet in den Jahren 1945 bis 1982  erlebte Hedwig Brenner so manches während der Ceaucescuadministration. Reisen ins westliche Ausland, in „kapitalistische“ Länder, waren untersagt und somit eine Seltenheit. Hedwig Brenner eroberte das Herz des einen oder anderen, bekam einen Paß mit Stempel und reiste mit vier Dollar Taschengeld ins „feindliche“ Ausland zu Freunden und Verwandten nach London, Brüssel, Düsseldorf und anderswohin. Nur alleine durfte sie reisen, Ehemann und Söhne blieben als Pfand zuhause. Die kommunistische Regierung kontrollierte und reglementierte das Leben seiner Bürger. Erst später, von Israel aus, besuchte das Ehepaar Brenner gemeinsam Land und Leute in Europa und Nordamerika.
Bis ins Detail sind Hedwig Brenner diese Städte mit ihren Sehenswürdigkeiten und Schönheiten  gedanklich geblieben, die Namen der Menschen, der alten und neuen Freunde kramte sie aus der Gedankenschublade und schrieb sie in Haifa in Neve Sha’nan nieder.
Nehmen sie teil an den vergangenen Erlebnissen und Begegnungen dieser alten Dame, lassen Sie sich verführen an Orte und durchstreifen sie mit ihr Städte, die heute anders aussehen als damals, seien sie zu Gast bei Menschen, die Hedwig Brenner in ihren Erinnerungen schildert. Fantasie ist auch eine Gnade und eine Gabe!

Israel..3-4-14 1663

Hedwig Brenner and her son Michael from the USA

“A Shtetl in the Caribbean”, a Roadmovie Documentary…

…across Belarus, Ukraine, Israel, USA and Curacao is now on the way to your heart and to your cinema!

Click on CC (closed caption) to turn on/off English subtitles.

Trailer A Shtetl in the Caribbean from Memphis Film & Television on Vimeo.

A SHTETL IN THE CARIBBEAN tells the compelling story of two childhood friends who grew up on Curaçao, in search for their family history in Eastern Europe.

Mark and Tsale, children of Eastern European Jews that fled to Curaçao, travel back to the home countries of their ancestors. In a documentary road-movie across Curaçao, the United States, Belarus, Ukraine and Israel, we witness their discoveries, courage and despair while they are reminded of the sacrifices their parents had to make to provide their family with a better future.

This unknown story is revealed in a journey from the desolate wastelands of Eastern Europe to the exotic Caribbean, a contrast metaphoric for the history of Mark and Tsale’s ancestors.

A SHTETL IN THE CARIBBEAN originated from a strong emotion: we are all part of the same family, no matter how different we are. The film is also an homage to Curaçao, a small island with a big heart, and a place that has been a safe haven for strangers. Only in such a place a human being can truly build a home.

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BIOGRAPHY MARK WIZNITZER
Named after his two deceased grandfathers per Jewish tradition, Mark Leon Wiznitzer was born in the US and brought to Curacao as a baby. There he was called “ Buchi, ” a popular island nickname that legend dates back to the strongest African slave broken by the loss of his beloved wife, and is still often given to a native first son. In Willemstad, Mark attended the Dutch-language Hendrikschool before he moved to New York City at the age of eleven with his mother. But he returned to spend all his school vacations on Curacao, where he worked with his father in La Confianza, the family-owned department store. After studying political science at the State University of NY in Buffalo, Mark went on to complete a Masters in Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He worked in Curacao for Wiznitzer Brothers, the family’s retail and wholesale business, for a year before he was selected to join the US Department of State as a career diplomat in 1976, at which time he left Curacao for good. During his various assignments in Washington DC, Latin America and Europe, he earned awards for his performance in political and politico-military affairs, and strategic trade. After retiring in 1999, Mark completed an Executive MBA in Vienna. He was a volunteer for Barak Obama’s campaigns for the Democratic nomination and election as President. As a result of his first visit in 2010 to Vashkivtsi, Ukraine, the birthplace of the four Wiznitzer brothers, he organized his family’s restoration of the neglected Jewish cemetery there. He currently lives with his wife, Paula Goddard, in Virginia, where he recently became a volunteer advocate for senior residents of Arlington County.

BIOGRAPHY TSALE KIRZNER
Tsale Kirzner was born on Curaçao as the oldest son of Socher Kirzner and Fania Shusterman, refugees who built a home on the Caribbean island in 1948. He was named after his grandfather from his mothers side, Bezalel, who was killed by a firing squad in Mikasjevits in Belarus, as a warning to the Jewish people living in the town. Tsale went to the Hendrikschool and the Radulphus College on Curaçao, after which he moved to the US to study Sinology at Harvard University and economics at The George Washington University, graduating cum laude. Since 1974 Tsale lives in The Netherlands. Tsale is married to professor Lorraine Uhlaner and is father to five children.

Read more at: http://www.memphisfilmtv.com/een-sjtetl-in-de-cariben/?lang=en

What’s it about: “The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road”?




Drawings dedicated by Arnold and Anna Daghani to Erich Dubowy



These two letters – Click here for the German transcription! – and the drawings above were sent by Arnold and Anna Daghani to Erich Dubowy between June and September 1976. They are reproduced by special courtesy of Erich’s son Daniel Dubowy from Canada. Concerning the relationship between Arnold Daghani and Erich Dubowy, we learn from Daniel: “…they knew each other from Czernowitz, (they were of the same age) but surely from Bucharest. In the early fifties in Bucharest there were quite a few Czernowitzer artists who socialized and met regularly, and my father who was an architect but also a decent piano player, must have intermingled with them. […] They may not have been close friends but acquainted enough to be in some constant correspondence before and after.” Even more, one of the reasons these letters make compelling reading is their historical relevance, far beyond just personal considerations. 






Arnold Daghani shines a light on his artistic self-conception as well as on his relationship to the Romanian post WW2 artist community, such as to the Czernowitzer poet Alfred Kittner, the Romanian art reviewer Eugen Schileru, the Armenian businessman and art collector Krikor H. Zambaccian, the diplomat and art critic Oscar Walter Cisek, who authored short stories, novels, poems and essays in both German and Romanian. In addition we discover at the bottom of these letters a catalogue of Daghani’s works, which apparently were still in his possession before finally emigrating to England and settling in Hove, near Brighton, one year later in 1977. Daghani died in 1985, a deeply frustrated man, and his work is now held at Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex.


Dr Deborah Schultz comes straight to the point stating in her article “Pictorial Narrative, History and Memory in the Work of Arnold Daghani” as follows: “His frustrations were intensified by the lack of public interest in the camps in Ukraine, with all the attention focused on better-known camps such as Auschwitz, and he strongly believed that his account had to be heard. For Daghani writing and image making may have been the means of locating himself and of finding his way.” You will better comprehend this by reading the first paragraph of Daghani’s second letter: “As an ‘homage’, I received from the public prosecutors the entire investigation procedure file, since, according to the chief prosecutor [Fritz Bauer], it’s solely due to me, that they gained knowledge of the atrocities committed on the other side of the Bug River.” But it’s finally G. H. Bennett,  Associate Professor in History at the University of Plymouth, who – by his article “The Limits of West German Justice in the 1960s: The Post-War Investigation of Walter Gieseke” and his book “The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road” – is enlightening the historical dimension for us.




Well, the “Nazi” was Walter Gieseke, Oberstleutnant of the Gendarmerie and SS, the “Painter” was Arnold Daghani and the DG IV (Durchgangsstraße IV) was the “SS Road”, the road building project across the Ukraine which resulted in the murder of substantial numbers of Jewish forced labourers, among those many from Bukovina.


At my previous posting “The Stone Quarry on the Bug River at 8 Miles from N 48°40′ E 29°15′” you’ll find additional reports on the fate of the Jewish forced labourers including excerpts from Andrej Angrick’s article “Forced Labor along the ‘Straße der SS'” and Gerhard (Bobby) Schreiber’s memoirs “A Tale of Survival”. After getting numerous answers to our initial question, the final question concerns the moral condemnation and criminal conviction of the war criminals, but read by yourself G. H. Bennett’s conclusion:


“Gieseke was never brought to trial and Daghani would eventually conclude that the West German investigations into the crimes committed along DGIV were ‘merely a farce, a meaningless gesture’. […] The investigation of Walter Gieseke highlights the problems in the 1950s and 1960s of securing justice for crimes committed during the war. The processes of investigating and prosecuting of German war criminals in the context of West German justice in the 1950s and 1960s were not likely to result in a conviction. Gieseke’s defensive strategies maximized the problems facing investigators which resulted from the set of legal, political, social and investigative contexts that made a trial difficult and, in the eyes of many West Germans, unwanted and unwarranted. […] In the case of Walter Gieseke can be glimpsed many of thecomplexiti es that protected the guilty men and women of post-war Germany. Moreover, study of this case hopefully demonstrates the need to discount concerns about ‘practitioners’ trespassing onto the territory of historians. In studying post-war German justice, and indeed most aspects of legal history, there is ample scope for practitioners and historians to pool their skills and approaches to the mutual benefit of truly interdisciplinary scholarship.There is much to be learned from each other and little to be feared.

Additional Links:
“SS film links officer with war crimes” by BBC
“Lost film unearthed in Devon church…” by Daily Mail 
“Arnold Daghani. Who is he?” by Miha Ahronovitz
“The Art of Arnold Daghani” by The Art of Polemics


“I Remember Them Now” by Laurence Salzmann

Blue Flower Press: In the late 1930’s, there were eight thousand Jews in Rădăuți, a small town in the Bukovina region of Romania. During 1974-76, when the photographer/filmmaker Laurence Salzmann went to Rădăuți on a Fulbright Fellowship, there were only two hundred and forty Jews among the entire population of twenty-two thousand.

“I Remember them Now” is a short film made from newly rediscovered, kodachromes and audio from the Salzmanns’ original time in Rădăuți.

Rohatyn and Bukovina Memorials at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv

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Marla Raucher Osborn at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv, with Rohatyners standing before the Rohatyn Memorial to the victims of the Shoah

Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio broadcast on “Ukrainian Jewish Heritage – Rohatyn”

 

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Bukovina Holocaust Memorial at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv

JEWISH GALICIA & BUKOVINA: Galicia and Bukovina were major Jewish centers as far back as the 13th Century and were home to over one million Jews, with unique cultural characteristics and a vibrant intellectual and spiritual life. These regions produced prominent Jewish thinkers, rabbis and Hassidic courts, who created influential texts and institutions that have had a long-lasting impact on the Jewish world. The Torah scholars and Jewish intellectuals of Galicia and Bukovina were known for their tolerance and openness towards modernity, while being firmly rooted in Jewish tradition and learning. This thriving Jewish world was wiped out in the Holocaust.