Robert Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps who later played a feisty prisoner of war in the unlikely 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, died on November 16, 2022, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 96.
Clary was the last surviving original cast member of the series, which also starred Bob Crane, Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis, and Ivan Dixon as the Allied prisoners. Their captors were portrayed by Werner Klemperer and John Banner, both European Jews who had fled Nazi persecution before the war.
For decades, Clary said nothing publicly about his wartime experience. That changed in 1980, when he decided to speak out after seeing Holocaust deniers attempt to diminish or erase the truth of Nazi crimes. His silence broke with painful clarity: twelve members of his immediate family — his parents and ten siblings — had been murdered. Clary himself was deported to Buchenwald, where he was liberated on April 11, 1945. He was the only member of his family to survive.
Beyond his acting career, Clary committed himself to Holocaust remembrance. Beginning in 1980, he spoke at high schools and community groups, participated in survivor gatherings in Jerusalem, volunteered with the Museum of Tolerance, and became deeply involved with the USC Shoah Foundation. He was among the first 100 survivors interviewed for their archive and later conducted 75 interviews himself, ensuring that others’ stories would be preserved.
Hogan’s Heroes aired on CBS from 1965 to 1971, running for six seasons and 168 episodes. It remains the longest-running American sitcom set against the backdrop of World War II.
Unrealistic as it was, I loved the show. It made me laugh then, and it still makes me laugh today. The series is available on Amazon Prime.
The Frauenkirche (“Church of Our Lady”) stands on the eastern side of the main market in Nuremberg, Germany. An example of brick Gothic architecture, it was built between 1352 and 1362 on the initiative of Charles IV (1316–1378), Holy Roman Emperor.
The church’s origins are bound up with tragedy. In 1349, during the Black Death, a violent pogrom led to the expulsion of Nuremberg’s Jewish community. Charles IV ordered the city’s synagogue demolished, and the Frauenkirche was built on its ruins as part of the newly created Hauptmarkt.
Yet within a few years, the city authorities, short of money, sought to attract Jews back. In 1351, Charles IV allowed their return under specific conditions, and by 1382 the Jewish community numbered more than 500, concentrated in the Judengasse (today’s Judenstrasse). More background can be found at the Jewish Virtual Library.
Centuries later, between the two world wars, Nuremberg became a stronghold of the Nazi Party. Julius Streicher (1885–1946) founded one of the first local branches there in 1922 and published the antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer. The city also hosted massive Nazi rallies, and its Jews lived under daily harassment and threat.
The Frauenkirche itself was nearly destroyed during the bombing of Nuremberg (see photo above) in World War II, leaving only its nave walls and façade. Restoration was completed in 1953, and today the church once again dominates the Hauptmarkt as both a historic monument and a reminder of the city’s layered past.
Visitors can upload a photograph of a Holocaust victim or survivor, and the site’s facial recognition technology will compare it to its vast archives, returning the ten most likely matches.
Patt’s motivation is deeply personal: all four of his grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. His initial goal was to help his grandmother recover photographs of her family members who were murdered during the Holocaust. When the war began, she was nine years old and fled her hometown of Zamość with her father and siblings. Her mother — Patt’s great-grandmother — remained behind and was shot and killed during the Nazi invasion. Later, her brother was killed when he attempted to return to rescue her. The rest of the family survived and eventually emigrated to New York City after the war.
The Musée Nissim de Camondo is a historic house museum of French decorative arts, located in the Hôtel Camondo at 63 rue de Monceau, on the edge of Parc Monceau in Paris’s 8th arrondissement.
The home was built in 1911 by Ottoman-born Jewish banker and art collector Count Moïse de Camondo, inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It was designed to house his remarkable collection of decorative arts and fine furniture.
Tragedy shaped its fate. In 1917, the Count’s only son, Nissim, was killed in World War I. Shattered by the loss, the Count withdrew from society and dedicated himself entirely to perfecting his collection. When he died in 1935, he left the house and all it contained to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, stipulating that it become a museum in Nissim’s memory.
Just nine years later, the Count’s last surviving heir, his daughter Béatrice, was deported to Auschwitz along with her family during the Nazi occupation of France. None survived. The Camondo family line ended, leaving the house as its sole surviving legacy.
As part of a trip to Greece in 2023, I visited Thessaloniki, the country’s second-largest city, with over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and learned about the tragic fate of its Jews during the Second World War.
On the eve of the war, about 77,000 Jews lived in Greece, with roughly 56,000 in Thessaloniki. The city’s Jewish community was prominent in industry, banking, tourism, and the trades, with many working as laborers, artisans, and port workers.
The Germans invaded Greece on April 6, 1941, and occupied Thessaloniki three days later. The Jewish community council was arrested, apartments were seized, and the Jewish hospital was taken over by the German Army. Jewish newspapers in French and Ladino were shut down, replaced by antisemitic and collaborationist publications. The looting of literary and cultural treasures from libraries and synagogues was carried out by “Operation Rosenberg,” aided by the Wehrmacht. That first winter, some 600 Jews died from hypothermia and disease.
On July 11, 1942, 9,000 Jewish men aged 18–45 were ordered to gather in Liberty Square, where they were humiliated in the summer heat—a day remembered as “Black Saturday.” The Jewish community negotiated their release in exchange for a ransom, funded in part by selling the 500-year-old Jewish cemetery to the Municipality. The cemetery was destroyed, and its tombstones used as building material. About 2,000 men were sent as forced laborers; by October 1942, 250 had died under harsh conditions.
In February 1943, Jews were ordered into a ghetto in the Baron Hirsch quarter. Their property was confiscated, and deportations to Auschwitz and Treblinka began the following month. By August, nearly the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki—some 54,000 people—had been murdered in the Holocaust.
The “Menorah in flames” sculpture, created in 1997 by Nandor Glid, commemorates these deportations. Glid (1924–1997), a Yugoslav sculptor, is also known for the memorial at the Dachau concentration camp. Installed since 2006 on Eleftherias Square, the site of the 1942 roundup, it was the first Holocaust memorial in a public space in Greece—a sign of changing official attitudes toward Holocaust remembrance. Sadly, it is regularly vandalized.
I also visited the Monastir Synagogue, built between 1925 and 1927 with funding from Jews from Monastir in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Architect Ernst Loewy (1878–1943) of Austria-Hungary designed it while working for the Austrian company that built the Thessaloniki–Vienna railway. During the war, the building survived by being requisitioned by the Red Cross. Severely damaged by a 1978 earthquake, it was later restored by the Greek government, with the final historic restoration completed in 2016 and supported by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Today, the synagogue is used primarily during the High Holidays. Daily services are held at a newer synagogue shared with the Rabbinate and the offices of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki on Tsimiski Street, near the Jewish Museum.
Thessaloniki’s once-thriving Jewish community is gone, but the memorials, the synagogue, and the stories that remain keep its memory alive.
Abram Enzel was born in Częstochowa, Poland, on June 18, 1916, to Chaim and Faigle Enzel. Chaim worked as a kosher butcher. They had five children — three boys and two girls — with Abram as the firstborn. In 1939, there were 28,500 Jews living in Częstochowa, about 124 miles (200 km) southeast of Warsaw.
The Germans entered Częstochowa on Sunday, September 3, 1939, and persecution of its Jews began immediately. More than 300 Jews were killed the following day, in what became known as “Bloody Monday.” On December 25, 1939, a second pogrom took place, and the Great Synagogue was set on fire. The family survived both pogroms.
On the morning after Yom Kippur in September 1942, Abram was separated from his family. One brother, Nathan, had previously been taken by the Germans to a concentration camp. The rest of Abram’s family was gassed and cremated three days later in Treblinka.
Abram was sent to work in a munitions plant operated by HASAG (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the largest German industrial companies using concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest such company after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Göring Werke. It operated four camps in Częstochowa, the largest of which — HASAG-Apparatebau — held 7,000 Jewish prisoners. The wages of these forced laborers were paid directly to the SS. Those unfit for work were killed under the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through work”). From July 1944 to early 1945, HASAG moved most of its equipment and Jewish workers to Germany. No HASAG personnel were tried by the Allies at Nuremberg.
In 1944, Abram was transferred from HASAG to Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and finally to Dachau. One of his most haunting memories was the transfer from Flossenbürg to Dachau with 500 prisoners. In a 1973 Pittsburgh Press interview, Abram recalled: “They made us march at first. But later they herded us like cattle on some old freight cars.” Only 18 of the 500 survived to reach Dachau — Abram among them.
On April 29, 1945, the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armored Division of the U.S. Army liberated Dachau. The next day, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Abram weighed just 78 pounds at liberation, compared to a healthy 130 pounds before the war.
By June 1946, 2,167 Jews had returned to Częstochowa, but Abram chose not to. He recovered in Germany, ran a grocery store in Bayreuth, and emigrated to the United States in 1951, settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In Pittsburgh, Abram met Dora Weiss, a survivor from Munkács, Czechoslovakia (now Mukačevo, Ukraine). Her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. They married on June 8, 1952, and had one son, David, born January 21, 1955.
Dora died of cancer on July 30, 1958, at age 35. Abram never remarried. He worked at H.J. Heinz before joining the Concordia Club, where he rose from busboy to maître d’. He considered his 30 years there the happiest of his life.
David moved to Washington, D.C., in 1979. Abram retired in 1981 and soon followed. He died on May 10, 1994, in Washington, the capital of the country that had liberated him.
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London is celebrating its 90th birthday. It is the oldest continuously functioning archive documenting Nazi crimes.
The Library has its origins in the work of Dr. Alfred Wiener (1885-1964). Dr. Wiener was a German Jew from Berlin who campaigned against Nazism during the 1920s and 30s and gathered evidence about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany.
Dr. Wiener and his family fled Germany in 1933 and settled in Amsterdam. Later that year he set up the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO) at the request of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. This archive collected information about the Nazis, which formed the basis of campaigns to undermine their activities.
Following Kristallnacht (the November Pogrom of 1938), Wiener prepared to bring his collection to the UK. It arrived the following summer and is believed to have opened on the day the Nazis invaded Poland.
During the war, staff gathered evidence to document and publicize reports of Nazi efforts to annihilate European Jewry, including an eyewitness account of Kristallnacht.
Throughout the war, the JCIO served the British Government as it fought the Nazi regime. Increasingly the collection was referred to as ‘Dr Wiener’s Library’ and eventually this led to its renaming.
Wiener’s recognition of the danger posed by the Nazis didn’t begin after Hitler came to power in 1933. Instead, he can justly lay claim to having been one of the first intellectuals to raise the alarm about the rise of antisemitism after World War I.
Horrified by the surge in anti-Jewish right-wing nationalism that he encountered when he returned from the trenches to his homeland, in 1919 Wiener published a tract, “Prelude to Pogroms?”, in which he warned: “A mighty antisemitic storm has broken over us.” If left unchecked, Wiener predicted, this antisemitism would lead to “bestial murders and violence” and the “blood of citizens running on the pavements.”
Anna, a young woman training to be a nun in 1960s Poland is on the verge of taking her vows when she meets her only living relative for the first time and learns that she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. Together they discover what happened to Anna/Ida’s family.
This jewel is only 82 minutes long and every moment makes good use of the viewer’s time. The story is one example of the decimation of Poland’s Jews during World War II. But in the end, this is not a film about Poland or the Holocaust – but about life.
The film, which came out in 2013, is in black and white. The places photographed are ordinary yet the cinematography is stunning. Each scene looks like a black and white photograph made by a Magnum photographer using a Leica camera. Łukasz Żal is a superb, young cinemaphotographer born in Koszalin, Poland.
Ida is played by Agata Trzebuchowska. Her character is sweet, innocent and beautiful. Her aunt Wanda – Agata Kulesza – is also a fine actress.
Pawel Pawlikowski directed the film. He was born in Warsaw in 1957. At the age of 14, Pawlikowski left Poland to live in Germany and Italy, before settling in Britain. In 2004, he directed My Summer of Love with Emily Blunt and Natalie Press.
This film touched me deeply and left me thinking for a long time about what’s important and what’s not. It is among the best films I have seen.
The second and final volume of German historian Volker Ullrich’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Downfall 1939–1945, opens with high praise for the wartime diaries of Friedrich Kellner.
Kellner, a court official in the small town of Laubach, had no special access to inside information. Yet he was repulsed by the Nazi regime and began keeping a detailed diary, recording what he read in the German press and what he heard from those around him. He hoped his writings would serve as a warning to future generations against blind faith and dictatorship.
Ullrich explains that Kellner’s diaries “show that it was entirely possible for normal people in small-town Germany to see through the lies of Nazi propaganda and learn of things like the ‘euthanasia’ murders of patients in psychiatric institutions and the mass executions carried out in occupied parts of eastern Europe.”
The Kellner diaries were first published in German in 2011 and are now available in English. They are also the subject of a moving 2007 television documentary created by Kellner’s American grandson.
The Panthéon is a monument in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. It stands in the Latin Quarter, atop the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in the center of the Place du Panthéon, which was named after it. The edifice was built between 1758 and 1790, from designs by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, at the behest of King Louis XV of France; the king intended it as a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, Paris’s patron saint, whose relics were to be housed in the church. Neither Soufflot nor Louis XV lived to see the church completed.
By the time the construction was finished, the French Revolution had started; the National Constituent Assembly voted in 1791 to transform the Church of Saint Genevieve into a mausoleum for the remains of distinguished French citizens, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome which had been used in this way since the 17th century. The first panthéonisé was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, although his remains were removed from the building a few years later. The Panthéon was twice restored to church usage in the course of the 19th century—although Soufflot’s remains were transferred inside it in 1829—until the French Third Republic finally decreed the building’s exclusive use as a mausoleum in 1881. The placement of Victor Hugo’s remains in the crypt in 1885 was its first entombment in over 50 years.
The successive changes in the Panthéon’s purpose resulted in modifications of the pedimental sculptures and the capping of the dome by a cross or a flag; some of the originally existing windows were blocked up with masonry in order to give the interior a darker and more funereal atmosphere, which compromised somewhat Soufflot’s initial attempt at combining the lightness and brightness of the Gothic cathedral with classical principles. The architecture of the Panthéon is an early example of Neoclassicism, surmounted by a dome that owes some of its character to Bramante’s Tempietto.
In 1851, Léon Foucault conducted a demonstration of diurnal motion at the Panthéon by suspending a pendulum from the ceiling, a copy of which is still visible today and is depicted below in all its glory.
As of December 2021 the remains of 81 people (75 men and six women) had been transferred to the Panthéon. More than half of all the panthéonisations were made under Napoleon’s rule during the First Empire. Several examples demonstrate the great contributions France has made to the world.
Rousseau
Tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was philosopher (philosophe), writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought. His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.
Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy (now a canton of Switzerland). He died in 1778 and was buried on the Île des Peupliers, a tiny wooded island in a lake near Ermenonville in the Kingdom of France. His grave became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. In 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire.
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe) and historian. Known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire, he was famous for his wit, in addition to his criticism of Christianity—especially of the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Tomb and Statue of Voltaire
Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, but also scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance and religious dogma, as well as the French institutions of his day. His best-known work and magnum opus, Candide, is a novella which comments on, criticizes and ridicules many events, thinkers and philosophies of his time.
Because of his well-known criticism of the Church, which he had refused to retract before his death, Voltaire was denied a Christian burial in Paris, but friends and relations managed to bury his body secretly at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne. His heart and brain were embalmed separately.
On July 11 1791, the National Assembly of France, regarding Voltaire as a forerunner of the French Revolution, had his remains brought back to Paris and enshrined in the Panthéon. An estimated million people attended the procession, which stretched throughout Paris. There was an elaborate ceremony, including music composed for the event by André Grétry.
Louis Braille (1809 – 1852) was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system, named braille after him, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day. On the centenary of his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris. In a symbolic gesture, Braille’s hands were left in Coupvray, reverently buried near his home.
Simone Veil
Simone Veil (née Jacob) (1927 – 2017) was a French magistrate, Holocaust survivor, and politician who served as Health Minister in several governments and was President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, the first woman to hold that office. As health minister, she is best remembered for advancing women’s rights in France, in particular for the 1975 law that legalized abortion, today known as the Loi Veil). From 1998 to 2007, she was a member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest legal authority.
René Cassin, Jean Monnet, Simone Veil, Antoine Veil
A Holocaust survivor, of both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, she was a firm believer in European integration as a way of guaranteeing peace. She served as president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, from 2000 to 2007, then subsequently as honorary president. In a ceremony held at the Panthéon in January 2007, former French president Jacques Chirac, and Simone Veil, then president of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, honor those who risked their lives to shelter thousands of Jews at Chambon-sur-Lignon, France.
Among many honors, she was made an honorary dame in 1998, was elected to the Académie Française in 2008, and in 2012 received the grand cross of the Légion d’honneur, the highest class of the highest French order of merit.
Simone Veil and her husband were buried at the Panthéon on July 1, 2018. Her eulogy was given by President Emmanuel Macron.
Joséphine Baker
Joséphine Baker (1906-1975), was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.
Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri but she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France.
Baker aided the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker sang: “I have two loves, my country and Paris.”
Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement.
On November 30, 2021, she was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France. As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph (a monument to someone buried elsewhere) was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthéon.
