In Memoriam: Barry Rubin

With deep sorrow, we announce the passing of Barry Rubin, husband, father, historian, political analyst, and mentor.

Holocaust survivor who safeguarded lessons and legacy

Hana Greenfield, a regal and charismatic member of Israel’s English-speaking community for more than 60 years, died January 27 in Tel Aviv after a long illness.

By Mordechai I. Twersky for Haaretz

Hana Greenfield, a regal and charismatic member of Israel’s English-speaking community for more than 60 years, died January 27 in Tel Aviv after a long illness. She was 87.

“My mother was a survivor in her spirit and in every fiber of her being,” said Ilan Greenfield. “She always made a point to speak about the Holocaust. This was her mission in life.”

Greenfield’s traumatic experience as a young Czech girl during the Holocaust spurred her creation of educational programs for fellow survivors and for a new generation of students in her native country.

The cause was complications after a three-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, her daughter, Meira Partem, said.

Hana Lustigova was born on November 3, 1926 to a prominent Jewish family from the town of Kolin in the Central Bohemian Region, some 60 kilometers east of Prague. During the summer of 1942, three years after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the 15-year-old was among 750 Jews sent to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto. After being sent to Auschwitz in 1943, she was among 500 “able-bodied” women selected for slave labor in Hamburg, Germany. She was among those in the death march − the Nazis’ forced movement of prisoners − to Bergen-Belsen, the German concentration camp.

Following her liberation in 1945, Greenfield was brought to London by her uncle, a chemist from Cambridge who had discovered her name on a list of Bergen-Belsen survivors. His insistence that she keep her Holocaust experiences to herself left her angry and frustrated.

“In spite of my appearance, I was raped as a child,” Greenfield wrote in her searing autobiography, “Fragments of Memory: From Kolin to Jerusalem,” (Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem and New York), first published in the 1980s. “I was robbed of my mother and father, of my home and of the love and warmth to which every child is entitled. I ached with pain and I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to cry and I wanted to scream, and I wanted to be comforted and hugged and understood. Instead I was told to be silent and to forget. Forget?”

Years later, in 1991, Mrs. Greenfield would establish a seminar at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial “for teaching, coaching and directing survivors … how to present their experiences in public for educational purposes,” she wrote in her autobiography, which has been translated into four languages and sold more than 100,000 copies.

In 1954, two years after she immigrated to Israel, Greenfield met her future husband, Murray Greenfield, a New York City businessman and Palestine Economic Corporation executive who was active in “Aliyah Bet,” a clandestine movement that brought Jews from Europe to Palestine by sea from 1934 to 1948. Together, they established art galleries in their name in Israel and New York and a duty-free business, among other entrepreneurial endeavors. “We had crazy ideas which we found wonderful,” recalled Mr. Greenfield, 87, who together with his wife of 59 years established Gefen Publishing House in 1981.

During a visit to the Czech Republic following the “Velvet Revolution” and the fall of communism in 1989, Mrs. Greenfield saw an opportunity to inject the legacy of the Holocaust into the public “consciousness.”

“I realized when I talked to young people that they didn’t know the word, ‘Jew’ − if you ate it or if you wore it − because the word had disappeared,” Mrs. Greenfield said in a 2001 Haaretz article that profiled an award-winning high-school educational program for Czech youth she created for the Terezin Ghetto Museum. That program is now in its 20th year.

In 1988, at a conference in Oxford, England, Greenfield presented a paper about the fate of 1,196 children from the Bialystok Ghetto in Poland who were gassed at Auschwitz on Yom Kippur in 1943. In the exalted company of scholars who asked about her academic background, Greenfield is said to have told her hosts, “I am a graduate of Auschwitz,” according to her daughter, Meira.

Friends and extended family members present at the shiva in Tel Aviv’s northern neighborhood of Ramat Aviv − where the Greenfields settled in 1967 − recalled a woman who was exquisite, impeccably dressed, a talented milliner, a painter and puppeteer, who was dedicated to her family and to fellow survivors.

“She taught me that you also have to be beautiful inside,” said Karen Zarfaty, who said she was virtually adopted by Mrs. Greenfield, who was her aunt. “She was like a mother to me.”

Hanna Feld, a native of Prague who first met Mrs. Greenfield in London after the war, marveled at her “tenacity.”

“How she had the courage to be positive after what she suffered,” said Feld, an 81-year-old Tel-Aviv resident.

Mrs. Greenfield was buried on a hilltop in Kfar Adumim, a mixed religious-secular communal settlement in the West Bank that overlooks the Judean desert. “She wanted to be buried in a place with a view,” said her son Ilan, a resident of that community who also recalled his mother’s Jewish pride and love for the land of Israel. “She settled in northern Tel Aviv as a pioneer, and for her, Kfar Adumim and Tel Aviv were one and the same.”

Hana Greenfield is survived by her husband, two children, 10 grandchildren and a sister, Irene Revel of Prague. A son, Dror, died of cancer in 2003.

Greenfield (nee Lustigová) was born in Czechoslovakia and was sent during the Holocaust to Terezin, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Hana Greenfield, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the Jerusalem-based Gefen Publishing House with her husband, Murray Greenfield, died in Tel Aviv on Monday after a long illness at the age of 87.

Greenfield (nee Lustigová) was born in Kolín, Czechoslovakia, on November 3, 1926 and was sent during the Holocaust to concentration camps in Terezin, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, and after a short period in London made aliya, married Murray and had three children.

Gefen Publishing House published her memoirs, Fragments of Memory: From Kolin to Jerusalem (1998, revised edition 2006), in English (the work has also appeared in Hebrew, Czech, German, and Russian), for which she received the Axel Springer Fund Award.

She was the initiator of Yad Vashem’s Survivors Speak Out program and founder of a high school program in Jewish history and Holocaust education for Czech youth, for which she was honored by then-Czech president Vaclav Havel. In addition, she was on the board of the Terezin Ghetto Museum, and her research on the children of Bialystok was published by Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

She is survived by her husband, two children, Ilan and Meira (a son, Dror, died in 2003), and 10 grandchildren.

Before learning of his mother’s death, Ilan Greenfield – who currently heads Gefen – visited The Jerusalem Post on Monday morning to discuss a new book on the Holocaust.

There’s only one word in the book, but it’s repeated six million times. The tome published by Gefen, whose cover is painted like a prayer shawl and lacks a title, commemorates the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in a unique – and chilling – manner.

The word “Jew” appears in every row and column, with no variation, six million times.

According to Greenfield, the idea for the stark book arose from the experiences of Rabbi Phil Chernovsky, editor of the Israel Center’s weekly Torah Tidbits, who was teaching young adults about the Holocaust some 20 years ago.

“He realized they were unable to fathom the figure of six million in terms of Jews annihilated during the Shoah,” said Greenfield.

As an exercise, Chernovsky asked the students to spend a couple of hours writing out the word “Jew” as often they could within the time allocated. The total came to 40,000 words. He hung the results on his classroom walls, making the point that, as large as this figure was, and as much space as it covered, it was as nothing.

Years passed until Chernovsky took the next step. He decided to print the word Jew multiple times on a single page and photocopy it over and over until he had six million repetitions.

Then he had the copies bound and the book was born.

He kept it at home and over the years he showed it to people, said Greenfield.

Last year, Greenfield’s partner in Gefen, Michael Fishberger, saw the book and showed it to Greenfield, who was shocked.

“The minute I saw it I said, ‘I don’t care what we do with it, I don’t care if we don’t make any money out of it, we must publish this,’” he recalled. “Being the son of a Holocaust survivor who went through Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I decided it had to be put out there, no matter what.”

Each book is part of a gargantuan hand-numbered limited edition, envisioned to eventually reach six million copies.

There is also a space on the first page, under the numeration, for a personal dedication, perhaps to a lost relative, said Greenfield. Or, lacking one, even to someone like the famous educator and Holocaust victim Janusz Corzcak, he suggested.

The aim, he said, is to encourage communities to have copies of the book to be used in educational programs. At present Denver, Johannesburg, and Sydney have committed to buying 1,000 copies each in a user-friendly agreement that translates into purchases of 50 copies at a time.

When Greenfield met with Anti-Defamation League national director Abe Foxman some five months ago, the latter’s reaction was “Wow…

wow!” “I think he bought 20 copies right away and said he would see what he could do. A week later he ordered 100 copies and a month later he came to Israel, and he wanted 2,000 copies,” said Greenfield.

“Foxman said that people simply could not put the book down. I have experienced that myself. You keep turning pages because you think, it cannot be, there must be something else on the pages, but no, you turn another and another, and all you have is the world ‘Jew,’ each time representing another victim,” he said.

Over the course of 2013, copies were distributed to ministers Yuli Edelstein and Naftali Bennett, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and President Shimon Peres, as well as US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and others in America, and there are plans to distribute the book among heads of state.

The aim of the project is for every teacher who teaches Holocaust studies, in the US and around the world, to have a copy of the book to show to students, said Greenfield. Its title, although not visible on the outside, is And Every Single One was Someone.