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Thoughts on a Video of 1933 Munkatch
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1
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Leonard
said:
My late father and also my grandparents who perished in the holocaust came from Muncac or Mukacevo as the town is sometime known. It was a Hassidic centre for 300 years and the famous Rabbi Shapira who died in 1936 came from the Town. I discovered those videos of the vibrancy of this vanished world through the Washington Holocaust Museum website and consider it quite a find. You can see also the famous Zionist School in the videos which was supported by Masaryk the founder of Czechoslovakia and highly revered. Hungary occupied the Carpathos region in 1938 and although the regime was antisemitic - under Admiral Horthy it refused to implement the Final Solution until the Arrow Cross took over in March 1944 in a pro-Nazi Coup and Eichmann fed the furnaces of Auschwitz with the Jews of Hungary starting with the Carpathos region of which Mukatch fromed a part. The Jews of Munkac were rounded up and concentrated in a Ghetto within a brickfactory next to a railroad guarded by Hungarian Gendarmes and deported over a four day period in Mid-May. There are two instances of resistance being recorded - one as they were boarding and the second at Auschwitz itself when they ran into the woods and were hunted down by the Nazi guards armed with machine guns using spotlights. This pround vibrant community of centuries were exterminated in a matter of hours. My late father aged only 13 having lied about his age survived as slave labour until the Camp was evacuated one week before the liberation in January 1945, when he was forced marched bared foot intemperatures of up to minus 20 to Buchenwald and onto Therensdadt where he was liberated in May 1945. Barely fifty people survived the two deathmarches that he had participated in of which more than ten thousand had started of. He only returned to his Town to find his house occupied by Russian officer and was warned that if he knew what was good for him he would get out of Town which he did - aged now 14 to start a new life.
Posted by: Leonard on November 22, 2005 01:03 PM
2
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Leonard
said:
The secular Jewish children that you see singing the Hatikvah or " The Hope" which was later adopted as the Israeli National anthem come from the Zionist Gymnasium or School that was funded by the Czecholovakian government of which Masaryk the Czech founding father gave a personal donation. The children are not infact secular but traditional, but it is all relative in a town where are large section of the Jews were ultraorthodox Hasidic jews. Sadly probably all the children you see in this video were murdered in the Holocaust.
Posted by: Leonard on November 22, 2005 01:12 PM
Thoughts on a Video of 1933 Munkatch
Someone emailed me a link to a video of scenes of life in Munkatch in 1933 that is available on Google Video.
There are a few varied scenes available, including: the wedding of the daughter of the Grand Rebbe Eleazer Shapira of Munkatch in March 1933 (with the Munkatcher Rebbe making a speech in Yiddish exhorting Jews in America to continue to keep Shabbos), secular Jewish children singing HaTikvah, traditional religious Jewish children studying in an Orthodox religious school, a book peddler and weaver in Munkatch, and secular Jews dancing.
When I showed a friend--a survivor of the Shoah--the scene of the children singing, her one comment to me was, "What do you think happened to the children?"
Her comment reminded me of the introduction to "The World That Was: Lithuania," by Rabbi Yitzchak Kasnett. He writes:
An entire branch of Jewish life and culture was prematurely torn off and consigned to the flames--lost to future generations, a fact we really do not fully think about or comprehend.Crossposted on Daled Amos
Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Jews.
Posted by Daled Amos at November 21, 2005 09:11 PM