(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025)
- Author’s note: This article is based on a zoom talk delivered to the Los Angeles Holocaust Centre on 23rd October 2025. Many thanks are due to Justine Changunda for assistance with the photos, Dr Veronica Belling for information and the Jacob Gitlin Library.
Unlike countries like America and Australia, owing to discriminatory laws to stop Jewish immigration, few Holocaust survivors came to South Africa. Even though the Holocaust had removed the threat of thousands of unassimilable aliens swamping the country, the anti-East European Jews Immigration Quota Act of 1930 and the anti-German Jews Aliens Act of 1937 were not repealed after the war. This is despite the SA Jewish Board of Deputies trying without success to get permission for survivors to come to South Africa from HG Lawrence, the acting Minister of the Interior, and JH Hofmeyr, Prime Minister J C Smuts’ deputy. Holocaust or no Holocaust, more Jews were not wanted. In October 1944, opposition National Party MP Eric Louw had advised that if the Nationalist government came into power, it would not allow pogroms but would limit the liberties of Jews.[1]
One who came before the cutoff date clamping down on further German Jewish immigration was Ernest Ullmann, an artist. During the war he worked for the South African Army Intelligence Corps, designing advertisements portraying the misery and plight of the Jews affected by the Nuremberg Laws for its journal, the IC Digest. The committee refused to publish them – they did not want to shock the general public.[2] Even after news of the liberation of the camps, Afrikaans newspapers just mentioned “alleged” atrocities and, instead of photos of concentration camp corpses, published photos of suffering German women. National Party leader Dr DF Malan complained in Parliament in 1947 about “mass murder being committed upon the poor Germans …. on a par with the savage barbarities in the worst days of Central Africa”, saying further that “the crime of the Jews at Golgotha 1900 years ago still clings to the Jews.” This despite undeniable evidence of the real mass murder of Jews.
Jews felt differently. The editor of the S.A. Jewish Chronicle remarked that Malan had not offered a word of sympathy towards the Jews during the time of slaughter but now that a few Germans were suffering a tiny fraction, he found it necessary to speak up for them. As the news of the murders started to filter out in the 1940s, the SAJBD formed a Special Committee on the Tragedy of European Jewry to inform the Jewish and wider community and stir the public conscience [3] and held annual memorial gatherings with synagogue services and packed mass meetings.
A South African Jewish War Appeal was formed to raise money for the Jewish victims of the Nazis and sent money, food parcels, clothing and medicine to the refugees in DP camps. Clothing drives were arranged by the Women’s War Appeal. [4] After the war the SAJBD visited DP camps on behalf of the Appeal and invited survivor Levi Shalit [5] to address audiences in South Africa. He was refused a visa.
Imaginative appeals playing on guilt were sent out. One, issued in December 1945, was a summons to the Highest Court of Charitable Appeal on the grounds that the person addressed had “fortunately lived in South Africa during the last six years, thereby escaping the indescribable horrors of the Nazi aggression and war, and (has) consequently become obliged to assist in the rescue and relief of your less fortunate brethren in Europe.”[6] Another took the form of buying a license certifying that the bearer was “authorised to be alive, to have a comfortable and happy home in South Africa and earn his living without let or hindrance NOTWITHSTANDING (sic) the laws passed by the Nazis authorising the slaughter and extermination of the Jews and NOTWITHSTANDING (sic) the killing of more than 5,000,000 Jews in Europe and the starvation and disease prevailing among the survivor PROVIDED THAT (sic) the holder of this license does his duty as a Jew to the 2,000,000 survivors in Europe by supporting the SA Jewish War Appeal to the utmost.”
The SAJBD also established a Relatives Information Service in co-operation with the Red Cross, the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Russian consul [7] to trace people and published lists of displaced people who wanted to locate South African relatives. The office was inundated with enquiries, but visas were only given for family reunification or to rabbis and cantors for whom there was a shortage. There were very few cases of family reunification because most of the Jewish community had roots in Lithuania, where 96% of the population were killed, or in Latvia, where the figure was 80%.
The community was thus especially badly impacted by the Holocaust. As many had arrived in the late 1920s, before the 1930 Quota Act had clamped down on further Jewish immigration from that part of the world, their ties with their families in Eastern Europe were still strong. With the war, all contact was lost and the news of their murders, most having been shot into pits in the summer of 1941, was traumatic.
Barney Simon remembered a little Yiddish-speaking rebbe telling the Jeppe shul about the slaughter in the Vilna ghetto. The whole synagogue began to rock and wail, and he noticed his mother beating herself. That experience, he said, made him a Jew. [8]
In his novel Home [9] Cape Town-born writer Ronald Harwood described the first exposure to films of the death camps. “Year’s end 1946… in blazing heat the Jewish community of Cape Town show newsreels of the Nazi death camps… They sit beside each other… in the darkened hall adjacent to the Sea Point Synagogue. To the whirring of the sixteen-millimeter projector they watch the ghastly evidence of unimaginable barbarism. Men and women weep; there is the constant flickering of handkerchiefs.”
Added to their pain was an element of guilt at not having been able to persuade their families to join them here, and of anger with the government for refusing visas that might have saved some.
After the war the few survivors who arrived in South Africa came with no English, no assets, few marketable qualifications or contacts and with often undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They were welcomed by a warm supportive Jewish community, whose communal organisations sprang into action. An employment agency set up by the SAJBD to help ex-servicemen stepped in and Jewish welfare organisations provided temporary accommodation, food and money. The SAJBD also established aid programmes and a restitution office in 1946 to assist former Jewish residents of the Nazi-occupied territories with claims against the West German government for restitution, compensation or damages as a result of Nazi depredations.
Two momentous things happened in May 1948. On the 14th the State of Israel was established. The news was greeted ecstatically, both by the survivors, many of whom had wanted to settle there, and by the strongly Zionist local Jews.
Twelve days later, on the 26th, the National Party came to power. That news was greeted with horror. Before the war it had been openly antisemitic. It included people who had met and admired Hitler and wanted a Nazi government here. Little sympathy had been expressed for the plight of the Jews. Dr Karl Bremer (MP, Stellenbosch) stated that in fifty or one hundred years historians would not be writing of alleged atrocities against the Jews committed by the Nazis but would be relating the story of the cruel treatment meted out to the German nation by the Allies after the end of the war. [10]
With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the annihilation of the Jews and the establishment of the State of Israel, however, the triumphant National Party abandoned its antisemitism. DF Malan [11], now Prime Minister, issued a statement saying that “both he and the Government stood for a policy of non-discrimination against any section of the European population in South Africa” (note, the “European population”) and that he looked forward to the time when there would be no more talk of the so-called “Jewish Question” in the life and politics of the country. After all the Jews were no longer a threat and more importantly they were white. Malan even visited Israel, in 1951.
But a series of racist apartheid laws were instituted, many modelled on Nazi race laws, passed in the 1930s. These were based not on faith but on skin colour. Germany had wanted to remove the Jewish minority from its economy and country; the apartheid government could not, however, remove the black majority, whose underpaid manual labour supported the South African economy.
On 30 January 1950, South African Jewry observed the international day of mourning for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Services were held in synagogues, with mass meetings, shuttered shops and few dry eyes. In April 1951 the Israeli Knesset declared the 27 Nissan, Yom HaZikaron l’Shoah vehag’vurah: Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism. It became an annual community event attended by thousands with survivors lighting memorial candles, reading poetry or speaking. From its inception the survivors decided that rather than go home after the memorial service with their own pain, they would gather together afterwards. Later that year survivor Levi Shalit was given a visa and addressed audiences throughout South Africa to raise War Appeal funds.
Cape Town is a popular place for summer holidays. People from all over South Africa, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, as far as the Congo, would visit. They flocked to the beaches of Muizenberg – nicknamed Jewsenberg – with its many kosher hotels and boarding houses. In the summer of 1952, some Johannesburg survivors came too. An Auschwitz tattoo was clearly visible while its bathing costume-clad owner strolled along the beautiful beach and Nachum Zolin introduced himself and offered to arrange a meeting with fellow Cape Town survivors [12].
This was the beginning of the She’erith Hapletah, the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors with Zolin as organizing secretary. They advertised in the Jewish press for survivors to join them. Its aim was to promote social and cultural ties amongst the survivors, to involve them in the affairs of the community, to render assistance to members when required and to participate in all aspects of historical research and testimony on the Holocaust. They would meet monthly in private homes, with private socials and holidays with each other.[13]
To survivors whose family had been killed, the She’erith Hapletah members became surrogate family. They felt at home with each other. Mourning and memory was something they shared when they were together in an environment of total understanding. They could celebrate together at chagim and Shabbat meals in their old ways.
A second-generation daughter wrote, “Our family did not talk. Emotions were not allowed. My parents belonged to She’erith Hapletah and felt comfortable with fellow survivors who would come to tea, speak Yiddish and roar with laughter at events that happened on the run in Russia. I felt safe with them. They felt like family. In summer we would go to Muizenberg to meet with holidaying survivors, and they all had stories to tell. [14]”
For the survivors it was a decade of new beginnings, of establishing new lives, of starting new families. Professions were changed, businesses established, babies born. They were busy settling down but were still more comfortable speaking Yiddish and survivors in Johannesburg became prominent in the Yiddish press. Levi Shalit was brought back, this time to edit the weekly Di Afrikaner idishe tsaytung newspaper that he did for 30 years (he also published books and articles). The monthly Dorem Afrike was initiated (and edited) by Meylekh Bakaltshuk-Felin who had been the director of the Johannesburg Jewish Public School [15]. He also edited two important Yiddish Yizkor bikher (memorial volumes), for the landsmanschafts of Rakishok, Lithuania (1952), and Chelm, Poland (1954), the only two published in South Africa [16]. Later, survivor and poet David Wolpe became the editor of Dorem Afrike.
For the survivors sharing their own stories was not a priority. As Simon Wiesenthal wrote: “They wanted to forget so they would be able to live again. They surrounded themselves with a protective shell, trying hard not to think of what happened.[17]” As for the local community, who had lost so many relatives, the subject was too uncomfortable. The survivors were told to forget the past, concentrate on the present. As one survivor said, “People didn’t ask and we didn’t talk about it. Who could believe such a story? One reads books about such things, but they are impossible to believe”.[18]
Also there was ignorance. When Cantor Lichterman wrote about his Auschwitz Birkenau experiences in a Yiddish newspaper he was accused of lying. No Jews would be so hungry that they would support a recently deceased man in an upright position just for an extra bit of bread.[19] He refused to provide any more testimony. A German refugee invited to share her experiences with a WIZO group in Muizenberg, stormed out when asked why didn’t she just go to the police. She refused to talk about her past again[20].
One Cape Town survivor expressed this in a poem:
My children never asked me:
“Mother, the holocaust,
what was it really like?”
My husband never asked me:
“Darling, the holocaust,
what was it really like?”
My friends never asked me”
“Dear, the holocaust,
what was it really like?”
The holocaust
what was it really like?
A massacre on such a scale,
that after forty years,
I am unable to discuss it,
whilst eating Lasagna [21].
The Holocaust received some public attention when the American Army as part of the “Jewish Reconstruction” programme of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation decided to distribute religious items looted by the Nazis to Jewish communities around the world [22]. Dr Abt who cleared the items from Customs on behalf of the Board of Deputies in 1951 stated that “future visitors (to the proposed museum) will become conscious of the immense tragedy hidden behind every single item which tells of the biggest robbery ever committed in history. Visitors will see the blood dripping from silver candelabra. They will see eyes opened widely with horror; they will hear the cries of agony of death with which the silver will be connected for them. [23]”
An “Exhibition of Jewish Religious Art” including the looted items was shown by the Board in 1954 in Johannesburg and Cape Town, attracting thousands, Jews and non-Jews, and resulted in Jewish museums being established in both cities. The Johannesburg Board wanted to keep all the looted artefacts but after considerable acrimonious correspondence dating from 1949, Cape Town and Durban eventually obtained a fair distribution [24]. Just as well, because when the Johannesburg Jewish Museum opened after a long weekend in 1991, it was discovered that the collection and a Russian security guard had vanished! Interpol was alerted but the objects have never come to light [25]. The Cape Town Jewish Museum hastily increased its insurance and security.
The first Holocaust memorial was mooted in Johannesburg in 1955, and the Board agreed to erect a “Monument to the Six Million” in the West Park cemetery. It commissioned Hungarian sculptor Herman Wald [26], who had lost almost his entire family. His brother, a rabbi in Kimberley, had managed to bring him out just before the 1937 Aliens Act had slammed the door on Jewish immigration. His design depicted three hands emerging from the earth holding shofars with the Hebrew words spelling “Thou shalt not kill”. On the base of the memorial in Hebrew, Yiddish, Afrikaans and English are the words “Thou shalt not forget”.
The Rand Daily Mail newspaper reported on the opening in 1959. “Hundreds wept when more than 4,000 Jews from all over the Reef attended the consecration [27]”. The reaction showed that the Holocaust was perceived as a tragedy not only for the loss of European Jewry, but also for the Jewish community. By having Holocaust survivors play a significant part in the public proceedings, the organisers encouraged the turning of the private grief of the survivor into the public grief of the community.
In the early 1960s, many survivors from Rhodes Island arrived in Cape Town. In 1944, the Germans had deported to Auschwitz 1767 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Coss. Only 163 survived. Returning to a Judenrein Rhodes island, many decided to go to the Belgian Congo to join their families who had moved there in the 1930s. They settled, married and had their own families. The Congo gained independence in 1960, accompanied by violence. Stories of atrocities against whites surfaced in newspapers around the globe. Thousands fled. At first the Jewish community, hoping the violence would soon end, just sent out their frightened children by train to Cape Town, where they were housed in the Jewish Orphanage and Herzlia School’s boarding house, provided with clothes and other essentials [28]. Later the rest of the community, escorted by Belgian troops, fled in convoys, refugees once again, often fleeing with only the clothes they wore, abandoning their houses, shops and possessions.
The Rhodesian Jewish Board of Deputies flew to Northern Rhodesia to arrange assistance to Jewish refugees who had made their way there. The South African government sent representatives to neighbouring countries to assist and convince refugees to immigrate to South Africa. It is probable that the willingness of the apartheid government to help was because, in its eyes, this was an object lesson to the correctness of their policy, showing the dangers of black rule and one man one vote elections. If it could happen in the Congo, it could happen in South Africa. Most refugees, knowing about the Sharpeville massacre, preferred Belgium to apartheid South Africa. However, the Rhodes Jews came to Cape Town, which they knew from holidays in Muizenberg and where there was already a Rhodes Island community with its Sephardi synagogue. They had lost everything when they were deported to Auschwitz. Now they had to start their lives all over again. Soon, there were more Rhodes Auschwitz survivors in Cape Town than anywhere else in the world.
Initially, there was little contact between these French and Ladino-speaking Sephardi survivors and the now English and Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi survivors, even separate survivor support groups. The Ashkenazim felt superior – some believed they had suffered more as the Rhodes Islanders, who had only been deported in 1944 – this despite only 10% of the Rhodes Jews having survived! After some years, when it was realised that there were more Sephardi Auschwitz survivors than there were Ashkenazi ones, common sense defeated prejudice. The Sephardi and Ashkenazi survivors thus combined into one She’erith Hapletah, with a Rhodes Island chairperson and an Ashkenazi vice-chairperson.
Although the media coverage of the 1961 Eichmann trial broke down the reluctance of survivors to discuss the Holocaust, She’erith Hapletah was not very vibrant during that decade nor in the following one. However, contacts were established with the Israel Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem and the Claims Conference regarding compensation. Members of Cape Town She’erith Hapletah would take part in the annual Yom Hashoah events followed by a lunch at the Sephardi synagogue. One of its projects in 1967 was to place a commemorative six-branched menorah made by Nachum Zolin at the Pinelands No 1 cemetery as a Holocaust memorial.[29] Smaller replicas were installed in synagogues, to be lit every Shabbat and chag as a permanent memorial. The money paid for these by the congregations, plus subscriptions and donations, were used for a fund to provide financial assistance for emergencies.[30]
There was also a community recognition of the increasing ignorance about, and lack of awareness of, the Holocaust in the public as well as the knowledge that a younger generation was growing up to whom it was something that happened long ago. Education was needed.
In Johannesburg, German Jewish refugees had established their own synagogue, Etz Chayim, in 1937. In 1969, the congregation established its South African Yad Vashem Memorial Hall [31]. The initiator was its Rabbi Joseph Fogel, a survivor, who raised the funds and commissioned Ernest Ullmann to decorate it. Ullmann, whose father, a rabbi, had been killed in a pogrom, regarded it as a labour of love. His designs incorporated illuminated glass slabs, carved wood panels showing Jewish suffering, a cut down tree trunk, an Ark with two Torah scrolls rescued from the Holocaust and a yizkor book containing the names of the murdered family of South African Jews – including those of Rabbi Fogel.
The South African National Yad Vashem Memorial Foundation, based at the Etz Chayim synagogue, opened the next year. It organised adult education programmes on the Holocaust and, with the SAJBD, organised the Yom Hashoah ceremonies, with survivor participation. During the same period, Cape Town’s Jacob Gitlin Library was involved in adult education, at first with a Holocaust week, with sad music, lectures, films and a book display, later it became a Holocaust Exhibition Day, and Holocaust Outreach programmes were arranged during school lunch breaks.
By the 1970s the survivors had become integrated into their new homeland and community and were less isolated from survivors elsewhere. She’erith Hapletah had joined the American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates and Nazi Victims, and received its bi-monthly publication “Martyrdom and Resistance” and newsletters and was busy collecting names for Yad Vashem’s 1977 “Pages of Testimony” project to record the names of all the Jews who had perished during the Holocaust. [32]. In 2025 it was announced by Dr. Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, who has led the programme for 37 years that it had managed to identify five million names. “We are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures. Most of the victims of the Holocaust were left without graves, without traces — remembered now only through the Pages of Testimony that bear their names”.
By the mid 1980s, the Holocaust was no longer a subject kept under wraps and, as the perpetrators as well as the survivors were ageing, the subject was no longer so threatening to the outside world. As their children and grandchildren grew up, many wanting to know their family history from the safety of a comfortable space detached from the horrors, survivors world wide found that people were now willing to listen to the story they needed to tell. Jewish students at South African universities embarked on the Student Holocaust Interviewing Project in 1983 to record testimonies from the survivors on cassettes. The problems with students however is that they graduate and move on and when some years later the survivors started to ask for the promised transcripts, no one remembered what had happened to them. They were only unearthed in 2025 in the bowels of the Cape Town University’s archives.
The passing years had put a thin scab and a safe distance over the past. The Shoah was no longer the private pain of the survivors or an annual mourning ceremony by the Jewish community but had moved into the realm of public interest, as shown by books and films.The destruction of the Jews was conducted and planned by non-Jews and people wanted to understand how the previous generation could have perpetrated such deeds or allowed it to happen.
When the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the camps and defeat of Nazi Germany was due to be commemorated, Myra Osrin, chairman of the education committee of the Cape Town Zionist Council, approached the Cultural History Museum to host an exhibition, thinking it a good opportunity to address a wider audience. The director agreed provided it only focused on the liberation of Cape Town’s Jews. She’erith Hapletah was approached and a major exhibition was mounted from 14 April to 15 May 1985 together with an accompanying series of lectures and workshops in co-operation with the other major Jewish communal bodies and the Jewish Museum.
This was the first time the Jewish community acknowledged the She’erith Hapletah as a group with stories to be told. Until then few people were aware of its existence. Its members were still insecure and reluctant to be identified as survivors and were named in the exhibition either by initials or with vague details like “Leon of Sea Point”. The exhibition brochure stated that the display “was envisaged as a personal statement and witness by those survivors who found refuge in Cape Town and the memorabilia on exhibition were but a modest testament to the inhumanity of the Nazi genocidal programme”. The exhibition was a great success, and for the survivors it represented public recognition and an affirmation of self-worth.
The fortieth anniversary was commemorated by a World Assembly of Survivors in Israel, attended by Cape Town and Johannesburg survivors. Miriam Lichterman was impressed by an address by Simon Wiesenthal. He told them that they, the last survivors and the last witnesses, were all getting older and had to put their memories down on paper for the next generation. It was important to document them, particularly as Holocaust deniers were casting doubt on the truth of their experiences. On her return to Cape Town, she told She’erith Hapletah what Wiesenthal had said: “Until this time we didn’t talk much. After that we started to talk.”
Among the meetings to commemorate the fortieth anniversary was a B’nei Brith seminar. Three survivors appeared on a panel, the first time that survivors had spoken on a public platform in Cape Town. The hall was crowded. Soon after Herzlia School asked them to address an audience of teachers, parents and the older students in the presence of the visiting Israeli ambassador. Then more invitations started to stream in. People were keen to listen to their experiences. Audiences were moved at their presentations. Survivors found the meetings emotional and meaningful and went to speak at schools, churches and gatherings. They discovered that it was okay to talk about the past. That it was okay to have suffered and be different. That it was okay to have survivor guilt.
Observed survivor Violette Fintz, “I often speak to people about my experiences. Some cry with me, some don’t want to hear. If G-d made a miracle which enabled me to survive then I must give testimony. I must never forget, and I can never forgive [33].”
A Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council, with two She’erith Hapletah representatives (Ashkenazi and Sephardi), was set up the following year as a coordinating council to promote awareness and knowledge of the Holocaust among the Jewish and general community. It organised regular public lectures, film screenings, commemorative events and exhibitions and the Council with the Board was involved in arranging Yom Hashoah commemoration ceremonies.
By this time Cape Town’s Pinelands Cemetery was full and a new cemetery was opened. Once again, the She’erith Hapletah arranged for a Holocaust memorial to be erected. This one, designed by architect Hillel Turok, was erected in 1990.
The She’erith Hapletah would meet and reminisce and decided to put their reminiscences in a book. An additional incentive was the news that the white supremacist Neo-Nazi AWB wanted to bring Holocaust denier David Irving to SA. The members were outraged and in 1988 a plan of action was submitted to the Holocaust Memorial Council and the SAJBD. The book was finally published in 1995, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation from the camps and the defeat of Nazi Germany, the year after South Africa had its first multiracial democratic elections, and its first Black president. Edited by this writer and called In Sacred Memory: Recollections of the Holocaust by survivors living in Cape Town, it contained the stories of 50 Cape Town survivors. It was reprinted twice [34].
It was the first time that many of their relatives learnt what had happened to them. One had thought her aunt just an emotional Lithuanian immigrant. She didn’t know her aunt and uncle had spent two years buried in a cellar under the fodder box for the cows and pigs.
One Rhodes survivor asked for her contribution to be withdrawn because her daughter did not want people to know she had been in Auschwitz. After much discussion she agreed for it to appear under the initials of her sister who had died in Auschwitz. When the book came out, her daughter approached me, having read her mother’s story and said, “I realise now that I did not have to be ashamed of my mother.” ASHAMED? It is terrible what harm ignorance can create. She now felt pride in her mother and the whole family dynamics changed – the shameful secret was now out in the open and was not shameful at all, but a sign of resilience. When subsequently I interviewed that survivor for Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project, the daughter asked if it could be filmed in her home as her family wanted to be part of it.
In 1996, while visiting Israel, Capetonian Myra Osrin read about a centre, called Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre, that had opened the previous year in England in the Sherwood Forest. Myra went to visit it and was very impressed. It was small, simple, comprehensive and moving. She was fortunate that its remarkable young founder, Stephen Smith, a theologian, was there [35]. He told her that five years before, he and his brother James, a medical student, had visited the Holy Land. They went to Yad Vashem and started to ask themselves questions [36]. Why the Jews? How could the destruction of European Jewry become an integral aim of educated, civilised, cultured people? What about the mentality of evil that reduced the destruction of entire communities to a bureaucratic order? How could they have gone through school and university without learning about it in their formal education? “As we left Yad Vashem that day, we decided we would dedicate some of our time, energy and resources to assisting the British public in confronting the Holocaust” he wrote.
When they returned home, the brothers told their parents it was not a Jewish problem but a Christian one. His father was a Methodist minister who ran a Christian retreat with his wife in their 19th Century farmhouse. They decided it was their moral mission to do something and turned their retreat into an educational centre to educate Christians, using only Christian funding. After extensive research, visiting death camps and Holocaust centres, Stephen designed the exhibitions, renovated the farmhouse and laid out the centre with the help of his family and volunteers. He very generously told Myra he would help to design something similar in Cape Town including copying some of his exhibits. He thought it a valuable contribution to the “New South Africa” where citizens were seeking ways to build a more tolerant post-Apartheid society [37].
Soon after her return, Myra called a special meeting of the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council and informed them of the proposed centre to be built on a floor to be added above the Gitlin Library. Stephen came out to help and in August 1999 the Cape Town Holocaust Centre was opened to wide acclaim. To make it relevant to South Africa’s own history, comparisons were drawn to racist Nazi laws and racist apartheid laws – like photos of a park bench marked NOT FOR JEWS and another marked WHITES ONLY, or bunk beds in the concentration camps and the bunk beds in the overcrowded hostels for black mine workers.
Soon schools, colleges and companies were booking tours. Survivor testimony played an important part of the experience, followed by debriefing workshops which became the focal point of the visit as the group was made aware of how the issues raised by the Holocaust impacted on their own lives and what problems can arise from prejudices. The workshop encouraged the groups to reflect on how they would have responded under similar circumstances, and how they did respond when faced with examples of bullying, racism, prejudice and discrimination. Would they be a victim, a perpetrator or a bystander?
One black teacher thanked Myra Osrin, telling her, “You have no idea how important this experience has been for my pupil’s self-esteem. For the first time they understand that people can be discriminated against even if they do not have a black skin.”
Soon the police and prison services were booking tours to handle racism and bullying among their staff. They had noticed that during the debriefing workshop, having learnt of the brutality of the Nazi era, the staff were able to admit to their own racism and brutality towards their prisoners because nothing they had done could compare to the Nazi behaviour. The police even brought heavily tattooed rival gangsters. Admittedly the Holocaust volunteers felt anxious, especially during the workshop when the gangs were mixed together but it went off without incident and the police later reported that for the following three months there was no gang violence in the township.
Experiences during the Holocaust inspired some Jews to actively oppose apartheid racism and discrimination. Roman Eisenstein of the African Resistance Movement had escaped through the Warsaw Ghetto sewers [38]. Pauline Podbrey lost all her relatives in Lithuania. She said she had never got over it nor did she think that any Jew who had lived through that period had [39]. Twelve members of Conscientious objector David Bruce’s mother’s family were murdered. Andrew Feinstein’s mother was hidden in a cellar wrapped in a carpet; 20 members of her family were killed [40]. Ronnie Kasrils heard about it from relatives, and it affected him strongly [41]. When Benjamin Pogrund saw his father cry on learning of the murder of his family, “that imprinted something on my psyche which is there to this day.”[42]
Other activists were influenced by the knowledge of the Holocaust. Albie Sachs “cried and cried and cried” when he visited Prague sites commemorating the Holocaust. He explained to his wife that not only did he lose a large section of his family, but he was also part of those destined for permanent extinction[43]. Laurence Nathan said the turning point in his activism was a visit to the camps. He realised that the Jewish community kept the memory of the Holocaust alive so that it should never happen again, but that the ‘it’ could also be extended to that level of barbarity which was happening in South Africa[44].
In May 2000, Andrew Feinstein introduced a motion on Holocaust Remembrance in Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Month with the support of ANC Chief Whip Tony Yengeni. He began by reading the last letter his grandfather had written as he was being deported to Theresienstadt and mentioned the importance of encouraging the study of and education about the historical and moral dimensions of the Holocaust [45].
In 2007 the government decided to make the Holocaust a compulsory part of the curriculum in all schools. It would help address issues of human rights and social cohesion, particularly in view of the country’s own history. Given the levels of ignorance about the Holocaust, particularly among the black teachers, the Centre wanted to be sure that the subject would be taught correctly, and embarked on tours to the provinces to run workshops for teachers. As it could not afford staff to run around the country teaching teachers, it produced well received handbooks, resource books, workbooks, posters and DVDs.
With its inclusion in the school curriculum, more Holocaust centres were required, and one was opened in Durban in 2008 and in Johannesburg in 2019.
To move to the present: Beth Shalom is now called the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. Stephen has returned to Cape Town several times and one year addressed Yom Hashoah. He has gained his doctorate as well as several honorary doctorates – James and his mother also receiving one. Stephen was awarded an MBE from the queen, was co-founder of Britain’s National Holocaust Centre, was the project director to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, the Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, and holds the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education. His wife is Jewish and in 2023 Stephen converted to Judaism.
Unfortunately, the Etz Chayim Synagogue and its Yad Vashem Memorial Hall are no longer in existence, the glass slabs broken and the wooden panels now housed at the Beyachad Jewish community Centre – victims of the inevitable migration of the congregation to safer suburbs.
In 2024 the daughter of Xavier Piat, the survivor who initiated the book of their memories, suggested that for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps a further volume be issued containing the memoirs of survivors who had moved to Cape Town after 1988, the discriminatory laws of the 1930s no longer being in force. The book was published in June 2025 by the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre [Ed. See Book Preview: In Sacred Memory (Volume Two) – Jewish Affairs, Summer 2023].
The book revealed how universal our survivor’s experiences were and although few in number, they had wide connections with Holocaust history. One had taught ballet to Anne Frank’s sister Margot, Mrs Frank had said Anne was too hyperactive and on the wild side. Another had obtained 20 protection letters from Raoul Wallenberg and had stolen the stamp in order to forge more. The confiscated house of another’s grandfather, 4 Tiergartenstrasse, became the headquarters of the Nazi T4 Euthanasia project responsible for murdering 200,000 so-called “useless eaters”. Several survivors had arranged for their rescuers to be made Righteous Gentiles, others had seen stolpersteins laid at the houses of their families.
The stories in this book came from 24 Cape Town survivors who had come from Belgium, Belarus, Bosnia, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Hungary, France, Germany, Poland, Romania, Rhodes Island, Russia and Transnistria. The first volume had also included survivors from Austria, Lithuania and Greece.
Wherever they had lived, they had not been safe. In all of these countries their families and friends had been hunted down and killed with industrial precision caught in a ruthless administrative network designed for the bureaucratic slaughter of millions.THAT WAS GENOCIDE!!!!
As for our survivors, they are an ageing and diminishing group. The She’erith Hapletah is no longer in existence, the post Yom Hashoah Cape Town She’erith Hapletah get together is no longer held in the Sephardi synagogue but is arranged by the Cape Town Holocaust Centre and the Board of Deputies and our three Holocaust Centres are now embracing second and third generation survivors. Many of our survivors have published books about their experiences and some have had their story filmed.
The Holocaust and the presence of survivors have left an indelible imprint on South Africa and has resulted in the erection of monuments and Holocaust centres and especially in the Holocaust becoming a compulsory part of the curriculum in all our schools, and a permanent reminder of what genocide really means, despite the ANC’s denial for reasons of financial expedience.
- Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.
NOTES
[1] Herman, S.N, Reaction of Jews to Anti-Semitism, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1945, 35
[2] Jooste, Derek, The life of iconic artist, sculptor and designer Ernest Ullmann, Heritage portal, August 5, 2016m; The life of iconic artist, sculptor and designer Ernest Ullmann
[3] ‘Three years’ service: A Review of the World of the Board of Deputies’, Jewish Affairs, May 1945, 3
[4] Green, P, South African Jewish responses to the Holocaust 1941-1948 MA Thesis (Unisa 1987) 151,158, A Scandinavian shipping line transported clothing free, and took 20 000 garments, 3000 pairs of shoes and 1000 blankets to Gdynia, Poland. To Hungary the SA War Appeal sent 1 645 packages of jam, marmalade and raisins. To Italy 4 000 cases of food, 10 000 articles of clothing and 1 000 pairs of shoes.
[5] This, and other references to Shalit are from Veronica Belling, “Introduction,” in Levi Shalit, So We Died: a Memoir of Life and Death in the Ghetto of Siauliai in Lithuania. (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Alabama U. P. 2024)
[6] This and the following appeal comes from Berger, Nathan, In those days, in these times (1929-1979). Kayor, Johannesburg, 1979, 104-105. As an indication of the value of money the license cost 2/6; the summons recipient was asked for one guinea “as an admission of guilt and token of thanks for your happy survival of the recent tragic years”.
[7] Robins, Gwynne, The Work of the Cape Board 1912-1948, in South African Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape Council) 1904-2004, A Century of Communal Challenges, Citi Graphics, 2004, 22
[8] Suttner, Immanuel, Cutting through the Mountain : Interviews with South African Jewish Activists, Viking,1997, Penguin press, London,1997,121
[9] Harwood, R, Home, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1993,.31.
[10] Green, P, op cit, 174, 188.
[11] Berger, N, op cit, 154
[12] Piat-ka, Xavier, She’erith Hapletah, IN Schrire, Gwynne In Sacred Memory; recollections of the Holocaust by survivors living in Cape Town, Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council, 1995, 194-195
[13] Piat-ka, op cit,
[14] Glezer, Batya. My life as a second-generation Survivor, IN, Schrire, Gwynne In Sacred memory: Recollections of the Holocaust by survivors living in Cape Town, Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre, 2025, 115
[15] https://congressforjewishculture.org/people/6707/Bakaltshuk-Felin-Meylekh
With thanks to Dr Belling who provided the information on the Yiddish writer survivors
[16] Bakalczuk Felin, M. ed. Yizkor-bukh fun Rakishok un umgegent . (Yizkor-book of Rakishok and environs) Johannesburg: Rakishker Landsmanschaft of Johannesburg, South Africa, 1952 and Bakalczuk Felin, M. ed. Yizkor-buch Chelm . Yohanesburg, Dorem-Afrike: Chelmer Landsmanschaft, 1954.
[17] Wechsberg. Joseph (Ed), Wiesenthal, Simon, The Murderers Among us, Heinemann, London,1967, 6
[18] Czerniewicz,Helene, Schrire, Gwynne In Sacred Memory; 1995, 76
[19] Lichterman, Jacob, IN Schrire, Gwynne In Sacred Memory, 1995, 135
[20] Lotte Liebrecht, personal communication
[21] Spitz-Friedman, Clara,IN Schrire, Gwynne In Sacred Memory, 2025,48
[22] Letter to Dr Abt , SAJBD, from Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation, Frankfort Regional Office, US Army, dated 2 July 1949, Beyachad Archives
[23] “Tragedy in silver” undated unsigned typed document, Beyachad Archives
[24] Letter dated 13 February 1951 from Dr Abt to Chief Rabbi Professor I Abrahams These and the following letters are all contained in a memorandum dated 26 February 1951 from JM Rich to IA Maisels, K.C., BA Ettlinger, K.C., SN Kuper, K.C., AB Klipin, J Daleski, Saron, Druion and Dr Abt, Beyachad Archives
[25] Jewish Telegraphic Agency https://www.jta.org › archive › priceless-judaica-stolen-.. 4.10.1991
[26] Ben Yosef, Ute, online web exhibitions, Kaplan Centre, University of Cape Town, Home | Herman Wald
[27] Petersen, Tracey, ‘Placing the Cape Town Holocaust Centre in a Post- ..’
[28] Schrire, Gwynne, Jewish Affairs, Vol 78, No 3, Summer 2023: The Congo, its Jews and their flight to Cape Town – Jewish Affairs
[29] Piat-ka, op cit
[30] Piat-ka, op cit,194
[31] Fogel, Rabbi Joseph J, Nothing Happens Haphazardly, Jerusalem, 1998.157-8.
[32] Piat-https://www.timesofisrael.com/yad-vashem-says-it-has-compiled-5-million-names-of-jews-murdered-in-holocaust/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2025-11-03&utm_medium=email#:~:text=Homepage-,Yad%20Vashem%20says%20it%20has%20compiled%205%20million%20names%20of%20Jews%20murdered%20in%20Holocaust,-Milestone%20achieved%20withka,
[33] Fintz, Violette, in Schrire, Gwynne, In Sacred memory; 1995, 148
[34] The illustration on the cover is by Lottie Liebrecht, the woman who walked out of a WIZO meeting because of the ignorance of the members.
[35] Du Preez, Max (Ed), A Place of Memory, a Place of learning: The First ten years of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, Cape town Holocaust Centre, 208, 10-11
[36] Smith, Stephen, Making Memory: Creating Britain’s First Holocaust Centre, Quill Press, Newark, notts. 1999. 21-26
[37] Smith, Stephen, op cit, 86
[38] Ancer, Jonathan. Mensches in the Trenches: Jewish footsoldiers in the anti-apartheid Struggle. , Batya Bricker, Johannesburg, 202123-25
[39] Suttner, Imanuel, op cit,38-39
[40] Feinstein, Andrew, Middle East Eye, 11.6.2024
[41] Suttner, Immanuel, op cit,,173
[42] Ancer, Jonathan, op cit, 127
[43] Suttner, Immanuel, op cit,361
[44] Suttner, Immanuel, op cit,180
[45] Feinstein, Andrew, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, Jonathan Ball, Cape Town, 2007, 93-96
