‘Read and pass it on’
Former Milwaukeeans write Holocaust books

By Leon Cohen
of The Chronicle staff

Two elderly Jewish women now live at practically opposite ends of the country; but they have significant traits in common.

Both lived in Milwaukee for long periods. Both have a powerful interest in the German Nazis’ attempted genocide of the world’s Jews.

And that interest led both of them to write and to pay for recent publication of books on the subject.

But in other respects, these books and women are extremely different.
Joyce Wagner, 84 and now of Lauderhill, Fla., survived the Holocaust. Her book, “A Promise Kept to Bear Witness” (AuthorHouse, $12.95), describes her experiences in the small Polish town in which she was born, in a ghetto, in the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on a death march as the war was ending, until she was finally liberated by the Soviet army.

Helen Weber, 94 and now of Seattle, did not go through the Holocaust herself. Indeed, she concludes her book with a “Thank You” to, among others, “my parents for leaving Lithuania — my father in 1900, my mother in 1902,” and so enabling her to avoid the war.

And Weber tried to tell the story through the experiences of others. Her book, “Holocaust Mosaic” (iUniverse, $20.95), follows six individuals from 1933 — the year when Weber herself first became aware of Nazi Germany — to the end of the war.

‘Always writing’

Two of Weber’s individuals are well-known: the German-born Dutch adolescent Anne Frank, author of the world-famous diary of her time in hiding; and Käthe Kollwitz, the non-Jewish German artist and pacifist, who recorded her experiences in a diary and letters that have been published.

The other four people also left records of their experiences: survivors Josef Katz (“One Who Came Back”) and Thomas Geve (“Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust”); German “half-Jew” Peter Schwiefert, who was killed in action with the Free French army and whose letters were published as “The Bird Has No Wings”; and Etty Hillesum who was killed at Auschwitz and whose diary and letters were published in the 1980s.

In a telephone interview, Weber said she chose these people largely because they left behind records; and she tried to surround their experiences with the historical context.

“I tell you how the war [against the Jews] was fought,” she said. “I wanted to find out how it was planned and executed.”

Weber, a Milwaukee native, had some previous writing experience before she started work on “Holocaust Mosaic.” “I was always writing and took odd jobs” to support her efforts, she said.

She had worked as an interviewer for the University of Wisconsin Survey Research Laboratory, speaking to people who had been arrested in the Milwaukee “so-called [race] riot” (as Weber put it) of July-August 1967.

She wrote a short book about that subject, “Summer Mockery” (Aestas Press, 1986), which won an “Award of Merit for Distinguished Service to History” from Wisconsin’s State Historical Society.

Weber said she moved to Seattle in 1988 and the following year began to work on “Holocaust Mosaic.” She did a large amount of reading on the subject — her bibliography comprises 27 pages of the 263-page book — and struggled to make each of her six people fit into the story. “That was the hard part,” she said.

Weber also struggled to find a publisher until she heard about iUniverse. This firm does not do publicity for books unless authors pay for it, which Weber said she is not doing. Nevertheless, Weber said some copies have been sold in Seattle.

Indeed, she recently received a letter from a reader, who said her book “should be read by every bigot and every Jew,” she said.

‘Survive and tell’

Wagner had more personal reasons for writing her book. As she explained in a telephone interview, she said that during her stay at Auschwitz, she and some friends “promised each other that one of us would survive to tell the world” about their experiences.

Nevertheless, when she and her husband Michael (whom she met in a displaced persons camp) moved to Milwaukee in 1949, she became so absorbed in “learning the language and making a living” that she never spoke about her experiences.

Eventually, her four children left Milwaukee, and after her husband became ill, she went with him to Florida, where he eventually died.

In 1977, Wagner visited her daughter, Gilda Ross, who had become a high school guidance counselor in Chicago — and the school’s theater program was about to perform “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Ross persuaded her mother to speak to the cast. “I was shaking” beforehand, Wagner recalled; but she did it; and she remembers that “they opened their eyes” when she showed them the number tattooed on her arm.

After that, she spoke to students at that school just about every time that she visited Chicago; and some of the students said, “Why don’t you write a book?”

Wagner had written her speeches down during those years, and would add to them as she remembered things. By the time she finally decided to write her book five or six years ago, she already had 100 pages of material, she said.

Nevertheless, it took her five years to complete the book; and even when she finished it, Wagner said she felt she could have written more.

As was the case with Weber and iUniverse, Wagner had to pay to have her book published by AuthorHouse, and would have to pay even more to have it publicized. But Wagner said she is not interested in such publicity.

“I just wanted it for students in schools to read,” she said. “My purpose is to educate the children, and my family.”

But some people have bought the book and asked her to sign it. And when she does, she tells them, “Read and pass it on. Everybody should know.”