Bits and Bites from Around the World > Cat survives 100 days in the Canadian wilderness

 

Cat that had been missing for 100 days in

the wilderness reunited with Jasper family

By Fakiha Baig  The Canadian Press

Posted December 6, 2024 10:57 am

 Updated December 6, 2024 1:09 pm

 3 min read

View image in full screen

Felix, a four-year-old cat shown in this recent handout image, survived more than 100 days in the wilderness after a ferocious wildfire forced the evacuation of Jasper, Alta. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Nicole Klopfenstein *MANDATORY CREDIT*

Nicole Klopfenstein wonders what tales her family cat Felix would tell if he could speak.

She wagers the best would be about how the four-year-old black and white feline survived in the wilderness for more than 100 days after a ferocious wildfire forced the evacuation of the Rocky Mountain town of Jasper, Alta., this summer.

“What did he eat? He must’ve eaten mice,” says Klopfenstein, a 41-year-old animal health technician born in Jasper.

“Maybe he went to a house and he got some food there. What did he do every day?”

Klopfenstein says Felix jumped out of a friend’s arms and ran away in Valemount, B.C., as a wildfire scorched one-third of Jasper’s homes and businesses about 100 kilometres east.

A few nights earlier, she says she was babysitting Felix, who belongs to her sister, when Jasper ordered some 5,000 residents to leave as a wall of flames approached.

Klopfenstein says she grabbed Felix, and her own dog and cat, and started driving toward her dad’s cabin in Valemount. Her parents, who moved to Jasper from Switzerland in the 1970s, followed behind.

She says ash floated in the air and cars beelined to one exit in the town, moving slowly bumper to bumper.

“I just remember the sky was really red. I got the back seat full of all these animals, like the cat, the dog, the other cat meowing like, ‘What’s going on?'”

2:17

Evacuees capture videos of Jasper wildfire

Klopfenstein says after Felix ran away from the cabin, she spent four weeks putting up posters around town for the missing feline, posting on social media, setting up cat traps full of sardines and tuna, and waiting for word that Jasper residents could return.

She says intense heartache kept her up at night at the cabin. She kept thinking about the wildfire ravaging her community and how scared and alone Felix must be feeling.

She returned to Jasper a month later with her sister, who had left her vacation and reunited with her family to help with the search.

Klopfenstein says she returned to Jasper with a feeling of guilt because her home was standing but several belonging to her loved ones were ash.

A week later, she says she got a call from a woman who thought she saw Felix. Klopfenstein drove to Valemount again with her sister and caught a cat in her trap that wasn’t him.

She drove back to Jasper disappointed.

Then Klopfenstein’s phone rang again.

A woman sighted Felix on her home’s security camera.

“So we went out again, set the trap, called him, but nothing,” she says.

She returned home devastated, with brutal thoughts swirling of Felix in a ditch, getting hit by a car or roaming around hungry.

On Nov. 7, the same woman who had seen Felix on her security camera texted a photo of Felix hiding in a marsh 15 kilometres away from the family cabin.

“I look (at the photo), and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, looks like him.'”

Klopfenstein says Felix would have had to cross train tracks and a busy highway to reach the marsh.

She and her sister raced to the area from Jasper one last time and caught Felix in a trap.

On the drive back home, Felix was quiet.

“He was relaxed and sort of grooming himself. He was quite feral when eating, which was a little bit disturbing.”

Klopfenstein says Felix has regained weight since his return from the wilderness. She’s grateful he survived, as some other pets died in the flames because they couldn’t evacuate with their owners.

Jasper residents she bumps into ask about Felix constantly and tell her he’s a reminder there’s hope despite the devastation.

“When you’re having a bad day, it’s like. ‘Oh, he survived 100 days. I can do it too.'”

International Holocaust Remembrance Day > One of the Darkest Days in History, soon to be outdone

 

Thousands mark Holocaust Remembrance Day

amid marches in Germany, Italy

By Simon Druker

   

Mourners stand before the Wall of Death during a ceremony at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on Saturday, marking the 79th anniversary of its liberation. Photo by Jarek Praszkiewicz/EPA-EFE

Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Ceremonies were held across the world Saturday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day against the backdrop of continued anti-far right rallies in Germany and pro-Palestinian marches in Italy.

"Today, and every day, we mourn the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as the Roma, Sinti, political opponents, persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ individuals, and others persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime," the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued Saturday.

"The United States stands with Holocaust victims, their families, and their descendants. We remember and we carry forward the legacy of survivors and their families when we apply the lessons of the Holocaust to combat antisemitism and other forms of intolerance."

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday condemned the global rise of anti-Semitism in a statement issued to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Biden called the Holocaust "one of the darkest chapters in human history."

And the world is rapidly closing in on a new darkest chapter in history, and, unbelievably, it's the same old story!

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site in Oswiecim, Poland, 20 Holocaust survivors laid wreaths and lit candles at the Wall of Death in the yard of Block 11, where German guards slaughtered thousands of Jewish prisoners during World War II.

In Potočari, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint Muslim-Jewish commemorative event was held to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, attended by Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović.

She called the occasion "a beacon of hope at a time when divisions often seem insurmountable," adding, "We must remember our duty to act decisively against hate speech, incitement to religious violence and discrimination."

Thousands of Holocaust Remembrance Day observers in Germany also attended scheduled events, while at the same time approximately 100,000 people in the western German city of Dusseldorf took to the streets to protest the country's far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Several smaller rallies were held in around 30 different nearby cities. Flags in Germany were at half-staff to mark the day.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday publicly urged people to stand up to anti-Semitism and racism.

"'Never again' is every day," Scholz said during his weekly video address, in reference to the Holocaust.

In Italy, demonstrators defied police bans on marches during Remembrance Day, gathering in Rome, Milan and elsewhere in support of Palestinian civilians who have been killed in Gaza amid Israel's war on Hamas militants.

"We are not here to say we are against the Jews. We are here to say 'no' to genocide in Gaza," one activist outside Rome's Piazza Vittorio told the Italian ANSA agency Saturday.

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Bits and Bites > 4 kids including 4 y/o and infant survive 40 days in Colombian jungle

..

4 kids lost in the jungle for 40 days after a plane crash

found alive in Colombia

By Kenneth Garger, NYPost

June 9, 2023 9:37pm  Updated

Four siblings, including an infant, were found alive and well in the Colombian jungle on Friday — a remarkable 40 days after the plane in which they were traveling crashed, killing every adult on board, authorities said. 

The miraculous ending to the saga that has captivated the world was shared by President Gustavo Petro, who told reporters Friday that the children’s incredible tale of survival “will remain in history.”

The scrappy youngsters were ultimately located in the Amazon rainforest by one of the rescue dogs handled by soldiers with the Colombian army who joined the search weeks ago. 

“The jungle saved them,” Petro said Friday. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”

The children – ages 13, 9, 4, and 11 months – are members of the Huitoto people who had been traveling with their mother from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare when their Cessna single-engine propeller plane crashed into the dense jungle on May 1. 

The mother, another adult and the pilot died in the wreckage, which was located by a search team on May 16. 

Soldiers and Indigenous men pose for a photo with the four Indigenous brothers who were missing after a deadly plane crash, in the Solano jungle, Caqueta state, Colombia, Friday, June 9, 2023

The four children had been the subject of an intense search in the Amazon jungle that held Colombians on edge.

AP

In this photo released by Colombia’s Armed Forces Press Office, soldiers and Indigenous men tend to the four Indigenous brothers who were missing after a deadly plane crash, in the Solano jungle, Caqueta state, Colombia, Friday, June 9, 2023.

AP

While the bodies of the three adult passengers were located, the children were nowhere to be found. Soon after, Colombia’s army joined the search and rescue operation, providing 150 soldiers with dogs to locate the kids. 

During the intense search through thick foliage and grueling conditions, soldiers dropped boxes of food into the forest for the siblings’ survival.

Rescuers, who also included volunteers from Indigenous tribes, used megaphones to play a recorded message from the children’s grandmother — imploring the quartet to stay in one place.

Petro told reporters the children were alone when searchers found them and are now receiving medical attention.

AP

Officials said the oldest of the four children possessed some knowledge of how to survive in the rainforest. 

Two days after the plane was recovered, it was falsely reported that the siblings had been found after Petro tweeted that was the case. 

But the president later said he received erroneous information from a government agency, and he deleted the social media post. 

Military personnel unload from a plane one of four Indigenous brothers who were missing after a deadly plane crash at the military air base in Bogota, Colombia, Saturday, June 10, 2023.

AP

After the children were rescued Friday, they were wrapped up in thermal blankets and tended to by the soldiers and volunteers, according to photos tweeted out by the military. 

Another picture shows one of the soldiers holding a bottle to one of the children’s lips. 

“The union of our efforts made this possible,” Colombia’s military command wrote on its Twitter account.

How a bag of flour helped kids survive 6 weeks in the Amazon after plane crash killed adults

Kids who survived 40 days in Colombian jungle have their grandmother to thank

With Post wires

SOMETHING INVISIBLE PUT EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

By Bob Jones, RevWords

I don’t know if you agree, but something invisible came

and put everything in its place.

Suddenly

Gasoline prices went down, pollution went down, and discretionary time went up. Parents are spending time with their kids as a family; work is no longer a priority, or traveling or social life either.

Suddenly we silently see within ourselves and understand the value of the words “solidarity”, “love”, “strength”, “empathy” and “faith”.

In an instant we realized that we are all in the same boat, rich and poor. The supermarket shelves are empty and the hospitals are full.

Old cars and new cars also, gather dust in the garages, simply because nobody can get out.

Empty streets, less pollution, clean air, and the land also breathes.

Survive

The human returns to his origins, realizing that with or without money, the important thing is to survive.

Health is now the main thing, in spite of wanting to have or possess.

It took six days to establish the social equality that was said to be impossible.

Fear invaded everyone.

We realize the vulnerability of every human being.

Nature is forcing us to clean up the mess made by ourselves.

Surrender

Our overthrown gods:

– Money

– Sports

– Entertainment

– Politics

What the coronavirus is teaching us:

– Our best protection: SPIRITUALITY

– Our best refuge: HOME

– Our best company: FAMILY

– Our real time: TODAY

– Nature’s call: STOP US

– Its message: WAIT, RESPECT

Basics

We are not gods, we are not kings, nor do we have the power of controlling everything.

We are part of a whole, fragile, brittle and vulnerable something.

Part of something that we wanted to dominate and today is telling us:

Stop, breathe, respect.

Go back to the basics, to the essentials, and let the peace of your soul guide you towards what you are: LIGHT.

-Anonymous

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. In him was life and the life was the light of men.”

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

God saw that it was good.

APPLICATION: The world is in crisis. Health care systems are overwhelmed. Hockey rinks serve as temporary morgues. What would have been the script of a B movie just two months ago is now our reality. With the world in isolation now is good time to turn to the Light – Jesus. “Come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest.” Email me at bob.pb.jones@gmail.com to talk.

Hero Who Hid Jewish Children in Laundry Baskets from Nazis Dies at 107

By Gabrielle Okun 

A heroic man who hid Jewish children in laundry baskets in Amsterdam from Nazis has died at age 107.

Johan van Hulst, a Dutch seminary leader and later a politician, died March 22, the Daily Mail reported.

Hulst was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1972, an award that is given to non-Jews who heroically rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

The former Protestant seminary leader rescued at least 600 Jewish children from being deported to Nazi death camps.

Hulst used an “ingenious system” to hide young Jews, most under the age of 12, in laundry baskets and sacks across the city.

Nazis kept Jewish families in a nursery school across the street before being deporting them to death camps. If there were too many children, Nazis would separate them from their parents and put them in Hulst’s school prior to deportation.

The brave Hulst resisted the Nazis by writing down fewer children than SS Guards originally believed were at the school. He would use his system to save the Jewish children by having his helpers smuggle them to different houses and pretending that they were their own children, The Times of Israel reported.

Hulst successfully skirted the Nazis until one of his collaborators revealed the scheme and he was forced to go into hiding in 1945.

After the war, Hulst became a politician, serving as a senator for the Christian Democratic Party from 1956 to 1981.

“We say, those who save one life save a universe. You saved hundreds of universes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Hulst during a trip to the Netherlands in 2012. “I want to thank you in the name of the Jewish people, but also in the name of humanity.”

Hulst said he felt that he didn’t do enough to deter the Nazis and rescue Jews.

“I actually only think about what I have not been able to do — to those few thousand children that I could not have saved,” he said in 2015.

Heroes are like that!

The Netherlands is second to only Poland in the number of heroic people honored as Righteous Among the Nations, with more than 5,000.

Rest in Peace good brother; you have earned it.

Horror of Auschwitz Recalled on Holocaust Memorial Day

‘You were just clinging to life’

Holocaust Memorial Day each year remembers the estimated 6 million Jews systematically slaughtered in the Nazi genocide which wiped out two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

The world observes those murdered on January 27 and reflects on the atrocities of the World War II, in an effort to ensure that mankind doesn't repeat the horrific mistakes of its past.

This year marks the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland by the Soviet Red Army, eight months before the war officially ended.

Around 7,000 people were still in the Auschwitz camp when the Soviets arrived, with the many other prisoners sent out on a death march.

Here we remember some of the harrowing stories of those lucky to have escaped imprisonment and death in the infamous Auschwitz death camp.

Primo Levi

Initially interned at Fossoli, Levi was transported along with 650 other Italian Jews to Auschwitz in February 1944 but was only one of 20 who actually emerged from the camp. The 25-year-old fell ill with scarlet fever in late 1944 and when the Red Army approached, all inmates, excluding those already ill, were rounded up, with most then killed. Levi’s illness at the time spared him certain death.

She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?"

And they had replied: "It is we who are burning."

Primo Levi

Ephraim Reichenberg, Hungary

Born in 1927, Ephraim and his family were deported to the camp in July 1944, where he and his brother Menashe avoided the gas chambers by claiming they were twins. As a result, however, they had a number of experiments conducted on them by the infamous Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele. After being liberated from the camp, Menashe was hospitalized and died a year later as a result of experiments.

They injected us at the base of the neck with a certain substance that after the war 

we found out to be cancer cells. The experiment was done time and time again. 

Mengele would sit on the side and take notes.

Ephraim Reichenberg

Viktor Frankl, Austria

A psychiatrist, Frankl survived three concentration camps over three years, including Auschwitz, where both his mother and brother would be killed. On his first day at the camp, he witnessed a haunting sight that stuck with him throughout his life – smoke emerging from the chimneys where bodies were being burned. 

U.S. Army / Public Domain

Elie Wiesel, Hungary

Wiesel, 15, and his family were deported to the camp, where both his mother and sister were killed shortly after. Wiesel said he went ''from despair to despair,” later revealing the only glimmer of hope keeping him going was knowing that his father was alive. "I knew that if I died, he would die,” Wiesel said. Wiesel’s father died, however, shortly after the pair were moved to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. That was their obsession to be remembered, and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

Elie Wiesel

Erling Mandelmann / photo©ErlingMandelmann.ch / CC BY-SA 3.0

Eugene Black, Czechoslovakia

Born in 1928, Black was brought to Auschwitz in May 1944 on a cattle truck and separated from the remainder of his family. Forced into slave labor, Black’s job was to load rocks onto truck for up to 14 hours per day, ultimately resulting in pneumonia. “We were full of lice,” Black said. “I tried to make myself small so no-one noticed me.”

“It is hard for anyone to understand unless you were there," he said. 

"You were just clinging to life. We were so starved and hungry and thirsty and afraid.” 

Eugene Black

USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography

Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel

How 4 heroes who escaped Auschwitz

told the world of the atrocities

The following is the raw story of the effect of four men who escaped from Auschwitz to tell the world about Hitler's final solution. Their stories came out of research done by Joel C. Rosenberg for his book Escape from Auschwitz.


Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were Slovak Jews. They escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944.

Arnost Rosin was also a Slovak Jew. Czeslaw Mordowicz was a Polish Jew. Together they escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.

Upon making it safely to Czechoslovakia, Vrba, only 19 years old, and Wetzler, 25, linked up with the Jewish underground. They explained Auschwitz was not simply a labor camp, as most thought, but rather a death camp. The Nazis were systematically murdering prisoners, mostly Jews, using poison gas called “Zyklon B,” then burning their bodies in enormous ovens.

The men explained the Nazis were dramatically enlarging an expansion camp a few miles from Auschwitz called “Birkenau,” building new train tracks, enormous new gas chambers, and massive new crematoria. They had also completed ramps leading all those arriving in the cattle cars directly into the gas chambers.

Vrba and Wetzler said they had heard SS guards talking about Hungarian “salami” that would soon be arriving. They knew from their jobs as clerks in the camp that none of Hungary’s nearly 450,000 Jews had yet arrived, even though Jews from most of Europe had come already.

They urged the Czech Jewish leaders to warn Hungarian Jews immediately so they would revolt and not get on the trains. They also urged that the Allied leaders be notified so they would mount an operation to liberate Auschwitz.

Both men were asked to separately draft detailed eyewitness reports. Their reports were then cross-checked, compiled into a single report, and then simultaneously translated into multiple languages.

Eventually, Mordowicz, 23, and Rosin, 30, escaped as well. When they got to Czechoslovakia, they wrote up reports of their own, which were added to the existing document. But all this took precious time the Hungarian Jews did not have.

The report, known as “The Auschwitz Protocol,” was sent to Jewish and Allied leaders in early June 1944. Excerpts were leaked to the press, creating an international uproar. But the Germans had begun deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in massive numbers on May 15th. And “The Auschwitz Protocol” landed in the hands of President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their top aides just as the Allies were executing the D-Day invasion of Normandy and trying to liberate France.

On July 2nd, the U.S. began bombing Budapest. Admiral Miklos Horthy’s, the Nazi-backed Regent of Hungary, feared the air raid was in reprisal for the Jewish deportations. He ordered the trains halted. Thus, while, more than 300,000 Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz and gassed, 120,000 more Hungarian Jews were saved from deportation and certain death.

Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian, would later note, “The Auschwitz Protocol” was responsible for “the largest single greatest rescue of Jews in the Second World War.”

That said, neither the U.S. nor the British military took direct action to liberate Auschwitz during the war. Nor did they bomb the train lines to the death camps, or bomb the camps themselves, as Jewish leaders had implored.

When the Soviets finally entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, only 7,000 prisoners remained alive. More than 1.1 million had already been exterminated.

Why didn’t Washington and London take decisive action upon receiving detailed, inside intelligence? Couldn’t they have at least tried to stop the Holocaust, or at least disrupt it, knowing the hellish nightmare people in the camps were experiencing?

Historians have been debating this for years.

The moral courage that Rudolf Vrba, Alfred Wetzler, Arnost Rosin, and Czeslaw Mordowicz demonstrated seventy years ago was extraordinary. They understood the nature and threat of evil, and they risked their lives to tell the world the truth.

They deserve to be remembered and heralded by Jews and Christians and all who care about freedom and human dignity.

We must never forget what they did, and why they did it. But we must also be ready to act wisely, bravely and decisively if a mortal threat rises again. For if we learn nothing else from the history of the Holocaust, we had better learn this: Evil, unchecked, is the prelude to genocide.


Joel C. Rosenberg is a New York Times best-selling author of novels and non-fiction books about the Middle East. His latest political thriller, The Third Target, centers on an ISIS plot to attack the U.S., Israel and Jordan.

Holocaust Survivor Who Funded Rescue of Christians From ISIS, Dies at 96

George Weidenfeld, Inspirational Holocaust Survivor Who Funded Rescue of Christians From ISIS, Dies at 96

Liam Hoare 

George Weidenfeld, a Holocaust survivor who famously repaid the debt of honor to those who saved him by bankrolling the rescue of Christians from Islamic State, has died at 96.

The Jewish publishing magnate credited Christians with helping him escape the Nazis and went on to build one of the most influential publishing houses in postwar Britain.

“George Weidenfeld was one of the most remarkable figures of post-war Europe,” the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said. “An extraordinarily successful businessman, philanthropist and thinker, he was a supreme influence on a whole generation of European politicians. I benefitted enormously from his wisdom and from his encyclopedic knowledge of the world.

“Above all he was a man of huge compassion and humanity never ceasing to wonder how he could make a difference to the world and then making it. It was a privilege to know him.”

Born in Vienna in 1919 and a graduate of the University of Vienna, George Weidenfeld escaped Austria for the United Kingdom in 1938 at the age of nineteen following the German invasion and subsequent Anschluss. After working at the BBC Overseas Service, Weidenfield obtained British citizenship in 1947 and in 1948 he—along with his business partner, the late writer and politician Nigel Nicholson—founded the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, since 1991 a subdivision of the Orion Publishing Group.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson is best known as the house that published Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” in 1959, a novel that had been banned in Britain for four years prior, on the basis of its deception of a sexual relationship between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl. Books like Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s “New Deal for Coal,” Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and James Watson’s “The Double Helix” all helped to establish the reputation of Weidenfeld & Nicolson in its earliest years, later home to heavy hitters like Lyndon Johnson, Golda Meir, and Henry Kissinger.

Weidenfeld was “a tireless worker for Israeli, Jewish and other causes,” in the words of Board of Deputies of British Jews President Jonathan Arkush, serving as Israeli President’s Chaim Weizmann’s aide for a year not long after the state’s founding.

Weidenfeld last year launched an initiative to rescue 20,000 Syrian Christians from the civil war in that country. The Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund was intended as a tribute from a survivor of the Holocaust to those Christians whom had helped him and other young Jews escape Nazism before it was too late. Last July, 150 Syrian Christians were airlifted to Warsaw as part of that project, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

“I had a debt to repay,” Weidenfeld said when the initiative was launched. “It applies to so many of the young people who were on the Kindertransports. Quakers and other Christian denominations brought those children to England. It was a very high-minded operation and we Jews should also be thankful and do something for the endangered Christians.”

Weidenfeld credited the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren as life-savers who fed and clothed him and helped him to reach Britain in 1938, The Independent reported.

Weidenfeld spearheaded Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund, which last summer supported the flight of 150 Syrian Christians to Poland on a privately chartered plane to allow them to seek refuge, making them the first beneficiaries of the resettlement project. The fund aims to offer 12-to-18 months of paid support to the refugees.

Weidenfeld received a knighthood in 1969 and was made a life peer in 1976, taking up the Labour whip in the House of Lords. He disassociated himself with the Labour Party in 1981.

George Weidenfeld at his 1966 wedding to Sandra Mayer. Image: Getty Images

Leaders from the British Jewish community were quick to pay tribute to Weidenfeld. “Saddened to hear of the passing of Lord Weidenfeld, a towering figure in the Jewish community whose legacy will be one of great compassion,” the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis tweeted. “Lord Weidenfeld was a leader, thinker and businessman whose thoughts and understanding of our changing world were sought after by leaders the world over,” Sir Mick Davis, Chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, said.

“He had a broad view of the world and how it could be shaped for the benefit of mankind. He was innovative and tireless in his search for solutions to the challenges of our time.”

“George Weidenfeld was so much larger than life, and so inexhaustible in energy, that it is hard to believe he is no longer with us. I knew him not only as a publisher, a connector, a man who seemed to know everyone, but as an elemental force for good. He was always thinking of new ways to fight prejudice, heal ancient wounds, and bring peace to troubled regions of the world,” the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said. “He was bold, he was visionary, he was hard working, and he was fun. He was a giant, and without him the world will seem a smaller and less vivid place.”

Warm words about Weidenfield’s life and legacy came from around the world. “George Weidenfeld embodied the best of British, German, Jewish thought and culture. With his death, an era end,” the author and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum tweeted. “I am deeply saddened that George has left us. He had great wisdom, and until his death was a friend who always gave me valuable advice,” Ronald Lauder said. “He knew right from wrong. Throughout his life, he strove to ensure that good will triumph over evil. He will be greatly missed.”

Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis, said, “Lord Weidenfeld was a man who epitomized community service and leadership whilst his perception of the new challenges facing Europe was both unique and powerful. One of Lord Weidenfeld’s last acts, rescuing Christian families from Syria and Iraq and resettling them elsewhere exemplifies the legacy of a man we should all endeavor to replicate.”

Amazing Story of Courage, Resistance, Rescue and Survival from the Nazis

The Bielski Partisans

Holocaust Memorial Museum

JEWISH PARTISAN ACTIVITY IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1942-1944

Group portrait of former Bielski partisans from Nowogrodek taken in the
Foehrenwald displaced persons camp. Germany, April 3, 1948.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Kagan

Operating in Western Belorussia (Belarus) between 1942 and 1944, the Bielski partisan group was one of the most significant Jewish resistance efforts against Nazi Germany during World War II.

While its members did fight against the Germans and their collaborators, the Bielski group leaders emphasized providing a safe haven for Jews, particularly women, children, and elderly persons who managed to flee into the forests. Under the protection of the Bielski group, more than 1,200 Jews survived the war, one of the most successful rescue efforts during the Holocaust.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Germans occupied Western Belorussia (before 1939 Western Belorussia had been a part of Poland; after Germany invaded Poland in 1939 it was annexed to the Soviet Union by previous agreement with Germany). There, German authorities killed tens of thousands of Jews in Nowogrodek (Novogrudok) District (including the cities of Lida and Nowogrodek) between July 1941 and the end of spring 1942, and confined those they did not shoot to ghettos throughout the District. When German SS and police units liquidated these ghettos in 1942-1943, they killed most of the remaining inhabitants.

Tuvia Bielski

After the Germans killed their parents and two brothers in the Nowogrodek ghetto in December 1941, three surviving brothers of the Bielski family—Tuvia (1906–1987), Asael (1908–1945), and Zus (1910–1995)—established a partisan group. Initially, the Bielski brothers attempted only to save their own lives and those of their family members. They fled to the nearby Zabielovo and Perelaz forests, where they formed the nucleus of a partisan detachment consisting at first of about 30 family members and friends.

The family members chose former Zionist activist Tuvia Bielski, a Polish Army veteran and a charismatic leader, to command the group. His brother Asael became his deputy, while Zus was placed in charge of reconnaissance. A fourth and much younger brother, Aharon (1927- ) was part of the group as well.

The Bielskis had been a Jewish farming family in the nearby village of Stankiewicze, and the brothers knew the region well. Their familiarity with its geography, customs, and people helped them elude the German authorities and their Belorussian auxiliaries. With the help of non-Jewish Belorussian friends, they were able to acquire guns. The Bielski partisans later supplemented these arms with captured German weapons, Soviet weapons, and equipment supplied by Soviet partisans.

Asael Bielski

Tuvia Bielski saw his principal mission as saving the lives of his fellow Jews. The Bielskis encouraged Jews in nearby Lida, Nowogrodek, Minsk, Iwie, Mir, Baranowicze, and other ghettos to escape and join them in the forest. Bielski frequently sent guides into the ghettos to escort people to the forest. In late 1942, a special mission saved over a hundred Jews from the Iwie ghetto just as the Germans planned to liquidate it. Bielski scouts constantly searched the roads for Jewish escapees in need of protection.

Many Jews hiding in the forests in smaller family groups joined the Bielski group; Jewish partisans serving in Soviet partisan organizations also fell in with the Bielskis in an attempt to escape antisemitism in their units. The stream of Jewish survivors increased the size of the Bielski group to more than 300 people by the end of 1942.

Alexander Bielski

Until the summer of 1943, the group led a nomadic existence in the forest. In August 1943, however, the Germans began a massive manhunt directed against Russian, Polish, and Jewish partisans in the region. They deployed more than 20,000 military personnel and SS and police officials. Moreover, they offered a reward of 100,000 Reichmarks for information leading to Tuvia Bielski’s capture. The Bielski group, which had increased to approximately 700 Jews, was especially vulnerable to discovery by the German patrols. The group feared in part that the local peasants from whom they obtained food might betray them. As a result, the Bielski group moved in December 1943 to what became a permanent base in the Naliboki Forest, a swampy, scarcely accessible region on the right bank of the Niemen River, east of Lida and northeast of Nowogrodek.

It was in this primitive and unlikely setting that the Bielski group created a community. Despite some opposition from within the group, Tuvia Bielski never wavered in his determination to accept and protect all Jewish refugees, regardless of age or gender. The Bielskis never turned anyone away, permitting the creation of a mobile family “camp”—in effect, a Jewish community in the forest. The group organized the skilled workers among the Jewish refugees into workshops, which employed at least 200 people, including cobblers, tailors, carpenters, leather workers, and blacksmiths.

In addition, the group established a mill, a bakery, and a laundry. The leadership managed a primitive infirmary, a school for the children, a synagogue, and even a courthouse/jail. Work groups supplied the camp with food and cleared the land where possible for the cultivation of wheat and barley.

Bielski Group at mass grave site 1948

COOPERATION WITH OTHER PARTISAN GROUPS

The Naliboki Forest was under the administration of Soviet partisans, wherever the Germans were not present. Although the Bielski group had no ideological orientation, Tuvia Bielski and the other leaders cooperated with the Soviet partisans: Bielski himself established a friendly relationship with the regional Soviet partisan commander, General Vasily Yefimovich Chernyshev (codenamed “Platon”). Despite the prevalence of antisemitic sentiment among several of the Soviet partisan detachments, General “Platon” protected the Bielski group. He recognized the vital role of the camp as a maintenance base for Soviet partisans. In 1944, the camp leaders received weapons from Soviet partisan headquarters.

Bielski refused Soviet requests to provide an operations unit from among the approximately 150 men in his group who engaged in armed operations. He did not wish to abandon the married men, the women, and the children, for he knew that they could not survive without the armed protection of the armed men in his group. This concern was another reason for him in 1943 to draw his entire group deeper into the most inaccessible regions of the forest. Subsequently, although the group remained de facto united and under Tuvia Bielski’s command, they formally split into the “Kalinin” and “Ordzhonikidze” detachments of the Kirov Brigade of Soviet partisans.

At the same time that it saved lives and protected the noncombatants in the camp, the Bielski group carried out several operational missions. It attacked the Belorussian auxiliary police officials, as well as local farmers suspected of killing Jews. The group disabled German trains, blew up rail beds, destroyed bridges, and facilitated escapes from Jewish ghettos. The Bielski fighters often joined with Soviet partisans in operations against German guards and facilities, killing many Germans and Belorussian collaborators.

LIBERATION

On June 22, 1944, Soviet troops initiated a massive offensive in Eastern Belorussia. Within six weeks, the Soviet Army had destroyed the German Army Group Center and swept westward to the Vistula River in Poland, liberating all of Belorussia. At the time of liberation, the Bielski group had reached its peak of 1,230 people. More than 70 percent were women, elderly persons, and children, who otherwise would have perished under the German occupation. An estimated 50 members of the Bielski group were killed, an unusually low casualty rate in comparison not only with other partisan detachments but also with Jewish groups in the region.

After World War II, in 1945 Tuvia and Zus Bielski emigrated with their families to Palestine. They both fought in the Israeli armed forces during the 1948 war that established the Israeli state. They subsequently immigrated to the United States. Asael was drafted into the Soviet Army. He died on the front in East Prussia in February 1945.