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Created in hiding during WWII, a Jewish artist’s underground ‘zines are finally rising to the surface
What do you do when you finally admit to yourself that you’ve had something akin to Anne Frank’s diary in your living room for your entire life?
Simone Bloch mostly ignored it. The four bound volumes were like all the other antiques in the Queens home furnished by her parents, who traveled to Europe on buying trips for their Midtown store, Continental Antiques — nothing to see there. Occasionally, her father pulled one of the old-timey looking books down from a shelf and read a poem aloud. In German. WTF?
Here’s WTF: Simone’s father, Curt Bloch, a wicked satirist, wrote those poems. He also wrote songs and essays and wartime updates. Hundreds of them. He made collages of Nazis — Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, all the biggies — depicting them as babies, animals, buffoons. He somehow managed to corral all of this into 96 postcard-sized magazines while hiding from the Germans and their Dutch collaborators in an attic crawl space in Enschede, Holland, from August, 1943 to April, 1945. He produced them at a pace of one per week.
To be clear: Curt didn’t print his magazines; how could he? There was, and still is, a single copy of each which circulated among 30 or so of the Jews hiding in Enschede. Het Onderwater Cabaret, or The Underwater Cabaret, was Curt’s answer to the untenable situation he, his family, and the rest of Europe’s Jews had found themselves in. The title is a play on the Dutch expression for hidden Jews: “Onderduikers.”
Divers.
I: Going Down
In 1933, Curt Bloch was in his early 20s and living in his native city of Dortmund. He was a Jewish lawyer with a promising career in the judiciary when the Reich decreed that no Jew could hold a position in the civil service, and he was forced to resign. A non-Jewish co-worker sent a gang of Nazis to beat him up, and soon after, as more Nazis were knocking at his door, he escaped out of an attic window, crossed the German border, and rode into the Netherlands on a bicycle.
Curt stopped first in the Hague and then settled in Amsterdam, working odd jobs, including selling carpets and antiques. He slipped back into Germany just once, to submit a death certificate for his father, a veteran who’d fought for Germany in World War I. In May 1940, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, and the disenfranchisement of Jews proceeded much as it had in Germany. Dutch Jews carried ID cards stamped with J, were forbidden from holding civil service jobs, and were barred from schools, universities and public facilities. By May 1942, they were forced to sign over their assets to the Reich, affix yellow stars to their clothes, and were now eligible for “resettlement,” a process that began in a crammed cattle car and ended in a concentration camp in Poland. Curt went into hiding.
II. Dry Land
Simone Bloch is a therapist and sometime playwright who lives in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her mother, Ruth, a survivor of several camps, is 100 years old and lives in her own apartment on the ground floor. Simone shares the rest of her house intermittently with her three children and four grandchildren, an ever-changing number of dogs, plus the occasional traveler. Currently, her elder daughter, Hannah, a lawyer like her grandfather, is ensconced with her husband, children and dog while she teaches law at a local university.
I know all this because Simone is a friend. We met in Central Park when my dog, Otis, was a puppy, and her dog, Manny, still roamed the earth. Since then, we have been two-thirds of a weekly writing group . Even when we don’t have any writing to discuss, we meet and talk, and Simone, in her therapist’s guise, comes in particularly handy. Over the past 11 years, we have watched Simone, now in her mid-60s, midwife her father’s work, which miraculously survived the journey from Enschede to Manhattan, back out into the world.
What took so long?
Simone had to do all the other life things before she did this. And, as she puts it, it wasn’t so appealing to have this story. Really, nobody wants to hear it. But Simone never had the luxury of not knowing about death. Other people had grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins. What is a grandmother? young Simone wanted to know. Where was hers? Her parents told her. After that, she assumed everyone else must know about death, too. There were a few kids in high school whose parents had survived the Holocaust, but talking about it wasn’t a thing back then.
As if that wasn’t enough, when Simone was 10, her 22 year-old brother, Stephen, died by suicide. He was born in Amsterdam and made the journey to New York with parents when he was just one. It was the 1950s, a time of conformity, and his German-speaking, Holocaust-surviving parents distinctly did not conform. The transmission of trauma is real, says Simone. Being the child of survivors had a profound effect on her brother’s emotional health. Simone, herself, was a quiet child who cried easily, but as she became more aware of her parents’ past and processed her brother’s death, she was determined to be the tough one, the one who got her shit together. Then, when she was 15, Curt died.
Simone had had a difficult relationship with her father. She was a wild teenager who didn’t consider her own trauma until quite recently, having spent the better part of her life diminishing the sadness to herself, to other people, and eventually, to her children. She acknowledges the fury she felt towards her father when he tried to rein her in, though she didn’t realize what brand of dangerous behavior Curt imagined she might be engaged in until she was in her 50s and saw the German television series Babylon Berlin.
Curt tried to keep Simone safe because he could not do that for his sisters. Erna, the elder, was deported with her husband, Max, and both were murdered in the camps. Curt’s younger sister, Leni, along with their mother, had followed Curt to the Netherlands and gone into hiding separately from him. The two women were discovered and deported. They were murdered at Sobibor. Leni was just 19.
Simone used our writing group sessions as a kind of psychoanalysis. Curt became a character she had to contend with. Like her father, Simone is both furious and funny, and Curt’s gift for satire — that particular admixture of anger, fear and humor that is a common Jewish coping mechanism — has been his legacy to her. For Simone, it is her defense against the world, most particularly from ending up like her brother.
III: Surfacing
Simone’s daughter Lucy became interested in The Underwater Cabaret when she was an undergraduate at Grinnell studying history and German. She asked Simone what the little magazines were, exactly. Simone replied: “Your grandfather made them while he was in hiding.” Did other families have something like them? Lucy wanted to know. (“As though everyone in hiding was doing craft projects,” Simone told me over the phone.) Simone said no. Lucy got a grant to go to Germany and see if there were non-Jewish equivalents to Het OWC, as Curt sometimes called it. There were not. But her advisors, along with the German Academic Exchange Service, found the magazines compelling. Simone thought, Huh.
This was the beginning of The Underwater Cabaret’s journey back to the surface. It went in stages. First, Simone and Lucy, who was also an artist, considered co-authoring a graphic novel of Curt’s life. After a bit of work they abandoned that idea, because, well, the writing and art for the work already existed. Simone then started speaking to friends, to academics, and to publishers with whom she was acquainted about how to get the story out. She has a gift for emailing and calling people she barely knows and asking for their assistance. There were emails back and forth with a Dutch publisher and two years talking to an art historian.
After hundreds of calls and emails, she met Thilo von Debschitz in a Facebook group called Jews Engaged Worldwide in Social Networking. It has the unlikely nickname of “Jekke,” a word coined by Israelis referring to German-born Jews who’d made aliyah. Thilo is not Jewish, nor does he live in Israel. He is a graphic designer in Wiesbaden whose grandfathers were Nazis. His maternal grandfather died by suicide when he learned Hitler was dead. Thilo has an interest in bringing lost stuff to light, particularly Jewish stuff, so together he and Simone re-approached the Jewish Museum Berlin, where, 10 years earlier, she had pitched The Underwater Cabaret.
IV: Up for Air
Finally, in February of 2024, after a nearly 13-year journey, the JMB presented an exhibit of The Underwater Cabaret and made it part of their permanent collection. I traveled to Germany for the first time to attend the opening, and despite a deep knowledge of Curt’s story, I was alternately heartbroken and astonished.
The evening began with a presentation in a large atrium, packed with people, where the museum director, the curator, and Simone spoke. An actor performed a poem in the original German to great effect; the irony in his tone as he landed on the tight rhymes brought Curt’s writing to life. A young woman played and sang pieces Curt called songs in the magazines, accompanying herself on the piano with music she had composed for the occasion.
The audience then moved on to the exhibit, where the magazines were placed in a chronological timeline of history and of Curt’s life. There were also copies of the original magazines from which Curt had taken clippings for his collages and a decades-old video recorded by the Shoah Foundation of Karola Wolf, a woman who had been in hiding with Curt and with whom he had fallen in love.
I have thought a lot about what Curt’s work might have meant to his fellow “divers.” I imagine that waiting for The Underwater Cabaret each week helped them mark the time and reading it made them laugh in the face of gut-churning terror. Passing it along to each other, despite the grave danger of doing so, gave them the courage to persevere. Maybe even to hope. Het Onderwater Cabaret was a social media platform of its time, creating community, spreading the truth, using visuals to depict the indescribable, and channeling fear into action. At a time when one in five Americans do not believe the Holocaust happened at all, a new generation of divers is hiding in cities across the country, communicating with each other on smart phones, and depending on their neighbors for support. The reemergence of Curt Bloch could not be more apt and unsettling.
A coda: Curt made many trips back to Germany as part of his work as an antiques dealer. In 1972 he returned to Dortmund to attend his 45th high school reunion. There he was hailed by old friends, many of them former Nazis. One greeted him like this: “Curt, we weren’t expecting you.”
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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