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Booze, Glorious Booze! Bill Wolchock and Prohibition in Manitoba
Ed. introduction: This story was originally published to our website in October, 2023, but it resonated so much with readers – who have continually told me they enjoyed it so much, I’ve decided to bring it back to our Home page every once in a while. It has received an astounding number of views since it was first published – over 10,000 – making it the most popular story ever published on this website.
To explain, last September, I began what turned into an unexpectedly amusing dive into a part of our Jewish community’s history that is endlessly fascinating to me when I wrote about a book that was published in October titled “Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the Amerian Dream.”
That book is about someone by the name of Wilf Rabin, who was originally Wilf Rabinovitch. Rabin was born in Morden, but moved to Chicago as a young man. Eventually he became involved in the juke box business – a business which was ripe from the outset for exploitation by criminals, especially the Mafia, as juke boxes spun out huge amounts of cash that were never reported to tax authorities.
In the course of writing my article about that book, I mentioned several other Jewish characters who preferred to make their money illegally. I also referred to someone whose name was spelled “Bill Wolchuk” in a book about Winnipeg’s North End, but I made the mistake of saying “Wolchuk” wasn’t Jewish.
Boy, did that unleash a torrent of corrections from readers. It was made quite clear to me that Bill “Wolchock” was very much Jewish – and that he was practically a legend in this town.
Then I received a phone call from reader Arnold Rice, who told me that he had in his possession an article from a December 2, 2002 Winnipeg Free Press about Bill Wolchock. Arnold offered to loan me the article, but I declined, saying I could probably find the article on the Winnipeg Pubic Library digital archives.
That I did – and when I scanned the article, which was written by a former Free Press writer by the name of Bill Redekop, I thought to myself: Here’s the perfect article for our Rosh Hashanah issue: It’s much too long to ever fit into any other issue – and the theme will likely resonate with many of our readers who might consider atoning for their sins on Yom Kippur.
In any event, I was able to get in touch with Bill Redekop and I obtained his permission to reprint the article in full (for a fee, of course). It turns out the article forms a chapter in a book written by Redekop in 2002, titled “Crimes of the Century – Manitoba’s Most Notorious True Crimes.”
I told Redekop that I was actually able to find the book on Amazon – much to his amazement, but that it was also available at several branches of the Winnipeg Public Library. Now, it wasn’t easy transcribing that chapter of Redekop’s book, but I thought it might prove delightful reading for many of our readers.
So, here goes: The story of Manitoba’s greatest bootlegger – Bill Wolchock – someone whose success was on a par with that other great Jewish bootlegging family: the Bronfmans. (Wolchock, however, liked bootlegging so much that he turned down the opportunity to go straight, unlike the Bronfmans. Can you just imagine how much the Combined Jewish Appeal could have benefited from a “straight” Bill Wolchock? And what of all the buildings that would have been named after him – and honours he would have received from our Jewish community, if he had only decided to emulate the Bronfmans?)
A pair of employees talking on the floor of the CNR shops in Transcona sounds like an unlikely launch to the biggest bootleg operation in Manitoba history.
It was the early 1920s under Prohibition. Leonard Wolchock, 74 son of bootlegger, Bill Wolchock, tells the story.
“Sonny (nickname), a CNR boilermaker one day came up to my dad, who was a machinist with the railway and asked if he could make a part for him. “What’s it for?” my dad asked. “It’s for a still,” Sonny said. Sonny was making stills for farmers out in the country. My dad said, “Sonny, you want to make a still? I’ll make you a still and we’re not going to fool around!”
What began as a still to make a little booze for themselves and friends during Canada’s Prohibition certain soon turned into something much bigger. The two CNR workers realized there was an insatiable thirst for their product. “I don’t think dad planned to be in the business for a long time. It was just going good,” said Leonard.
“Before you know it, my dad was making big booze. He could knock out almost 1000 gallons a day. He wasn’t one of these Mickey Mouse guys making 10 gallons like in the country, like in Libau and all these places. And as time went by, he became very big.”
Sonny and Wolchock parted ways when Wolchock quit the railway to work full-time at alcohol production, but other partners came on side. Every one of them was the same: blue collar men like Wolchock who made a living with their hands.
During Prohibition in the 1920s, Bill Wolchock ran the biggest bootlegging business in Manitoba. He was producing tens of thousands of gallons of 65% overproof alcohol – 94% pure alcohol.
Later, after his business took off, Wolchock shipped almost exclusively to the United States and mostly to gangsters. He stored illegal in farmers’ barns from the village of Reston in southwestern Manitoba to the village of Tolstoi in southeastern Manitoba. He stored illegal booze in a coal yard that used to be on Osborne Street in Winnipeg; in a large automobile service station in St. Boniface;. and in a St. Boniface lumberyard. He stored booze in a Pritchard Avenue horse barn. Those are just some of the known locations.
At the height of the Great Depression, Leonard estimates his father employed as many as 50 people who would not have been able to put food on the table otherwise. “They all had families, they all had houses, they all could put groceries on the table, thanks to the illegal business,” said Leonard.
Crooks or entrepreneurs?
Wolchock’s story has euded historians all these years. When Wolchock was finally caught and sentenced to five years in prison for income tax evasion, the Second World War was on, and his case didn’t get the publicity it might have otherwise. Besides, the Prohibition era had been over for more than a decade and was old news. Wolchock hadn’t gone straight like the whiskey-making Bronfman family, but had continued to bootleg long after Prohibition had ended.
Leonard Wolchock told the story of his father and a gang of North End bootleggers for the first time for this book. The story was checked against news clippings from the period.
Wolchock owned at least two large stills in Winnipeg. A huge four-story still operation in a building that was in the 1000 block on Logan Avenue, just east of McPhillips Street, that produced up to 400 gallons a day; and a huge still in a building that used to be on Tache Avenue, about 300 meters west of the Provencher Bridge on the river side. He also had smaller stills, often in rural locations and owned portable stills. He moved around from barn to barn outside Winnipeg to elude police.
Wolchock never considered what he was doing wrong, said his son. He thought the governments were wrong. People were going to find a way to drink one way or another.
“My father was a manufacturer. He was filling a niche market. I’m not ashamed of anything he did,” said Leonard.
Even the police chief who lived just five doors down from the Wolchock home at 409 Boyd Avenue would drop in regularly for a friendly drink. The fire commissioner, who lived one street over on College Avenue and three houses down, was another thirsty visitor. Granted, Wolchock ran a little import liquor businesses as a front, which was legal at the time, but Leonard has little doubt the authorities knew what his father’s main source of income was.
“The chief of police knew what my father was doing, and the fire chief was over at our place all the time!” said Leonard.
When the RCMP finally moved in on his father for income tax evasion, it was a measure of the respect for Wolchock that he was never arrested. Police called his dad with the news, said Leonard. “The police chief phoned up and said, ‘Bill, I want you to come down.’ They never sent anyone to get him.”
Booze, glorious booze! Was it more glamorous in Prohibition when it was illegal, or was the illegal liquor trade more harmful by turning otherwise law abiding men into criminals? Was illegal liquor more dangerous to your health (alcohol poisoning), and did concealed drink drinking lead to more serious drinking problems?
While both Canada and the United States brought in Prohibition, there was a great gulf in how Prohibition played out in the two countries. Like a typical Canadian TV drama, Prohibition was more shouting than shooting in Canada. In the United States, it was more shooting. Much more.
Corpses in the gangster booze wars in the US were rarely found with just one or two bullets in them, but four, five, eight. Gangsters adopted the submachine gun invented by John Thompson in the 1920s, variously dubbed the Tommy Gun, Chopper Gat, and Chicago Typewriter. Frank Gusenberg took 22 bullets in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s men disguised as police officers lined up seven of George “Bugs” Moran’s men against a warehouse wall and opened fire. One creative reporter at the time wrote the machine guns “belched death.”
These two news stories from a single September day in 1930 on the front page of the Manitoba Free Press are typical:
Detroit, Michigan: “An unidentified man was killed tonight by two assassins, armed with sawed-off shotguns who stepped out of an automobile, fired four charges into the body of their victim and escaped in the auto. It was the third gang killing of the week here.
Elizabeth, New Jersey: “Twelve gunmen waited in ambush within Sunrise Brewery here today, disarming a raiding party of seven dry agents and shot and killed one of the invaders.” One federal agent was found shot eight times. “The gangsters, who apparently had been forewarned of the raid, than escaped.”
There are likely several reasons why Canada didn’t go the gangster route. One, there were more loopholes in Canadian law to get liquor if you wanted. For example, you could get a prescription for “medical” brandy. Two, we have never been as gun-happy as the Americans. And three, our Prohibition didn’t last as long. Prohibition in the U.S. ran from 1920-1933. In Manitoba, Prohibition started in 1916 and ended in 1923.
While Canada didn’t have the gang wars like down south, it did become the feeder system, the exporter, the good neighbour and free trader to the U.S. for liquor. Our Prohibition was winding down just as American Prohibition was getting started in 1920. How fortuitous for an enterprising bootlegger! Manitobans could legally buy liquor from the government and run it across the border into the hands of thirsty Americans.
And being neighbourly, we did. One of the major gateways was the Turtle Mountains in southwestern Manitoba. Booze poured through the hills, said James Ritchie, archivist with the Boissevain and Morton Regional Library.
“A longstanding tradition of smuggling through the Turtle Mountains already existed before Prohibition. People had already been smuggling things across for 50 years or more, so alcohol was just more item of trade,” Richie said.
Minot, North Dakota, of all places, was a gangster haven and was dubbed “Little Chicago” back then. A railway town, it served it as a distribution hub for liquor coming in from Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
The 65-kilometer border of Turtle Mountain Hills is carved with trails every few kilometers so there was no way a border patrol could close down the rum running, said Richie. Many of the trails were simply road allowances where a road hadn’t got built. “If you tried to cross anywhere near Emerson, where it’s so flat, the custom guard could see your car coming from 10 miles away. You can’t do that in the Turtles. The custom guard can’t see you from 500 feet away,” said Ritchie.
Many a poor southwestern Manitoba farm family augmented their income with a little rumrunning. They could buy a dozen bottles every two weeks, the government-set allotment for personal use, and sell it for profit just a few miles away. “Prohibition created an economic opportunity for a lot of families,” said Ritchie.
But it was small trade compared to what the Bronfmans would do. Ezekiel and Mindel Bronfman arrived in Brandon in the late 1800s. The 1901 Canada Census lists them as residents of Brandon, along with their children, including Harry and Sam. It was after the Bronfmans had moved to Saskatchewan that they began selling whiskey to the United States in the 1920s. They exported whiskey by the boxcar-load. They later moved to Brandon briefly, where they continued the rumrunning before finally setting up in Montreal.
Meanwhile, Winnipeg was the bacchanalia of the West prior to Prohibition, as the late popular history writer James H Gray, liked to say. By 1882, Winnipeg had 86 hotels, most of which had had saloons. It also had five breweries, 24 wine and liquor stores (15 of which were on Main Street), and 64 grocery stores selling whiskey. The population was just 16,000.
When government turned off the tap, Manitobans went underground. Private stills sprang up everywhere. Ukrainian farmers were famous for their stills and acted as engineering consultants for the rest of the community. The Ukrainians seemed to have an inborn talent for erecting the contraptions, and some stills made the old country potato whiskey. In Ukrainian settlements like Vida, Sundown, and Tolstoi someone’s child was always assigned the task of changing the pail from under the spigot that caught the slow dripping distilled whiskey.
Even Winnipeg Mayor Ralph Webb, who had an artificial leg and was manager of the Marlborough Hotel, campaigned for more liberal liquor laws. Webb wanted to attract tourism by promoting Winnipeg as “the city of snowballs and highballs.”
The United States was interested in the Canadian experiment with Prohibition and summoned Francis William Russell, president of the Moderation League of Manitoba, a group that opposed Prohibition, to a U.S. Senate committee in Washington in 1926. Russell said Prohibition simply resulted in the proliferation of stills in Manitoba.
Arrests for illegal stills rose from 40 in 1918, two years into Prohibition in Manitoba, to 300 by 1923. “We found that the province of Manitoba was covered with stills,” he said. He claimed Prohibition hadn’t stopped drinking, it had just kicked it out of the public bar and into the home where it wreaked havoc on families.
One of the strangest still stories took place in the RM of Springfield, just east of Winnipeg, when an RCMP officer and a Customs inspector came across a “mystery” shack. Sure enough, they found a still inside and went in and began dismantling the evidence. Unknown to them, the owners arrived, saw what was going on, and set fire to the shack with them in it. The agents escaped the flames in time, but so did the arsonists, and no charges were laid.
Yet historical accounts only mentioned small stills in Manitoba. Some historians concluded there was no major bootlegging out of Winnipeg, just small neighbourhood and homestead stills. The story of Bill Wolchock shows that not to be true.
Winnipeg had two large thirsty markets in its vicinity: the Twin Cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota, and to a lesser extent, Chicago, Illinois.
St. Paul was a nest of gangsters. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker and her sons, all took refuge in the city at one time or another. The person who ran the underworld in St. Paul was gangster Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld.
Chicago, of course, was the gangster capital of North America, controlled by Al Capone.
Capone was just 25 years old when he controlled Chicago. It does seem that Prohibition brought many young people into crime. Another Chicago bootlegger, Hymie Weiss, was gunned down by Capone’s men at the tender age of 28. “Hymie Weiss was not Jewish as his name suggests, but Catholic. His real name was Wajciechowski, and Hymie was a nickname.)
Wolchock and his partners were in their early twenties when they started selling booze. Wolchock shipped pure alcohol to both the Twin Cities and Chicago, but more so to Minnesota. When his son Leonard attended a convention in Minneapolis years later, he was feted by a gangster-looking character who recognized Leonard’s resemblance to his father. The gangster offered to foot his bill.
Wolchock Sr. Also sold to Duluth, Minnesota, and to Alberta distilleries. It’s also likely he was also shipping to Minot, since he was storing alcohol in barns in southwestern Manitoba. His business was selling to other manufacturers who brewed the pure alcohol into liquor. He would get rich from it.
Archibald William Wolchock was born in Minsk, Russia, which is now in Ukraine, in 1898, and came to Winnipeg in 1906 with his parents. He grew up and married and lived at 409 Boyd Avenue, at the corner of Boyd and Salter Street. Wolchock wasn’t a gangster, but he sold to them. Leonard believes his father likely dealt with Kid Cann in the Twin Cities, who ran the illegal liquor business there. “My dad did a lot of business in St. Paul,” said Leonard.
Most of what Leonard knows about his dad’s business was told to him by friends and associates of his dad. His father followed the code of the day and kept his business and home separate. Wolchock had a simple rule for his son if people should ask about his work: he would press his index finger to his lips.
While at Assiniboia Downs a man once approached Leonard and said he knew his dad. This sort of thing happened a lot in Leonard’s life because he resembled his dad.
“The guy was a railroader,” Leonard related. “He said, ‘I knew your dad. We stole a train for him once. I said, ‘Get out of here.’ He said, ‘Listen, your dad said he had a big shipment going to Chicago that he couldn’t deliver by car. I told him, ‘Don’t worry, Bill.’ The man said a crew of four, including a brakeman, pulled an engine and three box cars over at Bergen cut-off and loaded them with alcohol. The alcohol, when it went by rail, was shipped in 45 gallon drums. Somewhere along the track, the railway men switched the cars over to the Soo Line track that went to Chicago. When the payoff came, Wolchock showed up at a secret location and dished out $100 bills like playing cards to the railroaders.
The Bronfman family knew about Wolchock and Wolchock, of course, knew about them. Wolchock was friendly with the Bronfman brother-in-law, Paul Matoff, who ran Bronfman stores in Carduff, Gainsborough, and Bienfait, Saskatchewan where he sold whiskey to American rumrunners. On October 4th, 1922, Matoff took payment from a North Dakota bootlegger. Shortly after a 12-gauge shotgun blast killed him instantly in the railway station. The murder was never solved.
“Matoff told my dad, ‘Bill, your market is in the States,’” said Leonard.
Another time a friend of Wolchock Sr., nicknamed Tubby, took Leonard aside. They bumped into each other at the hospital, where Wolchock was dying. “Tubby said he and his brother had a truck, and one day my dad called and asked if they had a tarp for the truck. They said, yeah, so dad said, “Go to such and such place, back up your truck, don’t get out, don’t look in the mirror, don’t do nothing. Someone will put something in your truck. Then go to this address and do the same. Don’t get out, don’t look in your rearview mirror, don’t do nothing.’ That’s how business was done.”
Wolchock was always a sharp dresser and wore suits and long overcoats. His shirts were specially made by Maurice Rothschild’s in Minneapolis and monogrammed AWW across the pocket. His suits were made in the Abe Palay tailor shop that used to be on Garry Street across from the old Garrick Theater. “My dad wore a fedora because he was bald,” said Leonard. One of Wolchock‘s favourite hangouts was the Russian Steam Baths on Dufferin Avenue, where he went Wednesdays and Saturdays.
When that closed, he and his bootleg pals went to Obee’s Steam Baths on McGregor near Pritchard.
Wolchock had a chain of people with various trades and skills on the payroll and always paid well. For example, he had agreements with several tinsmiths to make him the gallon cans to put the alcohol in when it was being smuggled by car.
One tinsmith told Leonard he used to make $200-$400 per week moonlighting for his father. He earned $30 a week on his day job as a tinsmith.
The gallon cans would be put in jute bags and tossed in the back of a car. The drivers would go across the border at small town points like Tolstoi and Gretna.
Border security back then wasn’t like it is today.
Wolchock couldn’t buy anything in bulk, like the sugar to make the alcohol or the cans to put the liquor into, because it would attract too much attention. So he had deals all over the place. He had a deal with a major local bakery, which used to have a central bakery and stores around Winnipeg, to supply him the sugar. He also had a deal with a bakery out on the West Coast.
Wolchock even had deals with hog farmers to get rid of the mash from alcohol production, which makes an excellent feedstuff for livestock. He had drivers and sales agents. He had a chemist on the payroll.
Wolchock also had two or three henchmen. They carried guns in shoulder holsters and hung around the family, but they were the only business associates that ever came to the house. “My dad lived a normal life. We sat and listened to hockey games, but he had strong-armed men around if there was any trouble,” Leonard recalled.
“My dad wasn’t a run-around,” said Leonard. “He was a family man. He was home for lunch and dinner all the time.”
Wolchock also had a friend highly placed with the federal excise office in Winnipeg. His name cannot be revealed here. He also had a highranking local bank official who helped him, but Leonard also doesn’t know in what way. Wolchock once gave his sister $30,000 to deposit in a bank, but that’s all Leonard knows about the transaction. Later in life, Leonard once asked the banker, a big gruff man who always smoked a cigar, what his arrangement was with his father. “None of your f-ing business,” the banker snapped.
One of the problems for Wolchock was where to put the money. He made piles of money, but he couldn’t deposit it in the bank like everyone else because he couldn’t explain to authorities how he made it. Leonard thinks he stashed it, but doesn’t know where. While the family didn’t live ostentatiously, perhaps because that would have attracted attention, they always had money at a time when most people didn’t. “People were dirt poor. There was no money around,” said Leonard. All four of Wolchock ‘s sons received vehicles when they were old enough to drive and all would later get houses when they left home.
One of Wolchock’s hobbies was collecting racehorses with names like Dark Wonder, Sun Trysts, Let’s Pretend. “My dad had a stable of horses in the early days to just get rid of the money,” said Leonard. Leonard’s mother Rose used to travel to watch the horses race at major racetracks in California and Hastings Park in Vancouver. Other enterprises Wolchock invested in included buying a ladies’ garment factory and the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver. Leonard believes his father may have been a millionaire by the time he married Rose in 1927. Leonard was born the next year. “My mother’s family was poor. Dad gave them lots of money. He paid for everything. Money was of no consequence.”
His parents regularly took vacations in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which was sort of a racketeer tourist destination at the time, with legal gambling introduced thanks to gangster Meyer Lansky. It also had bath houses with natural hot springs. For some reason, racketeers had a thing for steam baths and hot springs.
Leonard claims – and insists it’s true – that his father would carry around $15,000 on him all the time. He once walked into a car dealership on Portage Avenue where McNaught Motors is now and bought a Cadillac on the spot with cash. “I never saw my dad with a wallet. All he had was a roll of bills with an elastic around it.”
Everything was in cash. For his bootlegging business Wolchock would buy six to eight cars at a time for his rumrunners to transport booze. He bought the cars at two Winnipeg dealerships where he had business relations. The first thing he always did with the new cars was tear out the backseat so he could fit in more alcohol. The stable of cars was parked inside a St. Boniface service garage. The runners had access day and night, mostly night. They sometimes went all the way to destinations like St. Paul, but usually they would just cross the border and unload into a shuttle car driven by an American rumrunner.
Wolchock and his merry men were a crosssection of Manitoba nationalities and religious origins in the 1920s. Wolchock was Jewish, and his cohorts were a mix of Poles, Frenchmen, Scotsmen, Ukrainians, Jews, Mennonite farmers near Steinbach, and Belgians – “a lot of Belgians,” Leonard said.
Leonard doesn’t know exactly how many people it took to run a still, maybe eight for the larger ones. When RCMP busted Wolchock‘s large still on Logan Avenue in 1936, it was the largest still ever found in Manitoba. Its operations extended to all four floors and into the basement, according to the Manitoba Free Press. The building also had an office, two vehicles and living quarters on the third floor. Employees gained entrance to the living quarters through a crawl space. In the living quarters were bunk beds and cooking equipment and books. The building was empty when police raided it. No charges were laid. The building was owned by the city from a tax sale.
Even after Prohibition ended and liquor was legal, it was government-controlled in Canada, so good money could still be made in bootlegging. The Bronfmans had managed the tricky business from illegal bootlegger to legal distiller, but not Wolchock. Like most law breakers, he didn’t quit while he was ahead.
RCMP finally charged Wolchock after customer Howard Gimble of Minneapolis got caught and ratted on him. Gimble was the key witness against Wolchock. The Manitoba Free Press reported that RCMP had tried been trying to nail Wolchock for years before Gimble gave them their break.
The charge was conspiring to defraud the federal government out of income tax moneys on liquor sales. The RCMP claimed he defrauded the government of $125,000, but that that was just a figure plucked out of the air, based on the scale of operation from a single portable still. The jury was locked up for the 10-day trial because of previous suspicions of jury tampering. Gimble told the court Wolchock had a portable still he moved from farm to farm near Winnipeg. RCMP found the still on Paul Demark’s farm in Prairie Grove, now a bedroom community at the end of Ste. Anne’s Road, just past the Winnipeg perimeter. But Gimble told the court Wolchock also used the still on the farm of Abraham Toews near Ste. Anne on Dave Letkeman’s farm just southeast of Steinbach, and in Jay Kehler’s barn one mile west of Steinbach. Court was also shown pictures of warehouses and buildings around Winnipeg, including St. Boniface, used in Wolchock ‘s illegal liquor business. Gimble also alleged Wolchock operated another still on a farm near Stonewall. He said it produced five thousands of gallons of alcohol that summer of 1940.
Wolchock and seven of his partners were convicted, but it took three trials. The first trial was declared a mistrial due to suspicion of jury tampering. In the second trial proceedings were halted when Wolchock required a hernia operation. Finally, he was sent to jail.
He got five years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, and that was before there was such a thing as parole. It is the most severe sentence ever laid in Manitoba history for a liquor offense. Up to that point in March of 1940, no one had received more than an eight-month sentence for liquor offenses in Manitoba. Also convicted and sentenced were Ned Balakowski, three years; Ben Balakowski, eight months; Frank McGirl, eight months; Jules Mourant, one year. Sam Arborg, Eugene Mourant, and Cass Morant each received suspended sentences.
After serving his time, Wolchock remembered the people who helped him in prison. A prison guard at Stony Mountain named Mr. Anderson was always kind to Wolchock. When Wolchock finished his prison term, Leonard was sent out every Christmas over to the Anderson household to deliver food and presents.
Wolchock Sr. also gave generously to the Salvation Army. “He was a great guy to the Salvation Army because the Sally Ann was very good to him in jail,” said Leonard. His father also saw to it that Leonard took Jewish dishes to the Jewish prisoners in Stony Mountain on the high holidays.
He had money left when he got out of jail but the cost of lawyers for three trials drained a lot of it. Wolchock paid everybody’s legal fees. His wife Rose managed their family of four young boys while he was in prison for five years, and Wolchock, when he got out, bought the home then called Bardal Estate, formerly owned by Winnipeg Funeral Director Neil Bardal. It’s a large clapboard house at the end of Hawthorne Avenue in North Kildonan, along the river on what is now named Kildonan Drive. “There was a fireplace in every bedroom,” Leonard recalled. Wolchock also had money to buy a little company, Canadian Wreckage and Salvage.
But the money wasn’t anything like he was used to and, after a couple years, Wolchock called his old mates together for a meeting. He wanted to make one last batch. Who was in? So the men walled off a portion of the Bardal’s home basement. Two of Wolchock’s close friends were bricklayers – and they constructed a still behind the wall. There were no neighbors on Kildonan Drive at the time, so there was no one to detect the smell from alcohol production. The men made the alcohol, distributed to people they could trust, and dismantled the operation. Then they rode off into the sunset.
“The old man had a bundle of money and he dished out to everyone. Louis went to Sudbury and got a 7-Up franchise; Charlie went to California and bought a liquor store; Benny G bought a trucking company; Benny B moved to Vancouver; Ned went back to work.” There were others involved, but Leonard doesn’t know what became of them. Other partners had already taken their money and invested before the RCMP arrest: Johnny B moved to Vancouver and bought a furniture store; Fred S bought a retail fish store in Winnipeg that still exists today under different owners; another partner went into the hotel business.
And Wolchock? “My dad started Capital Lumber at 92 Higgins Avenue with a partner,” said Leonard. “He didn’t make money like in the past, but he still called the shots and had a successful little business.”
That was Prohibition.
“There was honour among men. Back then, your word was your bond. Nothing was written down. Everything was a handshake,” said Leonard.
“My dad came to this country and he always called it the land of milk and honey. He always said that. He said it after he got out of prison, too. He was never bitter.”
Archibald William Wolchock died in 1976 at age 78.
Features
You might not like what this article has to say about what happened on October 7 and the aftermath
By MARTY GREEN I just read a very disturbing article in Ha’aretz about the treatment of Arab prisoners in Israeli detention. 71-year-old Dr. Mazen Rantisi was recently released after 127 days in detention, and he told Amira Hass about conditions on the inside. No, he was not hung upside-down and beaten; his fingernails were not pulled out or his bones broken. That is not the Jewish way. Without getting into details, the conditions he describes are more along the lines of filth, enforced “discomfort”, hunger, and daily humiliations. And yes, occasional kindness from one guard or another. All in all, treatment no better (and probably often worse) than our own hostages received while they were being held in Gaza.
Which brings me to the point of this article. We like to justify our devastation of Gaza by reminding the world that the declared purpose of Hamas’s invaders was to kill every single Jew they could get their hands on…man, woman, or child. “It’s right there in their Charter!” we proclaim.
We, on the hand, were perfectly blameless in our conduct of the war. “We dropped leaflets to warn people of impending attacks”. “Civilian casualties were because Hamas used them as human shields”. And our trump card: “Hamas could have ended the war at any moment by simply releasing the hostages”.
Could they really have? The last hostages were released a year ago but we are still killing “militants” every single day…some 1,600 since October 10th 2005. (A figure not disputed by Israeli authorities…and considerably more than the 1200 Israeli’s killed on October 7th.) It seems we continue to carry out targeted killings of every single Gaza resident who we can identify as having participated in the October 7th operation…even if those targeted killings involve “collateral damage”.
Yes, we had every justification to invade Gaza to rescue our hostages. But on October 7th weren’t there already thousands of Arab prisoners being held “hostage” in our own prisons, including 1,300 being held without criminal charges or pending trial under our “administrative detention” system? And if the conditions were anything close to those described by Dr. Rantisi, was the need for action (at least from Hamas’s viewpoint) to liberate those prisoners – by whatever means possible – any less than the subsequent need for us to liberate our own hostages?
Does any of this justify the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th? This is a difficult question to answer, because those cruelties and acts of barbarism were so…well, unspeakable…that Israel has for the most part refrained from posting the evidence online. Yet some details have come out little by little. For one thing, contrary to early claims, it does not seem that any babies were murdered by being placed alive in microwave ovens. Yes, it is all but certain that individual acts of wanton cruelty occurred, but let us look at some actual numbers: specifically, rapes and murders.
But we are going to analyze those in the context of what we will presume, for the sake of argument, to have been a “military operation” whose purpose was the taking of hostages for the “legitimate” purpose of negotiating the release of the detainees being improperly held in Israeli prisons. What are the numbers? And how do they compare with the numbers from our Gaza operation? You should stop reading right now if you don’t like where this is going. . . .
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Okay, let us continue. Of the 1200 Israeli casualties, 373 were members of security forces. That’s almost a third. So 800 deaths were civilians…that would be what we call “collateral damage” when they are Palestinian deaths. Then let us call them the same when they are ours. We pride ourselves on the low ratio of “collateral damage” we inflicted on Gaza, claiming 20 to 30 thousand armed combatants out of 70,000 total casualties. Well, then evidently our ratio of “collateral damage” is not better than that of Hamas.
(And by the way, how do we count the three unarmed Israeli escapees we killed? If they had turned out to be Arabs would they have been counted as enemy combatants (despite being unarmed) or merely as “collateral damage”? Clearly, we had no compunction about killing unarmed individuals who might have had concealed weapons. Should Hamas have been more scrupulous than us in terms of who they killed in the course of their operation?)
Now let’s look at some percentages. The biggest single site for casualties was the Nova festival, where some 350 were killed….about 10 percent of the total number there. After that, some nearby kibbutzes and settlements were hard hit…Kibbutz Be’eri, 132 dead out of a population of 1,000; Kfar Aza, 80 out of 800 (some of those were security personnel); and communities like Nir Oz, Nahal Oz, and Kissufim: 170 out of 1100.
So the numbers killed in the most heavily hit communities was 10 to 15 percent. These are devastating numbers but they are hard to reconcile with the claim that Hamas intended to murder every single Jew they could lay their hands on. Israeli resistance was stiff in many of these locales, as evidenced by the high number of military casualties. So many of the civilian deaths must have been, (once again from the point of view of Hamas) “collateral damage”.
We all know the story of the one killer who boasted gleefully of having killed ten Jews all by himself. But if we reckon that at least half the civilian casualties were “legitimate” (by the same definition we used for civilian casualties in Gaza), that they were merely “collateral damage”, then no more than two to three hundred civilian deaths would have been gratuitous murders. Those murders could have all been plausibly committed by no more than 30 to 50 of the six thousand invaders in total….less than one percent. Yet in the post-ceasefire world, it remains our declared intention to kill every invader who participated in October 7th.
What about women and children? Women were close to 300 civilian casualties out of 800. Children….perhaps 40 altogether, including exactly seven under the age of six. How many of the 70,000 casualties in Gaza were children under the age of six? We cannot know the true figure with any certainty, but it is hard to believe that the comparison would favor Israel on a percentage basis.
What about rape? There is little doubt that rapes took place at several locations, with many of the victims being subsequently killed. But no actual numbers are readily available. Surely the great majority of the 300 female casualties were mere “collateral damage” and not rape victims. All we can guess is that the number of women raped and then killed could have been anywhere from 10 to 100. But again, these are mere guesses.
Survivors of rape is another story. Only one woman has come forward to publicly testify that she was raped. How many more may have kept quiet or reported their ordeals only privately is unknown. But I would find it hard to believe that in the chaos of the day’s events, that 100 women were raped and only one survived to tell her story out loud. Yes, rape happened. But it could hardly have been on any kind of mass scale. Especially considering the eagerness of the Israeli side to publicize stories of atrocities.
Finally, it is important to remember that this operation was not a “walk in the park” for Hamas. It is said that out of an elite contingent of 3800 fighters, between twelve and fifteen hundred died on Israeli territory. More Arabs than Jews died on October 7th.
Those special forces were followed by perhaps 2000 civilian looters, many of them armed. To the extent that atrocities occurred, it seems highly likely that they came largely from perhaps a hundred individuals out of this contingent of opportunistic marauders, rather than the disciplined forces that were evidently fighting and dying to complete their assigned mission.
And what of the success of the mission itself? If it was intended to give Israel a black eye, it was hardly a failure. And if it was intended to secure bargaining chips in the form of hostages, then the 4000 Arabs released from custody would have to be a win for Hamas. What about the 70,000 dead? Well, we all know that human life means very little to the Arabs. Don’t we? We’ve said it often enough.
If the Arabs don’t regard their own casualties as human beings, maybe it’s time we started to. And going back to where we began this story, with Dr. Rantisi: let’s remember that we are supposed to be responsible for the humane treatment of prisoners. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t somehow decided to make those who remain in our custody endure extra suffering on behalf of those we were forced to release.
Features
A Sensation at the Bible Contest in Jerusalem
The final of the International Bible Contest, Chidon HaTanakh, takes place every year on Israeli Independence Day (Yom HaAtzmaut). The event is broadcast live across the country, and American contestants appear each year — yet few expect them to win. History, however, records exceptions. In 1988, two teenagers from New York challenged decades of Israeli dominance, and one of them accomplished the impossible.
A TV Quiz Show Where the Subject Is the Bible
Chidon HaTanakh is an annual international competition testing knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures — something like Jeopardy, except that instead of pop culture, every question revolves around the Torah. It is the country’s largest televised event, followed by the entire nation; the nation’s top officials are invariably present in the hall. Students travel from around the world, yet the balance of power is predictable. In more than half a century of the contest’s existence, only three Americans have taken the top prize. The crown almost always goes to an Israeli.
Why Israel Holds an Almost Permanent Advantage
The reasons for the host country’s dominance are less mystical than pragmatic. In Israel, Chidon is surrounded by state attention and public prestige, especially within the Religious Zionism community. Schools release promising candidates from regular classes for dedicated preparation; some are trained almost from infancy. The Israeli stage covers around 400 chapters from the most demanding books, while the American national qualifier covers roughly 100 from relatively accessible ones. Finally, the language barrier is enormous: absorbing hundreds of chapters of biblical Hebrew is incomparably easier when modern Hebrew is one’s native tongue. The language question frequently proves a stumbling block beyond Israel’s borders as well — kykNET is launching a new show in South Africa, Die 1% Klub, and one of the requirements for participants is knowledge of Afrikaans. This already eliminates a significant proportion of potential contestants from outside South Africa, even though there are formally no citizenship requirements.
For foreigners, the contest is just one of many extracurricular activities; for Israelis, it is a matter of national importance.
A Joke That Turned Out to Be an Accurate Diagnosis
As far back as the 1970s, the celebrated Israeli comedy troupe Lul turned the predictability of the results into a sketch that became widely quoted. “We are at the Chidon final,” gasps the host. “Of 60 contestants, three remain. The Scandinavian has 37 points, the Sudanese has 42, and the Israeli has 473 out of a possible 400. The final question is worth 13 points. Everything can still change!” The sketch captured a cultural phenomenon in which suspense existed only on paper.
A Quiz or a Money Game
The TV quiz show format built around the Hebrew Scriptures fits naturally within Jewish tradition. Competition in Torah knowledge is encouraged, and in religious circles it is perceived as an extension of study. Entertainment shows built on gambling are a different matter. The wheel of fortune, bets, multipliers, and cash prizes — as seen in Playtech Live Game Shows, information about which is publicly available — are also presented as televised spectacle complete with a studio and a charismatic host. From a religious standpoint, however, the picture is more complex. To simplify greatly and set aside the distinctions between streams of Judaism: the dividing line runs through money. A person who simply watches the broadcast as entertainment and risks nothing is not participating in gambling. One who places a wager is playing, and under halakha such conduct is either prohibited or, in more lenient interpretations, condemned. In Chidon, only points and reputation are at stake, and the only thing a contestant can wager is years of preparation. In 1988, those years unexpectedly outweighed decades of Israeli tradition.
The Exception That Happened in 1988
That year, two American teenagers arrived in Jerusalem not as also-rans. Jeremy Wieder and Noah Feldman were considered genuine contenders for the title. Both knew the material down to the finest detail. But the story of their rivalry ended in a way no one had predicted.
The American Qualifier, Where the Favorite Was Not the Future Champion
The national Chidon in the United States is divided into four divisions: two each for middle and high school, separately in English and in Hebrew. The strongest contestants typically emerge from the senior Hebrew-language division. In June 1987, that division was won by Feldman — with a near-perfect score. Wieder finished second. Contest organizer Dr. Mitchell Orlian noted that the gap between them was negligible, though the American program’s scope was considerably narrower than the Israeli one.
Who Wieder and Feldman Were
Wieder grew up in Monsey, New York, in the family of a physics professor. He studied at the Ashar and Spring Valley yeshivas and then at the Yeshiva University boys’ high school. An experienced synagogue Torah reader, he was competing in the international final for the first time and was remembered by rivals as someone who “simply knew everything.”
Feldman came from an academic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his parents taught at Harvard and MIT. He attended Maimonides School in Brookline and displayed intellectual brilliance from an early age. He won the national qualifier having lost only half a point — he had confused the dimensions of two sets of curtains of the Tabernacle. “I was off by about a cubit and a half,” he recalled later.
A Year of Preparation, Two Different Approaches
From September 1987, Wieder — who had enrolled early at Yeshiva University — devoted at least one hour each day to reviewing the material. His foundation was a thorough knowledge of the Pentateuch, which made up a third of the program, but the remaining sections required months of additional work.
Feldman structured his preparation differently. His school released him from classes during the Prophets (Nevi’im) period, and he used the 42-minute slot to memorize texts with traditional cantillation. In the final months, he discovered in the Harvard library an archive of Chidon questions and answers dating from the 1950s and used it as a training tool.
The Two Weeks Before the Broadcast That Viewers Never See
Foreign participants arrive two weeks before the final. The program includes tours of the country, meetings with rabbis, politicians, and the Prime Minister, and a visit to a military base — all guided by mentors drawn from former finalists. Informally, the whole experience is known as “Tanakh camp” — a project for strengthening Jewish communal bonds around Israel and the biblical text.
It was here that the Americans first grasped the scale of the competition. Among the contestants was a student from behind the Iron Curtain who had arrived with a teacher from Hungary, and Canadian champion Sean Zelig Aster. The Israelis displayed photographic memory: one of them moved a finger across his forehead as if turning pages and recited entire passages from memory. “They were a little frightening,” admitted another American contestant, Jeremy Spierer. Feldman summed up the contrast this way: in America, he had simply been told — “Noah, there’s a Tanakh quiz, you like that sort of thing, go tomorrow.”
The Final at the Jerusalem Theatre and the Role of the Written Exam
On Israeli Independence Day (Yom HaAtzmaut), thousands of spectators filled the Jerusalem Theatre, where in earlier years David Ben-Gurion had personally checked contestants’ answers against his own Bible. Television cameras broadcast every movement on stage.
A significant portion of the contest, however, is decided before the broadcast. Several days before the televised rounds, contestants sit a written exam of 50–60 questions, and the points scored carry over into the final. The questions on stage are made easier so that no one is publicly humiliated, meaning that anyone who loses too many points in the written portion is effectively out of contention before the cameras roll.
In 1988, the written exam proved unusually lenient and even included a multiple-choice section. Several contestants achieved a perfect score. “I was lucky,” Wieder said. “The Israelis knew the material better than anyone, and the only reason I had a chance was the unusually easy written exam.” Sixteen contestants advanced to the televised rounds; Wieder and Feldman were among them.
On stage, the foreign contestants added color: Aster placed a small Canadian flag in front of him, and Feldman, in the Israeli manner, answered with long quotations, reciting a passage from the Song of Songs from memory. Contestants were eliminated one by one, but several maintained a perfect score into the decisive round. The final question was posed, as tradition dictates, by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Contestants were given ten biblical occurrences of the word shalom and asked to identify the source of each and provide commentary. Wieder answered 19 of the 20 points correctly. The result: a tie for first place with an Israeli contestant of Tunisian descent, Zehava Haddad. Aster finished fourth, Feldman fifth.
Shock, Rumors, and Mutual Suspicion
The result triggered a wave of conspiracy theories. The American participants believed that Wieder had in fact won outright, but that the judges had not dared award the gold to a foreigner and had arranged a tie instead. The Israeli side advanced the mirror-image accusation: one of the finalists publicly claimed that the political establishment had wanted the prize to go neither to an Israeli nor to a woman. The organizers rejected both versions.
The Winner Himself Called It Luck
Wieder consistently emphasized that his success was a confluence of circumstances. In a “normal” year, with a rigorous written exam, he would never have reached the final question. Nevertheless, the record stands: the first American victory since 1973, when the prize was taken by Leora Reich of the Flatbush yeshiva in Brooklyn. The next comparable result came only in 2013, when Yishai Eisenberg shared first place.
Two Paths After the Contest
Wieder received rabbinic ordination (semikha) and became the youngest head of the RIETS rabbinical school in Yeshiva University’s history. He also earned a doctorate in rabbinic literature from New York University and today teaches Talmud and Tanakh. “The knowledge of Prophets (Nevi’im) and Writings (Ketuvim) that the preparation gave me has remained a resource for life,” he has noted.
Feldman graduated from Harvard with the highest grade point average in his class, received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, completed Yale Law School, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter. He later advised the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and became a professor at Harvard Law School. He described Chidon as “one of the most important educational experiences of his life,” one that opened access to medieval Hebrew poetry, to English-language literary corpora saturated with biblical allusions, and that deepened his inner connection to a foundational text.
A Rare American Victory Still Debated Today
Over more than half a century of Chidon HaTanakh history, Americans have won only a handful of times. The 1988 final stands out against the backdrop of prolonged Israeli dominance for several reasons at once: an anomalously lenient written exam that for the first time opened a genuine path to victory for foreign contestants; a tie for first place that some considered fair and others politically motivated; and two careers that grew from a single youthful competition.
Features
The Leica Camera Family and the Shoah
By DAVID TOPPER I was born in 1943 in Pittsburgh, steel-town USA. While I was still in diapers, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Shoah was well under way. The mass murder continued, only coming to an end due to Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. My father was in that war, spending over two years in the Army Signal Corps on the other side of the world – on a small island in the South Pacific. He didn’t kill any Japanese soldiers; the US Marines had already “liberated” the island before he arrived. Being in the Signal Corps, he must have heard the radio contact with the airplanes on the nearby island of Tinian, on those two days in August of 1945 when they took off carrying the nuclear bombs that ended the war with Japan. By the time he came home in March 1946, I was a toddler. He resumed his job at one of the steel companies, where he held a clerical position.
My father was what was called in those days a camera buff. He liked to take pictures and develop the film himself. He built a darkroom in the basement, and it was there that I learned the craft. Initially he just had a simple box camera: point and click. But he always talked about getting a real camera someday: where he could set the aperture, speed, and focus himself. His salary at the steel company was not enough to get an expensive camera, such as a Leica. Although he did talk about these German cameras; they were top of the line 35mm roll film cameras, with the 1/1.5 aspect ratio negatives. I remember looking at them in the photography magazines he bought. Owning a Leica was a fantasy. This was when I was still very young.
I vividly recall the day he bought a real camera. I was around the age of nine, or maybe older. He saw an ad in the for-sale section of the newspaper: someone was selling a Rolleiflex camera, the twin-lens reflex camera using 120 roll film with 2¼ x 2¼ inch square negatives. The Rolleiflex had hit the market in 1929 and quickly set the standard for medium-format photography, in competition with the popular 4 x 5 inch press camera.
I went with my father somewhere on the other side of Pittsburgh. The man had been on a business trip to Germany, where he bought the camera. But he was selling it because he was frustrated with the need to focus, set the speed and such. He just wanted a box camera: point and click. So, my father bought it.
Since the specific camera my father bought was not only made in Germany but had been sold there, all the writing on it was in German. My father loved the camera. He said it produced exceptional images. He believed the lens was so good because it was made only for Germans themselves. At the time I believed this; as I believed everything he said at that age in my life. Now I think otherwise.
It was around this time that my father joined the camera club at the steel company where he worked. There were monthly meetings, as I recall. He was an active member; even the president at one time. Occasionally he took me to a meeting. And that’s where I met Carl, whose last name I can’t recall. So, why mention him? Because Carl owned a Leica. He was the only member of the club to have a Leica. Carl probably had a much higher paying job than my father and the other guys at the steel company. (And, by the way, they were all guys; except for the models. But that’s another story for another day, not relevant here.) Anyway, Carl had a Leica; and he even let me hold it, as long as I kept the strap around my neck. Whether I actually snapped a picture with it – I don’t recall. Probably not. But it was a highlight of my time at the club. Now, before you jump ahead: no, I didn’t buy a Leica, ever.
But I did get a Rolleiflex – or Rollei, for short. Here’s how. My father’s love affair with the camera didn’t last. The catalyst for the change was when cameras started coming out with built-in light-meters. No longer did you have to fiddle around with the light-meter hanging around your neck, pointing it to the subject, and then setting the camera’s shutter and aperture. It was all built-in; you adjusted the setting directly on the camera. And so, my father bought another newer Rolleiflex; this one with a built-in light-meter.
He then sold me his German Rollei. Yes, you read correctly: he sold it to me. My father grew up during the Depression in the 1930s, and this was the source of such behaviour. I was older at this time – somewhere in my teenage years – and I had a paper route, so I could afford it. I don’t recall the price; and I’m sure I got a good deal – he was my father, after all – but still.
I, in turn, loved the camera – even though I had to use a hand-held light-meter. It was my only camera for many, many decades of my life.
One more thing, before I get to the role of the Leica in the Shoah. As I write this, I’m living in Canada. I moved here in August 1970 to begin what turned out to be a 42-year tenure as a university professor. Moving from the USA to Canada was an adjustment in many ways. For example, the role of the monarchy here was a novelty for me. I mention this because I was pleased to learn that the Queen, who was head of state at the time, owned a Leica.
The name comes from the owner of the factory in the city of Wetzlar, in south-west Germany, near Frankfurt. Here is where the first prototype camera was invented in 1914; a camera that used 35mm film. Before that, photographers had to use bulky wooden boxes with large glass plates. The factory was the Ernst Leitz Optische Werke; in other words, the optical plant of Ernst Leitz. The First World War delayed production of the invention, but by 1925 the first Leica camera debuted at the Leipzig Spring Fair. For the name they combined the words Leitz and Camera and got Lei-ca – or Leica. (Note that they used the Latinized, camera, not the German, kamera.) Thus, was introduced the portable 35mm camera that led to everyday street photography and photojournalism, such the famous images of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others. Subsequent models over the next decades introduced the rangefinder, better lenses, extended shutter speeds, and so forth. The Leica M3 of 1954 is called by AI: “one of the greatest mechanical cameras ever built.” Fortunately, for the average photographer, there subsequently were other 35mm cameras introduced at considerably lower prices by Kodak and Argus in the USA, with more coming later from Japan.
All of this paralleled the development of the Twin-Lens Rolleiflex, which my father and I owned. The Rollei is another example of German precision engineering. Franke & Heidecke in Braunschweig, Germany is where the first Rolleiflex hit the market in 1929. The model went through many changes over the decades, so that up to the 1960s, also according to AI: “the Rolleiflex was the undisputed king of photojournalism, street photography, and portraiture.” I’ll leave that topic where it is.
Now I want to get to the point of all this background discussion of photography. Namely: the account of the family-owned Leica business in Germany under the Nazis. It started in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor, and the government passed the Nuremberg laws, which institutionalized racial discrimination and stripped German Jews of their citizenship.Subsequently, Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, professors, and business owners—were gradually barred from their livelihoods and public life.
At the time, Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956) was head of the firm. The Leitz family were Protestant Christians. Their attitude toward their workers was progressive for the time: with pensions, sick leave, and health insurance. The firm also employed many Jews in various positions, from workers to the professional staff. Seeing the writing on the wall in 1933, many Jewish employees and their families wanted to leave Germany. The company also had offices elsewhere: London, Paris, New York, and Hong Kong. In a short while, the ocean liner Bremen was docking in New York harbour, and Leitz employees and their families were being escorted to the Leitz Manhattan Office. Every few weeks, under the guise of being assigned overseas, another group of Leitz “employees” arrived in the harbour. Each German employee had a Leica camera hanging around his neck. Until a position was found for him, he was paid a stipend. Eventually they all found jobs, mainly in the photography industry.
The same thing happened in the other offices outside of Germany, especially after Kristallnacht in November 1938, as synagogues and Jewish shops were torched across Germany. Thus, many Jewish employees and their families (and even Jewish friends of families) were assigned jobs in sales offices in London, Paris, and Hong Kong, where they too escaped the Shoah.
This continued until September 1939, when Germany closed its borders, after the invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War. By then hundreds of Jews had left on what was later called “the Leica Freedom Train.” It was all a ruse to save Jews from the Shoah. We don’t know the exact number; but it ranges from 100-300 lives saved.
Ernst Leitz II was able to pull this off because he was not only a respected member of the business community, but his factory was also producing military optics, rangefinders, and telescopic sights essential to the German military. As long as the military was getting what they needed from Leitz’s factory, there was no reason to question the way he was moving his employees around the world.
In general, this was true. But not always. One executive was jailed for helping Jews leave the country. He was eventually freed, after Ernst paid a large bribe.
But worse was to come. Since many of the workers at the Leitz factory were drafted as soldiers in the war, the place lacked workers to keep it running. Between 1940 and 1945, the Nazi government sent approximately 700 to 800 women from the Ukraine and Western Russia as slave labourers. This is where Ernst’s daughter, Elsie Kühn-Leitz (1903-1985), comes in. Elsie had a Doctorate in Law from Frankfort University, as well as degrees in business administration. She was married to Knut Kühn, with whom she had three children. Working for the Leitz company, she treated the women well, providing them with sufficient food, clothing, and living quarters – for which she was reprimanded by the Nazi authorities. Nonetheless, she refused to treat them as slaves.
Then in May 1943 she was asked to help a Jewish woman, Hedwig Palm, escape to Switzerland. Hedwig Palm (née Dessauer, born 1888) was the wife of Hermann Palm, an optician and photo equipment dealer who owned an optical shop in Wetzlar, and who had business connections with the Leitz family. Hedwig apparently was the only Jew in the family. Elsie had an aunt in Munich, not far from the border with Switzerland. So, in the dead of night Elsie safely took Hedwig to her aunt’s home. With a map and some money that Elsie gave her, Hedwig next set off toward the Swiss border. Unfortunately, she got lost and hailed a milk truck. Assuming she was a Jew, the driver drove her to the border police. From documentation that I found in the Yad Vashem, Hedwig was arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, where she died in 1944. Incidentally, the Palm store is still there in Wetzlar. You may find its website under Juwelier Palm, specializing in jewelry, watches, and goldsmithing.
When the Gestapo found out that Elsie had helped Hedwig try to cross the border, she was called in for questioning for several hours. Her humane treatment of the Ukrainian women also came up: what the Gestapo called: “excessive humanitarianism.” Ultimately, she was sent to the Frankfort police prison on September 10, 1943. As she hugged her children good-by, she thought that she would never see them again. The conditions in the jail were sub-human. Minimal food, filthy quarters, bug infested – plus she was sporadically manhandled roughly by the staff. What food her father was able to get to her – she shared with her fellow prisoners. At one point the Gestapo were threatening her with deportation to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. It lasted three months until November 28, 1943, when her father paid a very large ransom to the Gestapo to have Elsie released. Even so, the Gestapo kept an eye on her, often calling her in for interrogation. This continued until the end of March 1945, when American tanks rolled into Wetzlar.
After the War, Elsie and Knut divorced and she got actively involved in humanitarian and diplomatic work, mainly in Africa. She particularly supported the work of Albert Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, even paying a visit in June 1959.
In general, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for all this work in saving Jews. It was only after that generation died out, that the full story came out. And this happened mainly because of the following event.
Like many stories from the Shoah, there are often several layers to them. That’s true for this one too; for I note the following fact. In 1988, surviving labourers and Shoah survivor-groups initiated class-action lawsuits in U.S. and European courts against dozens of major German industrial firms. The Leica Company was one of them, having used women from the Ukraine and Western Russia during the war. In 1999, a Compensation Fund was set up by the government; Leica, along with other German companies, paid into a collective multi-billion-mark fund, as compensation for slave labourers (or their surviving heirs) across Eastern Europe, Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. This may explain Leitz family’s reticence for publicity about their efforts during the war.
Note that Elsie, who died 1985, didn’t have to deal with this. But her children surely did.
Finally, I mentioned before the famous street photographer and artist, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who wrote the well-known book The Decisive Moment (1952), and who incidentally, used Leica cameras. He knew Elsie, and wrote this tribute about her. “I knew Elsie Leitz well and she always welcomed me warmly…when I visited Wetzlar. I was very impressed by her passionate concern for international humanitarian causes, and by the great risks she took during the war to save many people who were in danger. I remember her with deep admiration.” This affirmation forms the Introduction to the book: Elsie’s War: A Story of Courage in Nazi Germany, by (Rabbi) Frank Dabba Smith (Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2003).
