As prisoner 8331 at the Nazis’ Westerbork transit camp in Holland, Jacob Boas must have witnessed the sorrow and fear of hundreds if not thousands of fellow inmates before they were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to die at Auschwitz.

But he has no memory of it. Jacob Boas, a Dutch Jew, was born in the camp on Nov. 1, 1943, and was captive there until he, his parents and older brother along with 876 other prisoners were liberated by Canadian troops 18 months after Jacob was born.

There’s nothing that Jacob, or Jack, as he calls himself now, remembers of those 18 months.

“My earliest conscious memory is in postwar Amsterdam. I must’ve been around 2 or so because I was stuck in a high chair, the coal stove started smoking, and my mother came rushing in from the kitchen for the rescue,” Jack told me.

Each week during the war, a train of cattle cars delivered Westerbork prisoners, including Jack’s grandparents and other relatives, to die at Auschwitz or Sobibor. A total of 102,000 Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and many of them came through Westerbork, including Anne Frank.

Jack, his brother and their parents beat the odds through sheer luck: a camp commandant at Westerbork who had a policy of not immediately deporting mothers in late pregnancy, and a father with tailoring skills.

“The fact of being born in the transit camp has struck deep, impenetrable roots within me, coupled with a seemingly unslakable need to know,” Jack wrote in a book published two years ago, Until Further Notice … Theresienstadt On My Mind.

As a historian and author of six books, four of which deal with the Holocaust, Jack has spent his adult life trying to satisfy that need. He has also taught university courses on the Holocaust and writes magazine pieces.

I met Jack at a second-hand bookstore in Portland, Ore., where we both live. He works there every Monday as a volunteer. Jack is a self-effacing man, the kind who listens more than he talks. He’s not apt to come right out and tell you that he is a victim of the Holocaust. Jack’s story has come to me in segments, as we discovered we had a common obsession — German history. And the more we talk, the more intriguing his story becomes.

A false sense of security

Jack and I were having coffee at a Portland cafe when he showed me a photograph of a 1944 registration card from Camp Westerbork. It bears the names of his family: parents Barend and Anna, Jacob and his brother Marcus.

“Wife’s pregnancy exemption canceled because the child was born on Nov. 1, 1943,” states the typewritten card.

The camp commandant, Jack explained, had a policy regarding pregnant women that might seem merciful, but was not. Women in their third trimester were exempted from deportation until six weeks after giving birth, along with their husbands and children. This was part of a larger camp charade. Living conditions at Westerbork were not as bad as other camps. There were soccer matches, chess tournaments and concerts, and inmates wore their civilian clothes instead of concentration camp pajamas, so that prisoners would have a false sense of security before they were sent east.

The trimester “exemption” was one of two cards that had been protecting the Boas family.  The other was Barend’s skills as a tailor. After their arrival at Westerbork, Barend was put to work in the camp’s tailor workshop, and later at the Nazis’ headquarters in The Hague.

In 1944, the family learned they were going to be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, which — although the Nazis presented it as a model camp — served as a feeder camp to Auschwitz. But they never got to Theresienstadt. Canadian troops liberated Camp Westerbork on April 12, 1945.

The family began putting their lives back together in Amsterdam. Barend started a tailor shop. Anna was a seamstress. They moved to Montreal in 1957 because they had no living relatives left in the Netherlands and because of two events portending war: the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Jack got a BA in history and political science at McGill University in Montreal, married a McGill student and followed her to the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his PhD in European history. His dissertation was about German Jews living under Hitler from 1933–39. Research for his dissertation led to his first book: Boulevard des Misères:  The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork.

Jack’s parents didn’t talk much about Westerbork. This was not unusual for Holocaust survivors. They just wanted to get on with their lives. But Jack loved tracing the lives of people in the past, including his relatives. It became the mission that shaped his life.

Survivor syndrome

As I was having coffee with Jack, he talked about his eight-year struggle to get financial compensation as a Holocaust survivor from Dutch authorities. Jack filled out the application in February 1979, and later sent a separate document pertaining to his physical and mental health.

Compensation requests were processed by Dutch authorities under a victims’ benefit act known by its Dutch initials, WUV. A WUV representative went to Jack’s San Francisco apartment to question him, which was followed by interviews by a psychiatrist hired by WUV administrators.

Reports written from these conversations said Jack suffered from “major identity issues,” struggled with depression, implied he was lazy and irresponsible, and noted that his marriage had failed. But the WUV psychiatrist said he was unable to “relate his (Jack’s) symptoms or his cognitive or identity issues directly with his family experience or with his wartime experience.” One report made the ludicrous assertion that  approving Jack’s application for compensation would place “a heavy burden on the Dutch budget.”

So Jack’s application was rejected.

The WUV-hired psychiatrist was not a specialist in the problems of Holocaust survivors. Jack hired one who was, who concluded that Jack showed symptoms of “survivor syndrome,” which he listed as “repeated feelings of persecution, long-term depression, problems with authority, intense anxiety, displaced rage and aggression and obsession with the Holocaust.” Another psychiatrist engaged by Jack said Jack was suffering from “significant repercussions the camp experience had on him and his family.”

Jack’s application for compensation was finally approved in 1984.

It is important to note here that many thousands of Nazi survivors had to wait decades for compensation, partly due to racist or antisemitic attitudes as well as Cold War politics — including forced laborers, German military deserters, Sinti and Roma, and relatives of people murdered because they had disabilities. Even many Jewish survivors encountered long delays, especially those who fled early, lived in hiding, or lacked the documents postwar officials insisted on.

I went to a talk Jack gave on his latest book, Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant. “Burden of proof” refers to the ordeal he went through for compensation. The second part of the title refers to himself. “I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant,” he told his listeners.

Jack’s audience was mesmerized as he told of his lifelong pursuit to understand his identity in the context of the Holocaust — his research trips to Holland, an invitation by the German government to attend the commemoration of a victims’ memorial, his adventures as an extra in a Dutch docudrama about Bergen-Belsen. He is neither maudlin nor angry when he tells these stories. And he frequently jokes about his experiences.

So this is who prisoner 8331 has become: a surviving remnant who is piecing together a life from fragments, and who reminds us that even fractured memory can be an act of defiance.

The post ‘I’m fragmented, and a surviving remnant’: The story of Westerbork prisoner 8331 appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Concerts by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, have now been called off in Poland and Switzerland amid growing backlash over his past antisemitic comments, further disrupting plans for his upcoming international tour.

Ye also said he had postponed a June concert in Marseille as French media reported that Interior Minister Laurent Nunez was seeking to have the event banned.

“After much thought and consideration, it is my sole decision to postpone my show in Marseille, France until further notice,” Ye wrote in a post on X. In a subsequent post, Ye appeared to allude further to the situation, writing, “I know it takes time to understand the sincerity of my commitment to make amends.”

The cancellations follow the scrapping of a London music festival earlier this month where Ye had been slated to headline, after the British government denied him entry into the country amid mounting pressure from Jewish groups over his history of antisemitic remarks.

While Ye has apologized multiple times for his antisemitic tirades, including his previous vows to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” and the release of a song titled “Heil Hitler” last year, the rapper’s upcoming tour this summer has faced mounting cancellations. But his comeback tour — which launched with two sold-out shows in Los Angeles — is prompting renewed scrutiny over the sincerity of his apologies, and debate over how much time should pass before figures who have erred are allowed back into public life.

On Saturday, the Swiss football club FC Basel, which coordinates concerts at the St Jakob-Park ground where Ye had requested to perform in June, told Reuters that it had denied the rapper’s request to use the venue.

“FCB received an enquiry and considered it. However, after thorough review, we have decided ​not to proceed with the project, as ​we cannot, in accordance with our values, provide a platform ‌for ⁠the artist in question within this context,” a spokesperson told Reuters.

And after the Polish culture ministry announced it was seeking to block Ye from performing in the country, the Silesian Stadium in Chorzów cited “formal and legal reasons” for canceling West’s upcoming June concert.

“The decision to organize a Kanye West concert in Poland is unacceptable,” Poland’s culture minister, Marta Cienkowska, wrote in a post on X, adding, “In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment.”

Ye still has concerts slated in New Delhi, Istanbul, the Netherlands, Italy, Madrid and Portugal later this year.

The Centraal Joods Overleg, a Dutch Jewish watchdog group, called on Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel to cancel Ye’s planned concerts in the country earlier this month, writing that it must “apply the same standards” as the U.K. and Australia, which barred Ye from entering the country in July. The mayor of the city where the concert is to take place, Ahmed Marcouch, said last week that he saw no legal basis for canceling the concert, even as he said he thought Ye’s comments about Jews were “disgusting.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Kanye West concerts scrapped in Poland, Switzerland as backlash over antisemitic remarks continues appeared first on The Forward.

If you are a fan of klezmer music, you may be familiar with a catchy up-tempo Yiddish song “Barikadn” (barricades), recorded by the popular band The Klezmatics. The song is about a strike by workers in the Polish city of Łόdź, in which men, women, and children join together to erect barricades in the streets of the city.

Barikadn was popular with the Bund (General Jewish Labour Bund), a secular Marxist Jewish political movement established in 1897 in Vilna (then in the Russian Empire), just two months after the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland.

The Bund was one of the first socialist political movements in Russia. It played an important role during the lead up to the Russian revolution, but disbanded in the early 1920s, in response to pressure from the Communist Party. However, it continued to be an influential Jewish voice in Poland and Lithuania until the outbreak of World War II.

The Bund promoted the use of Yiddish, rather than Hebrew as a Jewish national language. The concept of “doikayt” (Yiddish for “hereness”) was a central feature of Bundist ideology. It discouraged Jewish nationhood (Zionism), advocating instead for Jewish communities to remain dispersed but culturally autonomous and politically engaged within their host countries.

Before the outbreak of World War II, the Bund was the most popular Jewish political force in Poland, with a party membership of close to 100,000. Its members were central to the vibrant secular Yiddish cultural life of pre-war Poland. However, as recorded by Yad Vashem, the Bund suffered the same fate as all the Jews of Poland. Only 1,000 members survived the war.

Today, in the aftermath of October 7, and now the Iran war, the Bund is enjoying something of a revival, as exemplified by Molly Crabapple’s new book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. The book highlights the universalist hope of Bund ideology, versus the perils associated with following the Zionist plan, including eternal war with Israel’s Arab neighbors and an increasingly chauvinist agenda.

Crabapple’s book has received a number of positive reviews, including one in The Forward and another in The Guardian (“For Leftist Jews the Bund is a Model”). However, one reviewer in Commentary Magazine has pointed out the fatal flaw in the Bundist program. He writes “We’ll never know if the Holocaust would have happened as it happened had there been a State of Israel at the time. Instead, the Holocaust happened during the time of the Bundists. That isn’t to blame them, obviously, for what happened. It is merely to say that Bundism wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival.”

As noted earlier, very few of the Bundists survived the Holocaust, so we don’t really know their views in the aftermath. However, Isaac Deutscher was a prominent Polish-Jewish socialist, writer, and journalist, a biographer of Trotsky.

Before World War II, Deutscher opposed Zionism as economically retrograde and harmful to the cause of international socialism. But after the Holocaust he regretted his pre-war views, saying, “If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.”

The Bund wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival. Zionism was, and still is. Unlike other nationalisms, modern Zionism is a survivalist imperative, a rescue mission. In this, it has been remarkably successful; a refuge for Jews from the DP camps of Europe, from the Arab/Muslim world, and from the Former Soviet Union.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.