World War II (1939-45)

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      Inge Ginsberg, Holocaust Survivor With a Heavy Metal Coda, Dies at 99

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      Her rich life, spanning three continents and 11 decades, entailed wartime espionage, volumes of poetry, songwriting and a late-career turn as a rock band’s frontwoman.Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped American spies in Switzerland during World War II, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died on July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.The cause was heart failure, said Pedro da Silva, a friend and bandmate.In a picaresque life, Ms. Ginsberg lived in New York City, Switzerland, Israel and Ecuador. She wrote songs and poetry, worked as a journalist and refused to fade into the background as she aged, launching herself, improbably, into her heavy metal career.She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television in “Switzerland’s Got Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ms. Ginsberg would typically appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.In the 2017 music video for the band’s song “I’m Still Here,” Ms. Ginsberg stands in front of a screen showing filmed images of refugees. She sings — in a manner reminiscent of spoken-word poetry — about her grandmother and four young cousins, all of whom were killed in German camps. At the end, she slices the screen and walks through it, singing as she joins the other band members amid a roar of electric guitars, drums and a pounded piano.“All my life, I fought for freedom and peace,” she sings. In the last chorus, Ms. Ginsberg, who was in her 90s at the time, screams, “I’m still here!”The band grew out of a friendship between Ms. Ginsberg and Lucia Caruso; they had met in the audience of a concert in 2003 at the Manhattan School of Music. Ms. Caruso, a student there, was watching the performance of a doctoral composition by her boyfriend, Mr. da Silva. The couple married, went on to performing and teaching careers in classical music and stayed close to Ms. Ginsberg.One day in 2014, Ms. Ginsberg read out loud to Mr. da Silva the words of a children’s song she was writing. “She wrote these lyrics about worms eating your flesh after you die,” Mr. da Silva said. That had the ring of heavy metal to him, and he suggested building a band around her.The band began rehearsing and filming music videos later that year, the productions paid for by Ms. Ginsberg. She wrote the lyrics to their songs and performed them, with Mr. da Silva and Ms. Caruso and others accompanying her on various instruments, including the guitar, piano, drums, organ and oud.A short documentary video in 2018 for The New York Times Opinion section by the filmmaker Leah Galant recounted Ms. Ginsberg’s story. It shows scenes of her performing on “Switzerland’s Got Talent” and auditioning to appear on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent.” Speaking on camera, she said she wanted to prove through her performing that elderly people could still contribute to society.“In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the Op-Doc. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”A 96-year-old who fled the Holocaust finds a new way to be heard.Leah GalantMs. Galant said in an interview, “We felt energized by her as much she felt energized by us.”Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1922, to Fritz and Hildegard (Zwicker) Neufeld. Her father ran a freight company, and her mother was a homemaker.Ms. Ginsberg described herself as a “Jewish princess” in her youth; she and her brother, Hans, had been afforded every luxury. But that changed with the rise of the Nazi Party.Ms. Ginsberg would tell Ms. Caruso and Mr. da Silva stories of the persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Vienna. In one instance, she said, she hid all night behind a grandfather clock in a building in town to evade Nazi paramilitary forces targeting Jews. Her mother assumed the worst, but Inge returned the next morning to a tearful reunion.After the war had begun her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp but was freed, Ms. Ginsberg said, after he bribed Nazi officials. Her mother, meanwhile, using money from the sale of her jewelry, fled to Switzerland in 1942 with Inge, Hans and Inge’s boyfriend, Otto Kollman, who would become Inge’s husband.The family lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, and Ms. Ginsberg managed a villa in Lugano, which was used as a safe house for Italian resistance members; there, she said, she and Mr. Kollman would pass messages from the resistance to the American O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A.After the war, she and Mr. Kollman made their way to Hollywood, where they worked as a songwriting duo. The couple divorced in 1956.Ms. Ginsberg in an undated photo. “In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” she said. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”Inge GinsbergMs. Ginsberg said in the Times documentary that she eventually found Hollywood “all fake” and returned to Europe the year of her divorce. She worked as a journalist in Zurich, wrote a German-language memoir of her time at the villa and published several books of poetry. She had invested successfully in the stock market, which kept her wealthy throughout her life and allowed her to pursue writing.In 1960, she married Hans Kruger, who ran a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv, where the couple lived. They divorced in 1972. That same year, she married Kurt Ginsberg, and they mainly lived in Quito, Ecuador.Ms. Ginsberg is survived by her daughter with Mr. Kollman, Marion Niemi, and a granddaughter.After Mr. Ginsberg’s death, Ms. Ginsberg split her time among homes in New York, Tel Aviv and Zurich. By the spring of 2020, she was living in the Zurich care facility when she contracted the coronavirus. Pandemic restrictions often kept residents from seeing one another or from entertaining visitors, and the isolation took its toll.“We have no doubt whatsoever that she died because of boredom, loneliness and depression,” Mr. da Silva said.He and Ms. Caruso kept in touch with her over the phone, and the three began writing another song for the band called “Never Again,” also drawing on Ms. Ginsberg’s experience during the Holocaust.“Each one of my songs has a message,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the documentary. “Don’t destroy what you can’t replace.” She added a second message: “You can’t avoid death, so laugh about it.” More

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      ‘Misha and the Wolves’ Review: Fuzzy Memories

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      Did an ostensible Holocaust memoirist really spend her childhood running with wolves? This documentary has answers.The documentary “Misha and the Wolves” revisits a semi-infamous episode in Holocaust appropriation. In a 1997 book, an author named Misha Defonseca claimed that, as a child during World War II, she had trekked through the woods living with a pack of wolves.The spoiler-averse will want to stop reading. But about a decade later, her story was exposed as a fraud. The film, directed by Sam Hobkinson and streaming on Netflix, recounts how various people — a publisher, Jane Daniel; a genealogist, Sharon Sergeant; and a Holocaust survivor, Evelyne Haendel, who tirelessly researched the case in Belgium — uncovered information about Defonseca’s real wartime experiences.The movie also tries to illustrate the nature of deception, to the point of lying to the viewer. A person labeled by name as an ordinary talking head turns out to be a performer on a set; at a critical moment, we see her wig removed. But “Misha and the Wolves” is most absorbing when it deals with the search for truth. Haendel, who spent her own childhood during the Holocaust hiding as a Catholic, recalls how she pored over old phone books and other records.“Misha and the Wolves” plays best on first viewing, with its surprises intact. The current documentary “Enemies of the State” deals more provocatively with verification issues in a less publicly settled case. Still, “Misha and the Wolves” shows how, in certain situations, people too polite to demand evidence can be hoodwinked. The film’s late efforts to portray Defonseca as at least some sort of victim don’t wash.Misha and the WolvesRated PG-13 for lies. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

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      She played the accordion in the camp’s orchestra. Decades later, she spoke out against fascism and racism, using music as well as words.When Esther Bejarano was 18, she played accordion in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, which played marches as prisoners left the concentration camp for hard labor and upbeat music as train loads of Jews and others arrived.“They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things can’t be that bad,’” she told The New York Times in 2014, recalling how some detainees smiled and waved at the musicians. “They didn’t know where they were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”Mrs. Bejarano died on Saturday at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany. She was 96. With her death, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist, is believed to be the only member of the orchestra still alive.Mrs. Bejarano’s death was announced by the International Auschwitz Committee, which was founded by survivors of the death camp and to which she belonged, serving as a powerful voice against intolerance in her later years.She would also form a band with her children to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs and, in her 80s, joined a hip-hop group that spread an antifascist message.Being in an orchestra at a concentration camp was often an escape from forced labor, and possibly from death. For Mrs. Bejarano, playing music for her captors relieved her of having to carry heavy rocks and earned her decent medical treatment during two illnesses.Women deemed fit for work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, in a photograph taken in May 1944.Vashem Archives/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Mrs. Bejarano learned that a women’s orchestra was being formed at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, she approached its conductor, Zofia Czajkowska, a Polish music teacher.She played the piano, but there wasn’t one at the camp at the time. When Ms. Czajkowska asked if she could play the accordion, she said she could, although she never had. Yet she passed her audition, playing a German song, “Du hast Glück bei den Frauen, Bel Ami” (“You’re Lucky With Women, Bel Ami”).“At the time it was a very well-known hit,” Mrs. Bejarano said in an interview cited in “Auschwitz Studies No. 27,” published in 2014 by the Auschwitz Memorial State Museum. “I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones. I managed.”Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps — to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes.“They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.She celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis in a market square in Lubz, Germany. A picture of Hitler was set on fire by American soldiers. A G.I. handed her an accordion, which she played as soldiers and other camp survivors danced.“That was my liberation, an incredibly great liberation,” she told Der Spiegel last year. “The American and Russian soldiers embraced and shouted, ‘Hitler is dead.’”She found her way to a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, near a former concentration camp, where she learned that the Nazis had killed her parents in Riga, Latvia. Her sister Ruth, who had fled to Switzerland, was deported and sent to Auschwitz before Esther’s arrival.“That is so fateful,” Mrs. Bejarano told the British newspaper The Telegraph in an interview. “I came to Auschwitz in April 1943, and if she had lived, I would have met her there.”From Bergen-Belsen, Mrs. Bejarano hitchhiked to Frankfurt and took a train to Marseille, France, where in August 1945 she boarded a boat to what was then British Palestine and was reunited with her sister Tosca. Their brother, Gerhard, had immigrated to the United States some years earlier.Mrs. Bejarano in 2015, with Efim Kofman on accordion. She formed a band late in life to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs.Daniel Reinhardt/picture-alliance dpa, via Associated PressEsther Loewy was born on Dec. 15, 1924, in Saarlouis, in southwestern Germany, near the French border. Her father, Rudolf, was a teacher and cantor. He met her mother, Margarethe, in Berlin when they were teenagers; he was her piano teacher, and the two fell in love.Ms. Bejarano described her childhood as “lighthearted,” but that part of her life ended when she was sent at 16 to a Nazi work camp near Berlin, from which she would be sent to Auschwitz.After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”Mrs. Bejarano, a recipient of Germany’s Order of Merit, issued a statement this year through the International Auschwitz Committee calling for Germany to declare May 8 a federal holiday to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe.“And if you are concerned about whether Germans should celebrate this day solemnly,” she wrote, “imagine: What would the world look like if the Nazis had won?” More

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      ‘Apocalypse ’45’ Review: Graphic Images of Wartime

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      Candid testimonies from World War II veterans accompanies vivid archival footage in this immersive documentary that showcases the myths we tell ourselves about war.At one point in “Apocalypse ’45,” the camera gazes over Tokyo from an American military bomber as the plane ejects a cluster of cylinders. For several beats, the bombs disappear into the air. Then we see the explosions: tiny bursts of orange far below.Startling images appear throughout “Apocalypse ’45,” a transfixing documentary that depicts the final months of World War II in rare detail. The film (streaming on Discovery+) combines vivid archival footage from war reporters with the accounts of an array of veterans. Its project is to immerse us in the horrors of warfare, and to convey the ways its witnesses cope with war’s psychic toll.The images, taken from digitally-restored film reels that sat in the National Archives for decades, are disturbingly graphic. A Japanese woman steps off a cliff in the Mariana Islands to avoid being taken hostage. Soldiers on Iwo Jima shoot flamethrowers into caves. Planes piloted by kamikaze plunge into ships near Okinawa. The director Erik Nelson adds realistic wartime sound effects to the silent footage, achieving an unsettling verisimilitude.But the veterans, whose candid testimonies are interwoven in voice over, are the movie’s shrewdest addition. Notably, Nelson declines to distinguish among the men, and instead patchworks their deep, breathy voices into sonic wallpaper. Without faces or names, their remarks cannot be individually condemned or celebrated. Rather, they blend into a collective, showcasing how people seek out myths — about war’s inevitability, Japanese conformity, or American might — to find reason where there may be none.When it comes to representing non-American experiences, the documentary is less equipped. Nelson calls on only one Japanese interviewee, a survivor of Hiroshima. His voice opens the documentary, and reappears later on to describe the atom bomb attack. The survivor’s perspective is vital, but offered alone, its inclusion feels perfunctory. “Apocalypse ’45” knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.Apocalypse ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      'Colette,' From the Video Game Medal of Honor, Wins an Oscar

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      “Colette,” which was featured in the virtual-reality video game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, took home the award for best documentary short.It was a night of firsts: First Korean actor to win an Oscar, oldest performer to win best actor, first woman of color to win best director.And, for the video game industry, its first Oscar recognition for best documentary short.The statuette was for “Colette,” a short film featured in the Oculus virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is also the first Oscar for Facebook. (It owns Oculus, the virtual-reality group that produced the documentary short along with EA’s Respawn Entertainment.)The 24-minute film, directed by Anthony Giacchino and produced by Alice Doyard, follows a survivor of the French Resistance, Colette Marin-Catherine, as she returns to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II to visit a concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother, Jean-Pierre.“The real hero here is Colette herself, who has shared her story with integrity and strength,” Mike Doran, the director of production at Oculus Studios, said in a statement. “As we see in the film, resistance takes courage, but facing one’s past may take even more.”Medal of Honor, which is set during World War II and casts players as an Allied agent trying to outwit the Nazis, did not garner much acclaim as a video game. Many reviewers criticized it for its huge system requirements, which were largely the result of the inclusion of so much historical and documentary footage.But now that the film has won an Oscar — well, that might change a few minds. Or at least get it in front of the eyes of nongamers. You can watch “Colette” free online on Oculus TV or YouTube, or on the website of The Guardian, which later acquired and distributed the film.“We hope this award and the film’s reach means” that the memories of all of who resisted “are no longer lost,” Doran said. More

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      Theater Review: 'Yellow' in the 'Sorrows of Belgium' Trilogy

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      Theaters have been closed in Belgium since October. An on-camera production was born out of necessity, but its look at Nazi history offers a fascinating blend of theater and cinematography.A year ago, filming was hardly a priority for most theater companies. Luk Perceval’s “Sorrows of Belgium” trilogy, commissioned by the Belgian company NTGent, shows how fast the business has adapted. In 2019, the first installment, “Black,” was recorded only for archival purposes; the second, “Yellow,” premiered this month in an eye-catching version designed primarily for the screen.It was a pragmatic decision in Belgium. As in many countries, theaters have been shut since a second wave of Covid-19 hit in October, with no reopening date in sight. A group of arts workers and venues called Still Standing for Culture has ramped up protests; on March 13, it marked the anniversary of the first Belgian lockdown with around 250 symbolic performances and marches.The film version of “Yellow” may have been born out of necessity, but it offers a fascinating blend of theater and cinematography and sheds light on a chapter in Belgian history that most foreign viewers would be unfamiliar with. Having delved into the atrocities in Congo under Belgian colonial rule in “Black,” Perceval focuses here on Flemish collaboration with the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War. (The final production in the trilogy, “Red,” is planned for next season and will tackle the terrorist attacks that shocked the country in 2016.)“Yellow” is still tentatively scheduled for a stage run at NTGent in May, and is supposed to travel to the Landestheater Niederösterreich in Austria in the fall. According to a spokesman for NTGent, Perceval, one of Belgium’s best-known directors, wanted the film to be “as different as possible” from what audiences would eventually see in the theater.That goal has undoubtedly been achieved. As I watched “Yellow,” I kept wondering how certain transitions, involving cuts between scenes in different parts of NTGent’s building, would translate onstage. The filmmaker Daniel Demoustier also leaned into a period aesthetic by shooting “Yellow” almost entirely in black-and-white, and the camera hovers near the characters’ faces as fascist slogans worm their way into their psyches.The production is based on a new play by the Belgian-born writer and director Peter van Kraaij, interspersed with speeches and other historical material. Its choral structure and allusiveness require a little work from the audience early on, but the characters soon fall into place. The main story line revolves around a fictional Flemish family of Nazi sympathizers. The son, Jef, leaves for war on the eastern front and sends letters home; his sister, Mie, wishes she could join him and enters into a correspondence with another soldier, Aloysius.Lien Wildemeersch, left, plays the daughter in a Flemish family of Nazi sympathizers in “Yellow.”Fred DebrockThe family’s father, Staf, clashes with his brother Hubert, who opposes the German occupation and hides a young Jewish woman, Channa. Her story — told to Hubert rather than explored in depth — feels a little like a token in the larger arc of the production. The link between Nazi collaborators and the Holocaust seems obvious enough without it. Then again, that may be an optimistic view.“Yellow” eloquently charts the rise of Rex, a far-right Belgian party that advocated collaboration during the German occupation and encouraged men to enlist for war. Its founder, Léon Degrelle (played by Valéry Warnotte), makes appearances and voices his admiration for Hitler alongside Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian SS officer.Perceval’s depiction of collaborationists left me with mixed feelings. The film’s many close-ups bring out a sense of disconnect in the main characters, their eyes glazed over yet betraying a chilling inner fire; Hubert and Channa, on the other hand, are empathetic even in moments of despair. The contrast is visually effective, but it also positions fascists promoting murder as delusional rather than fully rational — a complex debate that occurs again and again when it comes to extremism.The choreographed scenes peppered throughout “Yellow” reinforce that impression. The actors often dance to heavy drums on and around a large table designed by Annette Kurz, in a state of trance; in one instance, an actor shouts war statistics into the camera as the others writhe. It brought to mind the troubled legacy of German modern dance, which favored choral group numbers. Some of that movement’s choreographers ended up collaborating with the Nazi regime, too, and contributing sweeping tableaux to its propaganda.The cast is faultless: Lien Wildemeersch (as Mie) and Peter Seynaeve (who plays the father), especially, hold one’s attention in every scene. Under the circumstances, “Yellow,” which will be shown again for 48 hours beginning Friday, is a stunning achievement; I’d like to see how live performance recalibrates the audience’s perception of it.NTGent isn’t the only Belgian theater looking for virtual ways to salvage the season. Several are in the process of building online platforms, including the Brussels-based KVS. On KVS 24/7, it will stream the premiere of the French-language production “The One (et Demi) Man Show” from Thursday through Sunday.Ismaël Saidi’s “Muhammad” at the Théâtre de Liège.Dominique Houcmant GoldoThe Théâtre de Liège, in the French-speaking region of Wallonia, started an app in February and has already shown Ismaël Saidi’s “Muhammad,” a new one-man show about the Islamic prophet. In late April, its Émulation festival for emerging artists will also be available to watch online.Still, the most creative local response to the circumstances belongs to the Théâtre l’Improviste, in Brussels. This venue dedicated to improvisation has opted to translate its craft to YouTube, with a little help from the audience.Two weekly live shows, “Visio” and “#Hashtag,” bring actors together for online comedy sessions in French. Viewers determine the premise of the improvisation via YouTube’s chat feature. On a recent Sunday, for “Visio,” I joined a dozen attendees who determined that the actor Patrick Spadrille would play a character in the Seychelles; that the second performer, Ron Wisnia, would be one of his employees; and that Spadrille, tired of his tropical getaway from the pandemic, would look for an excuse to return to Belgium.The chat feature is turned off during the hourlong show so the actors can perform uninterrupted. Their exchange strayed from the initial rules, as always with improvisation, but Spadrille and Wisnia were seamlessly reactive as a roguish fraudster and his seemingly gullible right-hand man.The cast for “Visio” and “#Hashtag” changes every week, with actors tuning in from Belgium, France, the United States and Canada. As with “Yellow,” the benefits for viewers at home are real: Each production offers a window onto Belgium’s creative scene.It’s tempting to think of this as a silver lining in the pandemic, but given the scale of damage reported by the Belgian culture sector, that would probably be a step too far. It is better than nothing, but in the meantime, stages remain dark. More