Holocaust survivors say anti-Israel protests remind us how things started in Nazi Germany

Recent anti-Israel protests across the United States remind one of Holocaust survivors of a situation in which his mother was forced to hide his Jewish identity by joining Hitler’s youth after his mother was sent to the Auschwitz death camp during World War II.

Jocchen “Jack” Warf, who moved to the United States when he was 17, said he was “surprised” and “disappointed” by the waves of anti-Israel protests that had erupted throughout the United States.

Part of the problem is that people at 93 believe they believe, but many, especially young people, do not fully understand what happened during the Holocaust. The period of German state-sponsored persecution led to as many as six million Jews across Europe who were killed by the Nazis before and during World War II.

“I wouldn’t even dream of something like this happening,” Wurfl told the Christian Post about anti-Israel camps that appeared on university campuses and reports of a global surge in anti-Semitism incidents.

“Now that’s happened, I think we need to do everything we can to teach people what the Holocaust is, who Adolf Hitler is, his philosophy and what he was trying to do.”

“What’s going on at all these universities now, and with these students, it’s the beginning of what happened in Germany during Hitler’s time, just in a different way.”

WURFL was born in Austria in 1932 to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. In 1936, due to an escalation of political tension, Wurfl’s parents sent him and his siblings to live with his grandparents in Berlin, Germany.

“Berlin was a little quieter at the time than the rest of Germany,” Wurfl told CP.

At the outbreak of World War II, seven-year-old Warf and his eight-year-old brother Peter joined Hitler’s youth to hide their Jewish identities and escape persecution.

“Everyone was killed.”

The boy’s mother later came to Germany. One day, the two brothers had returned from business when they witnessed their mother being arrested by the Gestapo, a Nazi German political police officer.

“And we said, ‘We’re better off not going in now. We can wait, then later ask our mother why they were there,” recalled Wurfl.

“Well, to my surprise, when we were standing there, it was my mother who got out of the building and put one of the cars in and then drove.”

The brothers finally met their mother before being sent to Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps founded by the Nazis.

The brothers ran to the prison where their mother was taken, sprinting from floor to floor until they found her.

According to WURFL, the guards weren’t paying much attention to the two little boys running around the prison, but when they finally found their mother, she expressed concern to anyone who knew they were there.

“She looked at us and recalled, ‘Oh boy, what are you doing here? It’s so sweet about you, but if they catch you here, the same thing will happen to you who knows what happens to me,” Wurfl recalled what his mother said.

The mother instructed her sons to “become a good boy and go to school to learn what she can,” and told her that she wanted her to know that if she never sees them again, she would love them forever.

Wurfl’s mother passed away from Auschwitz. Their father, the political prisoners at the Mautausen concentration camp, died shortly after the US military released him at the end of the war.

“As far as the rest of my family is concerned, no one survived,” Wurfl said. “Everyone was killed. My aunt, my uncle, my cousins, everyone,” Wurfl said. “But the two survivors were my brother and me.”

The brothers, like many relatives, did not die in the concentration camps. Because my grandfather arranged to live in a children’s summer camp in Dangasto, located 200 miles northwest of Berlin in the North Sea.

“We were very fortunate.”

A German woman named Irma Franzen-Heinrichsdorff ran a summer camp and agreed to take care of the boys. The women became like their second mother, Wurfl said.

“She was a great person,” he recalls. “We lived with her for seven years before coming to the US.”

The camp operator told the brothers they had to join and merge with Hitler’s youth, an organization that instilled young people in Nazi beliefs. In the children’s camp, the boys also attended small schools where teachers belonged to SS, the elite guard of the Nazi regime.

“This teacher knew we were Jews,” he said. “The teacher and Irma knew each other very well. We were very fortunate to have these two who saved our lives and took a huge risk.”

At the end of World War II, the US Committee for the Care of European Children relocated WURFL and his brother to the United States, and began a new life in Baltimore, Maryland, where he learned English and began working for a small insurance company.

Recover family treasures

In addition to telling the story of his survival, Wurfl recalled how the Nazis recovered the title “Hell Rosen” of oil paintings stole from his family during the Holocaust.

The 1915 painting by German artist Lovis Corinth was one of the various possessions the Nazis took from Warf’s family, many of which were not restored.

According to Artnet, German national socialists confiscated most of Corinthian works in the 1930s. With the help of a lawyer, WURFL recovered and restored the painting, and the artwork is currently on display in German museums.

“The good news is that the family treasures have been restored and I have a copy on the wall now,” he said.

After two years in the US Army, WURFL began his own insurance agency in 1969, a diverse insurance industry.

He also married former Miss El Salvador, Zonia Nusen, who lasted 63 years before his death in 2018. The pair had three daughters together.

Wurfl’s brothers currently live in Australia, but as the two men are in their 90s, they are in contact with each other by phone as long-distance travel becomes more difficult.

As a survivor of Hitler’s attempts to eradicate Jews, Wurfl shared his story at school and in his book My Two Lives. The book was released in October 2023 a month before Hamas attacked Israel. The massacre, which experts pointed out was one of the worst attacks on Jews since the Holocaust.

“I wrote it for my family,” he said of his book. “My family asked me to write a book so that our children, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren always know where we came from, what happened to our families, and how they came to America.”