This year will mark 81 years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust — the systemic genocide of more than six million European Jews. As the number of Holocaust survivors diminishes every year, the descendants of those who experienced this atrocity are keeping the stories of their loved ones alive by providing testimonies that illustrate the discrimination and brutality their relatives were subject to, along with the resiliency and hope that sustained them through unimaginable cruelty.
These testimonies were shared with area high school students on Wednesday, Feb. 25, as Louise Jesse and Marty Thau shared the experiences of their fathers, who survived the Holocaust in different ways. This is the second year this program, organized by the Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee, was presented to local students at The Grand Theater. Students from DC Everest High School, Wausau East High School, Newman Catholic School, Mosinee High School and Edgar High School were in attendance for the event.
While both men were subject to the Holocaust, the individual experiences of Jesse and Thau’s fathers differed greatly.
“Like all Holocaust survivors’ stories, they are outliers,” said Sam Goldberg, HERC education director. “The Holocaust took place all over Europe and North Africa, and the ways in which people were affected differed significantly based on where you were, who you were and pure luck. The goal was to kill all European Jews, so those that survived were the outliers. What worked to save one person may not have saved another, and all stories are unique and all deserve to be told.”
The first testimony was from Louise Jesse (whose husband, John, is from Wausau). Jesse’s father, Edgar Inselberg, survived the lesser-known Holocaust that occurred in Greece.
In October 1940, Fascist Italy (aligned with Nazi Germany) invaded Greece from their bases in Albania, supported by Bulgarian and Hungarian units. Weeks later Greece surrendered and Germany, Italy and Bulgaria divided the country into zones of occupation. In Athens, where Edgar Inselberg lived, it was occupied jointly by both Germany and Italy. At that time of occupation, nearly 72,000 Jews lived in Greece.
“Despite all of this, when Italy surrendered, Germany took over this occupation and it became a brutal occupation of mass murder,” Goldberg said.
German officials deported the Greek Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious death camp located in Poland. Eight hundred Jews from Athens and another 4,000 from the Greek islands were all sent to these death camps.
“The SS murdered the overwhelming majority of Jews in these transports upon arrival, and yet, we still have stories of survival,” Goldberg said.
Jesse began her testimony by explaining that, despite their subsequent discrimination, Jewish citizens of Greece were an integral part of Greek society -- woven into Greek culture as friends, neighbors, classmates, soldiers, business partners and more.
“When the Nazis invaded Greece, the Greek Orthodox Church, of whom 95% of the population participated in, urged the parishioners to protect their Jewish brothers and sisters,” Jesse said. “Even though many of them answered the call, the majority of the Jews were killed. Eighty-five to 90% of the entire Jewish population was killed during World War II. My dad was one of the very few who survived. So it’s not lost on me how fortunate I am to be here with you today.”
Jesse’s father, Edgar Inselberg, was born in Greece on June 15, 1930. Inselberg’s paternal family can be traced back to Poland in the 1800s. They arrived in Greece to work in importing and exporting. Inselberg’s maternal side of the family had been in Greece since the 1400s, when the Jews were expelled from Spain.
When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941, planting their flag on the Acropolis and marching through the streets, Inselberg was in his teens.
“The Germans knew how to scare people and how to intimidate them, and they wanted to send a message,” Jesse said. “They wanted to send a few messages. One is: we don’t want you helping the Jews; we want you to help us. We want to know their names, we want to know where they live, and we want you to help us find them.”
Edgar Inselberg’s father, Valentin, would eventually join the Greek Resistance. Valentin, who was widowed at this point, made the difficult decision to leave his sons, Edgar and the younger Alfred, with a family he did not know.
“He was a partisan and he went up into the mountains to work with the British by being an interpreter with all of the languages that he spoke,” Jesse said of her grandfather Valentin. “When he decided to leave, they obviously left tearfully, and they didn’t hear from him again through the entire war.”
Edgar, a devoted student, was able to teach himself English during these years. That proved useful as the war waged on and occupied Greeks found ways around the German’s blocking of radio signals. Families would gather at night in the basement to listen to news from the British Broadcasting Company, translated to Greek by Edgar.
“They heard about the Normandy invasion in June of 1944, and that was the precursor to the liberation of Europe. It lifted their spirits and it gave them great hope,” Jesse said.
During the occupation years, Edgar and Alfred remained in hiding at several different locations in Athens. Their closest shave with the Nazis occurred shortly after the Invasion of Normandy, when, for the first time, the brothers saw a couple German Schutzstaffel (SS) soldiers walking down the street where they were hiding. The SS was a radical paramilitary organization most responsible for the genocidal murders of the Holocaust.
Edgar was on the third-floor terrace of the house when he saw the SS officers ring the bell of the house next door.
“We look at each other and thought, well, this is kind of it,” Edgar said in an archival recording. “We would jump. I remember that.”
After about five minutes, the SS officers left the house and the neighborhood. Edgar waited a day before approaching the neighbors to ask what the Nazis wanted.
“Can you imagine if the neighbors got scared and said, ‘Well, the Jewish children are in this house right next door?’” Edgar said, indicating the neighbors knew of their presence but kept silent. “That’s amazing that the secret was kept and that they didn’t [speak up], either for money or just for their fear of their own lives.”
But not all Greeks were as understanding. Like any of the Nazi-occupied countries, there were Greek collaborators who worked with the German army. Edgar remembers his young brother would frequently go curse and shout insults at one known-collaborator.
“He came to our house and said, ‘I know these children are in this state, but for your sake,’ because he liked the people who were keeping us, ‘please do something about these boys. I’m going to have to denounce you to the Germans,’” Edgar said. “So at that point, the lady that kept us, who was the daughter of a Greek priest, takes my little brother aside and says, ‘You are the embodiment of Satan! The first time the soul showed, you are the embodiment of Satan.’ And I just stood there; I knew what was right. He was endangering all of our lives.”
Athens was liberated on Oct. 12, 1944, but Valentin did not immediately leave the Greek Resistance and come down from the mountains. A couple weeks later, on his youngest son Alfred’s birthday, Valentin returned and was reunited with his boys for the first time in years.
“[Valentin] was not well; he had lost a lot of weight,” Jesse said. “The conditions in the mountains were very difficult; it was very cold. But they were so happy to be reunited.”
Even though the war was over, great struggles remained. Valentin took his boys to the apartment he bought for the family in 1936, only to discover it had been taken over by two Greek collaborators. The friend Valentin had entrusted everything to — all of his money, his business, his belongings — had taken everything.
“He was homeless and penniless after surviving the war,” Jesse said of Valentin. “This happened to a lot of people, and we don’t talk about it very much; it’s like you survived the war, but then what? So my grandfather went to court to fight for his apartment. And the court awarded him half the apartment. It was very modest. I’ve been there; two-bedroom, one-bath apartment with a very small kitchen that he had to share with this collaborating family who’d been trying to find and kill Jews this whole time. He and the three boys stayed in one bedroom, and the other families stayed in the other.”
Edgar went back to high school, where he excelled. He came to the United States with an interest in studying agriculture. He eventually graduated from Cornell University and became a professor.
“For the rest of my dad’s life, he worked to help people, either by giving money, advice, or he even let people stay in their home,” Jesse said. “Can you even imagine being your age or younger, having a war start, losing your mom, going into hiding with people you don’t know while people are out there trying to hunt you down and kill you because of what you believe in, and being hungry and scared? And then being freed only to find out that you’re homeless and you have no money? This is what happened to my grandfather, my father, and my father’s brother. And they survived, and they even thrived eventually.”
The story of Charlie Thau’s experience during the Holocaust was told by his son, Marty Thau, who learned about his father’s experience over time.
“My father never sat down with me to talk about what he did, what happened,” Marty said. “When you talk to any survivor, basically they keep their mouth shut; they’re embarrassed, they’re afraid.”
The story of Charlie is the story of a partisan fighter. Partisans were armed resistance groups operating behind enemy lines to sabotage, ambush and gather intelligence against Axis powers. Many of the Jewish partisans lived in the forest and they gathered after escaping ghettos and camps to form fighting units of guerrilla warfare.
“They had to be constantly on the move to avoid being discovered,” Goldberg said. “They built shelters and had to find food anywhere they went. In some places, partisans received help from local villagers, but more likely they really couldn’t count on that, partly because of the antisemitism they faced and partly because of people’s fear of being punished for helping.”
Despite the dangers and obstacles, as many as 20,000 Jews fought the Germans as partisans in the forests of Eastern Europe.
“It’s important to note that not everyone could resist in this way; some may have been too young or too old or couldn’t escape in the same way others did,” Goldberg said. “The Jewish men and women that acted as partisans did so at great risk.”
Charlie was born in 1921 in east Poland, he was the eldest of three boys. His parents were local peddlers who sold chickens and eggs in the city market near their home.
When the Nazis invaded Poland, Charlie’s parents warned their three sons to run and hide so they wouldn’t be taken. Unfortunately, Charlie’s two younger brothers refused to leave their parents when the Nazis came into town.
“My father, being 18 years old, he ran out in the back of the house into the woods. So he watched his parents and his brothers taken by Nazis in a truck, never to be seen again,” Thau said. “Just think about it — how would you react if that happened today in your house? Somebody came in, took your parents, your family, never to say goodbye or to say, ‘Hey, take care of yourself.’ Nothing like that.”
Charlie, devastated by the loss of his family, fled to the woods to evade the Nazis. He hid in the forest for 19 months, which included two winters. Marty said his father learned to survive in the wilderness by observing animal behavior.
“My father had to dig caves, live in barns where the farmers lived, and lived in the farms until the Nazis came in the morning and they were looking for the Jews hiding,” Marty said. “My father obviously had to get out and hide in the woods.
During the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union, while not aligned with the Germans, also invaded Poland from the east, annexing large parts of the country. Eventually, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941. Around this time, Charlie encountered the Soviet Army in the wilderness. He joined the army, which offered him food, clothes and a weapon for the first time in over a year.
The Soviet Army transported Charlie to a military training facility in Siberia. Similar to Edgar Inselberg, Charlie spoke seven languages, so he served as an interpreter during the war, as well as a commander of four tanks and artillery.
Charlie sustained several wounds during the war. He was shot twice in the leg when he exited a tank, and once in the mouth toward the end of the war. He managed to save his leg from infection and amputation by pouring Russian vodka on the bullet wounds. The mouth wound was not treated initially, either.
“He had one of those bullets in his cheek,” Marty said. “He thought it was just a bump that went through his cheek or a broken cheekbone, so his cheekbone moved around. But it wasn’t a cheekbone; it was a bullet.”
Charlie was part of the Soviet Army that marched on Berlin near the end of the war, where the Soviets fought alongside American forces to end the war. Following the German surrender, Charlie changed his clothes in Berlin and left the army so he wasn’t forced back to Moscow. He went the opposite direction, toward Salzburg, and joined a group that offered aid.
“They were basically people that were helping the people in concentration camps, ghettos, liberating them and getting them to Israel,” Marty said. “And it wasn’t legal to transport people without documentation, so my father joined that group that did a lot of undocumented procedures to get the Jews from Europe to Israel.”
Charlie returned to his hometown after the war, in 1946, to find his house and neighborhood destroyed.
“Eight-thousand Jews were eliminated from his hometown,” Marty said. “He didn’t know what to do.”
Like those he helped, Charlie eventually settled in Israel in 1948. Three years later, he immigrated to the United States. Charlie’s immigration was sponsored by a Jewish family in America. He settled in Sheboygan and eventually moved to Milwaukee for a factory job. At that point, coworkers urged him to see the factory doctor about his mouth. Finally, six years later, the bullet was removed from Charlie’s mouth.
Despite speaking multiple languages, Charlie knew very little English. Charlie and his wife, Ida, spoke mainly Yiddish, Hebrew and dialects of German around the house. Because of this, Marty didn’t learn to speak English until he was five. He wasn’t allowed to enter Kindergarten until he learned English.
“Today, the society, the education today, you can go to any school and there will be some support in your school to help those people that don’t have the English language and teach them how to do that and how to survive in school, but I didn’t have that opportunity until I was five-and-a-half after my father and mother started speaking English,” Marty said.
Due to his experience working on Soviet tanks, artillery and weaponry, Charlie opened a gas station and garage in the 1950s, where he worked for the rest of his life. In 1955, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel profiled Charlie’s experience in the war. Decades later, Marty went to a museum in Germany and saw a photo of his father on display.
“That’s a big thing, and I’m proud of him,” he said.
Students listened to these testimonies for about an hour, and were invited to ask questions afterward. Students were interested in what people can do to stop something like the Holocaust from ever happening again. Earlier, Marty mentioned the common Holocaust remembrance pledge to “Never Forget.”
“We forgot,” he said. “What’s going on in the world today — Ukraine, in Australia, in the US, in Europe — hatred, discrimination, and it’s just terrible. It’s just happening again. And you as students need to think about what you’re going to do to prevent this from happening, because it’s happening again. It’s bad, it’s terrible, it’s horrific.”
Students also asked what they can do to help stop antisemitism, how Thau and Jesse’s parents beat boredom while in hiding, how their fathers learned to move past these tragic events, and how their parents’ experiences shaped how Thau and Jesse grew up.
Jesse said her hope is that, on a personal level, hearing these stories of resilience might help the students at some point in their life.
“Maybe you’re going through a hard time right now, maybe you’ve gone through a hard time prior, maybe you will face adversity in the future — life is like that,” she said. “But you too can persevere and you can even thrive. Or if you see someone who’s being mistreated because of what they look like, what they believe, or where they’re from, you too may have the courage to act with kindness and courage and speak up.”
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