Nazis stole this Holocaust victim's books. How his grandson unexpectedly got them back

Yahoo

28-02-2025

Not one for emotion, opening the four boxes that arrived at his Salt Lake City home from Germany overwhelmed Amos Guiora.
Each contained a leather-bound book embossed in Hebrew with the name Shlomo Natan Goldberg, his paternal grandfather who died in Auschwitz on May 26, 1944.
'There are no words,' Guiora said, sitting in his living room with the books stacked on the coffee table in front of him.
How the books made their way from his grandfather's suitcase confiscated in the selection line at the infamous death camp in Poland into the hands of a notorious Nazi in Germany is a mystery.
As part of an effort to wipe out Jewish culture, Nazis looted books from Jewish owners, libraries, universities and private collections. Many of the items were destroyed, but some were saved for institutions the Nazis planned to establish in order to study and 'scientifically' prove Jewish inferiority, according to Jewish Insider.
After World War II ended in Nazi defeat, thousands of stolen books were left abandoned for decades.
Leibl Rosenberg, an official representative of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, Germany, has dedicated his life to finding descendants of the rightful owners of 9,000 books looted from victims of the Nazi regime and discovered in Julius Streicher's library at the end of the war.
Streicher was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. He was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1946.
Rosenberg, a former journalist, has spent nearly three decades researching the provenance of the books, which are currently housed at the Nuremberg Municipal Library, according to Jewish Insider.
The books are not author's copies or library copies, but tend to belong to everyday people, he said in a 2021 interview posted at Arolsen Archives.
'It was by no means only scholars, rabbis, priests, bibliophiles, collectors and dealers who were robbed. Perfectly ordinary citizens were targeted too, neighbors, friends, and relatives — people you knew, people you had dealings with, people who went about their daily lives alongside you and whose names are now forgotten," Rosenberg said.
About 3,700 of the books contain notes or writing of some kind and he was able to match them to about 2,200 people or institutions, he said.
Books that belonged to those who were murdered or died in the Holocaust take on greater significance when they're returned to living family members. 'Sometimes this can lead to very emotional scenes, which also touch me deeply at a personal level,' said Rosenberg, the son of Polish Jews.
Dozens of volunteers for the project have tracked down 87 heirs in the past three months, including Guiora.
Born in Israel in 1957, Guiora never met his paternal grandparents, Shlomo and Therese Goldberg, both of whom were killed at Auschwitz. He is the only child of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Alexander and Susie Guiora, who referred to herself as a 'Holocaust victor.' He has seen a picture of his grandmother but not his grandfather.
His parents shared little information with him about their experiences. When he was 12, his father took him canoeing and told him that 'in one minute I'll tell you my story and in one minute I'll tell you your mother's story, and this is the first and last time we'll ever have this conversation.'
Alexander Guiora did acknowledge his ordeal once when as an 'impertinent' 15-year-old Guiora asked him why he didn't play golf or tennis or ski like other parents. Without raising his voice, his father replied, 'I survived the Holocaust. Don't you think that is enough exercise?'
The elder Guiora gave a speech at a conference in Budapest sponsored by the Catholic Church about its role in the Holocaust. He focused on Jewish-Christian reconciliation. He never mentioned the word Holocaust. Holocaust scholars have described it as the greatest speech ever given by a Holocaust survivor.
A University of Utah law professor who splits his time between Salt Lake City and Israel, Guiora wrote a book about the Holocaust, 'The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust,' which includes his parents' experiences gleaned from other sources and interviews.
Guiora's mother never told him that like Anne Frank she lived in an attic in Budapest where an elderly Catholic woman brought her food every day. At age 12, she twice survived Hungarian Nazi collaborators taking her and her mother from the home to be shot.
His father never told him he led a group of men from a work camp in Serbia on a 134-kilometer trek in the winter over the Carpathian Mountains to safety in Bulgaria without any navigation tools. The elder Guiora eventually made his way to Palestine.
The unexpected discovery of his grandfather's books has given Guiora another sliver of light into his family history. But he doesn't quite know what to make of it. Did life come full circle? Did it bring things home? Does he keep two books in Utah and two in Israel? It's so fresh and new that he doesn't really know what to do, 'so for now let them rest and then we'll see.'
It might be enough just to have something tangible from the past.
'If you think about it, that's remarkable. It is actually an incredible story,' Guiora said. 'In the age of Holocaust denial, I think anything that we can show or demonstrate that this actually did happen is really important.'
Guiora was at his house just outside Jerusalem when he received an email late at night last December from an amateur genealogist working with the Looted Books Project, a joint initiative of JewishGen's Kalikow Genealogy Center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Leo Baeck Institute, both in New York.
He didn't recognize the sender but the subject line got his attention: Shlomo Natan Goldberg.
It was only the second time he'd seen his grandfather's name. The first was on a Holocaust memorial in his grandfather's hometown of Nyiregyháza, Hungary, along with the names of 10,000 other Jews from the town killed at Auschwitz.
The email and subsequent emails contained a series of questions to verify Guiora's identity and relationship to Goldberg. Guiora's father changed his surname from Goldberg to Guiora on the advice that Holocaust survivors should take an Israeli last name to put the past behind them.
Guiora said the genealogists' effort to find him was 'detective work at its very finest.'
In 1981, Alexander Guiora filled out forms identifying himself as a Holocaust survivor and recorded testimony of Goldberg's death at Israel's Yad Vashem — The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. When Alexander Guiora, a University of Michigan psychology professor, died in 2015, the university wrote a tribute about him. The last line noted his son, Amos, was a University of Utah law professor. A simple Google search led genealogists to Guiora's email address.
The four volumes containing explanations and interpretations of Jewish law found in the Talmud arrived at his home last Friday at the expense of the German government. It appears the text was written between 1670 and 1675 but not printed until 1880.
'To tell you that I am eternally grateful would be an all-time understatement. This is the only thing I have of him, of my grandfather,' Guiora said.
Guiora slept only two hours the night the books arrived because he was so excited to touch them again. 'It's so visceral, maybe that's the word, to have this,' he said.
He has thought a lot the past few days about how his father would have reacted to seeing the books. He said he thinks the terrible reality of Auschwitz 'would have hit him smack in the face.'
Last month, Guiora spoke to 1,000 students at Eisenhower Junior High School in Taylorsville about the Holocaust and his grandparents and parents. He said speaking to kids about his experience is challenging and important.
'As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, one of my greatest fears is that the Holocaust will be put in the dustbin of history,' he said in an S.J. Quinney College of Law article by Lindsay Wilcox published after his visit.
Guiora said the students asked 'intelligent and powerful' questions such as whether he was empathetic to his parents' travails and whether he could have survived the Holocaust if he were alive then.
A teacher at the school, Amy Burgon-Hill, described Guiora's speech about his parents as vulnerable and honest, not condescending or preachy.
'He is able to help my students see that there are people beyond them and that my students are not the only ones who struggle. He does not share his parents' story in a way that suggests students have it so easy. It is an acknowledgement of this horrible and hard thing that happened, but that people survived and they thrived,' she said in the article.
Guiora received 700 thank you notes from the students. They now hang in a frame on the wall in his study. He is going back soon to help the students write papers about the Holocaust. He has something new to share with them.
'I think there's a certain symmetry, if you will, that the books arrived shortly after I met with these kids,' Guiora said.
'This for me is one of those moments in life, if I may, I hate the word overwhelming, but overwhelming.'