Leon Szalet

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Leon Szalet , originally: Chaim Jehudah Leib Chalette ( April 9, 1892 in Żelechów - March 2, 1958 in Berlin ) was a Polish real estate agent . From 1921 he lived in Berlin; his escape to England in 1939 failed. He was then sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where he was subjected to massive abuse. In 1940 he was released thanks to the efforts of his daughter and was able to flee to the United States via Italy and Shanghai .

Szalet was one of the earliest contemporary witnesses to the crimes of National Socialism .

life and work

Memorial plaque at the Oranienburg clinker works , Lehnitzschleuse , in Oranienburg

As a young boy, Szalett went to Warsaw with his parents, where he attended and graduated from school. He then worked as a businessman, married and had a daughter, Gitla-Matla, who was born in Paris in 1914 when her parents were temporarily staying there. In 1921 he went to Berlin, worked as a real estate agent and in 1926 designed prefabricated steel houses together with a friend, the architect Georg Breslauer . The two applied for patents for their innovation, which were also granted in various industrial nations. In 1936 his and Breslauer's model houses were shown at the Olympic Building Exhibition in London. The increasingly aggressive foreign policy of the Nazi regime prevented further cooperation with foreign countries.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, Nikolaus Wachsmann reports , he made a daring attempt to leave Germany. On August 27, 1939, he boarded a plane to London without a visa, arrived there, but was turned back by “dutiful British border officials”. On September 13, 1939, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp along with another five hundred Polish Jews who lived in Germany .

237 days in the Jewish bloc

Szalet was one of five hundred Polish Jews who were deported from Berlin to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg in 1939 . In his report he paid attention to every detail, nothing should be forgotten.

  • The inhabitants of Oranienburg received the prisoners with insults, they threw stones and droppings.
  • Before Hitler, the small town of 25,000 was unknown. But since "German death mills" were built there, "Oranienburg's fame has spread far beyond Germany's borders into the whole world".
  • An SS block leader in his nailed boots ran over the backs of the prisoners in Barrack 38. “How my body burned. I was no longer skin, flesh and bones, ”recalled Szalet. "I was a single wound in which a fire sat and burned."
  • Images of the flower beds behind the barracks, of half-starved prisoners, have been carefully carved into memory. “During many sleepless nights, I was preoccupied with the tragic contradiction between the lovely flower beds and the crime-soaked atmosphere of the camp and robbed me of calm. But that we had to contribute to the cultivation of our grave flowers, that was more than irony. "
  • Szalet describes in minute detail: the camp life, the guard houses equipped with machine guns and spotlights, the stone house of the commandant's office, the barbed wire under power, the ever-growing barracks town - and how SS men kicked corpses across the roll call area.
  • Despite his illness, he reported to the Klinker work brigade, where people died like flies. He wanted to see everything to be able to report. "That in the accounting, if the wicked would crawl to the cross and beg for mercy, these observations could be thrown into the balance."
  • All prisoners unanimously report on the power of the Kol Nidre (sung) prayer in the camps: “Suddenly the oppressive silence was interrupted by a sad melody. It was the plaintive sound of the old 'Kol Nidre' prayer. "

The pain from back then remained with Szalet, until his death, especially the pain of being unable to find a language for what he had experienced. "Where are there words?" He asked himself. "Where can you find paint and brush, marble and chisel to reproduce this funeral procession?"

Release, escape

Due to the intensive efforts of his daughter, Leon Szalet was released on May 7, 1940. Father and daughter immediately traveled to Italy and there they reached the SS Conte Verde , the last ship to the Far East. After Italy entered the war in June 1940, further transports to Asia became impossible. Szalet made it to Shanghai and stayed there until October 1941 when the entry visa to the United States was received . He arrived in San Francisco on October 23, 1941 . In the United States, he tried to renew previous contracts and rebuild his business.

In the years 1942 to 1944, when the mass extermination of European Jews reached its peak on Polish territory, Szalet wrote - in accordance with his "vow" - his report on his time in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and on the tortures that the prisoners had to endure there. The detailed descriptions of the crimes committed by prison functionaries and SS block leaders were also intended to help prosecute the perpetrators in the future.

No peace to the wicked

"Szalet describes life in the camp in minute detail: the stone house of the commandant's office, the guard houses, equipped with spotlights and machine guns, the barbed wire under power, the ever-growing barracks town - and how the SS men kicked the corpses across the roll call square." Nothing should be forgotten devices. Despite his illness, he reported to the Klinker work brigade, which had a high death rate. He wanted to see everything in order to be able to report about it: "That in the accounting, if the wicked would crawl to the cross and beg for mercy, these observations could be thrown into the balance." Juliane Brauer describes the work as follows:

“Szalet's survival report is particularly impressive because of its linguistic urgency and its timely intensity. As an eyewitness, Szalet documented the worst months for the Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from September 1939 to the spring of 1940. Although it was not created as a diary, the attention to detail and the inner visualization of what happened, but above all the daily description of the first and cruelest 17 days in the Jewish barracks the impression that the report emerged from notes taken at the same time. In his vivid descriptions of the emotional and physical suffering of the prisoners [...] he is in no way inferior to the diary of the Norwegian prisoner Odd Nansen . "

The report appeared in an abridged English version in early 1946 under the title Experiment 'E'. Report from an Extermination Laboratory , where "E" stands for extermination and is intended to trace the continuity of the extermination in German and Polish camps. The taz wrote about the German edition of 2006 : "As the contrast between the peaceful images and the cruelty of what is reported hurts, so does the literary quality of Szalet's testimony, the poetry of his linguistic images."

Illness, death

After the fall of the Nazi regime, Szalet asked for compensation for the loss of assets in Berlin. He managed to get a building back. A publication of his eyewitness report in German, in the language in which the text was written, could not be realized despite various efforts during his lifetime. The book was only published 61 years after the fall of the Nazi regime, 48 years after his death.

In 1957, Szalet traveled across Europe. He visited Austria, France, England and Germany. Health problems forced stays in sanatoriums in Austria and England. The aftermath of the concentration camp detention was palpable. He died in Berlin at the beginning of March of the following year.

Daughter's life path

Gitla-Matla Szalet, later: Madleine Lejwa-Chalette , married the Polish biochemist Arthur Lejwa in 1947. The couple opened a gallery in Manhattan and became successful art dealers in the 1950s. The Chalette Gallery , named after her father's original name, was closed by the daughter in 1972 after her husband died. However, she continued to work as a consultant for collectors and museums, sponsored the biochemistry branch at Hebrew University and excavation work at New York University in Aphrodisia, and was patroness of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She died childless in Manhattan in 1996.

The couple's collection, The Arthur and Madeleine Chalette Lejwa Collection , is in the Israel Museum . The legacy includes works by Hans Arp , Julio González and Pablo Picasso . Further donations were made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington during his lifetime .

Book and film

A copy of the original manuscript by Leon Szalet came into the archives of the Sachsenhausen Memorial in the 1990s . In 2006 it produced a carefully edited and annotated edition - "Almost 50 years after the documentarist's death, his legacy is now before the public." However, it was not the original title that was chosen, but Barrack 38 , and the subtitle 237 days in the " Judenblocks ”of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The barracks 38 has in three ways a special historical significance: it stands as one of the three so-called Jews barracks symbolic of the "special treatment" of Jewish inmates in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, it was in 1992 almost completely destroyed by a right-wing arson attack and now is in the permanent exhibition Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen.

It was not until 2011 that the title of the manuscript chosen by the author - No Peace to the Wicked - was used, but not for a book publication, but for an essay film by Mikko Linnemann , which was made in 2011, and the literary survival report of inmate Leon Szalet with images and sounds of the places described from the time the film was made contrasted.

bibliography

Web links

Commons : Leon Szalet  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

  • Leo Baeck Institute : Guide to the Papers of Leon Szalet (1892–1958), 1914–1996 , AR 10587 / MF 944, processed by Johanna Schlicht, last changes 2005 and 2009, accessed on August 16, 2016. The holdings consist of ( I) personal documents, (II) manuscripts, (III) reviews, (IV) contracts and copyrights, (V) correspondence, (VI) steel houses, (VII) real estate in Berlin, (VIII) newspaper clippings, (IX) photographs and ( X) Mixed materials.
  • Nikolaus Wachsmann : KL - The History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps, Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-88680-827-4 . Pp. 273f, 280, 798f and 945. The materials were saved on four microfilms, Reel 1: 1 / 1-1 / 4, Reel 2: 1 / 5-1 / 22, Reel 3: 1 / 23-2 / 20 , Reel 4: 2/21-2 / 41

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wachsmann, p. 273.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Sonja Vogel: Where are there words? , Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), November 5, 2012, accessed on August 15, 2016.
  3. ↑ Thomas Rahe: "Hear Israel" - Jewish religiosity in National Socialist concentration camps. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999, p. 156
  4. ↑ a b c d e Juliane Brauer: L. Szalet: Barrack 38. 237 days in the "Jewish blocks" of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. , Review for H-Soz-Kult, April 5, 2007, accessed August 15, 2016.
  5. ↑ See also brickworks Oranienburg .
  6. ↑ Sonja Vogel: Where are there words? , in: Tageszeitung (Berlin), November 5, 2012, accessed on October 30, 2016.
  7. ^ Rita Reif: Madeleine Chalette Lejwa, 81, Art Collector, Dealer and Donor , Orbituary, The New York Times , June 12, 1996, accessed August 16, 2016.
  8. ^ Israel Museum : Dada, Surrealism and their Legacies in the Israel Museum , accessed August 16, 2016.
  9. ↑ No peace to the wicked. Backfire Productions website, accessed August 16, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Szalet, Leon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chalette, Chaim Jehudah Leib (original name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish real estate agent and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Żelechów
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1958
Place of death Berlin