Pod Insights ABC Rewind Laya's Way Home - part 2 About this episode Laya Semler was the last Jew sent to a concentration camp from Wennigsen, Germany, in 1945. Her non-Jewish husband Adolf was sent to slave labour for not denouncing her. Both survived. Now, Wennigsen has invited their Australian family back, to commemorate Laya and Adolf’s incredible story of courage and love. In Part 1, their great-grandchildren discovered a town perhaps finally ready to accept the extent of its role in the Nazi regime. In Part 2, they will experience that history face-to-face.
They experience that history face-to-face -- when they visit the slave labour camp, only recently unearthed, where Adolf was held. And where they must reckon with horrors that will shock even the German historians guiding them.
Michaela Kalowski, Joanna's husband John Hempton, Joanna Kalowski and Rick Kalowski
Guests:
Joanna Kalowski - internationally recognised mediator and granddaughter of Laya and Adolf SemlerMichael Wittich - historian for the town of WennigsenChristina Muller - city councillor in WennigsenJutta Henza - historian of the Stolen Gustav slave labour campCredits:
Writers: Rick Kalowski and Michaela Kalowski
Presenters: Michaela Kalowski and Rick Kalowski
Producer: Claudia Taranto
Sound Engineer: Hamish Camilleri
Research assistance : Tadhg Kalowski
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:09 Speaker 01 Hello, Kirsty Melville here and welcome to the History Listen and to part two of the fascinating and moving Laya's Way Home. Joanna Kolofsky's family came to Australia to escape the Holocaust. Joanna is an internationally recognised mediator and she served on the National Native Title Tribunal.
0:32 Speaker 01 But in 2019, she was contacted by a village in Germany with incredible news about her late grandparents, Laya and Adolf Semler.
0:42 Speaker 02 Out of the blue, I got an email from a name I didn't recognise and I was absolutely blown away and delighted. A local historian had discovered that my grandmother was the last Jew to be deported from the village to a concentration camp. My grandfather Adolf, who was not Jewish, had gone to a slave labour camp rather than denounce her, and he was a hero of World War One.
1:08 Speaker 01 Amazingly, both had survived and now the village wanted to commemorate them. So in 2022, Joanna returned to Germany with her adult children, Michaela and Rick Kolofsky, who narrate this story. In this episode, the family pays an emotional visit to the slave labour camp, where Joanna's grandfather Adolf was imprisoned. But first, as we pick up the story, Joanna has just laid stumbling stones, brass plates inscribed with her grandparents' names and the details of their ordeal, outside where they lived, when a sudden disruption threatens to undo the occasion.
1:55 Speaker 03 It had been one of the most moving events of our lives. Our mother Joanna had just laid the stumbling stones, or Stolpersteiner, in front of the house our great-grandparents had been taken from in 1945. But now an old man, in his 80s or more, had gotten past the police who'd held him back through the ceremony and was steaming towards us with an anti-Semitic sign, ranting.
2:18 Speaker 04 I'd often wondered how I'd react if ever faced with an actual pro-Nazi. I'm sure like many Jews I'd harbored heroic revenge fantasies. But seeing this old man coming at us aggressively, I felt none of that. Because what he was saying wasn't Germany anymore. Even in our short time in Veniksen, we could feel from nearly everyone we met, their acceptance of the past, their real regret, determination to keep forging a different Germany, and above all, recognition that that was every individual's personal responsibility.
2:49 Speaker 03 We'd come to find out the old man was, for want of a better description, the town crank. He'd been in and out of institutional care and had gotten worse since the death of his wife. He was why police had been at the stumbling stones ceremony. He wouldn't be at our second event. The other thing ensuring our great-grandmother would be remembered in Veniksen, they were naming a new street after her, Laya Semler Weg, Laya Semler Way.
3:15 Speaker 04 The new street is on the outskirts of town, in an area that for now is semi-rural, with new apartments and houses being built. In the fading light of dusk, it was beautiful. It was also full of young families and kids. Jo said Laya would have loved that.
3:33 Speaker 02 My oma would have been delighted to know that there are new babies in her street. And she would too. She loved looking at little babies.
3:43 Speaker 03 That's the reason Joanna thinks she and Laya were so especially close. When Laya and Adolf reached Australia in mid-1947, Joanna was a baby of six months. Laya was ecstatic. Beyond the doomed infants on the train platform at Teresienstadt, she hadn't seen a living baby in years.
4:02 Speaker 04 Joanna unveiled the new street.
4:11 Speaker 04 The street sign records Leia's birthplace, where she died, how long she lived in Venikson and that she survived the Holocaust.
4:19 Speaker 03 But wonderful as it was, it was also ironic, as our mum said.
4:23 Speaker 02 She couldn't have read it because both she and my grandfather were both illiterate.
4:30 Speaker 03 Many of the street's young parents took time out from the early evening witching hour of dinner and bath to attend the unveiling, ask who Leia was and take photos with their kids at the street sign. One couple told us they'd made a point of bringing their newborn baby girl. They wanted Leia's strong woman vibes to rub off on their daughter.
4:50 Speaker 04 We also found out how Leia came to have the street named for her. Former Venikson city councillor Christina Müller was at the unveiling. She had voted for it over many other ideas. For her, it was the power of Leia's story and a little luck.
5:06 Speaker 05 We have a list from people that was transported to Theresienstadt Katze. And it was women. First, we just had the name, the name and the birth date. And later, when we heard she over lived, we were happy. It's a wonder, it's a present. It's a gift. And therefore, a lot of people died. But these people from Venikson didn't die. And that's very, it's magic. And that you, the family, come to Venikson. It's amazing, it's amazing. Thank you for this.
5:46 Speaker 03 We feel the same. One thing we kept wondering about was whether people in Venikson could really have known for only 15 years that Jews had lived here.
5:57 Speaker 03 We got our answer when we met sociologist Dr Wolfgang Schulz. He helped plan these commemorations and is an expert on Venikson's wartime history.
6:06 Speaker 06 Und in diesem Staat wurden die Juden mitmachen.
6:09 Speaker 03 As he explained it, the fact Venikson never had a synagogue had allowed some to believe there'd been no Jews here and so no Jewish persecution. But others, like a local Lutheran pastor in the 1960s, had suspected that Jews had been here and looked for the evidence. It was that research that first uncovered Leia's name, leading to eventual confirmation she'd lived here and to these commemorations.
6:36 Speaker 04 Our first day had been mostly learning about Leier, but our second would be mostly about our great-grandfather Adolf and what he had experienced. We were going to the Holsen slave labour camp, where he'd been sent aged 50 for refusing to denounce his Jewish wife, Leier. The next morning, as we prepared for the trip, our heads pounded. The night before, we'd been invited for a short tour of our great-grandparents' former home. It had turned into a long tour of the entire history of German wine.
7:05 Speaker 03 But as we got on the bus for the slave labour camps, we sobered right up. We'd thought it was just Joanna, us, and our stepfather who were going. But already on board, waiting for us, was a local who's who: historian Michael Vittish, mayor Inge Klockermann, local business figure Hans-Jürgen Här, who he told us was therefore formally known in German as Här Här.
7:27 Speaker 04 And there was Harmut Rama, who had laid flowers on Leier and Adolf's stumbling stones the day before, after I'd first misjudged him. He was with his wife, Sibilla. None of these people had been obligated to come. They had wanted to. Again, the people of Venixen had shown the depth of their commitment to reconciliation and to us.
7:48 Speaker 03 An hour and a half later, we arrived at Stollen Gustav, Gustav Forest, site of Adolf's slave labour camp, Holsen. Our guide was Frau Jutta Henzer. A former teacher, she's extensively researched the area's slave labour camps and was raised and lives in a nearby village.
8:09 Speaker 04 Asphalt has long been mined here.
8:14 Speaker 04 And mines are where the Nazis came, Frau Henzer explained.
8:18 Speaker 07 Die Nazis waren unter großem Druck, weil die Lufthoheit an die Alliierten übergegangen war.
8:26 Speaker 02 Because the Allies suddenly took control of the air, German munitions factories were all targeted. And so they moved a whole industrial complex to here.
8:39 Speaker 03 Germany planned to rebuild its war machine underground, in the disused mines.
8:44 Speaker 07 Das war im VW-Werk Ferdinand Porsche und das war Werner von Braun.
8:51 Speaker 04 overseeing the plan were Ferdinand Porsche, car brand founder and enthusiastic Nazi, and Werner von Braun. The day before, we'd been stunned to see Von Braun memorialised as a great scientist on the big sundial in Venigsen. Von Braun had designed the V2 rockets that devastated European cities later in the war, killing and maiming tens of thousands of civilians in London, Antwerp and elsewhere. Those bombings had no real strategic value, they were little more than Hitler's revenge for allied bombings of German cities that had military capability.
9:26 Speaker 03 Since the war, there have been attempts to rehabilitate Von Braun's reputation. He was given a pass for his Nazi activities in exchange for coming to America to work for the US Army on its ballistic missile programme. He made films with Walt Disney, then he joined NASA.
9:41 Speaker 04 But Von Braun was an arch-war criminal. His plan to build weapons underground here was the very reason for the slave labour. The slaves were needed to transport the parts and equipment to the mines.
9:53 Speaker 07 Adolf Semler hat hier gearbeitet, in diesem Stollen. Die Arbeiten bestanden darin, die Stollen weiter auszubauen.
10:02 Speaker 03 Here at Holzen is where Adolf was held as a slave. Nazi laws didn't recognise his earlier conversion to Judaism, but he was now deemed halb Juden, half Jew, for being married to a Jew and not denouncing her.
10:16 Speaker 04 Slaves like Adolf had to work with their bare hands, Frau Henzer said, including to build their own barracks. Before that, they slept outside. It was February, winter, it could get to minus 30. Even now, in midsummer, the forest felt different.
10:36 Speaker 03 As soon as you walk into the shade here, you can feel how cold it is. I can only imagine how cold it must have been for Adolf Semler, for Orpah, and for all the other men who worked here, non-stop.
10:51 Speaker 04 Adolf wasn't the only man sent to slave labour for having a Jewish wife. At 50, he wasn't even the oldest. Frau Henzer told, and Joe translated, the story of a man from Frau Henzer's own village.
11:03 Speaker 03 There was a man in the village who was married to a Jewish woman. And right at the end of the war, she was arrested and taken to Theresienstadt. And unlike my grandmother, she was moved on to Auschwitz. And on the way to Auschwitz, she uses the word "verschollen", which means disappeared, and it either means that she died on the transport or that something happened to her, she was killed in some way. And the Christian husband, who had, so to speak, like my grandfather, protected her during the war, went to see the Bürgermeister, the mayor of that little town. And he said, "I've only got one thing to say to you.
11:44 Speaker 03 I hope that what happened to my wife one day happens to yours, that you suffer my fate." He immediately denounced him to the Nazis and he immediately went, came to slave labour and didn't survive.
11:59 Speaker 07 Da waren Ostarbeiter, Polen, Tschechen.
12:02 Speaker 03 Husbands who refused to abandon Jewish wives were also not the only types of slaves here. Ostarbeiter, East European soldiers captured on that front, were also brought to Holsen.
12:13 Speaker 07 Das ist die Baracke, in der er gelebt hat, also wo er geschlafen hat.
12:18 Speaker 04 Holsen's slave barracks no longer exist. But we walked to where they were and we saw the stone foundations.
12:27 Speaker 04 We were amazed to learn the site had been found just one week before. Historian Michael Vittich had used wartime maps to locate the Holsen slave barracks on the floor of the forest.
12:39 Speaker 04 By total coincidence, we were visiting just days later.
12:45 Speaker 04 Wittich let us dig around in the foundations. We were among the first ever to do so.
12:51 Speaker 03 Wittich's research is so meticulous, he was even able to show us exactly where Adolf had slept. The Hohenzollern area, room two. That allowed our family, in accordance with Jewish custom, to lay stones there in Adolf's memory. John's putting his stone here where Opa slept.
13:13 Speaker 04 From Holsen, we then travelled to the Lennar slave labour camp about an hour away.
13:19 Speaker 04 Its slave barracks have been maintained as a small museum and memorial.
13:25 Speaker 04 It brought home viscerally what slave labour must have been like. Even on a hot summer day, once again in here it was really cold and nearly pitch black.
13:36 Speaker 03 The walls of Lennar's slave barracks are covered in displays on the forced work done and slaves imprisoned here. The railway track that slaves took down to the mines, pushing metal carts full of heavy equipment and stones, has been maintained. On each rail track is the name of a German company, some like VW still in business, that helped make Nazi weapons using slave labour.
14:01 Speaker 04 Particularly haunting was a display about a Polish woman, Christina. With her mother, she was brought here and forced to work as slave labour for VW from 1940 to 1945. Businessman Lars Farrenbach, who'd been our drinking buddy the night before, also came with us to see the slave labour camps. And he translated Christina's testimony.
14:22 Speaker 07 So as soon as we have broken a regulation, we have been sent to a special treatment camp. I was suffering all my life. My youth was stolen and that I had to stay five years in Germany, from when I was 15 to 20. And that I was not allowed to make any kind of formal education. I was suffering the rest of my life from this punishment.
14:55 Speaker 03 It took us all a moment to realise what this meant. Not only were women slave labourers, they were kept in the same barracks as men. But it was even worse than that. As Frau Henzer explained, the women were not allowed to sleep separately from the men. Some of these women became pregnant, whether from consensual experiences or not, we don't know, and gave birth here. An old man from the area has recalled as a child seeing a newborn baby being brought from these barracks. None of these women ever saw their babies again.
15:30 Speaker 07 Es wurde ja immer größer dieses Problem der Geburten in den Lagern.
15:35 Speaker 04 The babies were given to women from the local village. But the women were instructed to leave their windows open, in the hope the babies would die of exposure. When the village women objected, the babies that were of Aryan enough appearance were given to other German couples. We can only guess the fate of the rest of the babies.
15:56 Speaker 03 The mood was sombre as we finished our tour of the slave labour camps, even as Vittish told us about Lea and Adolf's comparatively happy ending.
16:06 Speaker 03 Adolf and his fellow slaves were liberated by American troops in April 1945. As in many other cases, the slave labourers were in such shock, initially they wouldn't leave. Lea was liberated when the Theresienstadt concentration camp was found by Russian troops a month later. But she was so sick with tuberculosis, she wouldn't leave for another three months.
16:30 Speaker 04 Adolf had promised Lea they'd both survive and reunite, but...
16:35 Speaker 02 Imagine how hard it was for people to find each other again in the chaos of post-war Germany, post-war Europe. Lea, when she was well enough, was able to say to the Red Cross that if her husband was alive, he would be in Veniksen. And he was. He walked five kilometres there and back every day and sat in the town square, because every day the Red Cross came and read a list of survivors. And eventually, she was on that list and he was able to identify himself as her husband, and so they were reunited.
17:11 Speaker 04 Their daughter Rose, Joanna's mother and our grandmother, had left Germany for Australia in the late 1930s. From almost the moment of her arrival, she was also trying to get Lyia and Adolf out.
17:25 Speaker 02 Here is a letter written by my mother, Rose, to her parents in Hanaufer on the 17th of November 1939, so very shortly after she arrived when war had already broken out. And she writes: "Ich will euch euer Herz nicht schwer machen, sondern euch nur sagen, dass ich sehnlichst auf Frieden hoffe und dann wird es mit Gottes Hilfe auch nicht mehr lange dauern, bis ich euch hier bei mir habe."
17:58 Speaker 02 "I don't want to make you sad." She says, "I don't want to give you a heavy heart." "But I just want to say that I most deeply hope for peace and then with God's help, it won't be long before I have you here with me."
18:20 Speaker 04 In fact, it would be another eight years.
18:23 Speaker 03 Lyia and Adolf had not been able to join Rose because under Australia's refugee rules, they were too old. Now, after the war, Australia still wouldn't admit them, this time until Lyia could prove she was fully tuberculosis-free.
18:39 Speaker 03 So they returned to Venikson to live again in the house on what is now Neustadtstraße, the house they'd been arrested and taken from. Even after all they'd endured, it was they who were trying to comfort their daughter Rose.
18:53 Speaker 02 This is a letter plainly written for them by a scribe. And this is a classic of what I think survivors do in all kinds of circumstances to reassure those who are worrying about them. They write: "Hier ist jetzt wundervolle Frühling."
19:12 Speaker 02 Ihr müsstet mal mit dem Flugzeug herüberkommen können und die Baumblüte genießen. Es wird auch schon wärmer und wir erholen uns hier in der frischen Landluft ganz gut. Macht euch nur keine Sorgen. Hier ist es ein wunderbares Frühjahr. Ihr müsst ein Flugzeug nehmen und sehen diese schönen Blumen auf den Bäumen. Die Baumblüte. Es wird auch wieder wärmer und wir sind in der frischen Luft des Landes. Ihr müsst uns nicht sorgen. Und dies ist am 7. Mai 1946. Also fast ein Jahr nach der Frechheit.
19:56 Speaker 03 Sie kamen endlich in Australien, im Juni 1947.
20:01 Speaker 04 Obwohl Joanna unsere Großgrandpasen kaum von ihren Kriegserfahrungen erinnert, sah sie ihren Effekt auf Leia.
20:08 Speaker 02 Ich erinnere daran, dass, wenn ich nach einer Nachmittagsschlafung aufging, sah ich Leia im Plumpen mit einem Tisch schreien. Ich bin sicher, das ist der Grund, warum ich so viel schreie. Sie hatte ein Foto von Michaela, ihrer anderen Großvater, der sie um sieben Jahre alt verloren hatte.
20:29 Speaker 04 Michaela war die Tochter von Leia's einzigen Kind, seinem Sohn Bernard. Wie Rose, Bernard hatte in den letzten 1930ern Deutschland verlassen. In seinem Fall für was dann Palästina war. Joe erklärt, was zu Michaela passiert war.
20:43 Speaker 02 Sie hatte Mitteljahrserkrankungen. Und als der Port blockiert wurde, gab es keine Medizin. Und sie starb von einer gewaltigen Erkrankung.
20:53 Speaker 04 Es gab mehr Tragödie. Michaela starb während der Arabische-Islamischen Krieg 1948. Sein Vater Bernard hatte den Funier in seinem Militäruniform besucht. Er wurde geschossen und ermordet von einem Feindsniper. Seine Frau Raleigh hatte seine einzige Tochter und seinen Mann verloren. Beide waren beide innerhalb eines Tages.
21:12 Speaker 03 Leia died in 1975 at nearly 86. Even at the end, she hadn't forgotten the war.
21:20 Speaker 02 When Umar was very elderly, shortly before her death, she went to an old people's home. And she'd stopped speaking for some reason. The Jewish geriatrician who came to see Leia was wearing on a chain a star of David, which fell out of his shirt as he leaned over her to examine her, at which moment she immediately put her finger to her lips and gestured him to come closer and told him to keep very quiet and not to speak and to hide the star of David so that nobody would know that he or she was a Jew. And when the geriatrician reassured her that she was quite safe,
22:05 Speaker 02 she started speaking again and spoke until she died.
22:09 Speaker 04 Adolf lived until 1980, dying at the age of 85. As we walked through the Holzen slave labour site in the forest, Joanna poignantly recalled her Opa's end.
22:20 Speaker 03 Will you tell me again the story you told me about how you cut Opa's nails?
22:27 Speaker 02 When Opa lost his sight, and he could still shave, but he couldn't cut his nails the way he liked.
22:37 Speaker 02 So from the time he became blind, shortly after that, he asked me if I would do his nails. And I used to go regularly to see him every week, and I would cut his nails.
22:49 Speaker 03 Would you take me sometimes?
22:51 Speaker 02 I took you and I took Rick. And towards the end of his life,
22:59 Speaker 02 he really wanted not to be here anymore.
23:04 Speaker 02 And he started talking about it on a regular basis. And one day, I went with you to see him.
23:15 Speaker 02 With all my equipment. And he said, please, you know, don't cut my nails. And I said, why? And he said,
23:26 Speaker 02 because I really want to die.
23:30 Speaker 02 And if you touch me, I will want to stay.
23:36 Speaker 02 I will want to stay. And the next week, he very quietly died. He was such a determined man that I think if he'd wanted to die here, he would have found a way. But he wanted to be alive.
23:56 Speaker 02 And he spent another 30 years being alive with Orman, with us.
24:05 Speaker 02 So I think he had the pleasure of coming to Australia and seeing a new world.
24:17 Speaker 03 It was time to leave Venikson. They had been incredible days. We promised to stay in touch, and we have. With historians Michael Vidish and Wolfgang Schulz, Hamut Rama has invited us to become honorary members of the German anti-fascist party VVN, whose flag he carried at the stumbling stone ceremony. Rick's oldest son Malachi, 18, also recently visited, detouring from his end-of-high-school backpacking trip with mates to visit Venikson, see his great-great-grandparents' stumbling stones, as well as Lyia Street.
24:51 Speaker 04 We don't yet know how many other Jews lived in Venikson before the war or what happened to them. But Lyia was almost certainly the last Venikson Jew, woman or man, to be sent to a concentration camp. She may even be the only Venikson Jew sent to a concentration camp who survived. After grit and luck, the other reason was Adolf, who so successfully prevented her capture until so late in the war. To us, both of them are truly history makers.
25:20 Speaker 03 But it's the impact on our mother Joanna that has been the most profound. We asked her to reflect on what all this has meant to her.
25:28 Speaker 07 I spent all those years on the Native Title Tribunal. And I used to come home and say to John...
25:39 Speaker 02 I don't know my own country.
25:44 Speaker 02 I didn't know its history.
25:48 Speaker 02 I felt ashamed.
25:51 Speaker 02 And I particularly felt ashamed not to have known. Because once you know, there's no turning back.
26:01 Speaker 02 The truth is, much as it irks me to say so, the Germans have done more in eighty years. Sixty years certainly, because the first twenty years after the war, they just didn't want to know. They couldn't face themselves. But they've done more in that time than I believe we have in Australia, and we still have that to do.
26:28 Speaker 02 A wonderful Aboriginal colleague of mine once said to me
26:34 Speaker 02 that I over-identify. He said, "You over-identify with us. Leave it to us. Just leave it alone. We can manage without you," you know? And he also used to say, "Don't speak for us. We can speak for ourselves. We don't need any more white people to speak for us."
26:53 Speaker 02 And now I feel that's happening to me.
27:01 Speaker 02 That I'm saying to people in this town in a, not even a roundabout way, in a direct way, "We are here.
27:11 Speaker 02 You wanted us not to be here. You pretended we weren't. You tried to wipe us out. But we are here, and we're not going to be angry and resentful. We're going to make change."
27:30 Speaker 02 And I think that's the most important part of this trip.
27:37 Speaker 02 And you can't do other people's business if you haven't done your own.
27:48 Speaker 01 That was the second and last episode of Liar's Way Home. It was written and presented by Michaela and Rick Kolofsky. Research assistance by Tyge Kolofsky. Produced by Claudia Taranto, sound engineer was Hamish Camilleri. I'm Kirsty Melville and I'll catch you next time on the History Listen. See you then.
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