Out of Her Tree: Echoes Into the Past

Most of the focus in the lgbt community on Holocaust Memorial Day has often been towards the thousands of gay men imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. It should be remembered that lesbians were also persecuted.

One of the many lesbian victims who were lost in history re-emerged in the 1990s when she became the subject of a book called “Aimée and Jaguar” by Erica Fischer. It was the true story of a lesbian couple who were separated because one of them was a Jew.

Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust met in 1942. Felice was a Jewish Resistance fighter and Lilly was the wife of a Nazi soldier. They fell in love and Lilly left her husband. The two women lived together and signed a form of marriage declaration in 1943.

In 1944 Felice was betrayed to the Gestapo and she was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later transferred to Auschwitz. Felice is thought to have died on the death march from Auschwitz to another camp in December 1944.

In the meantime Lilly was under constant observation by the Nazi authorities. Despite this she managed to hide three Jewish women in her home. They all survived the war, and in 1995 Lilly was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel, an honour given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to help Jews escape Germany during the war. Lilly died in 2006 and on her gravestone there is also an inscription in memory of Felice Schragenheim.

Felice was arrested because she was a Jew rather than her sexuality, and her ancestry shows a long history of her ancestors’ persecution because of their faith.

Felice’s family on both of her parents’ side fell victim to the Nazis. Her maternal grandmother had been sent to Theresienstadt, the same camp Felice was later sent to. Sadly, her grandmother died there in 1942.

Her father’s cousin, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, had a very close association with Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. They were actual next-door neighbours. Ludwig’s son, the eminent professor Edgar Feuchtwanger (b.1925) remembers encountering Hitler outside their homes. Ludwig’s brother, Lion Feuchtwanger, became a prominent author and playwright, and wrote anti-Nazi propaganda. Naturally, once Hitler gained power the Feuchtwangers were persecuted and Lion was arrested. He managed to escape disguised as a woman and found asylum in the USA.

The Feuchtwangers, the family of Felice Schragenheim’s paternal grandmother, take their surname from the city of Feuchtwangen in Bavaria. All through the Middle Ages Jews were persecuted in many European cities. In 1555 Feuchtwangen conducted a pogrom (persecution and attacks on an ethnic, usually Jewish, minority) and expelled all remaining Jews. Felice’s ancestors fled to Fürth, a city about 60 kilometers away. There the family took the name of Feuchtwanger. In the middle of the 19th century the family moved to Munich.

Also in Fürth was the Fränkel family who had fled Vienna in 1650. Jakob Löw Feuchtwanger (d.1809) married Hanna Fränkel. The Feuchtwangers and Fränkels intermarried over several generations. The Fränkels were an influential family that extended into Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. Many male members of the family became rabbis.

A son of Jakob and Hanna was Seligmann Aharon Meir Feuchtwanger (1786-1852). He married Fanny Vogele Wassermann (1799-1875). She belonged to a wealthy family. Her father Amschel Elkan Wassermann was the court agent to the Duke of Öettingen-Wallerstein. He founded a bank in 1785 which became a leading German bank before Hitler’s rise to power.

Seligmann and Fanny’s son Jakob (1821-1890) married Auguste Hahn (1824-1896). The Hahns were, like a large number of Felice’s ancestors, from Frankfurt. Frankurt was a major centre of the European Jewish community in medieval times. Being centrally situated on trade routes that crossed the continent it attracted a large number of merchants and traders.

There were around 200 Jews in Frankfurt by 1241. There was no Jewish ghetto at that time and they travelled freely and had certain protections given to them by the emperor. However, in May 1241 unrest over the enforced Christian baptism of some Jewish children led to the citizens conducting one of the many pogroms against the Jews in Frankfurt. It is said that 180 Jews were killed and the handful that survived submitted to baptism.

The community managed to revive, aided by an influx of Jewish families from other parts of Germany escaping similar pogroms. By 1270 the community was once again flourishing. However, persecution continued to affect them, and they were taxed more heavily than the Christian community. More religious unrest led to another pogrom in 1349.

In 1462 the Jews were forcibly relocated into the Judengasse (Jew’s Alley), a street enclosed in a wall with entrance gates. It was the first ghetto in Frankfurt. As time went on and the population grew the ghetto became overcrowded, even though the ghetto limits had been expanded.

Despite the overcrowding and the persecution some Frankfurt Jewish families became some of the most influential in Germany. Many well-known modern families originated in the Judengasse – Oppenheimer, Rothschild, and Goldschmidt, among others. All of them feature in Felice Schragenheim’s ancestry.

In almost every generation of Felice’s ancestry there was anti-semitism. Some of her family bloodlines were affected more than others, but all of them show the resilience of the Jewish community that is echoed through many other families in other countries. Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we should remember that persecution of Jews existed before the Nazis. Let us hope that Felice Schragenheim was a member of the last generations of her family to suffer under a regime of hate.

Our Darkest Legacy

(I have friends and relatives in New Zealand. Along with the rest of the civilised world I was shocked by the terror attack in Christchurch last month by a self-declared white supremacist. I had written today’s article several weeks before the attack. I considered removing it from my blog schedule, but decided to keep it because we are living in a world where such attacks are frequently reported and there never be a time when it would be considered appropriate.)

Today I want to look at one of the most far-reaching influences that an openly gay man ever created. It’s one that came to dominate the 20th century more than anything else and is still seen today. But it’s an influence and a legacy that the lgbt community cannot be proud of. It’s the use of the swastika as a symbol of racial supremacy.

The swastika has been around for thousands of years. It’s well known that it was symbol of good fortune in ancient India. As a simple geometric design it appears in other ancient civilisations, from the Greeks to the Aztecs. It is truly sad that it became as symbol of hate and fear.

To trace the origin of the Nazi’s use of the swastika we have to go back to a neo-pagan occult group that formed in Munich in the 1890s. It was a small group, numbering only five central figures, mostly gay men, who were writers and philosophers. The two main figures were Alfred Schuler (1865-1923) and Ludwig Klages (1872-1956). The one who is of most significance to the swastika is Schuler.

Alfred Schuler was born in Mainz. He moved to Munich and began studying archaeology at the university. He was fascinated by ancient civilisations and the artefacts they left behind. However, this fascination came into conflict with his studies. Schuler believed that archaeologists were desecrating ancient religious sites, and by putting artefacts in museums they were declaring their superiority and control over the past.

It was also his admiration for ancient civilisations, Rome in particular, that led Schuler to develop another belief, that the modern world was a corrupting influence on the development of humanity, and that the Christian Church was ultimately responsible. This opinion pushed his spiritual beliefs into the occult (ironically, a Christian construct) and neo-paganism.

In 1893 Schuler met Ludwig Klages and between them they formulated a set of beliefs that developed into the formal association called the Cosmic Circle. One of the core beliefs of the group was that of an ancient global matriarchal culture. The Cosmic Circle believed that Christianity purposefully destroyed the matriarchal societies of the past and was leading the world to disaster. A second irony is that their own beliefs and symbols that gave rise to a regime that did just that.

Throughout all his adult life Schuler imbued his perception of ancient Rome with the Greek Eros. Just as Sigmund Freud imbued his psychoanalysis with sex, so did Schuler with the Cosmic Circle, except that Schuler’s sex was homosexual and open.

Part of the Cosmic Circle’s elements of “worship” was for members to re-enact life and events from Roman and classical history, dressing up in period costumes and holding mock rituals and erotic dances. Schuler himself often dressed as the Earth Mother Goddess with wig, dark robes and heavy make-up. He was much more serious about these ceremonies, more so than the other members. For instance, he firmly believed that an exotic dance performed by young, nubile men could cure Friedrich Nietzsche, the pioneering philosopher of gay rights, of the madness he had developed.

On another occasion Schuler planned to bring down all governments by having one of his colleagues stand naked in Munich market place chanting to the ancient gods. The colleague declined to take part.

It was at about this time, 1904, that the Cosmic Circle began to deteriorate. Schuler had been expressing anti-Semitic opinions for many years. Some members of the Cosmic Circle were Jews or had Jewish ancestry and Schuler began a “witch-hunt” against Jews in “his” organisation. He demanded that they renounce their faith and heritage or leave the Cosmic Circle. Following the collapse of the Cosmic Circle in 1904 its members split into Schuler and his Aryan anti-Semitic supporters and their opponents.

Schuler had travelled to Asia some years earlier and had seen the swastika symbol in India and Tibet. Its symbolism seemed to appeal to his own Cosmic Circle ideas of supernatural life and power. He was not alone in adopting the swastika. Across Europe it began to appear in logos from everything from sports clubs to occult groups. It was a popular symbol of life, energy and harmony. To Schuler the swastika was also a symbol of his homosexual, orgiastic, anti-Semitic propaganda, and through his influence it began to be adopted by supremacist groups.

In 1907 in Austria a white supremacist group called the Order of the New Templars adopted the swastika and its anti-Semitic symbolism as their emblem. This seems to have been the first time the swastika can definitely be claimed as a specifically anti-Semite emblem. Between 1917 and 1925 the Thule Society, a German Aryan supremacist group, used a circular swastika as their emblem.

By this time Alfred Schuler was conducting lecturers on his beliefs. He still had some supporters, including the prominent Munich salon host Princess Elsa Bruckman. It was at one event at Bruckman’s salon in 1920 that Schuler and Adolf Hitler were both present.

Hitler was clearly influenced by Schuler’s swastika symbolism. In his book “Mein Kampf” in 1923 Hitler described how the new Nazi Party looked for a suitable symbol and flag. He was familiar with the swastika through his connections to both Schuler and members of the Thule Society. Independently of each other, Hitler and Dr. Friedrich Krohn, an active Thule member, came up with flags with a central swastika. Hitler adapted them into the flag that became the emblem of hate that dominated the 20th century.

If nothing else the evolution of the swastika from a symbol of life and harmony into one of hate and fear tells us a lot about the power one ideology can have over the use of just one symbol. The fact that an openly gay, neo-pagan, occultist inspired this change the darkest legacy that any member of the lgbt community can leave.

The final irony is that the evil Nazi regime that stamped its swastika all over Europe also stamped homosexuals with a pink triangle, and it is the pink triangle that was claimed by survivors of the Holocaust and the pioneering lgbt rights activists in the 1970s and transformed from a symbol of oppression and discrimination into one of pride and defiance against hate.

Around the World in Another 80 Gays : Part 13) From the Ghetto to Hollywood

Previously : 23) The Harper Road Woman (c.60 AD) may have been a witness to the destruction of Roman London by Boudicca, whose name, according to 24) Judy Grahn (b.1940), was the origin of the term “bull-dyke”, a derivation also investigated by 25) SDiane Bogus (b.1946), whose poetry was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the same category as 26) Irena Klepfisz (b.1941).

26) Irena Klepfisz’s “A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990)” was one of five nominations in the Lesbian Poetry category of the 3rd Lambda Literary Awards in 1991. His collection of poems gives just a glimpse of Irena’s development as a poet. In particular it is a semi-autobiographical examination of the role of language in its power to unite and divide. Through her poetry, and “A Few Words in the Mother Tongue”, Irena presents past and present atrocities as a connected sequence of events. The politics and regimes may be different, the mechanics of persecution may be different, but divisions based on culture, race, belief and language remain.

Perhaps there has never been a period where language could mean life or death than during the Nazi Holocaust of the 20th century. Irena Klepfisz knew this herself as a Polish Jew in Warsaw. Irena’s father was an active member of the Jewish Labour Bund, an organisation which campaigned for the rights of Jewish workers and their families and the opposition of anti-semitism. He helped to get many Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto as World War II began to grow in momentum. The bund party went largely underground following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and some of its leaders were executed. Jews were forced into ghettos and the Warsaw ghetto was the largest with over 300,000 people. The Nazis then began to transport them to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. Almost the entire 300,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka before anyone in the ghetto discovered the truth – they were not being sent to labour camps, but to their death.

The remaining Jews in the ghetto began an armed revolt in January 1943 and Irena Klepfisz’s father was killed on the second day. Before the uprising Irena’s father had smuggled her and her mother out of Warsaw, and afterwards they fled into the countryside. In order to escape capture they posed as Christians. Because of this Irena was not exposed to the Yiddish language that her family spoke.

After the war Irena and her mother migrated to the USA. As a teenager Irena felt that she had “no language in which I was completely rooted”. Her native language was Polish, and she began to learn Swedish after fleeing Poland to Sweden, and a little Yiddish as a child after the war, and now she had to learn a fourth language, English. Together with the turmoil of her cultural heritage having been attacked by the Nazis Irena realised that language could be divisive as well as a unifier. English is the language which helped her to express her Yiddish heritage most personally in her poetry. By the 1970s Irena Klepfisz was a well-known Yiddishist and campaigner.

The immediate post-war years were ones of establishing stability and unity in countries around the world in the aftermath of the war. Being “different” to the rest of society was not encouraged. I would suggest that once nations had begun to re-stabilise and a new generation was growing up minority groups felt overlooked and often victimised. Feminist groups, civil rights groups, and gay rights groups grew during the mid 1950s onwards. So too did other cultural and ethnic groups.

Yiddish was among the many diverse cultures which began to emerge from the shadows. A new generation of Jews who had hardly heard any Yiddish, except from elderly relatives, began to use the language widely. Irena Klepfisz was just one of many who began to teach Yiddish and produce Yiddish literature.

It was in more recent decades that there has been a growth in the lgbt Yiddish community, Queer Yiddishkeit. In the 2000s it seemed that a large proportion of lgbt Jews in America were embracing their Yiddish heritage.

One of the leading figures in Queer Yiddishkeit has been 27) Eve Sicular (b.1961). She is mainly associated with a style of traditional Yiddish music called klezmer, a style mostly associated with celebrations. Like Yiddish itself, klezmer regained popularity in the 1970s and was adopted by many members of the Jewish lgbt community. Eve Sicular has formed several klezmer bands since 1994. Her most successful band, Isle of Klezbos, won a Grammy award in 2007.

As well as traditional Yiddish music Eve Sicular has made her name as an expert on Yiddish film history. Inspired by “The Celluloid Closet”, the popular ground-breaking book by Vito Russo which chronicled the many lgbt references, influences and allusions in film, Eve produced a study called “The Celluloid Closet of Yiddish Film”. This was first published in “The Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review” in 1994 and quickly developed into a video lecture. In 1986 Eve actually went to one of Vito Russo’s lectures, long before the documentary film of the same name was produced (1995), and later in 1989 she invited him to give the lecture in Seattle.

Eve used her knowledge and experience as a curator of the Film and Television Archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1990s to create a project which is as ground-breaking as Russo’s original. It has grown and developed and remains popular. Eve is still presenting her video lecture 25 years later.

The original “The Celluloid Closet” by Vito Russo was published in 1981 and been reprinted and revised several times. Gay characters have appeared in film since the silent black and white days and were portrayed often as the “sissy” and “nancy boy” that Hollywood later preferred.

Next year is the centenary of an early silent film featuring a gay lead character. “Different From the Others” (“Anders als die Andern” in its original German) is a black and white silent film released in June 1919. It has been described as the world’s first pro-gay film. The plot is similar to that of the much later British 1961 film “Victim” in that the lead character is blackmailed because of his sexuality.

The film has a deliberate social message. At several points in the film one of the supporting characters, a doctor, gives speeches which are aimed more at the viewer (and the authorities) than the characters in the film. He describes homosexuality as normal and not to be suppressed. The film ends with the words “Paragraph 175” being crossed out in a book. Paragraph 175 was the anti-gay laws introduced into Germany in 1871 and which was the catalyst for the Nazi persecution that followed.

The doctor in the film was not an actor but a real doctor. No ordinary doctor, but one who was uniquely qualified to speak on homosexuality. He was the pioneering German sexologist and gay right campaigner 28) Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935).

Next time : We learn why most people weren’t able to see the film in full, and how the legacy of Magnus Hirschfeld takes us to Africa, Tonga and the Galaxy.

Holocaust Flags

For this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day I thought I’d design a few flags to mark the event. There is already an established Holocaust Memorial flag, designed in 2005. It is shown in the illustration at the bottom of this article at the head of 9 other smaller flags. This flag specifically commemorates the Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. I thought it would be an idea to commemorate other persecuted groups individually with their own flag design.

The pink triangle became a symbol of gay rights in the 1970s (first used in Melbourne, September 1973, as described here) because it was the symbol used in the Nazi concentration and labour camps to indicate which prisoners here homosexual. Just as the Jews were forced to wear yellow triangles on their shirts homosexuals were forced to wear pink triangles. Each imprisoned group had their own coloured triangle.

The system of triangles and additional markings used by the Nazis can be confusing, as can be seen in the chart below, an actual chart of symbols from Nazi Germany. For my flags I’ve just used the triangles.

When deciding whether a persecuted group should have a flag I thought about the wider definitions that were used by the Nazis. In the end I decided that all groups had people who deserve to be commemorated. For example, you may wonder why I include a flag with the purple triangle, because that colour represented Jehovah’s Witnesses. This faith is not known for it’s tolerance of homosexuals, but they were persecuted none the less for their faith. The purple triangle group also included people such as Baptists, Adventists and New Apostolics as well as “Bible students”. And so were people of any faith who preached pacifism.

Pacifists on moral grounds were grouped with the asocial/anti-social black triangle prisoners. This group included a large number of people, such as female Roma/Gypsies (male Roma were given their own triangle later in the war), mental health patients, alcoholics, drug users, beggars, prostitutes and conscription avoiders. Lesbians have frequently adopted the black triangle as their symbol because they were considered anti-social for not wanting to marry and have children.

One group I also debated over with myself are the green triangle prisoners. These were the convicted criminals. Those criminals who didn’t receive the death penalty were imprisoned. However serious or trivial their crime might seem to us imprisonment was their sentence. They did not deserve to receive inhumane treatment in the concentration and labour camps any more than the other persecuted groups.

Finally, there is the Prisoners of War, mainly Soviet soldiers, who were sent to the camps. Their triangle was pointed up in the opposite direction to the others.

For my designs I deliberately avoided using the horizontal stripes of the original Holocaust Memorial flag (there’s far too many horizontally striped flags around, there’s little variety or distinction). I hope my suggestions for these other memorial flags will be taken up. At most memorial events the raising of national flags of allied national and countries who liberated the camps takes place. In my humble opinion some reminder of the groups who suffered should be commemorated in the same way.

Pioneering Pink Triangles

The first truly international symbol adopted by gay rights groups was the pink triangle. The origin of the pink triangle in the Nazi persecution of gay men in the Holocaust is covered extremely well in media and print. But I’m always trying to find more about how, when and why it was adopted by the lgbt community.

It is often stated that the use of the pink triangle was pioneered by gay rights groups in Germany and, shortly afterwards, in the USA. However, they may have widely advocated it’s use but the first actual national display of the pink triangle by gay rights groups was on the other side of the world.

But how did it come to be used at all? Why did a symbol of Nazi oppression become a symbol of gay pride?

Very little, if anything, was known outside Germany of the use of the fabric triangles attached to the clothing of people interred in concentration and labour camps. People were generally aware of the yellow stars worn by Jewish internees. Those liberated from the camps were in no mood to perpetuate the memories of the hell they have lived through and little truth about what happened in the camps remained hidden, though some people considered the testimony of survivors as vitally important in recording the atrocities and revealing the true extent of the evil Nazi regime.

One of the few survivors who decided to record their experiences was Eugen Kogon (1903-1987). In his book “The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the Systems Behind Them” (originally published in German in 1946 and translated into English in 1950) Kogon wrote about the use of various triangles to denote the types of prisoner. For the first time in print the general public was made aware of the pink triangle.

Of the Holocaust survivors who wrote about their experiences in the concentration camps in the following years none of them admitted to being homosexual. Despite liberation from the camps, homosexuality was still illegal in Germany.

As the gay rights movements around the world began to spring into action at the beginning of the 1970s one gay Holocaust survivor, Heinz Heger (1917-1994), wrote “The Men With the Pink Triangle” (published in German in Hamburg in 1972). The newly-formed gay rights group, Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW), were looking for a unifying symbol for their activism and the pink triangle seemed to be just right.

HAW urged all of their members and supporters to wear a pink triangle as a memorial to gay victims of the Holocaust. HAW’s claim to be the first gay rights organisation to adopt the pink triangle as a logo in October 1973, however, may not be correct, as I’ll explain later.

During the summer of 1973 several gay journals wrote about Holocaust victims and the use of the pink triangle. The UK journal “Come Together” and the San Francisco journal “Gay Sunshine” both urged their readers to wear a pink triangle in remembrance of gay Holocaust victims. However, there is no documentary or visual proof that the wearing of these triangles was anything more than individual personal choice.

And that takes us to the southern hemisphere and gay rights activists in Australia. The Sydney Gay Liberation group proposed a Gay Pride Week for 7th to 14th September 1973. Other gay groups across Australia – in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne – were enthusiastic about this idea, having only begun to hold Gay Pride events in the previous two years and eager to produce something that would produce more publicity for gay rights. The national, co-ordinated event would help to unify their activism.

From the very start the use of the pink triangle was to be pivotal in the Gay Pride Week publicity. The image below is of an A6-sized poster designed to promote the events. Is this the first use of the pink triangle by an lgbt organisation? It doesn’t merely ask people to wear one. It is being used quite deliberately, without the need of explanation, or as an illustration of its use by the Nazis, but as a symbol for the national Gay Pride Week.

In all of the Australian cities which celebrated Gay Pride Week in September 1973 the pink triangle was highly visible on banners, flags, posters, leaflets and badges. This was a month before HAW adopted it as their logo. In Adelaide further recognition of Holocaust victims was made with the planting of 60 pink crosses on the lawn next to the war memorial. There are many images online showing the pink triangle being used during Gay Pride Week clearly in all participating cities – just Google “Gay Pride Week 1973 Australia”. If any reader out there can point me to any image online to show a definite earlier use elsewhere I will be eternally grateful.

Australia was proudly displaying the pink triangle in the manner to which many later Pride events all around the world would follow.

Extraordinary Lives : A Gay Pimpernel

On this Holocaust Memorial Day I want to bring you the story of another Holocaust hero. He was a great-grandson of the Chief Rabbi of England, the manager of the biggest department store in Berlin, and helped to rescue thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis.

Dubbed “the Real Scarlet Pimpernel” by the Association of Jewish Refugees, with whom he worked during the war, Wilfrid Israel was born in London in 1899 into a wealthy Anglo-German Jewish family. He was destined to become the manager of the family business, a Berlin department store that was renowned throughout Germany. The store employed over 2,000 people and it was one of the first commercial businesses in Germany to offer sickness insurance and extra pensions for its employees. Facilities such as sports clubs, drama groups and long weekends were also provided. Being born into this atmosphere of philanthropy Wilfrid went on to go beyond this social conscience once the Nazis began their physical persecution of the Jews.

As a very wealthy Jew he had the financial resources and connections in England to escape the persecution, but he chose to stay in Germany and use these resources and connections to help the less fortunate to escape instead.

Wilfrid’s humanitarian work began in the 1920s after establishing contact with the Jewish Youth movement in Germany, the League of Nations and British intelligence.

The beginning of 1933 saw a huge change in European politics. Adolf Hitler was sworn in as German chancellor in January. In February the German parliament building was destroyed by fire in what Hitler proclaimed was a Communist plot. This gave him the excuse to ban all Communists from parliament and establish the Nazi majority rule that led to his dictatorship.

Wilfrid’s store was raided in March and he was arrested for not firing his Jewish employees. His influential connections helped to secure his release. However, Jewish businesses like his own were boycotted. He was determined to stay put even when other Jewish businesses closed down.

As the persecution of the Jews grew with Hitler’s power many Jews, aware of Wilfrid Israel’s progressive social conscience, came to him for help. He formed secret networks within the Nazi establishment which enabled him to influence the release of many people from concentration camps by providing documents and money to help them to escape Germany.

Unlike the Nazi party who sought to indoctrinate children Wilfrid saw them as innocent victims of propaganda and played as huge part in what is called the Kindertransport, the international programme which saw thousands of children being taken away from Germany and central Europe to more safe nations.

Despite being a known Jew and potentially dangerous Wilfrid was allowed to travel internationally. This enabled him to visit Palestine and the kibbutz Hazorea which was founded by Jews who had already left Germany. Wilfrid was a pioneer of the youth migration movement to the kibbutz and aided many in settling there, and today it houses his vast collection of Asian artifacts.

In 1940 Wilfrid moved to Britain after being alerted by his spies that he was about to be arrested. In Britain he continued to work for German Jews. Many had been locked up as “enemy aliens” in British camps and he worked for several refugee organisations in getting many of them released. He constantly urged the British government to do more to help children escape from Germany after the termination of the Kindertransport programme in 1940.

Thousands of immigration documents for the settlement of British-controlled Palestine were printed and Wilfrid set about distributing them. At the same time he was persuading the Jewish Agency to help him rescue thousands of Jewish refugees from Vichy France and fascist Spain and Portugal.

In 1943 he was sent on a mission to Lisbon to begin the task of getting refugees out of Portugal. Two months later, on 1st June 1943, he was flying back to London to prepare for rescue work in France when the plane was attacked by Nazi fighter planes and shot down. All 17 people on board were killed. This attack became one of the most well-known events of World War II. Not because of Wilfrid Israel but because of a more well-known passenger who perished on that flight, actor Leslie Howard, himself a European Jew.

It has been rumoured ever since that the plane was shot down because Leslie Howard was on board. Howard was reputed to have been a spy. The real reason may never be known, but it is also possible that the Germans knew Wilfrid Israel was on that plane and that he was the intended target.

In later decades the name and work of Wilfrid Israel faded from war histories to be overtaken by other great rescuers such as Sir Nicholas Winton and Oskar Schindler. A recent biography and film have brought Wilfrid’s name and great works into the wider public arena. This modest, very private, hero deserves to be recognised for his extraordinary bravery and efforts to see an estimated 30,000 people resettled or released from incarceration.

Poster for the 2016 film biography of Wilfrid Israel

Perhaps the final words should be ones attributed to Leslie Howard. Two of Howard’s most famous film roles were as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Pimpernel Smith, the latter having a remarkable similarity to the work of Wilfrid Israel himself. It is reputed that when Howard and Israel met one said to the other “I have only played the part of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but you were the Scarlet Pimpernel”.

Extraordinary Life : Holocaust Survivor

To commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day we look at a Holocaust survivor whose life straddled both sides of the conflict. His name is Pierre Seel (1923-2005). I must give Chris Furneaux of the Australian lgbt radio and online channel Joy 49.9 the credit for suggesting I write about him today.

As his name suggests Pierre Seel was French. He was born in Alsace, a part of France that borders Germany. For centuries the region has been a political ping-pong ball bouncing between the two countries. During Pierre’s lifetime he found his home town, and indeed his own nationality, changing twice. From 1871 Alsace was a French province but at the end of the Franco-Prussian War it became part of the German Empire. Then, after the defeat of the German in the First World War possession of Alsace was returned to France.

In France at the time of Pierre’s birth there was no law prohibiting homosexuality though the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church led many to hide their sexuality in public, and even from their own families, as was the case with Pierre.

In 1939 he was in a well-known gay “cruising” site when his watch, a precious gift from his godmother, was stolen. He reported it to the police, but the officer he reported it to was not sympathetic. He shouted abuse at Pierre because of his admission to being in a notorious cruising site and placed his name on a list of homosexuals. This list had no official or legal purpose but it was to prove disastrous to many in a very short time.

The Second World War began with Britain, followed by France, declaring war on Nazi Germany later in 1939. In response Germany invaded and annexed Alsace. Now Pierre and his fellow Alsace natives found themselves being treated as German citizens subject to the laws of Nazi Germany. Pierre joined many others in working secretly for the French Resistance.

That list of homosexuals to which Pierre’s name was added was handed to the German authorities and soon Pierre was arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to painful physical and emotional torture, including being forcibly sodomised with a wooden stick.

In May 1941 Pierre was transferred to the Schirmeck labour and “rehabilitation” camp in the south of Alsace. More than 15,000 Alsatian citizens were imprisoned there over the next 4 years, all being forced to work with little rest or food. There were none of the infamous Pink Triangles on the uniforms of the gay prisoners, this camp did not use them. Instead Pierre wore a blue bar which was used to indicate someone who was anti-social. This also implied homosexuality and was virtually just as bad. Life for a gay man in the labour camp was still hazardous. Gay men could not find comfort in their own subgroup because fellow prisoners and SS guards alike regarded them as the lowest class of society.

When Pierre was arrested he became separated from his boyfriend Jo but he saw his beloved again in the labour camp. He could not acknowledge Jo, but watched in horror as the guards stripped Jo naked and set the guard dogs on him. The bloody death of his boyfriend marked Pierre for the rest of his life and gave him a fear of dogs.

To his surprise and relief Pierre was released, the camp’s commander having been satisfied that he had been “re-educated”, though Pierre would have to report daily to the Gestapo. Pierre returned home to his family but nothing was ever said of his experiences or sexuality.

Now a “free German” citizen Pierre was conscripted into the Nazi army. He was placed in the Wehrmacht which contained other Alsace natives forced to fight against the Allies. Then, in 1943, he was surprised again, this time to find himself being sent to the Nazi’s Aryan-breeding programme. He was only there for a few days.

By summer 1944 Pierre found himself on the Russian front, one of the most hostile combat zones of World War II. As the Allies pushed from the west and the Soviets from the east the Nazi regime began to crumble. Pierre found himself the only survivor of his post and surrendered to the Soviets.

He made his way to Poland where he joined a refugee convoy of concentration camp survivors. The Red Cross arranged for them to travel to Odessa on the Black Sea and Pierre was placed in charge of order and discipline at the refugee camp there. Eventually he managed to catch a train back to Paris and from there back to Alsace. He never revealed the full truth of his experiences, they were too traumatic, and for nearly 40 years his story was hidden in his memory.

Alsace once more changed hands after the defeat of the Nazis and the French laws were restored – except one. In 1942 the Vichy government of Nazi occupied France outlaws sex between adults and minors. This law was retained after liberation. Pierre received abuse from his own family because of his sexuality and eventually he sank into what he called “years of shame” when he tried to come to terms with his sexuality.

The memorial illustration dedicated to Pierre Seel, one of several produced by the Italian lgbt rights group Arcigay in 2015.

In 1950 he decided to marry, not telling his bride about being gay. They had 3 surviving children. Family life was very unsettled as work took them all around France. He also felt uncomfortable relating to his children, He became stressed and depressed and haunted by nightmares, He turned to drink and tranquilisers. The stress grew as the decade progressed and in 1978 Pierre and his wife separated.

In 1981 Pierre attended a book launch for “The Men With The Pink Triangle” by Heinz Heger, one of the inspirations for the play “Bent”. It was then that Pierre decided to speak out, anonymously in writing at first, about the truths behind the persecution of gay men by the Nazis. He was particularly keen to highlight the French victims, as most of the prevailing stories of persecution were about German gay men.

Pierre became a well-known activist and campaigner for the recognition of lgbt Holocaust victims at memorial commemorations. In 1994 he published his life story with the help of a journalist and fellow activist Jean Le Bitoux. Because of his high profile appearances in the media and elsewhere Pierre received more homophobic abuse, some of it physical. Through it all Pierre’s dignity and resolve remained steadfast.

By 2003 Pierre Seel was receiving official recognition for his activism. In 2005 France’s President Jacques Chirac spoke about the plight of French Holocaust victims, a tribute to Pierre Seel’s campaigning.

Pierre Seel died 7 months after President Chirac’s speech. By the end of his life he had gone to live with his partner Eric in Toulouse and had received the acceptance of his lifestyle from his family. A street near where he lived in Toulouse was named after him in 2008.

Pierre’s persecution during the Holocaust was not unique, except perhaps for his forced non-combative career in the Nazi army, but his testimony as one of the very few French gay Holocaust survivors and his personal experiences helped to change French attitudes to Nazi persecution of their countrymen on occupies France who were all too often forgotten during remembrances.