Helen Weber wanted to know how — “how Germany and the other countries did what they did” in the Jewish extermination campaign, Operation Reinhard and the “Final Solution.” Being a writer for more than 60 years, she set out to learn all she could, to delve into the background and find out about the mechanisms of the Holocaust, as well as its horror.
Last year, at age 93, Weber published the results. Holocaust Mosaic, a 280-page book, recounts the history of the Nazi plans to eliminate Jews from Europe. Weber says she first became intrigued by the subject of the Holocaust when she read Jerzy Kozinski’s classic novel The Painted Bird about a boy, cast out and alone, avoiding the soldiers on a trek across rural Eastern Europe. Next she read Auschwitz, an account by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli of that infamous camp where he was sent with his wife and daughter.
“So then, I started to read and I couldn’t stop,” says Weber. Eventually she had gone through more than 200 books, watched numerous documentaries, visited Yad Vashem in Israel and spent time with Holocaust survivors and liberators. She took an Elderhostel class in the history of the Holocaust. Over all, she says, the writing project took her 17 years.
“I wrote it because I wanted to know how it happened,” she says. “I read so many survivors’ stories that I wanted to know how it was done. I wanted the background. And that is my book. It tells you, How did Kristallnacht happen? How did it all happen that so many people were killed? For instance, [author Josef Katz] talks about Kristallnacht — he’s very worried about Kristallnacht. They tell him, “˜Oh, it’s nothing.’ So I go into the background of how Kristallnacht was planned, how it was carried out.”
Being a storyteller by trade, Weber crafted the book by telling the story of the Holocaust not as a dry history but through the stories of six people who were there and went through the horrific events.
As primary sources, she relied on their six books: One Who Came Back by Josef Katz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl, Guns and Barbed Wire: a Child Survives the Holocaust by Thomas Geve, The Bird Has No Wings: Letters of Peter Schwiefert and An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork by Etty Hillesum.
Weber, who lives in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood in North Seattle, has literally been writing for more years than she can remember. She says when her sister visited recently they uncovered a 1945 magazine article Weber had written about her. She says she has published “hundreds of articles and short stories.”
Her other book, Summer Mockery, an account of the 1967 Milwaukee riots, won an Award of Merit for Distinguished Service to History from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Public Schools Award of Merit. The Writers Council of Wisconsin hailed her book as “An outstanding creative achievement in the field of professional writing.”
Over the years she worked on her Holocaust Mosaic project, Weber was a frequent visitor to the Washington State Holocaust Education and Resource Center.
“I went to all the meetings and affairs that they had,” Weber says. “I went to so many meetings, they asked me what camp I was at and if I’d filled out the insurance form.
“I met survivors and I talked to them,” she says, but chose specifically not to interview the people she met for the book. “I think they knew I was writing a book. And I had my six characters.”
Along with the six survivors and victims of the Holocaust, Weber also wrote about herself in Holocaust Mosiac. She says she wrote about her own experiences during the 1930s and ‘40s, her husband’s tour of duty, and “how I heard about it, how I learned what I did.”
Weber was born in Milwaukee Wisconsin, attended Milwaukee public schools, and the University of Wisconsin Extension Division-Milwaukee. Weber says she has gotten good reviews from people she knows who have read her book.
“They tell me it should be in every school. They tell me every bigot should read it. It should be in history classes. That’s what they tell me,” she says.
“The other thing they tell me is that it’s hard to read — not because of the writing but because of the subject. My own grandson, who’s a rabbi, told me that. My answer is: “˜If I could write it, you can read it.’”
Finding out “how”
