#Weremember: Maria Forescu

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, another occasion to remember every of the 6 million innocent people murdered only because they were Jewish. A sad moment in the history of humanity which took place less than a century ago. The date commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, by the Russian troops.

Hopefully, there were survivors who were strong enough to share with us the stories of the horrible lack of humanity humans can be capable of. Most of the people who were sent to the camps didn't survive though and it is our duty to remember them, because our memories of them keep them alive. 

One of the many who were sent to death and didn't come back was the actress and singer Maria Forescu, whose full story is relatively less known. I first read about her during a recent visit at the German Film Museum in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, where her activities and short details about her life, mostly undocumented, are mentioned. 

She was born in Czernowitz, nowadays Ukraine, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1875, as Maria Füllenbaum. She changed her family name into one sounding Romanian in order to avoid the obvious anti-Semitic intolerance at the time. She attended a boarding school in Paris, studied music and singing as well as drama at the Prague Conservatory. She secured a position at the Viennese Carl Theater as an operetta singer. She was on tours all over the world, including the Theatre of the West in Berlin or the famous Metropolitan. Since 1915, she decided to leave the singing career, moved to Berlin and dedicate all her energies and talent to the film, playing in various movies famous at the time, including Zwischen Nacht und Morgen or Danton, both launched in 1931. In total, she acted in around 160 films, only few of them archived. She was married with Harry Piel, an actor himself together with whom she appeared in many movies.

In 1932, her career was shortly cut by the racial laws of the Nazis. She decided to stay in Berlin, ending up completely isolated and expelled from the main professional organisations. After a short time during which she found refuge together with other Jews in Motzstrasse in the Wilmersdorfer borough of Berlin, she was sent to death, probably Buchenwald concentration camp where she died at the end of 1943.

In the camp

Felix Nussbaum, In the Camp, exhibited at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

On 27 January 1945, the dead camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, too late after 6 million innocent people were already killed. For many of those killed, it was not the end of the pain and humiliations. Those returning in Poland, for instance, were faced with the cruelty of their neighbours. And not all those looking to go to the eretz Yisroel, were allowed to finally have their home and were sent in (other) internment camps in Cyprus or Atlit where they waited for years. Some died because of the poor conditions in those places.

The Allies were too late, and the free world should never forget that when many of those killed in Auschwitz and the other killing camps erected in the middle of the cultured Europe tried to get a free entrance in America or UK and were refused. The historical and diplomatic evidences from the last years proved that the big powers were aware of what was going on in the camps.

One of those tragic destinies was the family of the painter Felix Nussbaum, entirely killed during Shoah. Originally from the German city of Osnabrueck, his father was a veteran of the World War I and a German patriot. Philipp and Rahel Nussbaum were able to escape to Switzerland but were homesick and returned to Germany where they were shortly sent to death.

Felix Nussbaum studied in Hamburg and was influenced by the works of Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau and Giorgio Chirico. Escaping Germany, he was sent to a camp in St. Cyprien, due to his German citizenship. His painting, In the Camp, is a testimony of those times, but can easily reflect the overall situation of the life in the camps. After the German invaded Belgium, he and his wife were living illegally for a while, before being caught and sent to Auschwitz where he was killed. The same destiny was shared by his niece, brother and sister-in-law.

Every victim has its own tragic story. They also give us, to the lucky ones to be born in a time when we do have a country to defend us, a lesson: that we should not give up and always keep believing. We might not understand the secret design, but we might be aware that every problem and tragedy have hidden the grains of redemption.

May the memory of the victims will be remembered and that of the murderers for ever erased.