the killing of the Filreis family

From the Yad Vashem archives in Israel, here are names of some of the Filreis family who were killed by the Germans during World War II. Most of them were exterminated at Treblinka:

Filreiss, Benek
Koldra, Lea, born 1881
Szejnfuks, Manja, born 1907
Akerman, Haya**
Filreis, Genia, born 1915
Filries, Szimon, born 1915
Filries, Max, born 1900
Filries Tauba, born 1895
Filries, Khaia

All were from Warsaw, Poland. I'm guessing that "Filreiss" is a real alternative spelling and that "Filries" is a mistake in transcription at some point (these are just guesses).

The names were submitted by Mrs. Idia Kcefner (I don't know who she is) in 1957, by Mr. Moshe' Koldra (ditto) in 1956, and by Zalman Akerman** in 1999.

For more about Zalman Akerman's story of survival, go here.

** Haya Filreis, married into the Akerman family, was Zalman's mother. Zalman and his mother lived for a time in the Warsaw Ghetto after the mass deportations from the ghetto had begun. Zalman is alive and well and living in Israel, and is the provider of this information, by way of Steve Filreis (my father's cousin Mel's son) and Ayelet Regev (one of Zalman's grandchildren). Ayelet (currently studying law in the U.S.) is my father's father's cousin's son's granddaugther, a closer relation that that phrasing makes it seem.

Kissinger: "...and if they put the Jews into gas chambers..."

Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit Richard Nixon (and Henry Kissinger) on March 1, 1973. Tapes Nixon's staff made of all his conversations in the Oval Office record Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

Then she left the room, whereupon Nixon and Kissinger dismissed her in brutal terms. Meir had asked that the U.S. put pressure on the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate to Israel to escape persecution. Now I quote:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Kafka = Kold Kash

Kafka's friend, the brilliant editor/critic Max Brod, saved his strange pal's papers despite his pleas that they be destroyed. Brod's lover-secretary got them after his death and now her daughter has them somewhere in or near Tel Aviv. Finally, because the daughter needs some cash, it seems that these papers will be made available, once some archive buys them (for many millions). This is all a big deal, although the Times, in covering the story this morning, hasn't much to go on: their writer in Tel Aviv quotes various Kafka scholars relevantly and irrelevantly. Is the question of Kafka's possible interest in the Hebrew language, in his Jewish identity, in Zionism, relevant to the news of the extant papers? Not necessarily. And via the headline we learn that the pressure of the daughter of the former lover-secretary to release the papers is "Kafkaesque." It doesn't seem Kafkaesque to me at all - in fact, the opposite. The motive (originating in her, not put on her) is purely to turn the writer's extraodinarily uncommercial writing into lots of cash. Such straightforward normative valuation seems unlike anything I've ever read in Kafka. Here is your link the Times article.