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Wellington’s vandalised graves include Holocaust survivor

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TALI FEINBERG

A video of the vandalised graves was circulated through social media. Although it is a tiny community, Wellington was once a centre of Jewish life, and South African Jews scattered around the globe have family members buried there.

Veteran financial journalist Allan Greenblo recognised the names on four of the graves as family members. Says Greenblo, “They are the parents, sister, and brother-in-law of my cousin. His brother-in-law, David Korzuch, was a Holocaust survivor.”

Describing his experiences during the war in the book In Sacred Memory: Recollections of the Holocaust by Survivors Living in Cape Town, the late Korzuch writes that he was born in 1930 in Shemyeshice, Poland, a town situated near the German border. He was the youngest of nine children. When a ghetto was erected in the town, three of his sisters refused to move into it, and left the village. He never heard from them again.

Korzuch celebrated his Barmitzvah in the ghetto, and soon after that, his mother, father, and grandparents were sent to the camps. He never saw them again. “There I was, all alone in the group of adults selected by the Nazis to work,” he writes. The rest of his childhood and adolescence would be spent in forced labour, trying to survive.

He and his brother, Alteshima, were moved to Markstadt in Poland, where they were forced to help build the Finef Taichen concentration camp. Later, when the construction of the camp was completed, Korzuch and his fellow labourers were transferred to it.

He remained at the camp until it was closed in 1944 to forestall the advancing Russian forces from liberating prisoners. Thereafter, he was forced to march for eight days. “I was like a delinquent, a desperate person who would look for any way to get some food, even stealing a piece of potato skin from a pig’s trough on the marches in order to eat,” Korzuch wrote.

The brothers were loaded into cattle trucks and taken to Buchenwald, where Alteshima later perished. David remained at the camp until it was liberated by the American army in April 1945. “It was very difficult in Buchenwald. We did not work there, just sat around doing nothing. When we worked outside the camp, we could sometimes organise a little extra food, but in Buchenwald, this was not possible because there was no connection with the outside world,” he wrote.

After liberation, Korzuch was discovered by his brother Max. “We decided to go to Argentina where we had an uncle, but they would not allow Jews in, so we applied for Paraguay, and crossed the border illegally. I met my South African wife there while she was on holiday. It took three years to get permission to join her because the South African government thought that if I was born in Poland, I must have been a Communist.”

In 1958, he finally came to South Africa. “Sometimes in nightmares I return to my village and walk the streets and go back to my school, but I will never, never go back there,” wrote Korzuch.

Greenblo remembers Korzuch as a gentle person “of few words and not entirely comfortable with the English language. As a child, I knew nothing of his experiences. Looking back, I do wonder what his thoughts might have been as he sat quietly in the room where we children were happily playing in all the security and plenty that our families provided.

“He married my second cousin, Ettie Forman, of Wellington in the Cape, where her parents ran a small store. They were of modest means. Ettie’s mother, Dora Forman, and my grandmother, Fanny Greenblo of Muizenberg, were sisters. The gravestones of Barney and Dora, David and Ettie, have all now been vandalised.”

Greenblo says Ettie and David got married in Wellington, where they started a family, and spent the rest of their lives. That is how he came to be buried there. He and his brother Max were the sole survivors of their family.

Meanwhile, the Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies is working hard to raise funds to restore the 39 vandalised graves and secure the site.

On 14 December, Stuart Diamond, the Director of the Cape SAJBD, and David King, Sub-Committee Chair of the country communities’ portfolio, visited the cemetery in Wellington where they met the leadership of the Paarl and Wellington Jewish communities to discuss the way forward.

“This shocking and disgusting act of vandalism needs to be called out, and so the following will need to happen: security hardening of the site and removal of what is left of the wall, replacing it with a clear fence so the site is always visible; restoring and repairing the graves; further engagement with the local SAPS [South African Police Services]; and engagement with leadership of the Drakenstein local council,” wrote Diamond.

In spite of a reward of R10 000 offered by the Paarl and Wellington Jewish communities for any information about the vandals, no suspects have been found.

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