Some 300 people gathered here Sunday to commemorate an event of 50 years ago when hundreds of non-Jewish women staged a weeklong, successful protest to get back their Jewish husbands and children, who had been arrested by the Nazis.
In a ceremony in front of the former detention center, the chairman of the Berlin Jewish community, Jerzy Kanal, spoke of one of the only examples of open courage and solidarity during the Holocaust that met with success.
One can learn from this uprising, said Kanal, that there is no reason to believe that resistance to the Nazis was impossible. He called for the erection of a Jewish center in the place where that detention center once stood.
Christine Bergmann, a senator from Berlin, spoke of “the powerless who overcame the powerful.” This should be remembered now, she said, as racism and anti-Semitism once more rear their ugly heads in Germany.
“We should not walk away from extreme right tendencies in our society,” she said.
Likewise, Cynthia Kahn, a leader of the women’s Zionist organization WIZO, said strength and courage are as necessary today as before.
The crowd, including journalists, applauded a 92-year-old woman, Charlotte Israel, who was one of the surviving protesters of that time.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
