Fighting Fascism and Surviving Buchenwald: The Life and Memoir of Hans Bergas

By Bension Varon

Bension Varon has given the world two great gifts: the publication for the first time of
the remarkable 1946 Buchenwald memoir of Hans Bergas and a riveting account of
Bergas' equally remarkable life. Bergas, a highly secular German Jew, was first
known to Bension Varon as the brother-in-law of his wife's uncle. Far transcending
genealogical interest, Varon's painstaking research has revealed the many identities
of Hans Bergas: an impassioned Social Democrat, who battled both fascist and
communist threats to Germany's fledgling, interwar democracy; a member of the anti-Nazi
Resistance in France, who aided other escapees of the Nazi regime; a victim of
capture and savage torture by the Gestapo; a years-long "political" inmate in
Buchenwald, active in the camp resistance; and a gifted chronicler of life in
Buchenwald and the detail of Nazi depravity. In this volume, Bergas emerges like a
lost treasure from history's attic, precious both in itself and for what it reveals about
its troubled times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503572553

Bension Varon

About the Author... Bension (Ben) Varon is a retired economist with varied interests as a writer, including history, genealogy, and biography. He is the author of, outside his professional field, Cultures in Counterpoint: Memoirs of a Sephardic Turkish-American, Xlibris, 2009, and The Promise of the Present and the Shadow of the Past: The Journey of Barbara Frass Varon, Xlibris, 2011. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia and can be reached at [e-mail].

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments - People and Sources

Introduction - So Near, Yet So Far

PART ONE - THE LIFE OF HANS BERGAS

I.     From Berlin To Buchenwald

Berlin

Paris

Montauban—Why Montauban?

Working With the Quakers

Resistance

Arrest and Survival (of Sorts)

Buchenwald

II.    Genesis and Preparation of the Memoir

Enter Gertrude Weaver

Wever’s Background

The Weaver-Bergas Relationship

Drafting and Translation of the Memoir

The Hans Behind the Memoir

III.   Evaluating the Memoir

The Challenge

The U. S. Army’s Buchenwald Report

Genre and Contents

Presentation and Style

Jews and the Memoir

IV.   What Hans and France Did for Each Other

Against Germany or for France

Le Comité des Intérêts Français

Jury d’Honneur

Further Honors

V.   After Buchenwald

The Forgotten Memoir

Weaver’s Later Years

Hans Begas After Buchenwald

The Woman in the Shadow

Part Two - Hans Bergas’ Buchenwald Experience In His Own Words

Part Three - Postscript by Jeremy Varon, The New School

Appendix 1.   Chronology of Hans Bergas’ Life and Related World Events

Appendix 2.   Rare Letter from Anne Bergas to Gertrude Weaver

Appendix 3.   Sample General Letter from Hans Bergas to Gertrude Weaver

Appendix 4.   Transcript of Interview with Suzanne (Bergas) Légé by Jean-Louis Rey, February 16, 2009

Appendix 5.   A Childhood Recollection of Pierre Bergas*

Selected Bibliography

Endnotes

Fascism can only exist if it keeps on expanding, if it has continual new success. It must somehow resort to extreme measures to justify its position to its own people. Fascism, as every dictatorship, was based on violence. Murders, killings, lies, crimes against one’s fellow men are the pillars of dictatorships. There is no crime that dictatorships will not resort to in order to maintain their power. Hitler and his regime proved that to the world anew. Has the world finally learned its lesson?

Hans Bergas

"He [the Gestapo officer] said, ‘I understand your viewpoint but I condemn it; first comes the fatherland and then one’s duty.

I answered, ‘No, first comes love."

Anna Bergas

Acknowledgments

People and Sources

H ans Bergas, the subject of this book, was the brother of Dorothy (née Bergas) Jurkat, an aunt of my late wife through marriage. This book grew out of a short chapter on Hans I wrote for the biography of my wife in 2011. ¹ The people I need to thank first are, therefore, the same ones who helped me with that first chapter. These include people with institutional affiliations and those who helped me on their own. Among those in the first group the top credit goes to Christopher Densmore, Curator of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, where the Hans Bergas memoir of Buchenwald and related documents are kept. Chris was enormously helpful during my three visits to his library; he gave me not only liberal access to the Bergas documents but also guidance on other avenues of research.

I would also like to thank Donald Davis, archivist at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Center in Philadelphia. Bergas’ involvement with the Quakers predated the drafting of his memoir. The Quakers had an office in Montauban in southwestern France from 1939 through 1946, where Begas worked for a time. When the Office was closed in 1946, its records (some 120 folders) were transferred to the AFSC central archives in Philadelphia. Davis not only gave me access to the Montauban files but he sorted through the files to help me identify those relevant to my main interests.

Another institution I gratefully acknowledge is the Research Library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The library’s collections on the Holocaust and related subjects match and in some cases may exceed those of the Library of Congress. They are also more accessible with respect to topics like concentration camps, the French and other resistance movements, and tools such as microfilm and oral history.

Hans Bergas died in 1969 and his wife Anna followed in 1982. What the couple could preserve and pass on by way of documents was very limited for understandable reasons, given the circumstances of their lives. These included their numerous physical moves—inter-country, inter-city and intra-city—both by choice and by force, often without their belongings, living under constant surveillance, nearly permanent censorship, frequent incarceration or the threat of it; the strict laws they faced against preserving, sending or receiving anti-Nazi documents of any sort; and the general prohibition of criticizing the regime, even among one’s kin. The meager records that Hans and Anna Bergas could preserve dated mostly from the immediate postwar period and were passed on to their surviving daughter, Ingrid (or Suzanne). A son, Henri, died before his last parent perished.

Ingrid Bergas, later Légé, died in 2012, and the few Bergas papers she inherited were passed on, in turn, to her daughter Agathe, one of two children. It is fair to assume that the inherited documents dwindled in number and familiarity with time. For all intents and purposes, the family records and collective memory stopped with Ingrid, the last person to have interacted extensively with her parents.

We are fortunate that at nearly eighty years of age Ingrid gave an extensive interview about her father to a Frenchman named Jean-Louis Rey. The interview and what it produced were remarkable. It dealt with the major highlights of Hans Bergas’ life, including aspects that, in his daughter’s judgment, were misunderstood or misreported. The transcript Rey prepared was exceptionally true to the interview; in it, Rey conveyed, in addition to the words spoken, Ingrid’s emotional verbal sounds and responses to the facts she was reporting or choosing not to talk about. In a separate note, Rey shared his impressions of Ingrid and her performance. Finally, in the course of the interview, Ingrid presented Rey with a number of documents which Rey passed on to the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore where I later obtained them or received directly from Rey himself.

Most fortunately for me, I was able to contact Rey in mid-2014 and to find him as interested in Hans Bergas as at the time of his interview of Hans’ daughter. I am deeply indebted to him for his sharing with me his knowledge, experience and Hans-related documents. He had a deep understanding of French history, including World War II, the Resistance, the political history of France’s southwest, the Buchenwald camp, and the major players. He had had further contacts with Ingrid after his interview with her and met one or two other members of the Bergas family, whose doors he opened for me.

Hans and Anna Bergas had six grandchildren, all of whom shared my interest in their grandparents. I established quickly a working rapport with three of them—Pierre, Agathe and Marie-Anne. In practice, this meant frequent exchanges of e-mail—a sort of interview on-line. We had, in addition, a two-hour conference call as a group. They complied most eagerly with my requests, supplying me with documents, photographs, and written notes. I am grateful for all their help and for letting me feel like family.

I also benefited from the assistance of several people who did not know about the Hans Bergas story until I introduced them to it. The assistance dealt with historical context. Chief among these is Robert Assa, a French-born ex-colleague who spent part of his youth in Vichy and who has a rich library of books on that period. In addition to letting me use his personal library, Assa guided me through France’s World War II history over dozens of coffee meetings. Another such person is Joan Nugent, who, likewise, has a rich personal library relevant to my work from which I drew frequently. In addition, Joan used some of her precious vacation time in France to follow up on some of my interests related to Hans’ multiple awards rooted in French tradition and recent history.

One more person I imposed Hans on is Andrew Kevorkian, a friend who introduced me to Patti Mengers, a senior reporter for the Delaware County Daily News who interviewed me on Bergas for her paper. I am grateful to her for her interest and opening the door for readers familiar with the Bergas story to contact me. While none has to date, the possibility—and hope—remain alive.

Finally, I wish to thank Joe Annunziata for his invaluable help with editing and Rolf Valtin for his translation from German, where needed.

Clearly, the biggest credit for the narrative that follows belongs to Hans Bergas himself. What one hears through this chronicler and interpreter and the many people who have assisted me, is Hans’ voice. The story that emerges is the story of the life he led bravely, purposefully and without self doubt, despite the pain. To remember him is to honor him.

Introduction

So Near, Yet So Far

T his is the story of Hans Bergas and his courageous, lifelong struggles on behalf of human rights and human dignity. At the center of this story is a remarkable artifact of the Second World War: a memoir of Bergas’ life in Buchenwald, comprised of nineteen letters he wrote in 1946, less than a year after his liberation from the notorious concentration camp. The original audience for these letters was another remarkable soul—a Quaker schoolteacher named Gertrude Weaver, who reached out to send relief packages to the Bergases and other survivor families in Europe—and the American students studying German under her at Chester High School in Pennsylvania. The letters have been carefully preserved in the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College.

Historians prize letters and diaries, as in-the-moment sources, and they handle memoirs, often composed long after the events they depict, with special care, as mediated by the passage of time. The Bergas correspondence with Weaver and her students is a unique hybrid source. His letters, recollections of events in the near past, together constitute a powerful, sustained, coherent testimony on the evils of Fascism and the courage of those who resisted it. What follows is my attempt to put Bergas’ account of Buchenwald into the context of his life and times.

I came across Hans Bergas through family contacts, combined with luck. Barbara, my wife-to-be, was Frass by name on her father’s side and Jurkat on her mother’s side. She came to the United States from her native Germany in 1959, after losing both parents. She made the move to live with her uncle and aunt, Ernst and Dorothy Jurkat, who had immigrated earlier and lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dorothy Jurkat was the sister of Hans Bergas, the subject of this book, although this would be unknown to Barbara or me practically for nearly the next half century.

Barbara and I met at the University of Pennsylvania soon after I myself came to this country from my native Turkey in 1960. We dated for about six months and were married in Philadelphia in mid-1962. I got to know the Jurkats, who served in many ways as Barbara’s surrogate parents, even before our marriage. I was invited almost regularly to Sunday dinners at their Germantown house. We moved across the street from them after our marriage and saw them daily. Soon thereafter, the Jurkats went on a series of assignments for the United Nations that took them to Turkey, Ethiopia and Tanzania and lasted for a dozen years. Upon their return, Ernst Jurkat started a period of political service, as economic adviser, for two terms, to the Governor of Pennsylvania. We maintained a close relationship during this phase as well, by visiting them in Harrisburg regularly.²

Dorothy (Bergas) Jurkat died in 1990 and Ernst Jurkat followed in 1994. Thus, with some long interruption, I interacted with them or was exposed to them for about forty years. Yet what I learned about their background and war experience especially is limited for understandable reasons. One did not talk about the war then. They rarely did. And my upbringing prevented me from prying. Besides, I was awed and, in the beginning at least, intimidated by them. Naturally, I learned more about Ernst’s Jurkat clan, as Barbara belonged to it. But Dorothy’s side was largely a mystery. I knew that she was born Jewish and had joined the Society of Friends soon after coming to the United States. I also knew that her father was a wealthy manufacturer of silverware back in Germany, but little else—little of substance in any case and nothing about Dorothy’s other close relatives.

This changed abruptly and came like a shock to me around 2010, while I was drafting a biography of my wife, devoting the longest chapter to her uncle Ernst Jurkat. As I explained in it, Ernst had fled Germany in 1938 ahead of his wife and young son. They were not to be reunited for seven years during which she roamed with her young son and widowed mother as refugees throughout France. Early on during this period, Ernst had managed to emigrate to the United States with institutional help from, among other agencies, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). In 2010, I took what I thought was a chance by asking the successor of the ERC for any records on Ernst Jurkat. I was able to receive, to my surprise and for a minor fee, the entire dossier of correspondence with or by EJ. In it, I came across a letter from EJ dated June 11, 1945—three days after Germany’s surrender—welcoming the news of the release of Hans Bergas from Buchenwald. He added, To know this meant much comfort to Mrs. Bergas (Hans’ mother) in her hour of death. Mrs. Bergas, who had been separated from Dorothy in the meantime, had died in Luzerne, Switzerland two days earlier. Despite my nearly fifty-year-long relationship to the Jurkats, this was the first time I heard about Hans Bergas—the tragic brother of Barbara’s aunt. And an avalanche of discoveries followed, including the surfacing of a third Bergas-born sibling, the late surrgeon Suzanne Levy (1891-1925), whom I also wrote about later.

My use of the common saying So near, yet so far above refers to more than the distance in years elapsing between my meeting the Jurkats—my joining their family, so to speak—-and my discovery of Hans and Suzanne Bergas. It aims to convey the difference between knowing someone lightly and doing so deeply, which I failed to do with either Dorothy and Ernst Jurkat or Hans Bergas, despite his memoir. What the four (to include Hans’ wife Anna) had in common was, of course, the war. The two brothers-in-law, Hans and Ernst, shared moreover the same politics; they were both socialists, although Hans was the more committed or activist one; they had both had to flee Germany; and they dealt with their war experience similarly, that is, with self-imposed silence, more so in the case of Ernst, who never attempted a memoir. This carried a cost to them, their offspring and observers like me. The cost to Ernst Jurkat, the member of the four (two Bergases, two Jurkats) I came to know best, was a profound loneliness, which is not uncommon among survivors of the war. Ernst buried himself in his work as a market analyst, economist and urban planner. His constant companions, other than his devoted wife, were his Friden calculator and his cigars. Of the four mentioned, only Anna Bergas, a pious Catholic, sought solace in God.

The cost of the self-imposed silence to others, especially historians, was the withholding of information. Both Hans Bergas and Ernst Jurkat were good writers. Hans wrote more than his memoir of Buchenwald. Most of his other output focused on justifying his request for a pension and other support (from the French government) for himself or aid to other refugees and survivors in need, rather than on the past per se. He also contributed articles to the socialist press, both national and international (operating out of Geneva), but none of these have survived. Moreover, although Hans lived approximately a quarter century after the war, he never returned to the subject of the war in any length. Ernst’s voluminous postwar writing was of a professional nature; to my knowledge, he hardly wrote anything about his past—least of all, about the war years. What is striking is that Hans’ and Ernst’s self imposed silence was accompanied by self-imposed isolation. Neither of them maintained contact, written or other, with their pre-war friends and associates, many of whom occupied important posts in Germany, France and the United States (in Ernst’s case) after the war and could have been of significant help to them.

Writing about Hans in particular is not easy. One is confronted with gaps, paucity of facts, the challenge of verifying or confirming information through other sources, and even conflicting reports or assertions. One has to resort to judgments and prior knowledge—or knowledge of the larger context—to assure the coherence of a narrative regarding which many important dimensions will never be known. This applied to my narrative also. In putting together Hans’ narrative, I benefited from the fact that through my work on my late wife Barbara’s biography, I got to know all three of the Bergas siblings, to each of whom I devoted a chapter.

One thing which I concluded from this arduous but rewarding journey is that Hans Bergas was not merely, and should not be regarded as, a German or ex-German, a German Jew, a Socialist, a rare Germano-French resistance fighter, a Buchenwald survivor and memoirist. He was, of course, all of these but not typical or representative of any. What follows, therefore, is not about a group or a category of people; it is, simply put, the story of a human being called Hans Bergas.

Part One

The Life of Hans Bergas

Chapter One

From Berlin To Buchenwald

Berlin – Paris – Montauban: Why Montauban?

– Working with the Quakers –

Resistance – Arrest and Survival (of Sorts) – Buchenwald

Berlin

H ans Bergas was born on July 23, 1898 in Berlin to Thérése Fleischenfeld and Albert Bergas. (See