How a German soldier-artist saved Dutch Jews from the Nazis
BERLIN — This is the story of how a beloved German children’s book illustrator, while serving in the army of Nazi Germany, saved the lives of hundreds of Jews from Adolf Hitler’s death machine.
It’s a story from before Werner Klemke was deeply beloved for his drawings of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, which made their way to every East German child’s bookshelf, and his hundreds of often lightheartedly erotic magazine covers, which were eagerly snapped up upon publication. It’s a story from before the creation of the communist state in which he managed to build an artistic career despite being occasionally at odds with the repressive government.
It’s also a story that the artist, who died 20 years ago, never told. The story surfaced only when Dutch documentary filmmaker Annet Betsalel asked whether she could poke around in the long-shuttered archives of the Jewish community of Bussum, the Netherlands.
“They told me the archives only really had financial data in them,” Betsalel said in an interview. “But I thought, well, financial records can be interesting.”
What she found was the story of a network set up by a Jewish businessman, Sam van Perlstein, who knew in 1942 that Jews were living on borrowed time under Nazi occupation and that if they were going to survive they were going to need some help.
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Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/09/06/3663193/how-a-german-soldier-artist-saved.html
Once upon a time, there were real heroes.....
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