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Survivor’s last interview March 8, 2024 28 Adar I, 5784 • Vol 23, No 9
By Heather Robinson, JNS It is painful for Jack Betteil, 100, to remember the concentration camps he survived during the Holocaust, narrowly escaping death many times. But after offering chocolate babka and water to a JNS reporter in his Bayside home, he agreed to discuss his life, testifying to his experiences during the Shoah and memorializing those he loved throughout his long life, including those who helped him survive. He shared haunting memories that his son Matthew Betteil, who was on hand, says often make it impossible for his father to sleep. “This is my last interview. I’m not going to make any more,” the elder Betteil told JNS. “You can ask me anything you want, and I’ll answer you.”
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Bayside centenarian lived full life after Shoah
‘Work faster’
Betteil was about 15 when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. He and his family were forced into the Krakow ghetto. When he was 19, in March 1943, his family was deported to the nearby Płaszów slave labor camp operated by the German SS, which Steven Spielberg depicted in “Schindler’s List.” He remembers being in a cattle car on a train. “The train would stop for hours,” he told JNS. “The doors were locked. There was hardly any air. All the people were yelling to G-d, ‘Water! Water! Water’!” “There were about 100 cattle cars with people. Each cattle car had 100 inmates,” he said. “It was horrible.” A fight broke out when some of the Jewish inmates ripped open the train floor to escape. Some were against it. “They said, ‘Let’s not run away because they’re gonna kill all of us, with machine guns, the Nazis’,” Betteil said. “There was such a fight. ‘Yes, let’s go!’ Or ‘No. Let’s not go!’ There was nowhere to run. We didn’t know where we were going. Nobody knew.” “If I could do it over again, I wish I would’ve
Jack Betteil.
Photo by Matthew Betteil
jumped through that hole and just run,” he said. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying and praying when the train arrived in Płaszów, he remembered. “Finally, the German officer says, ‘OK. Give them water.’ So they open up the hydrants and splash all the trains with water,” Betteil said. “You know what happens if you put cold water on a stove? It sizzles.” People were dying in the steam. “It was terrible,” he said. In Płaszów, Betteil was assigned to build barracks and to carry and stack bodies. He was assigned the latter grim duty at other camps as well. “They made me carry bodies piled up to one flight up,” he said. “I had to carry legs and the other guy was arms.” At one point, a Nazi officer looked at the “arms guy” and shot him to death. The Nazi looked at Betteil and said, “Work faster.” Betteil told JNS that he had a friend in Płaszów whom he wanted to acknowledge. He never learned the young man’s last name but remembers that Giovanni helped him survive in “hell” by showing him what he could eat. “He showed me how to eat any kind of garbage,” Betteil said. “We never could find out what happened to Giovanni, or even his last name,” Matthew Betteil said. “Giovanni didn’t make it,” the elder Betteil said. To this day Betteil — a sculptor who works in metal, copper, glass and other media — pays tribute to his friend in all of his works, which he inscribes with his pseudonym: Giovanni Yankle See At 100 on page 2 Betteil.
Navalny death recalls fight for Soviet Jewry By Alex Augenbraun The death in a Siberian prison of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny could be the spark that burns down today’s iron curtain, Rabbi Avi Weiss told The Jewish Star. Rabbi Weiss, retired spiritual leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, was a firebrand activist in the decades-long movement to free Soviet Jews, starting in the mid-1960s. Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was taken to a Berlin hospital after falling ill during a flight to Moscow in 2020. German laboratory technicians determined he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Putin’s signature poison. After recovering, he returned to Russia, knowing full well that Putin would imprison him the moment his plane hit the tarmac. He died on Feb. 16 at age 47 while serving a 19-year sentence in corrective colony FKU IK-3. Rabbi Weiss hopes Navalny will leave a mark on today’s Russian civil rights advocates similar
to that left by the Soviety Jewry movement. “It’s going to be a test,” he said. “They could be inspired by individual figures, but movements must transcend whoever that figure may be.” Weiss detailed his own encounters with authorities in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in his 2015 book, “Open Up the Iron Door: Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist.” He was a visible figure in the fight to free Soviet Jews, who were not allowed to leave the USSR. The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry staged demonstrations to pressure the USSR to give Soviet Jews human rights. “Soviet Jewry deserves a legitimate place in history in bringing about the fall of communism,” Rabbi Weiss told The Jewish Star. “When they stood up and said we’re not going to bend, it sent the message to many others who were not Jewish, who were afraid to stand up to the Soviet dictatorship.” “This is an activist who understands that the See Navalny on page 4
In the 1960s, Rabbi Avi Weiss protested at Soviet buildings in the US in support of Soviet Jews. In 2022, he went to the Russian compound in Riverdale to support the Ukrainian resistance. Michael Hinman, Riverdale Press