Holocaust survivor issues warning about anti-Israel protests

The recent anti-Israel protests occurring throughout the United States are reminding one Holocaust survivor of the circumstances that forced him to conceal his Jewish identity by joining the Hitler Youth after his mother was sent to the Auschwitz death camp during World War II. 

Jochen “Jack” Wurfl, who relocated to the United States when he was 17, said he was “astonished” and “disappointed” by the wave of anti-Israel protests that erupted throughout the United States and most of the Western world following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed over 1,200 people. 

Part of the problem, the 93-year-old believes, is that many, especially young people, don’t fully understand what happened during the Holocaust. The period of German state-sponsored persecution led to as many as 6 million Jews throughout Europe being killed by Nazis before and during World War II. 

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“You would never even dream that there would be something like this happening,” Wurfl told The Christian Post about the anti-Israel encampments that have popped up on college campuses and reports of a global surge in antisemitic incidents.

“Now that it did happen, I think that we need to do everything that we can to teach people what the Holocaust was all about, who Adolf Hitler was, his philosophy, and what he tried to do.”

“What’s happening now at all of these universities and with these students could be the beginning of what happened in Germany during Hitler’s time, just in a different way.”

Wurfl was born in Austria in 1932 to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. In 1936, due to escalating political tensions, Wurfl’s parents sent him and his brother to live with his grandparents in Berlin, Germany. 

“Berlin was, at the time, a little quieter than the rest of Germany,” Wurfl told CP. 

At the outbreak of World War II, 7-year-old Wurfl and his 8-year-old brother, Peter, concealed their Jewish identity and joined the Hitler Youth to escape persecution. 

‘Everybody was killed’

The boys’ mother later came to Germany as well. One day, the two brothers were returning from an errand when they witnessed their mother being arrested by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police force. 

“And we said, ‘We better not go in now. We better wait and then later, we can ask mother why they were there,'” Wurfl recalled.

“Well, to our surprise, as we were standing there waiting, it was our mother that they brought out of the building, put in one of the cars, and then drove away.”

The brothers would see their mother one last time before she was sent to Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps established by the Nazis.

The brothers ran to the prison where their mom was taken, sprinting from floor to floor until they found her.

According to Wurfl, the guards didn’t pay much attention to the two little boys running around the prison, but when they eventually found their mom, she expressed concern about someone finding out they were there. 

“She saw us, and she said, ‘Oh, boys, what are you doing here? It’s so sweet of you, but if they catch you here, the same thing is going to happen to you that I know is going to happen to me,'” Wurfl remembered his mother saying. 

The mother instructed her sons to “be good boys, go to school and learn what they can,” telling them that if she did not see them again, she wanted them to know she would love them forever. 

Wurfl’s mother died at Auschwitz. Their father, a political prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp, died shortly after the U.S. Army liberated him at the end of the war. 

“As far as the rest of my family is concerned, no one survived,” Wurfl said. “Everybody was killed — my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, everybody,” Wurfl said. “But the two people who survived were my brother and I.”

The brothers didn’t die at a concentration camp like many of their relatives because their grandfather arranged for them to live at a children’s summer camp in Dangast, located 200 miles northwest of Berlin on the North Sea. 

‘We were so lucky’

A German woman named Irma Franzen-Heinrichsdorff operated the summer camp and agreed to care for the boys. The woman became like a second mother to them, Wurfl said. 

“She was a wonderful person,” he recalled. “We lived with her for seven years until I came to the United States.”

The camp operator told the brothers that they would have to join the Hitler Youth to blend in, an organization that indoctrinated youth into Nazi beliefs. At the children’s camp, the boys also attended a small school where the teacher belonged to the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi regime. 

“This teacher knew we were Jewish,” he said. “The teacher and Irma knew each other very well. We were so lucky to have these two people who saved our lives, and who took a big risk.”

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children relocated Wurfl and his older brother to the U.S. They started a new life in Baltimore, Maryland, where he took night classes to learn English and started working for a small insurance company. 

Recovering a family treasure

In addition to recounting his story of survival, Wurfl recalled how he recovered an oil painting the Nazis stole from his family during the Holocaust, titled the “Helle Rosen.”

The 1915 painting by German artist Lovis Corinth was among various possessions the Nazis took from Wurfl’s family, many of which were never recovered. 

According to Artnet, the German National Socialists confiscated most of Corinth’s pieces in the 1930s, as they deemed the work “degenerate.” With help from an attorney, Wurfl recovered the painting with restitution, and the artwork is now on display at a museum in Germany. 

“The good news is that a family treasure was recovered, and I now have a copy on my wall,” he said. 

After serving in the U.S. Army for two years, Wurfl started his own insurance agency in 1969, the Diversified Insurance Industries.

He also married a former Miss El Salvador, Zonia Nusen, and their marriage spanned 63 years until she died in 2018. The pair had three daughters together, one of whom now runs Wurfl’s insurance company alongside her husband. 

While Wurfl’s brother now resides in Australia, the two stay in touch over the phone as long-distance travel has become increasingly difficult now that the two men are in their 90s. 

As a survivor of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, Wurfl has shared his story at schools and through his book, My Two Lives. The book was released one month before Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, a massacre that experts have noted is one of the worst attacks against Jews since the Holocaust.

“I wrote it for my family,” he said about his book. “My family asked me to write the book so that our children, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would always know where we came from, what happened to our family, and how we came to America.”