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March 10, 2008
Exhibit features dramatic rescue during Nazi death march
University Park, PA— "Anyone Would Have Done That: The Rescue of the 13 Jews from Ergoldsbach, Germany" is on display March 17–August 22, 2008, in the Diversity Studies Room, 109 Pattee Library. On March 19, 6:00 p.m., in the Foster Auditorium, 101
Pattee Library, several of the German organizers from Ergoldsbach and Gerhard F. Strasser, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Penn State and coordinator of this exhibit will host a discussion and address questions from the audience. The evening will also include two short videos.
The exhibit documents a dramatic rescue of 13 Jews on one of the death marches from the Buchenwald concentration camp in the northeast of Germany to nowhere, at the end of World War II. Thousands perished on the march; but some 200 prisoners reached the small town of Ergoldsbach in Bavaria at the end of April 1945. Thirteen of these individuals managed to escape. They were found by Max Maurer, the local police sergeant, who—contrary to Nazi SS orders he received that very day—did not shoot them on sight.
Instead, Maurer arranged for a cart to take the emaciated men to a barn belonging to a farmer who was known for her opposition to the Nazis. Anna Gnadl hid the men in her hayloft and fed them. The following morning, they were rescued by American troops.
One of the rescued men, John Weiner, weighed only 53 pounds when he was rescued, and it took him almost a year to recover in a Regensburg hospital. He was one of the last surviving members of this group and had Max Maurer, the brave police sergeant, included among the courageous Germans honored at the memorial at Yad Vashem. Weiner was also instrumental in creating this exhibit, first shown in Ergoldsbach and Bavarian schools in 2005.
The exhibit includes images of Nazi-era Ergoldsbach and the death march plus newspaper clippings from the 1930s, translated into English that give insight into local politics, during the Nazi regime.
The exhibit was made possible through the sponsorship of the Jewish Studies Program, and with the support of the Gene and Roz Chaiken Endowment for the Study of the Holocaust; the departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, and History; and Penn State's University Libraries.
For further information, please contact Brian Hesse, director of the Jewish Studies Program, at 814-863-8939.