Speaking of ... College of Charleston

From Charleston to Berlin, How Student Research Uncovered a Holocaust Story

• University Communications • Season 3 • Episode 16

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What began as a stack of forgotten letters in a college archive became a transatlantic journey of remembrance, culminating in a powerful tribute to the Landsmann family, Holocaust victims nearly erased by history. In this episode of Speaking of ... College of Charleston, we follow the story of how student research, archival discovery and community collaboration led to the placement of Stolpersteine, brass memorial stones installed in front of the family's last known residence in Berlin.

Featured in this episode:

Chad Gibbes joined the College of Charleston as assistant professor of Jewish studies and director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center in fall 2021.  Professor Gibbs teaches the history of the Holocaust, antisemitism, comparative genocide, and related topics. His research interests include Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, gender studies, memory and memorialization, and oral history. 

In his current project, Professor Gibbs uses spatial and social network analyses to expand our understanding of resistance and survival at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka. Those interested in his work should see his professional website here. He attained his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his MA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and his BA from the University of Wyoming. Before entering academic life, Professor Gibbs served in the US Army, including deployment to Iraq. 

Leah Davenport is one of the research assistants at the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. She is a senior at the College of Charleston and is majoring in Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. She joined the Pearlstine/Lipov research team in 2022 after her studies sparked an interest in Jewish communities of the South, specifically in the Lowcountry, of which she is a native. Leah was instrumental in finishing research on synagogues across South Carolina. In addition to her work with the Center, Leah is the Peer Facilitator for the both of the Jewish Studies First-Year Experience seminars in Fall 2024. She is currently planning to go on graduate school for social work, where she hopes to earn her MSW with a certificate specializing in hospital social work.

R. Scott Hellman ’96 graduated from the College with a BA in History and received an MBA from the University of Miami in 2001.  Hellman owns and operates a service driven insurance brokerage firm specializing in corporate benefits, as well as, life, health, long term care and disability income for individuals. Hellman is the current Chair of the Yaschik Arnold Jewish Studies Program Community Advisory Board; serves as Vice-President of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the oldest Jewish Charitable Society in the United States; and is on Hollings Cancer Center Advisory Board.  

As a multi-generational Charlestonian, Hellman enjoys all that Charleston has to offer on and offshore, riding bicycles, and spending time with his wife and child.

Resources from this episode:

 Darcie Goodwin  00:10

In 1942 the Landsman family was sent to Auschwitz and murdered 83 years later, on March 9, 2025 their names were memorialized in front of their Berlin residents, under the guidance of Chad Gibbs, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Zucker Goldberg center for Holocaust studies, Leah Davenport, a recent College of Charleston graduate, uncovered the story of the landsmans. The journey of remembrance led relatives of the landsmans, Max and Ann Hellman, along with their son Scott, to join Leah and Chad in Berlin for the placement of the stropelsteiner a marker to remember them. I'm Darcy Goodwin, Senior Director of advancement communications and guest host of this episode of speaking of College of Charleston. Today, I sit down with Leah, Chad and Scott to explore the story of Chaim Molly, Ida and Pepi Landsman.

 

chad  01:05

So Chad,

 

Darcie Goodwin  01:07

this entire project started with you. So why did you decide to delve into the letters stored in the Jewish heritage collection within Special Collections at the College of Charleston libraries?

 

chad  01:17

So thank you. It's, it's really great to be here and talk about Leah's accomplishment and what we're able to do to remember the landsmans at their home in Berlin, as I recall. This goes back a few years now. This project started with first getting to the college and looking at what our holdings at edelstone Library special collections were and finding out that we had several collections of original letters from the World War Two era sent between Jews in Europe and their family members here in the United States. And in my PhD program, I was coming here directly from finishing my PhD at UW Madison. I had worked under Professor Amos bitzon, who brought several postcards written from Poland to a little town called Racine, Wisconsin, and used those in his classes to teach about the Holocaust and to localize what people were going through. And what I got from that exercise was how really, really important it was to make the Holocaust something that didn't happen so far away, and how much it mattered to students that they saw Racine written on a letter that came from a ghetto in Poland, and how much more real all of that made it for them. So when I saw that we could do something like that, I knew that I wanted to bring those letters into our work at the Zucker Goldberg center, and my teaching and Leah came along, making it possible to do so much more with those

 

Darcie Goodwin  03:01

and Leah, would you share your discovery process with the letters between Minnie Toole Baum and Molly Landsman, the two cousins who never met, and what the letters prompted you to

 

Leah  03:16

do? Yeah, so I was given the opportunity to write an article for the southern Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina's spring magazine. And there wasn't really, not that there wasn't guidance on where to go with it, but sort of like what direction the letters are going to take you in, they will take you in. And not all of them have been translated. And so that was sort of the big thing about it was that that last letter is Molly essentially saying that they'd been forgotten and left behind.

 

Darcie Goodwin  03:48

And then would you describe what a stropelstein is, and what inspired you to get Stolpersteine for the landsmans? Yeah,

 

Leah  03:58

so Stolpersteine are basically not quite four inch by four inch brass cubes, they're installed at the last place that someone, whether it's an individual, a couple, a family, willingly lived before they were persecuted. It's not just Jews who are given them. It can be anyone who is a victim of Nazi persecution, whether or not they survived, they can get one. And so you'll often see think Berlin itself has about 10 has over 10,000 but in total, there are over 107,000 across 30 countries in Europe. And the whole thing about them is that it's meant to remind people who once lived in those neighborhoods. So you go into a neighborhood and maybe now it's wildly different than it was in 1930s Berlin. It was bombed during the war, and it's completely rebuilt. But you can go in and you can see reminders. That Nazi persecution wasn't just on the outskirts of town, it was in the center. It was out in the open where anyone could see it. And so that was for me, being able to not be the only person who remembered the landsmans and what they went through, and having it be a reminder for people who now live in their apartment building was a big thing.

 

Darcie Goodwin  05:22

And then what was the approval process to get the striner for the landsmans?

 

Leah  05:28

So they say that you need to request authorization from the city government, from the city. I don't actually remember if we ever sent that in or

 

chad  05:37

not. We did that through our German friend. We

 

Leah  05:40

did that through Teo. So we had to get an official letter from the Hellman saying that they get permission, that they endorse this, that they want this to happen, and then get the letter asking for permission from the city. And we had to make sure that we didn't have to make sure that we had the research and the funds, but that was a decision that I made to make sure that we had all those ready to go. And so each stone costs around 130 US dollars to install. And so that took about two years of fundraising to get the money for and then making sure that we knew what the lonsman sort of story was from first contact with Minnie in 1938 until that last letter in 1942 or summer 1941 and so that ended with finding survivor testimony in the Yad Vashem collection stating that Molly and Chaim were murdered at Auschwitz.

 

chad  06:41

I just add there on the fundraising side of things, Anne Hellman, Scott's mom offered very early on to just pay for the stolperstein to cut the process shorter and save time and Leah's effort. And Leah decided early on that that was not the way she wanted to go, not just make the family pay for their own memorial, but to raise the money herself. So through selling many, many, many, a bag of hamantaschen cookies, the stones were paid for mostly by Leah's efforts, instead of taking that directly to the family,

 

Scott  07:19

and the hamantaschen were very good, yes, too. So

 

Leah  07:24

of course, they were good. Got many compliments on

 

Darcie Goodwin  07:27

them to keep that going. And Scott You knew about the letters your family donated to the Jewish heritage collection, but you didn't know the contents. So what did your family learn when they were fully translated?

 

Scott  07:38

It was when Chad asked if I was going to the lonsman lecture at the Charleston County Library as part of the Americans in Holocaust, the Holocaust traveling exhibition from the US Holocaust Museum that Chad had to explain to me who the lonsmans were by telling me it's your family from grandmother's letters. And we went my brother, Brian, my mom and dad and I went to that lecture and learned a lot more than we ever had known, and all of a sudden we had a long lost family that we knew so much about. We also found out about all that my great great Aunt Minnie, went through not by documentation that she had mailed to the lonsmans. We really didn't have that information correct. We only had the documentation from the return from the authorities and all the other agencies that many communicated with about trying to get the lonsmans out, as well as the letters from the lonsmans. So it was somewhat heartbreaking to hear all that many went through to no avail, and also what the lonsmans were going through while they were trying to get help.

 

Leah  09:01

So photos of the letters are included in the magazine article, but to sort of give listeners an idea of what it was like to actually read one of them, I'll go ahead and read the very last letter that Molly sent. This was dated June 12, 1941 so by this point, they were already in the herzov ghetto in Poland, dear Minnie, I'm shocked I haven't received a single letter from you since February. I sent you a letter from the hilfsvieren in February, and before that, about the journey by ship. You didn't bother with this. The hilfsvieren also sent you a telegram, even with the response prepaid, but no answer came of that, dear many you don't want to hear anything about us anymore, and you are our only hope. I believe that you don't want to do anything because you know our situation, and you also understand our current situation and relationships. You wrote to me in February that you were sending a package, but we still haven't received that. You also wrote to me that Fanny wrote to us and sent us something I unfortunately haven't received. It either. Now there are unclear traveling from Berlin to New York via Lisbon, but unfortunately, we're not a part of that. I believe we'd be first if we unclear. Finally, with you, dear many, I beseech you to think of us and also to support us, because we have no other help. We're so in the village, such that we can, in no such way, travel. May God help us. May God help us that someone comes soon and that we see each other soon. I hope that you have unclear also, dear God and dear children. May we share together in the glory dear many, I beseech you to think about us again, and when possible, may we once again have a conversation. I will never forget this from you. In this hope, I send to you the heartiest greetings and kisses your cousin Molly. So in reality, it's we know that Minnie was sending letters and packages, but that in part, because of the war effort in Eastern Europe, and just with the way that the Nazis did things, it's more likely than not that these packages never actually even made it to Poland and were likely destroyed before they even got to the ghetto.

 

Darcie Goodwin  11:10

Yeah, it was. It was a difficult bunch of letters to read and then to get the rest of the story was really tough. But then you and your parents went to Berlin for the ceremony and tell me about that and what it was like for you. I wanna

 

Scott  11:27

start with what it was like getting back to the United States and going through customs and immigration at JFK. As I was asked, What were you doing in Germany for four days only, my response was, I was there to memorialize family members that were executed in the Holocaust. Well, they had no answer for that, and I got my passport and continued on into the country. But that was why we were there, and it was hard for us, because we really never knew we had family members that were murdered in the Holocaust or in concentration camps, we knew that family had been lost, but this was new for us, to the point now where I see pictures of Jews in Auschwitz, I want to see if I can recognize the landsmans from the photos that were found in the letters, which probably will never happen. I'm sure they never have looked like that at that time. But what was really interesting was going over with Leah and Chad and being with them for the weekend. It was as if we went to a family funeral built up to the ceremony of the stone placement, and then afterwards, look being able to say cottage with my father over our family members, and afterwards going and having a meal with Lee and Chad. And just as if we put our family members to rest and we were on with the next part of our lives, it's also to add as the chair of the advisory board of the Jewish Studies program, and my mother, the former president of the Jewish Historical Society where Leah's article went Originally, the letters were placed in special collections because of my mother's understanding at the time of the intertwined organizations of the Jewish Studies Program and the Historical Society and the special collections of the library that really made it so that my mother decided it was best to put those letters in the in the collections. And so it's nice to be able to look into this and realize we were in Berlin, memorializing my family Leah's research with Chad, helping to put it together, all because of the foresight of many individuals and their support to put these programs together to make it as to what we're sitting at this table talking about. And I'm

 

Darcie Goodwin  13:51

going to ask, Leah, you had so many of the apartment people in 17 hundredstrasse Come out, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah,

 

Leah  14:01

so we had, we got there probably about 20 minutes or so before the ceremony actually began, and before Gunter demnish actually showed up. And when he showed up, random man of the building, he was just sort of hanging out watching us, and he introduced himself afterwards. It's like, my name's Klaus. I live in the building. And he was just so interested in the entire process and why we were there, but not in a way that was at all malicious. It was very heartwarming. I thought, yeah, wanting to, like, understand, wanting to learn more. He told us that the building was original, that it had never, hadn't really been changed much, except into more apartments, and that we were more than welcome to come into the apartment building to look for traces of Jewish life, so looking for what would have been mezuzahs on the door frames

 

Darcie Goodwin  14:58

with some. Pieces look like, it's like,

 

Leah  15:02

rectangular, small, probably about four inches or so, just affixed to the side of the door frame. He hung out with us for about an hour and a half. Yeah,

 

chad  15:13

the whole ceremony, yeah, for all of the people standing around talking afterwards, he was there the whole time. Really, really kind interested person. And I just his, he first walks out like he had an agenda. He was going somewhere, but he noticed he recognized what was going on, and that he changed his whole day, clearly, like right there, and decided to stay. And you talk about the people who clearly follow Gunter Deming around as well. Yeah,

 

Leah  15:39

well, and who is Gunter Denning. So Gunther is the man who started all of this. He started the shulfer project in the 90s, and he goes and he installs the stones himself, most of them by himself, but he's getting older, and so sometimes he has other people install them, but he installed ours. And there was a group of people who, one of whom is a woman who teaches at NYU Berlin, and she had, I guess, friends who were in town, and they were just spending the day following Gunther as he installed stones across Berlin. And, well, first of all, they were very sad that they missed the actual installation. Yeah, they got there about five minutes after he left.

 

chad  16:20

Gunther was moving ahead of the schedule. They had,

 

Leah  16:24

evidently, and so, but they were, I mean, just so interested in the fact that we had come all the way from South Carolina to attend. And also they somehow they knew Max.

 

Scott  16:37

They knew my brother. Well, yeah, the one's parent in Atlanta knew my brother. Yeah, that small of a world. But

 

Leah  16:47

then their niece was a graduate of the College of Charleston, and had was like a minor Jewish I was minor, and she was in Berlin getting her master's, and to join us, she did. She had lunch with us afterwards.

 

Darcie Goodwin  17:02

I just remembered also that there were more flowers put out the next day. When you came by,

 

Leah  17:06

likely from Klaus,

 

Scott  17:08

we think when we also have to comment on what was done with the stones that were removed. That was Gunter, as incredible as he is, and now that I've been able to witness his work and his face and see how he's connected to this stoppage everywhere. When he was done, he took the block and put him in the next flower bed across the street. Unceremonious. It was unceremonious, but rightfully so. He just put it down, and hopefully, if somebody ever sees those stones, they'll find out they were removed to allow for the stones that memorialize my family

 

Darcie Goodwin  17:47

and Chad. You know, the litters between Minnie and Malia were just one set of many letters in the Jewish heritage collection. So can you just tell a little bit more about the project you've undertaken?

 

chad  17:58

Sure, so I get to throw out some much deserved kudos to another student, Grace Schaefer, who graduated College of Charleston in 2020, 433, yeah, my gosh, time is flying. Evidently, she is a PhD student at the University of Southern California now, and she and I and Professor Jeffrey ergel at University of South Carolina have just finished an article that is about how to teach about the Holocaust using letters like those sent by the landsmans that is now accepted for publication in the journal Social education. So it'll be put into the hands of that's a journal that's specifically for high school teachers to give them all the materials and the background and sort of the How to and which standards does it meet, all of that stuff, so that they can go just one place and learn how to teach using letters and and what standards it fulfills, and everything else they need for their leadership. So we're really, really proud of that. And my current research assistant, Chloe Duncan, we are working on a larger letters collection called the Lipton letters. These in PDF form, scanned in at edelstone Library. They run to 176 pages, I believe are off the top of my head. So with the London letters, we made 10 letters into teaching materials, and that's one size of things. But with the larger Lipton collection, where putting those into prepared form, just like Grace, Leah and Chloe have worked on with the Landsman letters, and we're preparing these with Scott auspelmeyer from the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust, to also go into South Carolina high schools and for high school teachers anywhere that might want to use them. Actually, I. Uh, the journal Social education will go a lot further than South Carolina, but we'll be putting those directly onto the website of of South Carolina Council on the Holocaust. And we'll be putting them forward as digital material, scanned in scaffolded put discussion questions around the letters that so much of that work is, the things that grace did that Leah has taken part in as well, and that Chloe will carry forward now that the two of them are both graduated. So we've got a lot we're doing with these letters, and we have high hopes, I think, pretty well founded, that they will be pretty great for education and classrooms locally and far beyond our state borders, well,

 

Darcie Goodwin  20:40

they'll certainly make it more real, certainly. So I want to thank you all for coming today and thank you for listening to this episode of speaking of College of Charleston. If you liked this episode, please help us reach more listeners by sharing it with a friend or leaving a review and For show notes and more episodes, visit the College of Charleston's official news site, the college today@today.charleston.edu You can find episodes on all major podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Amy Stockwell with recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz from the Division of Information Technology. You