The Google symbol on its home page was stylized to honor Fredy Hirsch, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

Google changed the logo on its home page Thursday to a Google Doodle honoring the memory of Holocaust victim Fredy Hirsch, who tried to save children and organized sports games for concentration camp inmates before being killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

The giant online search engine often changes the symbol at the top of its home page to what it calls Google Doodles, “the fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists.”

To honor Hirsch, an ardent athlete and fervent Zionist who organized Maccabi sports games before and during the Holocaust, Google created a stylized caricature of Hirsch with links to articles about his life.

Hirsch was born in Germany in 1916 and was involved in Zionist groups until Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, forcing him to flee to Czechoslovakia, where he organized the 1937 Maccabi Games that were attended by 1,600 people.

Arrested by the Nazis in 1941 for being Jewish, Hirsch was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he became the deputy supervisor of children. He worked to make life better for the children imprisoned there by organizing education and sports programs and even a Maccabi Games in the camp in 1943.

Punished for trying to reach a group of segregated children at the camp, Hirsch was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in the gas chambers in 1944.

Several survivors of the camps credited Hirsch with inspiring them, including Zuzana Ruzicková, who survived Auschwitz and later became one of the world’s greatest harpsichordists.

February 11, 2021 marks his 105th birthday. Five years ago the city of his birth, Aachen, honored Hirsch’s memory with Lord Mayor Marcel Philipp calling him “one of the most important sons of the city, if not the best known.”

Fredy Hirsch and the memorial plaque outside his childhood home in Aachen, Germany. (Beit Terezin Archive, Wikimedia Commons)

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Coco Schumann, a jazz guitarist who survived Nazi concentration camps to return to his musical career, has died. 

By: AP and World Israel News Staff

Heinz Jakob “Coco” Schumann, a famous jazz guitarist who survived Nazi concentration camps to return to his musical career in Berlin after World War II, has died. He was 93.

The German dpa news agency reported Monday that his record label Trikont said Schumann died Sunday in Berlin.

Schumann made a name for himself as a young musician in Berlin’s underground jazz and swing scene in the 1930s. He was arrested in 1943, after authorities learned his mother was Jewish, and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia at the age of 19.

There he played in a band known as the “Ghetto Swingers” before being transferred to Auschwitz in 1944, where he played music to entertain the camp guards.

Schumann lost his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Holocaust, while his parents survived. His father, a convert to Judaism, had ingeniously succeeded in keeping his Jewish wife hidden from the Nazis by declaring her dead after a disastrous fire

After the war Schumann immigrated to Australia before returning to Berlin in the mid-1950s and re-establishing his career, becoming a celebrated Jazz guitarist.

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Lt. Frank Winchester Towers helped save 2,500 Jewish prisoners bound for the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

US officer Frank Winchester Towers, who helped liberate 2,500 Jews during the Holocaust, died on July 4^th at the age of 99.

On April 7, 1945, Lt. Frank Winchester Towers, who was the division liaison officer of Regiment 743 of the 30th Infantry Division of the US Army during World War II, approached (with his regiment’s tanks) a stopped train in which there were 2,500 Jewish prisoners bound for the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis stopped the train because they were ordered to destroy it and drown the passengers in the Elbe river.

When the US regiment approached, the passengers shouted, “We’re Jews!” Towers helped his regiment rescue the prisoners by mobilizing ambulances and other vehicles, and helped the freed prisoners get to an American-run field hospital.

“I feel pride and joy to know I had a small part in their release,” Towers told Yedioth Ahronoth in 2010. “They rose from the ashes like the phoenix.…it warms my heart,” said Towers, who also took part in the invasion of Normandy and helped liberate Jews from a labor camp near Magdeburg.

In 2011, Towers visited Israel, where he met 55 of the 700 children who were rescued from the train to Theresienstadt. Later, he was able to contact 226 survivors from that train. He has spent his later years speaking at Holocaust events throughout the US.

“I feel pride and joy to know I had a small part in their release,” Towers said. “They rose from the ashes like the phoenix. … It warms my heart.”

By: JNS.org and World Israel News Staff

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