|
Professor
of Chemistry Heffy Taft
Hessy Taft
recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Israel
with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front
cover, and told the story of how she became an unlikely poster
child for the Third Reich.
When Hessy Taft was six months old, she was a poster child for the
Nazis. Her photograph was chosen as the image of the ideal Aryan
baby, and distributed in party propaganda. But what the Nazis
didn't know was that their perfect baby was really Jewish.
"I can laugh about it now," the 80-year-old Professor Taft told
Germany
's Bild newspaper in an interview. "But if the Nazis had known
who I really was, I wouldn't be alive."
Prof Taft recently presented
the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Israel
with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front
cover, and told the story of how she became an unlikely poster
child for the Third Reich.
Her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, both talented singers, moved
to
Berlin
from
Latvia
to pursue careers in classical music in 1928, only to find themselves
caught up in the Nazis' rise to power. Her father lost his job at an
opera company because he was Jewish, and had to find work as a
door-to-door salesman.
In 1935, with the city rife with anti-semitic attacks, Pauline Levinsons
took her six-month-old daughter Hessy to a well-known
Berlin
photographer to have her baby photograph taken.
A few months later, she was horrified to find her daughter's picture
on the front cover of Sonne ins Hause, a major Nazi family
magazine. Terrified, the family would be exposed as Jews, she rushed to
the photographer, Hans Ballin. He told her he knew the family was
Jewish, and had deliberately submitted the photograph to a contest
to find the most beautiful Aryan baby.
"I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous," the photographer told her.
He succeeded: the picture won the contest, and was believed to have been
chosen personally by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
Frightened she would be recognized on the streets and questions asked
about her identity,
Prof Taft's parents kept
her at home. Her photograph appeared on widely available Nazi postcards,
where she was recognized by an aunt in distant Memel, now part of
Lithuania
. But the Nazis never discovered Prof Taft's
true identity. In 1938, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped
up tax charge, but released when his accountant, a Nazi party member,
came to his defense.
After that, the family fled
Germany
. They moved first to
Latvia
, before settling in
Paris
only for the city to fall to the Nazis. With the help of the French
resistance, they escaped again, this time to
Cuba
, and in 1949 the family moved to the
United States
.
Today the Jewish woman who was once a Nazi poster child is a professor
of chemistry in
New York
.
"I feel a little revenge,"
she said of presenting her photograph to Yad Vashem.
"Something like
satisfaction."
|
