For decades, Donald Wittenberg spent much of his free time scrupulously documenting how the Holocaust affected people in the Philadelphia region and educating people to prevent anything like it from happening again.
Now, the archives of the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center (HAMEC) in Elkins Park are dedicated to Wittenberg, who died in March at age 79.
“In these more than difficult times, Don’s efforts will go on, and we will always appreciate those efforts,” HAMEC board president Chuck Feldman said to family and friends gathered at the museum Sunday.
Feldman estimated that with Wittenberg’s guidance, the museum and its educational programs have reached 400,000 young people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
Feldman said he had known Wittenberg since 1970, when they were young members of the Northeast Independent Democrats, helping to elect Milton Shapp for Pennsylvania governor.
Back then, the museum was in the basement of Yaakov Riz, who survived five years in a Soviet labor camp only to learn that 83 of his family members died in the Holocaust, Feldman said.
Though Riz was the museum’s founder, Wittenberg — a public school teacher and administrator — helped build it into what it is today, Feldman said.
“Don found artifacts through the local community, whose owners were looking for a respectful and impactful resting place,” Feldman said.
Wittenberg’s wife, Bonnie, said his motivation was partly personal. On his father’s side, most of Wittenberg’s family died in the Holocaust. Wittenberg wanted to know who they were, and who may have survived.
“He was like a detective. He was trying to solve mysteries,” Bonnie Wittenberg said.
One example: Her husband became obsessed with finding where a distant relative had been buried. She wasn’t sure if he ever found out, but unanswered questions like this one often drove his research.
This curiosity marked his conversations with the many Jewish families who over the years came to him with their own family stories. “He wanted to tell the story right,” she said.
Wittenberg’s search for his ancestors continued a journey begun by his own Hungarian-born father, Joseph Wittenberg, said Donald’s son Steven Wittenberg.
Joseph Wittenberg served in the U.S. Army during World War II, “and when the war was over, he went back searching for his family, but he couldn’t find them,” Steven Wittenberg said.
After Joseph died, Donald Wittenberg found personal journals and war trophies that revealed more about his family and his father’s military service, he said. He learned his father had been in Normandy on D-Day plus one and had seen combat.
One item, a Nazi flag taken from Nuremberg’s city hall and signed by Joseph Wittenberg’s comrades in the U.S. Army 102nd Cavalry Regiment, is now on display in the museum. So is Joseph Wittenberg’s Army service coat, which Steven and his brother Jan remembered wearing when they were children.
These objects, and the stories they tell, offer lessons for people today, Steven Wittenberg said: “The survivors are starting to pass away, and so you need to document that.”
Donald Wittenberg carefully chose every artifact in the museum, said Jacob Dupre, a Holocaust historian who worked as Wittenberg’s assistant and who will be taking over as curator. Dupre noted that there were no images of death on display — a choice Wittenberg made.
Wittenberg did include evidence of Nazi atrocities in the display, however. Tom Brennan of Oreland acquired a canister that once held Zyklon B, a gas used to kill people. Brennan noted that the shape of the puncture holes in the canister were the size of a standard-issue German soldier’s knife.
Other artifacts spoke to the resilience of those imprisoned in the camps, such as a tiny six-sided die made of bread dough.
One poignant item, a handmade birthday card passed between two concentration camp prisoners, was translated from German to read, “Whom the stork brought in May / the sun smiled on him.”
The poem-like text of the card, written more than 90 years ago, concluded with the lines, “Everything on Earth will change / when we’re all home again.”
Such messages of hope and endurance, found throughout the museum, still have something to teach people today, said HAMEC CEO Fabulous Flores. The museum tracked the yearslong process from the Nazi’s hate campaign against Jews to the end of World War II.
“We talk a lot about empathy,” Flores said. “When antisemitism is on the rise, when one group is targeted for hate, everyone is at risk.”
