Germany – Jewish Man Haunted by Holocaust Collects Yellow Stars

Berlin, Germany – Ever so carefully, Wolfgang Haney takes a yellow Jewish badge into his hand, tracing the letters with his finger.

‘Juif,’ it says in black letters on the faded material. ‘This one’s from France,’ he says, and then points to another. ‘That one is from Belgium, and that is one from the Netherlands.’

Haney collects Jewish badges, the identification symbol Nazis required Jews to wear by police order, which came into effect on September 19, 1941.

The 87-year-old has been searching for years at flea markets and collector shops for special pieces from all over Europe, but he does not limit himself to just the yellow stars.

He has brought together thousands of items related to Jewish people and the 1933-45 Nazi era, including telegrams from concentration camps, drawings by prisoners, anti-Semitic postcards, letters and identity documents.

What drives him is an almost insatiable scientific curiosity, and of course, his own history.

Haney was born in Berlin in 1924. His father was an Austrian-Hungarian pianist, and his mother a Jew from what is now Poland.

As Hitler comes to power, Haney is just nine years old, and his brother is eleven. The Nazis regard them as ‘mixed-bloods,’ and they experience discrimination in Nazi Germany from early on.

Haney is excluded from school and from getting a diploma, and loses many friends. ‘We were pariahs when we just wanted to be like everybody else,’ Haney says.

The police order for identification of Jews, which came into effect on September 19, 1941, declared, ‘Jews over the age of six are forbidden from appearing in public without a visible yellow badge.’

Haney remembers the day his uncle suddenly wore the badge sewn onto the breast of his clothing.

The uncle had fought in World War I, and been seriously wounded. For Haney, he was a hero, ‘and then he had to walk around with something.’ Haney says he felt ‘a great sense of shame.’ Some time later, the uncle was deported and died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Haney’s mother was required to give up her passport in exchange for an identification card with a large red ‘J.’ In the winter of 1944 and 1945, she narrowly evaded a search troupe of the Gestapo.

Her son hid her in a hut in a forest near Berlin with no heating or toilet. ‘It was horrible,’ he says quietly, and strokes over the yellow badges before him on the table. ‘Just horrible.’

But both parents, Haney and his brother survive the war, and attempt to rebuild their lives together after 1945. Haney becomes a businessman, continues to work in Berlin, and begins to collect yellow stars.

Over time, his documentation grows and grows. By now, it fills his entire house.

Books are stacked to the ceiling, posters cover the tables, and mountains of documents are everywhere. Three enormous iron safes in the cellar are filled to the brim with red and black folders.

Thousands of pages, letters, food stamps, arm cuffs and drawings document the discrimination and elimination of Jews.

It is not a light inheritance. ‘We sit on thousands of corpses,’ is how a friend refers to his collection.

While Haney persists in his search for more material, his collection is also making him sick. He says he can’t sleep well, and gets rashes that cause the pads of his fingers to burst open. ‘It has almost broken me down,’ he says.

His wife cannot understand why he continues enlarging the collection, on which he also spends most of his money.
‘You are running yourself ragged,’ she complains. ‘All you have here are the dead and the murdered.’
‘You are absolutely right,’ Haney answers. And yet he cannot stop.

His collection is not just a very personal kind of emotional processing, it is also contributing to scientific research. Haney organizes exhibits, gives lectures, and publishes books.

‘It is important,’ he says with a quiet voice, as if he had to remind himself of it. ‘What I am doing is important.’