Speech delivered next to the “Hate Ends Now” cattle car exhibit at the University of North Texas library mall, April 20, 2026.
Ladies and Gentlemen, UNT Students, Faculty, Parents, and Colleagues,
My name is Timothy L. Jackson, Ph.D., and I am Professor of Music Theory at the College of Music and Distinguished University Research Professor here at the University of North Texas. I teach courses on music theory and the politics of classical music, and have actively directed the “Lost Composers” Project, which seeks to revive the music and theoretical work of composers eclipsed or lost because of Nazi-era cultural policies and the Holocaust.
I am alive to speak to you today solely because all four of my grandparents were Jews who “saw the writing on the wall” and had the good sense to flee from Europe prior to the Holocaust.
My maternal grandmother (my mother’s mother), Rose Bluhmstein Sherman, came to the U.S. by herself in 1920—an astonishingly bold move for a single 21-year-old girl (Plate 1). Her family, the Bluhmsteins, were originally German-Jewish diamond merchants who settled in Berlin; however, my grandmother’s father emigrated from Germany to Poland around 1900 and established a coal business in the small town of Pabjanice (now spelled Pabianice), about a hundred miles southwest of Łódź.
The Bluhmsteins became middle-class Polish-Jewish petit bourgeois (Plates 3–5).
Ironically, before the rise of Nazism, when my grandma came to the U.S. in 1920, she preferred to associate with Germans since she spoke their language (in addition to Polish, Yiddish, and some Russian). Her two uncles, who had remained in Germany, had both fought in the German army in World War I.
In the later 1920s, my grandmother trusted a German family to look after my mother while she was working (my mother was born in 1924), and, much later, my mother’s closest friends were either Jewish or German, or both! My interest in studying German language and culture stemmed in part from my grandmother.
Anti-Semitism motivated the most momentous events in my family history. In addition to my maternal grandmother leaving Poland, my paternal grandfather, Yakov Zelechin, known as “Jack Zelechin,” changed his surname in London to “Jack Jackson” in 1936. Why? Because, at that time, it was dangerous, even in comparatively tolerant England, to be identified as Jewish by one’s surname. He wanted to fly under the radar, and thereby give his sons, particularly his youngest son (my father), a better chance in life. My grandfather, Jack (Yakov), to whom I was especially close in my childhood, had emigrated to England as a teenager just before World War I and the Russian Revolution, the son of a master carpenter in Mogilev, White Russia (Plates 7–8). When his father was murdered in a pogrom just before World War I, my great-grandmother Mariashe fled to England with her two children, my grandfather and his sister.
My grandfather’s name change from Yakov (Jack) Zelechin to Jack Jackson in 1936 was a momentous, life-changing event. Again, in 1936, with the rise of Hitler and the accompanying global anti-Semitism, even in Britain, it was bad to be identified as Jewish, or perceived as being “too Jewish.” Recall that 1936 was the period of the rise of Mosley and the Blackshirts in England, the British equivalent to the Nazis, and prejudice and anti-Semitism were ubiquitous. My uncles used to come home bleeding and bruised from street fights against the British fascists. Also, my father Anthony was in “grammar school” at the time, which was the sine qua non for a university or professional school education and subsequent career.
One night, on October 14, 1936, my father told me, as an 11-year-old, he went to bed as Anthony Zelechin, and the next morning he woke up Anthony Jackson (Plate 9). We often talked about his experiences growing up Jewish in England in the 1930s. At one point, he also drew a parallel with the famous movie Chariots of Fire, which afforded an inside look at the kind of genteel British anti-Semitism that permeated elite educational institutions, government, and upper-class society; the anti-Semitism that forced my grandfather to change his surname, and, thereby, his public identity, in order to help my father to attend the London Polytechnic, the equivalent of university, to study architecture (Plate 10).
But let us now return to my mother’s side of the family—those who remained in Poland and France. Of them, only one brother and two children survived in France. The rest of my large extended family were all murdered in various ways in Pabjanice or deported from France in cattle cars to the death camps. During the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, the Bluhmsteins were caught in the Nazi net in occupied Paris. A friendly woman from across the street—a Righteous Gentile—hid and fed them beneath the floor in the barn of her cottage in the countryside for almost three years (Plates 11–12). The family went crazy hiding in that dark, dank barn with nothing to do but remain quiet, accompanied only by constant, intense hunger, cold, and heat—and fear. One day, the father could not stand being cooped up anymore under these dire circumstances, and so he went out, was caught, and deported by cattle car to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. By doing some research in the archives of Yad Vashem—at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem—I found copies of records documenting the deportation of three of my mother’s uncles from France in cattle cars just like the one now on display here.
After the war, my grandmother traveled back to Europe to search for her family. Three of her brothers in Paris—and their wives and children—had been hidden, discovered, and deported on the cattle cars to the death camps; just one single brother, also hidden, had miraculously survived. Then, when she traveled back to Poland to look for the rest of her family, she found no one left. Eventually, she learned the truth. The author Rochl Auerbakh, who survived the war years in Poland, reported the following about the Jews of Pabjanice in her “Ghetto Diary”:
29 May 1942. Lately we have heard from Pabianice and from its neighboring towns that the “liquidation” of the Jewish population there was carried out in such a way, that the children up to age ten and the elderly over age sixty were killed by shooting. Those in the intermediate age groups were forced to go through a selection. Those who were capable of work were taken for work, and the incapable—the weak—were taken out behind the city and murdered by machinegun fire near open pits.
6 June 1942. Yesterday, I was told how the children under age ten were murdered in Pabianice. I could not understand how the mothers allowed their children to be taken away from them, how they allowed them to be torn from their sides without sharing the fate of their children. But apparently the hangmen made their job of slaughtering the children easier by taking all the women out to work at dawn on that day. In their absence, they took the children away, outside the city. At the same time, they spread a rumor in the city that they were being taken to Warsaw. They say that most of the mothers who survived lost their minds…. (Plate 13)
Another survivor, who, like my grandmother, returned to Pabjanice after the war looking for his family, described his feelings, which are similar to those of my grandmother:
Lonely with my own thoughts, I walked the Jewish streets of my hometown. Memories of my childhood forced themselves to the surface. Every house told a story. Every street had its own tale to tell: this is where my cheder [elementary school] was, we played here, later I worked in these buildings. Here we spun dreams for a better future. In this garden, we had many discussions, read books. When the Germans occupied the city, the first thing they did was to hang a big sign on the garden that read: “Entry forbidden to Jews and dogs.” The sign was no longer there—but the Jews weren’t there either. Empty. Everything was empty. I ran back to the Jewish streets. Every building, every wall spoke to me: This is where the Ghetto was. This is where they died of starvation and here on Warszawska Street the Jews of Pabianice walked their last road…. I left my hometown in sorrow and in pain—never to return.
To this day, I clearly recall asking, “Grandma, why did you take that extraordinary step? Why did you leave on your own?” She replied that she wanted to be free—that she could not stand the anti-Semitism in Poland, and in Europe generally, another minute. In Pabjanice, walking down the street, she had been repeatedly pushed into the gutter as “a dirty Jew” and she could not wait to leave. As a result of fleeing from Poland, she never saw her parents again.
Let us turn back the clock. In 1920, as I related, my remarkable grandmother Rose said goodbye to her mother, father, and six brothers in Pabjanice, and left for America by herself. She went to the American embassy in Warsaw, picked up her papers (which I still have), took the train to Bremerhaven in northern Germany, and got on the boat as steerage (Plate 16).
For a single Jewish girl at age 21 to go to America all by herself was a huge leap into the unknown. Luckily for her, she was able to emigrate in 1920, just before the eugenicists in America slammed the doors to Jewish immigrants from Central Europe in 1924, regarding them as “undesirables” not to be admitted to an increasingly xenophobic “white” America.
To this day, I clearly recall asking, “Grandma, why did you take that extraordinary step? Why did you leave on your own?” She replied that she wanted to be free—that she could not stand the anti-Semitism in Poland, and in Europe generally, another minute. In Pabjanice, walking down the street, she had been repeatedly pushed into the gutter as “a dirty Jew” and she could not wait to leave. As a result of fleeing from Poland, she never saw her parents again.
I was born in Canada, in the shadow of the Holocaust, in 1958. When I was three-years-old, I suddenly acquired a “foster sister” my age. My parents took her in, even though they were not financially secure at this point. Again, there was a connection with the Holocaust because my foster sister’s mother had been a human Guinea pig used for medical experiments in the camps. The Nazi doctors had taken bone grafts from her leg so that she became lame; the physical and mental agonies of my foster sister’s mother, who had been subjected to these “medical” tortures, were so severe that she could not look after her daughter properly; unfortunately, this little girl also suffered from her mother’s trauma.
When I was about six-years-old, my mother told me bluntly that I must live life to the fullest, that I must fulfill my God-given potential through an absolute devotion to self-development through education—and that I must make something of myself. My life would never be my own to waste because I had the obligation to live for the 1.5 million children—including my immediate relatives—who had been murdered in the Holocaust, those Jewish children who never had the chance to mature and contribute to the world—not to mention enjoy the many privileges and opportunities that I did.
For my family, racism was never an abstract concept, but a matter of life and death. My grandmother, although she remained a humble, poor, working-class woman her entire life, used to send me her carefully saved-up money for every birthday and Jewish holiday money which was duly put away into my college fund so that one day I could acquire the education that she never had. Her money, invested in Israel bonds, would help finance my undergraduate and graduate education. Having spent years in universities and conservatories earning the credentials to become “a distinguished university research professor” and a tenured full professor of music theory at UNT, I cannot tolerate anti-Semitism.
Every three generations, people lose a direct connection with the past. My son and daughter can understand the past intellectually but not viscerally and emotionally the way I do because of my conversations with my parents and grandparents. Alarmingly, I am now seeing that some of the same elements—political tribalization, economic uncertainty, defeatism, nihilism, social media algorithms that create echo chambers—are combining to form the dangerous preconditions for an analogous catastrophe.
It is my hope that, through good-faith debate, critical thinking, and basic respect for each other’s humanity, we can heed the warnings of history and ensure that nothing like the Holocaust can ever happen again.
To conclude, for me and my family,there is a direct, personal, and documented connection between the Holocaust and Israel. How did the few survivors in my family react to the Holocaust? In memory of our lost family members, we funded and built the Bluhmstein Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel ha-Shomer, namely the Bluhmstein Institute for Oral, Dental, and Jaw Medicine (Plates 17–18). In the best Jewish philanthropic tradition, this hospital is a humanistic endeavor, employing both Israeli Jewish and Arab medical staff to heal all patients, regardless of their ethnicity or faith.
Thank you for your time.
