JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY—A single warehouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, packaged and transported over a thousand tons of military equipment to Israel every week in the first eight months of 2025, according to a report jointly released today by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Progressive International (PI). A network of businesses based in New Jersey uses the privately owned warehouse to inspect, organize, and move military equipment, including Merkava tank parts, F-16 parts, ammunition, military gear, and armored and unarmored vehicles. The equipment is then packaged and delivered to nearby airports and sea ports and sent to Israel, researchers revealed.

The transfer of military gear to Israel is spearheaded by three overlapping Jersey-based companies—Interglobal Forwarding Services (IFS), G&B Packing Company, and G&G Services—which are all seemingly owned and operated by the same people. IFS and G&B serve as contractors with the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD), which works closely with U.S. weapons manufacturers to purchase weapons. IFS primarily handles administrative matters; G&B Packing Company handles, packages, and loads the equipment onto trucks; and G&G Services makes shipments to local ports with its own fleet of trucks.

The PYM and PI’s report documented that 91% of all Israel-bound sea exports of military gear that did not go through a U.S. military base passed through the IFS and the G&B warehouse.

Until now, little has been known about the Jersey-based companies that operate the warehouse and their role transferring U.S. weapons to Israel. The revelation of the warehouse, which serves as a significant pit-stop in the military equipment supply-chain, comes as Israel continues its assault on Gaza, despite a U.S.-brokered “ceasefire.”

Between January and late August 2025, the month when the PYM and PI report was compiled, an average of 878 tons of sea cargo and between 263-525 tons of air cargo passed through the Jersey warehouse weekly, according to the bills of lading tabulated by the researchers. The equipment often travels “from the IFS warehouse to Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal, where they are loaded onto a Maersk vessel on the MECL line, dropped off in Tangier, Morocco, and picked up by another Maersk vessel on the Med Loop C to be taken to Haifa,” researchers found.

The majority of the shipments are for tank and armored vehicles. In addition to shipments to the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD), IFS handles packages for private Israeli military companies, including Rafael Advanced Systems and the Israeli Military Industries (IMI). One 2025 shipment to IMI contained “340 tons of rifle ammunition,” researchers calculated. The warehouse is “the default location for any export of military goods to Israel,” researchers claim. In one Israeli government document, the IMOD requires companies to label cargo with G&B Packing’s address.

As recently as November 6, G&B Packing was listed as a point of contact for shipments to the IMOD in a U.S. government contract bid that is open for moving “unclassified spare parts in support of C-130, T-6, F-15, and F-16 aircraft” until February 2026, according to federal contracting data reviewed by Drop Site.

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It is possible that more deadly military equipment and weaponry passes through the Jersey warehouse, which is then transported to airports and military bases, and then sent by air to Israel. In contrast to sea cargo information, air cargo details are redacted in logs, so it is likely that other types of Israeli-bound air cargo passes through the warehouse.

The warehouse at 1A Colony RD in Jersey City is in a remote industrial park, circled by railways and surrounded by other warehouses and logistics and transport companies. At 125,000 square feet, the facility houses HAZMAT rooms to inspect and pack hazardous materials, including explosives. The grounds are surveilled by a 24-hour security camera system around the facility, which includes license plate readers.

When Drop Site visited the warehouse earlier this month, a tactical vehicle parked just outside, within a fenced off area, was identified as a “David” by the researchers. “Davids” are manufactured in Alabama by MTD Armor Corporation and used by Israeli soldiers; a 2021 contracting document obtained by Drop Site shows IFS was involved in delivering “David” vehicles to Israel.

Several Maersk containers were next to the warehouse in the loading zone. The Danish logistics company has long shipped weapons to Israel, and since the war in Gaza began, Maersk has been protested for the company’s involvement in supplying weapons to Israeli forces.

“This warehouse is not just a logistics company; it’s the lifeline of Israel’s war machine,” said Nadya Tannous of PYM. “Israel will use it to restock for its next assault on Gaza.”

Shortly after arriving at the facility and requesting to speak with company representatives, an employee at the site asked Drop Site to leave the premises. In a follow-up call, a G&B Packing Services secretary hung up the phone, refusing Drop Site’s request to speak with representatives of the company.

Drop Site emailed detailed requests for comment to the companies involved, the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the State Department. None responded to Drop Site’s requests by time of publication.

The Supply Chain For Israel’s “Mission”

The IMOD has had a major logistics office in New York City for decades, known as “the Mission,” which it uses to coordinate with weapons manufacturers, handlers, and transport companies.

The Mission, whose tagline is “protecting our homeland from afar,” originated in 1947—a year before the creation of the state of Israel “in anticipation of independence,” their website reads. It is now in charge of reviewing bids from vendors, negotiating with weapons manufacturers, analyzing the costs, approving purchases, and then working with logistics companies, like IFS and G&B Packing, to transport the weaponry.

The U.S. is the world’s largest provider of weapons and military equipment. In Israel’s case, the U.S. provides Israel with Foreign Military Financing: a lump sum of at least $3.3 billion every year to purchase weapons and military equipment from U.S. companies and an additional $500 million in missile defense. A report by the Center for International Policy (CIP) showed that the U.S. delivered nearly $4.2 billion worth of military equipment to Israel between October 2023 and May 2025. That includes both weapons sales to Israel brokered by the U.S. government and direct sales with private U.S. companies; IFS manages the transfer of weapons to Israel for both types of sales.

At least five companies are linked to the same operation that ships weapons from New Jersey to Israel. Aside from IFS, G&B, and G&G, two Israeli-based partner companies are involved in transferring cargo to the country, Interglobal Shipping 3001 and Interglobal Cargo.

IFS and G&B are both owned by Lawrence Grossman and Stanley Grossman, according to company registry documents. The companies trace their origins to 1947, when they were founded in the U.S. by the Grossman family, and expanded into shipping to Israel in the 1980s, according to Interglobal Shipping 3001’s website. Contracts between the U.S. Department of Defense and IFS date back at least to 2003, according to data from HigherGov.

In 2008, IFS was implicated in a federal investigation into Ori Zoller, a former member of the Israeli special forces and an Israeli arms dealer since the late 1990s who acted in 2007 as a middleman illegally selling U.S.-supplied weapons from Guatemala to Century Arms, a U.S.-based company. Zoller co-owned a private Guatemalan arms dealership that was a subsidiary of the then-Israeli state-owned company Israeli Military Industries (IWI)—later privatized and renamed Israeli Weapons Industries (IMI), which still uses IFS for packing and shipping. Zoller relied on IFS as a logistics hub to transport weapons to Guatemala.

That year, “several hundred automatic assault rifles and accessories manufactured by Israeli Weapons Industries (IWI)” were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in January in Newark, New Jersey, because the shipments lacked proper import licensing, according to State Department cables released by Wikileaks. Zoller held IFS responsible for the bureaucratic mishap, suggesting at least 30 of their shipments had gone through IFS. The diplomatic cable noted that “Zoller’s comments suggest” IFS transported items through the U.S. “without proper authorization.”

Later, according to a separate WikiLeaks cable, a State Department compliance office ordered a check on two shipments from IFS to the IMOD to determine whether the detonators sent by IFS were being integrated into cluster munitions—a use that could violate U.S. regulations. It’s not clear if that check was conducted or if any action was taken against the company.

The U.S. government and the IMOD continued to work with IFS and its partner companies. In 2012, Electronic Intifada reported that over 1,300 shipments from IFS were sent from the U.S. to IMOD, some including counterinsurgency weapons produced by U.S. military equipment company Combined Systems (CSI), according to trade export data reviewed at that time.

Researchers in 2017 with the International Peace Information Service (IPIS) discovered that from 2011 to 2014 Israel and IFS shipped over 16,000 tons of “diplomatic” cargo to Israeli ports on Maersk vessels. The IPIS researchers expressed concern in their report, questioning whether the massive amount of cargo was really for “diplomatic” purposes. The same report also said that IFS acted as a “shipper of convenience” on behalf of the Israeli government, so that “the bills of lading did not report the name of the company that was actually shipping the military equipment.”

“The Chain of Complicity”

Last week, the UN Security Council approved the Trump administration’s “stabilization” plan for Gaza. From October 11, the first full day of the “ceasefire,” Israel continued its assault on Gaza, with its supply of weaponry still flowing from the U.S. to the IMOD. Since the “ceasefire” went into effect, Israel has killed at least 339 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 871.

“A number of western states—chief among them the United States—are criminally liable for aiding and abetting a genocide,” said Ari Tolany, the director of the CIP’s Director of Security Assistance, Arms Trade, and Technology. Tolany tracks U.S. military sales to other countries, including Israel. “The severity and length of these atrocities has been made possible only through the United States’ supplying of munitions and broader political cover.”

As of 2023, the majority of guns in Israel came from the U.S., the CIP report notes. But it’s not just guns: the CIP report noted that depleted uranium, explosives and bombs, detonators, tanks and armored vehicles, aircraft and aircraft parts, and much more was also delivered to Israel. It is unclear whether depleted uranium, explosives, and bombs are delivered through the Jersey warehouse, since air-bound shipment details are redacted.

“The supply chain to aid and abet the genocide is involving massive amount of stakeholders, including international shipping companies and different vessels,” added Tolany. “More attention and research on the financial and shipping and logistics firms that facilitate the transfers is absolutely welcome.”

PYM and PI researchers say companies like IFS, G&B, and others in the supply chain are implicated in Israel’s war crimes. Reuters reported this month that U.S. intelligence officials learned that Israel’s own military lawyers warned there was evidence of war crimes in Gaza.

“The chain of complicity runs straight from Gaza’s rubble to the heart of the US American logistics industry,” said David Adler, Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International. “By exposing Interglobal’s role, we can begin to sever that chain—and confront the system that turns civilian slaughter into a business opportunity.”

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A Polish firm plays a central role in providing trinitrotoluene (TNT), the key explosive used in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, according to “The Missing Ingredient: Polish TNT,” a report published today by a coalition representing the People’s Embargo for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, Shadow World Investigations, and Movement Research Unit. Nitro-Chem, a state-owned company located in Poland’s northeast, produced 90% of the TNT imported by the U.S. to make the aerial bombs sent to Israel in recent years, the report claims.

Since October 2023, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) unleashed tens of thousands of bombs likely containing payloads of Polish-made TNT, resulting in the destruction of as much as 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings, including civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. “Based on information provided by the bomb’s U.S. manufacturer, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, the Polish company Nitro-Chem, and U.S. government databases, we can conclude that there is a high probability that a significant proportion of [Mk 84s] that Israel dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 2023 are filled with Polish-made TNT,” the report found.

Nitro-Chem contracts with U.S weapons manufacturers in the Mk 80 supply chain date back to at least 2016, with the most recent orders signed in April of this year featuring delivery dates continuing until 2029. The timing of one major contract at the height of the air campaign against Gaza in April 2024 suggests that the Israeli army was burning through its large supply of one-ton Mk 84s—a barrage that was already without recent military precedent. According to an estimate in Haaretz based on officer interviews, as many as two-thirds of the 50,000 bombs dropped by the IAF through the end of August 2024 were Mk 84s. Military experts described the display as one “not seen since Vietnam.”

Although the Biden administration placed a hold on Mk 84 shipments to Israel, it was lifted within days of Trump taking office in January. The hold Biden placed on the shipments was a hiccup, and the supply chain is as robust as ever, according to the report, with multiple contracts showing the three countries—Poland, the U.S., and Israel—eager to replenish the IAF’s bomb.

Israel requested to purchase 35,529 one-ton bombs from General Dynamics in February. Two months later, Nitro-Chem signed its largest ever deal to deliver 18,000 tons of TNT to Paramount Enterprises International—a U.S. intermediary that delivers the TNT to General Dynamics—between 2027–2029. According to the report,

“The agreement was signed in Poland by the CEOs of PEI and Nitro-Chem, in the presence of Poland’s Deputy Defense Minister, Cezary Tomczyk, who stated that Poland’s deals with the U.S. concerning TNT exports are “iron-clad.” The underlying mechanism of this partnership was detailed by [Polish investigative news outlet] Onet which in June 2025 investigated why Poland, despite an ongoing war on its eastern border for over three years, has been unable to produce basic artillery shells for its own military, while at the same time the country’s only NATO TNT producer, Nitro-Chem, sells enormous quantities of TNT to the United States at very low prices. The article quotes an anonymous military source, who said: “Polish politicians were told that if Poland wants the American security umbrella, we must continue selling them TNT. Breaking this contract was portrayed as an act against American companies in Poland.”

As with the bombs already dropped on Gaza, the replacements will fix Polish-made TNT into warheads at a General Dynamics factory north of Dallas. The company has been the prime contractor for Mk 80 bombs since the Vietnam War, when they became standard for the U.S. and its allies.

Israel would not have been able to decimate Gaza to this extent without the TNT production capacity of Nitro-Chem, which after the Cold War emerged as the largest producer of the explosive among NATO and EU members. During the October War of 1973, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) adopted the U.S.-made Mk 80 series, which features an admixture of aluminum powder to increase the heat and destructiveness of the charge. Israel’s air campaign in Gaza mostly featured the largest bombs in the series—the 1,000-pound Mk 83 and the 2,000-pound Mk 84. By April of 2024, Israeli pilots had detonated around 75,000 tons of Polish-made TNT on the densely populated enclave. In nuclear terms, this is an explosive force equivalent to a 75-kiloton fission bomb—significantly more than twice the combined yield of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Along with Vietnam, the Mk 80 supply chain echoes another dark chapter of history—one closer to the mixing site of its main ingredient. The Nitro-Chem plant is located on the former grounds of one of the biggest arms factories built by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. The authors of the TNT report note that, during the German occupation, Polish resistance cells repeatedly “infiltrated the plant and carried out acts of sabotage.” No such acts have been reported in recent years, as the TNT used in the Gaza genocide uses roads and train tracks in the vicinity of multiple Holocaust memorials, including the site of a mass grave known as the Valley of Death, and the Potulice Concentration Camp, where an estimated 25,000 prisoners were processed.

This irony is not lost on the report’s authors who write, “We call on Nitro-Chem and the Polish authorities to immediately cease the supply of TNT for the production of Mk 80 series bombs and artillery used by Israel, as well as direct supplies of explosives to Israel. Their failure to do so may meet the legal criteria for aiding and abetting genocide and other international and domestic crimes.”

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BROOKLYN, N.Y — Lola Mozes’ childhood came to an end in the fall of 1939 at a small bridge in Poland. She was 9 — seated in a horse-drawn wagon, her back propped against her family’s silver Sabbath candelabra, which was wrapped in a blanket — when she saw the aftermath of a German bomb attack. The sight of human bodies, along with eviscerated horses gasping in pain and struggling to rise despite their gaping wounds, reduced her to tears and panic. Her mother, Helena Rewitz, born Schwimer, who would hover over her daughter like a guardian angel later in a Jewish ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, took the terrified child into her arms.

I sat with Lola Mozes at her dining room table in Brooklyn on Friday. Short and petite, with curly black hair and white gold hoop earrings, she had a soft, infectious laugh, an impish sense of humor and fine facial lines that she inherited from her father and mother. Her charm and warmth were girlish and slightly coquettish.

“I am the great pretender,” she said, smiling. “It is always there, what I went through. I am tormented by it. It keeps repeating and repeating itself in my head.”

Lola grew up living next to her family’s small grocery in Katowice, a city in southwestern Poland. The language at home was German. She learned Polish in school. Her parents, especially when they wanted to talk privately, spoke Yiddish. Her parents and older brother celebrated the Sabbath and went to synagogue on religious holidays but lived as secular Jews. Her father, Emil, who sang arias as he bathed in the mornings, dressed in imported German suits and spats when he left the house. They lived in a working-class section of the city. Catholic children in the neighborhood taunted her as a “Christ killer” and once pushed her brother Oskar off a tram and beat him. But nothing prepared the family for what was to come. A dark future was only hinted at when the parents, their faces knotted in consternation, listened to Adolf Hitler on the radio.

The bloody scene at the bridge would foreshadow a crucible of mass murder and extreme deprivation lasting six years. For Lola, playing with her favorite doll, skating, swimming and picking out candy from her father’s grocery was replaced by a bitter struggle to survive. Ogres — including a drunken SS officer in the ghetto who used to hold her on his lap and complain about his boots being soiled by the blood of his victims, including the infants he dashed against walls — rose up like monsters in medieval fairy tales. Concentric circles of death and life would radiate around her. Her parents’ fierce love seemed, often, no match for the murderous intent of the armed and the powerful who held the family in their grip.

Lola’s family was herded with other Jews in 1941 into the ghetto in Bochnia, along the river Raba in southern Poland. The ghetto was surrounded by a high wooden fence. It was divided in two parts — Ghetto A and Ghetto B. Ghetto A housed the 2,000 Jews who worked in German factories and workshops where they made shoes, underwear, uniforms, gloves, socks and other items for the German army. The Jews in Ghetto B had no jobs. Many were elderly and sick. They lived in extreme poverty and were malnourished. Many Jews pooled what little they had and formed communal kitchens. The Germans segregated the men, including the husbands and fathers, from women at night. Lola and her family lived with her aunt, who had been well off before the war, in a large wooden house that had been incorporated into the ghetto.

“At one point they told us to stay in our houses,” she said. “I don’t remember when. I peeked through the window and saw strong young men who used to work in the salt mines marching. Every 10th or fifth man was being shot. In the morning there was a strange odor. It was nauseating. We peeked through the curtains. There were wagons with dead bodies. They were stripped. There were puddles of blood in the gutters. We went back to work the following day. We worked 12-hour shifts. For the morning shift we left when it was dark. I remember [when we went back to work again] it was raining. I was walking with my friend. I was carrying my bread. It fell on the ground. My friend said, ‘It fell in the blood.’ We thought this was very funny. We started laughing. I picked it up and brought it home after work and we ate it. It was too precious to throw away.”

Lola had a friendship with a gentle boy who lived with his family in the B section of the ghetto. He cut up newspapers and made a little book he lent to her. It was about a seventh-century rabbi named Sabbatai Zevi who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and walked from town to town promising to save the people. “He took me to where he lived,” she said. “It looked like a hovel. There were rags on the floor. It was dirty. There were a lot of people, especially old people. The stench was terrible. He was the nicest boy. I said, ‘How can people live like that?’ He was so embarrassed. I will never forget how embarrassed he was. He had been in my aunt’s house where each family had a room. My aunt’s house was clean. We had a stove. There was some heat. I don’t know what happened to him. Those in Ghetto B were the first to go in the transports [to the death camps].”

Her father constructed a small, underground bunker in a wooden shed that was filled with sawdust. When the deportations began in 1942 the family would hide in the bunker. There was barely enough room to huddle together. They would wait breathlessly as the Germans with their dogs prowled around the shed. Lola’s father sneaked out at night to scavenge for food.

Jews could leave the ghetto only under guard. They were marched out of the ghetto in rows of five to work in German factories. Hans Frank, the governor-general of the territories in occupied Poland, ordered that any other Jews found outside ghetto walls be executed. Nearly 2,000 Jews from the ghetto were shot. Most of the others died from disease or in the death camps. Only 90 of the 15,000 people originally in the Bochnia ghetto survived the war.

Lola’s father and brother worked cleaning German offices. She and her mother knitted socks for German soldiers in a large red brick building on Floris Street.

“They sent us socks from the Russian front,” she said. “By the time the socks came to the factory they had been washed. The bottom parts had been cut off. Only the top part was left. We started knitting downwards to make a new sock. We sometimes found blood, toes and parts of flesh in the socks. That is how we knew the Germans were struggling someplace where they were freezing.”

One day the Jewish foreman at the knitting factory asked her to knit a pair of men’s gloves. He gave her gray wool. A few weeks later a high-ranking group of Nazis visited the factory. Among them was Frank, whom the foreman introduced to Lola.

“He was wearing the gloves,” she remembered. “He shook my hand. He smiled. He told me the gloves were keeping him very warm. He said they fit well. He thanked me. That evening my father came home from work. He was full of smiles. He told me everyone had been shaking his hand. They were congratulating him. Everyone said to him that because Frank shook your daughter’s hand it would save the Jews. We thought if they were pleased with our work they would let us live.”

A year ago she happened upon a picture of Frank. She learned, for the first time, that after the war he had been condemned and hanged by the Allies at Nuremberg. He was one of the very few Nazis at Nuremberg who, before being executed, expressed remorse for his crimes.

The photograph and news of Frank’s execution were devastating. “I cried hysterically,” she told me. “I don’t know why. I could not connect him smiling at me like a father, shaking my hand and thanking me and then think of him hanging dead.”

In the ghetto her parents arranged for her brother Oskar, who was two and a half years older, to study with a rabbi.

“My brother became, because of this rabbi, very orthodox,” she said. “He was about 14. He would be charitable to everyone because the Bible said to be charitable. My mother would get some potatoes and peel them. She would say that when she came home from work she would cook us potatoes. But sometimes the potatoes were gone when she got home. My brother would have taken them to a poor family and we would have nothing to eat. One day he came home in wooden shoes. We asked, ‘Where are your shoes?’ He had given them to someone who was barefoot. He became like that. He was like a monk.”

Once, hiding under the sawdust pile during one of the mass deportations, Lola crawled over to her brother. “We talked,” she said. “It was the first time we really talked. He had a piece of bread. He said, ‘I am not hungry.’ ”

Her voice broke. She began to weep.

“That is hard,” she said haltingly. “And he did give me that piece of bread. It was like a rind. We were not like sheep. We lived. When we finally left the bunker I saw him dressing. His belly was distended from hunger.”

The factories and workshops were closed in 1943. Large sections of the ghetto were emptied. Most of the ghetto residents had been executed or taken to death camps. When Lola’s father sneaked out of the bunker at night he would wander through empty streets and forage in abandoned apartments. It resembled a ghost town. The fence around the ghetto was being rebuilt and pushed inward to open the emptied sections of the ghetto to the non-Jews in the city.

Lola’s father decided to move the family, along with her aunt’s family of four and two cousins, to a basement in an abandoned part of the ghetto. He said that when it got dark he would take five of them at a time to the basement. He took Lola, her mother, Lola’s aunt and a young cousin to the basement and went back to get his son and nieces and nephews.

“He never returned,” Lola said. “He was captured by a Jewish policeman. It was Succoth. My mother and aunt lit candles in the basement. We found a deeper basement. There was an Orthodox man hidden in the attic of that house. He visited us. He told us stories about the Messiah. He told us when we died we would go to heaven. I felt better, even with that gripping fear. My cousin and I went out at night to a vegetable field to dig up something to eat. There was a well, but it made noise when you cranked it up. That was dangerous. We could hear dogs barking.”One morning we heard a sound like someone scraping a stick along a fence,” she said. “My mother stiffened. She knew. They were shooting people. We could see the man in the attic make a sign with his arms like shooting. Then we heard singing. It was Shema Yisrael.”

She began to sing Shema Yisrael, the central prayer in the Jewish prayer book, softly in Hebrew.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart.

“There were 200 people singing Shema Yisrael, including my father and brother, going to death,” she said. “I did not at the time connect the shooting with my father and brother and cousins. The shots became steady and constant. My mother held me tight.”

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Lola read from a letter she wrote in 1981 to her four children:

Here is the essence of my story. To help my children grow, flourish and multiply without guilt or remorse, without a feeling that they are descended of people who went to slaughter like sheep. No song like Eli Eli or Ave Maria will surpass the chant of my father, my brother, my cousins and hundreds of others as they were led to be shot. It was the most powerful, courageous and victorious hymn. Their voices did not bleat like sheep. Their voices told of victory overcoming evil by dying like men without somebody’s blood on their hands. Their voices sang in unison a praise to the Lord. There was a might in them as if they were already one with their master. And it said Shema Yisreal, Hear Oh Israel, I will take you from your suffering and you will flourish. This was the message I received. That song was sung for me by my father. I flourished as I wish and hope my children will. My children, my dear sweet children. Your daily problems, which you try to solve with so much determination, are insignificant in the view of the awesome past of your ancestors. So you are told, but this is not true. Life is made out of difficulties and joys, of sorrows and utter happiness, but as long as your souls are not soiled with meanness which hurts others be proud of your life. Your life is the extension of the ones which are gone. And now they are immortal. Don’t pity them. They went peacefully because they had hope for the future, your present. My father’s mighty chant was meant as well for you and yours. With all my love, your Mom.

German soldiers discovered Lola, her mother, her aunt and her cousin in the basement. They were detained and, because hiding was a capital offense, waited to be shot. Her mother, holding her, told Lola they were going to the Garden of Eden to meet those in the family who had died. But they were spared and assigned to the last detail of 100 Jews used to clean up the remnants of the ghetto. The mother, working in a laundry, found her son Oskar’s shirt, apparently cut from his lifeless body. Josef Müller, the commander of the ghetto, had by then a Jewish mistress, a practice common among ghetto commanders and camp guards. The remaining Jews in the ghetto nicknamed her Mata Hari.

“She was quite beautiful, very tall,” Lola said. “She was dressed elegantly and wore makeup. She had a husband and a daughter my age. She ordered me around. I had to clean her room.”

Lola and her mother were then sent to the labor camp in Plaszów, a southern suburb of Kraków. Plaszów was commanded by Amon Göth, a brutal SS officer who routinely shot prisoners for sport and was portrayed in the 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Göth was hanged after the war.

Lola and her mother were put to work with other prisoners digging up a Jewish cemetery. The headstones were used for paving roads and constructing latrines. After spending two months in Plaszów they were sent to work in a munitions factory hidden in a forest near Pionki. It was there Lola was forced to watch the hanging of four or five Jews who had tried to escape. She took her mother’s place in the front of the formation of prisoners to spare her the sight of the hangings.

“They were calm and collected,” Lola said of the condemned. “They had their hands tied behind their backs. They said something before they died, but I don’t remember what. We were ordered to look at the hanging. We could not turn away our heads. As I watched, I saw what a horrific death it is — you can actually see life being squeezed out of the body. The face purple, red, almost swelling, as the hanging body twitches in last rebellion. The wife of one of the men, belly swollen with child, stood by the gallows the whole week as the Germans kept the spectacle on display.”

Lola was eventually transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The journey by train took three days. When she stumbled off the train with her mother, aunt and her cousin, she ran toward a ditch to get a drink of water. She visited Auschwitz-Birkenau years later and searched out the ditch. She said the death camp stripped of the emaciated bodies, stench, fear, shootings, barking dogs, beatings, smoke from the crematoriums, shouts of the guards, overcrowded barracks and foul, overflowing latrines failed to convey its reality. “They should plow it under and plant a field,” she said.

“I did not recognize my mother when we got off the train,” she remembered of her arrival at the camp. “She scared me. It was like seeing a ghost. She was drawn. She had big, round eyes.”

They were quarantined in Camp C after being shaved, sprayed with DDT and tattooed. She remembers seeing a group of dwarfs in the camp. “They were so beautiful,” she said. “I wanted to play with them. They were like dolls. On the second or third night they all disappeared.”

She and her mother spent about eight months working in Birkenau. At one point they were stripped and forced into a gas chamber with a large group of women before the execution was abruptly canceled. Lola had begged her mother before entering the gas chamber for their last piece of bread. “I said, ‘I don’t want to die hungry,’ ” she remembered. “My mother, said, ‘When we come out you will tell me you are hungry.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And she gave me the bread. When we got out of the gas chamber my mother said, ‘I told you so.’ ”The women were later put to work twisting strips of oilcloth into braids to be used, she believed, to make plane doors airtight.

“Two guards would pull on the ends of the braid, and if it broke the workers would be beaten, often to death,” she said.

In January 1945, with Soviet forces advancing on occupied Poland, the Nazi guards began to plan the destruction of the crematoriums. They told the prisoners the Birkenau camp would be dynamited and ordered some 60,000 prisoners from Birkenau and the satellite camps to begin a 35-mile march through the snow to a freight yard. Fifteen thousand prisoners died on the march. Lola’s aunt and cousin, who survived the war, hid under a pile of corpses. Lola and her mother, shortly before joining the march, found turnips in a barracks and gorged themselves. The turnips gave her mother diarrhea.

“My mother ripped a piece of her dress and asked me very shyly the next morning if I could wash her off, and that is when I felt what love is,” she said. “She told me they would dynamite the camp and we should leave, that I could withstand the march. We walked through the night. We passed our town, Katowice. We saw the lights. The next day my mother wasn’t feeling good. She was dizzy. She asked me for a little sugar. We were not allowed to bend down for snow. If you bent down they would shoot you. There were bodies on the sides of the road. But my mother asked me for some snow. I bent down quickly to get her some snow. The women around us helped my mother for a little while. They walked with her. Then my mother couldn’t walk. There was a tree. She lay down. She told me, ‘Run quickly and maybe you will save myself.’ Then a German materialized. I fought with him. I told him, ‘You have a mother. You know what it means to have a mother. Let her rest a minute and she will be able to get up.’ He smiled. I will always remember that strange smile. Something amused him. By that time his pistol was drawn. The soldiers began to hit me and push me away. He shot her. I was on the road again. At one point my little sack fell down. I picked it up. I thought to myself, you picked up the sack but you did not pick up your mother. Years later, as I replayed the scene of my mother’s death, her laying, reclining under that tree with her arms a bit outstretched, I thought of her as being crucified.”

Lola made it to the freight yard and was loaded onto open cars. She was transported to Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp in northern Germany. She was then put on a train to the Malhof camp. As Allied soldiers neared Malhof, the Germans closed the camp. Lola was soon marching again. Then the guards began to disappear. She remembers the bloated and blackened bodies of soldiers in the fields. One morning she and the other prisoners saw the camp commander in civilian clothes riding away on a bicycle. The war was over.

There is, somewhere in the vastness of the universe, amid galaxies and stars that light emanating from our planet takes decades to reach, the airy image of a girl playing with a doll in the Polish town of Katowice, the image of a girl terrified and clutched by her mother near a bombed bridge, the image of a girl hiding with her brother under a pile of sawdust and accepting a small piece of bread, the image of a girl shaking the hand of the Nazi governor of Poland and the image of a girl in her mother’s arms in a basement listening to men and women about to die singing Shema Yisrael. There is, too, the image of a girl telling a German soldier with a drawn pistol, “You have a mother.”

“I believe in God and heaven,” Lola said. “I speak to my husband, who I lost three years ago, and my parents. My belief saves me from talking to walls and air.”

I did not write this story to say that Germans are bad and Jews are good. The line between good and evil runs through all hearts. It is, sadly, as easy to become an executioner as a victim. This is the most sobering lesson of war. And it is something the greatest writers on the Holocaust, such as Primo Levi, who was also in Auschwitz, understood. There were, after all, Jüdische Ghetto-Polizei, Jewish Kapos, Judenräte, Sonderkommandos and Blockälteste whose contributions to the organization of the ghettos and the death camps kept the crematoriums functioning. The prisoners who lowered themselves to the moral squalor of the SS were soon lost.

I did not write this piece to say that virtue or goodness triumphed after the Holocaust. The Nazi extermination of 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, was a colossal, tragic and absurd waste of human life. I wrote this piece to say that the fierce and protective love of a mother and a father is stronger than hate. It can overcome evil. After the war Lola met a young German man in Spain. “He could have been a soldier,” she said. He asked Lola about her wartime experience. She told him. She kissed him on the cheek in saying goodbye.

Where time and light bend and twist in space, perhaps defying the known laws of physics, a mother and a father, fighting to protect their daughter and son from death, still exist in faint particles of light, making visible an iron bond of fidelity. They gave up life to save it. Scarred emotionally and physically — she rolled up her sleeve as we talked to show me her tattooed concentration camp number, A-14989 — Lola would nevertheless marry a survivor to raise, love and nurture four children of her own. Emil Rewitz and Helena Rewitz, at least in this small house in Brooklyn, won the war.

You can see the three-part interview I did with Lola at the links here: (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

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The voyage went relatively well until the interception. We sailed with the 1000 Madleens to the Gaza flotilla so we spent some time catching up to them, waiting for them and then sailing with them. I met a couple of their people while we were in prison and at the hotel after we were released. They were […]

The post Israeli Occupation Forces Attacked our Ship “Conscience” first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

[This is the second of two CAM special articles this week in honor of Indigenous Peoples Day.–Editors] In August 2023, the Kaw Nation transported a sacred boulder, known as Iⁿ‘zhúje ‘Waxóbe, from Lawrence, Kansas, to ancestral Kaw land near Locust Grove, Kansas, where Kaw Nation members lived. The Lawrence City Council voted 5-0 to allow […]

The post Kansas Gets Its Name From a Native Tribe that White Settlers Robbed and Then Displaced first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

Try Hard, With A Vengeance

By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com

I really can’t say that One Battle After Another is the worst movie I’ve seen in 2025 — because it isn’t — but it might be the one I disliked the most. 

At a glacial two and a half hours long, OBAA (which was that close to having “OBAMA” as its official abbreviation) feels more like a cinematic endurance test than a proper film meant to, you know, be enjoyed and entertaining and stuff. We’ve got Leo DiCaprio phoning in one of his least inspired performances to date, only to be outdone by Sean Penn, who looks like he’s literally trying to act as little as possible en route to collecting a paycheck. Maybe the people who signed on though it was going to be something more ambitious and subversive — the director clearly wanted this to be modern-day Battle of Algiers, complete with a scene where a character watches it on TV — but the end result is just a goddamn mess of a motion picture that tries to say a million things at once and ends up saying nothing because of it.

This is Paul Thomas Anderson at his worst. He’s made plenty of great movies before — Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master — but the things that made those movies great weren’t his directing, per se, but the fact that he allowed super-talented actors to just go full tilt and play off each other in the thespian equivalent of a 12-round heavyweight title fight. The best PTA movies always revolved around the acting performances and more particularly, how the ensemble cast interacted with one another. Well, I’m unhappy to report that OBAA is a loud, clunky, overloaded political diatribe that relies way too much on action set pieces instead of character development. Considering how staggeringly one-dimensional most of the characters are — and you know they’re one-dimensional when one of them is literally named “Jungle Pussy” — you sort of assume that PTA was trying to do some sort of tongue-in-cheek satire here. Except satires are funny, and watching Sean Penn rub one out while on an Antifa stakeout mission isn’t.

Politically speaking, this movie fails for the same reason last year’s Cosmopolis failed. It’s obviously trying to make a pointed message about the Trump administration and its immigration policies, but it goes about addressing those things in the wonkiest, most ass-backwards ways. The material is never treated all that seriously, with so many ridiculous popcorn action sequences in the mix that it almost becomes an insult to the people who actually are being detained in ICE facilities. It’s one thing to make a revenge fantasy, but it’s another thing to make a revenge fantasy where the actual victims of the totalitarian regime are relegated to nothing more than plot points. It’s a very bloodthirsty movie, but bloodthirsty in that usual Hollywood liberal way were the wet works are passed off to aggrieved minorities who feel more like unpaid labor for the consenting upper class than actual revolutionaries. It’s not really a movie about political persecution and the slow creep of fascism — rather, it’s PTA’s own cartoon daydream about sticking it to the “man” even though he lives in a multi-million-dollar home and gets all of the same tax breaks that the crypto-bros and MAGA sycophants are getting. “We want a revolution!” this movie loudly barks. “But only if somebody else suffers the consequences for us.”

I’d say OBAA is an insincere movie, but I don’t think its political messaging was all that sincere to begin with. It’s a movie with at least one scene that obviously calls to mind the arrest of Luigi Mangione, but at the same time it’s also a movie shockingly glutted with product placement for Budweiser and Coca-Cola. If this thing is genuinely calling for violent resistance, it’s the first ever type of violent resistance with corporate sponsorship rights hanging in the balance.

The humor, or the attempts at humor, just don’t work. You can make jokes about high-ranking FBI officials receiving made-up awards named after famous KKK members, but they fall flat in and out of context with the rest of the movie. Like, I swear, at least 40 minutes of this nearly three-hour movie is just Leo sitting around, smoking weed in various devices, just looking tired and waiting for his phone to ring. Toss in yet another nepo-baby job for Alaina Haim — who makes Corey Haim look like George C. Scott — and you have a film that ultimately feels about as serious as two kids in their backayard pretending to be Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, bonking each other over the heads with broom handles and shit.

Not only does this movie run out of gas by the 40-minute mark, you can almost feel the invisible hands of fate having to push the car over the finish line. There are parts in the final act that are so egregiously slow and uneventful that I wonder of PTA was just trying to pad out the runtime to win a bet with Martin Scorsese or something. It might not be as big or bad as an overblown ego vanity project like Cosmopolis, but at the end of the day it still feels every bit as confused, misguided and incomprehensible.

Even if you agree with every single morsel of identity politics in this movie — which would be impossible, considering how woefully inconsistent it is — I have a hard time believing anybody out there will genuinely enjoy this movie as pure entertainment. And as a philosophical statement — an attempted philosophical statement, anyway — it’s borderline unwatchable. PTA and pals may have thought they were making great art here; instead, they just crafted the world’s most expensive BlueSky rant … and one of the least convincing, at that.