The shadow of Shoah

PAT JOHNSON

Robbie Waisman's earliest memories, as the youngest child of six in a warm, traditional Orthodox home in Skarzysko, Poland, was of being spoiled and "very much loved."

"The joys of Friday nights, the comings and goings of my four older brothers and my sister, Leah ... their aspirations and hopes for the future," Waisman recalled. "It was exciting and wonderful."

These memories Waisman cherishes are an antidote now, as they were in the concentration camps where Waisman spent the rest of his childhood, to firsthand experience with the human capacity for evil.

Sixty-four years and nine days after he was liberated from Buchenwald, Waisman told of his survival in the face of the annihilation of practically everyone and everything he knew. At the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's Yom Hashoah annual commemorative evening Monday, Waisman spoke of the horrors he endured, of a form of redemption and of hope and fear for the future. (For a transcript of Waisman's entire presentation, click here.)

"My eyes have seen unspeakable horrors," said Waisman. "I am a witness to the ultimate evil. I am a witness to man's inhumanity to other human beings. My mother, my father and four older brothers were murdered by the Nazis ... uncles, aunts, cousins, friends I went to school with. I to this day cannot grasp how I managed to go through hell and survive."

Waisman recalled Golda, the young and beautiful wife of his oldest brother Haim, who could have found work in the munitions plant but would have had to give up her child, Nathan, Waisman's nephew.

"She refused to be separated from her little boy and instead was sent to the Treblinka gas chambers with him," said Waisman. "So many other young Jewish mothers did the same."

How most of his loved ones lost their lives were tragic stories Waisman pieced together in the years following the war, but one ending is seared in his childhood memories.

"I lost all four brothers, but my brother Abram is particularly painful because I was there," he said. "I witnessed it. He contracted typhoid fever and could no longer work. If you couldn't work, you were no longer of any use to the Nazis."

Waisman spoke of the last look the brothers shared, how Waisman tried to run toward the truck and how his brother waved him back.

"He did not want me near him. He realized as our eyes met that I should not be with him. Being with him meant certain death and he knew it. So I watched the truck leaving the compound towards the forest nearby. Never will I forget hearing the crackling sound of machine gun fire. Never will I forget the devastation in my heart as I watched in horror the truck returning empty."

What redemption Waisman and other survivors have taken has often come from finding a degree of joy in recreating the love of family.

"After having come out of the abyss, I remember thinking: What now? I must go home. My family is waiting for me," he said. "Then the questions began: Where are our loved ones? What happened to them? So much devastation. How will I cope? So many losses. Including our humanity. We became angry and outraged. How to have normal feeling and emotions again. How to cry and laugh, and how do we learn to love again? All of it had to be relearned ... Before the war, we all came from Orthodox homes, rich in heritage and tradition. But after coming out of the terrible abyss, the darkness, we questioned angrily."

The power of remembering was an important theme in Waisman's address. He credits his memories of a happy family life as the sole source of his survival and he warned of the dangers facing a world that today seems to be forgetting the lessons of that time.

"I often think of the short time I had with my entire family at home," said Waisman. "Although the years were few, the impressions on my life have been profound and everlasting. I am so fortunate to have those cherished memories ... the thought of being reunited, of going home to all my loved ones gave me the strength to overcome enormous obstacles and helped me focus on one thing only: survival, no matter what."

As Waisman and his peers – immortalized in Sir Martin Gilbert's book The Boys and in the National Film Board documentary The Boys of Buchenwald – adjusted to their new condition as survivors, memories sustained them in other ways.

"What we learned at home from our parents was not lost," Waisman said. "The Yiddishkeit and menchlecheit, the sense of humanity slowly returned to us. Our faith was shaken. Yet in spite of it all, we remained true to it."

But he warned that the promise "Never again" had been forgotten in a world where genocide is no longer an exclusively Jewish term.

"Never again is becoming again and again," he said. "What happened then, long ago, in my time, wasn't supposed to occur ever again. Yet it is happening today in many parts of the world."

Waisman also warned of the resurgence of anti-Semitism. The Yom Hashoah commemoration took place this year as a United Nations conference in Geneva, ostensibly against racism, began with an address by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president whose explicit promise of Jewish genocide is as clear as was Hitler's and who is likewise dismissed by the world as a comparatively harmless kook.

Ed Lewin, a member of the second generation, told the packed auditorium that much has been written and spoken about the intergenerational transmission of trauma from survivors to their children, then spoke about what he called an "intergenerational transmission of love, respect and duty."

As a child of survivors, Lewin said, he witnessed firsthand the resilience of a generation that was given little expectation of success when liberated.

"Suffice it to say that having been granted a new life of freedom and opportunity in a new land, Canada, my parents were determined to make the most of it, and the most of it, they certainly did," said Lewin. "In this, they were not remarkable, at least not for survivors, for to a person that is what virtually all survivors have done.

"My parents loved and nurtured me and my sisters with a fervor that is difficult to reduce to words," said Lewin, noting that his mother, Rose, was in attendance.

Lillian Boraks Nemetz introduced six survivors, Alex Buckman, David Ehrlich, David Feldman, Serge Haber, Bernice Neuwirth and Aaron Szajman, who lit candles before a moment of silence. Chazzan Yaacov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim and Chaim Kornfeld did the Kaddish.

The commemoration, which took place at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, included evocative Yiddish songs and instrumentals featuring singer Claire Klein Osipov, Wendy B. Stuart on piano, a stirring cello by Eric Wilson and 14 young singers, who filled the centre's auditorium with the strains of a civilization mourned. Cathy Golden, Ethel Kofsky and Rome Fox, members of the second generation, were the organizing committee. Wendy and Ron Stuart were artistic producers. Representing the City of Vancouver were city councillors Suzanne Anton and Geoff Meggs.

The evening ended with the singing of "Zog Nit Keynmol," known as the "Partisans' Song," the anthem of the Jewish resistance to Nazism, written in the Vilna Ghetto, with its declaration: Mir zaynen do. We are here.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of development and communications for Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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