Hundreds at Yom Hashoah

PAT JOHNSON

The story of the Holocaust, it has been written, is not the tragedy of six million, but the story of one, plus one, plus one. The story of one German Jewish family was shared with hundreds of Vancouverites in the overflowing Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver April 8.

Vancouver’s annual Yom Hashoah ceremony was punctuated with the plaintive chords of violin strings and the poignant Yiddish words of songs rarely sung. A solemn procession of 41 Holocaust survivors holding candles began the evening, which included prayers for the millions lost to Nazi terror. Marion Cassirer, a child survivor who was a six-year-old in Berlin when her family’s life was upended, delivered the keynote address.

Cassirer’s parents, Walter and Lina Kaufmann had paid to escape Nazi Germany. They had been forced into working for the Nazis, Walter at the train station and Lina at a Siemens factory. But now it was late 1942 and the fate of the Jews of Europe was sealed. Survival demanded escape, so they had paid a military officer to arrange for their passage from Berlin to safety on Oct. 3, 1942. But, on Oct. 2, the man behind the operation was arrested and he revealed the list of names of the people he was intending to assist.

On that fateful day, Marion and her mother returned home to find their door sealed with tape and a “do not enter” sign. Her father had been arrested at the train station and was sent to a concentration camp, but he managed to escape the train on the way to the camp and made his way to his sister’s home in Trier, in western Germany. It had been the couple’s plan that if they were ever separated, they would try to meet in Trier, Walter’s hometown.

Lina took Marion to the home of Emmy Erdmann, Lina’s best friend, who was not Jewish. Emmy gave Lina her identity card, into which they put Lina’s photo. Lina ripped the yellow star from her clothes and made the journey to Trier with Marion.

“Later,” Cassirer told the audience, “Emmy was arrested, interrogated and shot for helping Jews escape.”

When they made it to Trier, Marion’s aunt told them that Walter had been there but had left a week earlier to hide in the forest. They were advised to do the same.

The two walked through the woods, to the Dutch border, which was marked by barbed wire. Lina beckoned a man who was hoeing potatoes on the other side to assist them in passing through the frontier, he obliged and helped them through the wire barrier. They discovered only then that the Netherlands had become occupied by the Nazis and their safety was no more assured than it had been in Germany. A priest connected them to a Jewish group, which connected them with the underground resistance.

“Mom and I were separated the very next morning,” said Cassirer. Marion was placed with an Amsterdam family, whom she called Tante (Aunt) Mia and Oom (Uncle) Boy. Because in blond Amsterdam any curly, dark-haired person was suspected of being Jewish, Marion’s raven hair was routinely bleached at a local salon owned by a friend of Tante Mia. The trip to the salon, every six weeks or so, was the only time Marion was allowed out. After six months, while on their way to the salon, Tante Mia and Marion, whose hair had again gone black, were confronted by an officer. Asked why she was accompanying a Jewish girl, Tante Mia told the officer she had discovered Marion on her doorstep, crying. The officer asked her surname, to which Marion replied, “I don’t know.” The officer asked what her parents’ names were. “Mama and papa,” she told him.

The officer took Marion firmly by the hand and led her to a place called “the crèche,” where Jewish children from infancy to age 12 were held awaiting transfer to the camps. Most children were only at the crèche for two days before being transported, but Marion’s refusal to divulge her surname (in hiding, she also didn’t use her given name, but was known by Renie, the diminutive of her middle name, Irene) bought some lifesaving time. In an interview with the Independent, Cassirer explained that the Nazis’ obsession with recordkeeping – and probably the desire to locate other members of her family – resulted in her being kept at the crèche much longer than was routine. “Instead of being there for two days, I was there for six weeks,” she said.

One day, she was told by an older girl, who Cassirer assumes had some connection with the underground, that she was to leave the building, that there would be a soldier outside and that she was not to look at him and that he would not look at her. Walk to the end of the street, she was told, and she would be met by someone. She followed the instructions and found Tante Mia at the end of the block. Later, Cassirer found out that this officer, who was secretly helping the resistance, had, by the end of the war, saved the lives of 600 children like her.

Marion rode on the back of Tante Mia’s bicycle to the train station, where she was met by Oom Boy, who escorted her on the train to Arnhem, where he passed her off to nuns in a nearby village. At the convent, Marion was nourished and given new clothing. She learned some Catholic prayers and, after several days, was placed on a farm with a family who would protect her for three years.

The family dug a hole beneath the floor of their house, where Marion would be regularly hidden when strangers approached. On one occasion, when the family was also harboring an injured Allied soldier, a neighbor raced in to warn the family that a patrol was coming. After securing Marion and the soldier in the hayloft, her 14-year-old “cousin” quickly sawed through a rung on the hayloft ladder.

The patrol arrived, as warned, and a hefty soldier – soldiers who stole food from area farmers were the only overweight people at the time, Cassirer said – attempted to check out the hayloft. After falling from the broken rung of the ladder, the patrolman, apparently embarrassed, gave up and moved on with his squad. “It seems like a funny story,” Cassirer said. “But this one little act saved not only the soldier and me, but possibly the entire family.”

In 1944, the area was liberated by Canadian soldiers.

“I looked outside as I was pumping some water, and mushrooms were falling from the air,” said Cassirer. Paratroopers, eventually, would reach the farm where she was staying. “They came to us and they smiled – can you imagine soldiers smiling?” she said. “And they told us we were free.”

She began to explore the village and experience her first taste of freedom, but then the war’s trajectory shifted. The Allies lost a subsequent battle, chronicled in the book and movie A Bridge Too Far, and the area became occupied again – and now everyone knew there was a little Jewish girl in the area.

To escape, Marion was placed with a passing caravan of Roma people. Roma, or Gypsies as they were called at the time, were as endangered as Jews in occupied Europe, so this aspect of Marion’s story has drawn particular interest from both Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She has few recollections of this time beyond campfires and music, but someone took a photo of her on one of the Roma vehicles and this picture has been featured in exhibits worldwide.

After a month, the Allies finally captured the part of the Netherlands where she was, and Marion was free.

At the end of the war, Marion was reunited with Lina. Sadly, after hiding for 18 months in a haystack in the middle of a field, her mother had broken down mentally, developing multiple psychiatric disorders. “Consequently, we never really bonded,” Cassirer said. “For many years I doubted that she really was my mom.”

It was only in 2000, Cassirer later told the Independent, that she discovered how her father had died. After archives from the former Soviet bloc became available, she discovered the records from Auschwitz detailing the roundup of the Jews of Trier, including her father, and their transport to the death camp in Poland. Most were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. “My father was ‘allowed’ to live,” she said. “But three months later, he was shot. He had just turned 39.”

She said, “So, I finally have a Yahrzeit.”

Despite her mother’s condition after the war, the two moved to Amsterdam and, in 1949, to the United States, ultimately to Seattle. Cassirer married, came to Vancouver and, with a cousin, operated Yerushalem Imports. Lina passed away in Seattle in 2000 at the age of 93.

Anita Shafran, a member of the Second Generation, and Marcus Brandt, representing the Third Generation, spoke. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim and Chaim Kornfeld, a survivor, said Kaddish.

Wendy Bross Stuart and Ron Stuart directed the musical components. The evening featured Bross Stuart on piano and Nancy DiNovo on violin. Claire Klein Osipov sang Yiddish songs, also translating for the audience. She joined 16 youth singers in a moving performance of “Mir Lebn Eibik.” Before the performance, a young singer explained that the song was written and first performed in the Vilna Ghetto, in a cabaret performance attended by Nazi officials and SS officers, just months before the ghetto was liquidated. The song, the Yiddish title of which is almost identical to the German translation, asserts, “We’ll live forever.”

The ceremony was presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, with support from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and the Jewish Community Centre. The Yom Hashoah committee is Cathy Golden, Ethel Kofsky and Rome Fox.

The evening concluded, as it does annually, with the singing of “Zog Nit Keynmol,” with its defiant message, “We are here.”

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

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