VHEC – Page 10

The resilience of survivors

Peter Suedfeld and his mother. Taken at Vajdahunyad Castle, Budapest, Hungary, circa 1939/40. (photo from Peter Suedfeld)

Dr. Peter Suedfeld has devoted his life to the study of how human beings adapt to and cope with challenge, stress and danger. Yet it was many years into his work that he acknowledged his choice of academic pursuit may be related to his personal life history as a survivor of the Holocaust.

Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, will deliver the keynote address at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s community-wide Yom Hashoah commemoration at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on May 4.

Through the years, he has often been asked if his research was influenced by his family’s experience in the Holocaust.

His mother was murdered at Auschwitz; his father survived Mauthausen. Suedfeld was a hidden child in Budapest, living as a Christian in an orphanage run by the International Red Cross.

“My answer always used to be no,” he said, “because my research for a long, long time was fairly straightforward experimental psychology, cognition, perception, memory, things like that.”

But, when he was interviewed for the VHEC’s survivor testimony project, he “put it all together,” he said. “I started to think that maybe there really is a connection, because almost all of my research – not quite all, but most of it – has to do with how people adapt under unusual, extreme, challenging, sometimes traumatic environments and situations.”

His early work focused on sensory deprivation, looking at how removal of external stimuli affects things like cognition, studying astronauts, cosmonauts and people who work in polar research stations.

“I also started looking at people who were under stress because they had to make really important decisions in stressful circumstances, such as political and military leaders,” he said. “I realized that might have had something to do with my own experiences. How do people face unusual, extreme and sometimes dangerous environments – which people who have survived the Holocaust have had to do, including me? But, I want to emphasize that, at the time I was doing this research, I never thought this way. People asked me why I do all these things, and I said something interests me and I do research on it, that’s all, and I have a wide range of interests. But then, I thought maybe this does have something to do with my personal history.”

At the Yom Hashoah event, Suedfeld will reflect on his personal experience, discuss the Holocaust more broadly and then address the issue of the long-term adaptation of survivors of the Holocaust, a topic on which he has conducted a series of studies.

Suedfeld has reviewed the psychological reports written soon after the war about the long-term potential of survivors to survive and thrive.

“In general, what I found is that the early reports of psychologists and psychiatrists about how permanently damaged survivors are were, to put it bluntly, wrong,” he said. “Yes, of course, some people were permanently damaged and some people could never put their life back together again. But there are a lot of people who did put their lives together or build new ones, who were quite resilient and still are, did well in their occupation or in education if they were young when they came here, have family lives that are certainly no less happy than anybody else’s, are proud of their kids and grandkids if they have any, don’t think about the Holocaust all the time, don’t let it ruin their life.”

Many survivors, he said, have some post-traumatic stress, but not post-traumatic stress disorder. “Disorder means it really interferes with normal life,” he said. “And very few have that.”

Reviewing the early literature and knowing what he knows from personal experience and acquaintance with many survivors, Suedfeld is more surprised by the early negative prognoses than by the remarkable resilience of survivors.

“What did surprise me was the negativity of the scientific reports, which overlooked or ignored or never got to see any of the people who were so resilient,” he said. “There is now a substantial and rapidly growing literature showing not only resilience but post-traumatic growth and people’s strength instead of just emphasizing the weakness. And, again, that’s not to deny by any means that there are some people who were so terribly affected that they haven’t recovered, but that is not the norm.”

Suedfeld also cautioned that every experience of survivors is unique.

“We talk about the Shoah as though everybody had pretty much the same experience,” he said. “I want to bring home to people that that is also a mistaken idea, that people experienced very different things, all of which are lumped under the label of Holocaust or Shoah, but that’s an incredibly wide diversity of experiences to which an incredibly wide diversity of people responded in an incredibly wide, diverse way, so you cannot talk about survivors or victims as an undifferentiated lump. They’re not.”

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, as well as a member of the Independent’s editorial board. This article first appeared in the VHEC publication Zachor.

Canada’s 1936 Olympic decision

Rarely has a book worked me up as much as More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by professors Richard Menkis (University of British Columbia) and Harold Troper (University of Toronto).

More Than Just Games was published by U of T Press in the spring. I got my copy from Menkis, who, biases known, I consider a friend. Even so, it took me months to open. The cover image is of members of Canada’s 1936 Olympic team vying for Adolf Hitler’s autograph. Other than some high-quality archival images grouped in the centre of the book, the text is academic, looking almost as imposing as the topic itself. So I was surprised that, when I finally did start reading, I pretty much couldn’t stop. In just over a week, I had read the 230ish-page book, not counting the notes, bibliography and index.

That the scholarship of academics with the credentials of Menkis and Troper would be impeccable I had no doubt. What I hadn’t anticipated was the immediacy they could evoke with their writing. The amount of detail they provide, though on rare occasion overwhelming, serves to bring readers into the period leading up to Canada’s decision to send athletes to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, when there could be no doubt as to the Nazis’ actions and intentions.

Through ample use of citations from letters, articles and speeches of the pro- and anti-Olympic forces, readers witness almost firsthand the debates that took place prior to the Games, they get a glimpse of the almost dizzying number of internal conflicts within the boycott movement, and they get an idea of the amount of propaganda that was being disseminated by Germany in Canada (and other countries). They even learn of some of the differences of opinion between the German Olympic Committee and the Nazi party as to the value of hosting the Games, when the event’s ideal – no discrimination on “grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise” – ran contrary to the Nazis’ belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, and their efforts to annihilate those they considered inferior.

There were a few outspoken people who tried to waken Canadians to the reality of the Nazi regime – notably journalist Matthew Halton and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath – but their voices couldn’t rise above the Games’ advocates nor break through the apathy of most of the population. Canada, we are reminded, had closed the doors to Jewish immigration in 1923 – “In distinguishing Jews from non-Jews of the same citizenship, Canada predated Nazi regulations denying Jews and non-Jews equal status under the law by more than 10 years,” write Menkis and Troper.

This is one of the principal reminders of this book, which came out of an exhibit that the professors put together at the behest of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and which opened several months before the 2010 Winter Olympics were held in the city. Canada might have become a model of multiculturalism, but it was not always so.

Another reminder that stands out is that it doesn’t necessarily take evil people for bad things to happen. Many of the supporters – including athletes – of sending Canadians to the 1936 Games sincerely believed in their position on the importance of sport above all, and seem to have been genuinely confused as to why anyone would disagree. Canada’s position was that of a good colony, following the lead of Britain, which saw no reason not to send competitors. It’s not even obvious in hindsight as to whether Canada’s absence at those Games would have made a difference to the Nazis’ progression of violence to war, to genocide.

Sensibly, Menkis and Troper don’t try to examine the issues with the benefit of hindsight. They present numerous viewpoints and historical facts, mostly without judgment. Their opinions, however, pop out here and there via their choice of adjective or use of sarcasm. I found this comforting because they generally reflected my mood at those points in the book. I would be getting all worked up about what was being said at the time and their jibe would make me smile, and not feel like the crazy one. Because that’s what it felt like reading about it – I can only imagine how people like Halton and Eisendrath felt, actually being there, trying to fight against such ignorance, selfishness, pettiness, narrow-mindedness, greed and indifference.

More Than Just Games is an important contribution to Canadian history, and it is not only a must-read but a very good read.

Consuls save thousands of lives

Consul General of Japan Seiji Okada, centre, Yasuko Okada and Dr. George Bluman. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

There are Vancouverites who owe their lives to the wartime actions of the then-obscure Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. The mid-level official, vice-consul in Lithuania for the imperial government of Japan, disobeying explicit and repeated orders, in 1940 issued Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing the advancing Nazi onslaught.

Two of the people who received the visas were Nathan and Susan Bluman. Their son, Dr. George Bluman, delivered the keynote address Sunday at the 33rd annual Kristallnacht commemoration event, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel.

Bluman recounted the story of Sugihara’s life and the motivations for his actions, then addressed the magnitude of those events on his own family.

“There are thousands of stories like my parents’,” said Bluman, noting that this one family’s story is barely a footnote in the Sugihara narrative, but it means “the entire world for me and my family.”

Bluman, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, said his parents were two of about 2,100 people who received life-giving visas from the Japanese consular official. Approximately another 600 individuals were aided by being included in the visas of others, mostly their parents, and perhaps 25% more were helped in their survival by forged versions of Sugihara visas.

Bluman explained that, after Germany invaded Poland and divvied the country up with the Soviet Union, many Jews fled to the Soviet-occupied portion. Unable to flee to the west, and having been denied entry by most Western countries, Jews were effectively trapped.

Nathan Bluman and his fiancée Susan lived in Warsaw, which was occupied by the Nazis. Nathan fled to the Soviet-occupied east and prevailed upon Susan to join him, which she did, though her father forbade them from marrying without his permission.

“She would never again see any of her parents or siblings,” Bluman said.

While Germany had occupied the Netherlands, Dutch embassies and consulates worldwide remained loyal to the Dutch government-in-exile, located in London. Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch consul in Lithuania, began issuing visas to Curaçao, the Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Jewish refugees, including many Polish Jews like Nathan and Susan Bluman, made their way to Lithuania in hopes of obtaining a ticket to safety.

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, all foreign embassies and consulates were ordered closed. In the short window available, the Dutch consul, with the support of his superiors in the government-in-exile, issued visas for Jewish refugees to enter Curaçao.

However, while Polish and Lithuanian Jewish refugees were free to travel in the Soviet Union, they could not go further without a visa to another country. That made a Japanese transit visa priceless.

While there is no evidence that Zwartendijk and Sugihara ever met, it was their combined actions that are credited with saving thousands of lives. While Zwartendijk acted with the authority of his superiors, Sugihara ignored explicit orders not to issue transit visas, an act of extraordinary disobedience for a mid-level Japanese bureaucrat and an action that not only put his job on the line, but threatened the lives of himself and his family.

Sugihara handwrote the visas day and night, issuing the equivalent of an average month’s worth of visas every day in the weeks before the consulate was forcibly closed by the Soviets.

The combination of a Dutch visa to Curaçao and a transit visa for Japan allowed refugees to make the arduous journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, board a ship to a Japanese port, take a train to Kobe and, in various ways, survive the war. In many cases, the refugees became stateless people, interned first in Japan and then in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Bluman’s parents managed to get on one of the last two ships heading to North America before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched Japan and the United States into a state of war and made passage impossible.

The Bluman family’s fate was influenced by one of those fortunate flukes that occurs in history. While in Japan, Nathan Bluman ran into an old professor from school in Warsaw, who told him that a ship, the Hei Maru, was to leave for Vancouver the next day. Bluman raced to the Canadian consulate to request one of the 25 visas being offered to skilled workers and it was granted. There were no provisions for spouses but Susan Bluman, using some sort of extraordinary persuasive power, managed to get the Canadian official to include her on her husband’s visa and they boarded the ship the same day, arriving in Vancouver on July 9, 1941.

That single transit visa was responsible for 17 lives, including Nathan and Susan Bluman, their children and grandchildren and three great-grandchildren born this year.

George Bluman estimates that, in all, 30,000 people worldwide owe their lives to Sugihara. Yet, it was not until 1968, when a survivor contacted him, that Sugihara began to understand the magnitude of what he had done during the war. In 1985, he was named by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Sugihara died in 1986, as did Nathan Bluman. But the Bluman and Sugihara families have had a long association and friendship that remains strong today to the third generation.

The event Sunday night at Beth Israel began with a solemn candlelight procession of local survivors of the Holocaust.

The annual event commemorates Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” a government-initiated pogrom across Germany and Austria on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, nearly 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a member of the commemoration’s organizing committee, noted that the Holocaust ended 70 years ago with the Allied defeat of the Nazi regime. But when did it begin? Kristallnacht is often cited as the moment when the increasingly repressive policies of the Hitler dictatorship turned into the violence that would culminate in the “Final Solution.”

But Friedrichs said that the Holocaust was not so much a direct result of events of that fateful night.

“It is what did not happen in the days that followed,” he said. After a day or two of headlines worldwide, said Friedrichs, there was nothing more. The world’s reaction, or lack of it, was the signal the Nazis needed to be assured that their policies of eliminating those “deemed unworthy of life” would meet with no resistance from the world community.

Referring to the procession of candle-bearing survivors that had just preceded him, Friedrichs said, “a candle may not seem very heavy to you.” But each of the survivors who mounted the bimah, said Friedrichs, belonged to a family, many of whom were almost completely destroyed, and the candles represent not just their families or hundreds or thousands of people, but millions.

Vancouver City Councillor

Andrea Reimer, deputy mayor of the city, broke down in tears while reading the mayor’s proclamation after telling the audience how the history of the Holocaust tests for faith in humanity.

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Bluman and expressed gratitude that Bluman is a member of his congregation.

“You are a key component of maintaining the history of the Holocaust in our community,” Infeld said.

Arthur Guttman, cantor emeritus of Temple Sholom, chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer for the martyrs. Ed Lewin, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the survivors. Gary Miller, president of Beth Israel, introduced Reimer. Bluman was introduced by Prof. Richard Menkis, a member of the Kristallnacht commemoration organizing committee.

B.C. Achievement honor for Krell

Dr. Robert Krell with the Hon. Coralee Oakes (left), minister of community, sport and cultural development, and the Hon. Judith Guichon, OBC, lieutenant governor of British Columbia. (photo from B.C. Achievement Foundation)

On April 24, 2015, Dr. Robert Krell was among those honored at the 12th Annual British Columbia Community Achievement Awards ceremony held at Government House in Victoria, where he received a B.C. Community Achievement Award medallion and certificate.

“These honorees exemplify what it is to go above and beyond; to do what needs to be done and to give without question their time and energy for the betterment of their communities,” said Keith Mitchell QC, representing the British Columbia Achievement Foundation.

In a personal letter received from the premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, Krell was honored for his “many years of commitment to developing anti-racism, antisemitism and Holocaust education programs for people of all ages. By establishing the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in 1994 and documenting Holocaust survivors’ testimonials, you have ensured that no one will ever forget what Jewish people went through during the war. Your work with child survivor groups is further testament to your dedication to helping people gather together, talk to one another and know they are not alone in dealing with the aftermath of what they and their families experienced.”

Hidden as a child in the Netherlands during the Holocaust, child and family psychiatrist and University of British Columbia professor emeritus, Krell understands the necessity of Holocaust remembrance: learning from its lessons, providing education, supporting survivors and ensuring their stories are not lost. In addition to founding the VHEC, he also founded a group for child survivors, giving voice to their experience.

Exhibit’s familiar face

This photo is among the images in The Face of the Ghetto: Pictures Taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 1940-1944, produced by the Topography of Terror Foundation, Berlin. The bride on the right is Bronia Sonnenschein; beside her is her groom Erich Strauss. The second bride is Mary Schifflinger with husband Ignatz Yelin. Blessing the couples is Chaim Rumkowski, head of Lodz Ghetto’s Jewish council. Only Sonnenschein survived the Holocaust. She passed away in Vancouver in 2011. (photo from Yad Vashem Photo Archive)

The Face of the Ghetto: Pictures Taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 1940-1944, opened last week at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Produced by the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin, among the traveling exhibit’s photographs was a surprise – a photo with a local connection.

“Unidentified in the photo caption but recognized by our education director [Adara Goldberg] during her research about this exhibit, Bronia Sonnenschein is depicted in the photo to my left,” said VHEC executive director Nina Krieger in her remarks at the opening on May 14, directing attendees’ attention to an image “showing a double wedding ceremony presided over by Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Council of Elders in the Lodz Ghetto. Bronia was the sole survivor of those shown in this photograph. A multilingual secretary in Rumkowski’s office and a survivor of Auschwitz, Bronia passed away in 2011 but is fondly remembered by so many of us.

“Bronia, who stood maybe ‘this’ tall,” continued Krieger, indicating a measure of about shoulder height, “was a giant in terms of her dignity, her resilience, and her dedication to sharing her eyewitness testimony with tens of thousands students as a VHEC outreach speaker.”

About the Topography of Terror Foundation, Krieger explained that it “is mandated to transmit the history of National Socialism and its crimes, and to encourage people to actively confront this history and its aftermath. A distinctive indoor and outdoor museum, the Topography of Terror is located on the very grounds previously occupied by the primary institutions of Nazi persecution and terror: the SS, the Gestapo secret police and the Reich Main Security Office ran their central operations from the site.”

Krieger provided context for the exhibit. “Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis imposed a ghetto in the city of Lodz, which they renamed Litzmannstadt. From 1940 to 1944, more than 180,000 Jews and 5,000 Roma and Sinti lived in the ghetto’s cramped quarters, with many working in factories that supported the war effort.

“Ghetto residents were not allowed to own cameras, yet Lodz is the most documented of all the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. Some of these images were taken by perpetrators, often trivializing the terrible conditions in the ghetto and attempting to justify the exploitation of Jewish forced laborers. Others – and the focus of this exhibit – were taken by a handful of Jewish photographers, commissioned by the local Jewish council. While instructed to document the productivity of the war industry for the Nazis, the photographers also captured – at great personal risk – intimate moments of family, childhood and community.”

The Face of the Ghetto exhibit is here as a result of VHEC’s partnership with the German Consulate General in Vancouver and the sponsorship of the German government. Consul General Herman Sitz was at the opening and said a few words, as did Sonnenschein’s son, Dan. Drawn from a collection of 12,000 images held by the Lodz State Archives, one of the intimate moments captured is the one in which his mother appears.

“Last Friday was the historic 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day,” said Sonnenschein, addressing those assembled. “May 8th was personally very meaningful for my mother, as it was the date in 1945 on which she was liberated from the Nazi horror. For her, the bitterly harsh years had begun on March 13, 1938, when Germany annexed a largely welcoming Austria, immediately setting off intense persecution of the Jewish population.

“My mother, with her sister and parents, were among the longest-held prisoners in the Lodz Ghetto, from its formation in spring 1940 until its so-called liquidation in August 1944. Unlike many deported there from other places, they had fled Vienna after the notorious Kristallnacht, and were living under great stress in Lodz when the family was forced from their new home into the ghetto. They were later joined by a beloved aunt of my mother who was deported from Vienna. Her cherished elderly grandmother was deported elsewhere and murdered soon after.

“My mother, with her German-language and office skills, worked as a secretary in the ghetto’s Jewish administration,” he explained. “The photo in this exhibit shows her being married to Erich Strauss, who had been deported from Prague with his mother. The other bride in this double ceremony was Mary Schifflinger, my mother’s fellow office worker and good friend, whose groom’s name was Ignatz Yelin. Shown in the photo blessing the couples is Chaim Rumkowski, appointed head of the Jewish council by the ghetto’s masters in the German administration.

“These five people were all transported, in the usual dreadful way, to Auschwitz, where Rumkowski was killed. Soon after, the others were sent to a less well known but no less brutal concentration camp called Stutthof. There, Mary and her husband were killed, Erich Strauss and his mother were killed, my mother’s father and aunt were killed. As my mother once said, it was a killing field.

“Other photos of my mother in the ghetto may be seen on the internet, along with such photos of my Aunt Paula, who also married in the ghetto, to Stan Lenga,” continued Sonnenschein. “Unlike my mother’s first husband, my Uncle Stan survived and the couple was reunited after the war, being a part of my close family in Vancouver along with my maternal grandmother, Emily Schwebel. The local Jewish Family Service Agency gives an annual Paula Lenga Award in my aunt’s memory for exemplary volunteer service.

“My mother was also an exemplary volunteer, in her case, in Holocaust education. She began this late-life career, first under the auspices of the Canadian Jewish Congress and then with this centre, for over two decades compellingly conveying the suffering imposed on her and so many others for, as she put it, the crime of being Jewish. She often quoted Elie Wiesel’s saying: ‘Not every German was a Nazi but every Jew was a victim.’

“Although we no longer can experience her vibrant presence,” concluded Sonnenschein, “we are fortunate to have many recordings of my mother, as well as a book, to help her testimony live on.” Included in those recordings, he said, is one of her talking about the photo in The Face of the Ghetto exhibit, and related matters. The photos he mentioned of his mother and aunt can be found at google.com/culturalinstitute, searching for “Bronia Sonnenschein” and “Paula Lenga.”

In conjunction with the exhibit, the VHEC has developed a school program and teaching resource to engage students. “Visiting school groups will explore topics such as resistance to dehumanization; the unique experiences of children; and the complex role of Jewish leadership under Nazi occupation,” said Krieger, noting that several of the volunteer docents were at the opening. “Volunteers are central to our work,” she said, “and it’s my honor to acknowledge and to thank our docents for everything that they do.”

Krieger also thanked the VHEC staff – present were Goldberg, designer Illene Yu, archivist Elizabeth Shaffer, collections assistant Katie Powell and administrator Lauren Vukobrat – and the installation crew, Wayne Gilmartin and Adam Stenhouse, as well as the consul general.

The Face of the Ghetto is on display at the VHEC until Oct. 16.

– With thanks to Nina Krieger and Dan Sonnenschein for providing electronic copies of their remarks.

Tragedies, hope in numbers

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was commemorated here on Jan. 25 with a ceremony at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Holocaust survivors lit candles of remembrance and there was a moment of silence followed by Kaddish; Nina Krieger, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre executive director, read a proclamation from Mayor Gregor Robertson; and a screening of the film Numbered followed, in which survivors of Auschwitz, their children and grandchildren reflect in often unexpected ways on the meaning of the numbers the Nazis tattooed onto their victims.

photo - Robbie Waisman — Robbie Waisman *(photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)*

Vancouverite Robbie Waisman, who is a child survivor of Buchenwald, delivered remarks before the film. With permission, the Independent is privileged to publish a slightly edited transcript of his words:

I am honored to be with you this evening. This film speaks about numbers. I have not seen the film, but I have experience with numbers.

Numbers that have been given to us in the camps have two very significant meanings. They were very dehumanizing. They robbed you of your feelings as a person. Your humanity as a human being was taken away. And as long as you remained healthy and were able to work, in that sense the number given to you made it possible to remain alive and continue to live and hope to survive.

When I lived in France after liberation, they gave us identification cards. It allowed me to get around every day. The police issued it to me on June 9, 1947. I had to have it renewed every year. This was important to me. This was my first ID card, so it is hard to explain how I cherished this card. It meant that I was no longer just a number. It meant that I was a person, that I was a person of value. It proved I had a name and an address. I was so proud to have it. It gave us back some of the dignity we had lost. It gave us back our humanity.

Every time a ghetto was being liquidated, there was a selection of men and women who the Nazis selected to work. Those would be spared and taken to the munitions factories to replace other workers who they perceived as not being strong enough to continue working.

I myself have gone through three of those selections successfully with my father alongside with me.

All of us Jews who were no longer capable of working were eliminated in the most horrific way. I am not going into details – the pain always resonates.

The Nazis decided who qualified to live and work, and others were sent to the gas chambers. Six million of our people, of which 1.5 million were children, were brutally murdered. I represent the seven percent that managed to survive.

The Nazis and their collaborators murdered my mother, father and four older brothers … my uncles, aunts, cousins and friends who had been my schoolmates, and on and on.

Getting back to numbers…. When I read that many second- and third-generation survivors are [tattooing] their fathers’ and grandfathers’ numbers on their own arms and chests, I was upset.

Upon further research and reflection, I came around and now admire all those that have done this noble task. It is strange and amazing how, after all the years, those numbers have taken on a new meaning and brought change to what we think about those horrific years.

The book God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes is a reflection of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg, from Beth El New Jersey, who is the son of survivors Jacob and Rachel Rosenberg, wrote: “Growing up, I constantly looked at the numbers on my father’s left arm, which he received in Auschwitz. Those numbers instilled in me the urge to fight for the state of Israel and against antisemitism wherever it may occur. I became a rabbi because of those numbers.”

Here is my own experience with numbers. Imagine being a 14-year-old boy. Imagine having been in hell and back over four years of this boy’s life working in Germany’s ammunition factories, being hungry, starved, emotionally exhausted, physically weakened, deprived of every human emotion. Imagine being so brutalized and dehumanized that you begin to believe that you are no longer human. In spite of it all, I never lost hope of being reunited with my family.

Hope! – a very powerful motivation.

The emergence of the enormity of the Holocaust became known to us and we had to find a way to deal and cope with the huge loss of all our loved ones murdered by the Nazis. How are we going to live with all those horrors?

April 11 will be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald.

Would you believe, Gloria [Waisman’s wife] and I are invited by the German government to come to Weimar for this special occasion, where I am also invited to speak to German teenagers. I will share my experience in that infamous and dreadful place where death was a constant companion.

I celebrate April 11 as my birthday, for that day I was reborn again into freedom.

When the Americans liberated Buchenwald, we were euphoric! I will never forget the feeling! The soldiers were larger than life. They symbolized freedom, a new beginning! I tried to communicate with them, but had no words.

For the first time, I saw black men among the soldiers. Since I had been tormented by white persons and had never seen a black person, I thought that angels must be black!

The soldiers looked around and were surprised to find youngsters like myself. They wanted to know, Who are these kids? Where do they come from? What are their nationalities? Why are they here? What are they guilty of? What was the crime they committed?

Ultimately – a few days later – some men arrived to sort out the puzzle. They proceeded to make a list of our names and when my turn came and I was asked my name, I blurted out #117098, the number given to me. My name as a human was erased. I was surprised that they wanted my name not my number. So, you see here, again, the numbers are part of our stories.

When I think back, it was an extraordinary time, full of promise and hope. But it was also bittersweet. Those of us determined to survive had to focus all our efforts towards survival. We wanted to go home and be reunited with family. We soon realized that home was no more and that families we loved had been brutally murdered.

But after emerging from the abyss, thoughts and feelings returned.

Questions bombarded me. What now? Where is my family? Has anyone survived? If not, what is the point of my own survival?

Those wonderful memories of home no longer existed. Everything shattered.

How will I recapture feelings, so that I could cry and laugh again? How do I learn to love and trust again?

It was not easy to relearn the ordinary skills of life that had been shattered over a six-year period. We had to put our numbers aside, reclaim our names and that of our families and move forward.

We were also sure that when the American soldiers … when they saw the consequences of Nazi racism and brutality … that they would ensure that such things would never happen again. We, the survivors, were certain that the leaders and the citizens of the world would say “Never again!” and commit themselves to turning those words into reality.

Never again! Noble, thought-provoking words, but only if we act upon them. Only then do these words become meaningful.

Today, almost 70 years after my liberation, the promise of “Never again” has become again and again!

There have been a number of situations that have tested the world’s resolve … in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now in Darfur, Syria and so many other places, people have been, and continue to be, the victims of genocide.

My eyes have seen unspeakable horrors! I am a witness to the ultimate evil! I am a witness to man’s inhumanity to other human beings! To this day, I cannot grasp how I managed to go through hell and survive.

The promise of being reunited with my family, all my loved ones, was the strong motivator for not giving up, for not losing it and falling into despair. After having come out of the abyss, I remember thinking, What now? I must go home – my family is waiting for me.

Then the questions began. Where are our loved ones? What happened to them? So much devastation! How to cope? So many losses, including our humanity. We became angry and outraged.

We were 426 youngsters among 20,000 adults in Buchenwald. We were brought to Ecouis, France, for our recovery and were told by psychologists that we had become sociopaths who would never recover.

Most of us forged ahead in school and business, raised families and contributed to our communities. In fact, we count among the Buchenwald children such personalities as my friend Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner; and Lulek, Israel’s recent chief rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, and his brother Naphtali.

Simon Wiesenthal, of blessed memory, said, “I believe in God and the World to Come, and when they ask me what did you do? I will say, I did not forget you.”

I want to end with my friend Elie Wiesel’s words: “Zachor, remember, for there is, there must be, hope in remembering.”

The commemoration was presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, in partnership with the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre and the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, and with funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and Rita Akselrod and family, in memory of Ben Akselrod z”l.

Instilling a survival instinct

Jeanne Beker reads from her parents’ (Bronia and Joseph Beker) Holocaust memoir on Feb. 19. (photo from Jeanne Beker via vhec.org)

Some survivors of the Holocaust choose never to speak of the horrors they endured. My parents talked. They were adamant about telling us every detail of their war experience, time and time again. I remember hiding under the bed as a small child – I didn’t want to hear any more of their “war stories.” Now, I realize it was precisely their storytelling that made me who I am, coloring my personal philosophies, imparting a sense of resiliency and instilling in me a precious instinct for survival.

What they endured and all they have given me [was] on my mind a great deal over Toronto’s Holocaust Education Week [Nov. 2-9, 2014], with the recent publication of their memoirs, Joy Runs Deeper. With the last generation of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust slowly slipping away, my parents’ stories have taken on more value and urgency. As a child of survivors, I’m keenly aware that I have been left with a legacy that’s as powerfully daunting as it is inspiring.

My parents, Bronia and Joseph Beker, both grew up in Kozowa – a small town in eastern Poland that is now part of Ukraine. They paint a colorful prewar picture of life in their idyllic shtetl, where they met and fell in love. But when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, their lives became a living hell. By 1941, all the Kozowa Jews were confined to a ghetto.

Nazis would regularly come into town and randomly shoot any Jew in sight.

After these horrific shootings, the Germans would command the Jews to make their ghetto even smaller. Many people lived in one room, and with little food, people grew weak and prone to disease. My grandmother and mother both came down with typhus, and it killed my grandmother. In the meantime, my grandfather built a bunker in the basement of the family home where they would hide whenever the Nazis came to town.

In April 1943, my mother and nine members of her family went down to their bunker. After about six hours, they could hear digging: the Nazis were looking for them.

“We held our breath and didn’t move for about half an hour,” writes my mother. “They left without finding our bunker, but the pipes through which we got air must have been covered during their digging. We couldn’t breathe,” she recalls.

“I remember seeing my father, sitting on the floor in his prayer shawl, praying, and my brother with a hammer in his hand, trying to open the entrance to the bunker. Then I fell down and everything went black.”

My mom’s entire family perished that day: all of them suffocated, except, miraculously, for her. Like a knight in shining armor, my dad came to her rescue, scooped her up and, for many months until their liberation, my parents were on the run, hiding in barns and bunkers, depending on the kindness of strangers for their very existence.

It was these stories of survival that were relentlessly recounted to my sister and me throughout our childhood. “Don’t be afraid and never give up” was my father’s famous saying, the mindset that saw him through the war, and the sage edict he raised us on.

My mother’s modus operandi, which tended to chip away any potential optimism, was even more pragmatic: “Expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” It certainly wasn’t an upbeat way of viewing the world, but it was her motherly attempt at protecting us and sparing us pain.

While my mother’s influence certainly affects me even to this day, it was my father’s motto that I especially took to heart – an order that still carries me through all my trials.

Ultimately, both my parents taught me the meaning of fearlessness and tenacity, courage and dignity.

As my mother always says, “If you live long enough, you’ll live to see everything.” And her words rang true as I sat by her side at her book launch, watching in wonder as she proudly signed countless books bearing her name. On the verge of turning 94, suffering the ravages of Parkinson’s, but as radiant and stylish as ever, my mom was realizing one of her greatest dreams: she could now share her personal story with the world.

Her memoir, which she’d written more than 30 years ago, along with my father’s memoir, which he’d written, longhand, in Yiddish, just before he died in 1988, has been published by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.

Established in 1989 by the late Montreal philanthropist David J. Azrieli, himself a Holocaust survivor, this Canadian organization collects, archives and publishes inspirational accounts of courage and strength in the light of horrifying adversity, and distributes them free of charge to libraries and educational institutions across the country. (The books are also available at bookstores, with all revenues going back into this extraordinary memoirs program.)

My mother and so many others had their youth nipped in the bud, endured unspeakable pain and suffered profound loss. Yet still, they managed to soldier on, pick up the broken pieces and stoically rebuild their shattered lives.

Their tales of toughness and tenacity light our paths, and teach us the kind of fearlessness it takes to survive. These lessons learned from survivors, like my parents, inspire and challenge us to shoot for the moon, work hard, be successful and live out not just our dreams, but their unrealized ones as well.

Their heroism drives me relentlessly.

Jeanne Beker is a Canadian television personality, fashion designer, author and newspaper columnist. This article was originally published in the Globe and Mail and is reprinted here from Zachor, the magazine of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, with permission.

***

Jeanne Beker reads from her parents’ (Bronia and Joseph Beker) Holocaust memoir Joy Runs Deeper (Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs) on Feb. 19, 7 p.m., at the Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestnut St., to open the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s Shafran Teachers’ Conference. Those in attendance receive a complimentary copy of the memoir, and a reception follows. The event is open to the public and is free of charge but space is limited. RSVP to 604-264-0499 or info@vhec.org.

Carl Lutz exhibit opens at VHEC

Swiss Consul General Urs Strausak at the opening reception of the Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House exhibit, which features panel displays as well as various artifacts. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

He was the first Swiss national to be awarded the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem and he is credited with using his diplomatic privileges to save tens of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust. However, an exhibit dedicated to him had eluded Vancouver – until now.

Last week, Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest opened at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). A partnership between VHEC, the Swiss consulate in Vancouver and local Jewish families, the opening reception on Oct. 23 drew a full house, with a wide range of ages represented, from Holocaust survivors to young children, who attended with their parents. Several volunteer docents were on hand to walk the public through the displays and take questions.

photo - An example of the artifacts on display at the exhibit — An example of the artifacts on display at the exhibit. *(photo by Cynthia Ramsay)*

Panels display various topics, including Jewish life in Hungary before the Second World War, the rise of Nazism and the Glass House, where thousands of Jews found refuge, as well as personal stories from the era. The exhibit, sent by the Carl Lutz Foundation in Budapest, is enriched by a companion exhibit that includes testimony and artifacts from local Hungarian Holocaust survivors, showcasing important themes relevant to Lutz’s environment and life.

Nina Krieger, VHEC executive director, said the exhibit demonstrates the complexity of moral decision making in a turbulent time.

“Alongside narratives of moral courage and rescue, we must recognize, of course, that these were the rare exceptions,” she said.

She went on to discuss the artifacts, which bring a direct connection between the era and a visiting audience.

“On display are materials that reflect a vibrant prewar Jewish life in Hungary – a cherished prayer brook and photographs of everyday life – as well as evidence of antisemitism and persecution,” she said.

“An 18th-century silver chanukiyah buried by Dr. Joseph and Anna Lövi in the basement of a neighbor’s home on the eve of their deportation to Auschwitz survived; its owners did not. The chanukiyah was retrieved in July 1945 and given to one of their daughters, Judith Lövi Maté. Judith and her infant son Gabor had found refuge in the Glass House, representing a local family intimately connected to Carl Lutz.”

Swiss Consul General Urs Strausak, whose participation helped make the exhibit possible, emphasized the need for education about the Holocaust in his country and around the world.

“The study of the Holocaust shows the danger of being silent in face of evil, and education is a tool to make sure atrocity will never happen again,” he said in his speech at the exhibit opening. He explained the place of Holocaust education in Swiss education, saying, “The topic of [the] Holocaust is taught within the context of history teaching and civic education. Some aspects of the Holocaust are also addressed in social science, religious studies and literature.” Switzerland joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to promoting Holocaust education and research, in 2004.

Asked about his connection to the exhibit, Strausak, who is a personal friend of Lutz’s daughter and current curator of the Carl Lutz Foundation, said it was an important event to reach out to the Jewish community and beyond and help support further communal education. Teaching has to start early, he said, and it is important to emphasize figures such as Lutz since he was more than simply a person who saved Jews. “He was a mensch and people need to have the courage to speak out [regarding evil],” he said.

Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest will be at VHEC until Feb. 15, and is open to the public by donation. More information on the exhibit and becoming involved with VHEC can be found at vhec.org.

Gil Lavie is a freelance correspondent, with articles published in the Jerusalem Post, Shalom Toronto and Tazpit News Agency. He has a master’s of global affairs from the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.