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Listening to Survivors and Searching for "Little Schindlers"


Ester Golan
Survivor, Jerusalem

First presented in March 1996 at
The Annual Scholars Conference on Holocaust and Churches

The "W" question: who? why? where? when? what? are vitally important for us who deal with the Holocaust. Each decade has brought different approaches. Even after fifty years there is no consensus, especially on who should tell the tale, and what should be told. Silence is one solution for perpetrators and many survivors.

The Eichmann Trial in 1962 brought forth many victims who reluctantly broke this silence to bear witness to what was done by " them", the perpetrators - Germans, the Ukrainians or whoever stood over the victims. Their stories have been recorded. Thousands of documents have been collected. Libraries have been filled and archives are full of material waiting to be sorted out. People were classified: perpetrators, victims, survivors first generation, second and third.

Half a century has passed since " all that" happened.
How has our relation to the subject changed, to what is after all "recent history"? Some say : "Forget about it, it happened long ago". Others can never forget what was done to them or their loved ones. Some, cannot grasp how it could have happened, others are plagued by their conscience.

Remembering and learning from the Holocaust, we have to constantly review our ways in keeping with changing times. What happened will never be undone. But can we adjust, remember and learn, so it will be relevant to our times?

Who will be the voice of the future?

Let us ask ourselves:
Why should anyone want to listen, talk about or remember the Holocaust ? Because it is a human story. It should be told as such. "Man" did unto his "fellow men" what had never been done before to such an extent. It was unique.
Who is going to talk, and who is going to listen ?

Anyone we can get hold of to talk and anyone we can gather who cares to listen.

Where is a good place ?
Anywhere: in schools, teacher colleges, churches, or at home.
When is a good time to talk ?
Now, before it is too late and nobody remembers anything about it. Only too soon will it sound unreal and out of this world, like belonging to another planet, as has often been said about Auschwitz. That is, until it starts all over again.
What is a good story to listen to ?
A personal story, about a single person or a family.

Here I would like to share with you my experience in recent years, talking in Israel and Germany to pupils, students, teachers, soldiers and groups of adults of all ages and denominations.

When organizers are obliged to arrange for a speaker on given dates, such as Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Hashoa), you hear their dilemma, "Oh, not again! We know how many, and where, and when".
In recent years the trend has been to seek out survivors to tell their story. They seem to capture the audience more than any academic presentation, or documentary films.

In a personal story, whether first hand or retold, the listener identifies more easily with the protagonist. This allows for empathy to be established. We use our imagination, perhaps we even try to put ourselves into his place. Sensitivity increases and that makes the story more intimate. It is one way to restore dignity to the story teller, or persons no longer with us.

What can the personal story add, to what is already known ?
Much evidence comes to us from documents carefully kept by the Germans. Some have only recently become available, since they were taken and locked away by the Russians until the Iron Curtain fell. In most camps, records of incoming and outgoing movement were kept.

These documents are reviewed with a fine toothed comb. But all they can reveal to us is, what Jews were forbidden to do, or told to do, or where to go to, when to report and to whom. Transport lists had to be handed in on time, property listed and checked. The further east, the less accurate this information is. Some numbers can only be estimated.

Most German towns have allocated funds to record the history of their local Jews. Many of these works have been presented to me, and others I examined in the Yad Vashem library in Jerusalem. They are based on available documents, eyewitness stories of the "Kristallnacht", documentation of Synagogue sites, Cemeteries and other Jewish institutions. They may include a list of emigres, or deportees to the East and even the date of deportation. None conveys what it was like to be at the "receiving end". What was felt by parents who sent their children abroad to safety. To be left behind, uncertain of surviving another day. To move from familiar surroundings. To live cramped and crowded, without even minimum facilities. Never to be sure if one's name will appear on the next transport list. To live on the verge of starvation, working long, long hours every day. Yet to maintain a sense of camaraderie. To hope and dream of liberation, of finding one's loved ones.

So much I wanted to find out, with so little to go on.

Many survivors have written memoirs. sometimes in German even. Few have been translated.

In recent years there has been greater awareness of the need or importance for oral history, recorded personal stories which supplement and illuminate formal documents. When a person tells his story, not as a witness at a trial, but to an experienced interviewer or for his grandchildren sake, there emerges a different view. The whole person comes to light. Oral history is still new. It may well be one of the most useful tools to convey the experience of those days, in a dictatorship. But who we really were only we could tell, provided we are given a chance. Most perished, but some managed to write diaries, memoirs, stories, poems, drawings, even music.

For years I have searched for recorded stories or books, mainly to satisfy my own personal needs. I was desperate to learn how my parents might have fared after deportation to Theresienstadt. How my mother coped on her own after my father died there, whether she worked until she found herself on the transport list. Did she know the destination? What did she experience in Auschwitz ? She did not survive to tell us.

I asked as many survivors as I could find. None are able to let me in on his most personal, secret story. Of close to 500 000 survivors of the camps, very few were women from Germany. None of those I asked had ever met my mother.
Than I started to read and read, always hoping to discover something about my mother's last years, which eventually I did.

Half a century has passed since I left home. When I joined a "Kinder transport" from Berlin for England, my mother's parting words were : "See you again in our homeland". That was never to be. I never saw her again.
Having left Germany, as is often said "in time", we were considered the ones to whom nothing happened . We had "nothing to tell". But as it turned out, that was a mistaken attitude.

An other aspect needs to be discussed, but seldom is. Many people, especially children could not have been saved, if not for "little Schindlers".
Let us mention that and ensure that in our educational work we stress the importance of opening our hearts to those who need us. Let us educate that no man has the right to decide over another person's life. Who will live and who will die,- that decision remains in the hands of God alone.

We human beings should rather be concerned with helping each other. "Little Schindlers opened their hearts and doors to those in mortal danger. Rescue operations had to be organized. It took people with vision to realize the need and the solutions. An outstanding example is Recha Freier who founded Youth Aliyah, which took children off the streets of Germany, to live, learn and work in Palestine, thus saving 10 000 lives.

When Trude Wiessmueller decided to save Jewish children after the November 1938 pogrom, she approached Eichmann, who agreed to let some 600 children leave Vienna. The question was, where to ? Once more, Recha Freier, Lady Rebecca Sieff and others sat on the steps of the British Parliament until they obtained transit-visas. Until world war Two broke out, 10 000 children managed to reach Great Britain. The Quakers in England and the U S A, did a lot, as did many individuals who procured permits, whereas official institutions were often obnoxious.

Or those that put their own lives on the line, hiding people, procuring food cards and false papers, contacting guides to cross mountains into neutral countries.
In the work camps, the difference between life or starvation lay often in a slice of bread passed under the table. Or a box of sugar cubes left on a bed, or replenishing the stock of tablets secretly removed from a medicine cupboard in Birkenau to ease or save a life. (see Simcha Naor)

Let us not forget guards who made a personal decision to hit as hard as they could, or refrain altogether. Primo Levi, Victor Fraenkel, Simcha Naor and many others speak about them in their books.

Many could not have survived were it not for those "moments of reprieve".
"Little Schindlers" helped many to stay alive. They may have been small acts of mercy, but they made all the difference.

As Lea Jacobowitz recalls, at 13 years of age she stood naked in line to receive some injection. An attendant approached her and told her to run for her life, as she was much to young for this sort of treatment. She hid till dark behind a barrel and returned under cover of darkness to the barracks, were her friends hid and clothed for.

There are many such tales, seldom heard. Often they remain anonymous. Not everyone is recognized as a Righteous Gentile. But many did their share, however small, but crucial. Maybe many more should have done so. But that's no reason to forget those who did. For it's precisely those we should emulate.

I am here today, because people cared.

After 50 years I decided to speak up. Survivors long ago started to tell their tales. I wanted my mothers voice to be heard as well. Had she been silenced for ever? Just because she had not survived, did not mean her story should not be told !

Child survivors have come out of the closet and started to talk. By now they're in their late 60s. Some were sent away from home, others hidden with non-Jewish families, or brought up in monasteries. Most soon became orphans. Each story is unique. Like stones in a mosaic, each has a different color, shape and place. One may respond differently to different parts of the picture. What's important, is to feel that it's part of an elusive whole.

Some people are born story tellers. But not everyone is, nor does every camp or child survivor know how to tell his tale. Yad Vashem, together with "Amcha" - National Israeli Center for Psychosocial support of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation, has over the last few years arranged seminars where people are trained to stand in front of a group and tell their life story.
The personal encounter enables us to look into the eyes of another, person to person, face to face as equals.

We share the burden of the past. We have to admit that humanity as a whole failed to recognize in time the enormity and depth of inhumanity that human beings allowed themselves to be inhuman to other human beings and loose by that, their own humanity. Depriving another of his dignity, eventually boomerangs

Dignity is a key word, when remembering my parents. They lived and went to their death in dignity. They preserved their integrity, no matter what, as did countless of others. But when speaking of "countless ", they become faceless.

I have tried put all that into my Book " Auf Wiedersehen in unserem Land" ("See you again in our Homeland"). Econ Verlag Duesseldorf 1995 .

That, then, is precisely why I ask you to listen carefully to personal stories. It restores a person's dignity by listening to what he tells you of his life. Who he was before, during and after the Shoah. Life did not begin in the ghetto or camp. Starting all over was part of his life. Life had to be mastered anew.

Part of mastering life is crying as well as laughing in spite of everything.

This I learned from one of my grandsons when he was 8 or 9. Three years earlier my son had accompanied me on a visit to Auschwitz and made a video, which he showed his children. On my next visit to them my grandson enthusiastically announced: "Granny, I saw you cry." Suddenly I became whole in his eyes. A granny who cries. When, a couple of years later, I returned from a lecture tour in Germany and also visited Theresienstadt, were my father had died, he asked me :"Nu, Granny, how was the trip ?" For a moment taken aback, I answered: " You know, I visited Theresienstadt and there I was sad and cried." He chirped up: "That's Al right, Granny sometimes you have to cry and other times you have to laugh." No therapist could have given me better advice.

When I tell the story of my family, I show a map and a few pictures, read from a letter or use the blackboard. I try to involve my listeners, I asking them questions even if I have to supply the answer myself. I make them laugh and often they cry. Some ask to touch or stroke me. Many have never talked to a Jew before.

I make a point of reading on Jewish history, the Holocaust especially. I use the Yad Vashem library and have also built up my own collection, enabling me to combine historical events as experienced by one person or family.

Among the books I've read, a few which left the deepest impression on me are:
1. Viktor E. Frankl. ...trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (dtv sachbuch 1982)
2. Primo Levy. The Drowned and the Saved, (Vintage International N.Y. 1989)
3. Etty Hillesum. Letters from Westerbork, Before Auschwitz there was Westerbork (Graften Books London 1986)
4. Raphael Delperd. Ueberleben im Versteck. Juedische Kinder 1940-44 (translated from the French by Bettina Schaefer, Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger)
5. Simcha Naor. Krankengymnastin in Auschwitz, Aufzeichnungen des Haeftlings Nr. 80574 Vorwort : Tisa von der Schulenberg Herderbuecherei. 1986
6. Regina Scheer. Ahavah, Das Vergessene Haus, Spurensuche in der Berliner Auguststrasse ( Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag 1992)
7. Ruth Schwertfeger. Women in Theresienstadt, Voices from a Concentration camp ( Berg Publishers 1989)

Etty Hillsum portrays her parents emotional torment in Westerbork. It helped me picture what it was like to live, uncertain what the next day will bring.

Raphael Delperd talks about families being torn apart and the feelings of the children, who could not have told their story, had it not been for a lot of "little Schindlers" who found people and places for them to hide and smuggled some of them across the border.

There's a personal story connected with each of the last three books.
Before visiting Auschwitz in 1989, I read Simcha Naor's book. On the back cover it says she lives in Haifa, where I was living at the time. I traced her address and looked her up. She was confined to a wheelchair, but a livelier lady in her 80s I could not have found. Warmhearted, interested in what's going on the world, she's especially eager to meet young people interested in how it was in the camps.

The book brought me closer to a fellow visitor to Auschwitz, a camp survivor herself. It formed the basis of a firm friendship. On our return from Poland my friend and I visited Simcha Naor. It was a comfort to her to know that her book had helped us. Simcha died shortly afterwards.

Regina Scheer's book was given me by a mutual friend and I read it in one sitting, found her address, phoned her in Berlin, thanking her for shedding some light at long lasts on my parent's last days in Berlin.

Ruth Schwertfeger's was the first book in English on Theresienstadt. Interwoven with her description of everyday life are selected memoirs and poems by 20 women, carefully translated into English. I believe she captures the spirit in a very unusual manner. In the poem "Death in Theresienstadt", I heard my mother speaking. I tried to find her address. Imagine my surprise in Berlin, as a guest of the Senate, sitting at breakfast opposite a lady from New York who had been herself in Theresienstadt. I told her of this excellent book I'd just read and my fascination with the poems. "One of the poems is mine" she said. She knew Ruth personally and promised to send me her address. May be I will be able to see her or phone after the conference.

I can confront the future, for I have learned to confront my past and learned to share it. We shall be the who, for we know the why, the when is now, the where is here, the what, - - - you will have to choose wisely.

"Together we shall be the Voice of the Future".