Posts Tagged 'Holocaust'
Life Itself XV: War stories
In their own words – The Greatest Generation on World War II
https://leoadambiga.com/2017/05/02/in-their-own-wor…-on-world-war-ii/
The tail-gunner's grandson: Ben Drickey revisits World War II experiences on foot and film
https://leoadambiga.com/2017/05/02/the-tail-gunners…on-foot-and-film/
Love affair with Afghanistan and international studies affords Tom Gouttierre world view like few others
https://leoadambiga.com/2017/02/21/love-affair-with…-like-few-others
Retired warrior, lifetime scholar John Nagl became U.S. Army counterinsurgency guru
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/09/30/retired-warrior-…rinsurgency-guru/
Iraq War veteran Jacob Hausman battles PTSD and finds peace
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/10/31/iraq-war-veteran…-and-finds-peace
Retired Omaha World-Herald military affairs newsman Howard Silber: War veteran, reporter, raconteur, bon vi vant, globetrotter
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/10/06/retired-omaha-wo…nt-globe-trotter/
Milton Kleinberg: Omaha resident who survived little-known chapter of Holocaust history releases new edition of memoir
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/11/07/milton-kleinberg…on-of-his-memoir
Joseph Dumba and his Healing Kadi Foundation make medical mission trips to South Sudan
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/01/03/joseph-dumba-and…s-to-south-sudan/
Jacob Hausman, ©photo by Bill Sitzman
Having survived war in Sudan, refugee Akoy Agau discovered hoops in America and the major college recruit is now poised to lead Omaha Central to a third straight state title
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/03/01/having-survived-…ight-state-title
From wars to Olympics, world-class photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke shoots it all, and now his discerning eye is trained on Husker football
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/08/23/from-wars-to-oly…-husker-football
By land, by sea, by air, Omaha Jewish veterans performed far-flung wartime duties
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/05/22/by-land-by-sea-b…g-wartime-duties/
Bob Kerrey weighs in on PTSD, old wars, new wars, endings and new beginnings
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/01/27/bob-kerrey-weigh…d-new-beginnings
Ben Kuroki: A distinguished military career by a most honorable man
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/17/ben-kuroki-a-dis…st-honorable-man/
The Two Wars of Ben Kuroki: New book out about Nebraskan who defied prejudice to become a war hero
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/12/30/the-two-wars-of-…ecome-a-war-hero
Ben Kuroki
Bill Ramsey, Marine: A Korean War Story
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/26/a-korean-war-story-2/
Brenda Allen's real life country music drama took her from Nebraska to Vietnam to Vegas
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/06/01/brenda-allens-re…vietnam-to-vegas
Lauro play "A Piece of My Heart" dramatizes role of women in war zones
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/19/a-piece-of-my-he…women-in-wartime/
From the Archives: Hadley Heavin sees no incongruity in being rodeo cowboy, concert classical guitarist, music educator and Vietnam combat vet
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/10/17/from-the-archive…etnam-combat-vet
Brenda Allen wearing the green beret and insignia
The Vietnam Women's Memorial
The life and times of scientist, soldier and Zionist Sol Bloom
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/06/the-life-and-tim…ionist-sol-bloom
Kitty Williams finally tells her Holocaust survivor tale
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/04/104
Holocaust rescue mission undertaken by immigrant Nebraskan comes to light: How David Kaufmann saved hundreds of family members from Nazi Germany
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/10/david-kaufmann-a…escuer-from-afar
Art trumps hate: "Brundinar" children's opera survives as defiant testament from the Holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/01/15/art-trumps-hate-…om-the-holocaust/
Kitty Williams prays at her mother's grave
UNO Center for Afghanistan Studies plays role in multi-national efforts to restore Afghan educational system
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/25/uno-center-for-a…ucational-system/
UNO Afghanistan Teacher Education Project trains women educators from the embattled nation
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/20/uno-afghanistan-…embattled-nation
Afghan teachers training at UNO met with First Lady Laura Bush
James Martin Davis – A Self-Styled Gladiator in the Halls of Justice
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/james-martin-dav…halls-of-justice
Combat sniper-turned-art photographer Jim Hendrickson on his vagabond life and enigmatic work
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/08/30/combat-sniper-tu…d-enigmatic-work
Jesuit photojournalist Don Doll of Creighton University documents the global human condition – one person, one image at a time
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/06/23/jesuit-photojour…-human-condition
Don Doll
A Long Way from Home: Two Kosovo Albanian families escape hell to start over in America
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/08/18/a-long-way-from-home
War and Peace: Bosnian refugees purge war's horrors in song and dance that make plea for harmony
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/08/18/war-and-peace
Thomas Gouttierre: In Search of a Lost Dream, An American's Afghan Odyssey
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/19/in-search-of-a-l…s-afghan-odyssey/
Three old wise men of journalism – Hlavacek, Michaels and Desfor – recall their foreign correspondent careers and reflect on the world today
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/18/three-old-wise-men-of-journalism
John and Pegge Hlavacek's globe-trotting adventures as foreign correspondents
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/02/john-and-pegge-h…n-correspondents/
"Casablanca" – Film classic still enchants as time goes by
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/10/10/casablanca-a-fil…-as-time-goes-by/
John Hlavacek
Billy Melton served with Omaha's "Sweet Sixteen" in the all black 530th Quartermaster Battalion
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/04/30/omahas-sweet-six…master-battalion/
Omaha's Tuskegee Airmen
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/18/the-tuskegee-airmen/
Chuck Powell: A Berlin Airlift Story
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/18/a-berlin-airlift-story/
From the Archives: Veterans Cast Watchful Eye on the VA Medical Center
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/07/08/from-the-archive…a-medical-center
Bringing to light hidden heroes of the Holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/bringing-to-ligh…of-the-holocaust/
Ben Nachman's mission
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/ben-nachmans-mission
Ben Nachman: At work in the fields of the righteous
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/at-work-in-the-f…of-the-righteous
Rescuer curriculum gives students new perspective on the Holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/29/rescuer-curricul…on-the-holocaust
The Artful Dodger: Lou Leviticus survived the Holocaust as an escape artist
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/01/the-escape-artist
Walter Reed: Former hidden child survives Holocaust to fight Nazis as American GI
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/02/19/walter-reed-from…-in-world-war-ii
Walter Reed with a close friend who would
perish not long thereafter
The Hidden Child revealed: Marcel Frydman, Fred Kader, Tom Jaeger share childhood survival stories in gathering like no other
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/the-hidden-child…kader-tom-jaeger
Lola's story: Out of the ashes, destined to live
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/lolas-story-out-…destined-to-live
Holocast survivor Helena Tichauer: Destiny's child
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/holocast-survivo…r-destinys-child/
A not-so-average Joe tells his Holocaust story of survival
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/08/a-not-so-average…tory-of-survival
Sisters of the Shoah: Three survivor tales, three golden fates, three iron wills
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/04/18/sisters-of-the-s…three-iron-wills/
Bea Karp: Holocaust survivor feels obligation to share painful memories
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/15/bea-karp-holocau…painful-memories
Categories: Afghanistan War, Balkans War, Battle of the Bulge, Berlin Airlift, Holocaust, Iraq War, Korean War, Military, Nebraska War Veterans, Tuskegee Airmen, Vietnam War, World War II Tags: Afghanistan War, Balkans War, Battle of the Bulge, Berlin Airlift, Holocaust, Iraq War, Korean War, Military, Tuskegee Airmen, Vietnam War, War Stories, World War II
Life Itself V: Jewish-themed and related stories from 1998-2018
June 12, 2018 leoadambiga	Leave a comment
Life Itself V:
Jewish-themed and related stories from 1998-2018
Holocaust/War
Art trumps hate:
'Brundinar' children's opera survives as defiant testament from the Holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/01/15/art-trumps-hate-…om-the-holocaust
Leo Adam Biga's survivor-rescuer stories featured on Institute for Holocaust Education website
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/04/12/leo-adam-bigas-s…ducation-website/
Holocaust rescue mission undertaken by immigrant Nebraskan comes to light:
How David Kaufmann saved hundreds of family members from Nazi Germany
Walter Reed:
Former hidden child survives Holocaust to fight Nazis as American GI
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/02/19/walter-reed-from…-in-world-war-ii/
Piecing together a lost past: The Fred Kader story
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/piecing-together…fred-kader-story/
The Hidden Child revealed:
Marcel Frydman, Fred Kader, Tom Jaeger share childhood survival stories in gathering like no other
Sisters of the Shoah:
Three survivor tales, three golden fates, three iron wills
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/04/18/sisters-of-the-s…three-iron-wills
Holocaust survivor Helena Tichauer: Destiny's child
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/29/rescuer-curricul…on-the-holocaust/
Ben Nachman remembered heroes of the Holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/ben-nachman-reme…of-the-holocaust
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/02/bringing-to-ligh…of-the-holocaust
Ben Nachman:
At work in the fields of the righteous
Social Justice/Community
Abe Sass: A mensch for all seasons
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/05/02/abe-sass-a-mensch-for-all-seasons
Norman Krivosha's life in law
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/08/10/norman-krivoshas-life-in-law
Steve Rosenblatt:
A legacy of community service, political ambition and baseball adoration
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/04/27/steve-rosenblatt…seball-adoration
Leo Greenbaum is collector of collectors ofJewishArtifacts at YIVO InstituteÂ
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/09/leo-greenbaum-is…t-yivo-institute/
Louise Abrahamson's legacy of giving finds perfect fit at The Clothesline, the Boys Town thrift store the octogenarian founded and still runs
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/05/louise-abrahamso…uns-at-boys-town
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/06/the-life-and-tim…ionist-sol-bloom/
Shirley Goldstein: Cream of the Crop
One woman's remarkable journey in the Free Soviet Jewry movement
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/05/shirley-goldstei…t-jewry-movement
Sam Cooper's freedom road
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/07/sam-cooper's-freedom-road
Retired Omaha World-Herald military Affairs newsman Howard Silber:
War veteran, reporter, raconteur, bon vi vant, globetrotter
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/10/06/retired-omaha-wo…nt-globe-trotter
Howard Rosenberg's much-traveled news career
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/02/howard-rosenberg…eled-news-career/
Flanagan-Monsky example of social justice and interfaith harmony still shows the way seven decades later
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/31/flanagan-monsky-…y-60-years-later
Winners Circle:
Couple's journey of self-discovery ends up helping thousands of at-risk kids through early intervention educational program
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/31/couples-journey-…-of-at-risk-kids
Alone or together, Omaha power couple Vic Gutman and Roberta Wilhelm give back to the community
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/09/29/alone-or-togethe…to-the-community
A force of nature named Evie:
Still a maverick social justice advocate at 100
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/16/a-force-of-natur…e-advocate-at-99
Faith/Religion
A matter of faith: Beth Katz and Project Interfaith find bridges to religious beliefs
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/31/a-matter-of-faith
Identity gets a new platform through RavelUnravel
https://leoadambiga.com/2015/03/20/identity-gets-a-…ugh-ravelunravel
Rabbi Azriel's neighborhood welcomes all, unlike what he saw on recent Middle East trip;
Social justice activist and interfaith advocate optimistic about Tri-Faith campus
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/09/06/rabbi-azriels-ne…tri-faith-campus
Rabbi Azriel: Legacy as social progressive and interfaith champion secure
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/05/15/rabbi-azriel-leg…-champion-secure/
Temple Israel Omaha embraces new home and new era
https://leoadambiga.com/2014/05/26/temple-israel-om…home-and-new-era
History in the making: $65M Tri-Faith Initiative bridges religious, social, political gaps
https://leoadambiga.com/2017/05/25/history-in-the-m…l-political-gaps
Omaha Tri-Faith pioneers seeing fruits of interfaith collaborative take shape
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/05/26/omaha-tri-faith-…ative-take-shape
Business/Development
Master developer Jay Noddle and his Noddle Companies transform Omaha
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/28/master-developer…-transform-omaha
Urban planner Marty Shukert takes long view of Omaha development
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/28/urban-planner-ma…ha-development-2/
Customer-first philosophy makes family-owned Kohll's Pharmacy and Homecare stand out from the crowd
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/18/customer-first-p…t-from-the-crowd/
Bedrock values at core of four-generation All Makes Office Furniture Company
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/17/bedrock-values-a…urniture-company/
This version of Simon Says positions Omaha Steaks as food service juggernaut
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/15/this-version-of-…rvice-juggernaut
Allan Noddle's food industry adventures show him the world
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/04/28/allan-noddles-ad…ow-him-the-world
The much anticipated return of the Bagel Bin
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/12/03/the-much-anticip…of-the-bagel-bin
Omaha History
The Brandeis Story:
Great Plains family-owned department store empire
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/07/the-brandeis-sto…the-great-plains/
"Memories of the Jewish Midwest: Mom and Pop Grocery Stores, Omaha, Lincoln, Greater Nebraska and Southwest Iowa"
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/12/memories-of-the-…southwest-iowa-2
Once upon a time an urban dead end became Omaha's lively Old Market
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/06/19/once-upon-a-time…ively-old-market
Omaha's Old Market:
History, stories, places, personalities, characters
https://leoadambiga.com/2016/06/19/omahas-old-marke…ities-characters
In Memoriam: George Eisenberg
A man intimate with the Old Market's origins is gone, but his legacy lives on
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/in-memoriam-george-eisenberg
George Eisenberg's love for Omaha's Old Market never grows old
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/19/george-eisenberg…-never-grows-old
Buffett's newspaper man, Stanford Lipsey
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/02/buffetts-newspap…-stanford-lipsey
Sun Reflection: Revisiting the Omaha Sun's Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of Boys Town
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/04/28/sun-reflection-r…ose-on-boys-town
When Omaha's North 24th Street brought together Jews and Blacks in a melting pot marketplace
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/04/30/when-omahas-nort…-that-is-no-more
Omaha native Steve Marantz looks back at city's '68 racial divide through prism of hoops in new book, "The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central"
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/04/01/omaha-native-ste…of-omaha-central/
Rich Boys Town sports legacy recalled
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/31/rich-boys-town-s…-legacy-recalled
Roaenblatt-College World Series
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/06/19/rosenblatt-college-world-series
Arts/Culture/Entertainment
Potash Twins making waves in jazz:
Teen brothers count jazz greats as mentors
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/06/05/potash-twins-mak…reats-as-mentors
Identical twin horn players set to lead Omaha jazz revival
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/11/02/9614/
Author Scott Muskin – What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing writing about all this mishigas?
http://leoadambiga.com/2011/12/05/author-scott-mus…ll-this-mishigas/
Author Rachel Shukert:
A nice Jewish girl gone wild and other regrettable stories
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/05/author-rachel-sh…rettable-stories/
Rachel Shukert's anything but a travel agent's recommended guide to a European grand tour
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/05/rachel-shukerts-…opean-grand-tour
Omaha Lit Fest:
In praise of writers and their words: Jami Attenberg and Will Clarke among featured authors
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/06/19/omaha-lit-fest-i…featured-authors
Being Jack Moskovitz:
Grizzled former civil servant and DJ, now actor and fiction author, still waiting to be discovered
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/05/being-jack-mosko…to-be-discovered
Playwright turned history detective Max Sparber turns identity search inward
https://leoadambiga.com/2015/02/07/playwright-turne…ty-search-inward
The magical mystery tour of Omaha's Magic Theatre, a Megan Terry and Jo Ann Schmidman production
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/19/the-magical-myst…idman-production
Theater-Fashion Maven Elaine Jabenis
http://leoadambiga.com/2010/08/04/theater-fashion-…n-elaine-jabenis
Old Hollywood hand living in Omaha comes out of the shadows: Screenwriter John Kaye scripted "American Hot Wax" and more
https://leoadambiga.com/2016/01/30/old-hollywood-ha…hot-wax-and-more
Murder He Wrote:
Reporter-Author David Krajicek finds niche as true crime storyteller
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/10/28/murder-he-wrote-…rime-storyteller
Living the dream:
Cinema maven Rachel Jacobson – the woman behind Film Streams
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/02/01/living-the-dream…ind-film-streams
Film Streams at Five: Art cinema contributes to transformed Omaha through community focus on film and discussion
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/07/13/film-streams-at-…m-and-discussion
Omaha's film reckoning arrives in form of Film Streams, the City's first full-fledged art cinema
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/11/27/omahas-film-reck…edged-art-cinema
Joan Micklin Silver:
Shattering cinema's glass ceiling
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/05/18/shattering-cinemas-glass-ceiling
"The Bagel: An Immigrant's Story"
Joan Micklin Silver and Matthew Goodman team up for new documentary
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/03/16/the-bagel-an-imm…documentary-film
Joan Micklin Silver's Classic "Hester Street" Included in National Film Registry
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/02/09/joan-micklin-sil…al-film-registry
Women's and indie feature film pioneer Joan Micklin Silver's journey in cinema
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/09/05/womens-and-indie…ourney-in-cinema
Carol Kane Interview
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/08/20/interview-with-carol-kane
Actor Peter Riegert makes fine feature directorial debut with 'King of the Corner"
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/05/12/actor-peter-rieg…ng-of-the-corner
Prodigal filmmaker comes home again to screen new picture at Omaha Film Fest
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/03/27/prodigal-filmmak…-omaha-film-fest
Dan Mirvish strikes again: Indie filmmaker back with new feature "Between Us"
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/07/29/dan-mirvish-stri…ature-between-us
Crazy like a fox indie fimmaker Dan Mirvish makes going his own way work
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/08/18/crazy-like-a-fox…his-own-way-work/
Filmmaker Gail Levin followed her passion
https://leoadambiga.com/2016/05/07/in-memoriam-film…owed-her-passion
https://leoadambiga.com/2013/08/03/filmmaker-gail-l…owed-her-passion
Forever Marilyn:
Gail Levin's new film frames the "Monroe doctrine"
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/20/forever-marilyn-…-monroe-doctrine
A filming we will go: Gail Levin follows her passion
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/20/a-filming-we-wil…lows-her-passion
Gail Levin takes on American Master James Dean
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/09/20/gail-levin-takes…aster-james-dean
Dena Krupinsky makes Hollywood dreams reality as Turner Classic Movies producer
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/04/30/dena-krupinski-m…-movies-producer/
Bill Maher Gets Real
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/10/20/bill-maher-gets-real/
The wonderful world of entertainment talent broker Manya Nogg
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/04/30/the-wonderful-wo…roker-manya-nogg
Entertainment attorney Ira Epstein: Counsel to the stars
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/04/30/entertainment-at…sel-to-the-stars/
For artist Terry Rosenberg, the moving human body offers canvas like no other
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/03/23/for-artist-terry…as-like-no-other
Rebecca Herskovitz forges an art family at Kent Bellows Studio and Center for Visual Arts
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/10/13/rebecca-herskovi…-for-visual-arts
Song Girl Ann Ronell
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/08/19/song-girl-ann-ronell/
Radio Day: "Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know?" Live from Omaha
https://leoadambiga.com/2011/08/11/radio-day-michae…-live-from-omaha
Radio DJ-Actor-Singer Dave Wingert, In the Spotlight
https://leoadambiga.com/2010/08/25/dave-wingert-in-the-spotlight
Wild about chocolate
https://leoadambiga.com/2012/11/24/chocolate-gone-wild/
Categories: Arts-Entertainment-Culture, Business, Culture, History, Holocaust, Institute for Holocaust Education, Jewish Culture, Jewish Omaha, Jewish Stories, Nebraska Jewish Historical Society, Race, Religion Tags: Business, Education, History, Holocaust, Jewish Culture, Jewish Stories, Omaha, Omaha Jewish Culture, Race, Religion
March 27, 2018 leoadambiga	2 comments
Originally appeared in the Jewish Press
A gathering unlike any other took place the evening of September 24 at the home of Omaha Holocaust researcher Ben Nachman. Over the course of several hours a diverse group of guests heard three men discuss a shared legacy of survival — one that saw them persevere through the Shoah as hidden children in their native Belgium.
Two of the men, Fred Kader and Tom Jaeger, are well known Omaha physicians. The third, Marcel Frydman, is professor emeritus at the University of Mons in Mons, Belgium, where he is a psychologist and the author of a book exploring the long-term traumatic effects of the hidden child experience. Kader and Jaeger, who already knew each other, were eager to meet Frydman and hear his findings since they shared a common past and homeland.
According to Kader, a pediatric neurologist, the hidden experience is one that unites men and women, even of different ages and nationalities, in a special fraternity. "Because of the nature of our experiences, whether in Holland or France or Belgium, you do form this kind of a bond with another hidden child. It's a thing where we both survived, we both were hidden. The feelings we have just resonate back and forth. It's a common understanding. It's communication at a different level."
Until recently, hidden children rarely spoke about their wartime experiences. For many, the events were simply too painful or too suppressed to tackle. But since a 1991 international hidden children's conference attended by all three men, more and more long silent survivors have been seeking each other out to talk about their shared heritage in hiding.
Frydman, who came to Omaha at the invitation of Nachman and through the auspices of the Hidden Heroes of the Holocaust Foundation, hopes to have his French-language book published in English. Jaeger, a pediatric psychiatrist, has read the book and feels it offers valuable insights into the whole host of circumstances that determines how individuals cope with the emotional baggage of childhood trauma well into adulthood. He said the book provides a therapeutic framework for treating not only former hidden children but anyone suffering from post traumatic stress, which he added is a timely addition to research on the subject in light of the emotional toll the events of September 11 and after have taken on the damaged American psyche.
On hand that evening at Nachman's were educators, lawyers and journalists, all of whom came to learn something about the ordeal the three men underwent. As the night unwound, it became clear from what was said that the hidden experience is one marked by profound separation anxiety, where youths taken from homes and families go into hiding among total strangers and try to conceal their Jewish identity in order to save their lives. As each survivor described the story of his survival, he revealed something of the psychological scars borne from these searing events so far outside the normal stream of human conduct. They explained how, even after escaping extermination and building successful adult lives now a half-century removed from their ordeal, they remain haunted by the specter of their hidden odyssey, an odyssey that has both driven them and frustrated them.
There was something nearly sacred in this solemn exchange between the survivors and their rapt audience. The men and women huddled around the Nachman living room listened intently to every word uttered and asked questions that begged for more detail. The evening was also meaningful for the survivors.
For Kader and Jaeger, meeting Frydman and learning of his work helped further validate their own hidden histories, which remained shrouded and inarticulated until they began piecing together their own backgrounds at that 1991 conference in New York. Kader said a book like Frydman's "gives more credence to the feelings that survivors have. When hidden children get together they end up talking about the same kinds of things and what they talk about has often been well-repressed."
Kader said the more hidden children he gets to know, the more he realizes "all of us, in our own way, have the same sort of common thread of experiences and we all go through the same kind of process of finding a way out of it (the trauma) to make something of ourselves." He said Frydman's work helps demonstrate survivors "can cope and manage. Even though you may have these recollections of traumatic experiences in the back of your mind you can get past that point and go on with your life. His research shows all sorts of common denominators. You realize what you're going through is a natural evolution other survivors go through. It's reassuring to know we're all not crazy."
For Frydman, whose work in this area was sparked by a group of survivors at the who asked him to lead their counseling sessions, the evening was a chance to share his findings with fellow countrymen who endured a similar fate during and after the war. In writing his 1999 book, The Trauma of the Hidden Child: Short and Long Term Repercussions, Frydman found an outlet for his own survivor issues and a forum for examining the consequences of the hidden experience, many of which he found overlap from one survivor to another.
For his book he returned to the very site where he was sheltered after the war — a home for hidden and abandoned children of both Jewish and non-Jewish descent — and to the same group of individuals with whom he shared his early adolescence. To his astonishment he discovered that in spite of their war deprivation many of these individuals have achieved great professional success, with an unusually high percentage ending up in the healing arts, as evidenced by himself, Kader and Jaeger. As he studied this population he identified elements and conditions that explained the apparent anomaly of survivors reaching such heights from such depths.
"In my opinion, two factors were important," Frydman said. "First, the quality of family life before the war. These children knew there was a possibility of recovering the family unit. They felt forsaken but they knew their parents didn't abandon them. This was very important when they were confronted with the conditions of an institution where the affective life was very low. The second factor was the quality of the environment in which the child was placed during and after the war. If this environment was good and supportive, he could find again a normal life, mobilize his potentialities and perform very high. It's no accident that hidden children have chosen social or therapeutic professions. If you have experienced something as hard as we did you may be more skilled to help others."
Frydman finds survivors exhibit a remarkable resilience as a result of having endured what they did. Jaeger believes he and his peers managed compensating for the trials and deficits of their interrupted childhood because attaining success, coming as it did against all odds, became an act of defiance.
"Resiliency is an act of defiance in some ways," Jaeger said. "It's a way of saying, 'You were wrong,' to those people who said, You can't do this, or, You won't ever reach a certain point. As Marcel (Frydman) points out, the thing that contributed to this resilience was the love and nurturance we were inculcated with despite everything going on around us."
Recently, Jaeger found poignant evidence of the love he was endowed with via two formal family photographs his mother, who escaped the Shoah, commissioned at the time of the roundups and deportations. "I was struck by the fact that she felt it was important to have a memory to sustain our family even in the midst of what was going on. It reinforced what Marcel said about how important the home environment was. It probably provided a buffer that sustained us when we left home and went via this underground railroad into hiding."
Another impetus for survivors to strive so hard, Jaeger said, was their strong desire "to get on with things and to accomplish anything and everything we could. Most of us wanted to find acceptance — to be included in the mainstream."
Frydman, Kader and Jaeger were hidden at several sites but their protective custody mainly came in institutions run by various good Samaritans, including Catholic nuns. They are glad to have ended up in such good, caring hands. Frydman said there long was an assumption children placed with foster families were more fortunate than those placed in institutions, "but now I can say that wasn't true because the child placed in a family was alone in his stress — the family sheltered him but couldn't share his loneliness and sense of forsakeness — whereas the child in an institution eventually discovered he was not alone and any stress experience is made more bearable when the stress is shared."
In addition to drawing on his own experiences for the book, Frydman drew on his past work counseling "forsaken children" — orphaned or otherwise abandoned youths — which provided a field of reference from which to extrapolate. What Frydman found in comparing and contrasting hidden children with abandoned children is that "the trauma of the hidden group is more complex and is provoked not by one factor but by a succession of factors," he said. For example, he points to the roundups of Jews that Nazi authorities began staging in the early part of the war that invariably sent detainees to death camps. The fear engendered by these roundups signaled to children that they, their families, their friends and their neighbors were in peril. He said, "Even if you were not deported you heard about what was happening from other Jews who witnessed these events and the anxiety of the adults was communicated to the children."
As it became evident the only way to save children was to hide them, an underground network formed to shield them. Because it was easier and less conspicuous to hide a child alone as opposed to a family, children were usually separated from their parents.
"Little children couldn't understand why they had to be hidden and without their parents," Frydman said. "It was a safe thing to separate them, but for the children it wasn't a healthy thing. They were lacking the presence of their parents. They were missing all the affective, emotional ties. And children understood there was a danger of being denounced. We were told not to reveal our real name and not to reveal our Jewish identity. The child understood this, but it increased his anxiety. He understood too that the parents were also in danger. Sometimes he knew one or both of the parents had been arrested and deported, and sometimes he hadn't any news of there whereabouts. You don't find these conditions when you study forsaken children."
Prolonged exposure to such danger and distress left many former hidden children with deep-seated feelings of apprehension and insecurity, said Frydman. "Because they lived for years in an environment perceived as menacing they have some problems associated with anxiety. This has been fixed, at least on the unconscious level, and so they develop some defenses in order to adapt themselves. There's often a lack of trust and a sense of guardedness toward others. Some of them think they must control every aspect of a relationship because during the war they had no control. For example, some of my subjects told me they resist forming new relationships because it means risking being forsaken another time."
Even when in the same institution Frydman said hidden children demonstrated fewer issues of desertion than abandoned children because prior to being harbored hidden children presumably enjoyed a stable home life. "They had the chance to be in a normal family before," he said, "so they were better prepared to confront the separation. They knew there might be a family to try and find after the war whereas the forsaken children knew there was no family to be found." A striking difference he found in abandoned children versus hidden children is the slowed mental development of the former group compared with the latter group.
The author conducted his research for the book with the aid of one of his students. Interviews were completed with more than 50 adults who found sanctuary in Belgium or surrounding countries during the war. Frydman and his assistant used a non-invasive technique to draw subjects out, some of whom had never before verbalized their hidden past. "The interview was a non-directive one," he said. "We didn't ask questions. We just gave the subject the opportunity to evoke his experience and helped him to express what he had to say. For some of the subjects, recalling the past was an ordeal. Some cried. They couldn't stop. The trauma came back. And, yes, for some it was the first time they'd spoken about it."
The fact that so many hidden children remained resolutely silent about their past for so long is a phenomenon that Frydman has tried to explain in his book. He said it was a case of hidden children growing up in an atmosphere where the subject was viewed as too painful to revisit or misunderstood as something that could be easily dismissed.
"Just after the war hidden children didn't feel they had the right to speak because speaking about the trauma implied reliving it," he said. "They would have spoken if they could have found some help, but in post-war Europe we hadn't any psychologists. And adults didn't understand what to say, so if they spoke about the war at all, they said, 'You were lucky.' Of course, it's true, we were lucky not to be deported, but we suffered. If every adult says to you, 'You were lucky,' you haven't even the possibility to express your suffering." Or, as Jaeger explains, "People were getting on with their lives and moving away from that ordeal and, in effect, really nobody was there who psychologically gave you permission to speak. That listening ear and that permission just weren't there."
As the trauma is denied or ignored, Jaeger said, it festers like an untreated wound, only buried out of view, yet never too far away to be reopened. "In psychology there's a phenomenon where you either dissociate or you compartmentalize things that have been extremely bad. Children exposed to bad events can lose memory of those things. That's a protective mechanism to enable you to go on, but those feelings are always there at the surface. Certain sounds can evoke fear and anxiety in former hidden children. The sound of a truck is one of the most feared sounds because trucks were used in the roundups. It was the sound of your future. Of being rounded up, deported to camps and confronting almost certain death. Vulnerability is always just below the surface for some of us."
Jaeger said it was only recently, upon reading Frydman's book, he recalled suffering panic attacks as a boy after the war. He remembers the episodes occurred while riding in cars and presumes his anxiety was triggered by dim memories of deportations. Because Kader and Jaeger were quite young when they went into hiding, their memories are somewhat tenuous. Those who were older when hidden, like Frydman, retain clearer memories of the events and the trauma.
Symbols can also summon the horror of a perilous childhood. For example, Jaeger said some survivors have "a problem trusting authority or trusting the system" because they associate those things with the uniformed soldiers or officials who menaced them and their families.
Jaeger admires Frydman's book for its clear, thorough assessment of the hidden experience.
"It is an exquisite explanation of the dynamics of the experience and of its long term effects. It really has a kind of global description that applies to you no matter what your own hidden experiences were. He helps us understand how we arrived at where we are. Also, it's really one of the best explanations of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its long term ramifications.
"There's been lots written about PTSD, but this sampling of a population from a psychological point of view is somewhat unique in that here we have a group of people still living 50-plus years after the fact. It often takes that long for hidden children or camp survivors or other trauma victims to share their experiences because they evoke an emotional vulnerability that is not that easy to deal with. Everybody has to do it in their own way. There are people who to this day still don't say anything. They haven't reached that point. This is so applicable to what happened at the World Trade Center because that trauma will be imprinted over generations in some cases."
Ultimately, only fellow survivors can truly understand what their brothers or sisters of the Holocaust have gone through. Still, every time they share their story with others it gives added meaning to their witness bearing — allowing their testimony to live on in others. The need to testify grows more urgent as the number of survivors dwindles.
"Time is of the essence in that we're the last generation of witnesses left," Jaeger said, referring to hidden children like himself, Kader and Frydman. In an era when the nation's moral fortitude is being tested by the threat of terrorism at home, he said, it is more vital than ever to stand up and speak out against evil.
Categories: Ben Nachman, Fred Kader, Hidden Children, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Marcel Frydman, Omaha, Tom Jaeger, World War II, Writing Tags: Ben Nachman, Fred Kader, Hidden Child, Hidden Children, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Marcel Frydman, Omaha, Research, Tom Jaeger, Trauma, War
After the Holocaust, Lola could not find her sister and mother. By the time she did, they were headed from Sweden to South America. Lola met and married fine cabinet maker and fellow survivor Irving Reinglas in a refugee camp and they emigrated to America with their first child. The couple's new life here saw them build a business and raise a family. Meanwhile, Lola's sister and mother built a new life of their own — in Uruguay, where Helena met and married Walter Tichauer, a German Jew who fled there after Kristallnacht. Lola was finally reunited with her mom, in 1957, when Karolina visited the States. Three more years passed before she saw Helena. On a 1961 visit to Uruguay. Lola laid the groundwork for her mother, sister and sister's family to move to America, which they did in 1963.
"I feel I was destined to live"
Each sister's odyssey is a compelling lesson in human intolerance and endurance. Helena's story will be chronicled in an upcoming Press edition. This is Lola's story.
By the time the former Lola Schulkind reached Plaszow, the forced labor camp turned concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland depicted in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, the words of her father reverberated in her head.
"He always told us, 'Remember one thing — live. No matter what, try to do your best and live. Don't give up.' And whenever it was very bad, somehow I heard the voice of my father. Even to this day," she said, "when things go bad…I hear that voice, 'Don't give up.' I don't."
It was at Plaszow she believes Oskar Schindler saved her life. The camp was where the Jewish workers under the German industrialist's protection were interned for a time. Schindler, she said, was a well-known figure in the camp, but his good works on behalf of Jews were not. His enamelworks factory was nearby. He operated a pot and pan factory inside the camp and was often in and out of Plaszow, where, it turned out, he bribed the commandant to keep "his Jews" safe.
One night, a teenaged Lola was caught past curfew sneaking food to her father in the men's barracks. What happened next was something she didn't understand until years later — long after Schindler's rescue efforts were revealed. Taken to a hill by uniformed men, a man in the group she now recognizes as Schindler "took a gun and put it to my head," she said. "I thought he was going to kill me. But he started hitting me…beating me, beating me…until I lost my consciousness." She now surmises that with German soldiers looking on, he could not let her go with only a warning and, "instead of killing me, he beat me" and, thus, "saved my life."
Plaszow was a Dante's Inferno overseen by sadistic Amon Goeth, a large man often seen on horseback or surrounded by dogs trained to attack "on his command of Uda. When you saw him, you knew trouble was coming," Lola said. Built over a Jewish cemetery, inscriptions on desecrated tombstones could be read in the pavement covering the heavily fortified camp's roads. Random, public executions orchestrated by Goeth and his SS staff were done for sport and intimidation.
It was there Lola and her family arrived in 1942. The previous several months the family had been confined, with thousands of others, to a barbed wire and stone wall enclosed ghetto in the Podgorze district of Krakow. Even after generations of living in Poland, the Schulkinds and their fellow Jews were systematically made enemies of the state by edicts of the German occupation that began in 1939. "We were born and lived there from one generation to another for probably 100 years, but we still had no home. It was like we never belonged," Lola said.
Almost immediately, Jews lost their rights, their jobs, their possessions. Curfews limited their movements. Yellow Stars of David identified them. They were targets of roundups, beatings, killings. With her own eyes, Lola saw male Orthodox Jews accosted on the street by thugs and the victims' beards savagely "cut off, skin and all," with knives. She knew of people arrested and never being seen again.
Lola, who'd completed elementary school and one year of business school, was 14 when the war broke out. The Shoah not only ended her early formal schooling, but her childhood as well. Her father had to give up a business employing several people. When ordered to leave their homes in March 1941, Jews were marched to the ghetto prepared for them, where they lived in squalor. Allowed to take only five pounds of articles per person, they brought whatever clothes they had.
Jews were moved into what had been the homes of Gentiles, who, in turn, left to take over the Jews' abandoned homes across the river.
The Schulkinds occupied a two-room flat with another family of five in an overcrowded apartment house. There was Lola and Helena — two years her senior— then-11-year-old Nathan, and their parents. "We thought it was bad before we went to the ghetto. Then, we went to the ghetto. Not enough food. Ten to fifteen people in two rooms. We slept on the floor. No privacy. No way to take a bath. The living conditions were terrible. We thought, This is the worst. Well, how wrong we were," said Lola. Nothing could prepare them for what lay ahead.
Ghetto life was a particular shock to the Schulkinds, who'd enjoyed a privileged life replete with servants, summer-long stays in cottages, winter skiing vacations at lodges, et cetera. A bookworm, Lola had no access to her beloved literature.
The historical anti-Semitism harbored by a large segment of the native Gentile population, combined with the Nazis single-minded implementation of the Final Solution, left few friends Jews could turn to for aid. What help did exist, in the form of food or shelter, exacted an exorbitant price and extraordinary risk.
Lola's father, whose plan to take his family to Russia years earlier was rejected by her mother, boldly refused handing over his valuables to the authorities. "He took a great chance," she said. The family used jewelry and silver to barter with Poles and Germans for precious food provisions in scarce supply..
The ghetto was a despairing place where time stood still. Nothing beyond the imposing stone wall or the forbidding armed guards surrounding it existed. "We were afraid because we never knew what was going to happen tomorrow," said Lola, "or for that matter in an hour from now." People disappeared. Others got shot. When word came the Germans were liquidating the ghetto, she saw soldiers throw infants out of third-floor windows.
Making the harsh life there a little more bearable was her father's eternal optimism. Despite having come back from service in the Austrian Army in World War I a man who "didn't believe in anything" having to do with God, she said he was an inspiring fellow who buoyed people's spirits. "When you're an optimist like my father was, you always believe that better days are coming. He was always telling people. 'Tomorrow is going to be better.' He always believed."
Hardly a pacifist, he wanted more than anything to see justice done to his people's tormentors. "My father always said, 'No matter what's going to happen, I'm going to stay alive and see the Germans beaten, but good.' And, believe it or not, he survived the concentration camp and lived to see himself liberated and the Germans beaten like dogs. Two days later, he died."
There was no leaving the ghetto unless chosen for a work detail at a forced labor project outside it or you were brazen enough to sneak out. Lola was picked to work as a cleaning girl at a Krakow hospital where wounded Germans were treated. Mornings, she was part of a group of slave laborers taken by truck to their assigned jobs. The manual labor was new to her. "It was the first time in my life I scrubbed floors, cleaned windows, cleaned toilets and washed dishes," she said.
Demeaning as the work might have been, she counted herself lucky as it meant access to extra food. "Whatever I could save, I brought it back to the ghetto for my parents and my sister and brother to eat." She said to her surprise some Germans at the hospital were "very good" to her. "If they had food they couldn't eat, they'd tell me, 'You take it.' I was very happy I could bring some food."
As her saga unfolded, Lola found working "the only thing that would save you…No matter where you were, as long as you could work, you were OK. Once you just laid down…then they took you and shot you like a dog. A lot of people physically and mentally couldn't do it. They gave up. They said, 'What for?' And they died."
Death was never far away. Not long before the ghetto's liquidation, she recalls orders being given via loudspeaker for all inhabitants "to concentrate in one place." They were told to bring only what they could carry, which meant something awful was coming down. Sure enough, she and her family watched in horror as an estimated 1,500 men, women and children were ordered out of the crowd — to stand in front — where they were killed by machine gun fire. "I witnessed that. You know, I had never seen my father cry before. He was crying like a baby and blood was running like a river. It was horrible."
The ghetto dwellers were assembled once more, prepared to march to an unknown destination, when her brother Nathan was pulled out of line by the Gestapo. "The man said to him, 'You can't go.' He was 13, but very skinny and very little, and they were pulling out all the old people and young children and the ones whose looks they didn't like." That's when her mother bolted for her only son. "She grabbed him and went back in line with him. The man came and looked at my mother and he said, 'If you're going to do that, I'm going to kill your son and you right now. He can't go.' So, they put Nathan out and put him on a truck to Auschwitz. That was the last time we saw him. They brought him straight to the ovens."
The remaining human caravan from the Krakow Ghetto ended up in Plaszow, a compound around which an electrified fence ran. Stripped naked, prisoners endured another selection process that eliminated the weak and old. It was then and there that Lola's paternal grandmother was forced to dig her own grave. "She said to us, 'If that's what God wants, that's what's going to be.' She went in that grave with her bible, and they shot her right in front of us," Lola said.
Brutality became a numbing reality at Plaszow. Random acts of barbarism the order of the day. Once, Lola was forced to watch the hanging of a man caught trying to escape. "And so help me God I could hear the bones crack in his neck. They let him hang three days, so everybody that worked saw him. I said, 'No, this is it, I will never survive.'" She did survive, but only by steeling herself. "I was like a stone. I left everything behind me. I had no feelings." When the woman next to her in the barracks died overnight, Lola waited until the morning to report it so that she could consume the extra ration of bread and coffee. In such a place, she said, "We could not speak about the future — only about what was."
Upon first arriving at Plaszow, Lola continued her routine of being brought to thehospital to clean. Later, she worked in a quarry breaking stones with a hammer to make gravel. Once, she switched jobs with her ailing mother, who was too weak to carry a yoke laden with buckets of water. Lola briefly worked in a paper factory. Then, one day the factory was closed and she and others loaded onto cattle cars and taken by train to the first of two nearby camps whose German munitions factories she worked in. It was 1944. Her remaining family stayed behind at Plaszow.
At Skarzysko Kamienna, Lola operated a machine making anti-aircraft shells. "You had a quota to make 80,000 shells per shift," she said. "If you couldn't make your quota in eight hours, you worked until you did. Sometimes, you worked 12-14 hours on one slice of bread and a cup of coffee." Unable to meet the quota any other way, workers mixed defective shells in with the good ones. Once, a woman foreman discovered a bad shell in Lola's batch and used a riding crop to administer "25 lashes on my rear end," Lola said. "I couldn't sit for six months."
In 1945, Lola went to Czestochowa, the site of another munitions factory. There, she fell ill. "I could not eat. I could not drink. I was down to 60 pounds." Later, she found herself again in transit by train — this time to Germany — when the train stopped at night. By morning, the captives discovered their captors were no where to be seen. The advancing American Army had set the Germans on the run and the emaciated refugees were soon rescued. The war was over. "I was free," Lola said.
After months of rest and nourishment in an American-run refugee center, she felt strong enough to travel. "I didn't have money. I smuggled myself on a train to Poland. It took me three weeks to get to Krakow." She went to her family's home, praying for some sign of her family, only to find strangers. "The woman there said to me, 'Oh my God, you're still alive?' I said to her, 'You drop dead.'" Undeterred, she found an uncle who'd survived and stayed with him. Two cousins joined them. In Krakow, she learned the fates of her brother and father. Awaiting word on her mother and sister, they located each other and began corresponding.
Just when it seemed the danger was ended, pogroms broke out in several Polish cities. "Poles started shooting Jews in the street. They didn't want us. My uncle said, 'This is no place to stay.'" Lola said. Like hundreds of thousands of other survivors, they wanted out of Europe. Ironically, they fled first to occupied Germany, where displaced persons camps were a way station out. Lola, her uncle and cousins went by way of Czechoslovakia, where they stayed a week and were treated royally. "The people were wonderful." In Germany, they lived in the Foehrenwald refugee camp, where she fell in love with Irving Reinglas at first sight. Married in '46, they lived in Munich until '49, when they came to America under the auspices of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a major supporter of Jewish survivors in DP camps.
The ship carrying Lola and Irving docked in New York Harbor on Thanksgiving Day. Given the choice of staying in New York or relocating, they opted instead for a smaller, slower city. HIAS officials suggested Omaha, where the couple knew not a soul. With Jewish Community Center sponsorship, they settled here and cobbled together a successful life. They learned English. They ran their own business, Easy Chair of Council Bluffs. They gave their two daughters, Jeanatte and Ann, a good education and every advantage. Lola eventually regained her sister and mother.
Today, Lola is without her Irving, who died in 1988. The grandmother of two stays active. A longtime volunteer at the Rose Blumkin Home, she now gives her time to the Methodist Hospital gift shop. Except for an occasional speaking appearance or interview, she doesn't revisit the Holocaust. "I don't live in the past. It's not that I have forgotten. I know I've been to hell and back," she said, "but this is not my main subject. I think about today and tonight. If I lived in the past, I would have been in the nut house a long time ago."
The Holocaust, she said, is an unfathomable episode whose echoes, sadly, reverberate in latter-day oppression and violence. "There is not a word in the dictionary that describes the atrocities. And for what? Wherever you look today, people are fighting. And for what? For power. For nothing else."
That's as close to an explanation as Lola Reinglas can offer in making sense of her Holocaust survival. An Omaha resident since 1949, Reinglas and her sister, Helena Tichauer, survived a series of internments, some together-some apart, that defied reason except for the intervention of fate and their own indefatigable will.
"We're both very strong women," Reinglas said of she and her sister. Born Lola and Helena Schulkind, they were the well-to-do daughters of a proud, old Krakow family that included a younger brother, Nathan. Their father Karol was an electrical engineer and their mother Karolina a model of refinement.
Like so many Shoah families, the Schulkinds remained intact but a short time in the war. First, Nathan was taken away. He soon perished. Then, a grandmother was killed. Finally, Lola was sent to one camp while Helena and her parents remained at another. Except for a short separation, Helena and her mother remained together during the entire ordeal. Their father survived mere days after being liberated.
Categories: Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Jewish Culture, Lola Reinglas, Omaha, World War II, Writing Tags: Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Jewish Culture, Lola Reinglas, Omaha, War
Helena Tichauer was tempted to give up more than once. If she had, no one would have blamed her. For persecuted Jews like her and her family, reasons for despair were everywhere in Nazi-occupied Poland. Her family's pleasant, comfortable life in Krakow had been wrenched away in the looming darkness of the Holocaust.
She'd already lost her little brother, Nathan, when he was seized by the Gestapo from the clutches of their mother in the Krakow Ghetto and sent to his death at Auschwitz. No sooner did her remaining family arrive in Plaszow, the forced labor camp and eventual concentration camp depicted in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, than her paternal grandmother fell victim to Nazi atrocities.
"She was pulled out of line with many others and ordered to dig graves. Then, they had to go into the graves. She took her bible with her. She was a very religious person. She said to us, 'The upstairs is calling.' And she was shot with the others."
After seeing this, Helena, who's lived in Omaha since 1963, said she thought, "This is our end. I prayed to the Lord that maybe I don't get up the next day." In Plaszow, she watched as her mother wasted away. She knew she must do something before it was too late. "I was the one that looked after her," said Helena, who had to fight through her own malaise. "I didn't have any spirit. I vegetated. But I had my mother, and I had to live for her."
The eldest of Karol and Karolina Schulkind's three children, Helena took charge of her mother's well-being because someone had to. Her mom was a rather fragile woman, whose delicate sensibility and privileged background ill-prepared her for the rigors of enforced manual labor and starvation rations. "She never did work before the war. She was spoiled," is how Helena described her pampered mother, whose stately Krakow home was run by servants. Helena's younger sister, Lola Reinglas, was at Plaszow, too, but in a different barracks. Eventually, Lola was shipped out of Plaszow altogether. Their father was in another section of the compound reserved for males. Occasionally, the family was able to visit each other before curfew, but otherwise Helena and Karolina were on their own.
As her smart, self-sufficient mother's favorite, Helena was well-suited to be her mother's caregiver. Except for one short interval, the two remained together throughout the entire Shoah nightmare and even for years after its conclusion. Their time together at Plaszow and, later, at the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen forged a mother-daughter survivor's bond of unusual depth.
This symbiosis began at Plaszow. It was 1942. Helena was 19. Her mother 41. Officially a forced labor camp then, Plaszow was — for all intents and purposes —already the concentration camp it would later be designated as. Escape was useless. An electrified fence ran around the perimeter. The commandant, Amon Goeth, ruled like the despot and sadist he was. People were executed for the slightest infractions or no reason at all. Prisoners were ill, overworked, underfed.
Amid such conditions, Helena's own survival is amazing enough, but that she pulled her mother through the ordeal with her is even more remarkable. The fortitude and fate that brought Helena and her late mother out alive is shared, too, by Lola, a fellow survivor who was not reunited with her sister and mother until many years later. Lola was the first of the sisters to come to Omaha and she still lives here.
Much of their strength came from the sisters' father, an educated man who, despite their unimaginable plight, they recall as never losing hope. Through it all, he remained "always" optimistic. "He said every day, 'The war is over tomorrow.' I wanted to believe him," Helena said. She recalls he somehow managed secreting a radio inside the camp that he kept hidden and listened to for news of the Allies' advance on Axis Germany. "He'd come and cheer us up, telling us the war would be over soon. Sure that helped. Wouldn't that help you if you were down in the dumps? He lifted our spirits and the spirits of others, too. It's true." He survived the Holocaust, tragically dying two days after liberation.
She said her father also willed himself to stay alive in order to keep an oft-repeatedvow he made — that he would live to see the day the Germans were "beaten. Yes, he had strong will power," she said. His daughters did, too. "If I didn't have, then I would be six feet under a long time ago," said Helena.
Still, there were times, she said, when "I was thinking to give up. I could have. I could have thrown myself in the electrified wires and been finished with my life. But I couldn't, because I had to live for my mother."
Weakened by disease and malnutrition, Karolina was a pale shell of herself. If she were unable to work or if even she appeared unfit, Helena knew her mom would soon be disposable and, thus, a sure target for extermination.
"My mother was very sick. She had thrombosis in both legs. She had terrible bronchitis and TB (tuberculosis)," said Helena. "I forced my mother to work. There was not any other way. I pushed her and she pushed herself, even though it was very hard for her. I said, 'If you're not going to work, they're going to kill you.' She knew if she was not going to do it, it was going to be the end. She wanted to live."
To fool the guards into thinking her mother stronger and ruddier than she really was, Helena used a ruse that, if discovered, could have meant death for both of them. "Everything was taken from me. Everything," she said, except for one item she hid from the humiliating strip searches conducted in camp — a tube of lipstick.
"I carried the lipstick here," she said, indicating between her bosoms. "Mother was very white, like no blood was left in her face. She was very frail. Each morning, I tried to put on my mother's cheeks the lipstick, so that she would look healthy for the Germans. Every day…I made her look healthy. I saved my mother this way."
It was not the only time she saved her mother's life. Once, she said, her mother left the barracks to use the latrine, which wasn't much more than a hole in the ground. "She fell down the hole and she was drowning in shit up to here," Helena said, gesturing to her neck. "Somebody called me, and I had to pull her out and wash her off. It was a terrible thing."
How different things were only a few years before — before the German invasion and occupation of Poland began in 1939 and, with it, the ethnic cleansing campaign the Nazis called The Final Solution.
The Schulkinds were a family of prestige in the largely Gentile district of Krakow they resided in. Their history in Krakow went back more than a century. Karol, the father, was a highly respected and successful electrical engineer and the owner of his own company employing several people. A World War I veteran, he attended university in Austria. He was, Helena said, "a brilliant, eminent, handsome man."
Karolina, the mother, was a pretty, porcelain doll of a woman who was the picture of refinement in the house she decorated and in the artistic pursuits she favored.
The family vacationed together, with swimming and hiking-filled summers in the country and winter skiing treks in the mountains.
Helena was a smart, lively 16 year-old with two years of "gymnasium" (high school) under her belt and a dream of becoming a physician. "I wanted to study medicine," she said, but her fondest "desire was shattered" by the outbreak of hostilities.
September 1939 is when it all changed. An eerie quiet fell over Krakow the first few days after war was declared. "Nothing was happening, but then the Germans began bombing Krakow", she said, using the blitzkrieg strategy that overwhelmed Polish defenses, if not Polish resistance. "We spent most of the time in the basement bunker in our house. I was terribly afraid something might happen to my mother and father." The Schulkinds and their house survived the attack unscathed, but neighbors were not so lucky. Then, the German Army marched in and life as the Schulkinds knew it stopped. No more work. No more school. No more freedom.
Everything the family once took for granted was stripped from them, including their possessions, as Jews were made official outcasts in their own land. In March 1941, the city's Jewish population was ordered to gather up no more than five pounds of belongings per person and marched across the river into an abandoned Gentile district that became their ghetto prison. The stone wall and barbed wire enclosed Krakow Ghetto would be their grim dwelling place the next several months.
The Schulkinds shared a two-room flat with another family of five. Fear ruled the ghetto occupants' lives. Beatings and killings were widespread. Once, the inhabitants were gathered in a public square and those ordered out of the ranks, some 1,500 men, women and children, were machine gunned. Enforced labor, which was mandatory for all able-bodied persons, regardless of age, provided some relief. Each Schulkind worked except for Nathan, who was too frail. Karolina, the mother, repaired military uniforms. Karol, the father, plied his trade as an electrical engineer inside and outside the ghetto. Lola was transported by truck each morning to clean at a Krakow hospital. Helena swept dirt from the street and sidewalk in the summer and cleaned snow in the winter.
Food was in chronic short supply and the only way to get more was to barter or trade. In a bold and dangerous move, Helena's father defied authorities and held onto the family's jewelry and silver, which he kept hidden. Helena said she used these valuables for procuring food on scavenging missions outside the ghetto that she planned and executed herself.
"I tried many times to get out from the ghetto," she said. "Not to escape, but to organize food supplies. And I did. My mother said, 'You know, if you're going to go, you'll be killed.' I said, 'I'm going to take my chances.' I was frightened. But, you know, in a situation like that I took the chance."
She said that while the ghetto was barricaded by heavily guarded wall and wire, there were entrance-exit points where one could dare sneak past or bribe the guards, who were often directing traffic in and out of the ghetto. Her preferred method was to position herself near the passage way and bide her time for a guard to turn away or occupy himself talking with someone, and then, when "the opportunity" presented itself, she "slipped out. I went where I could get food. I can't remember where, but I bought it somewhere" with the forbidden treasures she carried. Then, food in hand — "a loaf of bread maybe or whatever I could get" — she had to repeat the process and "slip back in. I thanked God nobody ever caught me. I would probably have been shot."
Months later, at Plaszow, Helena said she employed a similar artful dodger routine. "There was some kind of opening there, and I looked for the opportunity and I went out," she said. This time, however, she had nothing to barter with. "I went to some homes where Gentiles were living and I begged them for food."
Helena's family was severed the first time when the ghetto was emptied and its occupants assembled in preparation for marching to the nearby Plaszow camp. The Gestapo began pulling the old, the young and the sick out of line, including her brother Nathan. Her mother pulled him back. That's when the Gestapo told Karolina she and her son would be killed right then unless she let him go. He was taken away, never to be seen again by his family. He died at Auschwitz.
She soon lost another member of her family, when her grandmother was shot before her very eyes at Plaszow. The misery of Plaszow ground prisoners down. Degradation and torture were all they could expect. Death, their only release. Once, Helena was picked at random and beaten. "They chose me — I don't know why — and they put me on a table and gave me 25 lashes on my bottom with a leather crop," she said. "No reason at all."
Camp commandant Amon Goeth would "shoot people, line the bodies up" and force prisoners like Helena to "look at them. This was Goeth. He was terrible." At the opposite end of the spectrum was Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist well known among prisoners for doing "business with the Nazis" in the camp, where "his Jews" were protected and where he operated a pot and pan factory. Helena's sister, Lola, believes a fateful encounter with him saved her life. Caught bringing food to their father after curfew, Lola said a man she now recognizes as Schindler beat her unconscious rather than let her be shot by the SS.
The only relief from all this despair was in the scattered moments Helena and her family stole with each other. Their work — pounding rocks into gravel at a quarry — was pure drudgery. What passed for meals — a slice of bread and cup of coffee in the morning and a rutabaga broth at night — offered no satisfaction. The starvation diet forced prisoners to make awful choices. "I asked my mother — What should I do? Should I eat bread now or keep for tomorrow? I kept for breakfast."
In 1944, Lola was shipped out of Plaszow to work in the first of two munitions factories. Then, Karol was transported to another camp. This left Helena to fend for herself and for her mother. "My sister was gone. My father was taken away. And I had to care for my mom. It was very hard. I was just a young person. I didn't know from life." Then, Helena's worst fears were realized when she was separated from her mother and shipped to the Tarnow Ghetto. Strangely, she said, she was sent back to Plaszow, where she was gratefully reunited with her ailing mom. She believes her father played a role in getting her returned. "My father was still alive, and people told me he had some influence with higher officials."
Helena, her mother and others were taken by train, on cattle cars, to Auschwitz. They knew evil was there. "I was terribly sad when I heard the word Auschwitz. I was afraid they took us to die," Helena said. However, they were spared in the short time they were there and, later, at Bergen-Belsen. As the war neared its end, the Nazi killing machine was disrupted. She and her mother were among those liberated by American soldiers at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.
"When the war ended, people cried from happiness" at having survived, she said, "and from sadness, too. The first words were, 'I don't know what happened to my father' and 'I don't know what happened to my brother.' It was very emotional."
Liberation found Helena and her mother drawn down to maybe 65 pounds each. Her mother was quite sick. Their recovery began in Germany and continued in Sweden, where the International Red Cross found them passage. Helena's mother recuperated in a sanatorium. "The care was excellent," Helena said.
It was in Sweden Helena learned Lola was alive. By the time they exchanged letters, Helena and her mother were bound for Uruguay, where relatives lived. Meanwhile, Lola married Irving Reinglas and settled in Munich, Germany before coming to America with their first born child in 1949. It was in Uruguay Helena met and married Walter Tichauer, a gifted glazer who fled Germany after Kristallnacht. Their two sons were born there. He did glazing work and she was a nurse's aide.
Years later, Lola prevailed on her mother and Helena and her family to relocate from Uruguay to America. They came to the U.S. in 1963. Just as Lola and Irving made a good life here, so too did Helena and Walter. Helena had her own hardware store in north Omaha, where she survived being held-up at knife-point, and, later, she had a gift shop in the Westroads. Walter applied his craftsmanship to new building projects. In 1967, Helena and her sister lost their mother. She was only 63.
Today, these survivor sisters are longtime volunteers at Methodist Hospital. They love America and appreciate the way the country has embraced them.
A grandmother of five and great-grandmother of two, Helena rarely talks about the Shoah. When she does, she says, "I don't wish on my worst enemy" what occurred. "That's why we have to remember. Not because it just happened to Jews. Because it's happened to many nationalities and religions. They're humans. They are people. They have a soul. They have feelings. And this is what counts." Now writing her biography, she's proud of how she's carried on and started over, first in Sweden, then in Uruguay and then in America. "That's the story of my life. I'm still alive. I still go on. Maybe this was destiny for me. I believe in destiny."
Categories: Helena Tichauer, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, World War II, Writing Tags: Helena Tichauer, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, War
March 27, 2018 leoadambiga	1 comment
For the first 52 years of his life Fred Kader lived everyday in the shadow of a lost past. An orphaned child of the Holocaust, Kader's early years remained an unfathomable mystery that he hoped one day to solve so that he might finally come to know how he survived the Shoah as a small boy in his native Belgium.
That he had been one of an estimated 4,500 hidden children in his homeland during World War II he already knew. That he was the lone surviving member of his immediate family he was certain. That he ended up in an orphanage reserved for Jewish children he definitely recalled. That an uncle found him after the war and took him in to live with his family he also remembered. But precisely how he came to be hidden, where he was protected and by whom were details frustratingly outside his memory's reach. After all, when the events that eventually, tragically separated Kader from his family first transpired he was about 4 years old — an age when distinct memories are rare in even the best of circumstances. Given the trauma he endured during the four years he was in hiding, he no doubt buried memories that he might otherwise have retained. Adding to his dilemma was the sad fact that the few members of his extended family who were left could provide only partial answers to the questions that dogged him all these years later.
For Kader, a pediatric neurologist with his own private practice in Omaha, the strain of not knowing his own life history left an ever-present void he could not fill and with the disturbing sense that pieces of this puzzling odyssey lay just beyond his grasp. Kader, a soft-spoken man with sensitive eyes, described what it is like to be burdened with such a gulf inside.
"It's like a big box of unknown," he said in his delicately-accented voice. "It's a big box that's empty, yet it isn't empty. You know it's full of things but there's no way of getting into it. When you have a chance to talk about it, you remember so little that it takes just a few minutes to put in words what you can say about it because the rest of you just represses it all. The pieces you know fill just a small corner of the box and the rest of the box is empty and yet you know it isn't. And you know whatever is in there certainly affected you and influenced you and has a direct relationship to who you are and what you do. It's a strange kind of void. It's part of you and yet it's separate from you. You must keep going in spite of it and just try and accept it."
Fragments and snatches of memories from war-torn Europe haunted him, but he could never make sense of them or be sure they were not fabrications of his imagination. Besides, the images in his head were obscured — like shadows filtered through a screen. For example, he recalled resting his head in someone's lap and crying during a noisy, nighttime road trip, but could not remember who consoled him or why or where he was traveling. Then there was the image of him wandering the streets as a little boy lost and somehow being whisked away to safety by someone. Why he was alone and who rescued him he did not know.
"It was all bits and pieces. Some of it I knew was facts, some of may have come from something I remembered and other parts of it may have come from something I read and incorporated. After a while, things kind of merge and run together and it's hard to tell what is factual, what's a memory and what's a nightmare."
Striking an uneasy truce with his seemingly irretrievable and intractable past, Kader got to the point of never expecting to fully know what caused him to be spared amid the Holocaust. Then, at the urging of a fellow hidden child from Belgium who, amazingly enough, had also wound up as a pediatric specialist practicing in Omaha— child psychiatrist Tom Jaeger — Kader joined his friend at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II in a shared search for clues to their missing stories. Heading into the 1991 conference in New York City, the then-52-year-old Kader adopted a decidedly guarded attitude about what he might find, so as not to be disappointed if his questions turned up no real answers. "Emotionally, I was trying to stay pretty calm, cool and collected because I didn't want to build up any kind of false hopes of being able to find something out," he said. "I mean, who was going to know anything about this one little Jewish boy in the middle of this immense devastation that went on in Europe?"
Much to his astonishment, however, he discovered a wealth of information that, for the first time, gave him a near complete picture of how his own hidden child story played out and revealed the identities of those individuals whose actions shielded him from almost certain death. These revelations came about as the result of Kader meeting people at the conference who knew his story either as researchers or as first-hand participants who aided his survival.
First, he met writer Sylvain Brachfeld, the author of a book chronicling the hidden children of Europe, including those in Belgium, and who upon hearing Kader's original name — Jeruzalski — immediately placed him and his story. "It was really meeting Brachfeld that just sort of put the key in the lock and unlocked the door," Kader said. "I mean, he just pinned me. He said, 'I know who you are and I know exactly what page you're on in my book. I know exactly what you looked like as a kid.' And the door just swung open and from there I met all these people who knew me and knew what had happened to me. I didn't know them, but they recognized me. They were actually able to corroborate some of the things I had in my memory. They dated it, they placed it, and a timeline started, so to speak, and my early years sort of got sorted out. It was like catching up with my life story. It was overwhelming."
Perhaps the most powerful corroboration came from Marcel Chojnacki, who informed Kader that it was his lap the then-4 year-old Kader rested on during that mysterious and road trip at night. It turned out Chojnacki actually discovered Kader and some other orphaned children waiting to be transported to Auschwitz. He put them in the hands of a rescuer, Madam Marie Albert Blum, a nurse who arranged for the waifs to be transported by truck back to safekeeping. At the time, Chojnacki was a fellow hidden child, although older than Kader, in the charge of Blum, who operated the Home of Wezembeek, a former sanatorium-turned shelter for Jewish children that was part of an underground network of safe houses throughout Belgium. The child-saving network that Blum participated in was known and somewhat tolerated by the Nazis and was sanctioned and partially protected by high levels of the Belgium ruling class, including Queen Elizabeth of Belgium.
Before Marcel Chojnacki and Madam Blum intervened on his behalf, Kader had already been rescued twice. His story of loss and survival began in September, 1942. The mass deportation of Jews in Belgium was already well under way. His father had been rounded up with other Jewish men and sent to a forced labor camp in France. His older brothers were already on their way to death camps. One day, Kader found himself with his mother at the Antwerp rail station, where trains were transporting Jews to various way stations en route to Auschwitz. A surviving aunt, who was also at the station that day, later told him that his mother made the heart wrenching decision to try and save her lone remaining son by ordering him to walk away from her. His mother knew he stood a chance because of his Aryan-like features — namely, blond hair and blue eyes. Like a good little boy, Kader obeyed his mother and wandered away, never to see her again. He does not remember his mother's face or voice or smell or manner. No photographs of her or any member of his family exist. Of that fateful day, he recalls only aimlessly walking the streets of Antwerp and being swept up and carried away by some unknown good angel.
In recent years Kader has learned his rescuer that day was a nun who escorted him to a house near Antwerp set-up for hiding Jewish children. Called the Home of the Good Angels, Kader was there with five other children only a short while before the house was raided. Kader and the other children were sent to Malines, a major train terminal and deportation site for Auschwitz. Meanwhile, the Wezembeek orphanage was also shut down by the Nazis, who forced Madam Blum and the dozens of children in her protection to move to Malines. It was in Malines where the paths of Kader, Blum and Chojnacki intersected. After being thrown out of their hiding place, Kader and his fellow young vagabonds, suffering from lack of food and sleep, were holed up in one corner of a former army barracks in Malines. Soon, Blum and her caravan of orphans arrived, too — unaware of the presence of Kader's group. All of the children were slated for transport to Auschwitz. A convoy of trains carrying Jews from France were to be their passage. Civilian trains were being employed at this time in the transport of Jews. That day, the trains were late arriving, Kader has learned, because some captives kept jumping off, causing repeated delays as the guards recaptured the fleeing prisoners or shot them on sight. In an ironic and tragic twist, it turns out Kader's father and uncle were on one of the trains en route to Malines. Neither Kader nor his father could have known the other was so near. And, as fate would have it, Kader's uncle — his father's brother — escaped into the countryside during one of the train convoy's unscheduled stops, but his father did not.
During the better part of a day and night, the enterprising Blum took advantage of the delayed trains to negotiate with German army officials, some of whom could be bought with bribes, for the release of the children to her care and for a guarantee of their safe transit back to Wezembeek. As the day drew on, some of the older children with Blum, including Chojnacki, wandered off to investigate the barracks compound around Malines. And it was while nosing around one barracks that Chojnacki and his mates came upon the huddled, ragtag forms of Kader and the others, who were brought to Blum's attention and added to her protective custody. Malines proved to be a crossroads of hearts and fates. While Kader, his uncle, Madam Blum and her wards were spared the horror of Auschwitz, the brutally efficient Gestapo were so intent on meeting their deportation quota that they dragged patients out of hospitals and onto the trains to take the place of the children. It is presumed Kader's father went to his death in Auschwitz too.
When, in 1991, Kader met up again with Marcel Chojnacki and learned how he came to be with him under Blum's protection, it was like coming face to face with his long "lost brother" and finding the once closed door to his unknown past opened wide. Kader said, "He knew how I came to be saved. How I survived. Meeting Marcel, the door didn't just swing open, it came off the hinges. It was just a flood of information. It couldn't come fast enough. It grew exponentially. I was trying to keep my feet on the ground to make sense of all this." He and Chojnacki have become close friends in the ensuing years. As part of his attempt to reclaim his past, Kader has traveled to Belgium to visit many of the sites he spent his hidden childhood in and to thank Chojnacki, Blum and other individuals who played a role in his survival. For Kader, the term hero only begins to describe how he feels about Blum, a Jewish woman who risked her life over and over to aid helpless children like himself. Blum has been recognized in her own country and around the world for her rescue efforts.
Kader's immediate post-war life, like that of many hidden children, was an unsettled affair. He stayed at a convent for a time and for two years he and other children fended for themselves at the by-then vacated Wezembeek facility and grounds. He developed street smarts during this time. "You had to mature fast if you were going to survive," he said. His uncle found him — purely by accident — and brought him to live with his family. Kader said his uncle rarely spoke about the war or the personal losses endured. "It was too painful to talk about it. He survived and my father didn't. He was the sole survivor of the family. And here I was reminding him of the family that he lost." He said his uncle's family treated him well, but his orphan's sense of abandonment and wariness made him resist their kindness. "As a kid, you realize there's nobody there for you. You're it. You're on your own. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Whether you're safe or not. You lived through the war. You ended up in an orphanage. Then, you're at your uncle's place. They tried very hard to make a family life for me, but I don't think I let them because everywhere you go, you wonder, How long am I going to be here?" Kader's mistrust and alienation only intensified when, at age 11, he was sent to live with a great aunt and her family in Montreal, Canada. "And then all of a sudden you're transported to a different place. To a different country. With a different family. So, again, you're left wondering How long" How come? and What's going to happen next? I looked at it as the next step in being alone and traveling on an ongoing basis. It took me years and years to make sense of my existence."
Finally, with time, he came to feel he did have a home and a family, after all. "It took a while to accept that there was no more wondering about whether I belonged somewhere. As you get a little older you stop wondering what's going to happen and you realize this is not just another temporary stopping place, but that this is it. This is the end of the line. This is where you're going to become part of a new family and this is where you're going to plant roots."
Gradually, Kader began to flourish in his new life. He did well in school, especially upon discovering that education was an opportunity to make something of himself and, in a way, to make up for some of what he had lost. From the time he arrived in Montreal he felt compelled to serve others. "I knew I wanted to do something to help people." He couldn't fully understand it then but he has since come to believe his wartime experiences are what drove him to be a physician focusing on children. "It's no accident I found myself working in medicine with kids. My past was a means to an end. Obviously, knowing what happened to me the first seven years of my life does give you a basis to realize how you got to this point and how you got be who you are. It makes you more whole when you can understand what you're doing and why you're doing it."
After training in Canada and the United States, Kader settled in Omaha in 1974, where he worked at the University of Nebraska Medical Center before entering private practice. He and his wife of 36 years, Sarah, are parents to three grown children (two of whom are professionals working with children) and are grandparents to three.
Since discovering his past, Kader, now 62, has spoken publicly about his experience as well as about the horrors and the lessons of the Holocaust. He feels it is the obligation of all survivors to do so. "We have to tell our story because it's the only way we can teach people what happened. You hope people will listen and you hope people will learn. If you know about it, then when you see bigotry in front of your eyes you'll recognize it and then maybe you'll try to put a stop to it."
Meanwhile, Kader's search for more details about his family's exact fate may never fully be completed. For example, his investigations have not been able to determine what happened to his only sister. "There's still little pieces missing," he said. "Things that I'll probably never know. You never quite get to the end. So there's still a sense of not totally putting closure to it."
Categories: Fred Kader, Hidden Children, History, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, World War II, Writing Tags: Fred Kader, Hidden Children, History, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Research, Trauma, War
Originally appeared in New Horizons Newspaper (1999)
On a January morning students at Omaha's Lewis and Clark Middle School file in an auditorium to hear a tale of survival by Bea Karp, a petite Jewish woman of 66 who as a child in her native Germany, and later in France, endured the Holocaust. She and her younger sister, Susie, are among their extended family's few survivors. As Bea's harrowing tale unfolds, the students listen with the stilled respect due the haunted figure standing before them. Not all survivors can speak about their experiences. Some want only to forget, but for Bea, and thousands like her, there is a need to speak out. To bear witness. Why?
"I tell this story in memory of my parents and the six million Jews that died. I don't want the world to forget. It's a lesson to the future and the future is in your hands. And it's up to you to make sure nothing like that will ever happen again," she tells the students in what is a solemn plea. Her German-accented voice rings strong and clear. Her words intoned as in prayer. Her kind eyes shimmer with sadness, yet burn with defiance. Her resolve remains unshakeable. Her will, unbroken.
One wonders if these comfort-laden kids understand the true horror of what she describes. Then again, who among us really can, save another survivor?
But the rest of us do have much to learn from her. If nothing else, that the human spirit can persevere in the most awful circumstances. Because she has so much to offer, Bea often shares her story with school, church and service organization audiences. She does it, she says, so others may know "how terrible hatred and prejudice is and what a terrible sickness it can be when you are not tolerant of other people." In 1936, the former Bea Stern had her childhood stolen at the hands of Nazi tyranny. Stripped of the most basic human rights, her family was imprisoned in work camps during the Second World War. While Bea and Susie were rescued by a children's refugee organization, their parents, along with scores of cousins, uncles and aunts, were killed. The orphaned sisters were fortunate enough to have relatives in England to take them in. By their teens the sisters came to America and remade themselves – marrying, bearing children, leading full lives. While Be a' post-war years have not been tragedy-free, she's found meaning in life and dedicated herself to educating others.
Every survivor has a story. Ultimately, it's one of rebirth. Of going into the abyss and coming back out, scarred, but alive, and, as in Bea's case, compelled to testify. As the number of survivors dwindles each year, there is added urgency to having their stories recorded for future generations. In 1994 that same urgency drove Steven Spielberg to establish the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation as a vehicle for preserving survivors' testimonies. To date, the Los Angeles-based foundation has videotaped interviews with 50,000 survivors, including Bea, worldwide. The goal, says executive director Michael Berenbaum, is developing the most comprehensive multimedia archive of survivor testimonies and making this material available via computer technology for educational used in schools, libraries, museums, et cetera. Further, he adds, the project is giving survivors like Bea a voice and face in history.
Omahan Ben Nachman, who interviewed 60 people for the project, says of survivors: "They're the most special people in the world. They're the most morally correct people I've ever found. I never see hate in them and they've got every reason in the world to hate. They're my heroes."
The telling, painful as it is, has not gotten easier for Bea. She began talking about her experiences years ago at the urging of her then young children. She's since shared her odyssey with her seven grandchildren and scores of other young people in schools.
"At first I had a very bad time about it. It was very difficult for me," she says. "After all these years, I still get emotional. It pulls me back too much and the emotions I felt then I can still feel. But I think it's helped me a lot psychologically. I don't hold it all inside of me. I feel like I'm doing something good and I feel my parents really want me to do it too. If I can just teach one person each time I tell my story, it's well worthwhile."
To appreciate the arc of her story one must go back to the beginning. To when the darkness descended and innocence ended. The year was 1936. Bea was 4 and living with her family in her birthplace, Lauterbach, a scenic rural village in western Germany. A sedate place where children played safely in the unpaved streets. Her family had a good life. Her studious father, Moritz, owned a textile store that her resourceful mother, Rosa, helped in. Their nice spacious home accommodated the immediate family as well as Bea's grandmother and an uncle.
Bea remembers, "We always had an open house. There was lots of goings-on. My aunts and cousins used to come and visit all the time. We enjoyed music. My mother and father loved dancing. Lauterbach was the only childhood I knew." Far removed from Berlin, the Sterns were at first unaffected by Hitler's anti-Semitic policies. But things soon changed. Jews were made to wear the yellow star. Signs emblazoned with "Juden verboten" (Jews forbidden) sprang up. Restrictions on their activities enacted. The black-booted, brown-shirted military began brutalizing the Jewish citizenry. Bea still sees the approaching apocalypse in the form of a rumbling tank.
"The first time I was aware that something was wrong came while playing in the streets. Suddenly, a tank came rolling onto that same street, going very slowly but still kicking up dust. I got terribly scared and screamed, 'Momma, momma, momma.' That was the start of it all. That was kind of like the end of my childhood."
She recalls arguments at home between her father and uncle over whether to stay or flee. Her uncle favored leaving, her father did not.
"I think my father was a bit scared of leaving Lauterbach because, you know, where were we going to go? What were we going to do? My father had responsibilities. He had a family to feed." As things worsened, her uncle left, taking his mother and sister with him to Palestine. Her father did act when anti-Jewish decrees effectively made them non-citizens. "Hitler decreed Jews could not own any property," she notes, "so therefore we had to give up our home and my father had to give up his textile store. There was no means for him to make a living."
She says her parents were in a state of disbelief over the turn of events. Numbed over being branded outcasts in their own country, a county the Sterns had called home for generations.
"They were shocked because they thought of themselves as German. That's when I really felt personally what Hitler was doing," she says.
In the face of such hostility the family moved to Karlsruhe, a city on the western border of France, near the Black Forest. It proved no friendlier. "Nobody wanted to rent an apartment to a Jewish family," Bea says.
"By then the Gentile community was afraid to have anything to do with Jews. We stayed at the apartment of an aunt and uncle and their three children. It took my father six weeks to find a small apartment of our own." Her father, unable to ply his trade, worked as a manual laborer.
Their lives grew ever more restricted. With religious services banned, her Orthodox family went to a nearby apartment for clandestine prayers. A lookout on the street below watched for approaching soldiers. School became a nightmare for Bea and her Jewish classmates. "I hated going to school. The other kids would push us on the street. They'd yell at us, 'Dirty Jew, Christ killer.' It got so bad my father had to go with me." She says grownups were at even greater risk, targeted by roving gangs and thugs. A male cousin disappeared without a trace. The parents of her Gentile friends were quite cruel.
"I had a friend across the street and we used to play with our dolls together. I loved her very much. One day I knocked on her door and her mother opened it, looked at me and closed the door in my face. That was the end of our friendship. I was heartbroken. I didn't realize she wasn't Jewish. When you're small you don't think that way. I never thought about being different."
As Bea and her family were made strangers in their own homeland, the less secure and more frightened they became. "These were very, very difficult times on my parents and us children. We really felt the hand of anti-Semitism. It wasn't a good feeling." With conditions deteriorating, she says she grew angry at her persecutors and turned from a shy, sweet-mannered girl into a loud rebel, once even daring to vent her anger at a soldier.
"One day my sister and I were playing in the street when two Nazis passed by. I went ahead and picked up pebbles from the gutter and threw them at them. One of the pebbles hit them and they turned and came after us. All of us ran and we escaped them in an alley. My mother, who had watched the whole incident from the living room window, was furious with us."
Bea recalls family discussions regarding plans for departing Germany."I think we were very close to being able to leave," she says, but once the borders closed and refugee quotients enacted, "then it was too late. On November 9, 1938 the Nazis unleashed a nationwide pogrom foreshadowing the atrocities ahead. Mobs swept through the streets smashing windows, looting shops, burning synagogues and ransacking homes of Jewish residents.
Bea recalls the glow outside her bedroom window and thinking all of "Karlsruhe" was on fire." The terror campaign didn't stop there, either, as Jewish males were attacked and some killed, The glass shards littering the streets came to symbolize not just shattered windows, but shattered ideals, morals, laws and lives. It came to be known as Kristallnacht of The Night of the Broken Crystal. When Bea's father didn't arrive home that evening from work, her mother grew distressed."I still remember her pacing. He never did come home that night. We learned he and other men had been rounded up and taken to Buchenwald, one of the worst concentration camps. I shall never forget the day he came home. He was covered with blood and mud. He was trembling. He was a sick man for a very, very long time and never quite recovered from his ordeal."
By the fall of 1940 Jewish children were not allowed to attend school, and Bea, then 8, was increasingly running wild, getting into trouble.
One day, without warning, there was a pounding on the apartment door. The Gestapo. The armed men barked orders to pack enough for two weeks. Bea remembers her mother asking, 'Where are you taking us"' and being roughly rebuked. "You ask too many questions. Mach schnell! Mach schnell!," (hurry up, hurry up) the men yelled. In the chaos Bea retrieved her favorite doll but a Gestapo goon shook her arm, saying cryptically, "Where you're going you don't need this doll." Bea was scared, then angry, and threw the doll on the floor, its porcelain face breaking. She gripped a table leg, sobbing to her mother, "'I just know we're never going to come back here.' I was very agitated," she recalls.
"My mother had a horrible time prying my hands loose and getting me out the door." So traumatizing was the episode that Bea recalls only her mother during this period, even though her sister and father were present.
"I was beside myself for a long time. It was like they uprooted me."The family was taken to the city's railroad station, where they and many others were forced aboard a passenger train, their destination unknown. "As we moved into the countryside some people jumped through the windows of the moving train," she says.
"But there were soldiers on the roof and they shot at the people. I don't know how many escaped." The train stopped at a French-German border station, where a voice on a loudspeaker ordered everyone to get rid of money or else be shot. When she saw her mother trying to hide money, she screamed, 'No!.' "My mother said, 'Here…get rid of it,' and so I took the money, went to the restroom and threw it down the toilet. Coming back to our compartment I saw, sure enough, the Nazis searching everyone. They took people off, lined them up on the platform and shot them."
When the train stopped again in southern France, the prisoners were ordered off, loaded onto trucks and transported to the work camp Gurs. Bea remembers it as "a dismal place. All gray, brown and black. Barbed wire strung all around the camp. There were so many barracks that it looked like a small village. Guardhouses towered above the barracks." Upon arrival the men and women were separated. "And that's the next time I'm conscious of my dad again," she says. "Because I had to say goodbye to him, I just clung to him."
She saw her father only twice more. Once, she and her sister defied orders and bravely marched past guards to the men's compound, finding their dad frail and weak. While in his barracks she recalls each of the men being given a raw egg, an unheard of delicacy. The famished Bea could "already taste" it. When cracked open, however, the eggs were all bloody inside.
"My father got very agitated because as an Orthodox Jew he could not eat such an egg. It's not Kosher. The Nazis were playing psychologically games. But I thought, 'My father will surely make an exception. We're starving, after all.' Well, to my utter surprise he threw the egg against the wall, and I went to the wall to lick off the yellow ooze, but when I saw the expression on my father's face I couldn't do it. I was so furious I stomped my feet on the floor. He took me and my sister in his arms and then we all cried. Looking back on it, I now admire my father's fortitude."
She saw her mother endure her own indignities, as when her pierced gold earrings were "pulled right off her ear lobes. To this day I can hear her cry out from the pain." Bea, Susie and their mother were assigned a barracks with dozens of others. The trio shared a rickety bed with a straw-filled mattress. Lice and rodents abounded. There was no medicine to treat sores, which invariably became infected. It rained often, leaving the compound a muddy quagmire. Their diet consisted almost entirely of watery soup. The entire barracks' daily bread ration was but one loaf and its division caused bitter fights.
"If one person would get just a little bit more than somebody else," Bea says, "the other women would jump on her. These women, who used to be ladies, ruined into animals. It was horrible."
To survive, Bea became like a feral child — scrounging and scavenging garbage cans for food. Any respite from the misery and tedium was welcome, as when a visiting Red Cross worker sang for the children and treated them to Swiss cheese wedges. But in such conditions even acts of kindness were soon perverted. "The stronger of us would take cheese from the weaker," Bea says. "One day I even took a piece from my sister…a terrible thing to do."
While adults worked as slave laborers, children went on long forced walks. Stopping invited beatings. Still, life went on. Children played games. Inmates performed music. Secret classes met. A black-market thrived. The family was at Gurs several months when Susie, who developed an infection from scratching her lice-infested head, was among a group of children taken out of the camp by the O.S.E. (The Osay), an international humanitarian organization operating homes in France for refugee children. Saying goodbye, not knowing if they'd ever see each other again, was hard on everyone.
Some time later, in about late 1941, the cholera-stricken Bea was herself rescued by the O.S.E. from the work camp Rivesaltes, where Bea and her parents had been taken. Each time, Bea's mother was given the impossible choice of letting a daughter go or stay to meet an uncertain fate. Some mothers refused to give their children up.
"It must have been terrible for my mother," she says. "First, one daughter, and then her other daughter leaving her. I don't know how she did it. I don't know how much she knew. Maybe only that we'd be better off anywhere than in the camp. At the time though I didn't want to leave."
But leave she did, staying in a series of safe houses where refugee children like her were fed, supervised and educated. Over the next couple of years she moved 14 times, eventually reuniting with Susie. Once rejoined, the sisters were inseparable. The homes, scattered throughout southern and central France, were large chateau estates. The children attended classes and performed chores. They received mail from family, although Bea and Susie heard nothing more from their parents after early 1942.
Bea describes it as "an uncertain time," adding, "I never knew how long I would be staying in one place. I never made close friendships." By 1943 The Final Solution was in full gear and the homes , which the Vichy regime tolerated at its discretion, were no longer safe havens. The children were dispersed — some to Christian families and others, like Bea and Susie, to a convent in Millau. The girls were given French names and identity cards, staying there nearly till the war's end.
By then Bea's parents were presumed dead, yet there was nothing concrete. "There were rumors" about death camps," she says. "I knew something terrible had happened. That they were gone, but where or how, I didn't know. For the longest time I still had hope that maybe, maybe they escaped. I remember thinking, What am I going to do? My sister and I are left all alone in the world."
She knew the war in Europe was won when American and Russian planes filled the skies in 1945. That's when the O.S.E. reentered her life and placed her and Susie back in a chateau. An ad in an international Jewish newspaper requesting contact with any living relatives netted responses from Israel and England. That same year the girls, then 13 and 10, left for London to live with an uncle and his family. There, Bea and Susie began a new life and with it learned new customs and a new language. As teens they made yet another transition, coming to America to live with an aunt and her family in New York, Queens to be exact.
Soon after graduating high school Bea married American-born Bob Pappenheimer and in 1949 moved with him to O'Neill, Neb., where he worked in the grocery trade. They raised four daughters there. It was in O'Neill when she got official word her parents had died at Auschwitz.
"I was very much upset because it was so final. On the the other hand, part of me was also relieved to finally know."
In the 1960s the family moved to Omaha, Her husband, Bob, died of cancer in 1987. Her second husband, Harold Karp, died also of cancer. Even after losing so much and then being twice-widowed, her indomitable spirit carries on, her righteous path continues. How?
"It's like I told my sister when we left England: "Susie, we're just turning another corner.' That's my attitude. Take things in stride. Otherwise, you give up." Her resiliency springs from a near epiphany at one of the children's homes.
"I was going down the staircase to the dining room, holding onto the railing, wondering, Why am I feeling happy? — things are just terrible. And it suddenly dawned on me happiness is something that comes from within. It was like a revelation. I learned to just take care of the moment. To not worry too far ahead. That it isn't so much what life hands you, as how you cope with what you get. And I always remembered that through everything."
It is a survivor's philosophy. One from which we might all benefit.
Categories: Bea Karp, History, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors, Omaha, World War II, Writing Tags: Bea Karp, Holocaust, Holocaust Survivor, Omaha, World War II
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