Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Holocaust survivor Gloria Lyon, 71, spoke to seventh- and eighth-graders at Sacred Heart School in Saratoga last year. She shows them the serial number A-6374 that was tattooed on her arm at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Untold Tales
Many believe survivors' stories had to wait until society was ready to hear them
By Sandy Sims
In a small library at the Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos, eight or nine people sit around a square of tables. They listen as Helena Smith reads from typewritten pages. She's adding a section to her book Zdenka, which she wrote some years ago. The book is in diary form and is about World War II. What she's reading here are pre-war experiences. When she's done reading, the others tell her it's wonderful. "Be sure to include the dates for historical perspective," they tell her. "Tell more about your nanny and your uncle." The leader tells her, "Maybe you could put this prewar information in a prologue."
A prologue would lead nicely into the first part of her story, in which Helena falls in love. More important, it would help preserve the good times and the history of Helena's family before they were killed in the Holocaust.
Helena is 90 years old. The people at the table are five, 10 and 20 years her junior, all Holocaust survivors, not the thin, unhappy-looking people one might expect, but robust, bright and healthy- looking, some thin, some a little chubby, with warm kind eyes, gray hair, one with a walker next to her. These few and others from around the county are writing personal Holocaust stories, something almost no survivors were doing 20 years ago.
For more than 30 years after World War II, Holocaust survivors were silent.
"You know why?" asks Alicia Appleman-Jurman, a child survivor whose entire family perished in the Holocaust. "Because no one wanted to hear it. They didn't believe that such terrible things happened," she says. "That's why so many kept the stories to themselves."
Nazis even told survivors no one would believe them. In the Displaced Persons camps set up by the Allies after the war's end, they were told, "Forget what happened and go on."
American relatives didn't want to hear their stories. "They couldn't take us with the Holocaust because we came with the tragedy of their family," Appleman-Jurman says. "We have seen the unseeable."
Survivors also shied away from the pain of reliving their stories. Many lost their entire families in the Holocaust.
There were other reasons too. Survivors wanted to put the horror behind them and rebuild their lives, and 40 or 50 years ago, foreigners weren't easily accepted by Americans.
Still, the subject of the Holocaust never went away.
In 1947, Otto Frank published his daughter Anne Frank's diary in the Netherlands. It was subsequently translated into 60 languages, including English.
Dr. Glenn Earley, Ph.D., program director for the National Council for Community and Justice (NCCJ), says a few scholarly papers came out in the 1960s.
Photographs courtesy of Chayale Ash
Chayale Ash (bottom row, right) was 10 years old when this photograph was taken of the Morganstern Amateur Yiddish acting group in Romania in 1929. Ash's father (top) and all the others in the photograph died in the Holocaust.
Night, Elie Wiesel's chilling memoir of his life in Auschwitz, was published in France and then translated into English in 1960. There was the trial of Adolph Eichmann--the architect of the Holocaust--in Israel in 1961. Earley says the Holocaust became the subject of college courses and a stream of scholarly work throughout the 1970s.
Still, survivors were silent.
But society became receptive to survivor stories when the 9 1/2-hour miniseries Holocaust aired on NBC in 1978. NBC estimated that some 220 million people in the United States and Europe saw the mini-series. "It wasn't great but more or less accurate," Earley says. He says the program caused Germans to begin confronting Holocaust issues.
More movies came out, including Winds of War in 1983, which depicted Hitler's regime. And in the mid-1980s, a Frenchman produced the 10-hour-long documentary Shoah (the Hebrew word for Holocaust).
Survivors tentatively began telling their stories.
Anne Grenn Saldinger, director of the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, whose father escaped Berlin as a young man, says the first conference of Holocaust survivors took place in Jerusalem in 1981.
Lani Silver, who attended the conference as a journalist, was amazed to find that survivor stories had not been recorded. She gathered up several interviews on audiotape, and with these recordings, Silver began the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, based in San Mateo. Today, the project has some 20,000 oral and video recordings of survivors, witnesses and children of survivors. Projects like this are going on all over the world including the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg.
Almost 60 years after the Holocaust, more and more of the few remaining survivors are opening up that dark part of their lives and sharing the gruesome details because society really wants to know what happened and why.
And that's the key.
Saldinger, who researched the psychological effects on survivors who tell their story, found one surprising result. "Everyone I spoke to had to be asked first. Someone had to reach out, and that person had to have a sincere interest and the ability to listen, really listen," Saldinger says.
Photographs courtesy of the Jewish Community Center
Chayale Ash speaks Feb. 10 at the monthly Sunday brunch for Holocaust survivors.
Finally, society is asking and listening, really listening. Schools, churches, synagogues, service clubs and more are asking survivors to come and speak. Oral history projects around the world are gathering as many stories as they can. Books are being published. States are making the Holocaust a mandatory subject in schools.
Earley has created a weeklong program on tolerance and discrimination that concludes with a visit from a Holocaust survivor. In April Early will be teaching his program for Barbara Kirkland's seventh- and eighth-graders at Sacred Heart School in Saratoga. Kirkland says Holocaust survivor Gloria Lyon will be coming for the third year. "She is a spry, little, chubby woman with red hair, and orange fingernails," Kirkland says. "She's flamboyant and compelling when she tells her story." Lyon was 12 years old when she was at Auschwitz, the same age as Kirkland's students. She tells how on the way to being exterminated, she jumped off a truck and miraculously survived overnight in the snow and got herself back to Auschwitz. Kirkland says, Lyon tells the children that she had never imagined she had such strength.
Lyon tells of starvation in the camp and of the kindness of a man at a munitions factory who would leave his sandwich on the bench for her. "The story is very moving," Kirkland says.
Kirkland says the children study the Holocaust, read The Diary of Anne Frank, and listen to Earley, but the experience doesn't become real until Lyon comes to class. Lyon's husband says his wife, who speaks around the Bay Area, has gotten thousands of letters. "The children start appreciating what they have, their families, their opportunity to study," he says. "They become patriotic and appreciate their freedom. They start understanding racial tension and how to overcome it."
Alex Bauer also works with Earley. The retired electrical engineer lives in a home in Sunnyvale. He speaks in colleges, high schools, and junior high schools. Born in Hungary in 1922, Bauer was a college boy when he was sent to a forced-labor camp at Dachau, north of Munich. "Most of us died of starvation or cold or were killed," Bauer says. In his story, he tells students about finding a potato and nursing it to last over days. He tells of how he was able to survive because he was lucky enough to have shoes. "If your feet froze, you were sent to the infirmary, where there was no medical care and your one slice of bread a day was taken away," Bauer says. "It was a death sentence." He says one class wrote him "thank you" notes on paper cut in the shape of shoes.
Bauer says he started to speak to schools in the 1970s when his sons were at Homestead High School. When one son learned about the Holocaust, he told his teacher his father had been in a concentration camp. The teacher invited Bauer to come and talk. "That's the first time my son heard my story," Bauer says. "He knew I was in a concentration camp, but we never discussed the details." Then he was asked to speak in his other son's class, and things snowballed from there.
"It's important to tell the children about the good things that people did," Bauer says. "I tell them about the time I was working in a factory, and a paid worker motioned me to a corner where we couldn't be seen by the SS guards." Bauer's eyes light up and glisten. "The man pulled out a big red apple and handed it to me." He tells of the farmer who requested laborers from Dachau and then distracted the guard inside the house while his wife fed the prisoners in the barn. "The farmer and his wife would have been killed if they were caught," Bauer says.
He quotes Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."
"For decades we didn't talk," Bauer says. "We wanted to get over it and not dwell on it." He says many of them [survivors] still find it too painful to talk about. "Once we started," he says, "we found it therapeutic."
"For me it's a duty. I owe it to those people who died, so they didn't die in vain," Bauer says. He says, "The lessons of the Holocaust are relevant today because prejudice is still alive and well. It's necessary to show what prejudice can do," he says.
"It's so nice to see the reaction from the students," Bauer says. "They are so appreciative. They make me into a hero. I do not mean for this to happen."
Photographs by Paul Myers
Holocaust survivor Alicia Appleman-Jurman, 71, wrote 'Alicia: My Story', a memoir of her horrific life as a child in Poland before, during and after the Nazi invasion. Her book is required reading in many schools.
But Alicia Appleman-Jurman, a survivor who's been telling her story since the 1950s, even when no one wanted to hear it, says these children need heroes. She has written the book Alicia: My Story, which recounts her life as a Jewish child of 9 when the war started in Poland, and continues the Holocaust and her struggle to get to Palestine [Israel] after the Holocaust. Her entire family was murdered in the Holocaust, her mother right in front of her. Twice she stood waiting to be shot at the edge of a mass grave and escaped; she survived typhus, being thrown in jails; she survived in the fields of Poland. Her story shows the cruelty and hatred some Poles and Ukrainians showed toward Jews. It also shows the courage of children. As young as she was, she helped many other Jews, including Russian soldiers, escape death. "There were 6,000 children in my village," Appleman-Jurman says. "Only five survived."
Appleman-Jurman's book has become required reading for many schools and classes. Her life is dedicated to speaking out about the Holocaust. That's because of a promise. When her brother Zachary was hanged for starting a resistance in their village, she swore over his grave that she would tell the world what had happened there. "I want the world to know about these brave children who died. They did not go like lambs to the slaughter. They fought back."
Chayale Ash, another survivor who speaks around the country, shared her Holocaust story in November with drama students in San Mateo. The students were preparing their production of Cabaret, a World War II story. They told her that her talk brought the meaning of the play to life.
Born in Romania, Ash was a teenager when she was taken to a forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union's Uzbekistan. Her father died there at age 48 and was thrown into a mass grave.
Ash doesn't talk so much about the horrors of the camp. "We must speak about the culture that died in the Holocaust. We lost scientists, musicians, composers, clerics--the cream of the crop," she says. "Jews went to Germany because it was so advanced culturally, and then they were killed by that advanced culture."
Ash, 83, is most passionate about Yiddish culture. Her Romanian parents were well-known Yiddish actors, and Ash had begun acting by age 2. On the walls of her apartment hang theatrical pictures and posters of herself from over the years. She has rows of books on Yiddish Theater. They include stories of her father.
"Almost all of the Yiddish actors and writers were killed in the Holocaust," Ash says. Ash contributed a chapter to one book, and in it she mentions the Yiddish actors who are now gone. "It's like a gravestone of names," Ash says. She adds that in 1952, hundreds of Yiddish writers were also murdered in Russian prisons.
In the Uzbekistan labor camp, Ash performed Yiddish plays. After the war, she started a Yiddish theater in a displaced persons camp. She started a theater in Israel, and she started one when she moved to Philadelphia.
Ash explains that Yiddish was the language of Eastern and Central European Jews. "They call it Mamaloshen [mother tongue]," she says, "because it's the language mothers spoke to their young." It's Germanic, written in Hebrew letters, with Hebrew and Slavic words in the mix.
Ash teaches Yiddish at senior centers and other places. She speaks in schools, acts in plays, tells Yiddish stories and poems, and sings Yiddish songs.
When Ash visited Anne Frank's house in the Netherlands, she saw the words Never Again written in many languages. "I wrote it in Yiddish," she says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Werner Barasch wrote his book 'Survivor' at the urging of friends. The book has been published in Germany, but Barasch is having difficulty finding a publisher in the United States.
Los Gatan Werner Barasch has a unique perspective on the Holocaust. He experienced the way different countries treated Jews and refugees during the war.
Barasch wrote the book Survivor, a story that spans seven years of his life, starting at age 14, when his upper-class family sent him to Italy to school. They thought he would be safe there from the dangers brewing in Germany. He applied for a visa to the United States to follow his mother and sister, but it took seven years for it to come through. His book reads something like an adventure novel, including near-miss escapes. When taping his story for the Oral History Project, he says interviewers told him, "We rarely interview anyone who has escaped as many times as you did."
The book has been published in Germany but he hasn't found a publisher in this country.
When the Nazis came to Italy to round up the Jews, Barasch left for Switzerland. When the Swiss politely told him he was an unwelcome alien, he went to France. In France he was thrown into a detention prison because he was a German. When the Nazis invaded Paris, prisoners and their French guards fled by train to the Mediterranean and finally to Marseilles. There he was caught in a raid and sent to a French concentration camp.
When he knew he was to be transferred to a death camp, he climbed a 10-foot cement wall and bicycled all the way to Switzerland. There he thought he would be safe in prisons as a refugee, but at the border, guards sent him back to a French concentration camp. He escaped to Geneva, where he was arrested and jailed.
After escaping that jail, he hiked over mountains to Spain, where again he was arrested as an anti-fascist and this time thrown into harsh and well-guarded prisons. He attempted an escape by clinging to the bottom of a truck, but was caught. Using the perfect Spanish he'd taught himself in prison, he talked his way out of being shot and remained in prison until after the war.
Seven years after he'd applied for his visa, Barasch immigrated to America. His father was killed in Germany.
Hava Megiddo, whose mother's entire family was murdered in the Holocaust, is the coordinator of the Holocaust group at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center of Silicon Valley. On her office wall is a quote by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
Megiddo says that after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Holocaust group thought no one would want to hear their stories. "After all the violence, they thought it would be too much to bear," Megiddo says. "We found the opposite," she says. "Students found the speakers empowering. Here were survivors of a terrible violence who had a historical perspective."
"It helps to speak about their experience," Megiddo says. "Imagine holding an experience so traumatic inside."
They are also writing and telling what it was like before the war because they want to preserve the memory of their families and friends who perished in the Holocaust.
"But lately, survivors feel pressure to tell their story," she says. "Every survivor feels they represent 6 million people, and the survivors won't be around for much longer."
Saratoga, California Since 1955
