Photograph by Paul Myers

Holocaust survivor Alex Bauer, a Sunnyvale resident, was one of the few to make it through the forced labor camp at Dachau. He says, 'The lessons of the Holocaust are relevant today because it's necessary to show what prejudice can do.'




Untold Tales

Many believe survivors' stories reamain unspoken until society is ready to listen to them

By Sandy Sims

In a small library at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center of Silicon Valley 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 prewar 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.

Helena is just one Holocaust survivor, who after years of silence, is finally speaking up. She and others, like Sunnyvale residents Alex Bauer, are using their memories of their horrific experiences in the concentration camps to help educate people.

For more than 30 years after World War II, Holocaust survivors were silent.

"You know why?" asks Alicia Appleman-Jurman, who is a child survivor and 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.

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.

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 for 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 U.S. 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 insane regime. And in the mid-1980s a Frenchman produced the 10-hour-long documentary Shoah (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 well-known Shoah 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 spilling out the gruesome details because society really wants to know what happened and why.

And that's the key.


Photograph courtesy of Alex Bauer

Holocaust survivor Alex Bauer from Sunnyvale and his wife Rita have brunch once a month with the South Bay Holocaust Group, an organization sponsored by Jewish Family Services in Los Gatos.




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.

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 mandatory curriculum 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.

Alex Bauer 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."

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 that recounts her life as a Jewish child of 9 when the war starts in Poland, during 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 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."

Hava Megiddo, whose mother's entire family was murdered in the Holocaust, is the coordinator of the South Bay Holocaust group at Jewish Family Service of Silicon Valley on Oka Road in Los Gatos. 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 attack, 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."

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