Willow Glen Resident

Cover Story

Photograph by Vicki Thompson

In Print: Willow Glen resident Chaja Ash points to a picture of herself in a historical book about the Yiddish theater. Her family of actors was sent to labor in the fields and ammunition factories in the Ukraine.

To Life

Holocaust survivor makes sure others don't forget

By Alicia Upano

Chaja Ash points to photos of a lifetime in the theater, where she is posing in various roles. In one she is a coquettish girl with braids. In another she has a coy grin under a top hat.

"It would not be an understatement to say I was born to be on stage," says Ash, 86, who lives at Chai House in Willow Glen.

Ash is speaking literally. In 1920, she was born backstage to parents who performed in Bessarabia, which was part of Romania. That world turned upside down when in 1939, Germany seized Poland, and the former Soviet Union occupied the east side of Romania in 1940, engulfing Bessarabia. The following year, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union.

Being both Jewish and actors put the family in a precarious position. Ash was only 18 when the family's lively theater days gave way to war.

The Soviet art department ordered actors and artists to evacuate. Ash and her parents, aunts, uncles and grandmother were transported to the Ukraine by train. When the train was under bombardment by the Germans, its passengers had to jump off. Ash's grandmother died in the fall. The family buried her near the rails when the train stopped in the Ukraine.

For several weeks in the Ukraine, the Ukrainians put them to work gathering wheat, used to make bread for soldiers. Ash recalls her family was barefoot, tired, dirty and malnourished. Mice jumped over their bodies as they slept in the fields.

After their work in the Ukraine, the group was transported by train to a Russian labor camp in Uzbekistan. There, Ash worked for four years repairing a military ammunition factory. Ash and her mother carried pails of melted tar to repair a demolished roof and mixed cement with sand to repair the factory's walls.

"People cannot understand how the instinct of survival gives you unbelievable strength," Ash says. "We slept in wooden barracks, wearing always the same clothes, unwashed and infected with lice."

Ash's father was shot in the camp; she and her mother barely survived. One winter, they were sent to the mountains between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to pick cotton with hands so dry and cracked from the cold that they bled during the difficult work. During this time, Ash lived on only 300 grams of bread and a tin cup of watery soup. It was Ash's talents in sewing and languages that qualified her for other work. She sewed shirts for the military and worked as a translator.

In 1943, Ash met Pesach Ziskind, an auto mechanic at the Ukrainian camp. After the war, Ash went with Ziskind to his native Poland. As their train approached the Polish border, she discovered anti-Semitism had not died with the defeat of the Germans. Someone yelled, "You are still alive? Go to Germany, they will finish you off."

The couple married and remained in Poland until 1947, when Ash became pregnant.

"Every woman who survived wanted to get pregnant," Ash says. Many carried with them the thought of the millions of children who died under Hitler's regime. "We had to give our country new children."

The couple decided to immigrate to Palestine, walking the entire length of Czechoslovakia with other survivors until they reached Austria. The American Displaced Persons police met them in Vienna, and they lived in a Displaced Persons camp in the American Occupied zone. At the age of 27, while living in Vienna, Ash returned to what she knew best, theater.

"I performed in Yiddish with others who had survived. What a miracle it was to see the audience of Holocaust survivors smiling and humming the familiar Yiddish songs," she says.

After their daughter was born, the family continued their trek into Israel. They crossed the Italian Alps, eventually arriving in Genoa, where they received assistance from an Israeli brigade that repaired an old fishing boat and helped them cross the Mediterranean to Israel. Ash lived in Israel for 15 years, then moved to Philadelphia and finally to San Jose to be close to her daughter, Chana. Her son, Moshe, still lives in Israel.

While in the United States, Ash continued to perform throughout North America. In a Winnipeg Free Press article written in 1972, a reviewer says of Ash, "Here is an actress who can act rings around any performer I have seen ... this year, or last year, for that matter. In fact, she could probably eat them all for breakfast, and have room left over for toast and coffee."

Along with her acting, Ash has told her own story of the Holocaust to many school- children. Her Chai House apartment is filled with stacks of their thank-you letters.

"These are my treasures," she says. "This is, for me, the best achievement to have."

From the stack, she reaches for a group of letters from Leigh High School.

"Everything you said made me feel just so sad," the student writes. "Hopefully nothing like this will ever happen again. I will never forget your speech."

Today, Ash is part of the South Bay Holocaust Survivor Group that meets monthly at Chai House, a senior facility in Willow Glen. On the weekend before Passover, nearly 50 survivors and their families gathered to share stories and humor and show off grandchildren.

Another Holocaust survivor, Alicia Appleman-Jurman, leads the brunch. Appleman-Jurman says the organization is a place for survivors to feel they belong, after being uprooted from their homes and cut off from their families more than 60 years ago.

Both Ash and Appleman-Jurman lived in Israel before they moved to the United States, and there, the Jews who died in the Holocaust are remembered at Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.

Alicia's story told

The Hall of Names covers the domed room at Yad Vashem in Israel with hundreds of faces. It is a visual testament to the six million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust.

Israel's Holocaust museum holds the fragments of lives destroyed during the World War II genocide, as part of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler's "final solution."

For some who perished, such as Bunio Jurman, all that can be found is an age (16) and a notation on where and when he died (Borki Wielki work camp, 1941).

Jurman was Alicia Appleman-Jurman's brother. She is the sole survivor of her family, which included Bunio, three other brothers--Moshe, Zachary and Herzl--and her parents, Sigmond and Frieda. Their lives, and the millions more who were lost in the war, have lived on within her, she says.

"I have always been part of them. I have been their cemetery," Appleman-Jurman says. "I have told their story."

Appleman-Jurman, 75, began telling her story of survival during the Holocaust after she came to the United States from Israel in 1952. She began speaking in schools, where students urged her to write a book.

From 1982 to 1985, Appleman-Jurman lived in Holland with her husband, Gabriel, an electrical engineer who was working on a refinery design. There, Appleman-Jurman wrote Alicia: My Story, a book that went on to win the 1989 Christopher Award and become required reading in schools across the country.

Eight years ago, Appleman-Jurman and her husband moved from their Southern California home to the South Bay. Settling into her home on the Campbell border, Appleman-Jurman continues to tell her story to all who will listen.

Surviving death

It begins with a courageous young girl from the Polish mountains who was living in the town of Buczacz when it fell to Russia in 1939. Moshe, Appleman-Jurman's oldest brother, escaped his studies in Russia because of the country's dire conditions. The Russians found him in the Jurman home and took him to Chortkov prison, where he died. In 1941, Germany seized control of Poland. Once in power, the Germans required every Jewish man between 18 and 50 to register with the police. Her father left to register and never returned.

After her brother and father were killed, Appleman-Jurman, 11 at the time, was forced with her remaining family and other Jews into a section of town labeled the Jewish ghetto. They were required to wear a white armband with a yellow Star of David sewn onto their clothing to identify them as Jews, and they were prohibited from mingling with non-Jews. During this time, while gathering wood, her brother Bunio was captured by the Germans and sent to a Nazi work camp, where he was shot.

Appleman-Jurman almost met the same fate. While visiting a friend in the ghetto, she was forced to board a train headed for a concentration camp. To survive German gunfire, she and other children on the train jumped from it while it was moving to escape.

Her life during the war continued to be peppered with near hits and misses. Her brother, Zachary, however, wasn't so lucky.

Zachary tried to help four Jewish children escape from German custody but was betrayed by a gentile Polish boy, who reported Zachary to the Germans. He was captured and hanged.

"We did fight back, but fighting back was sure death," she said.

In the early 1940s, Appleman-Jurman was beaten and imprisoned at Chortkov prison in the Ukraine. Unconscious and presumed dead by the Germans, she was left in a pile of bodies to be buried. A Jewish family that was forced to bury their kinsman found Appleman-Jurman's warm body among the dead. They nursed her to health and she returned to her family. But life continued to be a struggle.

In 1944, her mother, Frieda, shielded a bullet intended for her daughter. Frieda died, and only by good fortune was Appleman-Jurman saved from death. The officer tried to shoot her again, but his weapon was empty.

As a legacy to her family, Appleman-Jurman spent a significant portion of her war years and thereafter helping others to survive.

"The only way I could fight back was saving people," she says.

Wanting to educate

Ash and Appleman-Jurman have used their lives to educate others. They do it with warmth, by taking a hand or offering a hug, which sometimes moves the children to tears.

But Doris Schwarz-Lisenbee, a Willow Glen resident in the Second Generation Holocaust Survivor Association, says Appleman-Jurman and Ash are unique. They're dynamic and have turned a horrific experience into something positive.

Schwarz-Lisenbee says other Holocaust survivors have dealt with the experience in a range of ways. Some never spoke of what happened. Some suffered depression or became ambivalent toward their religion, she says.

The second generation group, like the Holocaust survivors group, focuses on building a community with those who lost their extended families in World War II. It's also a way for the children of Holocaust survivors to come to terms with their parents' years of silence and painful past.

According to Schwarz-Lisenbee, many of the survivors' stories lay hidden until Steven Spielberg, a movie producer, interviewed and recorded several local survivors in the1990s. The stories are archived with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The second generation group continues to share the importance of these stories, since much of oral history told by their parents is disappearing as the survivors age and die. Concentration camp survivors and their children hope a recounting will prevent history from repeating itself. To this end, the second generation group is also involved in advocating against the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

"On the brighter side of things, there's a lot to learn about survival and hope for the future--the will to live," Schwarz-Lisenbee says.

Organizations in the area are also highlighting the Holocaust as an important lesson. During March and April, Cupertino resident Phyllis Mattson, who escaped the Nazis as a child, spoke before a crowd at the Campbell Library and to eighth-grade students at St. Christopher School in Willow Glen.

"You could just see in the students' faces the shock and horror of the Holocaust," St. Christopher teacher Carly Roben says. "It's really hard for them to grasp how it ever got to this point."

Willow Glen resident Lindsey Greensweig and Rabbi Eitan Julius of Congregation Sinai are traveling with teenagers from Silicon Valley to Poland and Israel. The group will join 10,000 teenagers for the annual March of the Living. The teenagers will visit four concentration camps in Poland, walking the death march backwards. Then, they will celebrate Independence Day in Israel on May 3.

The education is what makes it all worth it, the adults say. The children find gratitude for their lives and their families, and discover perseverance in the face of adversity and tolerance.

In them, Appleman-Jurman sees some of the girl she once was.

"The children are naturally very brave," she says.

When Appleman-Jurman inscribes her book, she reminds her readers to remember the past, but also to look forward.

"A tragic page in history was written for my generation," she writes. "God willing, you will write your page with happiness, love, shalom and a celebration of human dignity."

Santa Clara County has scheduled a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony on April 25 at the county of Santa Clara Government Center, 70 W. Hedding St., from 3:45 to 5 p.m. Alicia Appleman-Jurman and Doris Schwarz-Lisenbee will speak at the event. For more information, call 408.299.5151.