Survivors and Liberators

Survivors and Liberators

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The men and women shown in this exhibit are now in

the final stages of their lives. We must not forget them

or their stories. Each of them offers to teach us how

we must behave. Each life tells the story of the worst

inhumanities; they tell us that prejudices and "anti-

whatever" create only pathology, not health, chaos

rather than order, and apathy instead of empathy.

Their timeless message is especially important now,

as we are again faced with the potential of vast

destruction. We learned from them, the greatest

teachers, that we must be a voice for those who suffer

and we must speak out against injustice.

Wilma Bulkin Siegel, M.D.


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Wilma Bulkin Siegel, MD


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Sam Axelrod – Liberator


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SAM AXELROD

My family, originally from Russia, escaped to Lithuania after World War I and the Russian

Communist Revolution. The family migrated to Palestine in 1925, and, at the onset of World War

II, I volunteered to join the Jewish Brigade of the British army. I was seventeen years old. In 1945,

at the end of the fighting in Europe, our Battalion was stationed on the border between Austria and

Italy. I was asked to join a group on a fact-finding trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp

across the Danube from the city of Linz, Austria. It was a trip that affected all of my life from that

point. As we arrived, I saw a group of men wearing prison stripes and looking like ghosts. One

man, approximately six feet tall and weighing maybe fifty or fifty-five pounds, approached me

slowly. He moved toward the brigade's insignia, a Jewish star, which was imprinted on the wing

of the half-track truck we were driving. "You are Jewish," He said. "I am Jewish, too. From

Hungary." The Jewish survivors were in turmoil. It was a time when the Russians let the allies into

Berlin and Vienna in exchange for advancing up to the Danube River, which would put

Mauthausen in their jurisdiction. American MPs were stationed all along the bridge, not allowing

any freed survivors to cross it.

Their policy was, "The Russians are taking the area, let them have the headache that comes with

it." The Jews feared that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and that they were doomed to stay in

concentration camps. Our group, so far from our base, lacked transportation. We hired a German

truck and trailer, filled it with Jewish survivors, and crossed the blocked bridge with the help of

some Jewish Gals. We returned to Italy and organized transportation for displaced Jewish people

from all over Europe toward the ports in the south. Any kind of available boat was used to smuggle

the refugees to Palestine through the British navy's blockade.

To get through the many roadblocks, we had documents headed by the acronym TIG, which

expressed the resentment we felt when the whole ugly story of the Holocaust unveiled before our

eyes. The letters stood for the Arabic-Yiddish combination of the phrase, "Lick My behind

Business." After the war, I studied for one year at Syracuse University, but was called back to

serve in the Israeli army during the war of independence. I married my fiancé, whom I had met in

Syracuse but who had come to live in Israel. The austerity in the country at that time was too much

for her and I resigned my rank of major, and we came to live in the United States. Sam's second

wife is a Holocaust survivor who hid during the war as a Catholic orphan to survive. Sam wrote

a book entitled The Wolf and the Lamb: The Case for Jewish Secularism. In the book he states:

"The greatest test for the population of this planet is if a thousand years from now there will still

be Christians, Moslems, Jews (Orthodox and secular). Buddhists, and all other religions. It is a test

of the tolerance that is essential for the continued habitation.


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Magda Bader


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MAGDA BADER

I was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia, which later became Hungary. I was

the youngest of ten children. My father was a businessman.

Life was good until was fourteen when my parents, my niece and four of my sisters

and I were taken to Auschwitz. My parents, one of my sisters and her baby, and my

niece were immediately gassed there. Another sister married and living in Prague,

died in Terezienstadt. One of my brothers escaped to Cambridge. The other three

brothers were sent to a labor camp, but they survived.

My three remaining sisters and I were sent to a labor camp in Germany run by the

SS. We escaped the camp thanks to a Dutch cook who told us of an opportunity to

get away. We later wrote a letter for him, hoping that at the end of the war he could

be saved. A few days after escaping we met American and British soldiers who

became the liberators. These men provided us with food and shelter.

Because we were not in the camp when the liberation came, we were not placed in

a displaced person's camp but worked to sustain ourselves.

One sister worked as a medic for the United Nations Refugee Agency, one as a nurse

one as a social worker and I worked as an interpreter for the British Red Cross. One

sister and I went to England where I attended art school in London. I won a foreign

student scholarship to Denver University. There I received my bachelors of fine arts

and got a job in Long Beach, California where I taught fourth grade. From there I

went to Columbia University to get my Master’s degree in fine arts and fine arts

education.


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Rose & Jack Beiglemen


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ROSE AND JACK BEIGLEMEN

“One should not stand in silence when seeing suffering, because one day it might be

you in that place”.

Both Rose and Jack are Jewish Holocaust survivors. They grew up in Poland and

were preteens when the Nazis entered Poland in September 7939. They describe

their youth, until that time, as not so different from life here in America. Then they

were forced, first Jack into the ghetto of Lodz and Rose into the ghetto of Srodula in

Sosnowiec, and then into concentration camps, Jack into Auschwitz and Rose into

Oberalstadt.

Both told of the severe tragedy of losing loved ones. Rose was more fortunate than

Jack. She was incarcerated with her sisters, and they remained alive. All of Jack's

family was murdered at Auschwitz.

After the war they were sent as orphans by the United Nations Relief Agency to the

Bronx, New York, and later Jack was placed in a foster home in Cleveland and Rose

was placed with relatives, also in Cleveland. Each of them married, had children,

and, after their spouses died and because they were longtime friends, Jack and Rose

married.

Most of their close friends also were Holocaust survivors, and both Jack and Rose

were activists in giving out the word that THERE SHOULD BE NO HATE IN THE

WORLD. They have moved to Florida and once again wish to make the statement

that "one should not stand in silence when seeing suffering, because some day it

might be you in that place."

Rose and Jack have been spokespersons for this purpose in schools and in Broward

Community College. They attribute their survival to luck, to staying out of trouble,

and to the attitude that tomorrow will be a better day

When we speak to students about the Holocaust, our last statement is: When my

voice will be silent, I want you to speak up for me. When someone denies the

Holocaust, I want you to tell them that you met a Holocaust survivor and you heard

her/him speak about what happened to her/him.

In this portrait of Rose and Jack, Dr. Siegel included


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Terez Bender


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TEREZ BENDER

“I am proud of my Jewish heritage. I survived as a Jew and believe that Jews should

survive. We all originate from the Bible, and we should live together as good human

beings. I do not know •why I survived, but I have always believed in prayer and

God”.

I was born in Romania to a family of five children. All five children survived the

Holocaust. The rest of our family perished. My father was in the lumber business

and was very religious. When the Nazis took him. He wanted to take his Tallis but

they would not allow it. When my brother returned to our home he found that the

Germans had hung the Tallis as curtains. This still makes me weep to this day. My

brother then took the Tallis with him to Israel.

My two sisters and I were taken first to Auschwitz. Then on to two other work camps

and finally to Bergen-Belsen. My older sister saved me by encouraging me telling

me to keep going that we would make it through to the end. At liberation our brothers

who were in other concentration camps, were finally reunited with us.

I found employment with the American Jewish Joint.

Distribution Committee and came to America. I became a successful real estate

agent and supported my children after my divorce.

When Dr. Siegel met Terez it was Election Day, and she was very proud to be

working at the polls as a Democrat. She was proudly wearing a Kerry Edwards

button.


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Marcelle Bock


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MARCELLE BOCK

"If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." Marcelle states that

her survival was "dumb luck." My parents left Poland to settle in Paris. France, in

1930-the year before I was born. I was a breach delivery causing a right upper

extremity palsy. My parents found it devastating to have a crippled child and sought

much help. Finally, when I was seven years old, I was helped by a neurosurgeon, Or

Bop. After the surgery, I was sent to recuperate in a sanitarium in Hendaye, a town

bordering Spain. In 1939, my father, fearing he might be called into the army, came

to visit me in Hendaye. I begged him to bring me home to my mother and twin

sisters. Unable to refuse my request, we returned to Paris. And so it was that our

family was together when the Germans invaded Paris in 1940. The immediate family

stayed intact until July 1942, when my mother, sisters, and I were arrested in a huge

raid and were taken to a stadium called the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris. There, we

met a volunteer nurse we knew who arranged for me to be taken to Rothschild

Hospital where I was held prisoner for a time. I eventually escaped from there,

although I have no memory of it.

While my father was in hiding in Paris, I was hidden in two separate locations

outside Paris. I remember an episode when I defied my father's advice to go back

into hiding when I was sick with appendicitis. Instead. I found a surgeon whom I

had known to help me. My father survived to almost the end of the war. On June 1,

1944,I learned that he had been arrested. When I tried to visit him on June 8, 1944,

to celebrate the Allied invasion, I learned that he had not survived. Neither did my

mother and sisters. After the war, I spent a year with my Aunt Jenny and cousin

Bernard. Aunt Jenny's husband also had been killed in Auschwitz. Then I came to

live in America with the help of a great uncle who owned a hotel in the Catskills.

When the summer season was over, we took a small apartment in the Coney Island

section of Brooklyn. In December 1946, I met my Leonard. We were married a year

later, when I was just sixteen and he was twenty, and we have had a good life

together. We have two married daughters and three grandsons. Marcelle now has

severe pulmonary disease, from a history of heavy smoking, and scoliosis, and she

requires portable oxygen. Dr. Siegel painted the oxygen tubing. She was recently

hospitalized and is recovering. She loves to paint using acrylics and signs her

paintings with "Maika.” Her painting of her twin sisters, who perished in Auschwitz,

is in the background of the portrait, as is a poem she has written, which can also be

found on the Internet.


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Dr. Pierre Chanover


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DR. PIERRE CHANOVER

“I often speak to groups about my life; I show them my yellow star, and I bring a ru-

tabaga, the food on which I sustained myself”

During the war. I was in Gurs one of the twenty-three concentration camps in France.

I watched other children escape the camp by climbing under a truck and hanging

onto the axle. When the Nazis entered Paris, my father, a tailor and designer was

taken away immediately. My mother and I escaped to Vichy, France but this was

taken over and I was captured and taken to Gurs. But, like the other children I had

seen, I managed to escape as well. The French underground then cared for me.

Eventually I was taken care of by a family who raised me as their son and sent me

to Catholic Church. One of the priests cared for me and, until he was killed protected

me as well as a number of other children from the Germans.

I returned to Paris upon liberation to discover that, though her apartment had been

entirely devastated, my mother's neighbors had kept her safe. Since she was a

seamstress, she worked for the Nazis as forced labor.

In the background of the portrait I have placed the yellow star we were required to

wear. I often speak to groups about my life; I show them my yellow star and I bring

a rutabaga, the food on which I sustained myself. But the survival skills I learned

through my trials later made me an excellent soldier in the Korean War.

Dr. Pierre Chanover is a professor of French at Florida Atlantic University.


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Howard Cwick – Liberator


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HOWARD CWICK

If I were lucky enough to survive and make it home, I would never allow the horror

to be forgotten.

I was a liberator who unexpectedly, was one of the first American Gls to enter

Buchenwald. I came from an Orthodox Jewish family and was raised in Coney

Island. As a member of the Combat Engineer Battalion. I was trained in demolition

specializing in mines and booby traps. When in Germany, while waiting for a vehicle

to take me to Company Headquarters. I mistakenly got into the wrong jeep, and the

driver and I found ourselves outside the gates of Buchenwald. The source of the

stench we had endured for the past five days was now apparent.

The gates were not locked, and several other Gls and I were confronted by a field

littered with scores and scores of bodies. Walking among them were barely alive

walking skeletons with hollow faces and sunken eyes.

There were huge flatbed wagons, each piled high with eighty to one hundred bodies

awaiting disposal. Several inmates dragged a Kappa (a fellow Jew who collaborated

with the Germans) up to me and the group of Gls standing nearby. A mob of inmates

had gathered around us demanding that the Kappa be given to them. To this day I

still feel the guilt of permitting that killing.

While walking among the dead and still dying, I swore an oath: That if I were lucky

enough to survive and make it home I would never allow that horror to be forgotten.

I have honored that oath.

Having carried a camera all through my army days, I took twenty-two photographs

of the horrors I saw. Those photographs and the original film are now in the United

States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. D.C.

As a many-time volunteer for Israel I have served with both Israel's army and her

navy. I still carry two of my most precious and prized possessions my American Gl

dog tag and my Israeli TSAHAL dog tag.


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Victor Cynamon


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VICTOR CYNAMON

My family and I were living in Poland on September 1, 1939, when the Nazis

marched into our homeland. We were stripped of all of our possessions and first

moved to a ghetto. From there, I was conveyed to a number of labor camps and then

to the Majdanek death camp. More people died at Majdanek than at Auschwitz. Only

a few hundred people survived. I was one of them. From there, I went to labor at a

munitions factory, then to Buchenwald, and on to another munitions factory. I was

severely injured. A Belgian doctor, a righteous Gentile, saved my life, and I will

always be grateful to him. I survived the allied bombing only to be sent to

Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia from which I was liberated by the Russians. After

liberation, I tried to return to my hometown, but found I was not welcome. There, I

met my wife and we moved together to a displaced persons camp in Germany.

We married, moved to the United States, and had a baby. After settling in the Bronx,

I had a very successful building business. I am now retired and living in Florida. I

am the vice president of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center and chairman of the

Holocaust Memorial committee.

My brother and sister survived the Holocaust as well. I have dedicated my retirement

years to the cause of remembrance. This series of portraits will serve as a witness

after the survivors are gone and will teach the world that, if they are not vigilant, it

can happen to anyone, anywhere. All through the camps, until I was separated from

him in November 1942 for the last time, my father commanded me over and over to

survive. He told me that when I survived, I should be willing to tell this story.

According to the Jewish law, there are 613 commandments.

I have a 614th-my father's command "to survive."

In the portrait Dr. Siegel has placed a recent photo. It shows Victor's current family

of which he is proud.


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Julius Eisenstein


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JULIUS EISENSTEIN

Hate and prejudice against each other is the worst thing. People should teach their

children to accept everyone as he or she is. We are all born the same, with no label,

and that is the way we should live our life. The Ten Commandments say, "Do not

envy your neighbor."

I was one of five children born to my family in Tomaszow-Maz, Poland. My father

owned a bakery. I survived the Holocaust in Dachau with my brother.

I chose to place in this portrait a photograph of the liberation of the camp by

American soldiers. This photograph has been seen in many documentaries including

Life magazine. I tried to find the liberator soldier next to me several years later by

using the photograph. My quest was rewarded when I was reunited 48 years later

with soldier Joseph Frolio. Frolio and I have often taught about the Holocaust

together. Frolio is no longer living but I have fond memories of him.

I met my wife, a former Auschwitz survivor, in Munich two years after the liberation.

We came to the U.S. and I opened a successful bakery. It is "beschert" that I am alive

and survived.

I feel that parents teach hate. Education is a way of enlightenment-that one can

understand that there is something other than hate. For the last fifteen years I have

been lecturing in high schools and colleges. I tell them my story of the Holocaust

and through my story, try to teach tolerance.


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Rena Finder


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RENA FINDER

Oskar Schindler is a shining example that one person can make a difference. He has

proven that everyone has the power to make a decision to choose to participate; not

to stand by and do nothing when you see injustice done, but to take action; to say no

to hate, bigotry, and racism.

While in New England this past summer, Dr. Siegel researched the Internet and

found a resource "Facing History and Ourselves.” Lillian Fox answered her call and

referred her to Rena Finder, who graciously agreed to have her portrait painted.

I was ten years old when the Nazis entered Krakow. Poland the city in which I lived.

My father died in Auschwitz but my mother and I survived working as Jewish

employees in the enamel and ammunitions factory owned by Oskar Schindler. Once

he saved my life when a German foreman noticed the machine I was working on

was broken and was berating me for breaking it. I was the youngest of the factory

workers, and Mr. Schindler intervened saying: "You idiots this little girl could not

break that machine!" To all the workers. He was a god. He opened his eyes to see

the sadistic murdering of the people while an indifferent world looked on. As the

movie states, "He who saves one life, saves the world." Oskar Schindler is on record

as saving a great number of Jews. 1,200, during the Holocaust. He dared what no

one else dared. He showed that one man can make a difference. After the war Oskar

Schindler was not successful in business and the survivors tried to help him. He is

buried in Israel.

After the war my mother and I lived in a displaced persons camp, where I met and

married Mark Finder who is also a holocaust survivor. In 1948 we came to America.


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Norman Frajman


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NORMAN FRAJMAN

When I die there will be no one to take my place. I am one of the younger survivors,

and, if I do not educate now as to what the Holocaust was about, then history will.

My survival was beshert. The Almighty had plans for me to survive. I was born in

the city of Warsaw, which was occupied by the Germans in 1939. I was ten years

old. I saw and experienced the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 and was

taken, together with my mother and sister and other members of my extended family,

to the Majdanek death camp. My mother and sister perished there.

I was shipped to the Skarzysko concentration camp where I worked as a slave laborer

in an ammunitions factory. The next stop for me was at the infamous Buchenwald.

As the Russians neared the camp, I was forced on a death march. I was fifteen when

the Russian troops brought Liberation, and I spent a bit of time then working as an

interpreter. I spent some time in a displaced persons camp in Germany before

coming to the United States, where I had an uncle.

My father survived the war as a political prisoner in the Soviet Union. We were

reunited after the war, having been separated for twenty-two years.

Norman retired to Florida seven years ago and today speaks extensively at schools,

colleges, and houses of worship. He is passionate about disseminating the greatest

tragedy known to mankind during the Holocaust. He hopes his message will serve

as a deterrent to prevent future Holocausts from happening.

In the background of the portrait is the jacket he wore at the Buchenwald

concentration camp. He considers the jacket to be a survivor as well.

Norman became a Bar Mitzvah at the synagogue in Auschwitz in 2003 during the

March of the Living for educators. He declares, "It took me sixty years, but it is

better late than never. Now I can consider myself a full-fledged Jew"


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Morris Freibaum


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MORRIS FREIBAUM

If there were no religion we could accomplish a lot. Everybody has a right to exist

and live the way they want to. Everybody has a different case. I only know what

tragedy that was.

I was born in Warsaw, Poland, where my father was in the furniture business. When

the Germans came in. my entire education was stopped, and my family was put into

the ghetto. I ran away from the ghetto in 1940 and six months later could not get

back to see my family. I was on my own and survival became hand to mouth. I even

had typhus and survived.

When the Jews were being rounded up for Auschwitz, I chose to move around among

the Poles. This simple decision meant that instead of Auschwitz, I went to the work

force in Radom, Germany, where I helped to build an underground ammunitions

factory. From Radom, I spent three days in a train moving to Auschwitz. I was

moved from camp to camp throughout Germany. As the allied bombing got closer.

I was wounded by shrapnel that hit my leg. Unable to continue working, I was sent

to Dachau to Block 28, and then on to the hospital where a French doctor saved my

life. The wounded were released from this hospital, given a package by the Red

Cross that contained civilian clothing, and loaded onto a boxcar. We were traveling

through the mountains when the Americans blocked our way. The Germans

unloaded us and we spent the night wandering, but in the morning, May 2, 1945, we

were liberated by the Americans. I was chosen to work for the American Army by a

sergeant who taught me to fix gasoline stoves.

I came to the United States and moved to the Bronx, New York where I became a

man of all trades a mechanic, a taxi driver, a garment worker, and a waiter. I married

and had two daughters. I am now divorced and live in Florida permanently. I spend

much of my time with the Jewish War Veterans of Delray. Dr. Siegel painted me in

my hat.

Morris considers his survival to luck at being in the right place at the right time. He

thought that there was no one left from his family, but by accident found a lost aunt

on his father's side. She had moved to Paris before the Holocaust. From this aunt he

received the photographs of his family, which

Dr. Siegel placed in the background of the portrait.


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Miriam Fridman


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MIRIAM FRIDMAN

As we approach the liberation anniversary, I thank America for liberating us and

giving us an opportunity of freedom for a better tomorrow. We raised our families

here and gave o u r children the best education possible. President Ronald Reagan

said that we were "the best immigrants Ame1ica ever had." I am proud of the

achievements of each of the survivors and now we have the ability to help others.

I was born in Lodz. Poland. My father was in the dairy business, which meant that

we were affluent and I attended private Jewish schools. In those days, I was involved

in Zionist causes. I spent my youth in the ghetto. I can remember my hair freezing

to the wall because it was so cold and we did not have wood to burn for fire.

I spent time in various concentration camps even Auschwitz where my job was to

clean the bricks of the crematorium. On May 8, 1945, I was liberated and found my

way to a displaced persons camp in Italy. A distant cousin gave me sponsorship to

come to the United States.

Miriam married in 1948, and her husband died in 1994. She has been honored many

times for her educational work dealing with the Holocaust. "By teaching about our

past we can prevent history from repeating itself" She has spoken to the Shoah

Foundation. She states that it is important for Israel to survive. She became a

founding member of the Holocaust Survivors of Southeast Florida and is serving her

third term as president.


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Lusia & Eddie Frohlich


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LUSIA AND EDDIE FROHLICH

EDDIE: "Never QUIT! I "Believe in survival! I wanted to survive to tell the story

that it should never happen again-the inhumanity of people to people. “Nature

happens but humiliation by other humans is too gruesome." Lusia and Eddie

Frohlich both were born in Stanislavo. Poland. Lusia's family was wealthy. They

owned a leather factory. Eddie had been a wholesale agent for leather and so she

knew him in her youth. In 1939, the Russians took over and the factory was

confiscated.

EDDIE: "In 1941, on the Jewish holiday Shana Rabi. The Germans came to

Stanislavo and massacred the Jews killing twelve thousand and placing them in three

mass graves. Those of us remaining were moved to the ghetto. In 1942 another

roundup took place, and about three thousands of us were taken to be killed. Most

were to be shot. I was among twenty chosen to be killed by hanging. I was the

twentieth in line for hanging. The rope was around my neck when I kicked the SS

officer closest to me, ran to another SS officer and asked to be shot instead. The Nazi

beat me with a bayonet, but he let me go free. He said to me. 'You are brave. I will

let you go.' My father was killed that day. I went the next day to Warsaw took a

Gentile name and lived outside the ghetto. I worked in the underground and helped

with an uprising in the ghetto. I learned of a French doctor who could erase the

Jewish mark of circumcision. When I was later captured, because of the surgery, I

was saved from the death chamber and kept as a prisoner of war."

LUSIA: "While these things were happening with Eddie. I was in the ghetto in

Stanislavo. My father was among those killed in the massacre. I was chosen by a

German officer to be his housekeeper and nursemaid for his child. He helped me to

get food in the ghetto which I shared. He also helped me to get papers which allowed

me to escape to Warsaw. My mother told me to try to find Eddie in the underground

in Warsaw but he was living under a new name. Fortunately, I went first to an old

family acquaintance and Eddie was there visiting. There our romance and life

involvement started. He got my mother and brought her into hiding in Warsaw."

Eddie was taken as a POW and was liberated by the Americans. Lusia was taken as

forced labor in Krakow and was liberated by the Russians. After the war, she was

reunited with her mother and with Eddie. They had twin daughters whose

photographs. Dr. Siegel has included in the background of the portrait.


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Hershel Fuksman


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HERSHEL FUKSMAN

People should accept each other and live by the biblical motto, "Love thy neighbor

as thyself." I was born in a small beautiful town only fifteen kilometers from

Warsaw. Piaseczno had a population of about five thousand, three thousands of them

Jews. I was the first and only child/grandchild that became the apple of my extended

family's eye. They showered me with affection and attention. A few weeks before

the war, fearing abuse that he had heard about from passing displaced Jews from

Germany, my father escaped to Bialystock, on the border of Poland and Russia.

When the German Army invaded Piaseczno on September 1, 1939, my mother and

I found ourselves trapped in our burning building. We ran into the street only to be

forced by the Germans back into the smoke-filled halls. Fortunately, a Polish soldier

instructed us out of the building when he saw us crouching, afraid to go back out

into the street. Being shot by a German soldier rewarded his action. I was six years

old. We found shelter with family but life took on unexpected demands and abuse.

We were forced to clean the dead people and horses from the bombed streets.

Hardships of life became a daily ordeal. After five months under the Nazi

occupation, my father sent a messenger to bring my mother and me across to

Bialystock. With many difficulties and dangers from bombings, strafing, and being

arrested, we crossed the border and were met by my father who brought with him a

big loaf of bread. My brother was born in Russia where life had its own dangers.

Disease, hunger, and Communist scrutiny of foreigners were common. Bialystock

was overrun with refugees. People were arrested in the middle of the night and never

heard from again. My father was one of these. We lost track of what became of him

and do not know whether he survived or perished. In the meantime, because of the

harsh life in Bialystock, my mother applied to return to Poland. The officials agreed

to send us back home, but instead we were sent off into the deep Taiga Siberian

forests. Out of the one hundred families that were sent to this place, called Komi

SSR, only eight families and two children survived. We endured eighteen months of

slave labor before being given permission to leave in 1942. We went to Bagish,

Russia, where the Enders Polish Army was being formed. There, my mother

remarried, and this new family of six survived the adversity and privation and

uncertainties of life under the Communist order. When the war ended, Polish citizens

were permitted to return to Poland. We traveled in cattle cars for weeks heading

home. We were met there with jeers and shouting for Jews to go to Palestine.


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Judith Evan Goldstein


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JUDITH EVAN GOLDSTEIN

“The Holocaust is a painful subject but I cannot let these memories die with me”. I

wish I was never part of World War II. It was given to me, and I was thrown into a

sea of suffering. I was meant to die, but lived and survived the survival and came

face to face with history. Judith Shapiro (Goldstein) was born in ViIna, Poland,

which is now Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. To the Jews of the world, it was known

as "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the Jewish cultural center of Eastern Europe. Her father.

Chaim, a mechanical engineer her mother. Yetta, a clothes designer her brother Meir

and Judith lived a comfortable and happy life. In June 1941, Nazi Germany occupied

Vilna. Three months later the Jews were placed in a newly formed ghetto and were

faced with murder and tragedy. At the young age of seven, Judith ceased to be a

child• she lost her childhood forever. She grew old so quickly. After two years of

suffering, hunger, disease, and extreme conditions, the ghetto was liquidated.

Families were torn apart, women, men, and children were separated. Most people

were sent to the killing place, "Ponary," a forest outside of Vilna. One hundred

thousand people were murdered there; seventy thousand were Jews. Judith and her

mother were shipped to a series of concentration camps, first to Kaiserwald, Riga,

Latvia, then to Stutthof, and Torun, Poland. In Stutthof, she nearly lost her life

because children under thirteen were taken away and never seen again. In 1945 they

were liberated by the Russian army in a small Polish town called Bydgoszcz. They

continued to travel to Lodz, Poland where they were reunited with her brother who

had survived Camp Buchenwald. Her father did not survive. They followed the tide

of the refugees to the American Zone in Germany and settled in the displaced

persons camp Zeilsheim. Judith's mother enrolled her in school and in the Offenbach

Conservatory of Music in Frankfurt am Main. It was during those years of her

childhood that she developed a strong love for the arts. In 1949, the family

immigrated to New York. Judith married Harry, an Auschwitz survivor and

established a nice family. She studied music and art and furthered her studies by

specializing in music and art therapy. She holds bachelors and masters degrees in

music. Judith is an accomplished artist composer and lyricist. Her art is in the

permanent collection of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, The Florida Holocaust Museum of

Art. St Petersburg, Florida, and in private collections. A number of her paintings

have been exhibited in seventeen museums in the United States.


36

Halina Greenwald


37

HALINA GREENNWALD

“I want the world to remember what happened. Although I have my doubts, I hope

that some lesson was learned from that horrible period in history. To live in the past

can only have negative influences on our children and grandchildren. We must move

on”.

I was born in Vilna. Poland. At the occupation by the Germans.my family was placed

in the Vilna ghetto. My father died there. My mother was a surgical nurse and

worked in the ghetto hospital. She was able to keep me with her during her surgical

shift. She kept me hidden behind a screen in the operating room. When it became

clear that the time in the ghetto was short my mother with the help of friends got

Aryan papers for me and arranged for a local farmer to keep me hidden on his farm.

Subsequently, my mother escaped as well and hid in the woods. She would walk for

many miles at night just to peek at me. The Russian army liberated us. When Poland

was divided in Potsdam my mother and I were the only survivors. From Poland we

smuggled our way to occupied Germany. We lived in a displaced persons camp in

West Berlin until the blockade in 1948 and at that time moved to Frankfurt. My

mother remarried in 1949. I have an older stepbrother who lives in Australia at

present. I graduated from Lycee in Frankfurt and came to Columbia University for

further studies. There I met my husband. We settled on Long Island. My mother

remained in Germany and died in New York while visiting her children in 1970.

During the years that I lived in Germany, I did not experience any anti-Semitism.

Until this day I have close contact with my non-Jewish school friends.


38

Professor Hans Heilbronner


39

PROFESSOR HANS HEILBRONNER

Dr. Siegel met Dr. Heilbronner after visiting Temple Israel in Portsmouth, New

Hampshire. He agreed to meet with Dr Siegel immediately, even though he was

going on vacation the next day I grew up in Memmingen, Bavaria, Germany. On a

single day, January 30, 1933, life immediately changed. I went from an assimilated

Jewish family life to being prevented from entering my own home by Brown Shirts.

My father, an affluent merchant who was president of our congregation, in

November 1938 was sent to Dachau. My mother, hoping for the release of my father,

went to the Gestapo chief and agreed to give him fifty marks and the keys to our

Mercedes in exchange for my father. In March 1939, my brother and I were sent off

to Zurich, Switzerland, and spent time in the care of a Swiss organization established

to save German Jewish children. At first I was placed in a school for delinquent boys,

but I ran away. A relative then found more appropriate living conditions for my

brother and me, and we ended up living with a widow. That was a happy time. We

knew no anti-Semitism and got to spend some of our mealtimes at a local elite

boarding school for girls. Upon my father's release from Dachau, he and my mother

came to find us, and, in August 1939, we escaped to London. We took the last ferry

that sailed from France to England. War broke out the next day. Through it all, I

didn't feel as if I were suffering. Life just felt like an adventure. My parents, in order

to avoid living in the ghetto, moved the family to Detroit where my mother's uncle

lived. Still our family remained poor. My father was a cookie salesman, and my

mother, who had always had maids in Germany before the war began, cleaned

houses. My brother and I served in the armed forces and then, because of the Gl Bill,

both of us were able to get an education, and I received my PhD. Hans won a

Fulbright scholarship as a Russian History scholar He was accepted by the

University of New Hampshire, but disappointingly found there an atmosphere of

anti-Semitism. He describes lecturing to a local women's organization in a country-

club setting where no Jews were allowed. When he announced that he was Jewish

they were forced to accept him on his merit, and from then on was well respected.

He maintained his Jewish heritage and is a member of the board of the synagogue.

He believes his survival was pure luck. He is a positive person who believes that if

you come to grips with the fact that life is tragic and the essence of existence is

tragedy, everything else comes into place. His story is part of Shoah.

Now retired, an endowed lecture series on the Holocaust has recently been founded

at the University of New Hampshire in his name.


40

Leon Heller – Liberator


41

LEON HELLER

“Nobody should have to experience what I saw again. The Holocaust was the most

terrible thing that could have possibly happened. I was so young seeing it. I learned

that we must never let something like this happen again, we must be forever

watchful”. Leon Heller is a Jewish liberator who has told his story to the Holocaust

Documentation Center of Southeast Florida. Dr. Siegel viewed his tape with him and

witnessed how very emotional these memories still are for him.

I was born in Chicago to a Conservative Jewish family in an assimilated

neighborhood. Still, I experienced anti-Semitism as a youth. At the synagogue we

attended. I was told of the atrocities going on in Europe, and we were encouraged to

take care of "our own" and to do whatever we could to help the European Jews.

I graduated from high school and then went to Wright Junior College. I was drafted

into the army at age eighteen. My brother was already in the army in France. I wanted

desperately to go to Europe but was sent first to Texas to be part of the Tank

Destroyer Battalion. I was nineteen when I was sent abroad to fight on the front lines

in Germany. As a private assigned to the 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion. I was part

of the unit to liberate Buchenwald on April11. 1945.

When we entered camp, I vividly remember the skeletal men in stripes, joyous that

the American soldiers were there bringing freedom. I spoke in Yiddish to one small

man and asked about family members I knew had been taken from their homes. This

man told me of how he was to carry the bodies to and from the crematorium. The

captives were giving us whatever they had. I wish I had given them my clothes. I

was completely unprepared for what I encountered there. The vivid memory of the

bodies in the crematorium and the stench will never leave me. I was so enraged that

upon entering another German town on a raid the next day, even though it was empty

of Germans, I destroyed anything of theirs that I could find. One week later I went

to Dachau but no victims were left. We visited the barracks and saw the horror of

the spaces including the meat hooks, the showers and the crematorium. I returned to

the United States to Roosevelt College and went into the family shoe business. I

married in 1953.and we had three children. Two of my children have married

second-generation Holocaust survivors and so I have been able to share my

experience with my family. Why did this happen? Education is so important but it is

all difficult to express.


42

Rosalie Lamet


43

ROSALIE LAMET

“I am one lucky girl. I write in my book that it should never happen again and that

it should be told about so that we will not repeat the horrors and terrors”. Antwerp,

Belgium, the city where I was born, was known as the City of Diamonds. My father

was a citizen of Belgium and a diamond dealer who died when I was eleven.

During the war, my mother, sister, and brother were deported and died. I knew

French very well, and, using what I had of ingenuity, determination, arrogance, and

beauty, I was able to escape to Vichy, France. In France, I again escaped the Gestapo

by denying that I was Jewish. I was smuggled into Switzerland, which became my

"Alpine Oasis." I lived out the rest of the war hidden in Switzerland. I will be forever

indebted to the Swiss for my survival. My brothers in New York arranged my

passage to America in 1946. I married here and raised a daughter and son.

Eventually, I registered for college, taking writing courses at Columbia University.

I published two books, City of Diamonds and Alpine Oasis, about the courage it took

to survive.

After suffering through the many years of the Nazi regime, I understood the need to

provide assistance for those in need. I started Lamet Hall in Israel to do just that. At

Lamet Hall, people who might not be otherwise able to afford such accommodations

are welcome to organize and celebrate bar mitzvahs, weddings, and the important

times in their lives. I continue to practice orthodoxy. I am a proud grandmother and

great-grandmother. I hope to return to Antwerp, my birthplace, where my

granddaughter is a physician.


44

Sam Levitt-Liberator


45

SAM LEVITT

“I remember meeting with a number of survivors a short time after their liberation

from Dachau and other camps and hearing stories of their horror”. I am an American

Jew, raised in Hicksville, Long Island. I am the eldest of three sons, and my parents

came to the United States from Russia. While I was in the U.S. army, stationed in

Germany, the liberation occurred in Dachau, just outside of Munich. I remember

meeting with a number of survivors a short time after their liberation from Dachau

and other camps and hearing stories of their horror. A few months later, the most

important contact I made was with a survivor I met at a displaced persons camp in a

town called Felderfing, which was also near the city of Munich. A friend of my

parents found out that I was stationed near Felderfing and requested that I bring long-

delayed mail to this survivor, a man by the name of Binyomin Appel.

Mr. Appel was overjoyed, finally, to receive these mailings, which represented the

first contact that his relatives in America had-a contact that was hindered by an

earlier breakdown in mail communication. Later connections that I made with Mr.

Appel took place during mid-1945 and early 1946. When it was time for me to leave

Germany in April 1946, Mr. Appel prevailed upon me to bring diary notes of his

horrible experiences in the camps to his relative in New York. At first Iwas reluctant

to do so for fear of losing these important notes but later decided it was worth the

risk.

After being discharged from the army in the U.S. on April 30, 1946, having spent

seventeen months in Europe, I was able to bring the diary notes to Mr. Appel's

relatives. Eventually, they turned them over to the Morning Freiheit, a well-known

Yiddish newspaper published in New York City. This resulted in a serial publication

of the diary in its entirety. The diary now can be found in the archival files of The

Center for Jewish History, 16 West Street, New York, New York 10011.

Mr. Appel, through the sponsorship by his relatives was able to come to the United

States and became an American citizen for the latter part of his life. Sam Levitt, a

retired secondary school teacher of the Great Neck, New York, Public Schools

presently is a resident of that community.


46

Jack Rubin


47

JACK RUBIN

“I want the world to know that people who hate, hate themselves. People who love,

love themselves. We are all God’s creation”

I was born in Vari, Czechoslovakia, which became Hungary in 1938. My parents

made a very comfortable living from the department stores that they owned

until1944 when we were taken to Auschwitz. I was fifteen years old. From

Auschwitz. I was taken to Thiel, Alsace in Lorraine, France, to work in a copper

mine for the Germans. In 1944, with the invasion of the Allies, I was brought back

to Germany to work in a salt mine in Kochendorf. In March 1945, I was taken out

of Kochendorf and taken on a death march to Dachau. At the end of April, I was told

that I would be taken from Dachau to Switzerland by train. The train was to cross

the Elbe River, but the bridge was destroyed. We were all taken off the train and

walked down to the bank of the Elbe.During the night the SS were machine gunning

and people were falling into the river. After a few hours, the shooting stopped. I

heard a lot of shouting and the SS soldiers started to run away. The few people who

were left walked down the road, where we met with American soldiers in the town

of Mittenwald. It was May 1, 1945. I was very sick and was taken into a field hospital

that was set up by the Americans. I was very grateful for all the medical treatment I

received. After being in the field hospital for two weeks, transports were being put

together to take the survivors back to their countries of origin. I was taken back to

Prague where I was reunited with my two surviving sisters. We returned to our

hometown which was then under Russian (Ukrainian) control. Everything had been

destroyed, including our home and our parents' business. We had no desire to stay,

and. when we heard of the displaced persons camps that were being established, we

returned to Germany. I heard that some of my friends tried to go to Palestine, but

were taken to Cyprus. I did not want to go to Cyprus. Right at that time, President

Truman opened the quota of age of under twenty-one without an affidavit to go to

the United States. I registered, and, in August 1947, I was in this beautiful country

as a free man.I was drafted into the army in 1950. After being discharged, I was in

the fur business and dry cleaning business. I married in 1954 and have three children

and four grandchildren.

Jack retired in 1995 and relocated to Florida in 1999. Here he became involved with

the Child's Survivor of the Holocaust group. He also was involved with the

settlement of the Hungarian Gold Train which he feels gave him closure.


48

Brenda Senders


49

BRENDA SENDERS

This is not a Jewish problem today; it is a human problem. If hate arises, then one

must move above the crowd and chop off hate; there is no place in society for

hate. We will live i n peace or we will die as fools.

I was born in a small town on the border of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union. I like

to think of myself as "one gutsy lady." As a member of the underground as a partisan

fighter for the Russians. I f ought with guns and grenades keeping the Germans very

busy. Much of the work was done in the surrounding forests where I hid.I know that

I was lucky to have survived without a scratch.

Since that time even the United States Government National Security Agency has

sought my experience. After the war, I went to a displaced persons camp in Austria

in preparation for going to Israel and married. But instead of going to Israel. I moved

to the United States where I lived outside of Washington. For the past fourteen years

my home has been in Florida.

I fought for my life and for the decency of humanity. This should never again

happen.


50

Betty Ventura


51

BETTY VENTURA

I was ten years old when German forces entered the small village of Oshmiany where

we lived. They led the Jewish men into the forest and murdered them. My father was

among the dead. Taken to Lithuania by way of cattle car. I was kept there among the

Jews in a temple of worship and subsequently was sent to a work camp where I

remained until its liberation by the Russians. An aunt who was also in this camp,

protected me and kept me safe even through severe illness.

My Jewish name was Basha Prusak. Following the war. I wanted to go to Israel

where an uncle was in a kibbutz but my aunt refused and wanted me to go to America

instead. I eventually went to an orphanage in the Bronx. I married a shipping clerk

and had three children but I felt that my marriage was a failure and we divorced after

twenty years. Three years later. I met the love of my life an Italian man and we

married. In 1986 as I was boarding a subway, I was mugged and remained in a coma

for eight days with three blood clots on my brain. While in the hospital my husband,

in his despair became a "born again Christian." I could not live with him, so once

again. I divorced.

The Jewish Family Service and Jewish Federation have helped Betty maintain her

current living, and she asks nothing from her children. She states she has had the

worst and desires nothing. In the painting. Dr. Siegel has collaged her family

photograph and her cherished Jewish star necklace.


52

Ilona & Manek David Werdiger


53

ILONA AND MANECK DAVID WERDIGER

Ilona:

I was born in Przemysl, Poland. My father was a highly educated man and also a

Talmudic scholar. In 1939 the war started, and my town was divided between the

Germans and the Russians. The river was the dividing line and I lived in the section

occupied by the Russians. In 1941 the Nazis invaded the town and deportation

started in shifts. My family stayed together in the ghetto until 1943 when someone

gave us up, and on one day, I lost everyone. The Germans began rounding people

up, chaos broke loose, and I was separated from my entire family. I was fifteen years

old and I never saw them again. We were moved in trucks to the railroad where we

were loaded one hundred at a time into cattle cars. Everyone was panicked and

crying. I saw an opening at the top of the car and convinced the others to help me

get out. I made it through the opening but fell to the tracks unconscious. I don't know

how long I remained that way, but, when I awoke, I made my way back to my town,

to friends of my parents, who still remained in their factory as supervisors and they

took me in. The Gestapo then began to liquidate all the illegal workers from this

factory, but left fifteen of us to serve the ones that remained. Eventually the fifteen

of us were sent to Plaszow in Krakow and from there to Auschwitz Birkenau. In

Auschwitz. Dr. Mengele chose me to go "to the right." Those sent "to the left" were

immediately gassed. Those of us who went to the right had our heads shaved, were

tattooed, and were made to labor. Some were then sent to the gas chambers, but I

was not. In 1944 I was sent to work in a munitions factory in Villisca. Germany and

from there to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. In May 1945, the Russian army

liberated us. I went to Prague and there found that all of my family had perished.

Having no one at all, I traveled to Austria, where I found employment applied for a

visa for either Canada, Palestine, or the United States, and met my husband. In 1948

we received visas to the United States United States. We arrived in February 1949.

We owned nothing at all. We had only ten dollars in our pockets. In the background

of our portrait we have chosen to place a photograph of the Statue of Liberty.


54

Manek

I was born in Krakow, Poland. My family was in the textile business. In 1939 the

Nazis invaded Poland, and I was f orced to wear the Star of David on my arm. In

1941 I moved to a ghetto, established by the Nazis for the Jews. In 1944 I was

rounded up with six thousand other Jews, placed on a cattle car, and sent to

Mauthausen, a work camp where I was beaten. I was sent to work in a factory making

German Tiger tanks and then forced to march to Gunskirken, Austria. May of 1945

brought liberation by the Americans. I was sent finally to a deportation camp in Linz.

I found out in that place that all of my family had been annihilated. I met my wife in

Hart, Austria, and we married in 1948. I worked as an accountant for the American

Distribution committee and thus received visas. That is how we came to the United

States.


55

Wilma Bulkin Siegel, MD


56

Documents

Survivors and Liberators