by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

February 5, 2009

Holocaust survivors are sharing their stories with area teens under a new program inspired by similar efforts in neighboring communities.

The Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey is acting as matchmaker, bringing together bar and bat mitzva students with individual survivors, so that the youngsters can talk to and get to know them and learn what happened to them and their families. Some have also invited the survivors to be part of their b’nei mitzva celebrations.

The goal is to have the youngsters learn about the Holocaust and help perpetuate the memories from that tragic time. Who better to learn from than those — a dwindling group — who actually lived through the Shoa?

But it is a delicate process. Felice Maranz, director of the federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council, who is running the “twinning” program, said it’s crucial that the youngsters involved be mature enough to handle the unavoidably disturbing stories these seniors have to tell. Some of the survivors escaped with their families; others lost everyone they knew. All endured enormous dislocation and loss, and the details can be tough for anyone, let alone a young person, to hear.

The process of choosing the participants took a little while to refine, but there are now 10 students who have either been through the program or are currently involved with it. They meet with a survivor about three times, usually accompanied by a parent, and again after that if the participants opt to do so. Some students simply sit and listen; others have taped their sessions. Maranz is hoping to get more people — both survivors and students — involved.

Martin Radley of Westfield is one of the survivors taking part. Born in Germany, he was a teenager when he was shipped out on a Kindertransport, through which thousands of Jewish youngsters left their homes in Nazi-occupied countries to safety in Great Britain. It has been 70 years since he last saw his family. He was taken in by a couple in England. “They used me like a slave, but they gave me a roof over my head,” he said.

A few years later, he went back to Germany with the British Pioneer Corps and served as a translator for a rabbi dealing with the final tragedy of the Shoa — the thousands of people who died of disease and malnutrition in the immediate aftermath of the liberation.

He shared his story with Rachel Miller of Green Brook, a bat mitzva student at Temple Har Shalom in Warren. In their first meeting, Maranz helped the two of them get going. Three times Rachel came with her mother to visit with Radley and his wife, Annette, in their home, where the youngster videotaped their discussions. She gave the Radleys a copy of the tape.

“I enjoyed the experience,” Martin Radley said. “I think it’s a good idea. The children don’t know much about the war, and especially they don’t know about the Kindertransport. It’s useful for them. I told her a lot of stuff that she didn’t know, and she learned a lot.”

‘A miracle of survival’

Enoch Trencher of Union has been working with three different students.

One of them, Matthew Sass of Scotch Plains, celebrated becoming bar mitzva on Dec. 6 at Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains — and Trencher was an honored guest at the event. He has also been invited to the upcoming celebrations for his other “twins” — Scotch Plains residents Andrew Olin, a student at Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains, and Jacob Arkin, a student at Temple Sholom in Fanwood.

Trencher had just celebrated his own bar mitzva when the war broke out. He was sent to 10 different concentration camps before finally being liberated from Theresienstadt, the Czech ghetto/concentration camp, in 1945.

Approaching 83, Trencher said that the memories from six decades ago seldom intrude these days, and he is more focused on the positive. “It is a miracle that I survived,” he said. “Now, we’re in America and thank God my wife and I are alive, and we have our children and our grandchildren.”

But any time he is asked to relate what happened, he has done so willingly. It’s tiring, he said, “but at my age being tired is my life.” He recorded his story for Kean University’s Holocaust Resource Center, for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, and for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He also related his story recently to students at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston.

“It’s repeat, repeat, repeat, but I do it because it’s very important that we never forget, to make sure it never happens again,” he said.

Matthew’s father, Bill, said the experience was deeply moving for Matthew and for his younger sister, Marielle, 11, who accompanied him and their parents on the visits to the Trenchers. Matthew came armed with questions, but once Trencher got going, he didn’t need any prompting. The children sat riveted.

They had learned about the Holocaust at school and at their synagogue, but this was different. Their father said, “I think the moment that brought the reality home most was when he showed us some of the keepsakes he had from his family home, and the number tattooed on his arm. That’s the kind of immediacy you can’t get from any TV documentary or magazine article.”

Trencher was very careful not to shock the children too much. “He told me later that what he told them was the ‘G-rated’ version,” Bill Sass said, “and that he couldn’t tell them everything he had to do to survive.”

Bill and his wife, Rebecca, are determined to keep the sense of connection alive for their children. “When we’re talking at the dinner table — say about the opening up of archives or about someone who is a denier — now we can relate it to this survivor the children know in person. They might not always be in a community with so many Jewish people around them, and if they meet people who deny the Holocaust or who don’t understand why it’s such a big deal to remember it, they’ll be able to share what they learned from meeting Mr. Trencher.”

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