by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

April 16, 2009

Clara Kramer remembers the dark, dripping crawl space under a neighbor’s house in Zolkiew, Poland, where she and 17 others hid for 18 months beginning in December 1942. Terrified every minute that the Nazi soldiers outside would discover her, the last thing 15-year-old Clara wanted to do was keep a diary, but her mother insisted.

“What’s the point?” she said she remembers asking her mother. “We’re going to die anyway.”

Her mother replied, “Then at least people will know what happened to us.”

Kramer left her childhood behind in that grim hiding place, but she never forgot her mother’s words, nor the imperative to let others know what happened to her and others caught up in the nightmare of the Holocaust.

Almost seven decades later she remains committed to telling the story, sharing her experiences with others, and through her philanthropy supporting a range of commemorative efforts, including founding the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University in Union and its annual commemoration for Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Now those efforts include a memoir based on the diary she kept so long ago. Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival (Ecco), will have its official American release next week, on April 21, Yom Hashoa.

The response to the book — which was coauthored with Stephen Glantz and published in Britain last year — has been so enthusiastic that editions are coming out in Poland, Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Canada, Brazil, and Australia

Interviewed earlier this month in her elegant home in Elizabeth, Kramer looked with wonderment at the volume in her hands. She never predicted such an outcome.

“I wasn’t very good at writing,” she confessed. “I loved books so much, when I learned to read, I immediately gave all my dolls to my little sister. I read all the time. But writing wasn’t my thing.”

What she has produced, however, is a riveting account of what she and her parents and the other hidden families endured. As educated and relatively affluent merchants, they had had a life filled with the rich comforts of stable, close-knit community. The war stripped all that away.

She tells how three families were cloistered together in that claustrophobic crawl space, entirely dependent for food, water, sanitation, and protection on the Becks, the ethnically German family who had taken possession of the house above them. Thanks to the Becks, 18 Jews survived. Only one life was lost: Clara’s little sister, Mania, who ran outside in a panic when a fire next door threatened the house. She was captured and killed.

Kramer’s lifelong gratitude to the Becks has resulted in their being honored as Righteous Among the Nations. So generous have the Kramers been in financial support, and so close are their bonds, the Becks’ grandchildren regard Clara and her husband, Sol, also a survivor, as family.

It was Valentin Beck who brought Clara the school notebooks in which she kept her diary. He also brought her a blue pencil he had sharpened to a point with his penknife. By the time their ordeal ended, the pencil was worn down to a stump, but what she wrote with it never faded, and a reproduction of those meticulously written lines adorns the outside and inside covers of the new book.

Kramer said she came close to destroying the diary. Having survived the war, she and her parents were forced to flee again to avoid anti-Semitic pogroms that were erupting across Poland. Pretending to be laborers from Turkey en route from Germany, they made their way across the border with Czechoslovakia.

“We were told to destroy any papers we had on us that might show we were Polish,” she said. She was about to destroy the four notebooks when her mother stopped her. “She said, ‘Over my dead body.’ She hid two books under her clothes and I hid two under mine.”

Clara met Sol Kramer in a displaced persons camp in Austria. After years in such camps, they managed to reach the newly declared State of Israel. They came to the United States in 1957 and eventually settled in Elizabeth, where they raised their two sons and Sol flourished as a builder and developer. They became active in the community, and Clara — with the constant support of her husband — took up the challenge of keeping alive the story of the Holocaust. She did it not just for those who died — like her beloved sister — but also for those who survived but could not bring themselves to speak about it.

Even for her, it wasn’t easy.

“None of us wore it on our sleeves,” she said. “I didn’t avoid the subject, but I didn’t ever speak much about it to my children. None of us did. And I was not invited to speak by one single Jewish organization.”

Out of the vault

For years, her diaries lay in a bank vault, safe but unseen. And then in the 1970s, Kramer realized that her sons and their children would never be able to read them unless she translated the Polish to English. She undertook that task, and then presented the original to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Three years ago, Polish writer and filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) read the original volumes and suggested they be turned into a book. Kramer agreed, and author Glantz was commissioned to work with her. They labored together, taking excerpts from her diary and further delving into her extraordinarily sharp memory to fill in the background events, with all their tension, despair, courage, and unexpected moments of joy.

Inevitably, Kramer’s book is drawing comparisons with Anne Frank’s famous diary. They have much in common, but, Kramer pointed out, “They were upstairs in an attic, with light and air. We were in darkness, under the house.”

But the greatest difference is the outcome — the fact that Kramer survived. For her, that has meant a lifetime of obligation to speak out for those who perished.

Writing the book was hard; it took long months of re-immersion in agonizing memories, but Kramer said it was unquestionably worthwhile for the sake of producing a lasting record that now seems likely to be read around the world.

“This is not about me,” she said. “Our generation is going. Who will be around to tell our story?” She plans to carry on giving talks and accompanying busloads of students to the Washington museum for as long as she can. And now she has the comfort of knowing that when that becomes too much for her, her book will carry on her work.

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‘For our little writer’

Beck had made a dancing bear for little Igo and Ala gave Klarunia one of her stuffed dolls. Beck had packs of cigarettes for the men and in no time at all the packs were ripped open, matches lit, and the room full of smoke, the men puffing and sucking like there was no tomorrow, content, full, drunk, and happy. Ala had given Mania one of her combs, which she immediately put in her hair. She ran to the mirror to see how it looked.

Beck gave me a package wrapped in newspaper. It was flat and at first I hoped it might be a book. I was crazy for a new book. I opened it. Inside was a composition book with a black cover and filled with lined paper, just like all the many composition books I had used in all my years in school and never given a thought to.

“For our little writer,” he said. “I know you’ll be a famous writer some day, Clarutchka, I just beg that you only say nice things about me.” Mr. Beck knew that I was keeping a diary and had no book to write in. He also gave me a blue pencil, which he had sharpened to a fine point with his penknife.

— From “A Gift from Mr. Beck,” Clara’s War

***

THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER. The Germans admitted themselves that they gave up Poltava. So something is going on after all. Maybe we will be able to leave this hole soon. God! If Mania would be alive! She was so happy with any bit of good news! She was clinging to life so much! And died so young. It’s thanks to her that we went into hiding. She was begging from the day the Germans came “let’s go into hiding.” I want to live. Mama didn’t want to go because of her asthma but she went on Mania’s insistence. I remember distinctly her words, “I want to live and you have to live for me.”

— From “Days of Awe and Atonement — September 1943,” Clara’s War

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