‘Moral courage’
Brookdale’s Holocaust center screens a film about survivors and saviors

by Norm Oshrin
Special to NJ Jewish News

On film and in person, eight Holocaust survivors shared with an audience at Brookdale Community College what film producer Isaac Dostis described as “personal acts of kindness that helped their emotional lives.”

The survivors, all from Monmouth County, are featured in Dostis’ film Soulsaving: Common Threads of Kindness, which was screened at Brookdale in Lincroft Sept. 13 in a program hosted by the college’s Center for Holocaust Studies.

In the documentary, the survivors recount their rescue stories and describe what Jane Denny, the Holocaust center’s director of education and the film’s narrator, described as “serendipitous moments” and “acts of kindness that saved them.”

“Isaac wanted to put together a film that looked at acts of rescue…, small acts that either for a moment or forever changed the Holocaust experience for the survivor,” explained the center’s executive director Dale Daniels.

“It is too easy to study the evil and the horror of the Holocaust, and we can be diverted from the lessons demonstrating the responsibility and ability of each of us to make a difference in another’s life,” said Daniels. “You don’t have to be a special person to do the right thing and help another.”

In the film, Ruth Rosenfeld of Interlaken recalls how an innkeeper interceded to save her. For Lisabeth Scharf of Middletown, it was an apartment-house superintendent. John Woolf of Marlboro recounted how a fellow concentration camp inmate saved him and his father by sending them to work in a laundry rather than the stone quarry.

One of the more dramatic recollections was related by Abe Chapnick of Howell.

Coming to his rescue was “Willy,” a fellow inmate who was interned at Buchenwald as a political prisoner and who helped Chapnick alter his yellow star of David to identify him as a political prisoner rather than as a Jew.

“He saved my life,” Chapnick said.

“Many of our survivors have incidents like this,” Daniels said, “the premise, of course, being that at any moment in time, each of us can act responsibly to help another.”

Daniels said the film will become part of “To Tomorrow’s Children,” the center’s ongoing program, which is touring libraries and is derived from a book published by the center that offers photographs and stories written by 29 survivors.

Dostis is a playwright who has made previous documentaries on Holocaust themes and, with his wife, Diana Sunrise, runs the Act One Presentations production company. He said he lost 52 family members when the Nazis targeted Greece’s Jewish community.

“My wife and I teach moral courage in schools, churches, and synagogues in New Jersey. That started us off,” he said. “We wondered how were they saved and why were they saved? Once we looked at the goodness of it, through all this depressive era, we began doing work on it. Rescuers, righteous — what did they do, how did they do it?

His conclusion?

“There’s goodness in everything and everywhere,” said Dostis. “We just don’t see it enough.”

For at least one survivor, however, individual acts of kindness do not erase the bitter memories.

“Please don’t visit [Europe],” said Gerard Blumenthal of Manalapan, who, during his days in hiding, served as an altar boy and a shepherd. Rather, he said, “get books and read about it. By going back, you actually support those countries, which are profiting and making money on the blood of the people who didn’t come back.”

Other area residents who shared their survival stories were Helena Flaum of Farmingdale, John Woolf of Marlboro, Liesel Spencer of Matawan, and Manfred Rosenthal of Middletown.