At exhibit on Shoa survivors, memories of suffering and triumph

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

They came by the hundreds into the crowded atrium at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany, partly to bear witness to the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust but mostly to pay tribute to the men and women who managed to survive years of genocide, relocate in America, and pass on their cautionary histories to new generations.

The occasion was opening day of From Memory to History, a six-week exhibition of survival stories told in photo montages, videotape, words, and artifacts. Curated by the Holocaust Council of UJC MetroWest NJ, with the cooperation of the Jewish Historical Society and Marilyn Kushner, PhD, a curator with the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibit includes testimony from 49 survivors and prisoners of war.

Flanked by his daughter, Renee Heyman Nachbar, and her three children, Fred Heyman of Morristown glanced at a showcase filled with the memorabilia of his own life and spotted the domestic passport he was once forced to carry as a teenager in Berlin.

“This was my ID card. It had a big ‘J’ on it. We just could not do what other people could do,” he told his family. “Toward the end of the war, when the Allied bombing was going on, it destroyed the building we were living in, and we moved to another part of the city. We were hoping nobody would stop us, because as soon as they would stop us they would say, ‘Show me your ID card,’ and that was the only ID card we had. We assimilated. I’d call that hiding. It’s kind of like living in the Bronx and you disappeared to Queens, where nobody knows you, hoping you don’t find somebody who knows you.”

Somehow, the Heyman family managed to live undetected in the German capital throughout the war.

“I was spared going to a concentration camp and came out alive,” Heyman told his daughter and grandchildren. “There are people today who deny the Holocaust ever happened. These kinds of exhibits and these kinds of stories will take it forward into the next generation and say, ‘These things did happen.’”

“I am very happy and proud that my grandfather and my other family were able to stay alive when these horrible times were happening,” said his 13-year-old granddaughter Danielle.

Her mother added, “My father and his family had a horrific story they lived through in Germany and were amazingly brave to live through what they lived through. They were very much the lucky ones. It is truly a miracle they survived and we are here to tell the story.”

Yet Heyman, who immigrated to New Jersey and had a successful career with AT&T, is unsure whether that story is being heard and remembered well enough. “We have many other genocides — Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo. It’s happening all over,” he said. “I am afraid we are not learning a lesson from it, but this exhibit is attempting to teach tolerance.”

“Some of us have learned a lesson but most of us have not. The genocide continues,” said Harry Ettlinger, who lived in Karlsruhe, Germany, where his parents owned a women’s clothing store that was forced into bankruptcy by the Nazis. Although his father’s mother starved to death in a concentration camp in 1942, much of his family managed to avoid incarceration.

“By sheer luck, my maternal grandparents were able to come here,” said Ettlinger. “My grandfather was arrested on Kristallnacht” — the Nov. 9-10, 1938, night of pogroms in Germany and Austria that many regard as the beginning of the Shoa — “in Germany but because he was 62 years old, they didn’t send him to a concentration camp.”

Standing beside Ettlinger was Jennifer Bernardes, a 15-year-old high school student from Newark who “adopted” him as a part of the Adopt a Survivor program pairing young people with Holocaust survivors. “He is like my third grandfather, and that’s really cool,” she said. “Like any documentary on the Holocaust, you become very moved by this exhibit, but because Harry and I have taken it to a much more personal level, it has a really big impact on me.”

Ettlinger beamed at the teenager.

“We recognize young people who go out of their way to do good things for other young people. That to me is a lesson of the Holocaust,” he said.

Forced to wear a star
George Rich of Short Hills looked at the montage of memorabilia from his own life. “It is emotional because I see my grandparents and others who died in Auschwitz. It is a heartbreaker.”

Yet Rich described himself as “one of the lucky ones. I was in the ghetto in Budapest when the Germans occupied Hungary.”

He recalled being forced to wear a yellow star at the age of 12. “I remember it extremely well. Once we took off the yellow star and went to the movies. We were kids and we were risking arrest.”

His mother was arrested but managed to escape from a train en route to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.

“Then we were saved by Raoul Wallenberg,” the Swedish diplomat credited with saving more than 100,000 Jews from extermination and who disappeared after being taken into custody by the Russians.

“I don’t remember my parents talking about this much when I was a child,” said Rich’s daughter, Irina Rich Langer of New Rochelle, as she stood beside him.

“We were in total denial for 30 years,” Rich explained. “Then I realized that our children have to know about it. There are too many deniers, and they have to be countermanded by our witnessing.”

Yet even as he bore witness, Rich said, he remained a pessimist. “I don’t think we’ve learned anything. We’ve seen examples of mass killings since 1945, and it doesn’t matter whether they were Jews or not Jews,” he said.

As they peered through glass cases filled with peoples’ personal belongings and grim artifacts that included the emblematic triangles and stars of David that victims of the Nazi state were forced to wear, two sisters made a startling discovery.

In one corner of a showcase was a child’s battered book bag that belonged to their mother, Stella Geller, now a resident of West Orange. Before Geller’s father and mother were seized from their home and shipped off to their deaths in Auschwitz, he gave their daughter the bag he had made by hand. She was hidden and raised by a series of French Christian families and kept the bag as a bittersweet memento.

“I never saw this before,” said Perri Geller-Clark of Cinnaminson. “There are some things she held onto. She never had much, so I’m amazed she held onto this.”

“I’m incredibly proud of my mother,” added her sister, Katje Spier of Florham Park. “She was the sole survivor in her family from Paris. She was a child who was hidden in a number of homes after her parents sent her away at age eight. Then she came to the United States after the war.”

As the audience rose from their seats in the Bleiwise Conference Center to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the official opening-day ceremonies, Louis Loevsky of North Caldwell snapped to attention and saluted the flag.

Dressed in the second lieutenant’s uniform he had worn 60 years earlier, Loevsky spoke lightly of his own survival during World War II. “I was a guest of the Germans for over 13 months,” he said jokingly.

Loevsky was a navigator on an American bomber that was shot down over Berlin in March of 1944. He was captured and became a prison of war.

“There was not sufficient food,” he said. “The Germans claimed the American gangsters had bombed and strafed Red Cross trains and had put us on half-rations and quarter-rations. We were in our 20s, but we didn’t talk about women, we didn’t dream about women, and we didn’t think about women. Food was number one. But the people who endured the Holocaust — we had it bad but they had it worse.”

Gina Lanceter of Montclair, chair of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, whose parents died in the camp at Majdanek in 1940, reminded audience members it was their “sacred duty to preserve this remarkable legacy and to educate young people to prevent this heinous crime from ever happening again.” She said the council is collecting testimonies on videotape and will issued them on DVD and in book form.

William Helmreich, a professor of sociology and Judaic studies at the City University of New York, collected many such testimonies in a book called Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America.

In a keynote address, Helmreich told the overflow audience of a request echoed by many sons and daughters of survivors. “Yes, our parents had problems after the war, but they rebuilt their lives,” the professor quoted his subjects as saying. “They established communities, they raised families, and they contributed mightily to the mosaic of the American-Jewish community. It would be a tragedy and a travesty if they were remembered only as people who were chronically depressed.”

As if to underscore that very point, seven survivors took to the stage moments after Helmreich ended his address.

In poignant Yiddish, accompanied by harpist Beth Robinson and vocalist Elana Safar, both of Livingston, they burst into a song called “Zog Nit Keyn Mol,” known in English as the Partisan Hymn.

Written in the Vilna ghetto by 23-year-old poet Hirsh Glick one year before his death in 1944, the song spread underground among resistance fighters in hideouts and concentration camps, its lyric conveying a message of defiance: “Never say you’ve come to the end of the way, though leaden skies blot out the light of day. The hour we all long for will surely appear. Our steps will thunder with the words ‘We are here!’”

The exhibit, on display until March 7, is open to the public Sundays through Fridays.

Groups from schools, churches, synagogues, and other institutions are encouraged to schedule guided visits by calling 973-929-3067 or e-mailing sappel@ujcnj.org.

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com