The Liberated

For 21 Shoa survivors, a synagogue’s tribute
is a chance to pass on the lessons of the past

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

In May, 1941, Lea Berger went to visit her father in a French prison with her aunt. She was nine years old. “We paid one of the guards to let him come to see us,” she recalled. And during that visit, he gave Lea a gift she still has. “He gave me a beautiful tower he made himself. It says, ‘Souvenir from May 1941.’ Underneath, it has his barrack number.” In June 1942 he was sent to Auschwitz. In August 1942, he was murdered there, Berger told NJ Jewish News.
This past week, 21 Holocaust survivors, including Berger, were honored as an Orthodox synagogue in West Orange marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in 1945.

More than 500 people attended the 39th annual dinner of Congregation Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob & David, held March 27 at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark. Among the guests were New Jersey acting Gov. Richard Codey and West Orange Mayor John McKeon.

Also honored were synagogue members Harold Dershowitz, who was awarded the Keter Shem Tov award, and Linda and Avi Laub, who received the Young Leadership Award.

The Orthodox synagogue said the time was right to honor Holocaust survivors, recall their suffering, and, perhaps most importantly, pay tribute to the lives they made when they emerged from hiding into new lives in America.

“This is something we have wanted to do for a long time. But the group has been reluctant to open up and talk about their experiences,” said synagogue president Michael Luxenberg. “Kids don’t have an understanding of what happened. Even we do not have a full understanding. We had to make something that could convey what happened.”

Ultimately, he explained, “we decided to focus not so much on the past and the ugly parts of the past but on what happened afterward: how people did more than just survive, how they built shuls and schools.”

A few of the survivors shared their stories with New Jersey Jewish News, including two who were too young at the time to remember much on their own. Several said the memories were still too painful to share. A conglomeration of their memories from before the Holocaust, at the onset of the war, and of rebuilding lives after liberation were presented in a slide show during the formal part of the evening, with three children of survivors narrating.

Dr. Samuel Kaye, a local pediatrician, was “three or four” when the Germans came to his town in Poland, he told NJJN. “We were put in a ghetto, but my mother knew the Germans would come to get us. So she insisted on building a hiding place under our home. Every night they were digging when they came home at night. The problem was what to do with the dirt. They made flowerbeds and the Germans never caught on.”

One night the Germans did come. “We hid in the hiding place. It was very narrow and very long. We were there a week or two. But my mother knew sooner or later they would find us, so we ran into the woods. The [other] adults did not want me to go along. They felt I would be a hindrance to them. Kids can’t run fast; they cry. But my mother told them if I didn’t go, she wouldn’t go.”

Kaye and his mother were among a group of 10-20 people hiding in the woods, with little food or clothing. “We were always one step ahead of the Germans,” he said, “who were afraid to come into the woods — they were afraid there were Russian partisans there.”

Kaye said he remembers that the only person who did not survive was an old woman. “I remember a 15-year-old girl with us and some older people. To me everyone looked old, but they were probably in their 30s or 40s. My mother was 22.” After the war, he came with his mother to Newark. “Since 1949, I was a Newark boy.”

A friend once suggested that Dr. Kaye, now 66, became a pediatrician because he wanted to save the children.

“I imagine it’s true,” he said.

Frances Gruber was only two years old when she entered the Vilna Ghetto. Through her father’s arrangements, the family snuck out of the ghetto and went into the bunker of a friend who happened to be a Polish count. From there, they hid in barns. At one point, her father traded her mother’s warm winter coat for a hiding place.

While Gruber remembers little, she does recall her father lifting her up in the barns to see the light. And she watched Russian soldiers kill a group of German soldiers “in front of my eyes.” Mostly, she said, “I remember terrible fear; even after we came to the United States. I’d see a cowboy movie on TV — when there was shooting, I would jump.”

Gruber’s family was one of only a handful of families to come through the Holocaust with each person alive. She speaks of the ordeal rarely, she said — mostly on Pesach, to her family. She is married to David Gruber, whose family survived in Siberia, where they were sent when the war began.

After her father’s arrest and murder, Lea Berger continued to live with her mother and younger brother in their Paris apartment. But her mother was very sick and eventually, she sent both Lea and her brother to be cared for in a Jewish home for children. One day in 1943, when she was 11 and her brother was six, she recalled, “the French gendarmes came and said they would take all the children for a picnic. I said to my brother, ‘We are not going.’ My brother said, ‘I want to go; I want to go on a picnic.’ I said no. Don’t ask me why I said no. I don’t really know. So we hid under a desk — the desks there were closed in the front. All the kids left and all the people, and there was nobody there. I took the star off my coat and we went on the subway and went home to see my mother.”

Berger’s mother hired a woman to take her and her brother to hide in the mountains, where they spent the rest of the war, from 1943 until 1945. After the war, Berger returned to Paris, but there were no friends or family left there. She learned that when the war was nearly over, her mother ran out of money to pay the concierge at her apartment. He turned her into the police and she was killed at Auschwitz.

As for the children at the Jewish home, not one returned from the picnic.

Also honored by AABJ&D were Barry Berger, Ziva Crane, Aaron Frank, Evelyn and Harold Frank, Moshe Furer, Karla Gross, Inge Kahn, Lou Kallus, Sara Katz, Toby Katz, Judith Moskovitz, Hella Novick, Ruben Pizem, Lori and Irving Raskin, and Paul Raskin.

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.