I don’t have any friendships with survivors, but I’ve met several. The last one that I met was a Frenchman- he was captured because of his Resistence work and put in a camp in the latter days of the war.
I know many, although I never really knew my paternal grandparents, who survived but died before I was born or too young to know about such things. (I’m named for a great-aunt who died with all of her kids in one of the camps.) I get a few stories from another great-aunt, although she doesn’t really like to talk about it.
Otherwise, I grew up with the Holocaust as a fact of life, since most of my friends had survivor grandparents, and many of the older people in my synogogue survived the war. I’ve probably known several dozen survivors in all, and I feel sad somehow that my kids probably won’t know many at all - they’re old now, and dying out.
I know one. She absolutely refuses to speak about it. I can undersatnd her motives, but on the other hand, there’s a great deal of history to be learned. Unfortunaltey, I don’t have the degree of confidence with her that would allow me to ask her about the subject.
About three years ago I helped a friend of mine move from Miami Beach. That was the first time I saw the tatoo on the forearm. It really made an impression. That day I saw about 12 concentration camp survivors. There’s a lot of them in Miami Beach.
Don’t know any survivors, but my maternal grandfather was a POW in Europe for a short while during the war. Joined the army, was shot through I think the torso, captured, liberated, and returned to the US, all by the time he was 19. My mom says he hardly ever talked about it or the things he’d seen, but he never used a gun in later years. His sons went hunting and stuff, but he never would because for him, guns were made for killing people, and he didn’t want any part of that.
I know a few concentration camp survivors.
And my dad (who was about 5 years old at the time) missed being sent to the camps through dumb luck: his parents and grandmother had tickets and were supposed to leave on the St. Louis, but didn’t make the ship for reasons that have never been made entirely clear to me. His grandfather had already been sent to the camps.
As a result, my grandfather (who was Italian) managed to smuggle my grandmother and my dad (who were Jewish) into Italy. They had to live like Anne Frank did, from what I understand. My dad still won’t talk much about his experiences which I understand but regret.
Fenris
Every year I wind up the school year with sigh a holocaust unit. Not exactly the most uplifting way to end the year, but, it has to be done. Today I’m showing “Anne Frank Remembered” to my classes.
This film follows up on what happened to Anne Frank after the family was arrested. We (my 8th graders) just finished reading “The Diary of Anne Frank.” This film shows people who knew the Franks in Amsterdam, and others who met them in the camps. It’s narrated by Kenneth Branagh and Glenn Close. It’s a good way to finish studying this book. I remember when I was in school, nobody knew anything about what happened to Anne, but here you find out the painful truth.
As for me, I used to work in a hospital, and I’ll never forget one time I had to bring a woman down for an obligatory chest X-ray. As I helped her into the wheelchair, I saw a dark blue tattoo on her forearm–a long number. She quickly pulled the sleeve of her robe over to cover it up, but we really made eye contact as she did so. I feel like there was a trace of shame/embarrasment/anger in her eyes, as if I was somehow prying into her history by knowing about that number.
I was only about 21 at the time, pretty clueless, but the impact of that look we exchanged has stayed with me, and resonates a little more with each passing year.
My Father-in-law’s whole family were in concentration camps. They were Germans that were placed there by Tito. I am amazed at the stories that he tells. I did not know until I met them that people other than Jews were placed in camps. I think it is a miracle that all of his family was placed in different camps and they all survived and all managed to find each other after the war. They were all little kids when they were separated from their family members and none of them know their real birthdays and several of them have health problems. He has told me that there was nothing growing as far as the eye could see because if so much as a blade of grass grew, they all fought for it to eat.
I lived in Germany when I was a kid, and we once took a field trip to a camp called, I believe, Struthof. One of the smaller ones.
They had this place decked out to look like it did during the war, except one barracks was turned into a museum; pictures, artifacts, etc. There was a field off to the side of the camp, filled with rows and rows and rows of graves.
My mother tells me I had nightmares for two weeks after that.
But we’re both glad I got to go.
My grandmother, who died when I was 4, was a survivor. My grandfather was also from Ukraine but he had a great story about avoiding the camps. At first he was a mechanic for the Russian Air Force (a rather pathetic group, they flew what they called “sewing machines”), so he retreated with them. He then went down through the Caucasus Moutains out to Israel. He ended up helping the RAF in some degree, but he wasn’t very useful as a mechanic because he hadn’t worked on Hurricanes or Spitfires, just the sewing machines. Still, he knew airplanes and went to Egypt with them, picked up some English, and managed to become an ATC here until Ronald Reagan fired him (this was before Bitburg). However, before he came to the US he went back to Europe to help people who survived the Holocaust, which is where he met my grandmother. They went to England for a few years and got married there before coming here. They didn’t go back to Ukraine because a) they were Ukranian AND Jewish, the fact they had lived that long under Stalin was a feat in and of itself and b) she knew she had no family left, he was afraid to find out. Luckily, he has a brother and a sister who made it through, one in Florida, the other in Israel, while my grandmother had a sister who made it here as well, and I’ve met all of these people. Also, our Hebrew School has an excellent program in which students bring in their grandparents to talk about the Holocaust, so I’ve met many others.
My wife’s grandmother escaped from Austria on a Kindertransport and eventually made her way to New York. She never expected to see her family again, but was extremely lucky and was eventually reunited with all of them several years later. My stepfather was a US Army captain stationed in West Germany in the years immediately after the war. He helped Jews and anyone else who wanted to escape from East Germany.
I have a distant relative who was in the camps. He’s in his 90s now, and is such a happy, charming, and cheeky bloke that it boggles my mind to think of what he’s been through. His strength of character really puts me in awe of him.
My great grandparents fled the Ukraine and Poland shortly before WWI, I believe. My great grandmother left the Ukraine under a pile of hay in the back of a wagon. She was a young teen at the time. She died when I was 10 or so… I wish I had the knowledge and interest I do now then.
I have a great-uncle who lived in Shanghai as a British subject who was put in a concentration camp by the Japanese (sorta like the movie Empire of the Sun). He doesn’t really talk about it much; I can imagine an experience like that can be indescribably traumatic for a child.
My grandparents spent WWII in labor camps. My grandfather told me about the tanks rolling into his town as they were coming out of church and the German soldiers rounding up all the men and boys. One of his brothers hid somehow and didn’t get taken away then. He didn’t hear from him again until after he immigrated to the US in 1948. His brother was living with friends in Canada, but they fell out of touch due to a misunderstanding with the people my great-uncle was living with. My grandfather hasn’t heard from his brother despite many attempts to look for him since the 1950s. He told me once about seeing one of his friends from his village worked to death in the camp. My sister interviewed him about his experiences for a class project once. Afterward, she heard one of the girls in the class poking fun of our grandfather’s voice. She slapped the girl.
My grandmother hasn’t talked much about her experiences. The most she ever told me was that since she grew up on a farm two officers in the camp made her groom and care for their personal riding horses. If they weren’t happy with her work, they beat her. She said she was terrified everytime she saw them.
A friend of my father owned a restuarant in the town where I grew up. My dad explained to me, when I was about 12, that this fellow was in a concentration camp during WWII. Number tattooed on his arm and everything.
This chap was very willing to talk about his experiences. I believe, as a way to help future generations keep from repeating the sins of the past.
God bless him… don’t know if he’s still alive though.
The father and uncle of my best friend growing up both were camp survivors, I remember seeing the tatoos and vaguely knowing what it meant (at seven) but the enormity of what they lived through didn’t hit me until I was an adult. They were reluctant to talk about it, but they didn’t hide the tatoos, it was just one of those things you knew better then to ask about.
Keith
You betcha. One of my former neighbors is a lovely woman who survived Auschwitz, moved here to Dixie with her husband, whom she met in the camp and they started a deli here. I still have her recipe for Liptauer Cheese Spread that said was her mother’s from Vienna. She never spoke much about the experience to me.
The rabbi of the shule (synagogue) that I attended when I was younger is a survivor. His whole family (grandparents, parents, siblings except for 2 brothers) perished. He managed to get out of a locked shule which had been set on fire by the Nazis. He went from Poland to Russia, managed to stay out of the Nazi’s clutches, and eventually made his way to America.
We went to a banquet a few weeks ago celebrating his 50th year as rabbi of the shule. An absolutely extraordinary person.