For all the music and food and embracing and picture-taking, they could have been at a wedding or a bar mitzvah. But the thousands of people who gathered in Washington yesterday, under soaring white tents that stretched half a block along 15th Street, were celebrating the miracle of their survival.
Instead of flowers, the tables under the tents were adorned with one- and two-word markers: Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gurs. And as their children looked on, as their grandchildren listened in, these men and women, targeted by Adolf Hitler simply because they were Jews, retraced the dark paths that led them out of the Holocaust.
Dannielle Ruben offers grandmother Milla Tenenbaum a supportive hug. As a young girl, Tenenbaum was hidden from the Nazis in a pickle barrel in her home town in Poland.
(Michael Lutzky -- The Washington Post)
|
|
"You're Buchenwald? Hello, Buchenwald! I'm Buchenwald, too!" one balding survivor said to another, a broad grin splitting his face. The men, strangers until that moment but members of the same scarred family, held each other. One rolled up his shirt-sleeve. "Want to see a memory?" he asked, exposing the tattooed numbers on his arm.
The reunion, across the street from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was organized as part of a tribute on the 10th anniversary of the museum's existence. It was designed to encourage connections and recollections on the most personal level. Speeches and dignitaries were few, and only in mid-afternoon did the crowd pause as one: to hear the words of fellow survivor Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate who has worked for decades to push the Holocaust to the forefront of the world's conscience.
"No one is more prone to be filled with gratitude than we," he declared. "We watch a child, ours, and we see our parents. And we will give that child all that was taken from us."
Yet Wiesel's words went beyond gratitude. "Surrounded by your children and grandchildren, do you feel joy in your hearts?" he asked. "Of course you do. But there is sadness also. . . . Close your eyes and see the invisible faces of those we left behind or have left us behind. As witnesses, your presence and our presence here today is the answer to their silent question: We have kept our promise. We have not forgotten you."
Yesterday, throughout the museum, there were moments of joy, laughter, tears and pain.
Sitting at a bank of computers in a small room downstairs, people pulled up familiar names and faces in the museum's massive survivors registry, while down the hall, second and third generations started tape recorders and interviewed their elders about their memories.
Some, touring the museum for the first time, struggled as they walked through the museum's austere exhibits. Others, even 60 years later, were searching for details, for people, to fill in the past.
A long line of boards allowed them to post messages.
"Anyone who remembers Jakob Lipner, Herschel Unger, Nusha Unger -- all from Bedzin -- please call . . . " one posting requested.
"Looking for Rumkowski orphans, Lodz ghetto . . . " another card specified.
And another, which a woman named Miriam Manko left under the heading of "Bergen-Belsen," said simply: "I survived."
Arnold Newman of Westchester County, N.Y., reluctantly revisited the sweep of events that annihilated his family and so many others in his small town of Kowal, Poland. On his first trip to the museum, he stared at the gate that once marked the entrance to Auschwitz, rehearing the music that played as the cattle cars arrived.
"I'm still alive," he said. "That's the witness. The witness to what they tried to do."
When they got to the boxcar that is part of one of the exhibits, Newman told his daughter-in-law that he did not want to approach it.
"I see it," he said, "I start to cry."
But the tears flowed anyway as he recalled the 1962 death of his brother, the only one of his 13 siblings to make it out of the camps.
"You come back here, you see these things, you remember everything," he wept. To his left, his son, Steven, draped an arm around his shoulder. To his right, his grandson, Jared, did the same.
In the white marble Hall of Remembrance, Marsha Glass sat with her daughter, Miriam Kuchinsky. She had wanted to light some of the hundreds of memorial candles lining the walls. But other survivors had passed through earlier in the day, and all the candles were burning.
So Glass picked a quiet spot near the section identified as "Treblinka," the death camp where her mother, sister and nieces were gassed. She wondered aloud why she had been lucky enough to hide with non-Jewish Poles near her home town of Bialystock while the others had perished.
Glass, 77, had never come to the museum before. Never has she given an oral history or made copies of her old photographs to add to the official chronicling of the millions of lives lost. She now pledges to make those efforts back home in Dallas. "There's not much time left," she said.
As she sat with her daughter, a worker pushed a cleaning cart along the long flickering rows, spraying water on each flame. So many survivors wanted to light candles that the museum had made the unusual decision to extinguish them every hour or so. Now we can do it, Mom, Kuchinsky said. Come on, here's our chance.
The women stood close together and illuminated more than 20 candles, starting at the section under the camp name of Sobibor and stretching nearly to Treblinka.
For Peshe, her mother. For Moshe, her father.
For her siblings: Hele, Tupe, Itka, Yosef, Mike, Tzile.
For her brother-in-law, her nieces.
For her husband's entire family.
She is not Jewish and has no direct connection to the Holocaust. But when flight attendant Linda Russell read a newspaper item about the gathering a few weeks ago, she was consumed with a desire to take part.
She reasoned that she could use the flight privileges of her Alaska Airlines job to escort a survivor or two to the event at no charge. All she had to do was find someone who wanted to go.
A 91-year-old survivor who lives in the same retirement home as Russell's mother said she wasn't up to it. She suggested another woman, who also declined, and gave Russell another name. That person, too, said no.
Then Russell's son remembered a Holocaust education program he had participated in at school in Seattle. His teacher introduced Russell to Leo Hymas, 77, who as a young American machine-gun operator helped liberate the Buchenwald death camp in 1945.
Hymas has been lecturing about the horrors of the camps in schools for eight years. Before yesterday, he had met four survivors who were at Buchenwald at the war's end. Yesterday, he met and hugged and was embraced by many more.
"At first I was disappointed, because I wanted to have this direct connection with the experience," Russell said. But after watching Hymas share memories with survivor after survivor, "It's almost like you feel it tenfold."
Joseph Goetz of San Diego and Leonard Gordon of Silver Spring did not immediately recognize each other. After more than half a century, the two men, now white-haired and slowed by age, had to look hard to find the familiar as they met again at the entrance to the reunion tent.
"He was much taller" back then, laughed Goetz, 80. The proof was the photographs he handed the 78-year-old Gordon, which showed them in Italy after the war. Gordon, who had been at Dachau, was left with a brother and sister; Goetz, who hid in a Polish forest with partisan fighters, found absolutely no one. He was the sole Jewish survivor from his Polish town of Szczucin. "No one came back," he said. From Italy, both men immigrated to the United States and then, except for two brief occasions, lost contact.
When Goetz decided to attend the museum tribute, "maybe, I says, maybe it's a chance to meet Leonard." In the tent, they talked, introducing families. His friendship with Gordon those many years ago helped save him, Goetz said later. Totally alone in the world, "I was wandering around. I would talk to myself: 'Who am I?' What's my name?' In order to survive after the war, we tried to cling to somebody. We were more than friends. We were more than brothers."
"If you had to write a note, one note, Pop, for future generations, what would you write?"
Albert Rosen quietly regarded Merle Rosen, his daughter-in-law.
"That is a big question," he said.
As a tape recorder captured his words, he mused. About the Polish town of Radom, where he'd grown up and married his childhood sweetheart. About the camp of Czestochowa, where both were liberated. About his return to Radom, where the neighbors "weren't too happy to see us. . . . Because they all took something from us -- they robbed the houses."
He and his wife paid a mail truck driver to smuggle them into Germany, where their son, Jack -- Merle's husband -- was born in the American zone of Stuttgart. Only recently has the Baltimore resident shared such details of the war.
"Nah, I didn't like to talk about it," he said. "I was ashamed. I said, 'My God, why have they done this all to us?' I'm not dirty. I look like everyone else. Why would someone want to take my life because I'm a Jew?"
So the answer to his daughter-in-law's question? "What if you were writing it now to [grandsons] Greg and Paul?" she prompted him.
"To remember the Holocaust, that it happened," Rosen, 85, replied. "That one human being can destroy another human being."
The formal program was over. U.S. soldiers from the military units that liberated the death camps had presented the colors. Wiesel, museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield and others had spoken. A time capsule had been buried.
The musicians began playing a Yiddish tune. On the dais, Benjamin Meed, founder of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, started to sing:
"Zog nisht keynmol az du gayst dem letzten veg."
(Never say this is the final road for you.)
From the last of the crowded rows of white folding chairs, Jenny Eisenstein, 75, stood up and threw her head back to join him.
"Ven himlen blayene farshteln bloye teg."
(When leaden skies will cover over skies of blue.)
The tune commemorates the struggle of Resistance fighters in the Jewish ghettos. Eisenstein and her friend Rose Rechnic, 77, learned it at Auschwitz from girls arriving from the Lodz ghetto.
They sang it on marches and in the barracks, and Eisenstein came from Toronto to sing it at the Lincoln Memorial at a 1983 survivors' gathering.
Yesterday, the two women took up the anthem again, first in Yiddish, then in English, surrounded by Rechnic's two daughters and their husbands, five grandchildren and three spouses, and her 3-month-old great-granddaughter.
"For the hour that we've longed for is so near.
Our step beats out the message: We are here.
We're here, our seeds are planted in the land.
We're here although they thought we'd die at their command.
We're here with all the memories of the ones we've left behind.
We're here to love again. To live,
Begin again. To give. We're here."
