People Who Narrowly Escaped Nazi Horror Gather in Williamstown
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — In her apartment in Israel, Hella Markowsky Drober keeps the yellow Star of David the Nazis forced her to wear as a teenager in Germany.
Walter Rinns keeps the tallit, or prayer shawl, he hid and smuggled out in a German army truck when he, his father and others, were forced to clean out the Torah scrolls and other remnants of their synagogue after it was smashed into wreckage during the violence of Kristallnacht.
Rinns, who formerly had a home in West Stockbridge, said, "We had to clean out the Torah and everything into a big Army truck, then they drove us out into the country and said, 'Now unload it.' But I took one tallit and put it in the rolled up canvas on the truck. My father wore it till he died. Now I wear it. And when I die I will probably give it to a Jewish museum."
Inge-Lore Spicker Wegener, who grew up in Adams, has a red-covered autograph book that her schoolmates and other friends signed, more than 60 years, an ocean and a world away. Spicker Wegener leafed through the book with Edith Iwiansky Strauss-Goldsmith, who had been her school chum.
Looking at the inscriptions, some in a distinctive, no longer used script, she said of one writer, "She perished." Of another, "That was our housekeeper. She took us to the boat."
Eva Ruth Lepehne Rosenfeld keeps the last postcard her father sent her, a postcard saying the next day he would be going on a train and probably would not be able to write her for a while.
These former students at the Jüdischen schule in the Baltic city of Königsberg were among the 16 or so who gathered for a reunion in Williamstown this past weekend. They had either narrowly escaped with their parents and immigrated to America, leaving behind aunts and uncles and grandparents who later perished in the camps, or, if they were caught in a Europe ruled by the genocidal Nazi regime, survived despite harrowing hardships.
Reunion organizer Amely Baer Smith of Williamstown said,"One hundred eighty of us were in the school. It opened in 1935, and we [Jewish children] had to go there after 1936, when the Nazis said Jewish children couldn't go to school with gentile children."
The older children could still go to gymnasium [high school].
"[The Jewish school] was a relief for us," said Smith. "For us it was a haven. Our teachers did a lot for us. And the director, when somebody was emigrating, he'd stretch a thread to keep their heart connected to the rest of us. He survived, and went to Palestine."
At the regular school, anti-Semitism was growing, she said. "Kids kind of shied away from you. It was getting worse and worse."
Smith and her parents left Germany for England in June 1939, and the next year boarded a small ship, part of a convoy braving submarine attack to reach the United States.
"Then, as long as you could get into another country the Germans wanted you to leave," she said. "But it got harder and harder."
Of the 180 students at the school,"many, many didn't make it through the war," she said. "[The Nazis] had a transport from Königsberg. No one knows where they ended up."
Smith, who has often spoken to local schoolchildren about Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, lost many family members, including her grandfather, who perished in Theresienstadt."
I think memories make you feel close," she said of the reunion. "I didn't know everybody, but we grew up under the same circumstances."
Drober, the child of a mixed marriage, was spared the concentration camps that claimed the lives of six million Jews. But she watched her mother and 5-year-old brother die of starvation, and literally led and carried her older sister Rita as they fled to Russia, where their father was sent to Siberia, back to Germany and into Lithuania. The Russian soldiers who liberated Königsberg brought their own brand of terror.
Now, she and Rita, who is not well enough to travel, live in the same apartment building in Israel. At Friday night's dinner at The Williams Inn, Eva Ruth Lepehne Rosenfeld recounted her story — a saga of wanderings and loss, and lives cut short.
Because her grandmother didn't want her parents to move as far away as America, Rosenfeld and her parents left Germany for Genoa, Italy. But Italian dictator Mussolini fell in line with Hitler's genocidal program.
"Things became worse in Italy," she said."My parents lost their business."
Her mother died, and her father was imprisoned.
"I came home from school to the rented room where we lived and friends told me to pack some essentials to take to my father in jail," she said. Once released, he fled to France. "Fishermen took him illegally, at night, with only a knapsack."
Before leaving, her father had arranged for the 12-year-old to stay with friends, a doctor and his wife, who would take her with them to America.
"Four days before the ship was to leave, war broke out and the harbor was closed," she said."I spent four years with people who were not my parents."
They were sent to a small, poor town in the south of Italy for the duration of the war. Afterwards, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to take 1,000 refugees from occupied Italy, the doctor and his wife were rejected, but Rosenfeld was accepted. She and the other refugees were kept at a former military camp near Oswego, N.Y., kept behind barbed wire and unable to leave without permission.
After a few weeks, relatives were allowed to visit, and, she recalled,"I couldn't talk to them. I wasn't a person. I was just a scared little human being."
After a year-and-a-half in the camp, she and the others were allowed to stay in the United States permanently.
"I didn't have a childhood," she said. "Nothing was ever normal in those years. I have four children, and six grandchildren, and I brought them up never knowing what was normal. I still have the last postcard my father sent me from France to Italy. He wrote that the next day he would be going on a train and would probably not be able to write me for a while.
"It wasn't until after the war we found out through the Red Cross that he never made it to the camps. The brother who stayed behind with my grandmother was sent to England. And my grandmother was sent to Theresienstadt, where she perished."
Said Siegfried "Fred" Flatow, "Every one of us is here in defiance of the Nazis who wanted to eliminate us.
"My wife and I went back to Königsberg in 1998. It is now called Kaliningrad, and is part of Russia. There was no sign anywhere that here was a Jewish congregation. It was a depressing experience, a sad experience. I had to go to put certain ghosts in my mind to rest."
Where the [Jewish] cemetery was is now an amusement park, he said. "I think it's hopeless to try to restore the cemetery, because the cemetery is gone. But perhaps we could motivate the Kaliningraders to erect a plaque saying 'Here was a Jewish community' One of the most emotional sights was the Hofbanhof [main railway station].
"We were saved by America. Without a miracle, my family would have been on one of those trains to the camps."
Bernard Lee, who changed his name from Levy, attended the school until it closed in 1942, then did hard labor in a factory until the war's end in 1945. Eventually, he was reunited with his father and sister through an acquaintance who saw Lee in the hospital, where he was suffering from tuberculosis.
"My mother was not Jewish," said Lee, who lives part of the year in England. "I had two sisters. One died in Auschwitz, the other lives in Arizona."
Ingrid Price, a retired social worker who lives near Princeton, N.J., hosted the first reunion three years ago.
"Everybody here went through terrible times," said Price. "Yet, look, we got up from the ashes and did what we had to do to raise our children. And here we are, grandparents, and thank God, we should remember, but not live in the past, live in the future."
During the war in Nazi-occupied France, "I was a hidden child," said Price. Her father, wanted by the Gestapo for political resistance activities, fled with her and her mother from Germany to Belgium. Then, he was sent into France, but his wife and daughter had no idea of his destination.
Trying to follow him, they went to the train station, where they were among thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis.
"My mother and I managed to smuggle ourselves onto a train, but we were taken off because someone heard my mother speak to me in German. My mother and I walked through France. She cooked, and I guarded cows. Briefly reunited with her father, who was in the French Resistence, the family again split up in a desperate bid for safety.
"I was hidden in a Catholic orphanage, run by nuns. I was shifted from institution to institution. My father was deported, and my mother was hidden in a hospice, passing as a deaf-mute. When I found out where she was I went through the window at night to visit her, because I hadn't seen her for 3 1/2 years.
"I joined the French Resistance. I was instrumental in blowing up quite a few trains. The German soldiers liked to sit around and drink at taverns. They would never have thought that the little girl working there deep in the French countryside would understand German."
"When I carried milk from the farm to the hospice, I'd carry messages from the Underground. After the war, they learned that her father had been gassed in Auschwitz. My mother had a nervous breakdown. After 2 1/2 years in Germany, I went with my mother to Ecuador."
She and some others noted acts of kindness and protectiveness on the part of individual Germans, one keeping sentry duty, another smuggling out family silver. Asked how she could find the strength to prevail in the face of horror, she answered, "I was tough."
