[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 52 (Wednesday, April 14, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H2558-H2560]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

  (Ms. KAPTUR asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, our country observed Yom HaShoah, or 
Holocaust Remembrance Day, this past Sunday, which recalls the global 
tragedy of state-sponsored systemic annihilation and persecution of 
European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators as well as 
millions more deaths of people who were of Roma extraction, the 
disabled, Slavic peoples, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and 
potential dissidents.
  I would like to include in the Record an article from the Toledo 
Blade in our district, a front-page story last Sunday entitled 
``Survivors Urge World to Never Forget Horror,'' which recounts the 
story of some of the heroic survivors in our district in Ohio.
  In our country, 150,000 to 170,000 survivors remain today. The horror 
of the Holocaust has affected countless souls across this globe. Our 
district is home to persevering survivors like Mrs. Clara Rona, whose 
words I will place in the Record today, and so many others who never 
should have had to make this sacrifice, but she remains a woman of 
hope.

                 [From toledoblade.com, Apr. 11, 2010]

                  Survivors Urge World To Never Forget

                           (By Ryan E. Smith)

       Living through the Holocaust was one thing. Remembering it 
     is another.
       Clara Rona still remembers the smell of human flesh being 
     incinerated at Auschwitz, seeing smoke wafting through the 
     air and knowing it was somebody's mother.
       She won't allow herself to forget a moment--not the 
     beatings, the hunger, or the baby who was killed in a toilet 
     in her presence. At age 89, the West Toledo woman still talks 
     openly about the horrors of which humanity is capable.
       And yet.
       ``I wish I had dementia,'' she says, pleading in her 
     Hungarian accent. ``I don't want to remember.''
       Between 150,000 and 170,000 survivors of the Holocaust 
     probably remain in this country, according to the United 
     States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there are fewer than a 
     dozen believed to live in the Toledo area. All face the same 
     dilemma: How to balance the responsibility of being the last 
     living threads to the systematic killing of 6 million Jews 
     with the pain of memory.
       Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Now and 
     in the days to come people will gather at events to urge the 
     world, ``Never again! Never forget!''
       But Rena Mann won't be among them.
       The 83-year-old has never opened up to anyone--not her late 
     husband nor her children--about what she endured in two 
     concentration camps during World War II. Maybe it's because 
     it hurts too much. Or maybe it's because she's afraid the 
     world doesn't want to know.
       ``Do people care?,'' the Sylvania Township woman asked. 
     ``On the one hand I don't want it to be forgotten, and on the 
     other hand I feel that people are really, in the future, not 
     going to care.''


                           Pain and suffering

       Born in Berlin, Mrs. Mann was 12 and living in Poland when 
     the war began. After her mother died of blood poisoning and 
     her stepfather was trapped in a newly formed ghetto, she was 
     sent to stay with family in another town.
       This was no death camp, but already the terror had begun. 
     She remembers being awakened in the night and sent to the 
     market to watch Jews being hanged. Their crime? Baking bread, 
     which was forbidden.
       ``As an example they were hung, and we all had to watch 
     it,'' Mrs. Mann said.
       Before she turned 14, Mrs. Maim was sent away to a factory 
     and forced into slave labor. It was hard work involving water 
     and spools of flax that left her fingers and feet 
     frostbitten.
       Mostly what she remembers is the hunger. There was a bit of 
     bread that was supposed to last three days and some potato 
     soup at night that might not have any potato at all.
       ``We got, like we used to say, too much to die from and too 
     little to exist,'' Mrs. Mann said.
       Two years later she moved to another camp, where she slept 
     in an abandoned factory with broken windows, no water or 
     privacy, and vicious guards who would kick and push. A Polish 
     song written by her girlfriends still resounds in her head. 
     It concludes:
       Who knows if I'll ever see / My mother's tender home. / 
     This is a song of despair, / Of Jewish pain and suffering.
       ``That song is always with me and I don't want to take it 
     with me to my grave,'' Mrs. Mann said.
       She never talked about the four years she spent in camps 
     before being liberated in 1945. No one really asked.
       ``I am actually a coward,'' she said. ``It's true. Because 
     I am pushing it away, or have been pushing it away.''
       Maybe now, though, after all these years, the pain is far 
     enough behind her that she can let it out.

[[Page H2559]]

                              Eyewitnesses

       Mrs. Mann isn't alone in her hesitation, according to 
     Arthur Berger, senior adviser at the United States Holocaust 
     Memorial Museum in Washington. But as survivors continue to 
     die at a rapid rate, it becomes more and more crucial to 
     record their stories--in print or on video but also in 
     person, he said.
       ``Nothing compares to a real person telling you about their 
     own lives,'' Mr. Berger said. ``No one can replace the 
     survivors. No one, can replace the eyewitnesses to history.''
       Rolf Hess, 75, of Holland was one of those eyewitnesses, 
     but he never spoke of what happened during the war until last 
     year when a granddaughter interviewed him for a school 
     project about his experience as an immigrant.
       ``That sort of opened up a can of worms on my part,'' he 
     said. ``It has been in the past, and it still is, a very 
     difficult thing.''
       The native of Germany was not even 5 years old when the 
     Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Yet he has vivid, emotional 
     memories of being separated from his mother after they were 
     taken to a camp and split up from his father.
       ``We were at a train station, just my mother and I,'' he 
     said, voice cracking. ``That I remember. And she gave me a 
     little book that I still have with some pertinent 
     information, with my birth date.''
       To this day he doesn't know what happened to his family. 
     All he remembers is rummaging through garbage at a children's 
     camp looking for food and being scared to death, even after 
     escaping to America in 1942 with other children as a refugee.
       ``I can remember in Cleveland where I was out in the 
     backyard and I heard an airplane and I scurried underneath a 
     bench for protection,'' he said.
       Only recently has he started investigating his own past to 
     fill in the gaps of his memory.
       ``I finally have come to grips with the whole situation,'' 
     he said.


                         `Dying in slow motion'

       For Dr. Aron Wajskol, 85, of West Toledo, the question has 
     never been whether to share his horrible story--the way his 
     starving father died in a ghetto, how his mother perished at 
     the death camp Auschwitz, how he nearly succumbed to the 
     bone-crushing work of concentration camps.
       For him, the question was how. How do you make someone 
     understand what it was like?
       ``Its like describing being on the moon,'' the retired 
     anesthesiologist said. ``Hearing about the facts and truly 
     understanding the facts are different things.''
       The son of a textile factory worker in central Poland, Dr. 
     Wajskol remembers the restrictions that went into effect 
     within days of Germany invading his country. His father's job 
     was taken away. His school was closed. Jews were forbidden 
     from using public transportation and forced to wear Stars of 
     David to distinguish them from non-Jews.
       ``Many families who could afford [to] fled Europe,'' Dr. 
     Wajskol said. ``Mine couldn't.''
       Within months, the city's Jewish population was forced out 
     of its homes and squeezed into a tiny ghetto. It had no sewer 
     system and little running water. People were dying in the 
     streets of starvation--Dr. Wajskol calls it ``dying in slow 
     motion''--and corpses went unburied for days.
       ``Even in death it was suffering,'' said Dr. Wajskol, who 
     was 17 at the time.
       His father was among those wasting away, and he eventually 
     died of tuberculosis.
       All the while, Jew were rounded up and deported. At first 
     for work, later for extermination. When Dr. Wajskol was taken 
     to a labor camp in 1944, hauling around 110-pound sacks of 
     cement while surviving on bits of bread actually seemed like 
     a reprieve.
       ``At least death wasn't surrounding us,'' Dr. Wajskol said. 
     ``We knew they needed us. We were productive for them.''
       To keep himself going, Dr. Wajskol imagined that there 
     would be an end to all of this one day, that he could go back 
     to school, that he would see his mother and sister again. His 
     sister managed to survive but had to watch her mother be sent 
     to the gas chamber.
       This continued for 10 months until he was evacuated to the 
     Buchenwald concentration camp due to the Soviet advance. 
     After spending five days locked up in a crowded cattle car 
     with no food or water, where he had no choice but to sit on a 
     dead body, he was released to something even more 
     frightening: SS guards with skulls on their caps, terrifying 
     German shepherds, and the skeletal faces of the prisoners.
       ``It looked like a nightmare,'' he said.
       Here he learned the pain of standing for hours in the 
     penetrating cold of winter without socks or underwear. In a 
     subcamp where his first job was to even out rocks for a steam 
     roller, he came to understand the Nazi goal of ``annihilation 
     through work.''
       Before long, he was on the move again, this time on foot to 
     escape the approaching Americans.
       ``This was a real, real death march,'' Dr. Wajskol said.
       They marched through patches of snow from dawn until the 
     evening, always under the watchful eye of the SS, who were 
     ready to shoot the slow or weak. Still, Dr. Wajskol and a 
     friend managed to escape, dashing into the forest and running 
     until they were out of breath.
       Dr. Wajskol will never forget how he felt once the war was 
     over.
       ``Feeling free after 5\1/2\ years of slavery, playing with 
     death constantly, I can't describe it with normal language,'' 
     he said.
       But he tries. He has told his story to high school students 
     and traveled to his old home in Poland with his wife and son.
       ``In the beginning it was very hard to revive all these 
     things,'' he said. ``[But] I strongly believe that it's 
     important to talk about it, make people aware of it, because 
     of the enormity of what happened.''


                           Trinity of terror

       As director of the Ruth Fajerman Markowicz Holocaust 
     Resource Center of Greater Toledo, Hindea Markowicz knows 
     about the importance of preserving this history. As the 
     daughter-in-law of Holocaust survivors, she feels it too.
       ``I have worries because history in the schools is being 
     taught so differently,'' she said. ``It's lucky if they have 
     a paragraph included in the history books.''
       The resource center, housed in the offices of the United 
     Jewish Council of Greater Toledo in Sylvania, on the other 
     hand, features hundreds of books and other educational 
     materials. There are videos of local survivors and a book 
     written by her father-in-law, Philip Markowicz, called My 
     Three Lives, which includes his experiences during the 
     Holocaust.
       It's one thing to read about these events in books, quite 
     another to hear about them from someone in person. That's why 
     Mr. Markowicz, 86, of Sylvania has told his tale and why 
     Sylvania Township resident Al Negrin speaks to students in 
     Florida, where he spends the winter.
       ``I talk because I want people to know what was going on, 
     so they have a chance, if something happens again, to prevent 
     it,'' said the 86-year-old from Greece.
       Mr. Negrin--whose mother, brother, and sister went with him 
     to Auschwitz but were immediately sent to the crematorium--
     recalls a trinity of terror: the German guard who stood 
     threatening with a rifle butt, the civilian supervisor with a 
     whip, and the fellow inmate in charge of the group armed with 
     a stick.
       ``Everybody was yelling `Arbeit! Arbeit!' Work! Work! Work! 
     If you stop for a while to take a breath, one of those three 
     objects will come over your head.''
       It was not sustainable and his father eventually succumbed 
     while moving to another camp. It was just a week before the 
     group was liberated.
       ``My father was weak, could not walk. I tried to get him 
     with my shoulders but the German guard said `No, you can't do 
     that because after a while then you'll be weak,' '' Mr. 
     Negrin said.
       ``I left him in the side of the street. I kissed him good-
     bye, and that's the last time I saw him.''


                       `He never talks about it'

       Norman Gudelman, 78, went about sharing his story in 
     another way. He wrote it down.
       It took more than six decades and some prodding from his 
     wife, but he finally took his suffering and made it tangible. 
     The result is a sprawling letter to his children on the 
     occasion of his 75th birthday. It covers everything from his 
     youth in modern-day Moldova to his escape to Palestine after 
     the war to his arrival in America.
       Mr. Gudelman of Sylvania Township remembers being carefree 
     as a youth, despite the anti-Semitism that was prevalent 
     around him. His restaurant-owning parents shielded him from 
     the world's hate, at least until the Soviets arrived in 1940, 
     arresting and executing Jews and banishing others to Siberia.
       When Romanian forces returned in 1941 with the Germans, 
     things were no better.
       ``Romanian soldiers came to our house, and ordered all the 
     Jews out,'' Mr. Gudelman wrote in his letter. ``Start 
     walking. Leave the home, the business, our possessions and 
     go.''
       He was 10 years old then. Today, Mr. Gudelman is happy to 
     talk about his experience during the war, but there's a sense 
     he'd prefer to defer to his written statement than relive--
     yet again--what happened in too much detail.
       ``He never talks about it,'' said his wife, Fanny. ``I 
     don't ask questions. I want it [to] come from him.''
       When he does speak, Mr. Gudelman can tell you about how the 
     group marched endlessly from one camp to another, begging for 
     food when there was a chance to slip away. In the camps, they 
     crowded into windowless rooms and slept on cement floors.
       ``They wanted to get rid of us,'' he said.
       It worked. He and his sister were orphaned within a year or 
     two
       That may be what saved them. When the Soviets returned and 
     chased the German and Romanian armies out, orphans were sent 
     to ghettos to stay with Jewish families, Mr. Gudelman said. 
     From there, he eventually made his way to the future state of 
     Israel. Thanks to a relative in Toledo, Mr. Gudelman 
     ultimately came here and became president of State Paper & 
     Metal Co., Inc.
       He decided to write all this down for posterity, he said, 
     because, ``sooner or later I'm going to forget, or sooner or 
     later I'm going to pass away.''
       His letter's massage is simple: ``Maybe in your lifetime 
     you will read books about the unbelievable cruelty of those 
     times. Believe them.''


                              Finding hope

       Then there's Mrs. Rona, who insists on picking away at the 
     scabs of the past.
       ``I want to remind myself,'' she said. ``They say I'm a 
     masochist--my friends, my psychologist.''

[[Page H2560]]

       Her reminiscences rarely come without a few tears, but 
     maybe it's for the best.
       ``When I'm crying, really it's good for me,'' she said.
       The only child of a butcher in Pecs, Hungary, Mrs. Rona 
     wanted to be an art teacher, but those plans were scuttled 
     when the Germans invaded. Her family was relocated from its 
     large house, and at one point they were living in a stable. 
     Later they were among those taken to Auschwitz, 80 people 
     squeezed into each rail car.
       Mrs. Rona was 23--tough, young, and strong--but also naive. 
     All she brought was a change of clothes and a bottle of 
     cologne, which she used to wash her mother when she fainted. 
     Mrs. Rona still regrets that she never traded the latter for 
     water despite her mother's pleas.
       ``I feel guilty,'' she said. ``I cannot forgive myself.''
       It was night when they arrived and they were divided into 
     two lines. Her mother and aunt went to the left--``straight 
     to the gas,'' Mrs. Rona said. Her father was transferred to 
     another concentration camp and later died.
       Mrs. Rona divided her time between several camps and 
     remembers it as a dazed experience.
       ``You think about food, but nothing else. You become like 
     an animal,'' she said. ``One spoon of soup means one day's 
     survival.
       ``There was electric wire. Some people ran into it because 
     they couldn't take it and they got killed,'' she continued.
       Mrs. Rona, who found out after the war that she could not 
     bear children, is certain that it is the result of her 
     treatment during the war. None of the women in the camp 
     menstruated, she said.
       When one woman gave birth to a child in the camp, Mrs. Rona 
     said she was forced to be present as it was put in a toilet 
     by fellow prisoners. Otherwise, both the mother and baby 
     would have been executed, she said.
       When the camp was evacuated in April, 1945, as the end of 
     the war approached, Mrs. Rona said she was in no shape for 
     walking. Desperate, she and another woman hid in the rain 
     under some bushes and simply waited for the group to head off 
     before dawn.
       When she finally made her way to safety in Prague, Mrs. 
     Rona estimates that she weighed about 50 pounds. She went 
     back home hoping to find her father, but he was gone 
     forever--along with more than 50 other family members. Only 
     three cousins survived.
       ``I was so angry,'' she said. ``Still the anger, it's 
     burned me.''
       Even as she left for Palestine and made her way to Toledo, 
     where she worked with children at the Jewish Community Center 
     of Greater Toledo, that anger never left.
       How could it when there were mass killings in the former 
     Yugoslavia? Rwanda? Darfur?
       ``I thought after, when we got freed, the world will be so 
     beautiful. They'll learn,'' she said. ``They didn't because 
     it's repeating the same things somewhere else in a different 
     way.''
       And yet.
       Mrs. Rona still speaks, making public her private hell. She 
     does this because 65 years after the Holocaust she still has 
     something that can offset the pain:
       Hope.

                          ____________________