[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.
____________________