[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 5]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 6637-6638]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST AND HONORING THE SURVIVORS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 30, 2014

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and remember the 
Holocaust survivors in our community. Communities around the world this 
week commemorated Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. As these 
individuals, who were small children and teenagers during World War II, 
are no longer with us, it is vital that we hear and record their 
personal stories of what happened in the ghettos and concentration 
camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. We must not forget what they have to 
say, and we must do everything in our power to ensure that these 
atrocities never occur anywhere in the world.
  I submit the following article from The Washington Post on first-hand 
accounts of those who survived.

                       [From the Washington Post]

     Washington Area Holocaust Survivors Share Histories in Day of 
                              Remembrance

                         (By Katherine Shaver)

       Blanche Porway remembers the guard tearing her from her 
     mother's hand as they stood in line at the Auschwitz 
     concentration camp with hundreds of Jews and other prisoners. 
     Her mother was led off to the gas chambers while Porway and 
     her older sister were spared, only because the guards deemed 
     them fit enough to work.
       Porway, then 19, had already survived the ghetto in Lodz, 
     Poland, where her father and brother had starved to death.
       ``My sister said, `I can't take this,''' Porway recalled 
     tearfully Sunday. ``But I said, `We have to. We have to live 
     to tell people.'''

[[Page 6638]]

       Now 90, Porway shared her story at a brunch in Rockville to 
     honor Holocaust survivors. The event, attended by about 40 
     survivors and their families, coincided with Monday's 
     Holocaust--Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, in Israel. Most 
     of the survivors were residents at the Charles E. Smith Life 
     Communities senior facilities in Rockville, where officials 
     say they have one of the largest groups of Holocaust 
     survivors in the Washington area.
       They came with their adult children, who had grown up 
     hearing their painful stories, and with grandchildren, who 
     they hoped would learn more. They told of fathers being 
     arrested in the night after an abrupt knock on the door. They 
     told of their synagogues burning, of being boarded onto 
     trains with other Jewish children fleeing the Nazis, of the 
     nuns who hid them in convents. They showed scars on their 
     hands from being forced to work in German factories and cried 
     as they recalled being forced to shovel dirt at gunpoint 
     during years in a labor camp.
       Many broke into tears as they told their stories, their 
     accents still carrying traces of their native German, French 
     and Polish.
       ``It's hard to accept what happened, even now,'' Porway, 
     who lives in Chevy Chase, said in a Polish accent, as her 
     voice shook and her eyes teared up. A few moments later, she 
     added quietly, ``I sometimes question if people want to hear 
     it, or if they'll get too upset.''
       Joel Appelbaum said he organized the brunch--this was the 
     fourth--to honor Holocaust survivors in memory of his late 
     father, who had stayed at one of the Charles E. Smith 
     facilities. Appelbaum is vice president of the Progress Club, 
     a Rockville social group that paid for the brunch through its 
     charitable foundation.
       He noted survivors' ages--those at the brunch were between 
     75 and 100--and the fact that their first-person accounts 
     would soon be left to books and video archives.
       ``We have a limited window to do this,'' Appelbaum said as 
     younger family members helped their parents and grandparents 
     get seated, often after parking walkers and wheelchairs along 
     the walls. ``Ten years from now,'' Appelbaum said, ``this 
     will not be an event.''
       Charles E. Smith community officials said the survivors 
     benefit from sharing their stories, too. Some had spoken 
     little about the Holocaust during their younger years, after 
     they had started new lives in the United States.
       ``I think at this stage in their lives, they want to talk, 
     and it helps them,'' spokeswoman Emily Tipermas said. ``They 
     feel it's safe for them now to talk, and they understand that 
     they lived through this period of history.''
       Yetti Sinnreich said her father, Beril Sinnreich, who is 
     99, had one question for her as they sat down to eat: ``Can I 
     speak?''
       Yetti Sinnreich, of Potomac, said she grew up hearing about 
     the Holocaust from both parents, who met after the war in a 
     ``displaced persons'' camp in Romania. Her mother, Klara 
     Sinnreich, 97, worked as a seamstress in a labor camp.
       While growing up, Yetti Sinnreich said, ``I remember my 
     father screaming with nightmares and waking up the house.''
       Klara Sinnreich no longer speaks much. But when the 
     microphone came around, Beril Sinnreich raised his hand. He 
     broke into tears as he recalled being forced to march to a 
     work camp. He was 26 when Romanian soldiers came to his home, 
     he said. He lost his entire family in the Holocaust.
       ``For three days and three nights, I didn't see water,'' 
     Beril Sinnreich said. ``We slept in train wagons. Every 
     night, frozen people were thrown out like garbage.''
       They marched for six weeks, he said, and his father died of 
     a heart attack. ``He couldn't walk anymore,'' he said.
       Beril Sinnreich, stooped with age and wearing a white cap, 
     appeared exhausted as he spoke before the crowd.
       ``Three years, I was in a concentration camp,'' he said 
     through tears. ``I survived.''
       When asked after the brunch what he wanted the children and 
     teenagers in the audience to take away from his story and 
     others, Sinnreich had a short answer: ``It shouldn't happen 
     again.''

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