10-2-2018
HOLOCAUST STORIES
VIII
השואה
It’s Time For A Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning
February 5, 2018
Over the past few months, more and more women have been opening up about
horrible stories of sexual harassment, assault and abuse. The #MeToo movement is
a long overdue corrective to our culture. And yet the stories of one group of
women have yet to crest into the mainstream and get the recognition they
deserve: Holocaust survivors.
Holocaust museums, educational institutions and film archives are full of robust
programs. But the stories of survivors who experienced sexual abuse are treated
as taboo, or of secondary importance. They are never part of a museum’s
permanent exhibition. And yet, we are becoming increasingly aware that sexual
violence, whether through experiments, terror, coercion, rape or routine
practices meant to humiliate and defile, was rampant during the Holocaust.
The reasons these stories remain hidden are complex. But one can’t ignore the
simple fact that few women survivors have shared them.
My own mother denied being a Holocaust survivor. Her identity was forged through
her experiences as a “freedom fighter” in the Israeli underground and army.
Those were the stories she told me, the stories she was proud of.
And it’s no small wonder. What would she have gained by telling me that she and
5,000 other mainly teenage Jewish girls from Upper Silesia were trafficked as
Nazi slaves to a remote town in Sudetenland, where they were imprisoned for more
than four years?
*
Nearly eight years ago, after an elderly relative accidentally told me my mother
had been a love child, I traveled to Poland to see if I could uncover her birth
records and get to the bottom of her true identity.
The records revealed the name Alta Hendla (or Hela) Hocherman, which was nothing
like Tamar Fromer, the name my mother went by.
With help from genealogists at JRI-Poland and the International Tracing Service
of the Red Cross at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I learned that my mother
had been a prisoner of one of the Nazis’ women’s slave labor camps called
Gabersdorf in Sudetenland.
They also led me to a hidden camp diary,
found by a survivor’s daughter and subsequently donated to Yad Vashem. Seeing
the page my mother had written nearly 70 years prior shook me to my core. I
realized how little I knew about her past, and I had to come to grips with the
fact that my mother felt obliged to shoulder all that pain, trauma and shame on
her own.
Though I held her hand as she passed, she died alone.
This tragic reality compelled me to mine the depths of all she had tried to
suppress. And that’s when I learned that my mother’s secret was far from unique.
Her camp was part of a vast, underground network of some 200 camps, where girls
as young as 12 were exploited to fuel the Wehrmacht and “the whims of our
oppressor,” as my mother cryptically wrote in a hidden camp diary that bears
witness to the abuses they endured.
Over the past few years, mounting evidence has emerged that Jewish women were
abused in far more ways than previously thought. During the Holocaust, sexual
violence was routine. Despite Nazi race laws forbidding relations with Jews,
sexual violence was woven into the fabric of their atrocities.
Recently declassified files found at United Nations War Crimes Commission
Archives attest that rape and sexual violence — including forced prostitution,
sterilization, nudity and corporal shaming — were so commonplace that there were
postwar sex-crime tribunals set up to prosecute perpetrators.
But as the Nuremberg Trials lawyers honed in on their cases, rape was deemed
secondary in importance. Subsequently, its perpetrators were never indicted; the
victims were left to fend for themselves. Their traumas went undiagnosed in a
world that didn’t classify sex crimes as war crimes until the International
Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda in 1994.
To this day, who has heard of these camps, these women, their stories? Women’s
experiences remain mere footnotes in Holocaust history, add-ons at memorials
that never validate what women experienced.
It’s time for the Holocaust to have its #MeToo moment.
*
The first time Elizabeth Anthony, the International Tracing Service and
Partnerships Program Manager at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
decided to research sexual violence during the Holocaust, she input the German
word for brothel, Bordell, into their database. She got 92 matches.
“It wasn’t just Auschwitz that had one,” she told me. “There were sex slaves
also in Dachau, Mauthausen and Buchenwald, to name a few; in something like 10
camps altogether.”
The records of the Nazis’ sex slaves contain only Polish and German non-Jewish
names. “It was totally against Nazi ideology and policy for a non-Jew to have
sex with a Jew, so they wouldn’t have documented if a Jewish woman or a Roma
woman, too, slipped into the ‘brothel’ ranks,” Anthony said.
According to personal testimony, one can surmise a few Jewish women were
“slipped in.” But the proof is elusive. Nevertheless, the files show the Nazis
were meticulous about recording whether their sex slaves had venereal disease
and even the medical treatments they received.
“It was a sobering discovery,” Anthony said. “I can understand why this sort of
information was concealed from families after the war. But without naming
anyone, shouldn’t we try to get the truth out there?”
Telling these stories has been my mission for the past seven years. I’ve
interviewed dozens of women survivors, trying to understand what they went
through, and why my own mother denied being a Holocaust survivor.
Throughout the interviews I’ve conducted, what always astounds me is how sexual
violence was incorporated in almost every aspect of a woman or girl’s experience
during the Shoah.
Perhaps most shocking was learning that it didn’t end when the war ended. Sexual
violence against survivors persisted after the liberation, and often at the
hands of supposed allies and rescuers.
One survivor of the women’s camp Ober-Alstadt told me that the Russians who
liberated their camp raped survivors with such abandon that she and her
roommates put up a sign that read “typhus” on their door to keep the Russians at
bay. It worked.
Another woman from my mother’s camp, Gabersdorf, told me the Russians were
driving a truckload of recently freed inmates to a nearby village when suddenly
the car stopped. The girls saw they were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by
trees.
“We looked at each other, realizing what the Russians had in mind,” she said. “I
yelled, ‘Run!’ We all jumped off and scattered through the forest.”
What happened next?
She stopped the story cold.
But it’s not all so cut and dry. There are the gray zones, stories of women who
were coerced into sex and had complex narratives to share. Fanya Gottsefeld
Heller, who died last November, had such a story.
“She couldn’t tell her story until her husband had died,” said Atina Grossmann,
professor of history at The Cooper Union, a historian of gender, sexuality, the
Holocaust and its aftermath. “Her memoir detailed her relationship with a
Ukrainian peasant, who she was pushed to have sex with by her father in order to
rescue the family.”
Fania describes it all very tenderly, however shocking it seemed at first. “So
we have to be careful to allow all the gray zones in, the sex, money, power,
‘good looks’” — the ability to pass as a non-Jew — “as a currency for survival,
the whole gamut of sexuality that got expressed during the Holocaust,” Grossman
said. “There were the stories of extreme terror and brutality, but also
relationships that were genuinely affectionate, for example with rescuers,
albeit within a terrifyingly coercive context that may have started out as a
forced situation.”
Thanks in large part to feminist academic scholarship, more of these stories are
emerging. Last December, Anna Hájková, professor of history at the University of
Warwick, England, hosted a conference in Berlin titled “Sexuality, Holocaust,
Stigma: Taking Stock,” as well as a dramatic presentation at the Gorki Theater,
which she says was a sold-out event.
There are also a growing number of exhibitions in Buchenwald, Mauthausen and
Ravensbrück, and new panels, exhibits and pamphlets at the USHMM and at smaller,
regional museums like the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau
County. An upcoming art exhibit at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York,
curated by the Remember the Women Institute, highlights rape as a part of
genocide from the Shoah until today.
Still, sexual violence in the Holocaust has yet to enter the mainstream
conversation.
Perhaps some of the fault lies in the way Holocaust history is recorded, a way
that is still largely shaped by men. A few years ago, while researching at
Auschwitz, I asked its research director why their tours never mention Block 24,
the infamous brothel immortalized in the novella “House of Dolls”, by Ka-tzetnik
135633.
“Another journalist fishing for a sexy angle?” He said with a smirk.
But sexism aside, some of the ommission of these stories has to do with the
survivors themselves. Testimonies were often taken in front of family members,
prompting survivors to censor themselves; who wants to admit in front of
children and grandchildren to being raped, or forced into prostitution? It’s why
the 1,700 references to sexual assault included in the University of Southern
California’s Shoah Foundation’s 52,000 testimonies are believed to be grossly
under-representative.
The USHMM’s Anthony, who first worked as a social worker with survivors before
moving to the Red Cross ITS department, recalls how guarded many of the women
were when giving testimony.
“Sometimes when I would drive the women home after speaking to a school or
community group, they would reveal things in the car, then say, ‘I could never
share that in public’ or ‘I would never tell that to my family.’”
More and more, we are realizing just how much self-censoring has gone on. One
woman told me a story that happened to her after liberation, on a train to a
displaced person’s camp. She was held down by a man who was forcing himself on
her. “I screamed,” she said. “Someone helped me.”
Other women have shared similar narratives: They’re about to be raped when, out
of nowhere, a brother appears, or someone comes to the rescue.
Almost none will say they were personally raped. It’s always someone else
they’ve witnessed.
Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff also recently learned
that a relative who had survived the Holocaust had altered her story. The author
of “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,”
Leff learned from archival records that her cousin, who had always maintained
that she had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen, had actually been liberated from
Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s camp in Germany.
Leff was confused by her cousin’s choice to misrepresent her time during the
war. And then she found out why she had done it.
“I learned that all the women at her sub-camp were raped by their Russian
liberators, if you want to call them liberators,” Leff recently said at a U.N.
Holocaust Remembrance event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, her voice
cracking.
The experience had lasting damage. “My cousin Vilma Heda Kaufmann never could
have kids,” Leff told me. “I suspect the sexual violence she experienced had
something to do with it.”
It broke Leff’s heart, not only because of what her cousin had suffered, but
also because she had suffered it alone. They are feelings I know all too well.
“Why couldn’t she tell us?” Leff now wondered. “Why is sexual violence still
treated differently than any other abuse Jews suffered during the Holocaust?”
And yet, it is, especially by the survivors themselves. Last week I interviewed
a survivor who had never before given testimony. When I asked her why, she told
me something I’ve often heard doing these interviews.
“I didn’t have it so bad,” she said. “We were good girls.”
I explained to her being raped or forced into sex work didn’t make her a “bad
girl.” But she wouldn’t budge.
“That didn’t happen to us,” she insisted. “I told you, we were good girls. Nazi
propaganda depicted us as whores. Why would I discuss anything that would give
credence to that?”
Couple that with the shame women survivors experienced after the war in the
United States and Israel, where many were routinely asked if they survived the
Holocaust by being “a Nazi whore,” and you begin to understand why women steered
clear of this Pandora’s box.
“You don’t understand how we were looked down on,” a neighbor, a Ravensbrück
survivor, once told me. “We were considered damaged goods — by our fellow Jews.”
Another survivor I met with last week was one of the first I ever interviewed
who was forthcoming about the sexual barter she witnessed taking place in the
latrines of her camp. She told me a story she had repressed all these decades.
She recalled a British POW offering her a cookie if he could pet her hair.
Starving and all of about 12 years old, she agreed.
“I can still remember what the cookie looked like,” she said. “It had an angel
on it.”
And what about the rest of the experience?
“It was over with fast,” she said. “It was fine.”
Later on, her daughter and I talked at length about her story. Had he otouched
only her hair? Or was that how she remembered it for her own self-preservation?
We’ll never know.
*
As a second-generation Holocaust survivor who never knew I was one because my
mother had never admitted it, I think about the question of agency a lot,
especially in terms of how you tell your story. I think a lot about how vital it
was for my mother, at least in the Shoah’s aftermath, to construct her own
narrative as one that cast her as a victor, not a victim. It was essential for
her self-preservation.
I would never want to take that away from her, or force a woman to tell a story
that undermines her self-preservation. But discovering my mother’s true past
makes me admire her all the more for having triumphed over Nazi oppression to
build a Jewish homeland, which must have seemed an unattainable dream when she
signed her name in Hebrew in that hidden camp diary.
I can’t say with certainty she would have wanted to open up about the sexual
trauma she endured. And yet, I feel it’s crucial that we come to terms with this
horrific aspect of the Holocaust, and that we open up spaces for women who want
to tell these stories, including us, their daughters and granddaughters,
prompting some long-overdue intergenerational healing.
If we can’t air these stories now, when we’re blessed to have Shoah survivors
still in our midst, when victims of sexual harassment and abuse are finally
being believed and freed from the age-old stigma women like my mother
encountered, then when?
These are the last years to relieve these women of the burden they’ve been
carrying alone. It’s time.
Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua is a New York-based journalist who is writing and
directing her first documentary, “By
a Thread,” about her search for her mother’s hidden Holocaust past.
Follow her on Twitter, @byathreadfilm
February 12, 2018
Why Renia Spiegal is being called “The Polish Anne Frank”
By Alex Ulam
Courtesy of Tomasz Magierski
“Listen! Listen to me and understand. Some kind of fever took over the city. The
vision of the ghetto, already forgotten by everybody, has returned. And it is
even more dreadful than before, because it knocks on the doors of petrified
hearts and it is ruthless, it doesn’t want to go away.”
In May 1942, 18-year-old Renia Spiegel was describing her terror of a ghetto the
Nazis were establishing in Przemyśl, a city in southeastern Poland where 17,600
Jews were murdered. Spiegel’s nearly 700-page diary, recently published in
Polish, also recounts her kissing her first love only hours before the Germans
invaded.
Spiegel and the parents of her boyfriend Zygmunt Schwarzer were shot in the
street by the Nazis in July 1942 after they were discovered hiding in an attic
outside the ghetto. Zygmunt added an entry to Renia’s diary on July 31st, 1942
about their killing: “Three shots! Three lives lost! It happened last night at
10:30 pm. Fate has decided to take my dearest ones away from me.”
Zygmunt survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
After the war, he studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg in Germany
and upon graduating moved to the United States where he became a pediatrician.
In the 1950s, a friend visiting New York from Przemyśl gave him Renia’s diary,
which was made of seven school books sewn together. Zygmunt brought the diary
back to New York and gave it to Renia’s mother Róża Maria Leszczyńska.
Renia’s diary describes life in wartime Przemyśl, which was divided between the
Soviets and the Nazis at the San River, which runs through the city. Before
1941, when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarosa and invaded the Russian
section of Przemyśl, most of the Jews lived on the Soviet occupied eastern side
of the city.
When the ghetto was established in July 1942, Renia and her sister Ariana were
forced to move there with their grandparents. However, after several weeks in
the ghetto, Zygmunt, who had a work pass, was able to spirit both sisters out.
He moved Renia to the house of his uncle Samuel Goliger, who, because of his
status at a Judenrat official, was allowed to live outside the ghetto.
Several days later, the SS marched on the ghetto intending to launch their first
major liquidation of the Jews. However, the Wehrmacht under the command of an
officer named Albert Battel, who was posthumously recognized as Righteous Among
Nations by the state of Israel, threatened to open fire on the SS troops unless
they withdrew. This standoff bought time for Battel to shelter a large number of
Jews from deportation in army barracks.
Zygmunt hid Renia with his parents in a garret in the town while Ariana was
taken to Warsaw by a Polish gentile named Ludomir Leszczynski and reunited with
her mother who was passing as a Pole and working in a hotel crawling with
Wermacht officers.
In Przemyśl, however, Renia’s hiding place was exposed by an informer, and the
Nazis executed her and Zygmunt’s parents in the street, only a day after Ariana
had escaped from the Ghetto.
“She
was grieving all of the time about my sister,” Ariana Elzbieta Bellak says of
her mother.
Bellak, who is 87 and is currently in possession of the diary, was a child film
star called Arianka in interwar Poland and was referred to as the Polish Shirley
Temple. In 1938, she appeared in two Polish films “Gehenna,” directed by Michał
Waszynski and “Granica,” directed by Jóżef Lejtes.
Bellak still retains her star power. She is a petite woman with a booming voice
and intense blue eyes heavily lined with mascara. She was dressed in a white
lace fringed blouse with elegant gold earrings on the sunny October afternoon
when I visited her. Her apartment in Manhattan’s Flatiron District where she has
lived for thirty-six years is decorated with photographs of relatives from
prewar era in Poland, including a large sepia-toned blowup of her sister as a
beaming teenager with her hair tied back in a bun.
As a child, Bellak says, she was not even aware of her sister’s diary’s
existence. “Renia wrote, ‘I want a friend that keeps my secrets and nobody is
supposed to know,’” Bellak told me.
For decades, Ariana kept Renia’s diary to herself, but at the urging of her
daughter Alexandra, she showed it to Tomasz Magierski, a Polish- American
documentary filmmaker. Bellak met Magierski several years ago at the Polish
Consulate General in New York, where he was screening “Blinky & Me,” a
documentary he made about a Polish born Australian animator Yoram Gross who
survived the Holocaust. Magierski, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side,
said during an interview that he endured several sleepless nights before
finishing the diary. Since then he has been on a mission to rescue its author
from obscurity.
Magierski has engaged in all manner of activities to call attention to Renia’s
life. With Bellak and her daughter, he started the Renia Spiegel Foundation to
preserve and promote the teenage writer’s legacy. He is also working to get a
former synagogue in Przemyśl, turned into a museum dedicated to Spiegel’s life.
Through the Spiegel foundation he has published the diary in Polish and is
getting it translated into English. In addition, the foundation has organized an
academic conference about the diary at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Magierski also has circulated Renia’s diary among scholars such as Anna
Frajlich-Zajac, senior lecturer emerita in Slavic Language at Columbia
University, who wrote of it, “This powerful diary is not only a primary
historical source of the Holocaust, but also a true and outstanding work of
literature.”
Currently, Magierski says he is making what he terms a “creative documentary”
based upon Renia’s life. “I want to show what she would be like if she
survived,” he said one evening over a glass of wine at his roof top terrace on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He showed scenes from the film, which feature
historical footage of Przemyśl and actresses in contemporary garb reciting
Renia’s poetry as the camera pans around the verdant rural landscape near
Przemyśl.
For the film, Magierski has sleuthed throughout Poland for physical traces of
the Spiegel sisters’ lives. One such object is a hand-painted cardboard box that
he said most likely originally enclosed the diary, which he obtained in
Przemyśl from a childhood friend of Ariana’s.
“She could have become a great writer,” Magierski said. “She did not have this
chance because she was killed.”
Reading Spiegel’s diary entries, it’s clear that she wanted people to know what
happened to her. “Remember this day; remember it well, you will tell generations
to come about it one day,” she wrote in one of her last entries on July 15th,
1942, “Today at 8 o’clock we have been shut away in the ghetto. I live here now;
the world is separated from me and I’m separated from the world.”
Alex Ulam is a New York-based journalist.
JEWISH JOURNAL
ISBN-13: 978-1502416391
DEC 30, 2015
Survivor: Klara Wizel
BY JANE
ULMAN |
“Seven, eight, four, five. Write that down,” Dr. Josef
Mengele instructed a nearby guard as a naked and painfully thin Klara Wizel —
then Iutkovits — stood before the Auschwitz doctor in yet another selection, her
drab, gray dress draped over her right arm, her tattooed left arm outstretched.
The 17-year-old was immediately whisked away, past her two older sisters who
were lined up behind her, and taken to a bathhouse holding 60 or 70 girls
destined for the gas chamber. Klara’s sisters Roshie and Hedy soon appeared at
the building’s barred window, crying and screaming, “Klara, don’t be afraid.
You’re going to be OK.” But Klara sat stone-like, wanting to die.
“I figured if I’m alive, I’m going to suffer more,” she
recalled. But she couldn’t get out the words to tell her sisters, whose screams
soon faded as German guards struck them with whips, sending them away. It was
December 1944.
Klara was born on Jan. 15, 1927, in Sighet,
Transylvania, in northwestern Romania. She was the ninth of Ignatiu and Frida
Iutkovits’ 10 children.
Frida, along with Klara’s oldest brother, Joseph, ran
the family business, a wholesale/retail operation that sold dried fruits,
cooking oil, flour and nuts. The entire family assisted, although Ignatiu, a
Torah scholar and, according to Klara, kindhearted man, mostly studied.
The business afforded the Modern Orthodox family a
luxurious lifestyle, including a five-bedroom house two doors down from Elie
Wiesel, who was a childhood friend. “We were a very, very happy family,” Klara
said.
Klara attended public school but learned to read and
write Hebrew with a tutor her parents hired. When not in school or spending time
with her family, Klara enjoyed bike riding, ice skating, reading and, most of
all, going to the movies.
Life started to change in August 1940, when Germany
transferred Northern Transylvania to Hungary as part of the Second Vienna Award.
More than 10,000 Jews lived in Sighet at that time, about 39 percent of the
population.
Klara’s father was forced to cut his beard to avoid
being physically harmed. And by 1941, Klara was forced to leave school.
Sometime in 1942, a Hungarian judge revoked the family’s
franchise to supply the province of Maramures with cooking oil. Soon after, the
entire business was confiscated. “Mother was heartbroken. The business was in
her blood,” Klara said.
Meanwhile, Klara’s brother Lazar escaped to Russia,
while her brothers Joseph and Haskell were drafted into slave labor.
Then, on March 19, 1944, the Germans marched into
Hungary. “When they came in, everything was going very bad,” Klara said.
On April 20, Sighet’s Jews, along with Jews from
neighboring towns, were forced into a ghetto. Three families moved into the
Iutkovits’ house, which was inside the ghetto boundaries, but less than a month
later, they were told to pack some clothes and food for resettlement.
Klara, her parents and five of her siblings were all on
the first transport, which departed on May 16. They were crammed 70 people to a
car, with no water or toilets. “It was very frightening,” Klara recalled.
On the third night, the doors slammed open at Birkenau,
and the prisoners were ordered to line up in rows of five — men and women
separately — where they were surrounded by soldiers with guns and dogs. Klara
stood with her mother and sisters Hedy, Roshie and Ancy. Mengele soon approached
them. “You look alike. You’re sisters, aren’t you?” he asked. “Yes,” one of them
answered. He sent Frida and Ancy to a waiting bus and dispatched the other three
to a different line. “You’ll see each other tomorrow,” he assured them.
Klara, Roshie and Hedy were processed, given gray
dresses and taken to a barracks.
The next day, Klara asked the block leader when she
would see her parents. The kapo pointed to the chimney. “See that fire there?
That’s where your parents are,” she said. Klara thought she was crazy, but soon
learned the truth. “We were falling apart, crying, screaming,” she said.
Klara was taken to work in a field of cut wheat, where
she was ordered to gather the grain into 5-pound bundles and knot them. On the
first day, a guard noticed her knot wasn’t done correctly. “Versagerin,”
he yelled, “failure,” and he began hitting her with a club as guards with dogs
circled them. “It was so horrible and frightening,” Klara said.
Next, she was transferred to a textile factory, where
she braided strips of leather. She was treated less poorly, though she continued
to lose weight.
By December 1944, the gas chambers and crematoria were
working day and night. Klara and the other girls selected by Mengele were moved
from the bathhouse to a small brick building to wait their turn. The girls
eventually cried themselves to sleep, but Klara, who was prepared to die,
remained awake. She was worried about her sisters and began to look for an
escape. Noticing that the building was constructed of adobe bricks, she pushed
on a few to see if any were loose. Then she noticed a chiseled area under a
window. She pulled at a brick until she pried it out and chipped away at others.
Soon, she created a narrow passageway and slid her body outside.
Klara made her way to a block that housed prisoners
being relocated. Finding an open window, she climbed inside and discovered a
group of girls showering. She removed her dress and joined them. Afterward, she
and each of the other girls were given a dress, a piece of salami and a loaf of
bread.
In the morning, the girls, all more robust-looking than
Klara, were loaded into cattle cars. “What is this muselmann [a survivor
on the verge of death] doing here?” Klara heard one girl ask. She didn’t answer.
She was sick and couldn’t eat. Later, she managed to trade her bread and salami
for some sugar, which she savored.
Three days and nights later, they arrived at the
Weisswasser concentration camp, a private munitions factory in Czechoslovakia.
When they’d disembarked and were waiting to be counted, Klara fainted, awakening
in the infirmary where a Jewish female doctor took a liking to her. Six weeks
later, she was cured. “The doctor gave me life,” Klara said.
At the doctor’s request, Klara was given a good job,
burning the rubber tips off pieces of wire. She was also well fed and slept in a
single bunk bed with a pillow and blanket.
But one day in early May 1945, as the girls stood at
roll call, no guards appeared. Finally, the block leader went to the Germans’
office. “I guess we are free. Nobody’s here,” she reported.
“I couldn’t believe it. Am I free?” Klara recalled
thinking. “I was turning around. Nobody’s following us.”
Klara made her way to Sighet, where she went to Wiesel’s
house, which had become a gathering place for returning survivors. When Baya,
Elie’s sister, came back several months later, Klara learned that her own
sisters Roshie and Hedy were alive. They made plans to seek her sisters out.
In Prague, Klara went to the train station daily in
hopes of intercepting Roshie and Hedy. But the one day Klara skipped was the day
they passed through Prague. Later, however, the sisters learned that Klara had
survived and wrote to her.
Klara traveled to Cluj, where her sisters were visiting
a cousin. “It was an unbelievable happiness. We were crying and screaming,” she
said. A month later, they returned to Sighet.
Meanwhile, Klara had been given a letter in Satu Mare to
deliver to Ezra Wizel, a second cousin of Elie Wiesel, for Ezra’s brother. She
tracked Ezra down and they began dating, marrying on Dec. 10, 1947.
Klara and Ezra remained in Sighet but wanted to escape
the communist regime. Finally, in early 1951, they were able to immigrate to
Israel, then to Montreal later that year. Their daughter Fraya was born in
November 1954, and daughter Judy in October 1956. In 1967, the family relocated
to Los Angeles to be near Roshie.
While in California, Klara learned that her brother
Lazar had survived the war and was living in Russia. She and her sisters helped
him immigrate to Canada, where Hedy lived.
Klara, now 88, has four grandchildren. She continues to
work in real estate investments.
A documentary about her life, “Auschwitz Escape – The
Klara Wizel Story,” created by Danny Naten, was released in 2009, and a
biography, “Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story,” was published in 2014.
Klara credits Roshie and Hedy with her survival.
“I think God wanted me to live, but, believe me, I
didn’t want to live. But I felt bad for my sisters, because they were crying for
me. I’m alive because of them,” she said.
BY AMI
Auschwitz Escape – The Klara Wizel Story
Kindle
Edition
by Danny
Naten (Author), R. Gifford (Author)
At the tender age of 16,
Klara Wizel had a picturesque life with a loving and supportive family. There
was no way to know that the Holocaust was creeping toward her and that soon this
young Hungarian Jew would be fighting for her life due to the most notorious
doctor of the 20th century, Dr. Josef Mengele.
Swept up in a week long deportation process along
with fifteen thousand other Hungarian Jews, Klara and her family arrive on cold
night at the infamous Auschwitz – Birkenau concentration camp after a three day
journey with no food or water. There, she and her family would first meet Josef
Mengele who would later become known as the Great Selector.
That night Mengele selected Klara’s mother Freda,
father Ignatiu, her older sister Ancy and younger brother Mortho to die in the
gas chamber sending the adolescent Klara and two of her sisters Hedy and Rose to
be housed like animals in the women’s barracks of Auschwitz. Dr. Mengele, who
was in charge of the women’s barracks, would become the chief provider for the
gas chambers and order gruesome experiments on children that often maimed or
killed his Jewish subjects. Like a blood hound, Mengele, also known as the
Murderer in White, searched out those who were too old or too sick to survive
his cruel science and those who served no purpose to the Nazi regime. As Klara
would later say, “Day or night you never knew when he would show, the ovens were
always burning around the clock.”
As the Russian front approaches, Mengele and the
Nazi’s selection process speed up. Klara finds herself sick, weak, tired and not
able to eat. Naked, she is brought before Mengele, a tall Rock Hudson-handsome
man who ideally would have been asking for her hand instead of deciding her
fate. Klara was wowed by his presence and hardly realized that Mengele had
deemed her unfit and sentenced her to die the gas chamber. As Klara is taken
away with approximately seventy other women, her sisters Hedy and Rose scream
and cry as she is dragged off, for they know this is her death.
Yet, somehow sick and dying on a snowy night, now 17
year old Klara Wizel not only escaped the gas chamber, but she also smuggles
herself out of Auschwitz. She’s the only Holocaust survivor of record to ever
escape Dr. Josef Mengele’s selection process. Her escape and journey through war
torn Europe to get back home to her small home town of Sighet is one of the most
inspiring stories of that time.
Now 86 years old and thriving in Los Angeles, Klara
is a grandmother and lives a comfortable life. She is a member of the 39 Club
and is dedicated to helping survivors of the Holocaust and their families. Her
story is one of survival against the greatest odds and a perpetual love for life
despite extreme loss and cruelty.
|
|
From Amazon.com:
|
Arie Tamir, nicknamed Leosz, was born in Poland to a well-to-do family. World
War II breaks out when he is all of seven years old, and for the next six years
he undergoes all the levels of hell that the Holocaust brought upon the Jewish
people.
The family first attempts to escape to eastern
Poland. They reach in turn two cities - Lvov and Lublin which are heavily
bombed. They then run to a village in which they spend several weeks and
encounter the German army for the first time. Deciding to return to their
home-town of Krakow, they spend the next year and a half living in an area full
of German families. This German environment protects the family from harassment
and anti-Jewish pogroms. During this time, Leosz lives in an illusion of being
in one long adventure and even pretends at times to be a German child.
In March 1941, the family is forced into the
Krakow Ghetto, where they live for the next two years Leosz undergoes an
accelerated maturation process, learns to smuggle food and fight for his life,
and is saved from three mass deportations to the death camps that catch most of
his beloved aunts, uncles and cousins. With the liquidation of the ghetto in
March 1943, when he is not even 11 years old, Leosz escapes alone, survives for
several weeks while pretending to be a Polish street kid, and then hides for
several months with a Christian family. At the end, he is caught and brought to
the Plaszow labor camp to be executed. Miraculously, he manages to escape this
death sentence as well, and is reunited with his father, mother and sister, who
are all in the camp working as slave laborers.
For a year, he lives in Plaszow, battling daily
to eat enough and survive. During this time, Leosz is saved from two "Actions"
specifically aimed at catching children and sending them to their deaths. In
August 1944, he is separated from his mother and sister and taken to the Gozen 2
camp in Austria together with his father.
Gozen 2 turns out to be human meat grinder,
where torture, starvation, extremely hard labor, beatings and murder are the way
of life. Leosz's father is killed in this hell. Several weeks before the end of
the war, Leosz is brought along with a group of other prisoners to a kind of
secondary death camp right next to Mauthausen. Due to a lot of luck, good
people, and resourcefulness, Leosz survives until the end of the war.
On May 5th, Leosz is freed by the American army,
recovers quickly, returns to life, and enjoys his freedom with all his heart,
mind and soul.