Auschwitz Is Remembered by Israeli Survivors

JERUSALEM — It was the most somber of reunions, a commemoration of a long-ago horror, that drew more than 3,000 people Sunday to Israel’s first public gathering of Auschwitz survivors.

Mingling in the cavernous foyer of this city’s largest convention hall, gray-haired men and women searched for long-lost friends or relatives and waited patiently in long lines to record their names and the numbers tattooed on their arms in a memorial book.

They came to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious Nazi death camp, to bear witness for the estimated 1.5 million who died in Auschwitz’s gas chambers or from its deprivations or at the hands of its guards.

For many, the pain reawakened by the gathering was deepened by the morning news--two suicide bombers had blown themselves up near the coastal town of Netanya, killing 19 people and wounding more than 60. Hundreds of those who came to the reunion had traveled by bus past that junction after the attack.

“Today too we lost dear sons,” Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein said at another Auschwitz commemoration, held at Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial. “Today too we were hit by death. Today too human monsters try to take our lives here and destroy the chances of peace. To our enemies, to our killers we say: 1,000 terrorist attacks won’t defeat us.”

Some of the survivors who attended the reunion at the Binyanei Haooma convention center--outside which 12 people were injured Dec. 25 in a blast that killed the suspected bomber, a Palestinian policeman--brought their children or grandchildren to the gathering Sunday. Some brought spouses, but most came alone. They sat at tables drinking coffee or huddled in front of bulletin boards plastered with notes in various languages that pleaded for information on long-lost relatives.

“Anyone who knew Leon Orner, who died in Auschwitz on July 29, 1942, please call his daughter, Esther Pen,” read one note. “Martha Kleiman, number A4931,” read another. “Born in Prague. Anyone with any information, please call Greenfeld Kleiman.”

Slipping back into their native Yiddish, Hungarian or Russian as they exchanged stories, the survivors reconnected--however briefly--with the only people on Earth who can fully understand what it means to know that under your crisp white shirt or soft silk dress, a number is tattooed on your left forearm.

“Until a few years ago, people didn’t want to listen to stories about the Holocaust. It was mentioned only discreetly,” said Ada Halperin, who spent a year in Auschwitz and lost her mother there.

“I met a woman in the bathroom who was in Auschwitz with me,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m looking for another woman who I know survived and who agreed to meet me here today. I think it was important to come.”

Halperin said she began to tremble as she filled out a questionnaire about her experiences.

“I’ve filled out forms for years,” she said. “But this time, it was different. I began to shiver as I wrote.”

Organized by Yad Vashem, the reunion was meant both to honor the survivors and to record the details of their personal experiences in the camp while it is still possible to collect firsthand data. Survivors received invitations and were allowed to bring one guest each.

They came at a time when the nation is still arguing over what the Holocaust means for Israel, when the term Auschwitz is being freely used in the political debate raging over the wisdom of relinquishing control of large parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Opposition Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu--an Israeli born after the Holocaust--frequently accuses Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of being prepared to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians that will “take Israel back to the Auschwitz borders,” meaning the narrow borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

But it was not the current political battle that was on Ilya Robozhnov’s mind as he lingered Sunday near one of the bulletin boards.

As his eyes searched the crowd for a familiar face, Robozhnov said his thoughts were on his youth, on events that seemed to have happened in another lifetime.

“I spent two years in Auschwitz,” the Polish native said. “I came today hoping I might find some of the girl prisoners I helped escape.”

On Jan. 18, 1945, Robozhnov recalled, he and thousands of other prisoners were forced by their guards to abandon the camp and march west through Poland to escape the advancing Russian army. Their flight came to be called the death march, because so many inmates were shot or died of exposure, starvation and disease as they trudged through the frigid countryside. Robozhnov said he helped a group of female prisoners escape the forced march and has always wondered what became of them.

“I lost seven brothers and sisters in the Holocaust,” said Robozhnov, his voice calm. Although he is married and has three children, he came to the reunion alone.

“My children are adults; the oldest is 48,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “They didn’t want to come. They don’t want to hear about it, and I don’t want to bother them. They have their own life.”

Half a century after the Nazi plan to exterminate world Jewry failed, a strange paradox exists here. The Holocaust is a part of the national psyche, but few Israelis want to hear what individual survivors have to say.

“The Holocaust is a part of our daily life here,” said Tom Segev, author of “The Seventh Million,” a book that examines Israel’s relationship with the Holocaust. “You cannot open an Israeli newspaper without finding some sort of reference to it on a daily basis. But we still don’t know what it should mean, what lessons should be learned. The political right uses it to justify occupying the territories. The left compares the behavior of the Israeli army in the territories to the Nazis.”

More Holocaust survivors--an estimated 550,000--made their way to what was then Palestine than to anywhere else after World War II.

By the early 1950s, Holocaust survivors made up roughly one-third of the Jewish population of the new state. Most rebuilt their lives. In many instances, they chose--or were urged by their countrymen--to try to forget what the numbers tattooed on their arms represented.

“When survivors came to Israel in the ‘40s and early ‘50s, they thought they were coming to a Jewish state that would welcome them with open arms and want to hear their stories. But that was not the case,” said John Lemberger, director of Amcha, a counseling organization for Holocaust survivors that has about 5,000 clients. “Israel was set up as the antithesis to the Holocaust, and people did not want to deal with the experiences of these people.”

Lemberger and some of his staff counselors were on hand at the reunion to hand out literature and offer on-the-spot counseling to survivors in distress. Lemberger said he had mixed emotions about holding such a gathering.

“Auschwitz survivors are a fraternity of people who underwent, endured, survived the most unimaginable horror conceived by man against man,” he said. “They see themselves as a special breed, their experience as unique.” A coming together of so many survivors in one place can be both a cathartic and traumatic experience, he said.

“We are afraid that tomorrow, the next day, next week, we will be flooded with phone calls from people in distress,” he added.

As survivors get older, Lemberger said, more and more are beginning to talk about experiences they kept silent about for decades. The survivors have made Israelis uncomfortable, he said, because those experiences represented the helplessness of a stateless Jewish people and the failure of the world’s Jews to rescue their brothers and sisters.

With few exceptions, Lemberger said, little was done to treat the psychological and social problems of survivors here until the early 1980s. Amcha, the Hebrew word for your people , was founded by a group of survivors who realized that time was running out for collecting the stories of the survivors and who wanted to help those who had never been able to exorcise their demons.

About 300,000 Holocaust survivors are alive in Israel today, Lemberger said. Survivors represent about 45% of the nation’s elderly population, he said.

“Many of those people are doing just fine,” he said. “But many of them are not doing so fine. They are the ones who need our help. This year is going to be a rough one for Amcha.”