“I vote for a new life.” Members of the Harmonium Choral Society reflect upon the Holocaust with stories told to them by family members, friends, and colleagues. The Tattoo When I began my teaching in New York State, I was renting an apartment from a lady who was a Holocaust concentration camp survivor. I do not remember which camp she was interred in, but she showed me the tattooed number on her arm. When I asked her about some of her experiences there, she began to cry and could not continue. Recalling such memories was obviously too painful for her. ~Jeffrey Kunick, Tenor 2 The Dutch Resistance I have an older Dutch relative who was a child during the Holocaust. Her mother was part of the Dutch resistance and helped hide Jewish families. In her honor, a tree was planted in Israel. My relative told John and me about the bombs going off in the neighborhood, about not understanding why her best friend could no longer go to her school, and about being defiant by visiting her best friend even though there were dangers and others were spying on her. She talked about how their family had to move many times. She took us around the town where she grew up (Zwolle) as she told her stories and made special arrangements for us to see an old hidden church (yes, a church, complete with an organ!) that was used to help hide people. ~Kris Lamb and John Lamb, Bass 2 The Italian Resistance At the age of 22, my grandmother, Hedda Massa Cimoli, graduated with an English education degree from the university in Pisa, Italy. She joined the Italian Underground, the resistance, with her brother Mario, who was 18. What they experienced is more than what people in my generation can comprehend—escaping from Nazis through the air vent in the bathroom to climb to the roof, opening the door from inside a bomb shelter to find the kind German soldier who had insisted on "women and children first" dead outside, and watching as their world crumbled around them as they secretly worked and sacrificed to save their liberty and live another day. In the end, it was the betrayal of a friend, desperate and starving, that sent my Nonna, an upper-­‐class Catholic, to an Italian concentration camp, joining the millions of non-­‐Jewish civilians who were imprisoned or killed by the Nazi order in Europe. It was only six weeks before the end of the war. Italian camps were not as deadly as camps in Germany or Poland and a priest would come every week to say mass for the women. One day after mass, the priest told them that if they all were very quiet, they could walk home...the war had ended and the guards had fled. And so she lived and eventually met my grandfather, an American officer, who recognized her from her work with the Underground. I don't think she ever blamed the friend who turned her in to the police. She knew she was desperate, and like everyone else, just wanted to survive. ~Elena Bird, Soprano 2 The Story of the Pennies I hid pennies. Everywhere. I hid them in cups and socks and tissue boxes. The coins would come in handy when the Nazis came, when they found me. I was 50% Kushner and in time, when they came, I might be able to exchange those pennies for life. Maybe I would escape and run, as I had practiced, faster than they were, and take my pennies with me. Even though I had been baptized and had spent church mornings singing and listening and praying, they would still come for me. They would find me sitting on Grandpa Kushner’s lap on Sunday afternoons, his restful time reading his Yiddish newspaper after a long Saturday of chanting and praying. “Your crosses, girls,” my mother firmly reminded us. “Slip them under your shirts.” They would find me, even though I had recited the Creed and memorized the Gospels and studied Luther’s catechism. Those Nazis knew. They would find me, even though my father refused to study the Torah and then married a shiksa. They would find me when I taught The Diary of Anne Frank, class after class, and again when I climbed the narrow staircase in Prinsengracht in Amsterdam and felt Anne Frank’s wonder and hopes and fears. They would find me in Morristown online, getting a signature from Isaac Bashevis Singer or borrowing library books by Malamud and Roth and Potok and Wiesel. They would find me meandering in Krakow square to avoid going to Auschwitz, or standing between the crosses and Stars of David in Terezin with tears too heavy to catch. One day, the pennies turned useless and invisible. During most of my life, terror of Hitler and the number tattoos and the gas chambers had gripped and strangled me, until one day the world finally got bigger and safer, offering relief and a shield from those demons. They might find me, but they would not find my children, born in a different time forty plus years after the Holocaust. Confident and untethered by my childhood fears, they have traveled with us, through books and songs and lands, welcoming the joys and wonders of culture, race, and religion. No need to hide even one penny, even though atrocities still exist. Perhaps my children will protect themselves during their personal journeys by embracing Anne’s wise philosophy of tolerance and goodness: “In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” ~Linda Clark (née Kushner), Soprano 2 The Norwegian Resistance Here is a family story about what Hitler did to citizens who did not do his bidding: Norway was occupied during WWII and had a fierce resistance army, with many of its citizens escaping and fighting with the British. My great-­‐uncle was the editor of the major newspaper in Oslo, Norway. He was told by a German general to print certain pro-­‐Hitler items in his newspaper. My great-­‐uncle refused, and was dragged off to a labor camp for the next four years. His house was also burned to the ground, and his wife and four children had to find shelter with relatives. He survived the four years, but never talked about it. My father was in the first wave on Omaha Beach on D-­‐Day. He would never talk about his experiences either. I think that generation went through so much, and never wrote down their experiences or talked about them—they all felt as if they were just doing what they had to do to eliminate Hitler. ~Linda Fagerstrom, Soprano 2 God is Good My uncle, Guenter Haenchen, was a child in 1943. His father was a German soldier at the Russian Front. For some reason, he never knew why, German soldiers invaded their home and forced his mother with four children onto a train in a packed cattle car. With no room to even sit down, they had no idea where they were going, no food and no water for days while on the trip. My uncle drank his own urine to survive. He was lucky; his infant sister died on the trip. They begged the soldiers to let them bury her by the side of the train tracks, which they were allowed to do. They eventually arrived at a displacement camp. There they worked, and his brother Hans contracted rickets—he survived and still limps today. Their mother did not survive. Guenter and his brothers Hans, Dieter, and Klaus were finally able to leave the camp after the war and somehow Guenter made it to the US where he met my mother’s sister and dedicated his life to helping others by working in Overbrook Hospital. For many years, he also served as a volunteer paramedic in Verona, NJ, until he contracted cancer and died in 2003. I miss him terribly. His favorite phrase was always “God is good.” He was Christian. ~Nancy Watson-­‐Baker, Soprano 1 The Kindness of Others My maternal grandfather's second cousin, Edgar Danziger, was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 15 (the same age as Anne Frank). The specifics surrounding his death were never completely clear, so when I found out Harmonium would be going to Auschwitz as part of our 2002 Tour of Eastern Europe, I was determined to obtain an official death certificate for Edgar and bring it back for my grandparents. My experience visiting Auschwitz has left an indelible imprint on my memory. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the eerie sense of unrest when I first entered through the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes you free) sign; still see the glass cases on display in the bunkers, cases filled with pounds of human hair, countless pairs of shoes, and thousands of empty poison gas canisters; still picture myself walking down the seemingly endless death path from the barracks to the rubble where the crematoriums once stood. It's hard to truly comprehend the horror that occurred in these camps, and I couldn't help but imagine what it must have been like for Edgar, so young (and only four years younger than myself during that visit), to have been trapped in such hell: scared, cold, hungry. Once our tour of Auschwitz ended, we had only about 20 minutes before we had to leave. I knew I had to act fast if I wanted to find the death certificate. I quickly ran to the general information help desk, where I was instructed to go to the archives department. After some trial and error (mostly error), I finally located the correct building. I tried my best to explain to the woman working there, who spoke limited English, who I was and what I was looking for. She then walked into a back room and returned with a huge book: an alphabetical record of every person killed in Auschwitz. And, sure enough, Edgar Danziger was listed. She told me she had to go to another floor in order to find his death certificate, but by that point, I was out of time and had to get back to the bus. In a last minute effort, I wrote down my name and address and asked if she could mail me a copy. She smiled and nodded. About a month or so later, I still had not gotten anything in the mail, and I thought maybe she had forgotten about me, but, lo and behold, a few weeks after that, I received my first and only mail from Poland: a copy of the death certificate, meticulously notated in true Nazi record-­‐keeping fashion: Edgar Danziger (student), b. 9/19/1927, Berlin d. 9/25/1942, 9:05 p.m. Cause of death: pulmonary edema with pneumonia I'd like to dedicate this concert in memory of all the Annes and Edgars whose innocent lives were cut short during one of humanity's darkest times. May they never be forgotten, and may we never cease in our quest for peace and tolerance in this world. ~PJ Livesey, Tenor 2 Embracing the Extended Family The pogroms of the 1880s and then again following the Black Sea rebellion of 1905 were key catalysts motivating 20% of the 7.5 million impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe to emigrate, mostly to the United States. My grandparents and also my wife Margot’s grandparents emigrated to the U.S. arriving either via New York or St. Johns Canada, which was then the cheapest route across the Atlantic. After years of searching, we have copies of most of the ship manifests. My maternal grandfather Morris’ father was reported washed overboard coming solo to the U.S., and Morris, the eldest of six children, was left on his own at age 13 when his mother remarried. He made his way to Odessa, briefly eked out a living as a tailor, was wounded in the Black Sea rebellion of 1905, and then escaped the subsequent pogroms by emigrating alone to the U.S. Some of our grandparents came with parents and some siblings, but most of the aunts, uncles, and cousins remained behind. With the exception of one girl who left White Russia in 1935 to join her boyfriend, all of the remaining family perished in the Holocaust, with towns like Slonim and small cities like Bialystok razed by Panzer tanks. My mother’s childhood memories are filled with visits to the New York docks with her father in the late 1930s and early ‘40s, trying to get news about particular villages and family members. All letters stopped by the late 1930s. Ahuva, the girl who made it to Palestine, was named, as was my mother, after her grandfather, who was also known as Leib (hence my mother’s nickname Libby). Her son became a famous astrophysicist and at age 67 is still asked by the Israeli Army to help with his special skills. We got to know her daughter and her family when we were students in Cambridge, MA. They became my and Margot’s model of what kind of family life we wanted. Their children were the flower girls at our wedding, and we have shared every family event with them for nearly 40 years. ~Paul Flowerman, Bass 2 Reality When I began teaching, an older fellow teacher showed me numbers that were tattooed on her wrist. She was a prisoner in the camps, had lost many family members there, and it was shocking to actually see that on a human being. When I was still teaching, a second grader told me that the Holocaust didn't really happen. I'm sure this idea came from his home, but I was shocked and countered what he said as best as I could with seven-­‐
year olds. I was concerned about how the Jewish children in the class might feel and spoke to the guidance counselor and the classroom teacher about it. I was also concerned about this student and his family's denial and also the impression such a statement could make on the non-­‐Jewish children in a classroom. I visited Dachau when I lived briefly in Germany in the early 1970s. I remember a sculpture made up of abstract human forms, fence posts, barbed wire, etc. that is an International Monument near Munich. It left an indelible impression on me. My husband and I took our two children to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The most poignant thing about that visit was a card received by each visitor. It depicted an individual, including a picture, who had been affected by the war and what had happened to them (some had survived and some had not). I was lastingly affected by a very powerful scene in the movie Schindler's List when Schindler considers how many more lives he might have saved if he had used the ring on his finger for that purpose. The question remains: How far is far enough for us to go, enough for us to give for others? There is no limit to our responsibility for the well-­‐being of our fellow human beings in the world, though we fall short. ~Sandy Sheridan, Alto 2 Where There is Love I learned about the Holocaust through my best friend, Anita. Her parents, Ben and Dora, were survivors of the camps in Poland. I knew only that their experiences were nothing short of a living hell, but never knew many of the details. Their relentless will to live, along with a number of serendipitous circumstances, as well as unexpected and self-­‐sacrificing kindnesses of others, helped bring them through the torturous years until they were liberated. Dora Rosen and Ben Weinkranz grew up as part of well-­‐to-­‐do Chassidic families in Poland. Although they lived near one another growing up, they belonged to different Chassidic sects so they did not know one another. They were both about 16 years old when the war broke out. On September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland and seven days later, Łótź, which held the highest concentration of Polish Jews, second only to Warsaw, was occupied and became the site of the Jewish Ghetto in Poland. Over a period of months, approximately 230,000 Polish Jews, including Ben and Dora and their families, were packed into a 4.3 sq. kilometer area in northern Łótź. Dora was the youngest of three children; her father and youngest brother died, it is believed, of disease, in the ghetto. Ben was the middle of five children, and the only one who survived. Ben and Dora met in the munitions factories that were part of the work camps in the ghetto. Ben was immediately smitten. This was their home until the ghetto began “liquidation” in June of 1944, during which time people were being deported to various death camps. Dora was sent to Auschwitz, and Ben to Bergen-­‐Belsen. Dora was one of the 20,000 women who made the now infamous death march from Auschwitz and other camps to Bergen-­‐Belsen, where she remained until the British liberated them. Dora was extremely ill, with either typhus or typhoid, and her life was saved because a friend pointed her out to the British soldiers and she was brought to a hospital in Poland and on to a hospital in Sweden that was caring for sick refugees. Ben searched for Dora and a mutual acquaintance told him of her whereabouts. He made his way to Sweden to find her. They eventually married and Anita and her older sister, Suzanne, were born in Sweden. They came to the United States in April, 1954, by ship, sponsored by HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society – still active). Ben and Dora’s wedding celebration consisted of sponge cake and oranges. They promised that their children would have better weddings, which they did. They created good lives for their children with strong family values. Ben was known to say “I have all the riches I need,” referring to his family. Both Ben and Dora are gone now, but my memories of both of them are strong, and now, even deeper. ~Kathy Ornstein, Soprano 1 My Name is Ruth I went to a prestigious and challenging girls’ prep school in Philadelphia as a scholarship student—my mom taught there. We learned French from the time we were little. In middle school, our French teacher was a shy, kind and rather strict and demanding (in a good way) woman known to us as Madame Renee Hartz. In the way of middle schoolers, we didn’t really think of her as a person, but as that mysterious entity, a teacher—especially since she was the kind who never ever shared anything personal in class. One day, instead of regular class, all the French sections were sent into one room. Sitting on chairs, desks, and window sills, and in slightly dim lights, Madame Hartz started to tell us how her name was not actually Renee, but Ruth, and when she was little she hid from the Nazis with her siblings by being “absorbed” into a French farm family and passed off as one of their own. She was even directly questioned by a Nazi officer at age five and had to lie and say her name was Renee and she was a child of that house, even as her real father was hiding in the fields outside. Needless to say, this story made a huge impression on me and my classmates, one of whom, Stacy Cretzmayer, grew up to be a writer, found Madame Hartz again and wrote her story. Madame Hartz remained close to my mom, and in the way of many survivors of the Holocaust, began to tell her story more as she got older. She still does, visiting schools and community events. The book is titled Your Name is Renee: Ruth Kapp Hartz’s Story as a Child Hidden in Nazi-­‐Occupied France. ~Anne Matlack, Artistic Director The Foster Child Brenda Levenson was a French Jew during the Nazi occupation of France. Her family, as did many other Jewish families in that horrible situation, sent her to live with a French family through the French Resistance network. During that time, the need to keep one’s child safe from the Nazi terrors surpassed the need to understand who was caring for the child, and Brenda suffered terrible beatings, barely had enough to eat, and was forced, at the tender age of 11, to do heavy household chores. She was not allowed to attend school and was forced to sleep in the same bed as other children of all ages. Her beautiful, long, wavy hair was shorn to the scalp because her caretaker felt she was spending too much time braiding it. Her letters home were scrutinized and she was not allowed to have the packages sent by her mother. She carefully crafted letters to her mother which contained hidden meanings and eventually the Resistance came for her and shipped her back to Paris. Here, reunited with her family, she was tutored by a teacher after school since Jewish children were often rounded up by the Nazis while attending school. Her family was forced to move often and stay a step ahead of invading German forces. Her memoir is titled: The present is never in the time you are in. Brenda is my aunt. ~Deborah Schuman Wohl, Soprano 2 All One Family Sing It seemed fortuitous that Harmonium was planning to visit death camps in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 2002, so I could see firsthand what made the Nazis tick. My daughter Jane, who was then about 16, went on that trip. I remember at Auschwitz, on a day when I seemed preoccupied by the institutional magnitude of the place (the brick buildings seeming to overshadow the rows of barracks), I came into a hall filled with bags of human hair, heaps of eyeglasses, and a whole room full of chipped pots and pans, only to see Jane transfixed and weeping at a display case filled with clothing salvaged from dead babies. That experience brought home the particularity of grief, in the midst of a general and abstract anger, towards the brutish project of social engineering that Hitler somehow managed to construct for himself. When I returned from that trip, I wrote a book of poems giving a lyrical expression to each of the fifty or so articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I set these poems into a book as if they were psalms, with Anglican chant tunes to give them a fuller realization as a form of spiritual expression in a group setting. Across from each page I put a photograph that I had taken, of some aspect of Auschwitz or Terezin. I called this book All One Family Sing. I think people should be mindful that the most comprehensive statement of human rights that we have was primarily motivated by the world's disgust at what had happened to the Jews, or, if you like, to Anne Frank. ~Jabez Van Cleef, Bass 2 I Vote for a New Life Ursula Pawel, a petite, soft-­‐spoken woman from Maplewood, never discussed her youth as a German Jew during Hitler's regime. Her neighbors knew nothing about her experiences at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, or the murders of her father, brother, and countless friends and relatives in Hitler's death camps. Even her sons knew little about these horrors. Ursula and her mother, Caroline Lenneberg, arrived in America in 1947. On their journey across the Atlantic, Pawel's mother told her daughter, "We have a choice. We can live in the past or we can start a new life. I vote for a new life." This is the pledge that enabled them to begin again and to prosper in their new country. Pawel is no longer silent about her experiences; she published My Child Is Back!, a memoir of her first 22 years. Encouraged by her sons to share her story and outraged by historical revisionists who try to deny the Holocaust, she felt a moral obligation to be a witness to the unthinkable yet real horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Pawel writes: "In 1933, my parents and many of their Jewish friends had been convinced that Hitler would not be in power for very long; they argued that the German people would not allow it! I think that up until November 1938, they were still hoping for a miracle. Then came Kristallnacht when countless Germans watched and many applauded as Jewish homes were openly plundered and destroyed. Jewish shops were smashed and our school and synagogue were burned to the ground... It became quite clear what the Nazis were capable of, and now everybody was desperate to leave Germany." Despite daily threats and inhumane treatment (Pawel's mother was ordered to "divorce the Jew," which she refused to do), Pawel's family managed to survive intact until 1942 when Ursula, at age 16, was summoned to join a transport to a labor camp. Knowing that eventually they would all be called, Pawel's parents and brother volunteered to accompany her. The Gestapo did not allow Pawel's mother to go. The transport took Pawel and her father and brother to Theresienstadt (Terezin), in what is now the Czech Republic. Pawel explains: "Theresienstadt had been a garrison town where soldiers were housed; the Nazis turned it into a transit station in 1941. Jews from all over Europe were held there, before being sent on to a camp where they would be selected for work or extermination." Her family spent two years in Theresienstadt where Pawel cared for children in the youth shelter and her father worked as a carpenter. In 1944, they again chose to stay together when Pawel's father was ordered into another transport, this time to Auschwitz, where he and Pawel's 14-­‐year-­‐old brother were killed. From this point on in her story, Pawel describes every day as being like a lottery. "You had no idea each day whether you would live or die…there was no reason to anything; it's impossible to say why one was chosen to live and another to die." Her survival and reunion with her mother are described in detail in My Child is Back! In 2002, Harmonium travelled to Eastern Europe on our second international tour. We prepared by singing some music about Terezin, and Ursula came and spoke to our audience in a most moving way about her experiences there. When we went to Terezin, we armed ourselves with a map and attempted to find her former address, which was quite hard since the street names changed after the war. Meanwhile, our guide was getting very frustrated with what was clearly (to him) an utterly pointless quest, and urged us back into the bus. The group refused; he didn't understand the personal importance this had to us, our direct connection and promised commitment to this wonderful lady. As a last resort, I thought to go into a small museum within the town -­‐ maybe someone there might know the prior German names of the streets. Amazingly, they had a printed map with the old German names. Using this, we were able to quickly locate the street and then Ursula's building. The satisfaction we felt couldn't be put into words. Ursula was, of course, very pleased. Ursula remains a loyal Harmonium audience member! ~Anne Matlack, Artistic Director; Valerie Davia, former Harmonium President; Murray Spiegel, Bass 2