The ties that bind

Holocaust survivors gather regularly, even as their numbers dwindle

By DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER | Photos By DEANNA DENT

Marion Weinzweig is 67 or 68 this year. She's not sure which. Born to Jewish parents in Poland during World War II, she lost her mother when she was a baby.

Her father, unable to protect her and knowing that he would soon be rounded up himself, paid a family of farmers to take the child in. But the farmers, most likely fearing for their own lives, deposited the child at a nearby convent. It was the first of several that Weinzweig would live in over the next several years.

After the war, Weinzweig's father, who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, managed to track her down. He arrived at the convent to claim her.

"I didn't want to go with him," Weinzweig remembers. "You have no idea what a Jew-hater I was, and here a Jew came to get me."

Today, Weinzweig lives in Phoenix. She has only a slight accent, which you could chalk up to her years in Toronto after the war. She has three grown, successful children and several grandchildren; their pictures hang on the walls of her well-appointed Phoenix home. But there is a sadness about her, in spite of her sense of humor and her energetic demeanor.

Like other children of the Holocaust, Weinzweig says she has "terrible issues with abandonment" and with food - "I was always hungry. I was always so hungry." And she was ashamed of what had happened to her. As an adult, she says, "I never admitted to being a survivor."

It wasn't until she saw a notice in Jewish News of Greater Phoenix from the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust, an international organization seeking children of the Holocaust, that she decided to "come out of the closet."

Sixteen years ago, she attended her first WFJCSH meeting, and a door that had long been closed for her opened again.

"It was so incredible meeting people like myself," she says. "It was like we were siblings. I could finally be myself."

Every year at the annual Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association meeting and dinner, the members take a moment to remember the survivors who died during the preceding year.

This year's meeting, held Oct. 19 at Beth El Congregation in Phoenix, is no different. Before the brisket, before the entertainment (Phoenix's own Chai Tones, playing klezmer), PHSA President Judy Searle stands at the podium set up at the far end of the synagogue's great room and reads the names of those who are gone. The guests, seated at a dozen or so round tables, fall quiet. Among others, the group lost Ella Adler, who was well known in the Phoenix area for her willingness to share her harrowing story - in remarkable detail, without self-pity or self-aggrandizement - with students.

A volunteer organization, PHSA was established 24 years ago. From the beginning, one of the group's goals was to connect survivors with young people who will take their stories of discrimination and deprivation to heart, thereby ensuring that nothing like the Holocaust will ever happen again. Schools in the Valley routinely contact the PHSA to request a visit from someone who lived through the Holocaust; lately those visits have been more difficult for the survivors to make. In some cases, the PHSA will send a "second generation," or child of a survivor, known as a 2G, to speak instead.

Unlike some other organizations, PHSA can't count on new members to replace the old. It's a finite group, a shrinking club that no sane person would wish to belong to. The question of what will happen to the group when no survivors remain is one that the younger members wrestle with, but so far, have not yet been able to answer.

The number of survivors in the Phoenix area is difficult to pinpoint. PHSA counts 240 current members, some of whom are 2Gs or 3Gs (grandchildren of survivors), some of whom are supporters. (It should be noted that not all local survivors are members of the PHSA.)

According to a census conducted by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office back in 1997, some 140,000 to 160,000 survivors lived in the United States; in the 11 intervening years, many have doubtless died.

The Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., indicates that there are 338 survivors living in Arizona. The registry is voluntary, so not as comprehensive as a census, points out Andy Hollinger, director of media relations at the USHMM. And as with the national census, the numbers are diminishing every day.

Along with the statistics, Hollinger provides the definition of survivor used by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office: "any Jew who lived in a country at the time when it was under Nazi regime, under Nazi occupation, or under regime of Nazi collaborators, as well as any Jew who fled due to the above regime or occupation."

The survivors who belong to PHSA all fit under this umbrella, but their experiences vary as widely as do their personalities. Some were born in France and were hidden with Christian families. Some were born in Germany and emigrated before the war. Some were born in Poland and survived extermination camps and death marches. They range in age from 67 (or 68) to 92. Almost all speak English with an accent, but the accents vary too, in thickness and in origin. Some members speak openly about life under Nazism, while others would just as soon change the subject.

Rudy Fraenkel is one survivor who prefers to discuss other things. Born in Maenz, Germany, in 1931, he left his homeland in 1938 and wound up in a convent in Marseilles, France. He came to the United States via Lisbon, Portugal, in 1941, as part of a group of 100 Jewish children sponsored by Pennsylvania Quakers.

Sitting at a table next to his wife, Paulette, at the PHSA dinner, Fraenkel answers questions about his background, but his responses are brief. He warms up when the conversation turns to life after the war. What brought him to Phoenix from Wisconsin, in 1984? "The weather," he says. "I didn't become a motorcycle bum till I got here. I'm a Chai Rider."

The Chai Riders is a group of Jewish motorcycle riders who meet at least once a month to have breakfast and ride; Fraenkel says that the average age of the riders is 50, and he's pretty sure he's the oldest member.

A tall, lanky man with a shock of white hair, Fraenkel looks younger than his 77 years. He finally started wearing a motorcycle helmet after he got hit last October and "totaled his bike," he says. He invites a reporter to come to the next Chai Riders' meeting, but declines a request to share photographs of his childhood - "Why would anyone want to see that?" he asks.

Marion Weinzweig, however, is amenable to sharing photographs of her youth. But, she hastens to point out, some of the older survivors in the group don't consider her a survivor, because she was born after the war broke out.

She was born in Lublin in 1940 or '41, she says, and moved to Apt, also known as Apatow, as a child. Not long afterward, her mother was murdered at Treblinka.

"She was supposedly a wonderful woman," Weinzweig says in a conversation at her home, a few weeks after the PHSA dinner. "I apparently look just like her."

Although Weinzweig's family spoke Yiddish, they did not speak it around her, so that she would not be able to give herself away. "From the minute my mother had me, she knew she wanted to save my life," Weinzweig says.

When her father found her at the convent, after the war, he took her to Germany, where life continued to be difficult for both of them.

"I was crossing myself and praying to Jesus every night," she says. She doesn't remember when exactly she stopped doing it, but, she says, it made her father and other relatives uncomfortable.

In Germany, Weinzweig says, the remaining members of the Jewish community "always put me at the head of all their processions and funerals. Because I was the only surviving child."

Eventually she and her father immigrated to Canada. But her father could not take care of her, and she spent a period of years in foster homes.

"I sort of raised myself," she says now.

In the early '90s, around the time she attended her first meeting of child survivors, she also hired a private detective in Poland, to find out more about what happened to her. He located key documents, including the letter her father wrote to the Kielce Province Jewish Committee in June of 1945, asking for a "one-time cash grant for the redemption of my daughter." With that letter, Weinzweig says she understood how much her father loved her, even though he had been unable to express it himself while he was alive.

"I got my past back, so that was really good," she says. "I got a father after he died."

In October, Weinzweig flew to Washington, D.C., for the annual international gathering of child survivors. And she regularly attends meetings of the PHSA, despite differences with some of the members.

"When you get the old survivors saying you're not a survivor," she says, "it really makes you mad."

After the annual business is concluded - new board members announced and approved, a brief presentation by Kathy Rood, of Jewish Family & Children's Service, on the Ghetto Fund - former PHSA president David Kader says the blessing over the food, and the guests file up to the buffet.

It's about 5 p.m. and still light out; PHSA dinners tend to begin early, since so many of the people attending are elderly, and some have to make the long drive back to Sun City when the evening ends.

The PHSA volunteers try to make sure that any survivor who wants to is able to attend; this evening, as on other occasions, they have arranged rides for those members, like Eda Lehman, who don't drive.

Volunteer Julie Kirschner - her father, Rudy Kirschner, was born in Dortmund, Germany - helped organize the carpooling, and she asks Lehman how it worked out. Just fine, responds the elegant, diminutive survivor.

"We're glad to be able to facilitate that," Kirschner tells her. "Any time."

Lehman nods, and the hint of a smile passes over her face. "You won't get rid of me that easy," she says.

Back