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Fearing the Nazis again

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Times Staff Writer

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn’t want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

She didn’t explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her “beautiful life” before Hitler’s armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

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That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they’d done so many years before.

Lying in her room at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, the elderly woman with the soft white hair and bright blue eyes “was seeing Nazis,” recounted daughter Esther Kane Meyers. “She was hearing things. I came and sat with her every day. It was the most painful thing I’d ever seen. It was all happening, right there.”

Watching 50 years of strength crumble under the weight of a long-buried trauma made Kane’s family sad and angry. What they did not know at the time was that her experience was not uncommon among aging victims of Nazi brutality.

In recent years, a body of research has sprung from the lives of Holocaust survivors like Kane as caregivers and mental health professionals work to understand and alleviate the pain of old age and remembered trauma. But when she first began to relive her past, the territory was largely uncharted.

“There has never been a group of genocide survivors live to this age in history,” said Paula David, editor of the manual “Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors.” Their experiences offer a rare window into the confluence of trauma and aging.

One clear lesson from this shrinking group, whose median age is more than 70, is that “resilience ages, too,” David said, “and diminishes along with hearing and vision.”

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The Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging has the largest population of Holocaust survivors in the West, according to nursing home officials. There were 63 such patients at latest count, although that number could rise to nearly 90 when a new building opens later this summer.

Although every Holocaust survivor is different, Kane’s end-of-life experiences are a good illustration of the kinds of things they can go through, said Chaya Berci, the Jewish Home’s executive director of nursing.

As people age and their grasp on the present weakens, events from the distant past can seem as real as anything unfolding today. For those who lived through severe early trauma, the memories that come rushing back are often of their most harrowing experiences.

Mental health professionals debate whether the symptoms they see in some aging Holocaust survivors stem from classic trauma or other conditions, such as an incomplete mourning process, said Allen Glicksman, director of research at the Philadelphia Corp. for Aging, who has studied the experiences of Nazi victims in long-term care.

Psychologist Marla Martin met with Kane regularly over the course of nearly three years as the woman’s depression and anxiety bloomed into a psychotic break fraught with paranoia and auditory hallucinations.

Even pleasant events sometimes took on dark overtones for Kane, as the voices in her head reminded her of all she had witnessed and lost.

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In October 1998, Martin wrote in her case notes that Kane’s “daughter Esther gave her two nice blankets, and this started a problem for her. She was feeling guilt because of the Holocaust and the voices telling her to share the blankets. How could she have two nice blankets?”

Martin has been treating Holocaust survivors at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for 15 years. By the time she started seeing Kane, she had already observed that a “sizable minority” of the strongest survivors dwelt daily on past horrors.

And a psychotic break like Kane’s is “not unusual,” she said. “People who have had really acute trauma can re-experience it, feel that they’re there.”

Kane’s first husband was shot to death after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Pregnant and alone in an occupied city, she fled to her family’s home in the small town of Byten. But the soldiers soon reached there, too, and forced Jews into a cramped ghetto.

After Kane gave birth, her father, a respected rabbi, begged her to leave. It was the only way, he told her, to avert disaster. So she took her infant daughter into the nearby forest and joined the resistance fighters.

The partisans were constantly on the run, sabotaging Nazi efforts, helping Jews escape from the ghettos, scavenging for food. Kane survived, but the baby died of starvation. Her name was Freidele, “joy” in Yiddish.

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More than half a century later, as Kane’s dementia worsened along with her health, Martin said, the elderly woman became increasingly focused on controlling her environment.

The shades on her window had to be just so. The leg supports on her wheelchair were never quite right. The more panicky and paranoid she felt, the tighter her clothes seemed to be.

“This was beyond the normal kind of reactions that people have adjusting to aging,” Martin said. “All of the loss of control she would have had in the Holocaust and what she had lost, that was reawakened.”

Kane’s failing vision meant much more than not being able to read, Martin said; it robbed her of an important bridge to prewar happiness, “to her loving father, a rabbi, who shared his wall of books with her.” A large-print prayer book helped.

She had trouble eating because of denture problems and depended on pureed foods. She felt that she was starving -- a common trigger for Holocaust memories -- and began to lose weight. Voices in her head reminded her of her first daughter’s death by starvation.

When Kane’s psychotic break began, there was no manual to help guide nursing homes and family members as they cared for aging Holocaust survivors.

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Early on in Kane’s breakdown, her caregivers recommended that she be transferred to a psychiatric unit at UCLA. But Meyers fought hard to keep her elderly mother in her own room -- and succeeded.

It was a critical lesson for administrators at the Jewish Home about the importance of familiar surroundings for Holocaust survivors and other dementia patients; the result is a psychiatric unit that is scheduled to open in the home’s new building.

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Kane’s experiences point out a conundrum: Though nursing homes are often the best choice for emotionally and physically frail Holocaust survivors, institutional life -- even in the most caring facilities -- can be a constant reminder of wartime horror.

Mundane experiences -- showers, doctor visits, hunger pangs, lack of privacy -- can trigger memories of concentration camps.

“Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors: A Practice Manual” lists nearly 40 such emotional catalysts.

The manual was published three years ago; it could have gone to press much earlier, said editor David, but “every time we talked to anyone, the list kept growing.”

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Lack of privacy is one reminder of life in concentration camps or in hiding, when “there was no privacy for the Jews,” the manual notes, “and at any given moment the world as they knew it could be turned inside out.”

Standing in line for treatment or service also can cause extreme anxiety in survivors who were forced to line up for food rations, roll calls, deportations -- even death.

As much as possible at the Los Angeles Jewish Home, Holocaust survivors are given private accommodations. Starting in 2006, residents ate restaurant-style meals in bright dining rooms, where the food comes out one course at a time and is tailored for individual health needs.

Personal hygiene is another trigger for many camp survivors, who watched as loved ones were promised showers but herded into gas chambers instead.

Caregivers can offer baths as an option, but that, too, can be an imperfect solution, because some of the Nazis’ victims were placed in tubs of dry ice for hypothermia experiments.

One major point in “Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors” is that what can cause distress in one person may be perfectly innocuous to another. It’s a lesson David learned firsthand at the Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System in Toronto, where she is senior social worker and coordinates the Holocaust resource program.

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“We have one gentleman who watched his entire family marched into a gas chamber. He was held back so he could pick up their corpses in a wheelbarrow and take them to the oven,” she recounted. “But his family arranged for him to have a daily shower. He feels thoroughly refreshed by it.”

Certain realities of nursing home life simply cannot be avoided, David said. For some, “like the impaired person who we cannot convince that they are safe and we are not the enemy,” institutional life means ongoing trauma, and individual attention is the only salve.

That is why the international organization that spearheads reparations to Nazi victims worldwide allocates millions of dollars annually for home care and is pushing the German government for more funding.

In a 2005 opinion piece in the Jewish newspaper the Forward, Roman Kent, an Auschwitz survivor and senior officer with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, called home care “one of our most pressing needs.”

“We survivors are adamant about remaining in our own homes rather than entering a nursing home,” Kent wrote. “To someone who endured incarceration by the Nazis, the prospect of institutionalization is frightening. It triggers memories and even induces panic.”

So far, the German government has allocated only about $50 million for home care services, an amount nowhere near enough to assist the nearly 700,000 surviving Nazi victims around the world, more than 120,000 of whom live in the United States.

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And some of the frailest survivors are simply better cared for in a nursing home, said Susie Forer-Dehrey, associate executive director of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. “For some people, including Holocaust survivors. . . with a psychotic break or Alzheimer’s,” she said, “it probably is the best place to be.”

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Today, Kane is 96 and one of the oldest surviving Nazi victims in the U.S. She has end-stage Alzheimer’s disease. She no longer speaks and is severely hard of hearing. Still, her caregivers try hard to keep her comfortable, secure and free of reminders of her painful past.

Every morning she is carefully dressed and helped into her wheelchair. Caregivers at the Jewish Home roll her to meals in a second-floor dining room, where pureed food is gently spooned into her mouth. She can neither chew well nor feed herself. She naps a lot.

Exercise classes are held in the same dining room, after the breakfast dishes have been cleared and the tables pushed to the walls. Frank Sinatra croons from the stereo. Kane squeezes a soft yellow ball in her weathered hands. The instructor slowly counts to nine: “One more, Rachel. Very good.”

And every Friday afternoon, there is Shabbat, the service that has shaped Kane’s life for the better part of a century, giving her strength and solace in the darkest times.

Meyers wheels her mother down to the multipurpose room, where two electric candles are lighted to signal the Sabbath’s official start. Wine is poured into plastic medicine cups. The challah is broken and passed around by hands sheathed in protective gloves. Prayers are intoned.

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Meyers repeats the sacred words into a small black apparatus she holds in her hand like a deck of cards. It amplifies the prayer and sends it through a headset directly into her mother’s ears.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam. Praised are You, Lord our God, King of the universe.

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maria.laganga@latimes.com

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