Jews Recall Horror of Holocaust With a Look Into Future

The walls of the synagogue were filled with the writings and drawings of children trying to understand what the world, more than 40 years later, still cannot explain: why 6 million Jews, some of them the children’s grandparents, were led to their deaths during World War II.

But while Orange County’s commemoration Sunday of the Holocaust looked backward by recognizing the survivors of the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust or annihilation), it also focused on the future, by honoring the third generation of survivors.

A Triumphant Message

“We Are Here” was the title of Sunday’s countywide service, Yom Hashoah, at Temple Beth David in Westminster, but it is also a triumphant message to the world, said the event’s organizers.

“This memorial service goes beyond the Jewish community,” Eleanor Burg, president of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, told more than 500 participants. “We have denied Hitler his final victory because we are here.”

“Perhaps most significant is the presence of you children,” said Rena Wolfson, chairwoman of the Holocaust Awareness Committee for the county’s Jewish Federation, and the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. “What better tribute to the fallen and murdered than your presence here today?”

Through poetry, essays, drawings and sculpture, the Jewish schoolchildren of Orange County paid homage to those who suffered and died in concentration camps, proclaimed pride in their heritage and vowed to never let another Holocaust happen.

A cardboard sculpture of a concentration camp, crafted by fourth grader Steven Benson of B’nai Tzedek, showed several stick-figures of people romping in the yard. Each was saying:

We are here.

We are back.

We survived.

We are glad.

Keith Metzgerm a seventh-grader from Congregation B’nai Israel, dedicated his award-winning poem to his great-uncle, who died in the Holocaust:

I am here . . .

I am not in the ruins

Of Hitler’s massacred world

I am here . . .

I am not in the solitary mind

Boggling gas chambers of Auschwitz

I am here . . .

Hitler and the whole world

Should know that I am here.

Also on display was an attention-grabbing poster that depicted Hitler, a smoking gun, a burning Nazi flag and humans hanging from nooses.

Sunday’s service was filled with song, some of them in English, many in Hebrew and Yiddish. One, “Ani Maamin” (I Believe), was rousingly sung by the people. It was sung by many Jews as they were marched to their deaths in the concentration camps.

Sunday’s service featured a candle-lighting ceremony, as Shoah survivors stepped forward to light six blue candles and rabbis read from writings about the Holocaust. They were followed by second-generation survivors, who lit six more flames, and finally, by third-generation survivors who set six more candles ablaze.

Singer Rosalie Gerut of Boston, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, sang as the final candles were lit:

Light a candle to remember,

Keep the darkness far away.

One of those attending the service was Dr. Ester Fiszgop. It took her 40 years before she could speak of the horrors of surviving World War II as a Jew in Poland. Even now, the words came haltingly, punctuated by tears.

She had been away, visiting her grandmother, when the Germans attacked her hometown of Brzesc and took her family away, she said in an interview after Sunday’s service. She and her grandmother were later put in a Jewish ghetto. The night before the Germans “liquidated” the encampment--the plan was to export the Jews to the concentration camp at Treblinka--her grandmother smuggled the 12-year-old girl out under a barbed wire fence to a Polish person who was to help her hide.

Never Seen Again

Her grandmother was supposed to follow a few hours later, but she was never seen again. Nor was the rest of her family.

“In the morning, I heard all the shooting,” Fiszgop said, her voice trembling. For the next two years, she survived by hiding in fields and forests and barns, all alone, for her Polish helper had deserted her.

Looking at the children at the Yom Hashoah service, filled her not with hope, she said, but with sadness.

“My brother was 10 when he was killed. He was a beautiful child,” she said, as tears spilled.

“I know intellectually and from experience that life goes on, but I’m very, very bitter,” she said. “It took 40 years for me to be able to talk about it. I have not forgiven.”

While the service focused on Jewish pride, one Gentile was specially singled out for praise. Irene Updyke, 65, of Yorba Linda, received a rousing ovation because in 1944, as a young Polish woman working in the household of a German major in the Ukraine, she hid 12 Jews in the cellar for nine months, until the war’s end.

‘I Can Never Forget’

She was scared but she never wavered, she said. “I believe so strongly that no one has the right to murder,” she said after the service.

Updyke, now 65, has attended the last two Yom Hashoah services, she said, “because I want to see the children. I saw little children taken from their mothers’ arms. I can never forget that.” Today, she speaks to schoolchildren because “I know only one thing will save us. We must build an understanding, and that is on the shoulder of the young people . . . I will be for the rest of my life telling children the truth, because they are our future.”

As the service ended, children lined the aisle, arm in arm, as singer Gerut sang her own composition, “We Are Here”:

We’re here, our seeds are planted in the land

We’re here, although they thought we’d die at their command

We’re here, and no one ever will erase our stand

We’re here to love again, to live, to begin again, we’re here.