Speaking Their Dread

Almost all of them live, still, with the nightmares. Fifty-four years have gone by, and they’ve yet to escape the past.

“I wake up and I am hiding from the Germans,” said Rose Schwarzberg, 73, who was living in Poland when the Nazis came to her village. “This night, for sure, [the dreams] will come again.”

Schwarzberg, of Laguna Hills, joined 19 other concentration camp survivors Sunday in a service at Temple Judea in Laguna Hills. At once mournful and uplifting, it memorialized the millions slaughtered in the Holocaust, and it celebrated the resilience of the human spirit and the Jewish people.

Commemorations of what Jews call the Shoah--literally, the storm--are being held around the world this week. The 54th anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of Nazi concentration camps is Tuesday.

Sunday afternoon, survivors who live in and around Leisure World bore testimony to the horrific events of a lifetime ago as they sang and read poetry along with some 200 other congregants.

They spoke out to prevent another Shoah, to make sure that no one will forget. But there was, as always, a price: awakening the memories.

Some struggled as they testified to the past. They lived the unspeakable, and the world they cherished became ashes. They know guilt and gratitude, shame and torment.

Irene Fogel, 76, of Laguna Hills lost everyone in her family: her mother, father, sister, four beautiful nieces and her brother, who was a violinist. She weighed less than 50 pounds at war’s end.

“It helps the world, maybe, [to speak], but not me,” said Fogel, her voice cracking.

Several survivors said it took more than 40 years before they could tell their stories. Some were coaxed from their shells by persistent questions from their children.

“Ours wanted to know why they had no grandparents,” said Harold Schwarzberg, 78, who met his wife, Rose, after the war. Harold Schwarzberg is a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald.

“I tell the story because I am still dreaming it,” he said.

During the service, feelings brimmed over as the survivors each lit an orange memorial candle to the 6 million who died in the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. Holocaust archivists--in particular, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation--have preserved their stories.

But more important to those gathered Sunday is the very fact of their survival. They have children and know their grandchildren. It is their enduring answer to Hitler’s “final solution.”

Daniel Ward, 13, who will have his Bar Mitzvah next month at Temple Beth El in San Pedro, lit the largest memorial candle. Aranka Klein, 71, his grandmother, lived through almost a year in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz after spending much of the war a prisoner in a Jewish ghetto in Hungary.

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As part of the service, Klein, a vibrant woman in a jaunty red suit, read a moving poem she wrote concerning April 15, 1945, the day British armored troops liberated Belsen.

The Leisure World resident described how the German guards went on a final rampage, shooting and killing inmates. “Just shoot one more, kill us all. . . . The Nazi’s last call,” she wrote.

“I had a hard time emotionally,” she said later of her effort to remember the past. “But every time I put some of my suffering on the page, I felt lighter. It lifted some of my burden, but I still can’t get rid of it.”

Klein said she first told her story only seven years ago, and now frequently speaks at schools because “unless you keep it burning, the light will go out.”

Her daughter, Liz Ward of San Pedro, acknowledged the responsibility borne by the survivors’ children and her pride in seeing Daniel be part of the service.

“You don’t want to pass on the awful memories,” she said, “but you want to pass on the history and the connection to what is going on now” in places such as Yugoslavia.

The survivors know they remain an object of curiosity and veneration. Their lives have a mythic quality. Their stories seem almost fables.

Ed Fleishman, temple president, noted that there are survivors who remain silent. “They keep it bottled up,” he said. “We had four families like that. They had the numbers on their arms and they didn’t want to talk about it.”

Others appear to have come to an uneasy truce with their decades of anguish.

Henry Wellner, who wore around his neck a small photo of himself in his striped inmate suit taken in 1945, recalled how a German officer treated a Jew who was a captain in the German army in World War I.

“ ‘A Jew remains a Jew,’ the officer told him,” Wellner said, “and then threw a grenade at his feet.”

Harold Schwarzberg, who wears tattoo 178660, told how he was tortured for two days for stealing a potato: hung by his arms, which were tied behind his back, then buried in a hole to his chin.

“The American Army came to Dachau,” he said. “Another hour and I would have been dead.”

Eva Wellner, 75, listened as her husband and Schwarzberg talked during a reception after the service. Her eyes constantly glistened, but the tears never fell. She had been in Buchenwald too.

“It was terrible” was all she said.