Troubled Twilight for Holocaust Survivors

In a life filled with unspeakable tragedy, Elizabeth Roth has found a quiet haven: Once a month, she and other elderly Holocaust survivors gather at a small kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, where they drink coffee, exchange small talk and deal with the traumatic past on their own terms.

A frail woman who lost her family at Auschwitz, Roth now wrestles with the medical and psychological burdens of advancing age. She rarely leaves her small apartment. The hours she spends at the Coffee House, hosted by a local Jewish relief agency, are one of the few bright spots in her world.

In recent weeks, however, a cloud has been hovering over these gatherings. As word spreads of $1.25 billion in assets that two Swiss banks will return to Holocaust victims--an agreement that a court may ratify this week--Roth and others have learned that they must fill out a long, unwieldy questionnaire to get cash payments of roughly $500 to $1,000 each.

One stark question in particular has awakened painful memories: “Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1934 through 1945,” reads Item D on Page 3 of the six-page legal form approved by the U.S. District Court for New York.

To lawyers and bureaucrats, these are formalities, basic facts to be compiled before Swiss banks return the money that thousands of Jews deposited during the 1930s as the Nazi threat grew more ominous. But in Brooklyn and other communities, the questionnaire has forced many aging victims of Hitler’s concentration camps to confront horrifying moments they have spent years avoiding--and it highlights larger problems plaguing America’s most vulnerable survivors.

“I am having difficult time,” Roth says in soft, broken English, as trays of pastries are cleared away. “After the Holocaust I take care of a blind sister until she dies, and then a husband until he dies. I raise three children who grow, and now I am all alone.

“I hear about Swiss money, and they say we get $500,” the 75-year-old woman adds, with bitterness. “But do you know what I really need? I need doctor’s care. My feet are swollen. I have bad heart condition. I need someone to be kind, not just throw money at me. Who is going to take care of me?”

It’s a question many are asking these days as thousands of survivors reach old age. While some have built successful careers in this country, raising families and becoming outspoken voices for remembrance, others lead lives of quiet isolation. They are desperate for companionship, in need of medical attention and embittered that a busy, bureaucratic world has passed them by. The idea that any reparations could pay them back for what they have lost fills them with anger, even though many believe it is a small measure of justice long overdue.

“In America we forget people when they get old--we throw them away to Miami, at best,” says Nobel Prize-winning writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “Yet when this happens to survivors, it is even more tragic because of all that they remember and must deal with. They are truly haunted people.”

Although it is impossible to quantify how many of America’s estimated 100,000 survivors fall into this category, there are thousands who need social services in New York--which has the nation’s largest concentration of Holocaust victims--plus Los Angeles, Chicago, South Florida, Detroit and other communities. A multitude of Jewish relief agencies tries to assist, helping survivors apply for benefits and making medical or legal appointments. Some provide counseling, housecleaning services and a helping hand to fill out the long Swiss questionnaire.

Self Help Community Services in New York, the nation’s largest city-based program targeting survivors, sponsors the coffee hour, along with home visits and other social programs. It operates five apartment buildings for Holocaust victims and reaches about 2,000 clients a year, more than 60% of whom live alone. In Los Angeles, a cluster of Jewish Family Services programs reaches out to more than 1,000 survivors, and the number is expected to grow as new services are launched in the San Fernando Valley.

For all their efforts, however, agency officials admit that more needs to be done to reach a population that is proud and in need of help--yet often afraid to ask for it. Social workers are especially concerned about those, unlike Roth, who have never come forward for any assistance and, in some instances, deny their wartime experiences altogether.

In the worst cases, some survivors suffer crippling flashbacks, refusing to undergo needed surgery because they confuse it with the grotesque experiments carried out on Jews in Adolf Hitler’s camps. Others have functioned perfectly well for many years but now have reverted to speaking only Yiddish. Social workers who attempt to sign up some survivors for Medicaid find their clients are petrified of bureaucrats and refuse to apply.

“We build a lot of Holocaust memorials, but we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to the issues of individual American survivors,” said Richard Arenson, CEO of Self Help. “Many of these people are living in pain, and they are among us. Some 20 years from now they won’t be around, and we need to make them a much bigger priority before virtually all of them disappear.”

The irony is underscored by the world’s expanding awareness of the Holocaust. On the eve of the Swiss bank distribution, the news is once again filled with stories of the 6 million Jews who perished during World War II. Museums in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and overseas are doing a brisk business; a flood of concentration camp memoirs fills the bookstores; and movies like “Schindler’s List” have turned the Holocaust into a global media event.

It wasn’t always so prominent. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, America found it easy to overlook survivors, many of whom tried to forget their experiences. Some held memory at bay by working hard and raising families, erecting psychological barriers against the past. But traumas came rushing back when many survivors retired and had ample time on their hands.

“As they get older, a lot of these people feel like they’re facing extinction a second time,” says Michael Skakun, author of “On Burning Ground,” a chronicle of how his Jewish father escaped the Final Solution by disguising himself and enlisting in the Waffen S.S. “They beat Hitler, but everything else has been taken away from them . . . and now death is the ultimate thief.”

With the Swiss bank payout approaching, there is a spirited debate over what should be done with the money: Some say a significant share should go to Jewish relief agencies, while others believe museum projects or world education programs are more appropriate. Wiesel and others say the priority should be people in need. Why not guarantee medical care or insurance to every survivor who needs it? Lawyers are expected to tackle these questions after Judge dward R. Korman approves the general agreement.

It’s a hot topic at the monthly coffee hours in Brooklyn, where Self Help workers try to soften the blows of a callous, distracted world.

Whether they pour coffee for 50 visitors, escort people to the dance floor or simply hold their hands as they try to fill out the Swiss questionnaire, workers often play the role of a Holocaust victim’s last surviving relative.

On a chilly afternoon, Roth tells how she got off a packed train from Hungary in 1945 and stepped into the caldron of Auschwitz. Herded into a dark room with hundreds of other women, she and her mother were stripped by guards and had their heads shaved. Barking police dogs lunged at them.

As the teenage girl stood shivering on the concrete floor, her mother whispered gently, trying to comfort her. “She kept saying to me: ‘You are still a beauty,’ ” Roth recalls. “A few months later, the Germans took her to another concentration camp and I never saw her again.”

Then Roth abruptly changes the topic. She doesn’t like to speak too openly with strangers, she says, and life today fills her with concern: “I wish I had happiness now, but the problem is, I can’t find myself. Do you see? I used to think I was strong. Now, I’ve gotten old.”

Next to Roth sits Helen Braun, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. She lost eight family members in Auschwitz and can barely bring herself to relive a trauma she has never discussed with her children. Braun, 72, walks with great pain, bent over, and speaks contemptuously of the impending bank payout.

“No money could pay us back, and they took a lot more than money,” she says. “They took my health, they robbed my granddaughters of a larger family. They took my dignity.”

Family members cherish her, Braun adds, but even her daughter, who teaches Holocaust studies at a New York high school, cannot persuade her mother to discuss the past. The idea of filling out a form to get money, and reliving events she doesn’t want to confront, is for her the final insult.

“It’s not enough that all this happened,” Braun says indignantly. “You have to remember everything, write it down, tell them when it happened and who took what from you. Then somebody has to certify all of this. It’s humiliating.”

Braun’s eyes sweep the room. Two elderly couples are dancing gingerly to “Sunrise, Sunset,” and she struggles to smile. “I used to have trouble listening to music because it reminded me of the family I’ve lost,” she muses. Then, abruptly, she describes her long train ride to Auschwitz, the memories of filth and squalor filling her eyes with tears.

“One day you are a member of a family, and then you have nothing,” she says. “Who will give me back my heart?”

Sitting at a table outside the banquet room, Aaron Berman grapples with a belief that the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust. Taken with other family members to a concentration camp when he was 18, Berman believes he survived because of his strength. The Nazis let some Jews live if they performed hard labor, he explains, and Berman endured for a miraculous five years.

“As a Jew, I was strong,” he says. Then, without warning, he begins to cry over the memory of seeing his father brutally beaten by camp guards. To this day, he is haunted by children’s voices in the camps shouting, “They killed Daddy!” Berman feels guilty over thoughts that he may be more entitled to financial compensation than those who spent far less time than he did in captivity.

Angrily pounding a table, he says life hasn’t been the same since he quit his job as a clothing salesman in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I was the best salesman that they ever had,” he insists, “and now I am alone, you see, with a lot of thoughts in my head.”

If someone is going to distribute money to Holocaust victims, he adds, they’d better do it fast. “We’re all getting so old. There are a lot of people here who don’t remember who they are anymore, who don’t know where they have come. We’re in a fog.”

At each table, there are stories of catastrophe and loss, long-buried feelings of helplessness and rage. But there is also the deep, universal sadness of being old and alone.

“Sitting in a room with many of these survivors is a moving experience,” says Elizabeth Schneider, who runs Self Help’s Brooklyn office. “You couldn’t possibly understand what they have been through. All you can do is try--and convince them that someone remembers. Someone knows they’re alive.”

Across town, at the southern tip of Manhattan, Norbert Friedman tries to teach that lesson every day at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. A Polish native who spent time in nine camps, he speaks to visiting groups about the past and is determined to bring something positive out of his experience.

It isn’t easy, because Friedman, 77, is all too aware of the darkness that can envelop those who survived Hitler. When he hears stories about people like Roth, Braun and Berman, his eyes brim with tears.

He recently convinced an elderly woman to share her experiences in public forums, Friedman says, but it was a traumatic step. At the end, she was glad to have spoken but still felt an emptiness; she was angered at her great personal loss and beleaguered by old age.

“Who could not feel for those whose lives have been destroyed?” he says, gazing across the harbor to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. “It’s just that I had to make a decision years ago: Did I want to remain a captive of my nightmares--or did I want to join my children in the dream for a better world and a more peaceful future for us all?”

Friedman has no shortage of demons, and the Swiss bank controversy brings him back to the small village where he last saw his mother, before she was taken away and slaughtered. She had given him a gold piece for safekeeping. He later gave it to camp commandants, who threatened to tattoo his forehead, instead of his arm, without a ransom.

“Will this Swiss money make my life different?” he asks. “No. Of course not. But that gold piece was mine. And I want it back. I want to live in this world with some kind of justice, however small. I want to be alive, with dignity.”