A History of Great Losses

Masha Loen was 14 when she exited a box car to be taken to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. A Nazi soldier, known as “Max the Sadist,” struck Loen’s head against the side of a barrack, splitting her head open.

At 17, Alfred Benjamin shot a picture of Adolf Hitler in Hamburg, Germany, as the dictator addressed a crowd of onlookers. Benjamin was one of only a few Jewish youngsters who saw the man responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews.

Manya Breuer spent one year of her late teenage years in the mid 1940s hiding from Nazi soldiers in a Catholic convent in Rome. The soldiers would have surely killed her if she had been discovered. She had been captured a few times before while escaping from camps.

On Wednesday, more than 50 years after that terrible chapter in world history, the three individuals and other Holocaust survivors recalled those images with a younger generation, a group of Jewish teenagers.

About 100 Jewish high school students from New York visited with Holocaust survivors at The Jewish Federation’s Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Wednesday to mark Tisha B’av, which began Wednesday at sundown and ends today at sundown.

The ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av is a major fast day in the Jewish calendar, marking the destruction of both the First and Second Temples of ancient Jerusalem.

Tisha B’av is the culmination of a three-week period of mourning, the last nine days of which are particularly intense, with observance of many customs similar to those practiced after the loss of a family member. Many Jews observe the day by fasting and refraining from all festivities. The Book of Lamentations, attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, is read in synagogues, along with poetic prayers.

This date on the Jewish calendar also commemorates various other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish community, including the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492, the initiation of World War I in 1914, and the beginning of Nazi deportations of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942.

Benjamin, a photographer and artist, displayed his collages depicting the horrors of the Holocaust. Red paint was splattered on many of the canvases to express the fate of many camp inhabitants.

The students--part of the Young Israel Teen Tour, an Orthodox summer program--were given a chance Wednesday to express their feelings on canvas.

Miriam Raisner, 15, from Queens drew a picture of a person behind a barbed wire fence. The inside was in black and white, the outside in color.

Seth Zahner, 14, of Long Island painted a picture of what he believes people were feeling while awaiting their fates.

A man stood inside a gas chamber. The day was sunny and pleasant, but the grass was brown, dead from the effects of the poison gas. The words, “death,” “kill,” “suffering” and “horror” surrounded the drawing.

Zahner has grown to know quite a bit about the Holocaust in his few years.

In the third grade, he said, he thought it was only one mad man, Hitler, who was doing all the killing.

He has since learned the truth about the fates of the millions of Jews that perished in Nazi camps, and still gets “freaked out and scared” when he learns more about the Holocaust.

“It’s almost like, the more you learn, the more confusing it gets,” he said, as he walked outside the museum. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”

Breuer, who lived in five concentration camps during her teenage years in Berlin before being liberated by U.S. soldiers June 5, 1944, hopes that the stories of survivors will help mankind.

She stood next to a box car at the museum, a reproduction of ones used to ship Jews to death camps, and urged that people love one another, regardless of religion or ethnicity.

“The most important thing is that we respect one another’s backgrounds and beliefs,” said Breuer, as tears began to pour down her face.

“When I see these children’s faces,” she said. “I see myself in a classroom learning about the Spanish Inquisition, where people were tortured, murdered and burned alive. And I so much want to tell the lessons of my feelings about the same horrors that came at me later on.”