Imagine just for a moment that you’re a child targeted for extinction, whose world has suddenly morphed into a surreal landscape designed to efficiently eliminate you and your family. And this is neither a video game nor a sci-fi tale set in a dystopian future.
Thanksgiving, a time to contemplate that for which we’re grateful while ingesting way too many calories, holds special meaning for a small but very unique population – the child survivors of the Holocaust.
One of these survivors is my friend, Lelah Hopp, an adventurous spirit whose earthy sense of humor, intelligence, curiosity, insight and wisdom share space with fearsome memories of the war years. Her life during that time comprises a chapter in “How We Survived,” a remarkable book containing the powerful first-person narratives of 52 people who, thanks to ingenuity, courage, sheer luck and the kindness of others, lived to share their childhood experiences of a period during which the Nazis’ “Final Solution” was being promulgated.
I feel proud and honored to have assisted Lelah in preparing her chapter, which we worked on a couple of years ago. It took grit for her to confront and articulate her past. Having lost a great many of my family members in the Holocaust, the collaboration had its wrenching moments for us both.
Although I’d known Lelah for many years and was aware she’d been a child in Europe during the war, she’d never before volunteered details of that time either to me or her children. Her motivation in finally coming forth was, in her words, “to make the Holocaust personal and intimate, not something theoretical; something that had happened to others. I wanted to let my children know that this is my story, this is what happened to their mother.”
“How We Survived” was created thanks to the vision and efforts of Marie Kaufman, president of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Los Angeles. That dream, several years in the making, is dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million children who did not survive the Holocaust.
The book launch finally took place before a packed auditorium on Nov. 20, a torrential but glorious Sunday afternoon, at a venue that couldn’t have been more appropriate: the Museum of Tolerance, a Simon Wiesenthal Center museum dedicated to educating visitors so that they understand the Holocaust historically and in contemporary contexts in order to confront all forms of prejudice and discrimination existing in today’s world. During the presentation, Wiesenthal was quoted as having said that “hope lives when people remember.” And this book of memories is a powerful testament to hope.
Many of us have had the experience of awakening from a nightmare. Lelah woke up into one. It was 1941 and she was nine years old. “I thought it was a thunderstorm,” she told me. But it was a cannonade. The Germans had started their invasion of Russia, and she and her mother lived in Brest-Litovsk, on the border that divided the German-occupied part of Poland from the Russian-occupied part.
The males in Lelah’s family were rounded up and shot, and she and her mother were confined to a ghetto, a space surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence with one gate. The only way out was to go to work. The women were sent to the army barracks to clean and do laundry, with a yellow star prominently displayed on their chests and backs. Food was sparse.
The following year, Lelah’s mother heard from a local policeman that the entire civilian police force of Brest-Litovsk was being asked to report for duty early the following morning, and he thought it had something to do with the ghetto. Lelah and her mother escaped and went into hiding just before the “cleansing” was to occur, when local police and the Gestapo would sweep through the ghetto, pick up all of the children and the infirm and leave the workforce behind.
One of their hiding places was in the tiny basement apartment of a friend of Lelah’s mother, who shared her quarters with a woman who used to be her servant but was now a Nazi sympathizer. Although arrangements had been made for the former servant to move to an apartment of her own in a few days, her presence in the meantime could mean death for Lelah and her mother if discovered, as well as disaster for her mother’s sympathetic friend.
Lelah and her mother, therefore, hid in a tiny niche in the wall, separated from the rest of the apartment by a folding screen. There was only enough space for them to sit on two stools behind that screen while the former servant was in the apartment, remaining motionless and silent as death if they were to have a hope of living.
This is a brief sample of the experiences described in Lelah’s story, and the horrors of that time have continued to resonate through the years in subtle ways. Today, she told me of an epiphany she’d had just a few days ago in a friend’s kitchen. She told her friend that she’d dined out with family members and when the time came to box up the leftovers, the waiter took care of packing hers. This special attention was very discomforting because “it made me stand out,” she said. The conversation with her friend, who dresses colorfully, then turned to Lelah’s wardrobe, which consists almost entirely of neutral shades.
“I suddenly realized I had an irrational need to blend in, to be invisible,” Lelah said, making the connection. To the child residing within her, drawing attention equaled death.
I kid Lelah by calling her the matriarch of a dynasty. Yet it’s chilling to think that her children and grandchildren would likely not even exist to celebrate this week’s holiday had a terrified little girl hiding behind a screen sneezed, coughed or made any sound at all. But my friend not only lived, she got her story into print and that’s definitely above the fold on my list of gratitudes this Thanksgiving.