Holocaust Survivors Reveal Stories New York Times; New York; May 3, 2000;
Tara Bahrampour;
Edition: Late Edition (East Coast) Column
Name: Painful to Recall, Impossible Not to Tell Start Page:
B.1 ISSN: 03624331 Subject Terms:
Holocaust History Speakers Public speaking Geographic Names:
New York City New York Companies: Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living
Memorial to the Holocaust-Battery Park City
NYSic:712120Sic:712110 Sic: 712120 Sic: 712110Abstract: ''You wake me
up in the middle of the night and it's with me,'' said Ms. Stromer, a tall,
strong-jawed woman with a thick Polish accent and clear blue eyes. But until
yesterday, Ms. Stromer had never spoken in public about her parents' deaths or
her harrowing journeys through Poland with her surviving sister. Encouraging
them to do so is the focus of a daylong workshop given twice a year at the
museum. The program began in 1997, when the museum opened. ''We started getting
phone calls asking, 'Do you have survivors who could go out and speak?' '' Ms.
[Ivy] Barsky said. Beginning with just a few, the museum's speakers bureau now
has 90 people who tell their stories at local schools and synagogues on and
around May 2, Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Full
Text: Copyright New York Times Company May 3, 2000
Gusta Stromer was
16 when she, her mother, and her three sisters were sent to Belzec, a death camp
in Poland. As the train charged toward the crematorium, two boys pried open a
tiny window and jumped out. ''You jump too,'' her mother urged her. She landed
in a cabbage field and never saw her mother again.
''You wake me up in
the middle of the night and it's with me,'' said Ms. Stromer, a tall,
strong-jawed woman with a thick Polish accent and clear blue eyes.
But
until yesterday, Ms. Stromer had never spoken in public about her parents'
deaths or her harrowing journeys through Poland with her surviving
sister.
What finally got to Ms. Stromer were those who denied
history.
''When I heard there are people who deny the Holocaust, I can't
tell you what I felt,'' she said as her son drove her from her Upper West Side
apartment to speak about her experiences at the Bruriah School, a Jewish school
for girls in Elizabeth, N.J., that her granddaughter Esther Malka Stromer, 15,
attends.
''Anytime I would go talk to a denier,'' she said. ''I'd say:
'It never happened? What happened to my neighbors, my parents, my town?'
''
Her fellow guest speaker, Thomas Martinez, is a former white
supremacist who now speaks to Jewish groups about his past and his change of
heart, after years of disbelieving the Holocaust.
After hearing Ms.
Stromer speak, Mr. Martinez approached her.
''I want to shake your
hand,'' he said.
''I wish I would've known you 25 years ago. I never even
heard about the Holocaust back then.'' Nodding solemnly, Ms. Stromer held out
her hand.
Ivy Barsky, director of education at the Museum of Jewish
Heritage in Lower Manhattan, said that while some survivors had been speaking
out for 50 years, many have only come forth recently. ''They realize that in 15
years a lot of them aren't going to be here, and they feel a need for their
stories to be told,'' she said.
Encouraging them to do so is the focus of
a daylong workshop given twice a year at the museum. The program began in 1997,
when the museum opened. ''We started getting phone calls asking, 'Do you have
survivors who could go out and speak?' '' Ms. Barsky said. Beginning with just a
few, the museum's speakers bureau now has 90 people who tell their stories at
local schools and synagogues on and around May 2, Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust
Remembrance Day.
During the workshops, teachers discuss retrieving
memory, tailoring presentations to different audiences and how to convey
experiences that seem too haunting to translate into narrative.
They tell
speakers not to give a comprehensive history of the Holocaust, but simply to
keep it personal. ''It's important to let them know that they are only an expert
on their own stories,'' Ms. Barsky said.
Lisa Lipkin, a professional
storyteller who was a guest speaker at a workshop in March, said the classes
were not group therapy, but rather a way to help personalize
memories.
''If they say, 'My mother was beautiful,' I say, 'Oh, do you
mean that she had red curls that fell to her shoulders, or such bright green
eyes that everyone stopped to stare at her?' '' she said.
Eliciting the
sounds and smells of vanished lives ''can be like pulling teeth,'' said Ms.
Lipkin, who is the daughter of a survivor.
''I had one woman,'' she said,
''who said, 'I have no memories, I have nothing.' But then suddenly she
remembered her mother's pound cake and it became a metaphor for this beautiful
life they had.''
While Ms. Stromer said that hearing about the deniers
wiped away her fears of speaking out, others need more nudging.
Until
joining the speakers bureau, Bronia Brandman, a retired schoolteacher, had not
spoken about her experiences even to her closest family members.
''I
never told my children that I had a brother or sister or anything,'' said Ms.
Brandman, 69, who spent two years in Auschwitz and whose parents, brother and
three sisters were killed by the Nazis.
Ms. Brandman said that she
originally went to the museum to train as a gallery educator, but that a more
experienced speaker, Norbert Friedman, coaxed her into telling her
tale.
''He felt that I owed it,'' she said. ''Also I realized that this
is going to take me over if I don't speak.''
Mr. Friedman recalled Ms.
Brandman's first speaking engagement three years ago at New Hyde Park (N.Y.)
Memorial High School.
''She was petrified,'' he said. ''But then when she
started to speak, you should have seen the faces of the girls. I drove her home
and she was trembling, but she was like a bird let out of a cage.''
Now
one of the speakers bureau success stories, Ms. Brandman sat in the balcony at
the Flatbush Park Jewish Center synagogue Monday night, clutching a stack of
index cards.
Dressed in an olive-colored suit with a delicate flower
brooch, Ms. Brandman whispered, ''I never feel ready.''
But once on
stage, her voice did not waver.
The room fell silent as the tiny,
fine-boned woman told of smuggling food to her family, of seeing her parents
waiting to be shot, of watching her sisters walk to the gas
chamber.
''Twenty-six years later,'' she concluded, ''I went to Israel
and laughed for the first time. Five years after that I found myself singing.
But nothing has induced me to cry. And I deeply want to cry. I want to howl and
howl and howl, to infinity.''
For this audience, comprised of fellow
survivors and their children, it was not the details that impressed them so much
as Ms. Brandman's ability to speak of them. Women crowded around, some in tears,
to kiss and thank her.
''My father was never able to talk about it,'' one
woman said.
''I just want to tell you how much I appreciate that you
could.''
Ms. Brandman still doesn't talk to her family much about her
experiences, although she now shows them her writing on the subject.
But,
she said, public speaking has become a form of self-preservation, relieving
long-simmering pressures and helping her, for the first time, to evoke her
mother's face.
It has also helped reconnect her with a world that once
seemed to have abandoned her.
''You feel you weren't talking to people
who were indifferent, gloating even,'' she said. ''There's always this fear that
maybe somebody's gloating. It did an awful lot for my restoration of faith in
humanity.''
But she said she still feels mixed about speaking to
schoolchildren. ''How do you tell young people about this?'' Ms. Brandman asked.
''It pains me to expose children to such barbarity. On the other hand, how could
you not tell?''
