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A Holocaust awareness session at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown. (Photo credit: Jon Marks)<\/p>\nA Holocaust awareness session at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown. (Photo credit: Jon Marks)<\/p>\n
Jon Marks<\/p>\n
Everyone had a story to tell at what they call the largest \u201cfamily reunion\u201d in the world.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the World Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants\u2019 36th annual conference, which took place here Oct. 23-26 at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown, has become.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis conference is basically a family reunion,\u201d explained executive committee member Esther Finder, both of whose parents survived their time at Auschwitz before eventually meeting after the war. \u201cThis organization was started by child survivors who sought each other out.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone they could be with to replace family they might\u2019ve lost. Someone who understands what they went through. This was started by people who were under 16 at the end of the war. Some of them were infants.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they wanted to talk about the war, the older survivors, the camp survivors might have said to them \u2018You didn\u2019t suffer. you weren\u2019t in the camps or you were little. What do you remember?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t feel seen or heard, so they came together as a family. They shared their stories and their pain and tears.\u201d<\/p>\n
About 400 people gathered to share those stories, ranging from the dwindling number of actual Holocaust survivors, to their children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. Philadelphia was chosen to host this year as part of America\u2019s 250th celebration, following Paris last year and Toronto in 2024.<\/p>\n
The purpose each time doesn\u2019t change. \u201cI think it\u2019s important because people have to remember,\u201d said Miriam Schupachevici, 90, who escaped from Poland with her family, before settling in Israel, then came to America in 1981. \u201cBecause we are passing away and there are not going to be any more survivors.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the current generation and the ones that come after have to remember. Otherwise we suffer for nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her family, at least, knows the score. \u201cPeople deny this,\u201d said her daughter, Chaya Amar, who said her children are well-versed in what happened to their grandmother, not to mention the 6 million lost. \u201cPeople deny Oct. 7.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople deny the Jewish country. We have four generations. It\u2019s hard to get them to believe things like this. But after Oct. 7 people started believing. \u2018Yeah it could happen again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
While Miriam, like many others in attendance, did not spend time in actual concentration camps, that doesn\u2019t make them any less Holocaust survivors. Having to flee their homelands under siege while witnessing atrocities, their lives were anything but normal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in Split, Croatia, which was Yugoslavia at the time,\u201d recalled Sarah Meller, beginning to tell a harrowing tale of the sequence of events that eventually brought her to America. \u201cWe were six, four children and my parents.<\/p>\n
\u201dThe Italians occupied the city and let us live there with restrictions for a couple of years. Then one year into the war, the Blackshirts, the fascists, came one day and burned down the synagogue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey made a big bonfire in the piazza right outside and threw everything in the middle, the Torah and holy books.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fearing the worst the family fled and went into hiding up in the mountains, eventually snaking their way down when partisans were able to signal a British destroyer which offered them refuge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was one rowboat hiding from the Germans which would take us out to the destroyer,\u201d she continued. \u201cSo many people wanted to get on. My mom said to the man on the boat \u2018If you put me and my two daughters on I\u2019ll give you everything I have.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we got there I looked up. It was so high. They threw ropes down and we had to climb up. When I put my feet on that ship I said \u2018Thank you dear God. I am saved.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Bella Hauser has a story of her own, which is more about her late husband of 56 years than herself. \u201cMy mother escaped from Poland to Russia, where there were 7,000 Jews,\u201d she said. \u201cIf it hadn\u2019t been for Russia I would not be here today.
\u201cBut my husband lived in five concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka. His mother was killed when he was 10. His father tried to run away and was shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe learned a trade and became a builder. He was in the carpenter\u2019s union all his life. I met him in Israel and we were married 56 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
They would have a son and daughter, who had a difficult time learning their parent\u2019s stories. \u201cHe would never bring it up,\u201d she said. \u201cHe had a number [on his arm], so they could see.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a familiar refrain for second-generation survivors. \u201cIn school we used to learn about the Shoah,\u201d said Chaya Amar. \u201cBut my parents did not want to share much information, especially my father.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe always said \u2018You\u2019re never going to believe what I have to tell you.\u2019 I think he didn\u2019t want to remember it himself. It\u2019s in the past and he did not want to dig into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The WFJHS&D Conference featured not only survivors, but educators and psychologists engaging in a series of panel discussions and other activities. There was also an array of exhibits including a number of books written by survivor members\u2019 families. \u201cI never knew anything about my grandfather until I read all these letters he wrote,\u201d said Nathan Drew, author of \u201cThe Counterfeit Poles, a Memoir with Letters of Survival under Nazi Occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Esther Linder added that not all survivors were treated equally by the group that organized the first conference here in 1985.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy parents didn\u2019t qualify because they were 16 at the beginning of the war,\u201d she said, noting that both of them survived Auschwitz and her resourceful father was in 12 camps working odd jobs before being freed. \u201cSo they\u2019re not child survivors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a huge difference for people my parents\u2019 age who had a childhood and had a foundation of love, respect and stability. Child survivors didn\u2019t have that. They were tossed around in the backwash of war.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Jake Sztejman, president of the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Association, the conference, where Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker gave a welcoming address, has been a success. But maintaining it hasn\u2019t been easy.<\/p>\n
\u201cFundraising is very, very difficult right now,\u201d said Sztejman, whose parents met in Siberia after his dad left Lodz, Poland, and mother left Kyiv in Ukraine. \u201cBecause it\u2019s an international organization and the events take place in different cities throughout the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cLuckily this year we were able to secure some funding to cover attendance by survivors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organizers announced that next year\u2019s conference will take place in Dallas.<\/p>\n
Jon Marks is a freelance writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Holocaust awareness session at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown. (Photo credit: Jon Marks) Jon Marks Everyone had a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[128760,74396,128761,182,69,71,70,128762,128763],"class_list":["post-315723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-auschwitz","tag-holocaust-survivors","tag-jewish-families","tag-local-news","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-shoah","tag-world-federation-of-jewish-holocaust-survivors-and-descendants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}