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May 13, 2011
A milestone memorial
Yom Hashoah is commemorated by generations.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Forty-seven local Holocaust survivors participated in the candlelighting ceremony at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s annual commemoration of Yom Hashoah this year. Together with child survivor Lillian Boraks-Nemetz’s account of what she lived through in the Warsaw Ghetto, this made it a particularly heartfelt memorial.
More than 350 people attended the commemoration, which took place Sunday, May 1, at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. From the comments received by the VHEC, it wasn’t one aspect that made it so special, but the whole – the participation of so many survivors, along with several younger members of the community, Boraks-Nemetz’s remarks and the music.
“I think you have to also realize the way it was framed. First of all, it started with the entrance of the survivors holding candles, which was a very moving thing,” Boraks-Nemetz told the Independent. “And then it had a musical program, which, I felt, the material was extremely good.... I think the candleholders, the survivors standing there, and then the minute of silence, provided the mood. And then my turn came at the end, and I just took the mic and I spoke to the people, looking at them, telling them exactly what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto and they were extremely moved. I had phone calls and, people who never paid much attention to the Holocaust, they said that they were really touched and people were crying. I had never seen that in our community before.”
Boraks-Nemetz shared the notes of her May 1 talk with the Independent. Her life changed tragically and irreversibly on Sept. 1, 1939, “when a dark mass of German airplanes flew low overhead in the village where I and my family were enjoying a holiday in the country at my grandfather’s villa. I heard explosions and shooting. I was not quite six years old.
“My father came running, grabbed and carried me to a ditch where others had gathered. I saw fear so strong in their faces and, then, a woman flew into that ditch. She had a bundle in her arms and, as she dropped to the ground, she wailed, ‘My baby is dead.’ As the baby’s inert little face lay in the sand, I saw death. The baby was instantly killed by a shot from a German airplane.
“After that air raid,” wrote Boraks-Nemetz, “life would never be the same, nor would our family. This was the beginning of a life driven by sheer terror, which paralyzed me for six long years and long afterwards.”
When the family returned to their apartment in Warsaw, it had been destroyed. “I had a new school bag waiting for me to pack for school, ballet equipment and the books I loved,” she wrote. “I had toys, games, dolls and teddy bears; everything was broken, torn, mangled or stolen.
“My father tried to explain what had happened so I could understand. It was hard for me to understand why somebody wanted so much to hurt us.”
In November 1940, “German officers in a big car announced through a bullhorn that all Jews must go and live inside the ghetto and those who don’t will be severely punished. The menacing wall was now 10 feet tall, laced with shards of broken glass and barbed wire.”
Boraks-Nemetz, her parents and her three-year-old sister took what they could of their possessions and moved into the ghetto.
“We were assigned one room in a shabby apartment that was to house 25 other people.... People were hanging yellowed old sheets around their beds for privacy. The whole place smelled of a mixture of rotten food and mold.
“The ghetto became a terrible prison that got worse as time went on and hundreds of thousands of Jewish people from various villages and towns near Warsaw came to live there.”
Boraks-Nemetz recalled hanging out by the wall to “listen for sounds of normalcy. People walking, laughing, streetcars and traffic going by ... while we imprisoned behind the wall heard cries of the sick, the starving and the oppressed.... I could see how, in the wall, low down at the ground level, thin boys would pull out the bricks and slip through so they could get food: a sack of potatoes or a loaf of bread thrown by some kind Christian.”
She recounted, “Our rations were some 185 calories per person compared with the 1,200 hundred calories for Poles outside the ghetto. More terror was provoked by hearing shooting and screaming in the streets by soldiers, who considered Jews a sub-human species. There also came bombardments by the Russians, when I would wake up at night to the sounds of falling bombs and had to run barefoot to the cellar for protection. No night or day was free from the terror of Nazi soldiers torturing and killing Jews.”
Typhus and tuberculosis also killed many. A short-lived secret school that Boraks-Nemetz attended when she was eight years old provided some respite, but it was discovered, shut down, the two teachers sent to prison.
When the deportations began, “my parents decided to separate the family in order to survive and get us children out of the ghetto,” wrote Boraks-Nemetz. Her sister “went out first because I was sick with scarlet fever the day I was supposed to leave the ghetto. I was too sick to say goodbye, and I never saw my sister again.”
Boraks-Nemetz continued, “Then my turn came to leave. One early morning my father took me down a dark street into a half-burned building.... A man came. He was a Jewish policeman who worked for the Judenrat. My father gave him a ring, soap and gloves, all luxuries at that time, even for the Nazis. The policeman took the things and left. We waited. He came back a while later and said, ‘I gave those things to them and they said that when the little girl will cross the checkpoint, they will not shoot. But you never know what they might do.’”
With false papers, Boraks-Nemetz crossed the checkpoint – alone. On the other side, “a tall woman in a grey suit emerged, grabbed my hand and we ran to a train station, where we boarded a train to the countryside.
“I lived there and with limited movement and activities with my grandmother, who was herself hiding at the house of a man, a Catholic from Krakow who offered to shield her. Now, the terror of us being discovered was ever present.
“There was no school, hardly any books, friends or toys. I peeled potatoes, emptied bedpans and worked in the garden or cleaned.... One day, many months after my escape from the ghetto, I saw my parents walking down the road toward our hut. The parents that returned to me were not the same parents I remembered in the good times. They were tired, shabby and sad.... They found out that my sister was informed on by a neighbor and taken by the Gestapo.... I had always lived with guilt that I survived while she didn’t.
“Only some years ago did we find out the truth of what happened. We found out that after my sister was informed on, the next day, Ukrainians and the Gestapo surrounded the villa where she lived and took her and the couple to the Gestapo headquarters. At the headquarters, the German officer in charge ordered a Polish policeman to shoot the child. When the latter declined, he was threatened with his life and his family’s life. The Polish policeman picked up a ball lying on the side, threw it and told my sister to run after it, then shot her in the back.
“The family was broken beyond repair. My mother lost her sisters, nieces and nephews; my aunts, my uncles and my cousins. My father lost his brother and his father. They all died in Treblinka concentration camp.”
Boraks-Nemetz called the birth of another sister in 1945 “a symbol of renewal and hope, as was coming to Canada,” which the family did in 1947.
“Today,” she concluded, “when I look at the senseless tragedy that was the Holocaust, I feel that I must continue together with other survivors to defy the deniers, the bigots and antisemites by helping to enlighten younger generations with the truth, through sharing my experience as a survivor-witness.”
Boraks-Nemetz has been speaking to students and others about her experiences for some 25 years, and told the Independent, “It’s going to be very difficult to take the place of survivor speakers; those are huge shoes to put on, but I feel that the children and the children’s children will be there to do it. I feel that the future generations will do it.”
She noted that child survivors and members of the second generation will be having a retreat at the Holocaust Centre this weekend. It will be the second such gathering, she said, stressing the importance of the centre in ensuring that survivors’ accounts continue to be shared.
While she has encountered in the community “an amount of boredom, of tiredness” with hearing about the Holocaust, Boraks-Nemetz said, “The reaction at the Yom Hashoah, which counteracts the past lack of interest or, rather, indifference, was incredible in that we survivors felt validated, kind of acknowledged. We are not heroes, but we are not victims either, and I think we work towards a cause to make this tikkun olam, and it’s good to live in a community that shows interest and feelings and compassion.... That was very important to see, that the hearts were open and accepting.”
Boraks-Nemetz described this year’s community commemoration as a “milestone.” “Some deeper understanding took place,” she said of the evening that was organized by Cathy Golden, Ethel Kofsky and Rome Fox, members of the second generation, and produced by Wendy and Ron Stuart. Also participating in the program were Cantor Michael Zoosman, a member of the third generation; Holocaust survivor Chaim Kornfeld; Dr. Moira Stilwell, MLA for Vancouver-Langara and parliamentary secretary for industry, research and innovation, who spoke on behalf of the premier; Dan Sonnenschein, a member of the second generation; cellist Eric Wilson; baritone Mark Fenster; and a choral ensemble comprised of Rivka Boxer, Alexandra Caine Clancy, David Cohen, Zoe Fenster, Jared Khalifa, Samantha Levin, Juliette Levine, Shira Mattuck, Oliver Philipp, Nirit Kaplan Rozenberg and Krystal Suranyi. Wendy Bross Stuart directed and played the piano.
About an overall message that she would like to impart, Boraks-Nemetz said, “If the community would take on active participation in the remembrance and understanding of the Shoah, then the load of the survivors would become easier with knowing that the legacy given to them by the six million victims will be upheld and respected. If they can celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, so they should absorb and memorialize the great tragedy in the Jewish history that was the Holocaust.”
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