{"id":97213,"date":"2022-08-27T17:05:55","date_gmt":"2022-08-27T15:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=97213"},"modified":"2022-08-18T07:31:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T05:31:43","slug":"10-05-78","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=97213","title":{"rendered":"Survivors in the Catskills"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/img\/tablet-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"35%\"><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/holocaust-survivors-in-the-catskills\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Survivors in the Catskills<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>ARMIN ROSEN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<h4 style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>A recent gathering of 56 survivors in the Hudson Valley was a painful and uncomfortable reminder that living memory of the Holocaust has nearly run out forever.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/b30891f57d925aa62a1021999cf06a65a03bff98-2500x3748.jpg?w=1250&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" width=\"50%\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Attendees of this year&#8217;s annual summer retreat for Holocaust survivors at the Granit Hotel in Kerhonkson, New YorkMARGARITA CORPORAN<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The Hudson Valley Resort and Spa rests on a gentle slope facing the near-distant curtain of mountain where the wilderness finally begins. Only the softest pinch of loss intrudes into the landscape\u2019s tranquil domes of spotlit green and emerald shadow. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna dedicate rooms to the old hotels that closed down,\u201d exclaimed Yossi Zablocki, newly the proprietor of what he says is the only kosher resort left in the entire Catskills. \u201cThere were hundreds of them!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Before he purchased the former Granit Hotel in Kerhonkson from a Chinese company that planned on tearing down the squat concrete blocks containing its guest rooms, leveling its two dusty theaters and bulldozing a spa and a piano lounge that could one day be transformed into hammams and hookah bars for New York\u2019s vacationing&nbsp;<em>frum<\/em>&nbsp;community, Zablocki had been the final manager and operator of Kutsher\u2019s, the longest-surviving of the legendary old borscht belt getaways. The family-owned resort was sold in 2013 when the construction of a nearby casino boosted the value of the property, a transaction that marked the final point where present-day cynicism and desperation engulfed whatever was left of the long-ago blend of social aspiration, good taste, and Jewish American particularity that made the Catskills possible.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Or maybe not so final: The phone number that called Kutsher\u2019s for nearly a century now reaches Zablocki\u2019s secretary, he said. As we spoke, a work crew was installing white marble flooring in a lobby that still felt far too large, even with its newly arrived wooden sculptures of local predatory wildlife. A volume of Talmud sat invitingly on a table in the inhabited center region of the cavernous entrance lounge. Peyos\u2019ed children walked by in Crocs and swimming goggles.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">For the previous week, in mid-July, it had been Zablocki\u2019s profound responsibility to host 56 New York City Holocaust survivors for a summer program sponsored by The Blue Card, a New York-based organization that has been assisting Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany since 1934. The participants, nearing the end of a full week of entertainment, relaxation, and exercise, were now making challah in one of the ballrooms. At a long table near the center of the faded and windowless hall, the last Jews of prewar Poland and Hungary, most of them women whose&nbsp;<em>sheitels<\/em>&nbsp;and head-wraps made them look reassuringly younger than they actually were, threaded long tubes of dough and kibbitzed in Yiddish with English undertones. Three of the people here had numbers tattooed on their arms, noted Ruchy Cisner, a young case worker with Nachas Health and Family Network, a Borough Park health care nonprofit focused on the area\u2019s survivors and co-organizer of the retreat.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The Blue Card had organized a media day where it would be possible to see how New York\u2019s last living connections to the Holocaust and to Jewish Europe were being cared for. Each of the 56 survivors present was an education in the nightmares that had shaped every Jew on Earth, but which the triumphalism of modern, multicultural America had been almost designed to obscure. So complete was the post-historical American cocoon of wealth and safety, and so total was postwar society\u2019s break with the legacy of the old country, that it became possible to forget that arrival in America is not a literal rebirth, and that for millions of Jews across hundreds of years, firsthand experience of dispossession, persecution, and murder had been the inescapable context of their lives in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Ahuva Jakober\u2019s family fled east as the Nazis advanced across Poland, and was lucky enough to make it into the Soviet Union. Luck, in this case, meant getting sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, and then to Kazakhstan, where there were enough deported Jews to sustain a Polish-language school. She made it back to Poland in 1946, but \u201cthey were beating Jews and we didn\u2019t stay.\u201d Next came a displaced persons camp, then a stint in Israel, then most of a lifetime in Brooklyn, where the Polish accent and Yiddish cadences never disappeared.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"ArticleView__content-switch bradford text-article-body-md font-300 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cThat\u2019s it. That\u2019s our life,\u201d the rasping old woman said, summing up this schematic version of the ordeal the Germans, Russians, and Poles had inflicted on her over 70 years ago. \u201cYou will be busy\u2014you have what to write.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">That\u2019s it\u2014it\u2019s a straightforward series of events, familiar enough by now. You will be busy\u2014and unless you were there, the true content of such a life can\u2019t possibly be known. And soon enough, no one will know it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">With no sentimentality or possibility of appeal, the extinguished Jewish worlds of Warsaw and Budapest, as well as the campaign of extermination that destroyed them, will soon lose their final living witnesses to an oblivion that is optimistically referred to as \u201chistory.\u201d At that point, which gets closer with every passing second, the memory and reality of the Holocaust will be the sole responsibility of people who weren\u2019t there.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">It is far from obvious that we are up to the challenge. Soon, Jews and the broader human race will have no living reminders and no living accusers. Instead, we will have to remind and accuse ourselves and each other, an unpleasant activity that most people, and indeed most Jews, might decide they\u2019re better off without.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In the unlikely case that Jewish Europe and the Holocaust aren\u2019t generally remembered in ways that are distorting and self-aggrandizing, they will still be in danger of being conveniently reduced to rhetorical devices or metaphysical thought experiments or a series of trivializing political catchphrases tailored to the latest partisan political ends. This is already happening, with the pace of the vulgarity increasing almost by the week. Anne Frank trends on Twitter with revolting frequency\u2014last week it was because of a Rhode Island sports bar attempting a tasteless joke. The joke was perhaps less appalling than the U.K.\u2019s Anne Frank Trust, which uses the name of a murdered Jewish child to legitimate their blandly universalist women\u2019s empowerment platitude factory, which&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/mobile.twitter.com\/JoPerryAuthor\/status\/1551711947741007872?t=MpNRnhajzYOOQthMo6fJEg&amp;s=19\">highlights antisemites<\/a>&nbsp;like Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker as role models for today\u2019s youth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The grossness of the ideologues who exploit Anne Frank\u2019s name and image is in turn exceeded by that of the New York-based Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights, which endeavors to \u201ceducate teachers \u2026about human rights and social justice through the lens of the Holocaust\u201d\u2014a mission it carries out by appropriating the moral capital of Holocaust memory in order to&nbsp;<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.toli.us\/announcements\/program-focuses-on-the-history-of-racial-injustice-in-virginia\/\">bless<\/a>&nbsp;newfangled and still-controversial \u201cequity initiatives\u201d introduced in U.S. public schools after the supposed American racial reckoning of 2020, which have a funny tendency to marginalize and exclude living Jews. The institute\u2019s online \u201c<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.toli.us\/about\/\">About<\/a>\u201d page and video only very obliquely mention the Jewish identity of the vast majority of the Nazis\u2019 victims.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As long as there are living Jews who experienced the attempted destruction of their people as not just a national but a personal violation\u2014an act of violence that real and identifiable perpetrators inflicted on them and on their societies and on their loved ones\u2014it is still possible to know what the Holocaust really was, and what it destroyed. And it is still possible, within this desperately narrowing span of time, to grasp the full burden of the task we will inherit once the last of the survivors are gone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<div class=\"Divider Divider--dotted-rule overflow-hidden\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Fifty-six survivors in a single room\u2014where to even begin? I mentioned to Cisner, the Nachas case worker, that I had recently been in Krakow, in eastern Poland. Perhaps there was someone in this ballroom who remembered what Kazimierz, the cobblestoned hipster precinct that is now a moving yet slightly ghoulish open-air Jewish heritage museum, had been like before the world ended. \u201cMrs. Mikel come here,\u201d Cisner beckoned. \u201cHe was just in Krakow!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">A formidable older woman in heavy makeup and a burnt-blond&nbsp;<em>sheitel<\/em>, streaked with tastefully understated ribbons of gray, appeared to float toward us. Erna Mikel had spent six years in various camps and ghettos after the Germans occupied&nbsp;Poland in 1939. First had been the Krakow ghetto, where she was locked inside walls built to look like giant Jewish tombstones, a cruelty followed by the Plaszow and Ravensbruck concentration camps, along with other loci of the German campaign to murder every Jew on Earth. She escaped a death march when a small group of prisoners pretended to relieve themselves by the side of the road and ran off into the forest. Today she has children in Los Angeles, Toronto, and Monsey, New York. One of her daughters is a lawyer. One of her sons she forbade from ever visiting Poland. \u201cAnd they\u2019re very good children,\u201d she said. \u201cThey call me every day.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Jewish Krakow was her home. Her father was a shoe salesman, a follower of the Belz Hasidic movement who wore a&nbsp;<em>shtreimel<\/em>&nbsp;on Shabbat. She lived in a house \u201cwhere I had everything,\u201d including a nanny. \u201cMy grandfather lived across the street from the cemetery,\u201d Mikel remembered, clutching Cisner by the wrist and craning her head upward. The centuries-old burial ground in the center of Kazimierz is still the site of several major rabbinic tombs, and its walls now face a row of \u201ctraditional Jewish\u201d restaurants and boutique hotels. \u201cThey were terrible apartments,\u201d she said. \u201cOnly the most honest people lived on this street \u2026 they gave their lives away for Yiddishkeit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cNobody can understand\u2014nobody,\u201d Mikel said of what came after. \u201cBecause nobody went through what we went through.\u201d I sensed she was not talking about the entire Jewish people but about the survivors themselves\u2014and maybe not about every survivor, either. Maybe just the Polish Jews knew what \u201cwe\u201d had been through. Because the Holocaust began in 1939 in Poland, earlier than it did in France or the Netherlands or Hungary, there are very few alive now who can talk about it firsthand. Mikel recalled hearing mass executions at Plaszow. She remembered hiding in a trench her father had dug in the family\u2019s basement. He later died in Mauthausen. \u201cI want to tell you everything,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it would take a few days.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow InsetImgSlideshow--default InsetImgSlideshow--center overflow-hidden border-bottom-black InsetImgSlideshow--multi-image\">\n<div class=\"relative\">\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__carousel-container relative w100 flickity-enabled is-draggable\" tabindex=\"0\">\n<div class=\"flickity-viewport\">\n<div class=\"flickity-slider\">\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1 is-selected\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/2ac0566833469a56d45d37a87cbcf2a443851bfe-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/2ac0566833469a56d45d37a87cbcf2a443851bfe-3000x2001.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/2ac0566833469a56d45d37a87cbcf2a443851bfe-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/2ac0566833469a56d45d37a87cbcf2a443851bfe-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption text-article-details-xs font-400 graebenbach color-gray-darkest\">The retreat includes entertainment, exercise, and activities like a challah baking workshop<\/span><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\">MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1\" style=\"text-align: center;\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/aea9ac9df0d58cda2d0015c834a7b8a0b7b25ca2-3000x2339.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/aea9ac9df0d58cda2d0015c834a7b8a0b7b25ca2-3000x2339.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/aea9ac9df0d58cda2d0015c834a7b8a0b7b25ca2-3000x2339.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/aea9ac9df0d58cda2d0015c834a7b8a0b7b25ca2-3000x2339.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><\/picture> <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption text-article-details-xs font-400 graebenbach color-gray-darkest\">The retreat is sponsored by The Blue Card, a New York-based organization that has been assisting Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany since 1934<\/span><\/em><\/span><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1\" style=\"text-align: center;\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/32965b8615a2e16bbd63bb2d6aaf77bfb3c4c198-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/32965b8615a2e16bbd63bb2d6aaf77bfb3c4c198-3000x2000.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/32965b8615a2e16bbd63bb2d6aaf77bfb3c4c198-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/32965b8615a2e16bbd63bb2d6aaf77bfb3c4c198-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><\/picture><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption text-article-details-xs font-400 graebenbach color-gray-darkest\">The rapper Kosha Dillz entertains attendees during a lunch of Caesar salad and eggplant Parmesan<\/span><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\">MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/a2190e233328f1bf8e26f05be37f4b19f7d85be9-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/a2190e233328f1bf8e26f05be37f4b19f7d85be9-3000x2001.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/a2190e233328f1bf8e26f05be37f4b19f7d85be9-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/a2190e233328f1bf8e26f05be37f4b19f7d85be9-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><\/picture><\/div>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\">\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption-container absolute transition opacity-1 events-all\">\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption-container absolute transition opacity-1 events-all\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption text-article-details-xs font-400 graebenbach color-gray-darkest\">Fifty-six New York City Holocaust survivors attended this year\u2019s program<\/span><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\">MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1\" style=\"text-align: center;\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/d083db3eefb38c03dd9af2c4df569cb1368ad12b-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/d083db3eefb38c03dd9af2c4df569cb1368ad12b-3000x2001.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/d083db3eefb38c03dd9af2c4df569cb1368ad12b-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/d083db3eefb38c03dd9af2c4df569cb1368ad12b-3000x2001.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><\/picture> <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\">MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__image-container mx_5 flex items-start mb1\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Img InsetImgSlideshow__image fit-contain absolute t0 r0 l0 w100 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/f206daca3f9352509ae4dea19c0840a252ac5243-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" sizes=\"(maxWidth: 768px) 768px, (maxWidth: 1080px) 1200px, 1200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/f206daca3f9352509ae4dea19c0840a252ac5243-3000x2000.jpg?w=768&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 768w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/f206daca3f9352509ae4dea19c0840a252ac5243-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w,https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/f206daca3f9352509ae4dea19c0840a252ac5243-3000x2000.jpg?w=1200&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1 1200w\" alt=\"\" width=\"100%\"><\/picture><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption-container absolute transition opacity-1 events-all\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__caption text-article-details-xs font-400 graebenbach color-gray-darkest\">An attendee addresses the camera during a challah baking activity. The rapper Kosha Dillz talks with other attendees at the table behind.<\/span><span class=\"InsetImgSlideshow__credit ml_5 color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-400 uppercase graebenbach\">MARGARITA CORPORAN<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">A petite woman with shocks of light orange hair\u2014her natural hair, it would turn out\u2014 approached us and pulled up one sleeve, revealing a tattoo on her forearm. Upon her arrival at Auschwitz, Alice Rosenberg, the daughter of a grocer who grew up in a Hungarian-speaking family in present-day Slovakia, was grouped into the camp\u2019s notorious children\u2019s housing, where twins and other potential subjects of medical experimentation were sent. Her jailor was Josef Mengele, a monster of history whom she saw with her own eyes. \u201cI was so little\u2014I don\u2019t take it seriously, the situation,\u201d she said. The dress she wore in the camp was too long for her. \u201cThey gave me a big shoe, like a man\u2019s shoe.\u201d She had no underwear. Her head was shaved at Auschwitz, though this did not trouble her. \u201cI never liked my hair, because it was red.\u201d No one else from her family survived the war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">For a surreal moment\u2014I am privileged to be able to call it surreal\u2014Mikel and Rosenberg compared their experiences in the German network of death camps, speaking with increasing speed and animation as each one prodded deeper into the other\u2019s memory, as if they were swapping recollections of their old neighborhoods, or at least of something less sinister than what was actually being discussed. Both remembered that upon arrival at a new camp prisoners were forced to give up everything but their shoes. Potato peels were a known vector of typhus and were only eaten as a last resort. Taking clothing discarded by dead inmates could get you shot, but sometimes you had no other choice. At any moment you could be killed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cI got married 10 years after the war,\u201d Rosenberg said. \u201cYou build a family \u2026 but it hurts you. It never heals \u2026 We tried our best.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cWe don\u2019t even like to think about it, because we have to live through it,\u201d added Mikel. \u201cWe have to have our lives. We have children.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cSee these two ladies?\u201d one of the volunteers asked as she walked by. \u201cThey\u2019re our best card players.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I was suddenly part of a circle of a half-dozen old women. Mikel, the dominant personality of the group, seemed to imply that at six years under the Nazis, she\u2019d had it harder than some of the Hungarians, who only fell under total German control in 1944 and for whom the Holocaust had been brutal and deadly but also comparatively brief. The Hungarians, she remembered, had arrived at the camps with furs, hats, and fancy luggage, \u201cdressed to kill.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">It was a fellow Polish Jew who eventually overtook Mikel in the conversation. Toby Goldberg\u2019s late husband had been on Schindler\u2019s list, and survived the genocide because of the German industrialist. The Nazis had tattooed her husband\u2019s arm, a number with a \u201cKL\u201d prefix, standing for \u201c<em>Konzentrationslager<\/em>\u201d or concentration camp. \u201cWhen he wore short sleeves people asked if it was his girlfriend\u2019s name,\u201d she said of those first years in America after the war. Later, an employer offered to pay for its removal. \u201cHe said, \u2018Oh no, I suffered too much for it. I\u2019m leaving it where it is.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The survivors had all lived in the United States for the majority of their lives. Most of them wound up in Borough Park in Brooklyn, one of America\u2019s strongholds of Orthodox Judaism. The sharp edges of their speech, the exclamations and interruptions, the scattered musings on life, the short aphoristic phrases, the serious humor, the humorous seriousness\u2014all of it belongs to the murdered Old World. They spoke the last of the living Yiddish of 20th-century prewar Central Europe, transposed onto American speech with both musical clarity and a poignant note of dissonance, as if the mixture never should have been necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cBefore the war, you can call it normal. We went to&nbsp;<em>cheder<\/em>. There was antisemitism. But it wasn\u2019t that bad,\u201d recalled Ben Kraus, born near Budapest, almost singing each sentence and each clause from the back of his throat, his quiet voice rising and falling to set up the concluding emphasis on each phrase. He wore a black vest and a head-sized kippah. Like many of the other survivors he had piercing and active eyes that somehow looked decades younger than the person to whom they belonged.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Word of the German arrival came hours before Shavuot in 1944, \u201cwhile my mother prepared for the&nbsp;<em>yontif<\/em>.\u201d The family fled to an aunt\u2019s apartment while their stove was still burning. Kraus eventually sought refuge in the Glass House, a factory that the Germans recognized as sovereign Swiss territory where over 2,000 people hid for the remainder of the war in conditions of unconscionable squalor and fear.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">After the war Kraus arrived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, along with his rebbe and hundreds of other Satmar Hasids who had lived through the European slaughter. There were roughly 20 other young men in his yeshiva class\u2014\u201csurvivors, all of them.\u201d After yeshiva Kraus got married and went into the manufacture of women\u2019s belts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cThat was the style then,\u201d added his wife, an energetic woman who was born in Romania and who spoke up to prod her softer-spoken husband throughout the conversation. \u201cEvery dress had a belt.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Lunch was served in the neighboring ballroom\u2014Caesar salad and eggplant Parmesan, with bottles of kosher seltzer water. In the ride up from the city the journalists had been joined by Kosha Dillz, an Israeli American battle rapper and a cast member on MTV\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Wild \u2019N Out<\/em>. He had made Holocaust commemoration part of his creative mission, performing regularly in Poland and, at one concert I\u2019d attended, introducing a Holocaust survivor to the son of the late Ol\u2019 Dirty Bastard, from the Wu-Tang Clan.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Dillz often carries a small amplifier, daily life in New York presenting infinite chances for an impromptu rap performance\u2014including, apparently, this lunch. \u201cI decided I\u2019m gonna sing for the ladies in the front row!\u201d Kosha announced over an appropriately unaggressive beat. \u201cThey say, Kosha where you feel the heart?\u201d he crooned. \u201cI met some ladies from Borough Park!\u201d A few listeners in front cooperated when he asked them to put their hands in the air. He launched into a verse in Hebrew.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cSpeak Hungarian!\u201d joked a man behind me in a tan dress shirt\u2014another survivor, born in Budapest.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">What did you think of this unexpected Jewish rap show? I asked. He replied with an Old World deflection, raising his hands parallel to his temples, arching his eyebrows, and spreading his mouth into a smile of cheeky, almost face-consuming vastness. \u201cI should go back to kindergarten!\u201d he declared. If only I could approach this with the wonder and enthusiasm of a child, I think he meant. But, for better and for worse, it\u2019s too late now.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"PullQuote PullQuote--center flex flex-col items-center pt1_5 pb3 mt1_75 mb_75 border-bottom-black\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p class=\"PullQuote__text PullQuote--center__text text-center\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">You know, I still dream of Auschwitz &#8230; I\u2019m still not finished from there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"PullQuote__text PullQuote--center__text text-center\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The Blue Card program offers a chance for the survivors to spend a week breathing fresh air in a place even more peaceful and quiet than Borough Park, surrounded by family and by each other. They were happy and relaxed and never alone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Yet there is a pain at the core of what the survivors saw and went through that, while merely notional for us\u2014experienced through the secondhand discomfort of attempted empathy\u2014is tangible and permanent for them. The pain might even be worsening with the passage of time. The survivors were born into a world that no longer exists, and that every day fewer people remember. The killings of nearly 80 years ago are incomprehensibly ghastly, yet they exist at the outer fringes of living memory, meaning the survivors are among the only people for whom those murders are fully real. The further away the horror gets, the harder it is for other people to understand what the survivors went through, and the harder it is to grasp that it happened at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As lunch wrapped up, I noticed a vital, athletic-looking, middle-aged woman in secular dress speaking Yiddish to a heavyset older man in a dignified button-up shirt and a dark knit vest and kippa. The man was her father, 96-year-old David Einhorn. He had been born into a religious family in Szeged, in southern Hungary. It was women\u2019s hours at the resort\u2019s outdoor pool, Einhorn\u2019s daughter explained. Perhaps while she swam I could speak with her father. I should record the conversation, she said, in case he said something new.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Einhorn spoke with total command, a sharp bristle of white beard fringing his round face. He was 17 when he arrived at Auschwitz, \u201ca week before Shavuot\u201d in 1944, as he told me. At Auschwitz he and his father, another&nbsp;<em>shtreimel<\/em>-wearer, were immediately separated from his three brothers, his three sisters, and his mother. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what means the left, what means the right,\u201d Einhorn said of the initial sorting of new arrivals at the camp. At the barracks the German guards left open the possibility that their family members were still alive, but the earlier inmates knew better. \u201cThe Polish said, your parents are burning already.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Einhorn was soon marched to one of Auschwitz\u2019s outlying labor camps, where he was forced to work 12-hour shifts 400 meters underground, in a coal mine excavated using dynamite. After the war, with his family killed and Hungary\u2019s Jews dispersed or destroyed, Einhorn attempted to join the&nbsp;<em>yishuv<\/em>&nbsp;in Palestine, but spent two years in a British detention camp in Cyprus instead. In the new State of Israel he found a society unsympathetic to what he had been through. \u201cYou come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,\u201d he recalled. He had \u201cno parents, no siblings, no nothing.\u201d He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he\u2019d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. \u201cYou know, I still dream of Auschwitz,\u201d he said. \u201cMy mind is still in Auschwitz \u2026 I\u2019m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I\u2019m still not finished from there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors\u2019 stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one\u2019s life in the United States making womens\u2019 belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn\u2019t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Throughout Einhorn\u2019s story there were puzzling and terrible hints of a God, subtle in action, mystifying in intent, and undeniably there. In the mines, Einhorn said, a dynamite explosion once sent a chunk of rock careering toward his head, knocking him backward but leaving him miraculously unscathed. \u201cThe foreman asked, \u2018how did you survive?\u2019&nbsp;I said, \u2018It looks like an angel pushed me out from there.\u2019\u201d As Kol Nidre approached in 1944, Einhorn yearned for something, anything he could eat to prepare for the coming fast. \u201cI went from the barracks and said, this is the day before Yom Kippur. I said God, I have nothing, how am I going to fast tonight? Tomorrow I have to go back to work.\u201d At that moment, he said, a cabbage rolled off the back of a passing supply truck and \u201carrived to my feet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">On the cattle car to Auschwitz, Einhorn\u2019s brother said to him: \u201cI don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going, but I\u2019m going to pray to God that you should survive.\u201d And he did. \u201cEveryone was killed,\u201d Einhorn later added. \u201cI\u2019m the only one who survived.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<hr>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"AuthorBioBlock col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 w100 mt6 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"AuthorBioBlock__container graebenbach mt1_5 text-section-details-sm font-300 color-red\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Armin Rosen<\/strong> is a staff writer for Tablet magazine.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\">\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Survivors in the Catskills ARMIN ROSEN A recent gathering of 56 survivors in the Hudson Valley was a painful and uncomfortable reminder that living memory of the Holocaust has nearly run out forever. Attendees of this year&#8217;s annual summer retreat for Holocaust survivors at the Granit Hotel in Kerhonkson, New YorkMARGARITA CORPORAN The Hudson Valley [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97213"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97451,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97213\/revisions\/97451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}