Trauma doesn’t end with the war ..it passes down the generations
Descendant of survivors tells their stories of suffering & heroism
HUNDREDS will today join President Michael D Higgins at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre to mark National Holocaust Memorial Day. The commemoration takes place on the Sunday closest to January 27, the date associated with the liberation of Auschwitz. Speakers will include Irish Holocaust survivors Joe Viselsky, 105, Suzi Diamond, 81, and Caryna Camerino – whose four grandparents survived. Here,
hears their remarkable stories...
DDEREK
ublin-based Caryna Camerino had four grandparents directly affected by Holocaust. But following collective years of persecution, hiding, deportation, work, concentration and extermination camps, theirs was an uplifting outcome.
Remarkably, each would live to tell the tale.
Originally spread between Italy, France and Romania, none of the four had met before Hitler launched his barbaric extermination programme.
Their survival rested on combinations of timing, heroism, good luck and the kindness of others before chance meetings in the early 1950s produced two married couples.
Caryna’s maternal grandfather Enzo Camerino was taken at the age of 14 from his home in Rome.
He would survive incarceration in three of the most notorious camps – Buchenwald, Dachau and finally Auschwitz, from where he escaped in 1945.
“My dad was raised by a Holocaust survivor and I was raised by a man who was raised by a Holocaust survivor and this becomes really important to the family in all kinds of ways,” says Caryna.
“And that kind of trauma didn’t just disappear the day the war was over, but passes on through generations.
“Because anti-semitism still continued. After all he endured, when the war was over and Enzo made his way back to Rome he still couldn’t get a job, nobody wanted to hire Jews.
“When my grandfather Enzo died, we found stockpiles of food in his house, he was always afraid of being hungry. You couldn’t necessarily see it but it was always there.”
Caryna’s grandmother Sylvana was tipped off in October, 1943 by the local police that a Gestapo knock was imminent and hid until Rome was liberated nine months later.
Enzo and Sylvana subsequently met in Rome, were married in 1951 and emigrated to Canada.
Caryna’s paternal grandfather Gilbert Lobelson was taken, along
When the war was over and Enzo made his way back to Rome, nobody wanted to hire Jews
with his brothers Sacha and Marius, from his home in Romania to a work camp, where they saw out the war. She said: “The three brothers were very close and because of the way the work was set up, security was such that they staged a number of escapes.
“On one occasion when Gilbert slipped away with one of his brothers, they made their way back home only to be ordered to go back to the camp by their mother – because they had left their other brother behind.”
Fearing round-up, grandmother Berthe, nee Kaminski, fled south from Paris to Vichy France, where her whole family were protected, given food and shelter by an entire village. Caryna revealed: “Berthe, along with her entire family were hidden/housed in a barn which had a huge false wall built into it.
“She fell in love with a son of the farmer and after the war when the couple told the farmer ‘we want to be married...’, they were adamant, ‘Oh no, you can’t, you are Jewish’.”
Gilbert and Berthe met in Israel in 1951, fell in love at first sight and were married 10 days later, subsequently moving to Canada in 1958 where Caryna’s parents Italo and Orna met.
Born in Canada, Caryna came to
There is definitely a rise in antisemitism and intolerance, scary things going on...
Dublin in 2002 and is the owner of the award-winning Camerino Cafe in the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
“It’s important to talk about Judaism in general and Jewish people in Ireland are a minority so it’s easy to forget that they are there and there’s diversity, unless people say it.
“In Montreal where I grew up and went to school around the time of the holidays like Passover or Rosh Hashanah, it’s happening around me.
“In Ireland, if I don’t host the ceremony or the meal, it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t exist so it’s really important for me to do it for myself.
“I really connect with those kinds of ceremonies and the symbolic foods and things like that. That’s where I really pause and celebrate my heritage. I do it for my family as well, my son is
Irish, and he’s Jewish Irish and it’s up to me to set an example of it being something to celebrate and something to be proud of and share with the people around us.”
Lessons from the darker times must not be lost to years passing.
“There is definitely a rise in antisemitism and intolerance, some scary things going on in the world and I worry about the appropriation of symbols and people using them lightly.
“Take the swastika, it’s just a pile of sticks really but it’s the meaning and the intention and I get worried about people using it and forgetting what is behind that symbol.
“I remember when I came to Ireland and people would call all kinds of things ‘Nazi’ and I was shocked – how could someone say such a thing? It’s said flippantly.
“By sharing the stories we can recognise when we see something that it may be a bit naive.”