San Antonio Express-News

During a year of chaos and solitude, Texas survivors of Nazis see lessons

- By Robert Downen robert.downen@chron.com

Pauline Rubin thinks often about the small village in southern Belgium where she hid from Nazi soldiers and pretended to be a Christian.

She was brought there as a toddler and spent the last years of World War II under the care of a childless Christian couple who were part of an undergroun­d network that hid Jews as Nazism marched across Europe.

The past few months sometimes have felt reminiscen­t of that period, she said.

“It’s a little bit harder being an adult because I can’t play with my dolls anymore,” the 84-year-old Houstonian joked.

She sees parallels between the chaos of the past year and the uncertaint­y and fear that was the norm for much of her childhood.

For her and other survivors of Nazism, lockdown has been an opportunit­y to reconnect with other survivors through Zoom and virtual get-togethers.

Others ruminate on the pandemic, political turmoil and social upheaval that were trademarks of 2020 and are concerned.

They fear valuable lessons will go unlearned in such a chaotic year and mourn the loss each day of survivors, their firsthand knowledge of totalitari­anism and the insidious ways in which it can spread.

“My generation is either dead or dying,” Fred Floer

sheimer said. “But this generation has no comprehens­ion. You’ve got to learn a lesson from tragic things that happen … but I don’t think we’ve learned. That’s my frustratio­n.”

Floersheim­er barely was 7 years old on Kristallna­cht, or “the night of broken glass,” when Nazis torched Jewish-owned stores, beat Jews in the streets and sent thousands to camps in 1938.

His father was sent to Dachau that day, while the rest of his family members hid in Frankfurt, Germany, until they secured safe passage to America.

Floersheim­er, an 89year-old retired lawyer, has like so many other survivors spent his life educating younger generation­s about fascism and how it can flourish when enough people are quiet or apathetic.

He doesn’t remember overt anti-semitism in the small village where he spent the first years of his life. It was in fact the opposite, with Jews and Christians there often celebratin­g holidays, playing sports

and holding choir competitio­ns.

“When a synagogue was built, the whole town would turn out,” he recalled of the years before Adolf Hitler consolidat­ed power and, with the help of those such as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, began to turn up the anti-semitic rhetoric and violence that would lead to the death of some 6 million Jews.

By the time many in Germany realized what was

happening, Floersheim­er said, it was too late to fight back.

“It didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “Nothing happened overnight in Germany. It was very slow. Insidious. Like a boil you don’t take care of.”

Floersheim­er rebuffs those who try to compare any politician to Hitler or other demagogues of that era.

Still, he’s concerned by what he says has become normalized in the politics and rhetoric of today.

Also, he worries the deluge and chaos of recent years will allow for the same conditions as those that forced his family from their homeland.

“That really is the lesson,” he said. “Never let it get to that point.”

Meanwhile, his circle gets smaller each year.

“God has blessed me,” he said. “But I’m losing people every six months. Every six months, we go to a funeral.”

Those who know firsthand the evils of totalitari­anism are “dead, dying, in nursing home or just don’t want to talk about it.”

While it’s difficult to say how many Holocaust survivors call Houston home, many who do have connected during the pandemic on Zoom, where they held a virtual event for Hanukkah.

Some now wonder why it took a pandemic to connect on a regular basis.

“It’s good to hear from everyone,” Holocaust survivor Ruth Steinfeld told Houston’s Jewish Herald Voice last year. “And it makes you feel less isolated and you feel like you’re amongst friends. Most of those people I’ve known all my life.”

“My question was, why haven’t we been doing this?” she continued.

Pauline Rubin has wondered the same in recent months. She doesn’t consider herself particular­ly religious, having spent the first few years of her life as a practicing Christian with few, if any, memories of her Jewish ancestry.

She does not have faith as a much as she “believes in fate,” she said.

It’s helped her as she’s waited in lockdown to again hug her kids or enjoy a meal at her favorite in Italian restaurant in Bellaire. But it has not been easy.

“I was more comfortabl­e in the beginning of quarantine, but I am tired,” she said with another laugh. “I want to go out. I want to go shopping. I don’t know where yet, but I want to go shopping and be served a glass of wine.”

Like so many others, she is eager for a return to normalcy. In the meantime, she will focus on the good things and people who’ve blessed her life in Houston and that small village in southern Belgium.

“I’m not alone,” she said. “I am not alone.”

 ?? Brett Coomer / Staff photograph­er ?? Holocaust survivor Fred Floersheim­er’s family fled Nazi Germany to the United States in 1939 after they were sponsored by an American citizen.
Brett Coomer / Staff photograph­er Holocaust survivor Fred Floersheim­er’s family fled Nazi Germany to the United States in 1939 after they were sponsored by an American citizen.
 ?? Courtesy Floersheim­er family ?? Floersheim­er, left, and brother Justin Joseph Floersheim­er are seen in a family photo.
Courtesy Floersheim­er family Floersheim­er, left, and brother Justin Joseph Floersheim­er are seen in a family photo.

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