Stories of survival, hope
In a tough year, Holocaust survivors keep teaching
It’s a story that 97-year-old Judith Altmann has told over and over again. But even as she recounts it for what might be the thousandth time, her voice shakes. She pauses.
She was being separated from her father at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He put his hand on her head. It was something he had done every Friday night of her life, but now his touch represented a final blessing.
“He said, ‘Judy, you will live.’ These were the last words that I heard from my father.”
For a woman who has looked death — and one of the Holocaust’s most notorious architects, Dr. Josef Mengele — in the eyes, weathering the pandemic has been more of a stressful inconvenience than anything.
Altmann lives alone in her apartment in Stamford and has seen very little of her two adult children and grandchildren in over a year. But she still gets up to go on a walk every morning when it’s quiet out. She reads.
Most importantly, she has been very busy giving talks and sharing her story virtually. It has been important to Altmann that she continue these speaking engagements, even during a pandemic.
“Whenever they call, I go,” she said.
The circumstances of the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic have made these traditional speaking engagements with survivors, now delivered virtually, all the more precious.
“Hearing from a survivor and what they’ve experienced and how they were able to persevere through such difficult times has become more important than ever,” said Kimberly Ballaro, director of the Holocaust Education Resource and Outreach Center in Connecticut.
This rapidly aging, vulnerable population, the people who spent months and sometimes years of their childhoods hiding under beds, going without schooling, and fighting for their lives, have been able to offer wisdom, hope, and perspective for the confused and anxious audiences they’ve connected with over the last 12 months.
The Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut (HCSC), of which Altmann is vice president, is a group made up of the roughly 100 remaining faces and voices of those who went through the terrors of the Holocaust. While the group provides friendship and connection for survivors through social events, their main goal and fervent mission, as stated on their homepage, is to educate. While not all members are active, the group’s speakers bureau has traditionally traversed the tri-state area, telling their stories at schools, colleges, churches, synagogues, and community centers.
Several members continue to educate and speak with school children via Google Meet or Zoom, sharing their powerful stories of perseverance with the next generations.
Even without a worldwide pandemic that disproportionately kills the elderly, their mortality is undeniable. At 80, survivor and President of HCSC Agnes Vertes is one of the youngest members of the group. She was quite young when she spent time living on the streets in Hungary, hiding from the Nazis and eating snow to sustain herself. Most of her friends in the group are in their nineties, Vertes said. In fact, the eldest just turned 99.
A resilient bunch
Miraculously, Connecticut’s child survivors have evaded the ravages of a virus that took so many this year, and many are now fully vaccinated. In the past 12 months, the group had at least two deaths unrelated to COVID, and only one person was hospitalized with a COVID infection, Vertes said.
There are an estimated 350,000 survivors still living around the world, according to rough estimates from Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, and an article in Forward. In the US, there could be as many as 80,000 to 100,000 still alive, but exact estimates are hard to come by, she said.
Those who work with this population are aware that the next five to 10 years could have a significant impact on survivor numbers.
“Had you asked me this a little over a year ago, I would have told you there were 70 survivors that volunteer at the museum. And today I have to tell you that there are 60 survivors that volunteer at the museum,” Saltzman said. “We had a really very difficult year of losing quite a large number of the members of our group.”
Saltzman said she has not kept official tallies of those who have died from COVID.
According to Saltzman, survivor speaking engagements, which usually numbered between 350 and 380 a year, were down to two, three, and four Zoom engagements per week.
And, of course, the survivors, many of whom lived entire lifetimes before the internet, had to learn to use the virtual platform.
“We had to regroup and think about how are we going to use the precious time that we have left to the best of our ability and still reach as many students as we can and teach these lessons that our survivors have for us,” said Ballaro.
The learning curve was steep, Ballaro said, but survivors were ready and willing to learn. Often, schools would organize practice runs and rehearsals to help them prepare.
Altmann’s son and daughter-in-law helped her navigate the computer and video technology. And she has happily complied.
“It really works beautifully,” Altmann said of her virtual talks. “The students ask questions and they come up with very, very good questions.”
Stories told, lessons learned
In a year marked by hate crimes against Black and Asian Americans, by angry mobs storming the Capitol in shirts that said things like “Camp Auschwitz,” by social isolation and a lack of social supports, these 80 and 90-year-old survivors continued their education work.
For Endre Sarkany, 84, his talks are a way to teach the next generation about the trauma and pain hate causes. He tells students to never use the word, to “wipe it out of the dictionary.” “It’s a devastating word that causes all the evil in the past,” Sarkany said. “I suggest they replace that four letter word with another four letter word. It’s love. L-O-V-E.”
From his home in New Haven, he’s continued his education work. And the events of the past few years — from Charlottesville to the recent riots in Washington, D.C. — have been a stark reminder of why he does what he does.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said of the scene he watched unfold at the Capitol on January 6. “We have an obligation to stand up and speak up and not be a bystander.” It’s a lesson he hopes students will learn through his talks.
Sarkany has spent his time in isolation with his wife of 50 years participating in online exercise classes three times a week and continuing his work at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven. But his talks have remained an important part of his schedule. And while he prefers an in-person environment, he’s still been able to connect with people near and far.
“There are so many survivors that are eager, anxious, and tenacious, and wanting to tell their stories to as many people, as often as they can,” Saltzman said. “Holocaust survivors are our greatest teachers about the consequences of unchecked hatred and antisemitism.”
And they had a captivated and eager audience even in the pandemic, said Ballaro.
“I think teachers really recognized the hardships that students were going to face in all of this uncertainty,” she said of the pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, her group even asked survivors to record videos of themselves offering messages of hope to the community, which they happily provided.
“It’s been really wonderful to see how our survivors can still, through the lens of a computer camera, how they can still reach students so deeply,” Ballaro said.
Pandemic perspectives
The pandemic has changed things up, but for those who have gone through the horrors of the Holocaust, perspective is everything. She’s focuses on what she’s thankful for: a roof over her head, food on the table, friends she can call on the phone.
“You have to always believe that things will change, and things will hopefully change for the better,” Vertes said.
This is the same lesson Ballaro said she carries from her extensive work with Holocaust survivors: the importance of perspective.
“Every time I face something that I deem to be difficult, I think about, ‘what would Ruth say? What would Ralph say to me in this situation?’ And I constantly recall things that they have told me over the years,” Ballaro said.
For now, survivors are focused on learning Zoom and getting vaccinated.
Recently, Altmann got her second dose of the COVID vaccine in New Jersey, where one of her sons lives. And finally, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for this almost-centenarian.
“I still love life and look forward to good times,” Altmann said.
But even though Vertes and Altmann, who are good friends, have both been living alone through these long months, they’re still in high spirits. Yes, they wish they could see their children and grandchildren more. But they are patient. Vertes is busy with her work as the HCSC president, checking in on members across the state.
“This too shall pass,” said Vertes. “I don’t know when, but it will, and you must always have hope.”