DARK memories
Holocaust book tells of childhood of West Hartford woman
Years before Morris and Miriam Rabinowitz and their two daughters, Ruth and Toby, settled in West Hartford, they lived a nightmare that they were lucky to survive.
As told in Rebecca Frankel’s “Into the Forest,” the Rabinowitz family escaped the fate of so many tragic victims of the Holocaust. The family of four were not sent to concentration camps. They escaped their besieged town and fled to the Polish woods, to hide with other refugees and guerrillas partisan to the Soviets.
They were freed from their ordeal when the Russians moved in. After the war, the family settled in Connecticut. Years later, Ruth married Philip Lazowski, who served as rabbi at Bloomfield’s Beth Hillel Synagogue for 45 years.
Frankel tells the story of how the Rabinowitz family endured food deprivation, frequent relocations, harsh winters, constant fear and the antisemitism of the Soviets, as well as their brief moments of joy.
“Very little of the forest narrative has been written, especially the families in the camps who weren’t part of the partisan community. That’s because very few people survived,” said Frankel, a native of West Hartford and lifelong member of Beth Hillel Synagogue, who now lives in Washington, D.C.
“The documentation that was facilitated in the early aftermath of the Holocaust didn’t apply to these family groups. The troops came through, rushing on their way to finish fighting the war, and the people were just sort of released. They just came out of the forest. No one was documenting names at first.”
“Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph and Love” will be released Tuesday. An event on Oct. 3 at 11 a.m. at Emanuel Synagogue, 160 Mohegan Drive
in West Hartford, will launch the book, with a talk by Frankel. The event is part of the “L’Chaim to Life!: Rabbi Shabbaton” weekend from Oct. 1 to 3, which is a tribute to Philip and Ruth Lazowski, Rabbi David Small and Debbie Chameides.
In a phone interview from Washington, Frankel said she has known Rabbi Lazowski’s story her whole life. Lazowski was from the same town as the Rabinowitzes, Zhetel, which was in Poland then but is now in Belarus. Lazowski last saw his mother and siblings in that town, after which he also went to live in the woods. He wrote his wartime memories in a book, “Faith and Destiny,” which was published in 1975.
“In Hebrew school, Ruth and Rabbi would come to our classrooms to talk about the Holocaust,” she said. “Ruth’s story was just not as familiar. I didn’t know very much about Miriam and Morris.”
Frankel initially wanted her book to alternate between the love stories: Ruth-Philip and Miriam-Morris. After interviewing Ruth and Philip, she changed her mind, making it a story about Miriam and Morris.
“I was really enamored of these people and their fierce love for each other,” she said. “Whatever strife was going on, it wasn’t able to break the bonds of parents and family. I think it tested it. How could it not have? There was so much trouble there. But their love held. It protected them.”
That love certainly was tested. The family lived in the woods with a motley collection of people. Some of them made life even more unpleasant. But most of them looked up to Morris as a stable anchor, which could be nerve-wracking, because hiding successfully often necessitated small, quickly mobile groups.
When refugees could find Christian
families willing to share or sell food, they ate. But often they didn’t. They battled cold and waist-high snowdrifts, boredom and anxiety. Ironically, they sometimes went head to head with partisan guerrillas and Soviet soldiers, many of whom shared the Nazis’ antisemitism.
“It would be hard for me to broad-stroke all of them. There is documentation of some helping Jewish families. … But their experiences were fairly terrible. They were constantly watching their backs. If they fell asleep during the night watch, they would run the risk of being killed as punishment,” she said.
“It was pretty terrible that they came together to fight a common enemy and it turned out that they were comrades by convenience or necessity,” Frankel added.
Frankel’s book also tells of the almost unbelievable coincidence that led to Ruth and Philip’s love story. After Lazowski’s mother helped him escape a massacre, Miriam let the 12-year-old boy pretend to be her son, for safety. After the Rabinowitzes and Lazowski were in the clear, they got separated. A chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn in 1953 reunited Lazowski with Miriam, and he met Ruth.
After getting to know the family for the six years it took to do the research, Frankel came to admire and respect the joie de vivre of Ruth and Philip, which she noticed all the way back from her childhood.
“They really do radiate a love of life. They are happy, embracive, wonderful people,” she said. “It’s hard to believe they would come out of that experience, certainly not unblemished with that trauma, but to find such joyful lives. They approach life with such a joyful attitude.”
“The documentation that was facilitated in the early aftermath of the Holocaust didn’t apply to these family groups. The troops came through, rushing on their way
to finish fighting the war, and the people were just sort of released. They just came out of the forest. No one was documenting names at first.”
— Rebecca Frankel