Reflection in turmoil
After chaotic year, local survivors of Nazism connect with others who fled, recall lessons from tragedy
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 last few months have sometimes felt reminiscent of that period, she said.
“It’s a little bit harder being an adult because I can’t play withmy dolls anymore,” the 84-year-old Houstonian joked.
She sees parallels between the chaos of the last 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 andmourn 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,” said Fred Floersheimer. “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 was barely 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 fatherwas sent to Dachau that day, while the rest of his family 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 ramp 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 inGermany. 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 is concerned bywhat he says has become normalized in the politics and rhetoric of today. And he worries that the deluge and chaos of recent years will allow for the same conditions as those that forced his family fromtheir 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 howmany 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 fewyears of her life as a practicing Christian with few, if any, memoriesofher 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 ameal 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.”