San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LIFE AFTER THE HORROR A survivor’s resolve
Gerhard Maschkowski was 8 years old when a brown-shirted Nazi marched him to the back row of his German classroom. He and the other Jewish students were derided as vermin — and much worse. At recess, they were beaten by classmates who used to be their friends.
It was 1933 and the nightmare had begun.
He was sent to his first forced labor camp when he was 13. He survived by volunteering for any kind of work that was needed.
After four grueling years, Maschkowski was crammed into a cattle car with about a hundred other Jews and a bucket in the center for their toilet. “Nobody ate, nobody drank, because nobody wanted to use it,” he says.
When the doors opened on April 20, 1943, the teenager stepped out into the Auschwitz-birkenau concentration camp, where he was tattooed with his new identity: 117028.
He was put on an excruciating cement detail, where prisoners were forced to run with heavy sacks on their backs. “People were dying in just a few days from the brutality of the place,” he says, shaking his head grimly.
He got lucky — a strange word when talking about the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s annihilation of 6 million Jews in World War II. “I had a chance to go into another work detail with a better life span.”
The very, very worst was yet to come.
In 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, the Nazis rounded up Maschkowski and other prisoners for a desperate, food-deprived death march that lasted more than three months. By the time he was liberated, he weighed about 75 pounds and was so sick that he spent three months in a hospital, nursed by nuns.
But the nightmare had finally ended.
After recuperating, he made his way to Berlin, where he found an uncle and aunt. Most of his family members — 58 of them — had perished. Miraculously, his parents had survived. “You can only imagine how the reunion was,” he says.
Maschkowski, who is 96 now and lives in San Marcos, also found another survivor — “a very nice girl.” But that part, the part he calls “the American Dream,” will come later.
‘Life Lessons’
Maschkowski’s story is one of 44 accounts of local Holocaust survivors who were interviewed by the staff of Jewish Family Service of San Diego (JFS) and compiled into a book for the ages: “Life Lessons From Holocaust Survivors.”
The two-year project, made possible by a grant from the Jewish Federations of North America, can be downloaded for free at the JFS website: jfssd.org/lifelessons. Copies also were sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem.
“Life Lessons” doesn’t end with their survival. Instead, it is an album-like compendium of then and now — with their thoughts on how to get through difficult times and words for future generations.
“We really wanted to help them celebrate the lessons they learned over their lifetime,” says Carole Yellen, senior director of Strategic Partnerships for JFS. “Not only from the Holocaust but the resilience and the strength that kept them going and the lives they were able to build here, specifically in San Diego.”
Yellen, who estimates there are about 500 survivors living in San Diego County, says she’s awestruck by their positivity.
Which brings us to Laura Breitberg, an 80-year-old survivor in Rancho Bernardo and her no good, terrible day dealing with technology.
Breitberg’s computer and phone were giving her fits.
“C’mon,” she told herself, “your mom struggled with much more difficult and dangerous things. It will be OK. You will survive.”
Breitberg was a baby when her mother and six other family members escaped from Ukraine to Siberia ahead of the Nazis. Her mother told her how she wept when she stopped producing breast milk and was so afraid her daughter was starving to death. A woman who saw her crying offered some cottage cheese. Feed it to her, the woman coaxed, maybe it will save her. And it did.
The eight family members survived for four years in a tiny room, with no running water or electricity. They slept on the floor, fending off rats. Her father, who was in the Soviet army, also survived.
There was more adversity to come. Growing up in the Soviet Union, where details of the Holocaust where scant, Breitberg faced systematic anti-semitism. After three attempts, she finally was allowed to go to college. She became a school teacher, but it was made clear that she would not be promoted because of her last name.
“You have to swallow it and go on working,” she says.
She and her husband, another Holocaust survivor who died this past April, raised two children who now live in Australia and Kansas. In the 1990s, she and her husband got their chance to leave, settling in Kansas, where, at the age of 55, she returned to college and got her master’s in social work. They moved here in 2010.
In her chapter of “Life Lessons,” Breitberg speaks of hope and kindness and humor. “The world survived because it laughed,” she told the interviewer.
And this brings us back to Maschkowski and the part of his story he calls “the American Dream.”
A happy ending
His parents decided to stay in Germany, but in 1947, at the age of 21, he immigrated to New York. He arrived with $4 in his pocket. He got a job as a busboy and rented a room from a Jewish family. That “very nice girl” later joined him and they were married.
They moved to Miami, where he got a job as an auto mechanic, eventually building a 10,000-square-foot shop of his own. His wife passed away in 2005 and he moved here two years later (two of his grown children live here and the third lives in Texas).
When he speaks to groups about his life, he begins with the nightmare but is careful to leave them with the dream — a happy ending that makes him beam when he tells it.
But in between is another story: the loss of his faith.
“How can you not (lose your faith) when you see the atrocities?” he tells me. “When you yourself gets beaten? When you see your best friend hanging in front of you? How can you believe in anything?”
His voice is more resolute than bitter. “I don’t believe in the afterlife. I believe in myself.”
Breitberg understands that sentiment. Although she began attending a synagogue when she came to this country, she says it’s still hard to fully believe in God.
People of faith often associate what happens to them as acts of God, she points out. “It’s really hard to say that God is so vengeful because we didn’t follow all his commandments and that’s what we get for that.”
Never again?
One reason for this “Life Lessons” project was to share the stories while these aging survivors are still here. Another was to put human faces to a horror in hopes it never happens again.
“Unfortunately, we can see some echoes of anti-semitism that still exists today,” says Yellen, the JFS staff member.
Last month, 22-year-old John Earnest pleaded guilty to killing one person and injuring three others in a 2019 attack on Chabad of Poway. He said he did it because he hates Jews.
In 2018, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six others in an antisemitic rampage on a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
And then there’s the White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which was punctuated with cries like “Jews will not replace us.”
Breitberg, showing her therapist side, worries that prejudice is part of the human condition.
“Xenophobia is somehow engraved in people and you have to become aware of it,” she says. “Really aware of it. That’s the first step. And the second step is you have to promote the tolerance and respect for your neighbor, no matter what color. It’s very hard to do because there are so many people who think they are superior.”
The passion of her words are reminiscent of another Holocaust survivor — the late Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate whose writings became an international plea for history to never repeat itself.
“We must always take sides,” Wiesel told us. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Another life lesson for the ages.