Holocaust survivors reminded of horror

When an anti-Semitic gunman killed 11 Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue during Sabbath services on Saturday, it raised strong emotions in many, especially those who lived through the Nazi Holocaust, the most horrific massacre of Jews in history.

“It brings back traumatic memories,” said Stanley Swimmer, one of several Holocaust survivors who live in the Towers housing complex in New Haven. “It reminds me of 1939 when the Germans invaded us.” Swimmer, 87, is a native of Poland and was forced to live in ghettos there before he was sent to “a slave labor camp” in Germany, where he worked in a tank factory.

“It shook me up, really shook me up,” he said. “It’s happening all over the world but not to this degree. I love this country but I hate to see what’s happening to it under the present regime.”

Swimmer was one of several Jews who held President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about non-Americans, foreigners and the media responsible for creating an atmosphere where hatred could flourish.

“I think he encourages it in a way,” Swimmer said. “By omission, not by commission. … He encourages hate … I’m sorry to say. He’s my president. I love this country. I also served this country. I was with the intelligence service.”

But he said he’s had nightmares since the shooting. “It is very, very difficult,” he said.

Swimmer’s daughter, Toby Gehm of Hamden, said her father is very sensitive and “talking about the Holocaust or anything gets him really upset.” As for her, Gehm said, “With any shooting I get sick over anything and this was 10 times worse. … I just can’t believe this stuff is happening in this day and age.

“Everyone’s being cautious right now but you have to go back to living your life and hope it doesn’t happen to you,” she said.

Isidor “Izzy” Juda is 97 and also lives in the Towers. He is one of a declining number of Holocaust survivors who tell their stories in schools and at remembrance events. He said the news of the Pittsburgh killings left him feeling “horrible.”

“I said, ‘Not again.’ It just brought back horrible things and I said, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me we’re going to have to go through this again.’ I was petrified. … I was hoping that coming to this country and serving in the United States Army for three years that we would get rid of this, but we haven’t gotten rid of this. And if we don’t do anything about it now we will have more problems all the time, and unfortunately the president we have now is creating fear all the time.”

Juda was born in Vienna and lost three uncles, two aunts and two cousins in the Holocaust. He escaped the Nazis by jumping off a train.

While saying Trump “thrives on fear. … He has created a big division in this country,” Juda added, “I have faith in this country that they will stop it before it gets too far.”

Endre “Andy” Sarkany of New Haven, who works in development at the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, was a child survivor in Budapest and a refugee after the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

He lived for five years in the heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh, where the shooting took place, but said he didn’t know any of the victims. He was a member of an Orthodox synagogue, while the Tree of Life (Or L’Simcha) Congregation is a member of the Conservative branch of Judaism.

He said he did meet students from Tree of Life because he worked at the Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh. “Of course it was a real shock to me … in a community that was so cohesive and together and extremely Jewish. On Saturday, the Sabbath, when people went to synagogue or coming from synagogue the streets were full of people walking back and forth, saying ‘How are you?’ and ‘Good Shabbas.’”

Sarkany, who lives in New Haven and who turns 82 today, said social media are contributors to the spread of anti-Semitism. “There’s a forum for it. You can create hate and particularly anti-Semitism, which unfortunately is growing in this country. … Of course, Europe is worse.”

The Pittsburgh attack was the worst targeting Jews in American history.

“Personally I can blame our government and personally I blame the media,” Sarkany said. “The more you talk about it, the worse it gets. Being in this country 62 years ... I have never seen anything like it.”

He said last weekend wasn’t the first time he experienced bad memories of the Nazi era. The first time was in August 2017 watching the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., seeing “these hoodlums marching with a swastika. I said, ‘Wait a minute. I cannot believe this is happening in this country. … I’m not as secure as I used to be, even though I wear my yarmulke or kippah all the time. I don’t feel I can do things like I used to because I don’t know who is behind me.”

Agnes Vertes of Weston is president of the Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut. She has also produced a documentary, “Passport to Life,” about Jews who were saved from the Nazi’s regime of death. Born in Hungary, she and her sister were rescued by a stranger.

“I’m sick over this whole thing that happened,” she said. “Even in this country, which I consider the best and safest country in the world, this happened.”

Vertes does not hold Trump responsible for inciting violence, however. “I don’t believe what the media says that this is because of our president. I do not believe that. I believe that he is a good guy and he didn’t instigate it at all.”

She said that while she supports free speech, “those people have a free card to speak against Jews or blacks or whoever they hate.”

Judith Altmann of Stamford, 94, was born in Czechoslovakia and talks to more than 7,000 schoolchildren a year to “explain what hate and intolerance for another person does.”

Altmann, who was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen death camp, said she is “very perturbed, extremely perturbed about what happened” in Pittsburgh but believes that “more talking and more writing” about the destructive effects of hatred will enlighten people.

She said the Pittsburgh shooting “reminds me of Kristallnacht. It reminds me of the beginning of what happened.” Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” occurred in November 1938 when German Nazis attacked synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses before the start of World War II.

Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus of Congregation Or Sholom in Orange is a first-generation American whose father escaped with his entire rabbinical school from the town of Lyebedov, Belarus, to Shanghai. “All my cousins and uncles and aunts were machine-gunned as well as all the inhabitants of [the] village,” he said.

“Obviously the event in Pittsburgh affected me profoundly as the son of a Holocaust survivor and as a Jewish American. My parents came here looking for a better place, a better life. … Millions of Jews came her looking for safety. That’s the horrible irony of this situation.”

Wainhaus said he doesn’t believe the United States is on a similar path as Nazi Germany. “I believe America is different and Jewish American history is different and the important thing is … to nip previews of coming troubles in the bud. It’s important not to be silent. It’s important to speak out and it’s important not to accommodate, to protest.

“What we saw last Saturday was America at its horrific lowest, but America has always rediscovered its soul … and its founding values. So that’s my prayer, that America finds its soul again.”