Holocaust Remembrance Message: ​“I’m Alive”

As the Jews of Warsaw struggled to stay alive during the early years of World War II, 15-year-old Helene Rosenberg was used to her older brother bringing her back a tchothke — Yiddish for a toy or some small token of normal life — whenever he was able to sneak out and back into the ghetto.

One day the tchotke the older brother gave Helene was an official-looking piece of paper. As he handed the document to her, he said, ​“This is going to save your life.”

The paper turned out to be a falsified birth certificate enabling Rosenberg to pass as a Christian Polish girl named Maria Zuk and to survive the war. Rosenberg’s brother and five others all perished in the resistance and liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Rosenberg, now 93 and a resident of New Haven’s Tower One/Tower East, told that story on a bright Sunday afternoon as she and a half-dozen Holocaust survivors and 250 members of the Greater New Haven Jewish community gathered for the solemn marking of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the senior citizen complex.

Another survivor and Towers resident, 95-year-old Bina Fenig, said that when this commemoration comes around each year, in the center of the whirlwind of thoughts that goes through her mind is a simple and remarkable one: ​“I’m alive. I never thought I would be.”

Her daughter, Lillian Topf, helped her to the dais to light one of the symbolic six candles, representing the six million Jewish dead of the war. Lillian said that she and her immediate family were able to escape the Nazis by fleeing east into Russia. They hid outside, with compassionate families, and just kept running to stay ahead of the Germans.

Even as Fenig and her parents survived, Topf said, her mother lost dozens of cousins and other relatives.

After ceremonies filled with emotional Yiddish and Hebrew renditions of prayers and a song of the partisan fighters, speakers such as Mayor Toni Harp and Clark University Holocaust Studies Professor Shelley Tenenbaum tried to find words appropriate for the occasion.

No easy task.

“I’m not sure there are words for the magnitude and the loss,” said Harp. She spoke in stark terms of how far calculated and premeditated hatred can go, calling attention to the more than 140 anti-Semitic attacks nationwide within the last three months, including in the New Haven area.

Her takeaway from the commemoration is that we must continue ​“to stay vigilant.”

Tenenbaum, herself a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, expressed an ongoing struggle with finding vocabulary and other means to address the Holocaust.

She raised a cautionary note that so many Holocaust narratives in popular culture, such as movies like Schindler’s List, end up on a kind of hopeful note. She therefore decided to use her platform at the commemoration to focus on texts of loss, describing situations in which the absence of hope alters the terms of how people acted, and consequently how we respond.

The passages included harrowing passages from Elie Wiesel’s Night, when the narrator expresses relief — the daunting guilt for which haunts him the rest of his life — that when his father finally dies in the concentration camp, he can look fully after himself.

Tenenbaum also quoted an incident from Judith Steinberg’s memoir In the Hell of Auschwitz, in which a Jewish nurse in one of the death camps submerges a newborn baby in cold water, killing it, and then says, ​“We had to save the mother; otherwise she’d have gone to the gas chamber.”

“Our language fails us. What can we say when we read accounts like this?” Tenenbaum asked rhetorically.

Maddy Rosenberg, herself 15 — the same age as her grandmother when Helene Rosenberg became Maria Zuk in order to survive — said her grandmother is quite open to talking about her harrowing experiences. Maddy wrote an essay in middle school about Helene on the subject of a person you most admire.

Young Rosenberg said she is moved to be so closely connected through her grandmother to the events of the Holocaust and looks forward to going on the March of the Living. She also said it has a universal spillover effect. ​“It’s easier to relate to others [other genocides and the plights of new groups facing such threat] when you have a personal connection,” she said.

In addition to the annual citywide commemoration, the area’s various synagogues are marking Holocaust remembrances as well, said Judith Alperin, in an email. She’s the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, the chief sponsor of the event.

Alperin reported that four survivors died recently. The number of living Holocaust survivors diminishes with each passing year. She estimated that fewer than 100 are still living in the Greater New Haven area.