Gerald Steinberg and others speak before a wall display of their family members
Gerald Steinberg speaks at the dedication of the Hativah Holocaust Memorial wall in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Springfield on Tuesday evening.
During a moving dedication of the Hatikvah Holocaust Memorial in the lobby of the Springfield Jewish Community Center on May 31, several area survivors spoke emotionally of what they saw and experienced during World War II when six million Jews – nearly two out of every three European Jews – were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
Survivors Gerald Steinberg, Curt Warner, Nicole Illouz and George Torrey shared their memories, sometimes in voices breaking with the pain of what was endured and of what was lost, to a gathering that included other survivors and their family members as well as board members and founders of the former Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center that closed last fall on the JCC campus.
Hatikvah, which means hope, was the name of a club early Holocaust survivors to the area formed.
With her mom seated in a wheelchair and her father standing at her side, Springfield resident Shirley Graziani read what each of her parents had written for the dedication. Graziani came to this country with them when she was 2.
Her father, Samuel Horowitz, recalled the Nazi bombing of Warsaw in 1939 that targeted Jewish neighborhoods and later the sight of enslaved Jewish workers being flung against walls by Nazi soldiers for sport.
Her mother, Faye Majerczyk Horowitz, recalled covering with her collar the yellow star Jews were forced to wear as Jews in order to get passed Nazi guards to buy food for the family as a young girl. Before one such occasion, Horowitz kissed her mother good-bye, an act that got her beaten by the guards and that also turned out be the last time she was to see her family.
Carl Karolinski of Feeding Hills shows his mom Bernice Rosentzwieg- Karolinski a family photo which is displayed at the dedication of the Hativah Holocaust Memorial wall in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Springfield on Tuesday evening.
The histories were told before the wall memorial which displays for public viewing photographs from 43 survivor families. An accompanying book contains their stories for visitors to read.
Curt Warner, born in 1921 in Aschaffenburg, Germany, pointed out his parents on the memorial. His mother was gassed by the Germans in 1942 at the age of 42; his father, a store owner made destitute by the Nazi-enforced boycott of Jewish businesses, died in 1937 as the result of being unable to get proper medical treatment for an illness.
Warner told of hiding inside a sleeper sofa in Frankfurt during Kristallnacht or what is known as “the Night of Broken Glass” on Nov. 9, 1938 when Storm Troopers and other Nazis arrested 30,000 Jewish males, sending most of them to concentration camps, destroyed nearly 300 synagogues and more than 7,000 Jewish properties and whose actions resulted in the rapes and deaths of a number of Jews throughout Germany, annexed Austria and the areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
Nicole Szyrman Illouz, who was born in Paris, spoke of her father Pinchas Szyrman being arrested and among those first to be murdered at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birenau when it opened in 1942 near Krakow. A child at the time like all of the survivors, she walked holding the hand of her mother, Nelly Specht Szyrman, 20 miles along train tracks to escape to the south of France not occupied by the Nazis.
George Torrey, born in Lodz, Poland, spoke of the hunger, disease and dead bodies he saw in the concentration camps. Although two of his uncles are immortalized on the board “in the bloom of their lives,” he said all six of his uncles perished in the Holocaust.
He called the wall a “significant” memorial to the six million who died.
Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno speaks at the dedication of the Hativah Holocaust Memorial wall in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Springfield on Tuesday evening.
Gerald Steinberg, too, called the wall “the gravestone” to those murdered.
“Men, women and children were brutally killed and buried in unmarked graves or cremated. Their existence obliterated for posterity. This wall is their gravestone, their memorial,” said Steinberg who was among the founders of the Hatikvah center.
Steinberg said he and his parents, from the village of Mlynov in eastern Poland, survived thanks to the efforts of farmers who hid them for two years in a hole underneath their barns.
“We are very grateful to two Polish farmers and one Ukrainian farmer whose friendships my father trusted and who saved us,” Steinberg said.
Of the 1.5 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust, Steinberg said, “Imagine what they might have contributed to humanity.”
Steinberg said his seventh grandchildren is named after Faiga Steinberg, his father’s sister who died in the Holocaust and who is immortalized on the wall, and added one of his grandchildren attends preschool.
Steinberg came with his parents to Springfield because his mother had relatives here and went on to become a pharmacist. He attended the dedication with his wife, Barbara, of 47 years, and called their married sons and grandchildren “part of the miracle” of being a survivor.
Former Hatikvah board member Elizabeth K. Rome organized the dedication and welcomed people to the evening.
Other speakers included Diane Troderman, who first chaired the Hatikvah board, Michael Paysnick, executive director of the Jewish Community Center, and Guy McLain, director of the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History.
When the Hatikvah center closed, some of its material, specifically the panels and most of the artifacts from its permanent exhibit of area family stories, “A Living Memorial: Holocaust Survivor Families,” were donated to the museum for future exhibition.
McLain, who in the 1990s was the library archivist for Texas’ Holocaust Museum Houston, talked about how the Springfield museum will work with volunteers and docents this summer to develop a teaching curriculum around the donated materials.
“A Reason to Remember: Roth Germany, 1933-1942,” the center’s other exhibit, is part of the recently opponent Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno told those present his parents, who eventually emigrated from Italy to Springfield, “had survived underground” from the Nazis. After Italy surrender to the Nazis in 1943, Germany occupied northern and central Italy.
Sarno said the story of the Holocaust “needs to be continually told” and thanked the survivors for sharing theirs.
“Thank you for making America your home and thank you for what you did for our country,” said Sarno, who also paid tribute to retired Judge Sidney M. Cooley, of Longmeadow, who was a U.S. Army officer with the 63rd Infantry Division in Europe.
Cooley helped help set up camp in Bayreuth, Germany for survivors of the Nazi death camps and also had the authority to take back from the Nazis property then had confiscated from Jews and others they deemed undesirable.
Other presents included David Cohen, one of the Allied soldiers who liberated the Ohrdruf and Buchenwald concentration camps in Germany, Ellen Perell, administrative assistant at the former center, and Martin J. Pion, director of the Institution for Theology and Pastoral Studies and professor of religious studies at the Elms College in Chicopee.
Rabbi Dovid Edelman, the dean of Lubavitcher Yeshiva Academy in Longmeadow, closed the dedication, reminding those present to not only to “not forget” the Holocaust but to “come together” in knowledge that the Holocaust is “part of us” along with the miracle of survival.
Rabbi Max Davis of Congregation B’nai Torah in Longmeadow opened the ceremonies, reading the following quote from Martin Niemoller, a minister and German nationalist who came to opposed Hitler and spent seven years in concentration camps.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Editor’s note: This is the story of the George and Paula Steinberg, one of the 43 survivor families featured in the new wall exhibit, “Hatikvah Holocaust Memorial: Remembering local survivors and their families,” at the Springfield Jewish Community Center.
Elizabeth Rome, a board member of the former Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, speaks at the dedication of the Hativah Holocaust Memorial wall in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Springfield on Tuesday evening.
Getzel (George) Steinberg was born in Mlynow, Poland in 1902. His wife, Pessia (Paula),was born in Mlynow on January 5, 1907. They owned and operated a small farm.
Pessia’s family owned a flourmill. Their son Zelig (Gerald), was born in Mlynow on Dec, 8, 1939, before Poland was invaded and occupied by the Nazis.
In the fall of 1941 all of the Jewish inhabitants of Mlynow, including the Steinberg family, were forced from their homes and moved into a ghetto.
The Steinberg family remained in the ghetto for almost a year.
In 1942, the Nazis issued orders to the Jews of Mlynow to dig ditches for storing potatoes. George Steinberg, suspicious of these orders, contacted some Christian farmers with whom he had a relationship and arranged for himself and his family to be smuggled out of the ghetto and into hiding.
The majority of Mlynow’s Jews were murdered and buried in the ditches they had dug. The Steinberg family hid for approximately two and one-half years in the barns of three different Christian families.
The hiding places were holes dug in the barns. The family was cramped together and only able to squat or lie down.
Food was scarce and George would sometimes have to venture out of the hiding place to forage for food by sifting through the garbage that farmers left for their pigs.
Sometimes George would encounter another Jew who was hiding in the forest and they would exchange news and information. As payment for hiding the family, the Christian families were given the Steinberg family farm.
George, Paula, and Gerald Steinberg all survived but the majority of their extended family perished in the Holocaust. Before leaving Mlynow, George Steinberg searched for and found the daughter of a friend who had been hidden with a Christian family.
Her parents and the rest of her family had not survived. The girl, Aviva Feldman, was taken in by George and Paula Steinberg and raised as their own child.
The Steinberg family immigrated to the United States on July 2, 1949 and settled in Springfield.