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Two Holocaust Survivors:
A meeting held on 25 January 2005 at Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue (NPLS) in commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day 2005. |
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Neil Drapkin commenced by explaining that what is done jointly by NPLS and Northwood United Synagogue to mark the Holocaust is not confined to the National Holocaust Day itself, but in fact consists of a week of events. This year 2000 school children came to the two synagogues to listen to a survivor, to learn more about the Holocaust, and then, in groups, be guided to think about what it was, how it happened, and most important of all, what they can do to try and stop it happening again.
Neil said that it was particularly appropriate to tell the story of a tree that survived on Shevat 15 because this date celebrates the Festival of the Trees. The story starts in Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. On the morning of 21 January 1943, it was cold and bleak, and a group of children secretly gathered in the courtyard near their barracks. They were there because it was Tu B'Shvat, the 15th day of the month of Shevat 5703 in the Jewish Calendar – the Festival of the Trees.
The Nazis had forbidden schools, but teachers managed to run clandestine classes in an effort to give the children some feeling of normality. One of the teachers, Frau Lauscher, planned a tree-planting ceremony to celebrate Tu B'Shvat. She persuaded one of the men who worked in the fields to smuggle a seedling into the camp, at the risk of his life. He brought it in hidden in his boot, and this was the tree the children had come to plant. The tree became a symbol of hope, and groups of children nurtured it carefully, and when the children were sent to the East, which meant to extermination camps in Poland, they passed the care of the tree onto other children.
By the end of the war, 15,000 children had passed through Terezin, and only 130 survived! But the tree survived, and so did Frau Lauscher, her husband and her daughter. The daughter had been in hospital. She was 6 years old when the tree was planted. She had typhus, but she recovered. After the war Frau Lauscher returned to Terezin, found the tree and transplanted it to the symbolic cemetery just outside the camp. And there it stood and flourished until it was a great tree over 60 feet high – a memorial to the murdered children and a symbol of defiance.
Frau Lauscher continued to look after the tree, and told its story to people she took to see it. Her daughter, who as mentioned had been sent to the camp suffering from typhus when the seedling was planted, took over from her mother the duty of looking after the tree and of telling its story, and she was often accompanied by her granddaughter, who has already promised to take over when the time comes.
A party from NPLS went to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) in October 1996 and in the course of the tour visited Terezin. Our Rabbi, Dr Andrew Goldstein, conducted a Service of Remembrance under the tree. Neil scrabbled around and found some of the seeds and brought them back to England, and planted them in his greenhouse. Four of the seeds germinated and grew until they were a few inches high. At that point he handed them over to others to nurture, and the saplings flourished.
On Holocaust Memorial Day 2001, one of the saplings Neil had handed over was taken to Beth Shalom, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Nottingham, where it was planted in a spot in the Garden of Remembrance overlooking the children’s memorial, where it is now flourishing.
Then on Sunday 27 January 2002, a National Holocaust Memorial Day that was also 14 Shevat, eve of Tu B'Shvat, the Mayor of Hillingdon planted another of the saplings on the verge by Green Lane's car park, where it stands as a memorial to all who died through tyranny, and especially the children of Terezin.
Now, sadly, nature appeared to have defeated Frau Lauscher’s tree through the dreadful floods in the Czech Republic last year, and it appears to be dead. We have recently heard from the Terezin Director of Memorial that they are going to attempt to revive it, and we hope they succeed. But as the children handed on the care of the tree from one to another, so the tree itself has been handed on by way of its seeds. Not only do we have two in this country, but there are others in Washington, and at Yad Vashem in Israel. Our trees are too young to shed seeds but we are going to try and take cuttings from the one down the road here in the hope that we can grow saplings to replace the old tree, should they fail to be able to revive it. Because of the tree, because of its fate, because of what we are doing to put things right, we are constantly reminded of why the tree is there, and the murdered children it commemorates. Its work as a memorial has succeeded beyond anything Frau Lauscher envisaged. Long may it continue to do so.
At this point, Sidney introduced the internationally acclaimed concert pianist Nelly Ben-Or Clynes. She is a survivor, a teacher of piano and the Alexander Technique. She lives in Northwood, and she survived the war years in Poland.
Nelly Ben-Or Clynes commenced by playing part of a prelude by Chopin which was recorded at a public performance she gave some years ago. She said it was an awesome prospect to speak of experiences in one’s childhood which were very frightening, very confusing, and which leave a deep wound which, because one was a youngster, thank God it is a wound that gets covered over by different experiences of life that come later. She started with music and would like to end with music, because it has been the very centre of her life, from very early childhood. From the age of 3 or 4, and before they had a piano in their house, she would sit on a stool, and with another stool as a make-believe piano, she “played the piano”. Eventually the family obtained a piano, and Nelly began to learn to play it. It was a middle-class family, and consisted of her parents, herself and her sister who was 8 years older. Her father was a travelling salesman and he would come home every Shabbat on Friday evening bringing gifts and treats for the family. Her sister was also very musical, and being that much older she had started having music lessons. So the sister became Nelly’s first music teacher.
Her mother created a warm, beautiful house. She was very gifted, particularly at embroidery, and she made many lovely things to beautify the home. She also made and embroidered beautiful clothes for the girls. It was a Jewish home which traditionally kept the Sabbath, and every eve of the Sabbath was a celebration; every Passover was a very big event, with all the special preparations which go for the feast of Passover.
You may know that Hitler made a pact with Stalin, and between them they divided Poland. Polish history is chapter after chapter named “the first division of Poland”, “the second division of Poland”, “the third division of Poland”. When one went to school in Poland this was how one learnt the history of Poland. It lies between two powerful neighbours who, throughout history, split large portions of it between them. Hitler invaded Poland on 1st September 1939, and the eastern part of Poland, where Nelly lived, was annexed to the Soviet Union – just for about a year and a half. But, of course, Hitler had bigger plans, he wasn’t just content with having part of Poland, he wanted the whole of Poland, and preferably the whole of Russia too! So when the big offensive started he took over the whole of Poland, and by that time their fate was sealed. As soon as the Nazis came to her town all the Jews were rounded up and put into a ghetto that the Germans created, which was a part of the town which they surrounded with an impenetrable wall covered with barbed wire and glass, where they were herded away from everything that they had. Nelly described the moment when the Nazis entered the building in which their apartment was situated, and how the Nazis stripped it of all the beautiful things that were there; her mother’s lovely embroidered prints and everything of value, including the piano, was taken. But frightening as it was, it was as nothing compared with what was to come.
They were taken into the ghetto with no personal possessions, or anything from their home. They were herded into one room, and other families into adjacent rooms within some building within the ghetto area. They were able to prepare what little food was available on a primus stove in a corner of the room. The conditions were awful.
What used to happen, usually at dawn, was that a lorry load of SS men would rush in and take people out of the ghetto to forced labour, often in factories where various things were produced for the German army. It was usually the young and healthy who were taken off for a whole day, from morning until quite late at night to work. Then, if they were lucky, they were brought back to the ghetto for the night. However, if the Nazis had not fulfilled their quota for extermination, some of those who had been working would not return to the ghetto, but be sent off to one of the extermination camps. Alternatively, they would be taken out into a field, made to dig a huge grave, and then they were shot into that grave. This happened on many occasions.
Sometimes the SS men would suddenly arrive, at any time of the day or night, heavily drunk and screaming, just taking people out and either shooting them on the spot, or taking them out to those infamous graves, or for loading on to trains to one of the camps. There were several of these extermination camps in Poland. The Jews called these events “Actions”, and the word would spread like lightning through the ghetto “There is an Action”, which meant that the SS were arriving, and they were going at random to take people for killing.
Nelly was 8 when they were in the ghetto. There was a lot of deprivation, and they suffered horribly from hunger, but the main thing was that they were terribly frightened. As a child everything was incomprehensible, and the fear was totally overwhelming. Nelly described how, on one occasion when there was an “Action” they and others managed to hide under the floor of an outbuilding which was a sort of furniture store attached to the building in which they lived. If they had been found she wouldn’t have been here to tell us about it!
On another occasion, when the signal came that there was an “Action”, a number of them hid in a space between the back of an outbuilding and a fence. One of the people hiding was a young woman with a very young baby in her arms. All eyes were on the baby. If it had uttered a sound it would have been the end for all of them.
Nelly’s sister, being 8 years older than Nelly, was in her mid-teens and every day she was taken on the lorry for forced labour, and one day she did not return and this was, of course, another of those horrific experiences. It was assumed that she had been taken to her death. It subsequently transpired that she had managed to escape from the railway station where she was awaiting the train to take her to a death camp. She first of all made her way back to the ghetto, and then escaped from the ghetto and made contact with some very wonderful people who managed to engineer Nelly’s and her mother’s escape from the ghetto, and to supply them with papers supporting false identities, with new names etc, and giving their religion as Catholic. The same procedure was to be repeated two days later to get her father out of the ghetto, but it was too late. He had been taken to one of the infamous places in the town where people were tortured and executed. They never saw her father again.
When they came out of the ghetto her mother was in her early thirties and Nelly was 9. The problem was where were they to go? Also they had to be taught to behave like Christians. So they were quickly taught prayers and outward observances of Catholicism.
One of Nelly’s uncles was quite a wealthy man. He was in hiding with his child, and when he heard that they had been rescued he began to give her mother money. It was decided that Nelly and her mother should go to Warsaw, and her mother should try and get employment as a housekeeper or maid in someone’s house. They went to Warsaw by train, which was quite a dramatic experience in itself as they ended up sharing a compartment with four SS officers, but their “cover” remained intact.
Eventually her mother found a young couple in Warsaw who would house and employ her, even though she had a child. The couple had a little toddler, about 2 years old, and the wife was expecting another child. Both she and her husband were working every day, so they employed Nelly’s mother to look after the toddler and do all the household chores. Living conditions were not ideal. It was a two-bedroom apartment. The young couple occupied one of the bedrooms, and the man’s parents occupied the other bedroom. Nelly and her mother had a bed in the kitchen.
There was a piano in the room occupied by the man’s parents. Nelly nagged her mother to ask whether she could play it. Initially her mother’s response was “no” because she thought that if it became apparent that Nelly had some knowledge of playing it would not fit in well with the mother’s false persona of being a simple woman who was widowed and who came from a village. However, eventually Nelly’s mother did ask, and the answer was “Yes”. So Nelly started playing the piano, but trying to disguise the fact that she knew more than she let on.
A grown up daughter used to visit the man’s parents and have piano lessons from a lady who called once a week. It was decided that when the lady came to give the daughter a piano lesson she could give Nelly a lesson as well. In point of fact this lady knew very little about teaching the piano, but it enabled Nelly to start playing again. Then the lady suggested to Nelly’s mother that Nelly should go to the big music school, but in view of the continuing need for them to maintain a low profile in public her mother refused to let her go.
Nelly’s mother had to work very hard with cooking, cleaning, washing and looking after the child, but she was absolutely grateful for that opportunity. One chore that had to be undertaken was collecting buckets of coal from the coal merchant. On one occasion the coalman remarked to Nelly’s mother “Your little girl is very pretty. She is just like a little Jewish girl”. Nelly’s mother laughed it off and asked him why he thought this, and he replied that it was the eyes. After this Nelly began to close her eyes as much as possible. She was constantly trying to hide her eyes because in her childish understanding she thought that if people could see her eyes they would recognise that she is Jewish, and that would be the end.
There were lots of horrific experiences in Warsaw. The Warsaw ghetto went through a history of its own. They witnessed the burning of the ghetto when the whole ghetto was reduced to ashes. The sky over Warsaw was red for several weeks from the flames which came from the ghetto.
The Polish Resistance Movement, the so-called AK, they called themselves the National Army, organised themselves to make an uprising against the Nazis. There was this very famous and courageous uprising of the Poles (non-Jews) of the rest of Warsaw. There had been an uprising in the ghetto of Warsaw until its extermination, and then there was an uprising in the city of Warsaw. The Nazis dealt with the city, and the citizens of Warsaw, in pretty much the same way as they dealt with the Jews. It developed into street fighting, and in every street that the Germans conquered, and of course they conquered everything in the end because they had tanks and aeroplanes, whereas the so-called Polish National Army had Molotov cocktails and a brave spirit, they would go up to the roof of the house, pour petrol on the roof and set the house on fire. So when the uprising was finally over there was not a house standing in the city that had one and a half million inhabitants. First the ghetto and then the rest of the city was turned to ashes.
Nelly and her mother happened to be among the non-Jewish population of Warsaw with their false papers, however stamped with the Warsaw stamp on them. When the Germans conquered the street where they lived with these two families, every man found in the house was killed on the spot. The women and children were assembled in some central spot in Warsaw, and eventually put on a train to Auschwitz. Nelly was 11 at the time and everyone on the train knew where they were going. Nelly said that she could hardly understand or describe the feelings that she experienced when she realised that they were going to this place of which they had heard of the most horrific things that were happening.
The train was moving out of Warsaw to Auschwitz when at some point it stopped, and all women and children were ordered out. However it was specified that it had to be little children. Nelly wasn’t a little child any more, but the woman for whom her mother worked had a baby and a toddler. So between them they decided that Nelly’s mother would take the toddler, she would take the baby, and Nelly would be between them, and they walked out of the train. This was, Nelly thought, the end of August 1944. In May 1945 Poland was liberated from the Nazis, and went into the hands of the Soviet Union, but that is a separate story.
After they had been turned out of the train they discovered that they were near some little town, and the townsfolk rallied round immediately. The survivors from the train had nothing but what they were wearing when they were taken out of Warsaw. Nelly didn’t even have any shoes. The people from the little town started bringing clothes and shoes, took them into their homes or found them places to stay, and brought them food.
Nelly then described the extraordinary kindness of one lady to whom she was introduced. This lady, using the pretence that she was having piano lessons, provided piano lessons for Nelly. Also, on the pretence that she was hungry, she provided food which she shared with Nelly. Winter was approaching and this lady had some special warm boots made for herself and, with the excuse that there was material left over, she had boots made for Nelly. Nelly said that there countless other examples of the wonderful side of humanity which the survivors experienced.
When the Red Army came with their tanks the soldiers were greeted with roses. People were liberated from the tyranny of the Nazis. Within a very short time Nelly and her mother went to another city, Lodz, where she entered music school, and after that she never looked back. She was given a piano by the government, they were assisted with housing, and she was given a music scholarship. She gave her first piano recital at the age of 13 in Poland. When she was 16 the State of Israel was created and her mother decided that they should go there. So in 1950 they immigrated to Israel where she completed her studies and began to give public concerts.
Eventually she came to England to study the Alexander Technique, met and married her English husband, and settled in Northwood. She continues to give concerts, and teaches at The Guildhall School of Music. Her concerts, and sometimes those of her students, help to finance a Scholarship Trust which friends and past pupils have established in her name to help young promising pianists. Nelly concluded her talk by commenting that after a horrific dark past, by the grace of the Lord, some wonderful things have developed. She then played some music by Chopin from the same concert recording with which she started her talk.
In response to a questioner, Nelly confirmed that her sister also survived the war.
Concluding the formal part of the meeting, the Chairman, Sidney Moss, said that in view of the subject matter comments were inappropriate. All we could do was to thank Nelly for coming and for her heartrending talk. Passing on the memories of the Holocaust survivors helps to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten.
- Bernard Tiley
