Flicker of Hope (Part II)

At the conclusion of World War II in May of 1945, the prospect of survivors rebuilding their lives was daunting. Antisemitism still persisted in parts of Europe and Jewish survivors feared returning to their former home. Thousands of names of survivors are posted in newspapers, tracing services, and in other public archives. Unfortunately, in many cases, survivors were unable to locate loved ones because either they did not survive or they had found a way to immigrate after liberation. Immigration possibilities were extremely limited and often took months or years to acquire the documentation needed to leave the refugee camps in Europe. An executive order called the Truman directive required that existing immigration quotas be designated for displaced persons.

So this Rudy and Bea Fox were very good friends of my parents. And after the war, they all went and ended in Stuttgart in Germany for a couple of years because they really didn't have anywhere to go. And these people all lived in a great big house. Like, I don't know how many couples, 10 couples lived in this house. And they tried to, you know, find money and jobs and this and that. And they worked and they lived together in Germany until someone finally got papers to come wherever they were going either the United States or Israel or South America.

And by this time I must've been pretty wild. I must've been, I mean, I had been two years on my own without much supervision. For two years, I lived with my uncle after he found me in Brussels, with his family and maybe they're family, but do they really want me or am I just going through here just like I went through Wezembeek?

Finally in 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act. This act helped individuals who were victims of persecution by the Nazi government. They were granted permanent residency and employment without forcing another individual out of a job. The Displaced Persons Act authorized 200,000 DPs to enter the United States.

Coming to the US wasn't an easy thing for a Holocaust survivor because the, uh, there were quotas on people that they would let into this country. When my father was in the displaced persons camp, he got a job with the US Army working on their vehicles. And, uh, he was befriended by many army officers and they kind of paved the way, made it easier for him to enter this country.

My father wrote a letter to my two aunts that were living in New York City. They were the sisters of my mother that if anything should happen to my mother or him, we should go to them. And I really didn't want to come here believe it or not, I wanted to stay in England. I was perfectly happy.

The Hebrew Immigration Society (HIAS) was founded in 1881, although they were not able to rescue refugees during World War II, HIAS was instrumental in evacuating displaced person camps and aiding in the resettlement of some 150,000 people in 330 US communities, as well as to Canada, Australia, and South America.

Rudy Fox lived in the house with them and he, uh, he had an aunt here. They got them papers and they sponsored them and they came to Omaha first.

The American Joint Distribution Committee provided relief for over 700,000 people worldwide before, during, and after the war. They supported soup kitchens, hospitals, and established educational and cultural programs.

We came in on the, uh, USS Tiger I was told, which is a, uh, a cargo ship. It landed at Ellis Island. It was processed through there. They were given by the Jewish Agency, a, an apartment in New York. My father, he had obtained a job through again, through the Jewish Agency, in a bicycle factory someplace in New York. For two or three days straight running, he got lost going to work and coming home from work and couldn't find his way back home. Of course, they knew no English, so it was very difficult for them to, uh, to get around.

The United Service for New Americans had a quota system. It served as a way to distribute Jewish immigrants nationally also to not burden communities with overwhelming numbers of new people.

My father was from a small city in Czechoslovakia and the Tatra Mountains. He and my mom went to the Jewish Agency and they asked if they could come to a small city someplace in the mountains. The Jewish agency looked up their records and they said, we have just a place for you and loaded the family up on a train and they got off in Omaha. Of course, not a penny to their name and they had to make their life here.

After we went on the train and we started moving. We went to the diner and since we didn't speak English, the waiter, he said, I'll do it. And certainly he did. He brought us two hamburgers with french fries, a small box of milk and a piece of pumpkin pie since it was after Thanksgiving. We gave him the $20. He brought us some change and then his hand was sticking out that means he wanted a tip. So my husband gave him the rest of the money and the $20 were for the food. And since then we didn't eat until we got to Omaha because we didn't have any more money. And I really cried, cried from all the way from New York to Omaha. And I talked to my husband, what are we going to do? We have no language. We have nobody there that could take care of us. We don't understand a word they are saying to us. How are we going to make a living when we pay $20 for two hamburgers? And my husband, the optimist that he always was, he said, Lola, don't worry. If I get a job, I work hard and we are going to make a pretty good living.

My husband, he told me he didn't want to live in New York City. And I had told him, I want to have a lot of children. So he says in New York, no place to raise children. His brother-in-law had opened up some grocery stores in the west. And so he wanted him to come and manage them and help him. And so we moved out west.

Rudy Fox came to Omaha, Mrs. Fox wanted to introduce her new nephew and niece that came from the old country in this. And they pulled out all sorts of pictures and photographs of my parents' wedding. Cause they had just been at this huge wedding. And my aunt Eudice was at the greeting party to meet these new immigrants. And she looked down at the pictures and said, oh my God, it's my nephew's wedding that you were at. And that's how they discovered that my uncle and aunt were here in Omaha. Herman and Eudice Mirowitz. And they'd come before the war because Herman was a religious man and didn't want to serve in the army.

How did Omaha receive the survivors as they arrived after World War II? It was difficult and many recall they were often left to start a new life on their own.

Their entire life was taken away from them. Anything that they knew about was taken away from them. Any possessions obviously that they had was taken away from them. They were in their twenties in their early twenties. And they came to this country and as hard as they had to work and they had to work very hard because they came with nothing. They just got to start all over again.

There were numerous businesses owned by members of the Jewish community who hired these individuals to work for them.

Someone else from Omaha had set up the pediatric neurology division, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. So I came back by car, got off the highway and forgot to get back on and we brought up three kids here.

Bob Newman working with his family business, Hinky Dinky, recalls when Joe Fishel came to work on their dock.

My father worked at the Hinky Dinky at the, um, at the warehouse. And he, I just remember the story he used to get on the bus in the morning. And he had a little piece of paper pinned onto his shirt to tell the bus driver where to let him off. And he would sling bananas. He used to carry bananas. That's all he could do cause he couldn't speak.

Hinky Dinky was a grocery store chain started by the brothers, Jule, Henry, Albert Newman and cousin Ben Silver in Omaha in 1925. Bob who was working summer shifts, often heard horrific details of the Holocaust and remembers them to this day. Another cousin, Herb Berkowitz, recalls that those survivors who worked at Hinky Dinky made a great impression in terms of morale, gratitude, work ethic, and learning aptitude.

My husband was a cabinet maker and he started working delivering the furniture and it was such a waste of his talent. Finally, he found a job, not making furniture, but store fixtures. He was working for Jack Newman on F Street in South Omaha. They hired him and they paid him 75 cents an hour. And after awhile, they saw how talented he was so they raised his wages 25 cents and he was making a dollar.

And the Jewish agency helped them obtain a job with a local car dealership called Morton Motors on 3141 Farnam Street. And, uh, he was a mechanic there for Morton for many, many years, and then moved on to become a machinist over at Sperry Vickers on 72nd and Crown Point until he retired when he was 65 years old.

And over time, uh, he went to work for his uncle, my great uncle Herman. And he, uh, he owned the Herman Nut Company. My mother worked full time, helped my father run the business. My father was active in his community. He was, I mean, there wasn't a grocery store that you could walk into that didn't know the nut man. I mean, everybody knew him because his policy was, you got to shake hands with everybody. He was always kind very, very kind to people.

There's a number on my father's arm number was 33072. When you're young, you, you ask what that's for and he told me. It was kind of a foreign concept to have a number on your arm and why somebody would imprison and torture you for just being Jewish.

I.G. would use his tattoo as his identifier, 33072, and where some people will etch a social security number or a code or something on things that they own. He would etch his concentration camp number. So to this day we have machines. We have tools. If you pick it up and look at it, it'll have his concentration camp number on it. That was his identifier.

Everything about our life was based on what happened then I think, uh, my father had a number on his arm tattooed on his arm and that was always there. And then we always saw that and it's not like he talked to us and made them horror stories. And he likes to talk about before the war. And he likes talks about after the war also.

Daily events that triggered something with them that they would then tell me about, uh, the history. You finish everything on your plate. Do you treat food as if it was valuable, prisoners fought each other for food. There was a dying person and I had to carry food to them.

You know, their behavior was a little bit different. They were survivors. So everything that they had, they had to, you know, they tried to hold on to food, for example. My dad was came out of the concentration, camp after the war he weighed 80 pounds, but when it came to food, we like to eat a lot of food. They were good people, you know, they were funny people. They, they love to live.

I grew up understanding both Czech and Polish and whatever this language was that was the combination. They often spoke to me in another language, in their language, their native language. And I would answer in English. And then that's the way the conversations went.

My mother was, um, was a real educated person, even though she didn't make it past the very far in pub-, you know, in school, she read very well and she was bound and determined to speak, write, and read in English. She wanted to. My father on the other hand, um, had a little bit more of an accent and he, uh, he, I don't think he ever got through the eighth grade. I don't think he made it because he had to go to work and then he got taken to the camps.

I didn't understand a word of English. Finally, I decided that I have to do something about that. I started going to high school in the evening. I left my baby with my husband when he came from work and I took a bus. And most of the time I came home about 11:30 to 12 o'clock midnight on the bus. And certainly after three or four years, I could speak and I could write and I could read. And finally I felt the same way as all the other people.

They wanted to be American. Uh, they wanted to dress like Americans. They wanted to have things that Americans had. My mother could have been the ambassador for Omaha. Both my parents loved this country. And you could never say anything bad about this country because they came from a place where it was so awful and so wrong to this country and there were so many opportunities here.

I would say that it's very important to study hard because the only way that you can have a democracy I feel is by an informed public and they should, and because of that, also, they should take an interest in what is going on in the world and in the United States and in your state, and even in your town.

We each have a personal responsibility to stand up for the rights of others, be it from bullying in school, to standing up to Holocaust deniers. It's, uh, it's each of us is a personal responsibility for each and every one of us.

The Holocaust is such an important thing to study and to understand, and to realize that it happened in not too very long ago and the things that are happening in the world today, we have to really pay close attention to and not just say, oh, it's happening over there because it can happen anywhere. It can happen anywhere with anybody, but it, it has such a spiraling effect on so many generations. And it continues to have an effect in my life, out of, you know, from day to day. So study hard and try to understand your history so that it doesn't repeat itself.

My responsibility now is to go and educate other people, you know, and therefore it kind of starts like a chain. The youth now we have, uh, I believe we have much more power than what the youth of, you know, generations before had. So I think we, we need to take advantage of that power that we have.

I would say our responsibility is looking at the issues that are going on now to say, okay, we know we've learned. So now what can we do about it, there was Rwanda a couple of years ago, the Holocaust is not the only genocide that's happened in history. So it's like we have all this information. So now what do we do? And kind of take charge and do something about it.

We're looking to change the world no matter what people say. And I think that we have the power and through education, through going on the trips, through talking to survivors, to becoming living memories in Omaha, in Nebraska and United States, anywhere I'm telling you if you care about something and if you know what you're talking about, people will listen and people will change their actions.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, author of Second Generation Voices: Reflections by the Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators said, "Remembering the Holocaust is not an issue for us. We are in our parents' mind the answer to the Holocaust. We are in our own minds, the guardians of a problematic, unique and volatile legacy. We do not need to be reminded of it. Rather, we need to learn how to translate our consciousness of evil, or skepticism, or sense of outrage into constructive action."