Hansen: A broken doll reflects the horror of the Holocaust, and one survivor's resolve
After speaking about the Holocaust to eighth-graders at Tri-Center Community Schools in western Iowa, Bea Karp gets hugs from the kids. KENT SIEVERS/THE WORLD-HERALD
"Learn to stand against prejudice," Karp says, "because prejudice made it so much easier for Hitler to do what he did." KENT SIEVERS/THE WORLD-HERALD
Bea always tells the students about the day she destroyed her only doll.
She is 82 now, and she has been guest speaking at Omaha-area schools so long that she may have introduced the darkest chapter of the 20th century to your grandpa, then to your mother and then to you.
And yet every time she steps into a classroom — just as she’s done two or three times a week each spring since 1963 — Bea tells the students the story of that doll.
She brings up the doll because she remembers it as vividly as you remember a wedding or a child’s birth.
She brings up the doll because the doll allows an Omaha teenager born a half-century after Hitler to catch a glimpse of what it was like to be a Jewish child living in Germany during World War II.
A child like Bea Karp.
On the day when the Nazis finally knocked on their door, Bea had just turned 8. There were two men wearing swastikas outside. Pack your things, they yelled. You are leaving.
As her mother threw clothes into a suitcase, Bea ran to the living room to grab her most prized possession. One of the Nazis followed her, eyeballed her as she picked up her doll, shook his head no, stomped toward her.
Where you are going, he said, you won’t need that.
Little Bea understood. She understood in a way that wouldn’t be clear to her for many years. Fine, she thought. If I can’t have this doll, you can’t, either.
She raised the doll over her head and flung it at the floor.
The doll’s porcelain face shattered into dozens of pieces. Her only doll lay there, broken, as Bea, her parents and her little sister left their home and were forced to board a train whose destination they did not know.
“I can still see that doll’s face,” she says 74 years later, as she stares into the distance.
Bea first stood inside a classroom and told this story when she was a young housewife living in O’Neill, Nebraska. The year was 1963. The sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, had focused attention on the mass extermination of millions of Jews.
Many of Bea’s surviving relatives refused to speak about what had happened during the war. Bea herself had rarely talked about her past. In fact, the only reason she was standing inside that O’Neill classroom is that she had taken a public speaking course. She had mentioned her childhood during the course, and the husband of an O’Neill teacher also taking the course had heard Bea. You should have Bea speak to your students, he told his wife.
So, that day in O’Neill, she walked to the front of the classroom and began to talk. Her voice quavered. She started to sob.
“It was a long time,” she says, “before I could get through a talk without crying.”
She dried her eyes. She kept talking, even as she and her husband, Bob Pappenheimer, and their four children moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then to Omaha in 1967.
She told Omaha’s junior high and high school students about the train ride from Karlsruhe, Germany, to a camp just across the French border. How some passengers jumped out of the train’s open windows. How she heard the gunfire and wondered — still wonders — if they got away or died next to the tracks.
She kept talking. She told the students about how the guards would throw one loaf of bread into each barrack at the camp, and 20 or 25 women and girls would have to split it. Fights would break out if one chunk of bread was a millimeter larger than another.
She told the students about the day she was so hungry that she stole a tiny triangle of cheese from her own little sister.
“My own sister, I took it from her,” she says.
She kept talking, as her own children grew up and graduated from high school but their old teachers kept calling and asking Bea to speak.
She told them about a day, when she was sick and weak from cholera, that her mother decided Bea needed to leave the camp. The OSE — a French group that saved hundreds of Jewish children during World War II — had a deal at the time with the Nazis that they could remove sick children from the French concentration camp. Bea’s sister had already left for this reason.
Bea’s mother took her to the OSE truck near the camp’s locked gate. Bea hugged her mother, got on the truck and watched her fade into the distance as the truck rumbled away.
She told them about being reunited with her sister, taken to one OSE group house and then another and then, when the Nazis got stricter, being passed off as a French child and hidden in a Catholic school.
She told them about the postcards she got from both her parents at first, postcards reminding her to be good and take care of her sister. And then, one day, the postcards stopped, and Bea never heard from her parents again.
She told them how she played by herself in the attic. How she pretended to be a princess, a princess with the power to end the war and make everyone happy and healthy again. A princess with the power to save her parents.
“I lived inside my own head,” she says.
After the war, Bea and her sister moved to New York to live with an aunt and uncle. She got married to Bob, who took grocery store jobs in O’Neill and then Omaha.
Bob died young of cancer, and she married again, to Harold Karp, in 1989. Harold died young of cancer, too. She has four grown daughters now, and seven grandkids, and is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first great-grandchild in August.
She kept talking. She talked to auditoriums filled with 500 or 1,000 students in Omaha. She drove to western Nebraska and western Iowa and talked at tiny schools to maybe 12 students.
Some history teachers had Bea come every year, until they retired, and then the teacher who replaced the retired teacher would have her come every year, too.
She has no idea how many times she has spoken at schools. Sometimes it is once a month. Sometimes 12 times in a month. She has done this pretty much nonstop for 52 years. She has no plans to stop.
“It’s a funny thing,” she says. “Each time I talk, it feels like someone is helping me to get the words to come out of my mouth.”
“I used to be so angry,” she says. “I was so angry that it showed in my eyes. And talking … it helped me so much.”
So each time, maybe 1,000 times, Bea has mentioned her doll.
She brings up the doll because it is more than a doll. She brings up the doll because it allows children to grasp the horror of the Holocaust, if even just for a fleeting moment. She brings up the doll because she wants them to understand that the doll was porcelain, but she is not. She did not shatter.
“Learn to hate bullying,” she says. “Learn to stand against prejudice, because prejudice made it so much easier for Hitler to do what he did.
“Don’t judge others when you don’t know anything about them. Get to know them. Listen to them.”
With that, Bea says she needs to go. It’s close to noon. She has to drive to a school. She’s speaking in an hour. She needs to tell them about the day she destroyed her only doll.
