That Millions Will Not Have Died in Vain, January 15, 1967

 

That Millions Will Not Have Died in Vain

Jewish Memorial for Hitler Victims to Rise in City

By JEFF NELSON Sunday Feature Writer

TWENTY-SEVEN Sioux City Jews who survived the Hitler holocaust plan to memorialize the some six million who didn’t.

A memorial shrine commemorating the tragedy of the millions of Jewish martyrs executed by the Nazis during World War II will be erected this spring at the corner of 14th and Nebraska Sts., on the grounds of the Jewish Community Center.

For most Americans, the six million Jewish victims of this opprobrious blight on humankind represent an infamous, but faceless, statistic of the war years. Not so for the 27 Sioux Cityans who are erecting this shrine. Hundreds of the dead were their families, their relatives, their friends.

Each of the 27 survivors, who immigrated to this country in the years after the Axis crumbled, personally experienced persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Some were incarcerated in concentration camps, survived brutality and brushed death. Others evaded their captors by being hidden, sheltered, or aided in flight, through the kindness of sympathetic French, Germans or Poles.

Each Lost Family

These 27, who planned the memorial and raised the money to pay for it, were motivated by sharing one common experience, points out a leader in the Jewish community who is close to the group: "Each of them came out of this nightmare completely and utterly alone. Each found all relatives and friends were annihilated."

All had to start new lives – but for some it was harder. Several in the group “are now on their second families – their second husbands or wives, their second set of children,” adds Rabbi Saul I. Bolotnikov of the United Orthodox Synagogue. “Their first families they saw burned at an Auschwitz, shot down in their home communities or hauled away never to be heard from again.”

The deeply-scarred survivors shared another common feeling, other than loneliness. This is an inexplicable, gnawing guilt. “Why were we spared?” asks a spokesman. “Should we have died along with our families?”

And a common question is asked by all: “How could such a thing have happened in the twentieth century?” they wonder dazedly.

The reason for the proposed shrine, explains Sam Goldstein, co-chairman of the project, is “to memorialize those we lost.” He admits it goes deeper than that, however.

“We fervently hope such a thing will never happen again. The memorial will be put in a place where everyone can see it; perhaps they’ll think about it.” Adds Mr. Goldstein, who fathered five children in this country: “It is very important to us that our children knew about this.”

The Tragic Experiences

These personal stories told by these Sioux Cityans of how they managed to emerge from the ordeal are poignant and tragic. Some still cannot discuss the matter. Most will talk about it, but find the experience extremely painful. And a few, like chic, young housewife, Mrs. Beatrice Pappenheimer, are highly articulate.

Mrs. Pappenheimer, attractive mother of four daughters, has lived in the city just two years, and soon will be moving to Omaha, where her businessman husband, Robert, has new employment.

She and her younger sister, Susan, arrived in this country as orphans in 1947, when Beatrice was 15 years old. But it was not until a few years ago that the German native allowed herself to speak of her experiences.

“We were living in O’Neill, Neb., at the time,” she says. “A friend of mine, who knew something about my background, encouraged me to give a talk about my experiences before a woman’s club. I didn’t want to do it, but my family convinced me it would be good for me.”

Her talk was a smashing success, and before long the small, blond woman was giving speeches regularly.

Her tale is one of terror.

Jewish citizens in Germany in the early 1940’s were indeed living under the gun, as persecution against members of the race reached a fever pitch.

Hated to Leave

“I suppose my father was like most other Jews at the time – he had a home and a business in Germany and didn’t want to leave. Everyone felt that this kind of thing just couldn’t go on forever, that someone would put a stop to it,” Mrs. Pappenheimer remembers. “Then one day,” she adds, her voice lowered, “the Gestapo came for us.”

She and her sister became separated from their parents, though she did see her father again, briefly, in a concentration camp in France. The two girls spent two years in German concentration camps in southern France.

Beatrice notes that these were not death camps – but they were obviously no picnic. “The camps were filthy and louse-ridden, and we were worked hard and poorly fed.”

In one camp, there were 20 women and girls in a single shack. “At noon sometimes they would throw one loaf of bread in the middle of the room

See Memorial, Page 2   C2 – The Sioux City Sunday Journal, Jan. 15, 1967 Memorial Recalls Jewish Ordeal in World War II Memorial From Page One

and let everyone fight over it,” she relates. “This is how they got to you.”

Mrs. Pappenheimer avows she owes her life to an underground organization called OZE, which helped Beatrice, her sister and other children escape from concentration camps. She remembers little about her actual flight, “except riding many miles at night in the back of a truck.” For a time in 1943, she, and up to 100 other escaped children were hidden in a private home.

“But we had to go elsewhere when the Nazis discovered these hiding places, and began raiding them and killing the children they found. Then we were hidden in a Catholic convent in central France, where we posed as French children,” she continues. ‘We were told to speak only in French, although we didn’t know any when we came. They even changed the spellings of our names to look more French.”

Found Relatives

After the war, OZE located relatives of the two girls in London, and they stayed there for awhile before coming to New York City, where Mrs. Pappenheimer lived until her marriage. Her sister is now the mother of three and lives in Oregon.

While Mrs. Pappenheimer almost delivers her story by rote these days, there are still some blank spots. “My mind suppresses some things. I try to remember them, but I just can’t.”

Most of the terrible experience is indelibly etched into her mind, however. “You can’t forget it, you just try to live with it. But to this day, I ask myself, how could it happen?

Izzy Shapiro

The young, resilient ones, like pretty Bea Pappenheimer, are more easily able to “live with it” than uprooted older persons. Barber Izzy Shapiro, the only one of a large family of 200 to live through the Nazi persecution, confides he still wakes up some nights in a cold sweat.

Young Izzy was on top of the world back in Tarnopol, Poland, in 1939. Still unmarried, but with plenty of family around, he owned his own barber shop and was doing well. Then the Russians and the Germans gobbled up Poland and Izzy’s life collapsed. He spent the next 12 ½ years in prison camps and DP camps.

Mr. Shapiro spent from 1939 to 1946 in a Siberian work camp, was returned to Poland in a prisoner exchange, fled into Czechoslovakia then went into Austria, where he lived for five years as a displaced person.

His treatment in Russia was probably better than he would have received at the hands of the Germnas, he concedes – at least he stayed alive. “But if you think the Russians are any nicer than the Germans, you’re wrong,” he scowls. He tells of subsisting on a diet of thin gruel, supplemented by what garbage he could steal, and of wearing the same clothes for nine months at a stretch.

The orphaned Russian girl he met in a work camp eventually became his wife. When the opportunity came to settle in the U.S. in 1951, the Shapiros grabbed it, and settled in Sioux City, where Mrs. Shapiro has relatives.

He sends money to Israel each month to help support the war crippled.

“No one can imagine what we went through. All of my family gone. For awhile I thought the dead were the lucky ones.” Izzy said he often weeps when he thinks or speaks of those awful years. “My heart just gets all shook up.”

Sam Goldstein

Sam Goldstein, Sioux City Jewry’s Kosher Butcher, says he “tries to forget” about his experiences and concentrate on the present. But he admits there is just too much to remember.

At age 16 he was snatched by the Nazis and spent from 1941 to 1945 in a series of German concentration camps. An indication of his fate is the name of his home camp – the infamous Buchenwald. “I was young and strong and as long as they could get work out of me, they kept me alive. If you were sick and couldn’t make it to work in the morning – you were dead. They didn’t wait for you to get well.

“Brushes with death were an everyday thing,” he says almost dispassionately. One didn’t make mistakes in one’s work, either, Mr. Goldstein adds, as errors usually drew gunfire or beatings for reprimands.

“I saw people die in almost every way you can name. And the last two weeks before I was liberated from a Czech camp, I was sure I wasn’t going to make it, either. We were marked for death those last few weeks, but the allies got to us before the Germans did.”

One of the things Sam recalls of his Buchenwald stint is his number – 83,960. “Prisoners from all over Europe were kept there. I was among the about four per cent who made it out safely.”

Sam is married now, and has five children. But of the family he once knew, only an uncle who lived in Israel, remains.

Jerry Schmulewitz

One black day in Novogrudek, Poland, a quarter of century ago, Nazi occupation forces ringed two gigantic holes in the earth with some 8,000 Jews. Machine guns rang out and thousands of human beings dropped over into their ready-made graves. Among those killed were the parents, relatives and friends of Jerry Schmulewitz, now a Sioux City packing plant employe.

Jerry wasn’t there at the time. He was laboring in a Russian camp hundreds of miles away.

Like Izzy Shapiro, Mr. Schmulewitz, a 33-year-old wholesale food distributor, had a promising business career ahead of him until the Russians and Germans divided up the country in 1939.

“The Russians didn’t like or trust businessmen,” he says. “They put me to work in a factory until the Germans invaded in 1941. Then they took me into the army.”

Jerry never hoisted a rifle for the Russians, however. The first troop convoy he was in was strafed by German planes. Hauling himself out from amid the wreckage and the dead, Jerry set out on foot for the Russian border, knowing “I couldn’t stay in Poland.” He hiked 200 miles in 10 days, without food or water and with bombs and shells bursting around him.

Rather than mobilize him for war duty, the Russians sent him to a work camp for nine months, and then to a permanent duty station at a Soviet college – where he carried coal to heat the dormitories. Hardly an ideal job for an intelligent young businessman, but Jerry feels he was fortunate in some respects. The head of the college was a Jew, who took a shine to the young Pole, and even let him attend some classes at the school.

And in what must rank as a classic wartime love story, he met and wooed dark-haired Olga, a Russian Jew, who happened to be a physician and lecturer on the college staff. They married secretly, and the friendly college director arranged for their safe transport back to Poland at the end of the war.

Danger Lingered

But Poland was still not a safe place for Jews in 1946. Naziism and anti-semitism still had a firm grip on the country. “The persecution was not as organized as under Hitler,” Jerry explains, “but it was almost as bad. It was not safe for a Jew to go out at night.”

An undercover group operating out of Israel with U.S. financing helped Jerry and Olga slip into Austria, and from there to West Germany, where they spent until 1950 in a DP camp.

The couple, and their small daughter, came to America, and to Sioux City, under a plan whereby Jewish communities in U.S. cities were taking responsibility for displaced European Jews. They arrived here Christmas Eve of 1950—neither knowing a word of English nor a soul in town. There are now four Schmulewitz children, the eldest a junior at the University of Iowa.

Jerry was a prime mover in the memorial project and feels strongly about it, regarding it as “a real achievement for the Jews of Sioux City.” But he is perplexed by the lukewarm reception the project received from some quarters of the city’s Jewish community.

As Sam Goldstein said, the 27 survivors are insistent the shrine be large and in a conspicuous place. Some others, at least at the outset, would have preferred something a little less prominent.

Says Mr. Schmulewitz: “It was as though some people seemed ashamed to demonstrate their Jewishness – even though there is not a single Jewish family in town that this tragedy did not touch somehow.”

Unanimity seems to have been reached on the setting, however. And Rabbi Bolotnikov, for one, will be proud to look across the street from his synagogue at the fountain – landscaped pool, walkway, concrete bench and marble monument that will comprise the $2,000 memorial.

Soil from Warsaw

(The memorial is intended to mark the 25th anniversary of the Jewish revolt at the Warsaw Ghetto. Imbedded in the base of the memorial will be a metal capsule containing five kilograms of earth from the Warsaw battlefield, especially consigned to Sioux City by the Jewish Community Council of Warsaw.)

The Rabbi, who fled Eastern Europe just ahead of the Nazi hate-wave but whose wife lost more than 100 relatives in the slaughter, contends the memorial is more than a monument to the six million who perished.

“We must all realize that the Nazis weren’t after European Jews alone. Their target was all Jewish people throughout the world. They meant us, too.”