A Cup of Honey: The Story of a Young Holocaust Survivor, Eliezer Ayalon

Ayalon

A sealed room in Jerusalem. January, 1991. I am no longer a child — I have children myself — even grandchildren. The War ended many years ago.

My childhood years were trapped inside sealed places. Closed off streets. A walled ghetto. Sealed borders. Bolted boxcars. Barracks, locked. Camps guarded with machine guns. Barbed wire fencing, electrified.

A gas chamber. Sealed tight. Very dirty. Cold. Dark.Yelling outside. Loud wailing inside. Mothers clinging to their small children, trying to soothe them. Not to worry, my little one. Mama is holding Chaya, protecting her.Tears fall effortlessly from desperate eyes. Bodies tremble uncontrollably in fright. In my imagination they cling to each other until the end.

Has my home in Jerusalem become a gas chamber? Impossible. We have an army. A government. The world would not let a madman suffocate us with gas fumes. It happened already, a long time ago, and the world learned a lesson. Never again, we said.

I watch the healthy, confident face of my small grandson. It is 2:00 in the morning, and he is sitting in a corner of the sealed room, with his gas mask on. He plays happily with a fire engine, making siren noises. It is hard to hear him. The mask makes him sound like he is in a barrel. Trapped in the barrel. He is not afraid. He feels lucky to be up 1ate.The real siren — the air raid siren — is loud. It rings in my ears. I cover my ears to make the sound go away.

My inother would hold me in her arms. She would whisper to me. With God’s will, she would say, everything will be all right. I want to see Mama’s face. Her smile. Her comforting eyes.

Gas masks. We each have been provided with one. My family look like insects in them. Like insects caught in a trap. Flies. Gigantic ones. In a few moments the air will run out.The gas will fill the room like a big yellow cloud. Each breath will make us dizzy. We will panic. Our faces will contort. We will try to breathe, but no air will enter our lungs. We will begin to climb the walls. To try to escape. We can’t escape — the room is sealed.

This is not rational, of course. Our government has prepared us well for this nightinare. The room is sealed with a special plastic to keep the gas out. Door openings are sealed with wet rags and thick tape.This is the opposite of a gas chamber. The gas masks will protect us from the harmful effects of any gas that might sneak inside from the Jerusalem hills. We enjoy all the modern defenses against gas attacks. We have a television — cable television. A radio. Up-to-the-minute news bulletins. Bottles of pure mineral water.This is 1991. I am in Jerusalem. We are perfectly safe inside this sealed room — it shelters our pale faces and trembling bodies.

I refuse to put on my gas mask. My wife is angry with me. So is my pregnant daughter. They cannot persuade me to do it. Not that it would be uncomfortable. The experts made sure the fit was perfect. Not that I would not know how to use it. We have been trained well, and have practiced. We even joked about it. People wear gas masks to clean up chemical spills. We have seen that in the evenings on CNN.

My wife and daughter cannot understand why I refuse to put it on. They tell me I am stubborn. I think I am invincible, they say.

I do not hear them anymore. I cannot see them either. Their faces have become a blur. They shake me, but I do not feel anything. I want to be with Mama and Chaya. Mama would hold us tightly together. You will have a sweet life, my darling. I want to suffer like they did. The gas must take me to them. I do not deserve this life — joys, happiness, comfort, pleasure. Grandchildren. A beautiful home in a golden city. I breathe deeply, wishing to be carried away. Then, blackness…

Kitzdevyoven [Childhood Years]

Eli’s translation of old Yiddish children’s ballad.

Childhood, dear and sweet childhood.

You remain in my memory forever.

When I think about your years, they seem to me everlasting.

Like a dream you vanished.

I can see my home in front of my eyes.

Where I was born and raised.

I can see my cradle there

Which still stands in the same spot.

Like a dream you vanished.

And my mama whom I used to love,

Even though she chased me to the religious school

Every pinch from her hand

Is so well known to me.

But no signs are left behind.

And I can see you, Ruchele, my dear one,

How I kiss your red cheeks.

Your eyes, full of charm,

Penetrate my heart.

I thought you would remain mine.

Childhood, I have lost you.

And my dear mama, I have lost you too.

Childhood, very sad, dark, and bitter.

Like a dream you vanished.

THOUGHTS ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR OF ELI’S LIBERATION FROM CAMP EBENSEE

A Cup of Honey: The Story of a Young Holocaust Survivor, Eliezer Ayalon was originally published in English in 1999; Hebrew and Spanish translations followed. Although Eli had been a veteran tour guide for special educational/cultural journeys, called missions, to Israel organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, he had not disclosed his astonishing personal story to the public, even to people who joined his mission groups.

Although Eli was often animated and brimming with stories, he also had revealed little of his experience during the war to his own family. While survivor guilt and shame were partly to blame for this, Eli, like many others, felt that people would not believe his story because it was so horrific. Also, at the time of Israel’s early nation building, the top priority was the need for the tiny new country to respond effectively to existential threats and multiple wars. In those years Israelis were necessarily looking forward, and many survivors, like Eli, changed their pre-war names, learned and adopted their new language of Hebrew and silently swept away the untold, and to most, inexplicable events of the past.

When I first met Eli on a mission to Israel in December 1991, I could sense he harbored secrets. The day our group arrived, we traveled with him as our guide to the newly opened Atlit Museum, near Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. When we arrived at this destination, Eli oddly walked off by himself, and we did not see him again until we boarded the bus for our next stop.

Others guided us through the exhibits that depict a tragic and bizarre chapter in Word War II and Jewish history. Many Jewish refugees, who had successfully escaped Nazi persecution, sailed to British-controlled Palestine only to find themselves imprisoned in Atlit detention camp, similar in appearance and form to Nazi concentration camps. From the time the war ended in May of 1945 until 1948, estimates of tens of thousands of illegal Jewish immigrants were detained there by the British as part of their policy of severely limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.

In 1945 there was a shocking incident where orphaned Jewish refugee children who had been rescued by the Jewish Brigade, and granted special permission to enter Palestine legally, were required by the British Mandatory Authority to be housed at Atlit detention camp—albeit temporarily, for disinfection.

When Eli disappeared before our museum tour, I suspected there was a story he was not telling. Later my group woke up at 2:00 a.m. for an hour bus trip to the airport to greet a planeload of newly arriving immigrants from the former Soviet Union. I invited Eli to sit with me.

Why did you go off when we arrived at Atlit, Eli? I asked him. I didn’t, he insisted and added, I just went to get a coffee. I didn’t buy his explanation. Come on Eli, you were gone for over an hour. What happened?

And Eli’s story started to emerge—just like that while everyone slept except the two of us. Eli sat in the window seat of the bus, hands stuffed protectively into the pockets of his light gray bomber jacket. I was a prisoner there, he whispered, and it hurts to see the place reconstructed. I cannot do it.

I felt goose bumps. Eli’s emotions, even his words, were raw and unfiltered; his face downcast. He was describing experiences and feelings from long ago to another for the very first time:

It was just after the War that I arrived there. I remember that day well. When I close my eyes, I see everything in front of me. When we entered the camp, we immediately saw fierce looking armed soldiers on the ground and even in watchtowers; the camp was surrounded by barbed wire, so we were trapped . . . caged. They forced us to separate from the girls, to undress and then to enter large shower rooms; they even sprayed us with DDT. We were children, and so we began crying, screaming. I was scared and confused. I felt humiliated—like I was back in Europe with the Nazis.

That’s why I went away, Neile. I wanted to walk a little, to gather myself. Dahhling, there are some things even you cannot possibly understand. At the museum, they recreated the disinfection room. I cannot walk inside because it takes me back. I do not want to go back.

And so I heard how it happened that in that November of 1945, after disembarking the Princess Kathleen ship that had transported Eli and the other children out of Europe, Eli entered Atlit where he and the children were astonished once again to be greeted with the horrors of barbed wire, manned guard towers, disinfection chambers, separation of boys from girls, cold wooden barracks, and roll calls.

But Eli also went back, way back. He talked and talked. In these early days of our writing collaboration, I heard just snippets—about broken legs, abscessed skin, ghettos, work details, mine explosions, a little about his mother. The snippets were enough to suck me in. I wanted to know more, and Eli wanted to tell me more. Others on the bus later admitted that they overheard portions of our conversation and were jealous that Eli was talking to me alone.

But how could he tell me more? I lived an ocean away. And why? After all these years, why was he telling me these stories, and why did I want to hear them? Well, the how we worked out. He would come to Baltimore, and I would travel to Jerusalem. We would also travel around the United States, and in Europe to visit archives, museums, and libraries holding important materials documenting the day-to-day life in the places figuring prominently in the book. We wanted to accurately reflect the names, places, and dates of his events. We would also visit or telephone individuals whose lives Eli touched along the way to cross-check their memories against Eli’s.

For Eli, it was time to open up after all those years. When he met Eli Wiesel, Mr. Wiesel had instructed Eli that as a survivor it was his duty to tell his story. Eli’s mother had imparted a similar message: that it was meant to be that Eli must survive the War in order to tell his story and keep the memory of his family alive. For Eli, the time had come because his children and grandchildren needed to know about their family.

And for me, the more I heard about Eli’s experience, the more I wanted to hear. As a mother of small children, I related to the boy whose story Eli was telling. I connected emotionally to his mother, too, especially after I saw her photograph, with those large and beautiful dark, proud eyes that appeared to look directly into mine, imploring me to help Eli. I was in awe how a mother, facing extraordinary circumstances, could muster the strength to urge her smallest child to set out alone into the uncertain world of German-occupied Poland while the rest of the family at least faced their uncertainty together. It was important for me to help accomplish her final wish for Eli: that he survive in order to tell the story of his family. And, of course, I wanted my children to hear the tale; I was certain they would benefit from seeing their mother in the process of uncovering it.

During the mission that December, Eli and I spent more and more time together discussing his childhood. After the mission returned to the United States, I stayed in Israel for an extra week, completely taken by Eli’s stories as we continued our sessions. After a while, we, along with our families, decided to pursue the project: I would write Eli’s biography.

***

WHILE SLOW, THE PROCESS OF uncovering Eli’s repressed memories was yielding valuable information and insights. I would interview Eli until I felt I was living in the moment; then I would write his story. Finally we would take what I had written and fill in detail as well as dialogue. We cross-checked the facts and this process triggered even more memories. Eli recalled songs from his childhood, and as he sang them, additional anecdotes were revealed.

This process kept expanding and Eli’s life-story started taking shape. I was happy because I felt I was opening up treasured memories and that this was important work. And so, for the next five or six years we carried on in this way, using old-fashioned PC computers with floppy discs and dot matrix printers. It was a life-changing collaboration for both Eli and me. I will never forget the day when we finished a first draft of the book. It was in 1993. The book would end up being changed significantly, with many stories added, but finally we had a beginning, middle, and end. We selected a title, calling it Beshert, or Meant to Be. My husband took the pages to a copier store and created bound copies. When Eli opened the box of the bound copies and saw his story in print, he started to cry. He felt that his life was finally validated. He was proud. He would never again feel the need to conceal his history.

And the publication of the book in 1999 changed Eli dramatically. Becoming a powerful, articulate, and charismatic public speaker, he suddenly felt liberated from his self-imposed silence, and found his calling. He began to speak to his tour participants about his experiences as a teenager in the Holocaust. He also started to lead international groups through the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem as part of educational seminars and workshops, and as a lecturer with the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies. This led to invitations from around the world for Eli to share, in person, his powerful personal story.

Eli traveled throughout the United States visiting places that included Michigan, Arizona, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, California, and Oklahoma, as well as Mexico, Costa Rica, and Europe. He lectured at conferences, schools, universities, and community centers.

As a witness to the events of the Holocaust, he led dozens of delegations to concentration camps and former Jewish communities in Poland. Relating to groups of all kinds was Eli’s gift. He was well received by Jewish and non-Jewish groups from many continents, including American Amish groups who eschewed their traditional restrictions on using modern technology by boarding planes and busses to visit the holy land. He related equally well to children and adults, men and women.

In 1998 he addressed a group of Native American tribal elders who were moved by their deep feelings about the similarities between their story and Eli’s. As Oklahoma City’s News9 recounted at the time, Shoshana Wasserman, public relations officer for the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum explained, The process of moving to Israel and beginning a new life and defeating Hitler, by the very fact that he has started a family and a legacy. . . I think our native people feel very much the same way, that we were meant to be extinct, and yet, we’re here, we’re resilient.

Speaking about the Holocaust became an obsession for Eli. He saw it as critical because the generation of Holocaust survivor witnesses was getting older. As Eli explained in 2011:

In 10-15 years, there will be no survivors that can utter the simple words: ‘I was there and I experienced this.’ The world must remember the extermination camps, not because we seek to arouse pity and compassion for ourselves—it is too late for that—the world needs to know about hunger and starvation today and about those who perished, to denounce the insanity of genocide and the ugliness of war and the banality of evil. You must speak out against prejudice, bigotry, racism, baseless hatred, because silence can kill—through the Holocaust we have seen how silence can kill millions."

And Eli was very good at telling his life story. As Natalie Page from Yad Vashem explained when Eli spoke to a crowd there about his experiences, especially about the life-changing moment when he was separated from his mother, Eli’s impact on audiences would be visible. Crowds were mesmerized by Eli’s intensely personal and animated storytelling. When Eli narrated an event happening in a place long ago and far away, he brought you to that place and time. He made you feel what he felt; he painted scenes, acted out voices, and even sang songs that would vividly bring moments to life in your head. He used his hands, eyes, and facial expressions for emphasis. You would laugh and cry with him; it was so very powerfully intimate.

When he spoke with children, he would sing lullabies his mother used to sing to him to illustrate his loving home; he would talk about playing soccer with his friends in the street, watching cowboy movies at the Kino Apollo and sleeping on a straw mattress in a warm and comfortable one-room house, and then he would gently discuss how the Nazis took everything away from him simply because he was Jewish.

With adults, Eli was more graphic. As Allyson Rockwell captured on film in her documentary, Eli, Inspiring Future Generations, Eli would transport the listener into the past. Speaking at the site of the former Plaszow Concentration Camp, where Eli, while recuperating from a near-deadly left leg abscess in the sick-house, was forced to witness daily executions of women, children, older people, even whole families like birds at a shooting range, Eli described the experience to a group:

[After pausing to collect himself.] I needed a few moments to myself in order to bring me back to this place. When I’m standing here on the hill . . . I show you an open graveyard, a mass grave, like a crater. And if I will take you down to [the bottom] I will ask you to pick up some of the soil and you can feel little pieces of bones and ashes in your fingers. So, you don’t see anything here! People don’t see anything. But when I close my eyes for a minute or two minutes, and I look around, I can see the layout of the camp! Everything. . . . Lying in the hospital, . . . the window was facing the hill. . . . Every day I could hear the staccato shooting of machine guns. . . . I could see a head, or a mother holding a baby, and then after the gunfire they disappeared [down the hill].

Detroiter Molly Chernow, also captured on film by Ms. Rockwell, said her first encounter with Eli in Poland when he led Ms. Chernow’s group through Holocaust sites, was like meeting a rock star because his story really resonated with me and inspired me. When she approached Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time, Ms. Chernow was in a full-blown panic attack. Eli walked up to her and gently said, Look at me, I’m not crying. This is a great day, I survived! As Molly explained, there was something about Eli that was unusual for someone who had been through such horrors: I would call it his zest for life.

And this optimism and happiness following a childhood characterized by extreme adversity set Eli apart from others. As Eli explained in 2008:

My wounds have healed but scars remain. I accomplished what I wanted. This year I will turn 82. I’m married happily for 59 years. I have two wonderful children, five grandchildren and one great-grandson; the second is on the way. Three generations born and raised from the ashes