The Holocaust Lady

1

The long, hushed hallways stretch before me in many directions. Slowly, carefully, I check the numbers on the classroom doors. I want room forty-one.

Through the open doors, I see young children busy at work. Free. Safe. Secure. I stop and stare silently. Lucky, lucky children. How we take freedom for granted.

Two young girls appear in the hall, chatting happily. They are about ten years old. One is blond, with long hair falling over her shoulders. The other has curly dark hair that encircles her head like a crown. They smile politely as they come closer.

Hello, girls. Can you help me, please?

Are you lost in our school? The dark-haired girl studies my face with open curiosity. What are you looking for? Her voice is soft.

Room forty-one. I smile.

Did you come to see the Holocaust Lady? There is sudden excitement in her voice.

"You mean to hear the Holocaust Lady." The other corrects her quickly.

I feel a sharp pain in my chest. My new title catches me by surprise. My voice trembles. I am ‘the Holocaust Lady’

They stare, bewildered. You are? they say together.

A picture of a bag lady I saw once at a train station flashes through my mind. I stared at her in the same way. She carried two heavy bags. Her life, her past, she carried in those bags.

I, too, carry heavy bags. Invisible bags. Bags filled with memories of horror, pain, courage, hope. My life. My past.

Each time I open my bags, the memories come to life. The people who died appear to plead, to demand, Speak for us. Children—blue-eyed, brown-eyed, dark, fair, young and innocent, much like the children before me—whisper, Tell them about us. Tell them how we lived. Tell them how we hoped. Tell them how we died.

Yes, I am the Holocaust Lady. My voice sounds strange. I am the Holocaust Lady.

I take their warm hands in mine. It feels good. Hand in hand, we walk into room forty-one.

A young woman, smiling warmly, moves quickly toward me, her hand outstretched in greeting. You must be Mrs. Sender. She holds my hand tightly. I’m Mrs. Warfield. I’m so glad you accepted the invitation to speak to us.

She turns toward the class. "Children, please say hello to Mrs. Ruth Minsky Sender, the author of The Cage and To Life."

All eyes are on me. Hello, Mrs. Sender. Welcome.

On the teacher’s desk I see copies of The Cage, my first book. It feels wonderful seeing my book in a classroom. Children and adults will read it and learn of my world, the world that was destroyed, the world we must not forget.

I hear the teacher’s soft voice. "We are all so eager to read The Cage. We would like you to autograph the books for us, Mrs. Sender."

Mrs. Warfield’s voice is music to my ears.

"I spoke to the children about you. We read together your piece in the New York Times. They are overwhelmed by your experiences, and very, very proud to meet you."

I swallow the lump in my throat as I move to the front of the classroom. My name is Ruth Minsky Sender. I am a Holocaust survivor.

The children’s eyes wander, bewildered, from my light-brown hair, falling in soft curls, to my neat blue pinstriped suit and pale blue blouse. Silently their eyes search for traces of the shaved head, the sunken cheeks, the rags, the concentration camp number. I see the puzzled look I have met many times before: She looks normal.

I do not look any different now than your mothers, grandmothers, teachers. I am a mother, grandmother, teacher, writer. Still—I swallow hard—I am very different. I am a Holocaust survivor. I move closer to the wide-eyed children before me and take a deep breath. As a Holocaust survivor I carry a heavy burden, a painful duty. The burden of remembering. The duty of passing on the agonizing memories so that the world will learn from them. It should not happen again. It cannot happen again.

Not a sound is heard. All eyes are glued to my face. My voice quivers. I am here to share the horrors of human degradation. I am here to share the acts of courage, of spiritual resistance against evil.

My voice is stronger now. No matter how hard it is, I, the survivor, make you, too, witnesses. Together we take on the painful duty of remembering, the awesome task of standing guard against indifference, against prejudice, against injustice.

I see the children’s intense stares, and pictures of cattle cars flash before my eyes. Cattle cars filled with men, women, children. Their eyes wide with horror, confusion, disbelief.

I see the terrified eyes of my younger brothers, Motele, sixteen, Moishele, thirteen, as we enter the gates of hell, Auschwitz. Their last, desperate words echo in my ears: Riva, we must live. We must survive. In the stillness of the classroom, they call to me, Remember! Remember! You survived. It is your duty to bear witness.

I raise my voice. Each Holocaust survivor, each liberator of the Nazi death camps has the duty to bear witness.

I have an overwhelming urge to take all the children here into my arms and hold them close, shield them from evil. My mind races from the past to the present, from the present to the past. I hear tormented voices. Children who never grew up cry, We want to live. We want to live.

The somber eyes of the children in the room ask silently, How could this happen? Could it happen again?

My hands tremble as I pick up from the desk a journal I carry with me. This journal, published by a hate group in America, dares to deny that millions of innocent men, women, and children were all murdered by the Nazis. I feel overwhelming outrage. "They try to tell me that the horrors I witnessed never happened. They try to tell me that my family never lived. They try to tell me that there was no Holocaust. They spread their ugly lies while there are still survivors to bear witness to the truth.

What will happen when the survivors and the liberators are gone? You, my dear children, will have to be witnesses. You will stand guard against hatred and indifference.

I stop to catch my breath. I saw how people close to me were taught to hate. I remember the smiling face of my childhood friend, blond, blue-eyed Harry.

"I was thirteen years old when the Nazis marched into Lodz, a huge industrial city in Poland. I grew up in a Jewish working-class neighborhood that later became part of the ghetto. I had two sisters and four brothers.

"My best friend, Harry, was an only child and spent most of his time at our home. His grandmother, Mrs. Gruber, and his mother, Olga, were close friends of our family. They were of German descent. We were Jews. We shared each other’s holidays. Shared joy and sorrow. They spoke Yiddish, as did all the people in that neighborhood; they knew Jewish history and Jewish customs. We were all one family.

"When the Nazis invaded Poland, they proclaimed that everyone with Jewish ancestors, even if they had converted to Christianity, was a Jew; they must wear the yellow Star of David and vacate homes outside the area designated for Jews. Everyone with German ancestors, they said, was now a Volksdeutsche, a German. Theirs was the power of life and death.

"Within three months, our best friends changed. They moved to the best section of the city of Lodz. They took whatever they wanted from their Jewish friends and neighbors.

"One day Harry came to see us, dressed in the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth, a nightstick in his hand. His big, blue eyes were strangely cold. From his mouth rushed the same hate words we heard all day long on the Nazi radio. I was horrified.

‘Harry, you were my friend, you were my brother, you grew up among Jews. How can you repeat that ugly propaganda?’

"For a moment, only a moment, he looked a little ashamed. Then a Harry I’d never known, in a voice I’d never heard, replied, ‘Germany is my fatherland. I’ll do anything for my fatherland’

I found out after liberation that Harry had been killed on a German front. I cried for him. I cried for myself.

My voice cracks. If people like Harry, Mrs. Gruber, and Olga could be brainwashed, could be taught to hate the people they knew, respected, and loved, you can imagine what hatred can do, what indifference can do. My mother, a strong believer in social justice and brotherhood, insisted, ‘A world full of people will not be silent’

I feel tears grasping my throat. The students wait in silence. "She was wrong. The world she trusted was indifferent. Silent. She perished. She was taken out of the ghetto during a Nazi raid on September 10, 1942. I never saw her again. She became a statistic.

But I held on to hope that she was alive. That hope helped me survive. Tears flow over my face. I wipe them quickly. When I returned to Lodz from the death camps, I learned that the people taken from Lodz in September 1942 were gassed in trucks in the town of Chelmno. The trucks had Red Cross symbols on them. The people entering them believed that they were going to be examined by doctors, but gas was pumped into the trucks. They all died. My mother was one of them.

I stop to compose myself. "If you happen to see the documentary Shoah, take note of the scene with the quiet, green fields in Chelmno. Numbers slide across the screen, numbers of those murdered there. When you see those numbers, remember, they were people. Think of them as people, not numbers. Think of my mother, a loving, compassionate woman who believed in a world that would not be silent."

Now I see tears in some of the children’s eyes. "In my mother’s words, ‘As long as there is life, there is hope.’

Never give up hope. We held on to hope surrounded by death. We fought moral decay by teaching values. We hid books and studied secretly. We held on to life. It took courage. It took strength.

My mother, my brothers appear before my eyes and vanish just as quickly. They died. I survived—and became the Holocaust Lady.

2

I glance at the clock. It has been over an hour since I began sharing my past with the eager listeners before me. Silently they have journeyed with me through secret study groups, hidden libraries. They have tried to imagine what it was like to feel the pain of hunger, to find the strength to make a small bread ration last for a whole week, to water down a bowl of soup so that it could be shared with three starving little brothers.

I was sixteen years old when the Nazis took my mother from us. I see the wagon, the ghetto policeman keeping Mama from jumping off. "My brother Laibele was dying