Courtesy of Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center

Elizabeth K. Rome, a board member of the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, helped organize the new stories added to the center’s permanent exhibit, “A Living Memorial: Holocaust Survivor Families.”

By ANNE-GERARD FLYNN
aflynn@repub.com

The new stories and photographs recently added to the permanent panels at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield, broaden the vignettes of the Jewish people with ties to this area who were exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.

However, the fact the panels are part of the “A Living Memorial” exhibit in which the stories are told in honest and intimate detail by the survivors or their descendants allows something remarkable to happen.

The viewer easily forms a connection both with those who were murdered as well as those who lived and who, by finding the courage to go on despite the horror inflicted on themselves and their families, managed to trump the brutality of bigotry and hatred.

These survivors include 88-year-old former businessman Thomas Marc Futter of Northampton, who endured days of severe physical torture after being arrested by Nazi Germany’s Gestapo police in Norway in 1941; 88-year-old German-born; and 81-year German-born Walter Lachman, who nearly died of starvation and disease after being interned at Bergen-Belsen.

Lachman retired in 1996 as the owner of Blake’s at the X in Springfield, and moved to California.

There is also Sigmund Tobias, today a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, but who during World War II was interned with his family by the Japanese in Shanghai, China, where they had fled from Nazi Germany as a condition of his father’s release from the Dachu death camp.

Polish-born Rouzka (Rosa) Wintraub-Schaumberg and her German-born husband, Julius Schaumberg, who lived for a time in Springfield in the late 1940s, both recount their experiences.

Schaumberg, whose parents, sister and brother were annihilated in the Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp, was interned at 17 in a work camp for Jewish children and later at Buna, which was the third camp established by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

Wintraub-Schaumberg, who watched Nazi soldiers lead her 42-year-old mother to the crematorium at Auschwitz, tells in her panel of the Germans occupying her native city of Lodz.

It reads in part, “I lived in the ghetto from 1939 to 1944. When the Nazis first came to the ghetto, to make us listen, they hanged 12 innocent people and forced everyone to watch. I was afraid all of the time.”

Elizabeth K. Rome is a Hatikvah board member who helped organize the expanded exhibit for which there will be a dessert reception on Wednesday from 7 to 8 p.m. It was her parents who sponsored the Schaumbergs, relatives on her father’s side, to come to Springfield.

Rome says “everyone is welcome” at the reception and sees it as “an opportunity to learn about history firsthand.”

“By writing the stories of eye witnesses we keep their memories alive,” Rome said. “We hope that this additions will be just the beginning of more stories. We hope to add others next year at this time. And we want to include stories of rescuers, liberators, partisans and non-Jewish victims.”

Rome said the new material was added in observance of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the permanent exhibit, which, besides “A Living Memorial,” includes the set of panels entitled “A Reason to Remember” about what happened between 1933 and 1942 to five Jewish families in Roth, Germany.

“The stories help us understand what life was like before the Holocaust because it is only through understanding what there was before that we can try to comprehend the magnitude of its destruction, and the courage and determination that it took to begin life again after the war,” Rome said.

The fact that “A Living Memorial” is a permanent but not complete exhibit is allowing children of survivors to further connect through research the pieces of their ancestry and discover relatives once only shadows to them.

Springfield resident Lawrence E. Smolarz expanded his family’s entry. His paternal grandfather, Meyer, a roofer and sheet metal worker changed his family name from Lefkovich to “Smolarz,” which means “one who deals in coal tar pitch,” to avoid anti-Semitic persecution in Poland. It was little protection in the Nazi-occupied country.

Meyer’s two siblings, their spouses and three children were all murdered in concentration camps. Meyer died of typhus in a camp outside Krakow; his wife, Rosalie, was murdered at Majdanek and her four siblings, their spouses and five children were murdered at Auschwitz.

Of the seven children born to Meyer and Rosalie, four of them, along with their spouses and two grandchildren, were all murdered either in concentration camps or the “cleansing” of the Krakow ghetto.

The three surviving siblings included Solomon and Eddie and Smolarz’s father, Leon, who married Regina Dawidowicz, and came to this area and had three children with her. Smolarz’s recounts in the exhibit how his aunt at great personal sacrificed saved his mother’s life in a concentration camp.

“I want my children to know their children their heritage. I never had that extended family,” Smolarz said. He added that he found both in his family and others “ultimately triumph and hope, as many of the stories end by talking about the birth of the next generation.”

Other children of survivors who share their families stories include former Springfield resident Michael D. Bart (see accompanying story) and Pearl-Anne Margalit, associate executive director of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts. Margalit and her sister, Shirley Avin, are the daughters of Polish-born Meilach (Misha) Rotholz and Lithuania-born Brina (Bronia) Kur Rotholz. Their father’s seven siblings died in Majdanek; their mother witnessed both the Soviet and then the German invasion of Lithuania before fleeing to an area of Uzbekestan near the Iranian border. Many Jewish refugees found themselves victims yet again of bigotry and brutality in trying to return to their home countries. The Rotholz immigrated to South Africa and then eventually to the United States.

For more information on the exhibit or to contribute a firsthand story, call Rome at the Hatikvah center at (413) 734-7700 or visit the Web site, www.hatikvah-center.org and click on “In Their Own Words.”

IF YOU GO
Event: Dessert reception for additional stories of survival added to “A Living Memorial” permanent exhibit
When: Oct. 21, 7 to 8 p.m.
Where: Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, 1160 Dickinson St., Springfield
Cost: Free
For more info: Call (413) 734-7700