Stories of Survival

Others may only have the chance to hear their stories through books or film, but during one evening at East Brunswick High School’s auditorium, guests and students were offered the rare opportunity to hear the incredible stories of survival from the Holocaust survivors themselves. 

Co-hosted by East Brunswick High School’s Robert Gangi, teacher of  “Genocide in the Modern World” and Sara Wilder, advisor to the German Honor Society, Thursday, April 28’s Holocaust Remembrance Day featured presentations from survivors Ruth Millman and Ruth Gottlieb.

As Gangi tells his students, he can teach them the history and the stories and he can show them the photographs, but they will never understand the Holocaust’s impact unless they hear from those who actually experienced it. 

“We don’t want history to become some cold historical analysis where people are translated into statistics,” Gangi said. “We want to translate those statistics into real people.”

Wilder said the idea to host a Holocaust Remembrance Day was spearheaded by Michael Abrams, who was the German Honor Society’s president last year and is now a senior.

“I feel privileged (to hear the speakers) because I am a teacher and how often do you get to bring the real history into the classroom?” Wilder said.

Millman, who was the evening’s first speaker, took guests on a journey that began in her hometown of Warsaw, Poland. It was while she was at home in 1939 that her family witnessed German dictator Adolf Hitler march down Warsaw’s main boulevard the day of his invasion of Poland.

They were arrested about three weeks later and were taken to the Warsaw ghetto.

“We later heard that my maternal grandparents were being taken to a better and bigger place where they would have more room and more food,” Millman said. “We were able to say goodbye but we later found out that they were taken to Auschwitz. We never heard from them again.”

When her father found out the ghetto was going to be bombed he was able to bribe three Nazi officers with jewelry to take them out. Her family was separated and placed in different living conditions to increase the likelihood of survival.

Millman’s sister was sent to a convent to become a nun and her father was put into a Catholic family’s basement where he spent the duration of the war.

Millman’s mother made arrangements with a Catholic man to live as a married couple for three months. Millman, who stayed with her mother, was told that she was not Jewish although she says at the time she was too little to remember that she ever was.

“We were so frightened because some of the families and neighbors we knew were giving up the Jews,” she said. “After the three months were over my mom and I were on our own, she didn’t have a job and we didn’t know where my father was.”

For a time Millman and her mother were homeless, sleeping in train and bus stations and stealing food from grocery stores, until they were arrested by the Germans and taken to the Linz labor camp in Linz am Rhein, Germany.

Millman and her mother escaped while the Americans and the English bombed the labor camp and traveled for days on a train until they reached Riccione, Italy, where they were taken in by partisans living in the mountains.

“For the first time since we left the ghetto we felt safe,” Millman said. “We stayed until we heard the most wonderful sound of American troops liberating us in the streets of Italy. They said, ‘you’re free, you’re free you can now go home – the war is over.”  

It was through the American Red Cross that Millman and her mother were able to locate where their family was. The Red Cross listed her father and sister as survivors.

“The Red Cross took us to where they lived and you can imagine this fabulous reunion,” she said. “We hadn't seen them for so many years.”

In 1950, with the help of a family friend and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), they were able to make a life for themselves in the United States, living first in New York City, and then moving to Asbury Park.

Millman, who has been speaking to schools about her experience for 25 years, remembers a time when one child asked her, “Did you ever think to yourself, ‘Where is God?’

“Never mind ‘where is God’, ‘where was man?’ ” Millman said. “Out of this very large, beautiful extended Jewish family, (my mother, father, sister and two cousins) are all that was left.”

Ruth Gottlieb began her story with a college application essay written by her granddaughter titled “Affliction Provides Strength.”

“For most people the Holocaust is just another page in a textbook or another topic to study for a history quiz,” Gottlieb said as she read from the essay. “For me, the Holocaust is part of my heritage…(my grandmother) witnessed sights that no human deserved to see and 70 years later she lives to tell her story.”

Born in 1935 in Lahnstein, Germany, Gottlieb’s family and business suffered as a result of the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of their citizenship and isolated them. As life in Germany became more difficult, through the encouragement of friends and family Gottlieb’s father made arrangements to leave for the United States.

However, there was only enough money to pay for her father’s passage.

Surviving through a ransacking of their apartment by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, the first organized pogrom against German Jews by the Nazis, Gottlieb found a letter her mother had written her father begging him for money and documentation to make arrangements for their passage.

By the end of February 1939, her father sent money and documentation and Gottlieb and her mother left Germany on March 23, 1939.

The clothes that she wore during her trip, as well as a scrapbook containing letters from family members who later died in Auschwitz, were displayed during the event.

Both Gottlieb and Millman credit their mothers for their strength and motivation to survive.  

“I have letters that I read constantly that (my mother) wrote to my father when he was already in the United States and that really gives me courage,” Gottlieb said. “If she has the courage to survive and make a life for herself and for me then I feel like I don't have any excuse not to live a good life and be thankful to be alive.”

East Brunswick High School sophomores Tiffany Wang, Julia Wescot and Sofia Khorosh said they all feel lucky to have been able to hear the survivors’ accounts.

“It's really moving for them to come up and be so strong,” Wescot said

Gangi said the Holocaust Remembrance Day is something that they believe they will do every year.

“The Holocaust is so overwhelmingly negative that there is no value from it or lessons to be learned, as if there was a price to be paid but we learned something,” he said. “But it does need to be something that’s remembered.”