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“I think the experience of children during the Holocaust was much more severe than adults,” a survivor, far removed from youth, recently said. “You always think back to your childhood.”
More than 60 years after the concentration camps across Europe were liberated and many of the Nazi perpetrators tried and convicted at Nuremberg, those who survived the Holocaust are all senior citizens reliving childhoods that ended too soon. For many, their earliest memories are of escape, incarceration, fear and death.
“I never spoke to my children about it,” said 89-year-old Werner Kleeman, whose Flushing home is now blanketed in remembrances of the war years - photographs, file folders, old letters, thank you notes - after a recent spate of speaking engagements following the release of his memoir.
“We shut up,” said Kleeman who spent time in Dachau before joining the U.S. Army in Europe. “We wanted to forget.”
85-year-old Jane Keibel, on the other hand, has always tried hard to remember.
“When we came here nothing ever was discussed about what happened in Germany, what happened to us,” said Keibel, a Kew Gardens resident who arrived in the U.S. in 1940 with her parents and sister.
“So many times I wish I could ask them what did they think of having a whole family leave, and what were they going to do?” she said in awe of her parents.
Little incidences come up such as a question over the name of a town or a street or a person’s name, and Keibel doesn’t have the answers.
“But you can’t go back to that, my parents aren’t alive anymore,” she said.
Hannah Deutch was 15 when she escaped from Germany to England on the Kindertransport. Now, 70 years later, speaking about the war has become easier for the Jackson Heights resident.
“It’s come to the point - the first time I spoke I needed three weeks to kind of remember and try and bring it out,” Deutch said of her painful war memories. “But now, now that you keep on taking it out and putting it back it doesn’t hurt that much anymore for the simple reason: I’m 85 now and all my people wouldn’t have been alive anyways,” said the self-proclaimed fatalist.
Ruth Turek, a survivor who lives in Little Neck, doesn’t see things quite the same way. Turek, born in 1927, lost her entire family in the Holocaust and was unable to speak about her experiences until 20 years after the war.
The absence of relatives has always stung, especially during the holidays, Turek explained.
At a young age one of Turek’s daughters came home after meeting a friend’s grandmother, begging for a grandma of her own.
“Please, please, please can you get me a grandma too because I’m a good little girl,” Turek recalled her daughter saying.
Turek was crushed then, and still reels from her past, but she is nevertheless “able to enjoy every bit of the good things” in her life.
“It may be difficult to listen to the story,” said Turek, who is now open to discussing her experiences. “But it is excruciating for us to tell the story.”
While Turek initially felt as though she had been punished, questioning why she lived and her family did not, Flushing resident Minia Moszenberg believes her survival was meant to be.
“Something guided me, something protected me,” said Moszenberg, a Flushing resident who lived through four concentration camps.
“I promised my family, I promised my aunt” that I would live, said Moszenberg, who recently turned 82.
“My aunt was always convinced that I would survive.”
Surrounded with death in the ghettos and concentration camps, Moszenberg accepted the fragility of life in Nazi Europe. She lost all hope and desire to survive. But afterward, Moszenberg became a different person. She had promises to keep.
“In the war I didn’t give a damn if they killed me,” she said, shaking her head. However, like so many survivors who lived through the atrocities of one of history’s darkest eras, Moszenberg somehow pushed on.
“Here, I wanted to build a new life,” she said, nodding slowly, proudly, her chin held high.
