RESISTANCE, RESILIENCE & HOPE: HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR STORIES

“Resistance, Resilience & Hope: Holocaust Survivor Stories,” a co-production of Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and Studio C, is a podcast series hosted by Andy Miles which tells the stories of nine Holocaust survivors in the Chicago area.

Each episode features a conversation with a survivor, each traveling back in time to tell their story as it happened in Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, England, Shanghai, Israel, and America. During the Holocaust, the survivors in the series ranged in age from toddlers to teenagers, some of them held captive in urban ghettos and remote concentration camps, others in hiding and on the run.

The mission of Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is expressed in its founding principle: Remember the Past, Transform the Future. The museum is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Holocaust by honoring the memories of those who were lost and by teaching universal lessons that combat hatred, prejudice and indifference. The museum fulfills its mission through the exhibition, preservation, and interpretation of its collections and through education programs and initiatives, like this podcast, that foster the promotion of human rights and the elimination of genocide. Visit www.ilholocaustmuseum.org.

The series was generously sponsored by Wintrust Community Banks.

EPISODES

EPISODE 9: IDA PALUCH KERSZ

On this episode, we hear the story of Ida Paluch Kersz.

Ida was born in Poland in May 1939, just months before Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. The Nazis immediately occupied the city she lived in, creating a ghetto that ultimately saw the deportation of 35,000 Jews to Auschwitz concentration camp. In the summer of 1942, with deportation imminent, her family tragically came apart, but Ida was given a new life, her Jewish identity known only to her new parents, a young Polish Christian couple anxious to start a family. Ida's twin brother was also saved, but the two would not see each other — or know the other's fate — for 50 years.

[Ida Paluch Kersz] I got this Chicago Tribune and there was this picture of this young man and I also have a picture of my grandparents, and when I looked at him and I looked at my grandfather, you know, I saw him in his face. And I said, I have to find out more about him. And the lady who interviewed him in Warsaw, I found her and I talked to her, and she said, “Ida, he does not have any memory.” I say, “Give me his phone number.” And I called Poland and one of his sons answered and I told him, “I want to speak to your father.” He said, “He’s not here.” I say, “Well, when your father comes, tell him to call me because I think he may be my twin brother.”

Ida Paluch Kersz arrived in Chicago in 1963, having spent the previous six years in Israel, where she had married and gave birth to her daughter, Esther. In Chicago she found work in a microphone factory and later owned a dry-cleaning and alteration business, eventually selling the business, divorcing her husband, and moving with her daughter to Skokie. She remarried in 1976. A few years later, Ida made a visit to the newly opened Holocaust Museum in Skokie, where she became a volunteer and speaker, contributing countless hours sharing the story of her survival with thousands of students and visitors to the museum. She currently serves on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center's Board of Directors and lives in Winnetka, Illinois. In 2019, her memoir, Unveiled Memories, was published.

We spoke over Zoom.

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EPISODE 8: BEN GOLDWATER

On this episode, we hear from Ben Goldwater.

Ben was born in December 1938, in Brussels, Belgium. He was living in Eisden, a small city in the north of Belgium, near Antwerp, when war broke out in September 1939. When the German army attacked the French and British armies though Luxembourg and Belgium, his family fled to France. The French government was not friendly to refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, so after several months, his family returned to Belgium, settling in Mons, near the French border. Ben’s family lived under constant fear of denunciation as Jews and did whatever they could to avoid the local Gestapo. Ben's father was active in the Belgian resistance and used his underground contacts to find a woman in a nearby village who was willing to provide a hiding place for Ben and his sister.

[Ben Goldwater] We got to this woman’s house — her name was Josephine — and I realized that I was going to be left there. I started to cry bitterly. That feeling of abandonment was just overwhelming. I was devastated. My father promised he would send my sister the next day, which he did. He brought my sister to stay with me the next day. And that’s when my sister and I went into hiding with this woman Josephine, who lived in her home with her daughter, Denise. Her daughter, Denise, was a teenager then. So, anyway, she took us in and set up two rickety beds in an attic, which was neither finished nor heated. And that’s the area that was given to my sister and I.

[Andy Miles] Ben Goldwater arrived in Chicago on December 18, 1949, his 11th birthday, and enrolled in the 5th grade at Mason School on the West Side of Chicago. He later attended Chicago’s Senn High School, where he graduated in 1957. When he was a senior at Northwestern in 1960, Ben met his wife, Linda. They've been married for almost 60 years and have two children and two grandchildren. Ben earned his JD degree from IIT Chicago Kent College of Law and has been practicing law, to this day, since 1964.

We spoke in the Illinois Holocaust Museum Library just before his 81st birthday — and the 70th anniversary of his arrival in Chicago.

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(Also available: a podcast extra)

EPISODE 7: ERNA BLITZER GORMAN

On this episode, we hear the incredible story of Erna Blitzer Gorman.

Erna was born in France but ended up spending almost two years of the war hiding with her family on a farm in Ukraine. In the tiny hayloft where they hid, Erna had to keep so still that she became mute and her muscles atrophied so severely that she temporarily lost the ability to walk. Just ten years old at the time she escaped this confinement, with the war still on, Erna and her family crawled in the snow near the Russian border with Katyusha rocket artillery lighting up the sky.

[Erna Blitzer Gorman] So because of those flashes in the sky and the shooting back from the other side of the road, the dirt road, there was an airplane raid and we scattered off, crawled off the road. And I was with my mom and my dad had my sister. And the airplane came; I imagine it must have been a German airplane that they must have communicated in some ways for it to be there. And they dropped a bomb. And all I could see was the blood running down her side.

Erna Blitzer Gorman has had, in her words, "a very eventful life, and a very interesting one." She came to the United States in 1953 and settled in Detroit, where she lived with her aunt and father. She initially found work in a sweatshop, where she did piecework in the manufacture of shirts, but soon left the low-paying job and found work as a salesperson at a wholesale jewelry house and, years later, sold real estate. Erna was married for 63 years, until her husband passed away about five years ago. She has two sons and three granddaughters, and in late 2019 moved to Highland Park, Illinois, to be closer to family. Erna began telling her Holocaust story in 1992 and has spoken to thousands of audiences, from Detroit's Holocaust museum to schools and churches throughout the Midwest. She has also been the keynote speaker at two university graduations and holds a pair of honorary doctorates of education. Erna is the author of the memoir While Other Children Played: A Hidden Child Remembers the Holocaust, published in 2010.

We spoke over Zoom.

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(Also available: a podcast extra)

EPISODE 6: VERA BURSTYN

On this episode, we hear from Vera Burstyn.

Vera was born in 1939 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1942, her father was taken to a forced labor camp, sent to the Russian front, and never heard from again. When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Vera’s apartment building became a so-called yellow star house, and she and her mother struggled to survive, with the city under constant assault of Nazi bombs and day-to-day living conditions extremely difficult. That fall, her mother was sent on a forced march to Austria and eventually to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Left on her own, Vera lived in a Red Cross orphanage in Budapest until an aunt with Swedish papers found her and took her in.

[Vera Burstyn] "When I got to the Red Cross shelter, just by chance of fate, my cousin Judy was also in the Red Cross shelter. Now, her parents were still in Budapest. Her mother had some Swedish papers and her father was hiding, but I think they thought that Judy was safer, you know, in the shelter than to be with them. And so we recognized each other at the shelter and we shared our, you know, blanket and we hugged and we kissed and we were together in the shelter."

Vera Burstyn arrived in Chicago on December 26th, 1956 with her mother, dad, and younger brother, having escaped from the Hungarian Revolution. She had many jobs over the years, from working on an assembly line to owning a store and later selling real estate. In 1958 Vera married and she and her husband, Hyman, have four children, six granddaughters, and six grandsons. She says, "If the Great American dream is to educate the children, have a house and a car in the garage, I have done that." Vera and Hyman have lived in Skokie since 1967.

We spoke over Zoom.

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EPISODE 5: ERNIE HEIMANN

On this episode, we hear from Ernie Heimann.

Ernie Heimann was born in 1929 in Mainz, Germany, 30 miles west of Frankfurt.  During Kristallnacht, November 9th and 10th, 1938, Ernie’s school and synagogue were destroyed. In the aftermath of these events, his parents knew that they had to get Ernie out of Germany. Days later the British Parliament passed a bill that would allow the temporary admission of 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children into the United Kingdom. His aunt was in England visiting friends at the time and she made provisions for Ernie to come to England. On his tenth birthday he learned that in one week he would leave for England to live with a family in a suburb of London.

Before Kristallnacht, Ernie had been asking for a 26-inch bike, but he says that with all the events that occurred, a 26-inch bike became “not so important,” and that nothing greater could have happened on his 10th birthday than the gift of leaving Germany. It was February 1st, 1939, exactly seven months before the start of World War II, when he departed for England on the Kindertransport.

[Ernie Heimann] I tell you, it’s kind of surreal because all of this had been pre-prepared. In other words, this wasn’t a last-minute deal; this was all planned out ahead of time. They knew that England was an island surrounded by the sea, and across the channel, Germans.

In 1943 Ernie Heimann came to Chicago where he would eventually enroll at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  He was drafted into the 101st Airborne, serving out the Korean War at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis.  Ernie made a career as a material manager in the furniture industry, and between he and his second wife, Roslyne, has four children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. 

We spoke at his home.

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EPISODE 4: ESTELLE GLASER LAUGHLIN

On this episode, we hear from Estelle Glaser Laughlin.

Estelle was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. When she was 10 years old, her family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. The family hid in a secret room to avoid deportation during liquidations in 1942. Estelle’s father built a bunker in which the family hid during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. The bunker was eventually exposed by a bomb, and the family was sent to Majdanek Extermination Camp, when Estelle was 13 years old.

[Estelle Glaser Laughlin] We were with a group of women, and a group of men were sitting opposite us. And my father had TB at that point, and he was running a very high fever. His eyes were so filled with pain. I was so used to looking into his eyes for comfort and reassurance. There was such pleading in his eyes. So at some point, when the guards passed and were on the other end, I shoved myself through the first row and I dashed across. And my father wiggled his way to be close, and I ran across to him and kneeled down in front of him. And I said, “Dad, don’t worry, Tata. They won’t get me.”

Estelle Glaser Laughlin arrived in America with her sister and mother in 1947. With only three years of public schooling and brief underground tutoring in the ghetto, she entered college and earned a master's degree in education and taught in Montgomery County, Maryland. After retiring, Estelle found a new passion in writing prose. Her memoir, Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey Out of the Holocaust, published by Texas Tech University Press in 2012, was named a finalist for the 2012 ForeWord Review Book of the Year Awards. Her new novel, Hanna, I Forgot To Tell You, also published by Texas Tech University Press, was released last year. She’s currently writing another novel. Estelle has three high-achieving sons, seven grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. Of course, they’re all wonderful, she says.

We spoke in late 2019 in her living room.

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EPISODE 3: judy kolb

On this episode, we hear from Judy Kolb.

Judy's maternal grandparents owned a fabric and dressmaking shop in Swinemünde, Germany, a fashionable spa town on the Baltic Sea. Their daughter, Carla, met a cantor named Leopold Fleischer in January 1937 when he moved to Swinemünde and rented a room in the same building. Carla and Leopold fell in love and married in the spring of 1939. By that time, the Nazis had begun encouraging Jews to emigrate from Germany, and when Judy’s grandfather, Julius, was arrested and imprisoned for six weeks in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, his wife, Martha, insisted that the family leave Germany as soon as possible. She set her sights on Japanese-occupied Shanghai, an open port city which refugees did not need a visa to enter. To be able to afford passage there, Martha sold her house, clothing store, and some furnishings to a wealthy, non-Jewish neighbor. She bought tickets for the entire family on the German Lloyd Line. After obtaining exit papers to leave Germany, Martha presented the passenger tickets to the Gestapo at Sachsenhausen. Soon after, Julius was released from the camp.

In June of 1939, Julius, Martha, Leopold, Carla, and her brother Heinz embarked for Shanghai. The journey took four weeks.

In Shanghai they were immediately taken to a Heime, German for “home.” Many Heimes were converted barracks crammed with narrow bunk beds, sleeping anywhere from six to 150 people a room. Soon, the whole family moved into an apartment in a small area called Hongkew. On March 6th, 1940, Carla gave birth to her daughter, Judith “Daisy” Fleischer.

Then, on December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor happened. The Japanese were at war with the United States and formed the Axis alliance with fascist Italy and Germany.

[Judy Kolb] So the following spring, in 1942, Colonel Meisinger came to Shanghai. He was called the Butcher of Warsaw. So he came to Shanghai and tried to convince the Japanese to somehow dispose of all the Jews living in Shanghai. Rumors were that they were going to put everybody on ships, send them out to sea without water, food, or whatever. There was even talk about crematorium being set up. Certainly they wanted to get rid of us. But what happened — the Japanese would not go along with the plan. So one of my saviors are really the Japanese.

Judy Kolb arrived in San Francisco in January 1948, nearly 8 years old. Soon after, her grandparents, parents, uncle, new aunt, and her aunt's parents bought a home not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1955, her father accepted a position in Chicago as cantor at a synagogue founded by German-Jewish immigrants who fled Nazi persecution. Upon graduating from Hyde Park High, Judy says she had "no inspiring ideas of what to do." A friend was taking the entrance exam at South Chicago Community Hospital School of Nursing and suggested Judy come along. She did and ended up taking and passing the entrance exam herself, and entered the three-year R.N. program at the school. After graduating in 1961 and passing board exams, Judy started working in pediatrics at the University of Chicago hospital. Two years later, she married Louis Kolb, a resident in orthopedic surgery. Their first child, Jeffrey, was born in 1966. They had two more children and she remained home, doing volunteer in the schools and the community, later working in her husband's office. In 2001, Louis died, and in 2003, Judy returned to working part time in a pediatric office, retiring in 2015. She started volunteering at Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center when it opened in 2009.

We spoke over Zoom.

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EPISODE 2: ERNEST FRUEHAUF

On this episode, we hear from Ernest Fruehauf.

Ernest was born in 1929 in Kitzingen, Germany, where his family owned a successful café located below their second-floor apartment. As a young child, Ernest experienced the rising tide of hate and antisemitism in Germany. On November 10th, 1938, during the events of Kristallnacht, an angry mob ransacked the café. His father was arrested and imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp, and his family was forced from their home to live in a community building, or Juden Haus. Ernest's father knew his family was in danger. Following thousands of Jews, he arranged to flee Germany in 1941. Although arranging refuge in the United States was difficult, his father remained undaunted and, sponsored by a relative here, the Fruehaufs got out of Germany just in time.

[Ernest Fruehauf] "We were lucky. Exactly in May of 1941, two weeks before Roosevelt closed the consulates in Germany altogether, we got our visas in the city of Stuttgart. We were lucky. And I thought, if it had been two weeks later, we wouldn't have gotten a visa anymore."

In 1941, 12-year-old Ernest Fruehauf arrived with his family in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where his mother's sister and family lived. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin School of Engineering and got a job with the Amoco Oil Corporation, now BP, retiring in 1989. He and his wife of 67 years, Ursula, live in Deerfield, Illinois, and have three daughters, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

We spoke over Zoom.

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EPISODE 1: RUTH GILBERT

On this episode we hear from Ruth Gilbert.

Ruth was born in 1938 in Łódź, Poland. Upon Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939, Ruth and her family were forced into the Łódź Ghetto. Ruth’s father recognized how difficult things would continue to be and, with savings he had secreted into the ghetto, went to the black market and purchased fake IDs for Ruth and her mother. In 1941, he bribed a guard to let them sneak out of the ghetto under the barbed wire. His plan was to make his way to Russia and join the Russian army, while Ruth and her mother would hide with a family in Lublin, Poland, for the duration of the war. But after a short time, the Polish family was evacuated, leaving Ruth and her mother homeless.

[Ruth Gilbert] So there we were. And since my mother didn't know what to do, she got on a train. She bought tickets and we were riding the trains like the hobos do. And it was very difficult. We didn't have any means of bathing, and we had lice. The only food we had was what she could buy from vendors, farmers at the different stations. And we would eat raw eggs. And worst of all, Nazi officers would come on the train looking for Jews. And if they found a Jew, which they did frequently, they'd drag them off the train and shoot them.

Ruth Gilbert came to the United States in late 1949 with her mom and stepfather, first settling in Patterson, New Jersey, and later coming to Chicago, where her aunt lived. Ruth met a young man in high school, and as soon as she graduated college as a teacher, they got married. She taught middle grades in a Chicago public school and was able to help her husband through medical school. As soon as they were financially able, they moved to the suburbs with their two little boys. Ruth became a stay-at-home-mom, busy with parenting and active in the boys' school and their synagogue. "Life was good," she says," but "unfortunately it did not last." Her husband was diagnosed with leukemia and died at the age of 49. Ruth was 47 and her boys were college age. After her grief subsided, she made the decision to move to Evanston and got a job in a local synagogue office where she worked until her retirement. She met a very nice man and they spent 30 wonderful years together. He died two years ago at the age of 87. Ruth's boys are both married now and she is the proud grandma of many beautiful grandchildren.

We spoke over Zoom.

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SERIES CREDITS

Thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for their song “An Oddly Formal Dance” and April Faith-Slaker for “Sojourn.”

Thanks as well to executive producers Marcy Larson and Amanda Friedeman for their assistance and guidance in bringing this podcast to fruition.