At an intimate gathering in Sandy Springs, second and third generation Holocaust survivors reflected on the grueling history of the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond.
Moderated by Cherie Aviv, dedicated Holocaust volunteer and chair of the Holocaust Survivor Support Fund, the March 12 panel featured child survivor Barry Seidel, second generation survivor Sue Weingarten Levy, and her son Ben Levy, who spoke about Sue’s parents Izak and Helen Weingarten.
Today, there are about 245,000 remaining Holocaust survivors, and 49 percent live in Israel. The median age of existing survivors is 86, meaning they were very young at the time of liberation in 1945.
Born in Antwerp in 1936, Seidel was four years old when his family moved to Nice, France, to distance themselves from the impending war. Despite the family using false identities, his older brother Simon was discovered and sent to a children’s camp in Switzerland. His father, Max Seidel, was arrested and taken to Drancy, a detention camp near Paris. Max was ultimately murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“I’d never want to go to Auschwitz,” Seidel said, referring to his granddaughter’s school trip to the concentration camp. “I know what happened there.”
Seidel and his mother Bertha ultimately survived by hiding in plain sight, becoming a part of the Catholic community in central France. They lived separately, but met up weekly where Bertha reminded Barry – who was serving as an altar boy at a Catholic Church – that he was still Jewish.
“Do what you need to do, this will all change one day,” Bertha said she would tell him. “You are Jewish, and you will be Jewish when this is all over.”
When it was all over, Barry and his mother, reunited with his brother in New York.
Levy’s incredible story of survival is also linked to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest extermination center of the Holocaust. Her mother, one of nine children, survived the concentration camp with her three sisters and brother.
“They saved each other,” Levy said. “When one of them got sick and couldn’t stand up … the other sister held them up so that they wouldn’t be taken.”
Her father, Izak Weingarten, was the only one of his four surviving siblings who came to the United States, getting a job at his uncle’s lumber and shipbuilding business. The family flourished in the U.S., making a home in Lorraine, OH, and Levy grew up with 17 cousins.
Shattered by pogroms, round ups, deportations, escapes, and murder, survivor families said they felt the need to move on post-World War II, but now feel the responsibility to recount history.
“The goal was to acclimate, to integrate, to make a new life for ourselves,” said Seidel. “We didn’t think about our past history, so I wasn’t as involved. I mean, I was a kid. My first my first goal was to learn the language, and go to school and get educated.”
Seidel said in New Jersey and New York there were thousands of immigrants, and they all had a story to tell.
“In those days, the word ‘survivor’ was not that was not as prevalent as it is these days. And to my youthful thinking, a survivor was one who survived the camps. I was never in a camp. My father was not a survivor. He was a victim of the camps. So I didn’t feel that connected or like I needed to tell my story, because there were lots of other people who had more bitter stories than mine,” Seidel said.
Aviv said the most meaningful work she does is to facilitate the retelling of stories. She interviews child survivors for the Last Chance program at USC Shoah Foundation, including Jews who fled Iraq and Greece.
The panel discussion was facilitated by the work of 3GAT and is led by Emily Yehezkel, the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Yehezkel delivers speeches to school-aged children about finding her own voice through the retelling of her grandfather’s story. 3GATL collaborates with Jewish organizations to brings together descendants of Holocaust survivors.
