two stories from the Boston Globe
July 3, 2005,
CELEBRATING PASSAGE TO FREEDOM: SURVIVOR, LIBERATOR MEET 60 YEARS AFTER CONCENTRATION CAMP RESCUE
By Deborah Fineblum Raub, Globe Correspondent
Frederick Grasso of Framingham and Henry Lefman of Wellesley live just a few miles apart.
Over the past 50 years, they could have bumped into each other any number of times and paid no notice, neither realizing that they had crossed paths at a moment that forever changed both their lives.
On May 6, 1945, Grasso's Army unit liberated Mauthausen concentration camp, freeing Lefman from more than five nightmare years in Nazi captivity.
A month ago, when they posed for the photograph that appears above this story, they learned about their connection.
It was taken at the 60th Anniversary Liberation Banquet on June 5, when 220 men and women, some with canes and walkers the survivors and the soldiers who liberated them gathered at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Newton to remember the devastation that brought them together and celebrate the lives they've managed to build in its wake.
The organizers wanted a photograph of a soldier and a camp survivor. Grasso agreed to be in the picture, so the announcement went out over the speakers: "Any survivor here from Mauthausen?" No one answered. Then a second time and still no response.
On the third try, a woman called out: "My husband, my hus band was at Mauthausen!"
She helped her husband to his feet, and the couple made their way slowly to the front of the building, where the photographer and Grasso were waiting.
"You were at Mauthausen?" Grasso asked.
"You were one of the liberators?" Lefman asked in return.
Then the two elderly men Lefman, who was a 17-year-old "walking skeleton" on that long-ago day, and Grasso, who was a battle-hardened private fell into each others' arms and wept.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Lefman said. "Thank you for saving my life."
"People don't believe what you went through," Grasso answered him. "Even now, they still don't believe it."
But 60 years ago, Grasso was already determined that others would comprehend the horror of what he and the rest of the US Army's 11th Armored Division had seen. He still carries a worn envelope stuffed with faded black-and-white snapshots he was forbidden to take. In disobeying his superiors and using a buddy's camera to record the terrifying sights, Grasso managed to preserve a slice of history in all its chilling detail.
Grasso's story
Over the years, Grasso now 83 has shared his experience with schoolchildren and community groups, on TV and in newspapers. "People don't realize there were thousands and thousands of them lying on the ground when we got there women, guys, and kids," he said. "They were in rows as far as we could see."
At war's end, the division had weathered the Battle of the Bulge and were told they had an assignment in Austria. "We didn't know what was next," Grasso recalled. It wasn't until they arrived at Maut hausen that their officers said, "Help them. Do whatever you can do for them."
It also fell to these GIs to help bury the dead.
"My outfit had to bulldoze the bodies into the hole. It was a huge mass grave," Grasso said. "The whole bunch of us were sick to our stomachs for three days."
Grasso said the soldiers drafted residents of surrounding villages to do the hands-on work of burying the dead, forcing them to confront the grisly remains of the death factory that they had willfully ignored.
"We're the ones who opened those gates; the Germans were all gone by the time we got there," Grasso said. "We fed them our K-rations. We gave them whatever clothes we had. You wouldn't believe what those people had to do just to survive."
Three days later after transporting the weakest to hospitals and helping the more able-bodied return to what was left of their homes, their families, and their lives the Army pulled out of Mauthausen. But Grasso's memories have haunted him for six decades.
"I saw a TV show where a fellow said the whole thing was nothing but a farce, but when I called the station, they wouldn't put me through," Grasso said. "I could have told them that it was real, all right the rows of bodies, the ovens filled with bones. And the stench that was real, too."
Now retired from his sales job with Coca-Cola, Grasso continues to give talks about Mauthausen. And he brings along his pictures.
"A lot of people can't take it. They look away," he said. "They couldn't believe it then the average American didn't know about concentration camps; it was kept quiet and they don't want to believe it now. My own son couldn't believe it until I showed him the pictures."
But until last month, Grasso had never met one of the survivors he'd helped liberate. Not until he met Henry Lefman. "He's the first one I've ever met from there," he said quietly. "Was it ever good to see him."
Lefman's story
Lefman was 12 years old when the Nazis occupied his hometown of Radom, Poland, on Sept. 8, 1939. He and the town's other 30,000 Jewish citizens were crowded into ghettos, where many succumbed to starvation, epidemics, and beatings. The punishment for failing to wear the yellow Star of David was death.
In the summer of 1942, the survivors were told to report to the railway station, where 600 older people and children were shot and 6,000 others, including Lefman's mother, Sara, and his brothers, Mendel and Shlomo, were deported to Treblinka. Lefman and his father, Ignacy, were sent to Majdanek.
In the fall of 1943, the camp's captives were evacuated. As they headed to the railway station, a guard struck Lefman's ailing father across the head with the butt of his rifle for moving too slowly. That night, his father extracted a promise.
"I have to tell you something very important, and you, my son, must promise to fulfill what I am going to tell you. You must live, no matter what will happen to me. You must live to tell the world what happened. You must live to remember your family."
His father died in the night. He was 42.
Other camps followed for Lefman. Plaszow, Wieliczka, and then, with the Russians close on their heels in March 1944, the Germans transported their prisoners to Mauthausen.
"During all that time, only my promise to my father kept me going," Lefman said.
Mauthausen, he discovered, was "an extermination factory where prisoners exhausted by the forced labor from neighboring camps Gusen and Ebensee were sent to the gas chamber."
Lefman's first assignment there: hauling rocks in the stone quarry.
After a year of deprivation and back-breaking labor, Lefman began to hear bombs exploding nearby and rumors that the Allied forces were getting closer. The prisoners' meager rations were nearly gone and, one May morning, the guards didn't show up at all.
Weak and disoriented, Lefman walked through the camp's open gate.
"I have no family, no country, and no home," he recalled thinking. He cast off the uniform he'd worn for so long and wandered less than a mile before a jeep full of soldiers pulled over.
"At first I was frightened, because I didn't know what they wanted, and I was almost fainting from the hunger, but they explained they were American soldiers and had come to help me. I realized it was a godsend, a miracle. They were very kind."
The GIs drove him to an American hospital in Bavaria, where he slowly recovered his strength. He enrolled in a university in Munich, learning enough German to earn a master's degree in engineering. He came to the United States in 1950.
"Here I became a free man, free from oppression, free from being brutalized . . . but not from nightmares," he said. Lefman was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Retired from his career as a nuclear engineer, Lefman has had several strokes that severely impaired his ability to walk and speak. His wife, Tania, who spent the war years hiding with her mother in the Polish forest, serves as his interpreter. Nonetheless, he keeps his mind sharp by playing chess online and he takes joy in his three children and five grandchildren. "He's a survivor so he can survive anything," his wife said.
And he can still savor a joy that only a survivor can know.
"For anyone to meet his liberators is a great event," he said. "They were the lifesavers. There are no words for it. I'm still blessing Americans and America itself for saving my life."
Finding Lefman after 60 years also had a powerful impact on Grasso.
"I was so glad to see him," he said. "I was so glad just to see he's alive."
Deborah Fineblum Raub works for Combined Jewish Philanthropies, one of the cosponsors of the 60th Anniversary Liberation Banquet.
___________________________
The Boston Globe
July 17, 2005,
POLAND'S NEW FASCINATION WITH JEWS
BY JEFF JACOBY
IN A 1973 ESSAY, Cynthia Ozick speculated on how Jews would be remembered if, like every other nation of antiquity, they had vanished long ago. As people speak today of "the glory that was Greece," she mused, the achievements of the long-gone Jews would be celebrated as "the genius that was Israel."
"How if there were no Jews the world would be enraptured!" she wrote. "The people that stood at Sinai to receive a desert vision of purity, the people of scholarly shepherds, humane prophetic geniuses, dreams of justice and mercy" how admired they would be. In a world without Jews, the memory of Jewish civilization would be endlessly fascinating. "Christian ladies," Ozick imagined, would "study 'The Priceless Culture of the Jews' at Chautauqua in the summertime" or create Jewish prayer shawls at "a workshop on tallith making."
Well, Jews haven't vanished from the world. They have, however, all but vanished from Poland. More than 90 percent of Poland's Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and most of those who survived emigrated long ago. The result is that a land that once was home to 3 million Jews 10 percent of Polish society, the largest Jewish population in Europe is now more than 99.9 percent non-Jewish. Millions of Poles have never knowingly met a Jew. But, oh, how enraptured they are with the genius that was Israel!
I arrived in Krakow near the end of the annual Jewish Culture Festival, a nine-day extravaganza of concerts, lectures, films, and exhibitions all with the aim, to quote a festival brochure, of "presenting Jewish culture in all its abundance." An elegant catalog, 160 pages long, lists a dizzying array of offerings: lectures on "Talmudic thought" and "Jewish medical ethics," forums on European anti-Semitism and the Hebrew poetry of Haim Nahman Bialik, concerts of klezmer music, liturgical music, and "Songs of the Ghettos and Jewish Resistance," workshops on Jewish cooking, Hasidic wedding dances, and celebrating Hanukkah with children.
Such a cornucopia would be impressive in Los Angeles or New York. In Krakow, with just 200 Jews in a metropolitan population of 1.5 million, it is astounding. More or less as Ozick imagined in 1973, Jews and Jewish culture are being embraced far more ardently in their absence than was ever the case when they were such a visible presence.
I caught part of the festival's closing concert, a kind of Jewish Woodstock that grows bigger every year. In the heart of what used to be Krakow's Jewish quarter, before an outdoor stage dominated by a giant electric menorah, 10,000 exuberant Poles swayed, cheered, and sang along as dozens of Jewish artists performed. The concert lasted for seven hours and was broadcast live on TV. In a country with no more than a wisp of Jewish life, where does such an appetite for things Jewish come from?
For some Poles, interest in Jewish culture is simply fun, or a fad; several in the crowd told me they had come because the concert is such a popular scene. But others, like 26-year-old Ola, who attended with her two young daughters, were drawn by an inchoate attraction they couldn't explain.
"I can't imagine Krakow without Jewish culture," she told me. But when I gently pressed her to say what "Jewish culture" means how, for example, would she explain it to her daughters? she replied, vaguely, "It's more about feeling than knowing. 'Jewish' to me means a warm feeling."
Then there are people like Tomasz Sierkierski, a 30-year-old computer programmer who was one of a dozen Poles honored during the festival for preserving Jewish landmarks. Searching for a way to reclaim some of Poland's lost Jewish heritage, he discovered a forgotten Jewish cemetery in Skarszewy, a small town not far from Gdansk. "It was really destroyed," he said, "full of trash and weeds." He recruited a group of teens from his old high school, and they spent the summer of 2004 carrying away the rubbish, cleaning and righting the fallen gravestones, and building a stone border.
Why do Poles like Sierkierski and there are many go to so much trouble? Of all the causes to care about, why worry about Jewish memory?
"Because," he told me, "it is Polish memory too." He knows that nothing will bring back the rich Jewish culture that was so much a part of Polish life. But he wants at least to keep it from being forgotten.
When he first came to Skarszewy, he couldn't locate the cemetery. No one knew anything about it. Eventually an elderly woman pointed him in the right direction, and he found the neglected graves.
"Before this project," Sierkierski said, "no one even knew a Jewish cemetery existed. Now the whole town knows." That, it is clear, made the whole thing worthwhile.
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