Whoops, author forgets to mention other Holocaust victims:
Who is to be remembered and who is to be pushed aside?
The story must be told: Holocaust Remembrance Day
oregonlive.com
"Rose Hassin is reluctant to dwell on the sorrows of a childhood interrupted -- but, like other survivors, her journey to hope is a powerful witness
04/18/04
GABRIELLE GLASER
On a hot July day in 1939, Rose Winternitz and her sister Emma boarded a train in Vienna, leaving behind everything they knew and loved. The Nazis had invaded Austria a year earlier, and their father was imprisoned at Dachau.
The girls, 13 and identical twins, waved goodbye to their mother as she stood behind a rope at the train station. They never saw her again.
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That afternoon, the sisters set out on one of the last trains known as the Kindertransport, a nine-month operation that sent some 10,000 Jewish children from their Central European homelands to relative safety in England.
By now, Rose fears, her story of surviving the Holocaust is a familiar one. It is one people have heard, in books and movies. Indeed, after the commercial and critical success of "Schindler's List" in 1993, so many thousands of survivors approached Steven Spielberg with their stories that he set up an organization, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, to record their stories. But many more, like Rose, 79 and a Portland resident for 10 years, prefer not to dwell on a history that is beyond comprehension.
In fact, during the course of an interview, she tried to dispel the notion that hers is a story worth hearing. "Why do you want to write about this? There are so many people like me. Why is this story important?"
The words of Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born writer and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Peace Prize, served as a gentle prompt: ". . . If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices," he has said. "As poorly as we can express our feelings, our memories, . . . we must try. We are not guaranteeing success, but we must guarantee effort."
And as war and terrorism churn the globe, stories like Rose's give today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a special significance.
Rose was a child of privilege, the daughter of a prosperous furniture maker. She wore tailored clothes, had handmade shoes. She spent summers in the countryside, where she and her two sisters (an older sister, Herta, moved to England before the war; it was she who alerted the family to the Kindertransport) splashed in creeks and hiked in the mountains.
But it all came to an abrupt end in 1938. On Nov. 9, Kristallnacht, "the night of broken glass," mobs ravaged Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes throughout Germany and Austria. Jewish bank accounts were soon frozen, and on a cold night weeks later, the Nazis took Rose's father, Julius Winternitz, away. Rose, terrified, recalls running down the street with his fur-lined coat. "Papa, Papa," she cried as he stepped into the back of a wagon. "Your overcoat!"
"Where he's going," a guard snapped, "he won't need that."
Overnight, idyll gave way to anxiety. Rich meals of roast veal and Sacher tortes gave way to what the Jewish agencies were able to give out, cans of white beans.
In London, the British Jewish Refugee Committee pressured the House of Commons to admit an unspecified number of Jewish children between the ages of 5 and 17. When they arrived, they went to foster homes, group homes and worked on farms throughout Great Britain.
Rose and Emma first stayed with two elderly sisters in the countryside, where they had their first taste of watercress and cucumber sandwiches. "So soggy!" says Rose, a gourmet cook.
Eventually, they were resettled at a London orphanage. Like many Viennese Jews, the Winternitzes were not religious, so the twins were at first bewildered by the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and other holidays. "When the other girls would say the blessings, we had no idea what was going on," she recalls.
When they turned 16, the girls were expected to fend for themselves. They moved into a furnished room and found work at a factory, where they quickly learned to sew -- in this case, heavy coats for RAF pilots.
Between them, they shared one pair of boots and one pair of shoes. Emma wore the boots one day; Rose, the next. Twice, the apartment buildings where they lived were bombed in the blitz of London. "We had already lost everything," she says. "So we just got another" place.
Occasionally, they saw Herta, their older sister. And, of course, they wondered about their parents.
Their mother, Frieda, had been deported to Poland. Where, no one ever found out.
But Julius, with the aid of a friend, miraculously escaped the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. He went home to Vienna, grabbed his skis and headed over the Alps. He eventually made his way to Brussels, where he was hidden by a Catholic cabinetmaker. He worked as a carpenter during a two-year stay.
After the war, Rose joined the British Overseas Airways Corp. as a stewardess, working routes to the Middle East.
When war broke out in Israel in 1948, she learned Hebrew and joined the Israeli Air Force, where she worked to encipher language into Morse code.
She bats away commentary about her exploits as if she is swatting away a fly. "What else was I to do?" she asks.
In 1952, a cousin somehow found Julius, who had returned to Vienna and had not known the fate of his daughters. When Rose got word, she flew to see him. She was 28. "When he left, I was 13 -- just a girl with socks to my knees. It was like meeting a completely different person, for both of us."
Indeed. Before the war, Julius had been a cheerful extrovert who delighted in making the family laugh. But when he saw Rose, he completely shut down, locking himself in a room for two days. "He simply did not want to discuss anything that had happened," she says. "His thoughts were his own."
But Rose counted her blessings. "Are you kidding?" she asks. "I couldn't believe my luck."
Her mother, cousins, aunts and uncles had perished, but her father and sisters had survived. And there was another bright spot on the horizon: Sam Hassin, an Israeli-born jeweler who had settled in Tennessee. Two decades her senior, he was handsome -- and offered a stability Rose had not known since her childhood. They married in Jerusalem, and she moved to Chattanooga.
The couple joined a synagogue, which embraced Rose -- a replacement family, in a way. In 1956, she gave birth to David, her only child. "My God, I was so happy," she says. From time to time, Julius would visit, and Rose would drive on Route 66 to Los Angeles -- Emma had settled there with her husband. "Adventure!" she says brightly.
Occasionally, her father would tiptoe toward tragedy. "If something ever happened to one of you," he told her, "I just couldn't take it."
"But Papa, one of us could get hit by a car, or become ill," she told him.
"Then I don't want to hear it," he said. She puts her hands to her ears, mimicking her father.
When it came time for Sam to retire, Rose persuaded him to resettle in Los Angeles, so she could be near Emma, or Amy, as she was called. They had some wonderful years, going deep-sea fishing, shopping, cooking together.
But in 1971, Amy was diagnosed with lymphoma; she died five years later.
Remembering her father's admonition, Rose did not let on. For years, she wrote letters simulating Amy's handwriting. When she called her father, she pretended the two of them were together.
"Papa, here's Amy, she's right here," she would say, masquerading as her dead sister. When she visited him in Vienna, she would bring Amy's regards. She told him that Amy couldn't make the trip because of a bad back.
Once, Julius even gave Rose a diamond to give to her sister. Those who had lost fortunes in the war knew the meaning of portable wealth, and Julius bought a diamond for each of his daughters. "Here," he told Rose, "give this to Amy."
Rose believes her deception saved her father's life. "The truth would have killed him," she says.
It was Sam who became ill next, dying of Parkinson's disease in 1978. Sister Herta died in 1987; shortly after hearing the news, Julius had a stroke and died. He was 96.
"In my heart," Rose says, "I know I did the right thing. I knew I couldn't break his heart more."
She learned to protect herself from more anguish, too.
After he died, Julius' second wife gave Rose a packet of letters he had written to her mother from Dachau. She took one from the pile, but put it back down. "I just couldn't bring myself to read them," she says.
Once widowed, Rose felt at loose ends at her home in Beverly Hills. She applied for, and got, a job selling jewelry at Bonwit Teller. Occasionally, she would buy designer clothes with her employee discount. Both her background as a child, and her experiences as a seamstress, left an indelible respect for finely made things, from Chanel suits to Pucci dresses. "Pucci!" she says. "Now that's fun."
As much as Rose has endured, so too has she pursued joy. Not surprisingly, she finds it most by spending time with her family. David is founder of the Portland building firm Terrafirma Building; his wife, Mary McDonald-Lewis, is a voice actor. They have a daughter, Madeline, 13, on whom Rose dotes.
David, Mary and Maddy moved to Portland in 1993; Rose soon followed. Immediately, she joined a quilting group in Lake Oswego, and once a month she goes to the Mittleman Jewish Community Center for a meeting of local Holocaust survivors called Cafe Europa. She goes camping with David and Maddy. She hikes. She knits. She travels to see friends, and her only complaint about aging is her diminishing ability to see at night.
Since 1983, she has fought cancer three times. "Ach," she says of the disease. "Maybe someday it will kill me, but not yet. I want to stick around, for the kids."
For David Hassin, the devotion is mutual. "Here was this woman who came from a different world, and there she was, raising a teenager in L.A. She used to say it was my dad who was in control, the man. But I don't believe it. I really think that she was the one who had the strength."
Being the daughter-in-law of a strong woman might impose some difficulties. But McDonald-Lewis, who wears the diamond intended for Amy in her wedding ring, stands back in admiration.
Rose, like any Holocaust survivor, had a choice, McDonald-Lewis says. "To succumb to what was given her, or to overcome what was given her. She has clearly not only overcome, but triumphed."
"What makes a saint?" she asks. "Is it the ability to see the best in everyone? Is it a refusal to lower oneself to murderous hatred that oneself has encountered? Is it humility? Good works? If that's the case, then Rose is an everyday saint."
Maddy, a seventh-grader at Oregon Episcopal School, is now the same age as her grandmother was when she boarded the Kindertransport train. She understands the stark contrast her safe existence has to her grandmother's life -- and the responsibilities her family history entails (on her mother's side, she is related to Meriwether Lewis, so hers is a remarkable gene pool). "My grandmother has so many stories," she says, polishing off an after-school fried egg sandwich Rose has made. "They're a big part of her life, so they're a big part of mine."
"Because of what happened, I don't have a lot of family on my dad's side. My dad and I -- we're her family now. And for me, my grandma is a lot of relatives, wrapped into one."
Still, Rose insists she is not special. "I get out of bed in the morning like everyone else. I don't always want to -- I like to sleep late. But I tell myself, 'Rose, you're going to be dead an awfully long time. Get up and see the day." |
