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Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greater New Haven

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Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greater New Haven 92 $ Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Greater New Haven By Martin Ira Glassner and Renee Glassner Background The Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut (HCSC) was founded only a few months after the first international conference of child survi¬ vors was held in New York in 1991. Since then it has been a vital support group. Although the wounds can never be completely healed, members of the group help one another to come to terms with their past. In addition, the group has mounted a number of outreach activities in the field of Holocaust education. Activities include an active Speakers Bureau, which matches survivors with churches, schools, civic groups, and others; a book called Childhood Memories: Jewish Children Who Survived the Nazi Peril Speak, designed for and widely used in secondary schools; an award-winning video docu¬ mentary, One Out of Ten, now also in DVD format; an essay contest for sec¬ ondary school students; and a full-length book on the impact of the Holo¬ caust on survivors who were children at the time, titled And Life Is Changed Forever, by Martin Ira Glassner and Robert Krell, published in 2006 by Wayne State University Press. The majority of members of the organization, some 70 of them, live in Fairfield County, but we have identified 16 who have recently lived in the New Haven area. Separating survivors by age is justified by many studies that demonstrate clearly that children react to stress and trauma differently from adults. The older survivors who settled in the New Haven area are discussed in some detail in the article “The Holocaust Fellowship of Greater New Haven,” by Sally Horwitz, which appeared in Jews in New Haven (Volume 8, pp. 133-139). Here we offer brief sketches of the younger sur¬ vivors, in alphabetical order. The Child Survivors Mark Marian Auerbach (formerly Marian Max Auerbach) was bom in Tamopol, Poland, in September 1926. He was in a number of camps, in¬ cluding Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but managed to stay with his father « 93 and brother until liberation. He graduated from an ORT school in Germany as a dental technician. He arrived in Boston in 1949. He lived in West Haven from 1955 to 1979, then in New Haven. He was a polio research technician at Yale, then a chemical research technician at Olin Corporation until he retired in 1982. He and his wife Rhoda were also active in commu¬ nity affairs, including Holocaust education, interfaith programs, and a soup kitchen for the hungry and homeless. He died on December 15, 2006. Eva S. Benda (nee Bloch) was bom in Berlin on May 13, 1924. She moved with her mother to Prague, her mother’s home town, in 1932 and watched the German army march into Prague on March 15, 1939. In Octo¬ ber 1942 she and her mother were transported to Terezin (Theresienstadt). They lived there in relative safety and comfort for two years, until October 1944, when they were transported to Auschwitz. They were shipped from there to Oederan, near Dresden, a vast improvement over Auschwitz. In April 1945 they were providentially returned to Terezin, from which they escaped to Prague. From there they went to New Zealand, where Eva mar¬ ried Harry Benda, a survivor of a Japanese internment camp. They came to the United States in 1952, landing in Miami. Harry taught at several uni¬ versities and they had two children. They came to Yale in 1959. Harry died in October 1971. Eva earned a master’s degree in psychology and became a psychiatric social worker with the State of Connecticut. She retired in 1989, but still works part-time as a real estate agent. Charles Gelman was bom in Kurenits, Poland, in 1922. After the Soviets and then the Germans occupied the area, he survived by becoming a house painter for the Germans. He escaped the liquidation of Jews in the area and joined a partisan brigade, fighting with them until they linked up with the Red Army in 1944. After the war he made his way to the American zone of Germany and then to the United States, arriving on October 5, 1948. He stayed with his cousin, Eli Zimmerman, until he married Sydonie Tanen- baum in March 1955 and moved to New Haven. He had a variety of jobs but primarily he sold insurance and served as the cantor of Temple Beth Sholom in Hamden, retiring in 1987. He died on May 24, 2004. Renee Glassner (nee Rywka Losice, later Renee Gewirtzman) was bom on November 6, 1931 in Losice, Poland. She, her parents, and two broth¬ ers were at times separated but, with the help of Polish farmers, managed to hide from the Germans. She hid in a wardrobe in the home of a Polish policeman in Losice for five months, then in Koszelowka in a pit under an animal shed for one and a half years. Of the 7,000 Jews in Losice in 1939, Renee was one of only 16 who survived. She arrived in New York with her family on July 30, 1948 and went immediately to Albany, New York, where 94 $ she lived with the uncle who sponsored them. In 1967, while living in Cali¬ fornia with her husband and three daughters, she earned an M.A. in Spanish and linguistics. She has been living in Hamden since August 1968. She taught Spanish and French in North Haven High School until she retired in 1997. She became active in the Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut, speaking about her Holocaust experience to schools, churches, civic groups, and so on, and working on other projects in Holocaust education. Holocaust survivor Renee Glassner addressing the public in her home town of Losice, Poland, May 20, 2008. Anna Stetier Goldberg (Dola Steiier) was bom on April 3, 1929 in Dro- hobycz, Poland. During the Holocaust she was a prisoner in Plaszow, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Gelenau, and Mauthausen. She arrived in New Orleans on April 3, 1949, settling in Connecticut in 1950, then in Hamden in 1988. She had one year of study at the Stone Academy of Business and has been a licensed real estate agent for 32 years. Geoffrey Hartman (Gert Haumann) was bom in Frankfurt am Main, Ger¬ many, on August 11, 1929. He was sent to England on a Kindertransport in March 1939 and lived on the estate of James Rothschild in Waddleston with 19 other boys. He was reunited with his mother and came to the United States in August 1945. He has lived in New Haven since 1949 with inter¬ vals of living elsewhere. He earned a B.A. at Queens College of the City University of New York and a Ph.D. at Yale. He is now Sterling Profes¬ sor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Yale and is a Co¬ founder and Project Director of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, also at Yale. Renee Hartman was bom in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1933. Both of her parents and her sister, one and a half years younger than she, were deaf and Renee had to serve as their “ears.” In 1943 the two girls were separated from their parents, who were deported to Auschwitz. The girls were sheltered for many months on a farm. They were returned to Bratis¬ lava, where they lived precariously, often on the streets, until deported to Auschwitz in 1944. The train tracks were bombed en route to Auschwitz and their train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen where, a year later, they were $ 95 liberated by British troops. Renee spent the years 1945-1948 in Sweden, recovering from several ailments, including typhus. The girls were sent to Brooklyn in August 1948 to live with relatives. Renee is married to Geof¬ frey Hartman, and they live in New Haven. Helene Kasha (nee Guttmann) was bom in Alsace, France, in June 1936. Her parents were from Przemysl, Galicia, Poland. Almost immedi¬ ately after the German defeat of France in 1940, most Alsatian Jews, includ¬ ing Helene’s family, fled to the “unoccupied” zone in south and southwest France. Germany overran unoccupied France in November 1942 and again the family fled, this time from Lyon to Switzerland. They were among the lucky 20,000 Jews admitted into Switzerland. Helene lived with a Swiss family in Basle for two and a half years. She rejoined her parents in Alsace shortly after the war ended. She arrived in New York in 1964 and moved to Hamden in 1991, where she lived with her husband Henry, also a child survivor, and established a business doing translations, mostly in Romance and Slavic languages. Before she died in 2006, she became involved in Republican politics and conservation. Henry Kasha was bom in Warsaw in 1929. From the establishment of the ghetto in October 1940 to liberation by the Red Army on January 17, 1945, he hid in the ghetto. Toward the end he and 15 others, including his parents and a few Christians, survived in a bunker in the ruins of Warsaw, scavenging for food and other supplies. After liberation, he resumed a more or less normal life, catching up academically, marrying another survivor, and raising three sons. He became a prominent professor of physics at Yale University. He migrated to New York in 1964 and has been living in Ham¬ den since 1991. Dori Laub was bom on June 8, 1937 in Cemauti, Bukovina, Romania. In June 1942, he and his parents were deported with other Jews to Transn- istria, the formerly Ukranian territory now occupied by Romania. They were interned in an old stone quarry, where the men were forced to do hard labor.
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