This "survivor" tells of gassing at Ravensbruck, that the Nazis forced people to write postcards, that she continued to cook her potatoes as a friend next to her was shot.
Another of the for-profit nonsensical tales...I wonder what she was paid to tell this tale? Comments invited.
- H.
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/072 ... t001.shtml
Holocaust survivor tells tale of atrocities
N.O. woman wants others to remember
By JENNIFER MELANCON
Special to The Advocate
Advocate staff photo by Bryan Tuck
New Orleans resident and Holocaust survivor Felicia Fuksman speaks to teachers during a recent workshop in New Iberia sponsored by the Southern Institute for Education and Research. She said she lost her family and home.
NEW IBERIA -- For New Orleans resident Felicia Fuksman, the Holocaust isn't just a nightmare of statistical atrocities spelled out in a textbook: It was gruesome reality -- the loss of her entire family and home.
"When I came out from camp, I did ask myself, 'Why me?'" Fuksman, 83, said. "'My parents were good people. They didn't do anything wrong. Why did I survive?' I'm still asking the same question so many years after. The only answer is that I'm left here to tell the story to other people."
With her Polish accent cracking and tears filling her eyes, the frail Fuksman told her story with a quiet dignity here earlier this month. Her audience was teachers at a workshop sponsored by the Southern Institute for Education and Research, an organization at Tulane University.
"You can't tell the story of 6 million, but you can tell the story of one times 6 million," said Plater Robinson, education director for the institute. "Teaching history should be like the reading of a good book: It should make these characters come alive."
Fuksman was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1920 to an impoverished Jewish family of seven.
"Just to feed the family was a big achievement, but I had all the love I wanted from my parents and my siblings, so I was a very happy teenager until the Germans came to Poland in 1939," Fuksman, said, recalling she had worked in a hospital while attending nursing school.
"First, they came to the houses," she said. "They didn't knock at the door; they just opened it with their boots. Then they closed my school and all public facilities, even the parks. There were big signs that said, 'Jews and dogs forbidden.'
"One day, I took my mother's shawl and I covered my yellow star (of David) and I went to the line for bread for Christian people," she said. "Someone recognized me and she called the German guard over and said, 'She is Jewish.' He came over and uncovered my star, and he kicked me out of line and I never did that again. He could have killed me for the same reason, but he didn't."
She was forced into the Lodz ghetto with 150,000 other people.
"Then they began to do away with the children," she said. "They said, 'If you give up your children, we will take care of them.' Some of the mothers brought the children -- they believed them. Some other mothers didn't believe and didn't want to give them up, and they'd grab the child in front of the mother and kill them, and then they'd take the mother away.
"My oldest sister died in the beginning of tuberculosis. My younger sister died of starvation on the streets. We didn't even know she was out there," she said. "My father and my oldest brother were taken off the streets, and we never saw them again."
Fuksman lived in the ghetto for four years, working as a nurse.
"The Germans would collect the children. Most of them were on the streets with no parents, so it was very easy to collect them in one big room in the hospital where I worked," she said. "When they had enough children for a load, a truck came by the window. This was a room on the second floor. They would open the windows, and they'd throw the children from the windows into the truck. The scream and the cry of the children I can still hear today. It will never disappear."
Her mother was ill and her brother was very young when the ghetto was "liquidated."
"My mother was already sick, so we decided not to go out when they called," she remembered. "They came to check the room, and they found us. So they dragged me away from my mother. She was holding onto my foot. He (the soldier) came with a big boot, and he turned her away to the wall, and he dragged my little brother, and we came down. He put my little brother into a different line, and I knew I would not see him. I didn't have a chance to tell him good-bye."
She spent 36 hours standing in a crowded railcar on a train to the Ravensbruck death camp.
"They told us to 'get all of your belongings together because you are going to take a shower,' and we were very happy about it because we needed a shower after all the days on the train," she said. "We came to the building where they gave us a shower, and they didn't give us a drop of water (to drink). They just put us in another room, and they shaved our heads. They took away all of our possessions from home, even gold teeth."
She spent six weeks working on a railroad, and her friend, Bronia, saved her life.
"One day I was so sick, very sick, and my friend pulled me out through the window," she said. "Her main mission was to survive and see her children, and because of her, I survived, too. I had given up. I knew my family was gone, and she helped me to survive. She knew I would be burned to death because this was an extermination camp. If somebody didn't perform, they would go to the gas chambers."
In the last few months of the war, she was sent to a labor camp near Wittenberg, Germany, to work in a factory. When the war ended, Fuksman was rescued by Russian soldiers and taken to a German house one evening.
"A shot came through the window and killed a friend of mine immediately," she said. "I went on with no reaction, without even looking at her; I continued to boil the potatoes. I don't know if it means that the potatoes were more important to me than my friend, or if I couldn't care for things anymore like normal people could. We just left the house with the potatoes until we got to another house."
When she returned home to Lodz, she discovered that a Polish woman was living in her home.
"She looked at me like I should apologize that I was still alive," Fuksman said. "She said, 'We have nothing of yours.' I knew no other country, but when she said the Jews were not welcome in Poland, I said that it's time to leave."
After working in a deportation camp in Berlin for several years, she signed up to come to the United States. She arrived in New Orleans and was placed with a family who took in survivors. She soon met a fellow survivor from Lodz named Max, who had been in camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau for two and a half years.
They were married within a year, began their own furniture store in New Orleans and had three daughters. Her husband died in 1982.
"When my children came to me with questions, I couldn't talk to them," she said. "I'd send them away to my husband. So when he passed away, I picked up the legacy of what he left behind. We know it's our obligation to talk about the Holocaust to make people aware that it exists because there are so many deniers."
The institute has provided information for more than 3,000 teachers in 800 schools in its series of Holocaust-survivor workshops. It also offers workshops about the civil rights movement and aids in cross-cultural community training to help people work in multicultural areas.
"The institute's mission is to promote racial and religious understanding and to promote good interethnic relations in the Deep South," said Executive Director Lance Hill. "The survivors' resiliency and generosity of spirit, given what they've experienced, never ceases to amaze me. They are the most understanding and compassionate people I know. I see the way that they change people's lives."
Robinson said, "Our kids have to appreciate how life can change on a dime, and your worst nightmares can be played out in broad daylight.
"The key point the students must understand is that the Jews were told, 'You're going to work.' The Nazis were so clever that they would have the Jews, under threat of a gun, write a postcard back to the ghetto saying, 'Everything is fine; we look forward to your arrival.' After writing the postcard, they would be destroyed.
"History repeats itself because human nature stays the same," added Robinson. "We all live in Hitler's shadow. Make your students step outside of themselves to look around, to be beyond the domain of self and to appreciate how lucky we are, not because we're better, but because we're luckier.
"We pay respect to those who've suffered by studying that period and fighting intolerance wherever it raises its head and saying "no" the first time," he added. "I feel I am a courier for other people's stories, bringing them to young people so young people will appreciate their own existence and also be on guard."
