Pictures Worth a Thousand Memories

• by Pierre Klochendler (jerusalem)
• Friday, March 02, 2012
• Inter Press Service

Checking the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Aris stumbled upon a photograph of herself as an eight-year-old at the end of World War II.

'I knew it was me in the photo,' Aris says. ‘Berthe Moskowicz, eight years old,’ it said. That was my former name. So, I called the museum...'

Launched one year ago, ‘Remember Me' is an innovative social media network. The online campaign helps ease the enduring tragedy of the Holocaust — children who were orphaned or separated from their families by the Nazi persecutions.

In all 1,100 photos of children orphaned and displaced by the Nazi persecution have been posted online. The Washington-based museum researchers hope to identify the last survivors and to keep their memories alive — before they’re buried forever. It’s a race against time, against oblivion.

Six million European Jews — over one million of them children and teenagers — were murdered by the Nazis. Within four-and-a-half years, parents, siblings, whole families were exterminated because they were Jewish.

At the end of the war, having no sign as to whether their loved ones had also survived, those who remained (often on their own) hoped to reunite with their families.

Seven decades later, thinkers and philosophers, still grappling with the enormity of the Holocaust, say that the crime surpasses any other crime against humanity. For it has killed ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’, the first commandment of humanity.

Millions of dead remain unidentified; the fate of thousands of surviving children remains unknown. What happened to all these children?

Aris tells her untold story: 'It all started when they took my mother away from me...'

Copies of old documents, faded pictures of childhood, are the graves on which she can silently recollect.

Bracha Aris was born Berthe Moskowicz in Paris in 1937, two years before the war, the only child of Chana Moskowicz and Noah Flambaum, Jewish immigrants from Poland who had met in France.

She barely knew her parents’ fate. She knew she lost them in Nazi-occupied France. She was three when her father was interned in a French camp in Pithiviers. 'I don’t remember him,' she says, 'I didn't even know his name.'

The only memory Aris has of her father is a hand-made pen and envelope opener which he managed to send from the camp. Engraved on it are the words, 'To my beloved Berthe, your daddy who loves you so much.' One year later, in June 1942, he was sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

But Aris didn't know.

All she remembers vividly is that fateful day of July 1942: The Vel d’Hiv round-up by French police of 14,000 Jews living in Paris: 'Mother received notice from the police to be prepared. She packed a suitcase. We awaited downstairs at the concierge at the time we were told we’d be picked up. Two French policemen and a Gestapo officer came for us.

'The officer told my mom, ‘Leave the girl here with the concierge. Don’t take her with you.’ First, she refused, but he told her ‘not to worry,’ she’d ‘be back within a few days.’ And that’s how I was saved. She left me with the concierge. I don’t know why the German officer ordered my mother to leave me behind. Perhaps he felt sorry for me. It was the last time I saw her.'

Her mother was deported to Auschwitz. The trail ended there.

After a few days, Aris was taken to an orphanage; from there, to a train station. 'There were many German soldiers on the train,' she recalls. 'I was told to keep quiet, not to talk about what happened.'

In western France, a man with a horse and buggy took her to a farm where she stayed for two years. 'They were not a very warm family, but they treated me well,' she says. 'I’d help churning butter by hand and taking cows to pasture. I’d also attend school.'

There were 35 other Jewish children hidden in the area. None of them knew of the others’ identity. 'Each of us kept it secret,' she says.

After the war, Aris was taken to another children’s home near Paris. The photo she discovered on the ‘Remember Me’ website was probably taken to help find her parents. For three years, she expected them, in vain. 'I had no one left.'

She was eventually sent to Israel in 1948. 'When I was asked for my father’s name, I was ashamed that I didn’t know it,' she says, 'so I simply invented one, Max. Since then, the name ‘Max’ appears on my ID card.'

Berthe rebuilt her life with no past as Bracha, married, had three children and eight grandchildren. Her husband passed away three years ago.

Later, she found out on a directory of all the 76,000 Jews sent from France to Nazi death camps (of which only 2,500 survived), that her parents had officially been listed 'dead on arrival'.

Aris shared very little of her childhood with her children: 'I didn’t want to talk, I don’t know why. Only now I’m starting to open up a little.'

Her revealed childhood exposed new details about her family. 'The only relative who survived was an uncle who immigrated to America before the war,' she explains. But the research has failed to locate him.

Each month, over a thousand people call the ‘Remember Me’ hotline. So far 230 of the younger Holocaust survivors have traced their love ones. Fifteen have lived in Israel, 13 are still alive.

Finally, hesitantly, Aris fills in a black hole in her life, revives lost fragments, pieces together childhood memories and stories suppressed for so long. Still, she cannot help suppressing her tears. 'I’ve lived all my life without feelings,' she says.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

Where next?

Advertisement