In Brooklyn, One Photographer Captured Joy Among Holocaust Survivors This Hanukkah | Vogue
this is an article from 2022, but I found it from browsing this photographer's (Mayan Toledano) work. we are losing survivors and it's more important than ever to remember them, to hold their stories with us.
"Sabina Green, 100, was the first survivor whom Toledano met, in July 2020. “She was sitting outside, and she was singing me a song in Yiddish and was super cheerful. I remember I brought her flowers, and she was so happy,” says Toledano. “While I was talking to her, I knew I was going to see this woman for a long time. This was not a onetime visit.”"
"At 18, she falsified documents to flee Poland, but her brother, sister, and mother were unable to escape and stayed behind. She later found out that they had hired a Polish man to take them to a town that was believed to be safe. The man took their money and belongings but brought Green’s family to the Gestapo and they were murdered."
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"Hymie Steinmetz, 96, hails from a part of Romania that later became Hungary. The Nazis came to his town on the last day of Passover in 1944, when Steinmetz was 18."
"At one point, the Nazis moved into his home, leaving Steinmetz and his family confined to one room. Eventually, Steinmetz was made to go to seven different concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. There, his parents were immediately killed in the gas chambers. During his time in the camps, Steinmetz came down with typhus and was sent on a death march in the snow toward the end of the war."
"When asked how he survived the war, Steinmetz replies, “I had emunah [faith].” He adds, “I was brought up religious and I said, ‘If I ever get liberated, I will speak to people. I will tell them what happened.’ I had emunah until the last minute. I never gave that up.”"
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"After two years of volunteering, Toledano first visited [Dolly] Rabinovich, 93, this past summer. “She welcomed me in right away, and with teary eyes said, ‘You young people are doing great mitzvahs.’ I try to bring lightness and cheerfulness to the home, but Dolly quickly started telling me about the war and showed me the number on her arm,” Toledano says."
"Even as a child, Rabinovich volunteered in the ghetto, assisting a nurse and caring for children and infants. At the end of May in 1944, Rabinovich and her family were sent to Auschwitz. Her father, who carried tefillin and a prayer shawl, was immediately sent to the gas chambers. There were two lines: Rabinovich and her mother were sent to the left and her sisters to the right. By chance, in a moment that Rabinovich considers a miracle, her mother told her to join her sisters. She never saw her mother again."
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"Sol Goldberg, 98, of Sheepshead Bay, was born to a Hasidic family in Zduńska Wola, Poland, an hour west of Lodz. Goldberg remembers the Nazis arriving in Poland when he was 14, in 1939. He was soon sent to the Jewish ghetto, where the synagogue was immediately destroyed. “They came with big hammers. They had the Torah, and they burned it,” he says. Goldberg describes the terrifying dystopia of the ghetto: In his family, 16 people were confined to two rooms. At times, he would have to wait in line for hours for bread in the winter, only to return with nothing. Soldiers and neighbors could enter the home as they pleased, taking food or raping women. Authorities also ordered all the men to cut off their beards, defying religious customs. Goldberg remembers one man who did not want to. “They caught a guy who didn’t want to shave,” says Goldberg. “So, you know how the soldiers have the bayonet? [One] took off the beard with the skin. Could you imagine? With the skin.”"
"There were other unfathomable horrors that Goldberg experienced in the ghetto, but one thing he notes is that the local authorities tried to prevent people from gathering to pray. So they’d meet in secret; the women would be lookouts so that the men could form a group of 10—a minyan—to worship. Celebrating Hanukkah was also out of the question and had to be done secretly. “But many of us were from [religious homes], so we shut the windows and just for an hour, we had the candles,” he says. At one point, Goldberg and his family took the menorah and buried it in the ghetto. “It was my grandfather’s,” he says. After the war, he dug it back up, and that’s the one that he still lights today, at his home in Brooklyn. It is the only thing he has from Poland. “We risked our lives for G-d,” says Goldberg, adding, “If we lost our Judaism, our faith, our traditions, then the Nazis would have won the war.”"
i encourage you to read the full article. i only included portions of a few of the stories spoken about in it.
