The Girl in the Cellar

by Gerda Krebs Seifer

  The camp housed 50,000, but disease, starvation and murder reduced the numbers to 20,000 inside the last six weeks. Others were dying of starvation even as we were looking the camp over. Food was available but not until tomorrow will it be comparable in quality and quantity to the food that we eat.

  The guide said most happily, “Tomorrow, if we get the same food as you get, it will be excellent!” He said he had examined our rations and found them excellent. It really made us ashamed of our complaints about eating out of cans. He said that he had a little soup, bread and margarine and was forced to work on this diet all day long.

  The prisoners worked very hard until they dropped dead. Some prisoners were hung by their arms (behind their backs) in the camp and then taken to a nearby forest and shot. Our guide told us, that there were still bodies in the forest who had been machine gunned and never buried. I suppose the Germans had no time for it before we arrived.

  We saw the crematory and could see charred skeletons quite plainly. 20,000 bodies could be burned in a day and the furnaces had gone full blast for a day and a half. Saw a room full of naked dead bodies of prisoners, who died of malnutrition in the previous day or two. There were shelves on each side and they slept side by side, packed in like Sardines. The bunks were stacked four high and the bedclothes were lousy. American ambulances were making trip after trip to the camp, to take the worst cases to where they could get medical attention. Those who could walk, wandered aimlessly around, others were lying on the bed and asked us for cigarettes, candy, and sugar. There was a group of German civilians in their best clothes, taking a forced tour of the camp. Our guide told us, that the German women cried and said: Hitler had lied to them. The guide told us that there were German political prisoners who were allowed to have visitors. Also, the camp prisoners cleaned up bomb damage in the nearby towns. So the German people knew what the score was or just deliberately closed their eyes.

  Well enough about this subject. If you have an opportunity to see movies or snapshots of these places, be sure and see them. I don’t believe you need to worry about us. GIs are not being too easy on the Germans.

  All my love,

  Clifford Michaels Jr.

  The 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz occurred on May 2005, the same day that I chaired the Yom Hashoah at the Long Beach Jewish Community Center. The attendance was better than we expected, and Newmans Green’s presentation was excellent. I had wanted to participate in the ceremonies in Kraków, but the more I thought about it, the more the trip seemed impossible. I could never have traveled on buses with my power chair or even with my old walker.22 By 2005, I was also using a motorized scooter outside. Getting up and down on buses and walking in grass or mud was out of the question. As it turned out, the weather in Poland was cold and wet, so those who were there complained bitterly. Ron Frydman, a member of ADL and Jackie Luk from the L.A. office had attended the event in Poland and later showed us slides of the trip. As Ron commented on them, I realized that he couldn’t see the slides the way a survivor could see them. Nor could he quite understand what living under Nazis or being an inmate at a camp was like.

  At times I think I have imagined certain experiences and occurrences during the war, and no sooner do I doubt they happened, when I read in a book or an article about a Holocaust survivor who had exactly the same feelings, thoughts, or experiences; and then it makes me feel validated.

  Sometimes I wonder why I still read other people’s Holocaust memoirs. Perhaps I was meant to live and tell the story of the Holocaust, which I have been doing for more than forty years. Yet I still have a constant need to know more and more about the Holocaust.

  Is it because I didn’t suffer enough? I didn’t starve like those who were in the camps. I wasn’t beaten and I had a roof over my head, but I still suffered by being alone with no one to share my feelings with. I suffered because I couldn’t grieve for my mother, my dearest Mamusia. I suffered because I never knew who might report me to the police. I suffered because of the constant fear of being discovered, that one of the Tarasiuk children may say a wrong word to a wrong person and the Gestapo would arrive at our door and kill us.

  I suffered because I lived a lie.

  I suffered because I’d lost my dearest, brave father, whom I’d hoped to see again when the war ended.

  In Together magazine, I read an article on the anniversary events held in Auschwitz about the many dignitaries who attended and what they all had to say. Despite their well-intentioned words, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Russia, Poland, Germany, France, England, Belgium, Sweden, and the United States. Anti-Semitism doesn’t have a country or borders. It may have changed its shape and symbols and rallying cries; it may be different from the far-right anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, but it lurks today in many countries and in many different forms. That is why it is important to fight against anti-Semitism. Pope Francis, who in 2016 visited Auschwitz, made an address to the International Conference in 2018. He began by saying that “indifference is a virus that is dangerously contagious in our time.” He went on, “In order to recover our humanity, to recover our human understanding of reality and to overcome so many deplorable forms of apathy towards our neighbor, we need this memory, this capacity to involve ourselves together in remembering. Memory is the key to accessing the future, and it is our responsibility to hand it on in a dignified way to young generations.”

  That is why, each year, it is so vitally important to commemorate the Shoah, to never ever forget.

  * * *

  22 For ten years prior to 2005, I was forced to use a walker in order to get anywhere. My physical condition was neuropathy, arthritis, and spinal surgeries that caused debilitating damage and progressive disabilities.

  My Heart is a Violin

  I received a book in the mail, My Heart is a Violin, by Shony Alex Braun, a great talent. Braun’s bright future as a violinist was cut short by the Nazis who deported him and his family to Auschwitz. Later, in the death camp of Dachau, he miraculously survived because of a violin. In 1994, his “Symphony of the Holocaust” for violin and orchestra, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He died from Alzheimer’s in 1992, but I was fortunate enough to meet him on two occasions when he played violin at parties, classical as well as Yiddish and Hungarian tunes. He played with such gusto and feeling, it made one feel like singing and dancing. I have some of his tapes and each time I hear them, I think of my childhood, and the music brings back warm memories.

  In June 2003, I visited the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to view an exhibit of Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, who had studied in the Bauhaus, a German art school, and was a well-known artist before the war. She and her husband were imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, where she taught children to draw. Somehow, in the optimistic atmosphere she created, the children were able to forget about hunger and being separated from their parents who had probably already been killed. The Nazis “beautified” Theresienstadt in 1943 for an inspection by the Swiss Red Cross. The following year, Dicker-Brandeis was transported to Auschwitz, where she perished, together with many innocent children.

  It is impossible to guess the immense loss of future geniuses who perished in the Holocaust: poets and writers, painters and composers, philosophers and historians, mathematicians and doctors, social activists and politicians, lawyers and jurists, inventors and entrepreneurs, skiers and swimmers, chess players and soccer players, generals and soldiers, teachers and students, parents and children.

  Since Then

  I have given several oral histories to organizations, The USC Shoah Foundation, The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., The Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and others. In those speaking engagements, I wasn’t able to give details about my relatives because of the limited time frame. Since most of them perished in the Holocaust, I feel it proper and necessary that their stories should be recorded in this document. Both my parents’ families came from Przemyśl. The book of records goes only as far back as my gr
andparents.

  On my father’s side was his father, Pesach Krebs, who married Gitla Kleiner, from Tarnow, Poland. They had two children: Evelina and Henryk, my father, born on January 7, 1891.

  My grandfather’s wife, Gitla, died at a young age. I saw her photo in my father’s watch. She was a very beautiful woman. My grandfather remarried. His second wife, Genia, whom I remember well, used to come to the store and sit at the little desk, trying to help with customers. I don’t know how much she really helped, but she felt good assisting in the store. She had silver grey hair, always kissed me and hugged me, and was a very quiet and lovely lady. She died of old age during the war.

  My aunt, Evelina or Eva, married Molek Mantel and they moved to Vienna. Later, they moved to Munich, which they left for England in 1938. They had to learn English, a rather difficult task for older people. Uncle Mantel was lucky to obtain a job as a filing clerk in a store. Many men in the same situation aged quickly and never accepted their new lifestyle; many committed suicide. When the Germans started bombing London, the Mantels moved north to Yorkshire and settled in Leeds, where I went in March 1946. Aunt Eva spoke fluent Polish and German and was able to learn the rudiments of English so that she could shop for groceries. She wasn’t comfortable conversing with English people.

  My grandfather, Pesach Krebs, and his second wife had one child, Berta. She married Leon Oberhardt, a lawyer, and they had two daughters, Irena and Lidia. Both cousins were slightly older than I was and lived in Przemyśl. The whole family perished—most likely in one of the concentration camps.

  My mother came from a much larger family. There were seven children: four sisters, and three brothers.

  Grandfather David Goliger was born in 1860, married Chaja, Rivka (Regina) Rubinfeld, who came from Zalesie, near Krasiczyn, villages close to Przemyśl.

  The oldest daughter, Mina Goliger, married young. Her husband, Mondschein, whose first name I forget, was the head of the railroad station in Stryj—an unusual position of importance for a Jew in those days. They had one daughter, Dora, who received a Ph.D. in philosophy. Dora married Dr. Korn and they lived in Katowice. They had no children.

  Samuel Goliger, an engineer, owned a large apartment building in Przemyśl. He married Helena, and they had two daughters, Irena and Lila. The entire family did not survive; likely they perished in Auschwitz.

  Zofia, an accomplished pianist, married a physician, Wilhelm Schwarzer, and they lived in Jaroślaw, a half-hour ride by train from Przemyśl. Before she married, Zofia played piano with concert orchestras. Her husband played violin, and often they played duets together for their own enjoyment. Wilhelm had a busy general practice, and aunt Zofia was his assistant. They had two children, Zygmunt and Danuta. Danusia, as we called her, was a year or two older than I. She developed pernicious anemia when she was about seven years old, for which there was no cure. Her parents traveled with her to the best doctors in Vienna to obtain the best medical care, but she died at the age of eight. Aunt Zofia was never herself after she lost her Danusia and never played the piano again. The whole family, except for Zygmunt, perished. Zofia and Wilhelm were hiding in my uncle’s building, together with Zygmunt’s girlfriend, Renia Spiegel. A neighbor must have reported them to the Gestapo. They were led to the street and shot there. Adolf Goliger escaped Poland through Romania. He went to Israel. He married but had no children, dying in 1960. I don’t know what happened to his wife.

  Henryk, the youngest brother, survived the war but died in 1950 of heart disease.

  Zygmunt survived Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. He immigrated to the United States, and practiced pediatrics in New York. In 1955 he was drafted into the Air Force and was stationed in San Bernardino, California. He and his wife subsequently had two children, Mitchell and Pamela. Zygmunt died in 2004 from an illness caused by his physical experiences in the concentration camps.

  My distant cousins, the Schochets, related to the Krebs family, were sent deep into Russia. They survived the war and have lived in Israel since before 1948.

  Millie and Vincent Benn, my very close friends in England, died at the ripe old ages of 96 and 97. Their daughter, Julia, married and had one daughter, Elizabeth. Her brother, Nicholas, became a doctor, husband, and had two children. Julia sent me some drawings that I made for her in honor of her seventh birthday in 1946 when I lived with her family in Otley. The drawings show a couple dressed in a Polish national costume. I never expected Julia to save them, but it was a wonderful gift to remind me of my early days with her family in England.23

  * * *

  23 Liz liked these drawings well enough to ask for them. She framed them and they decorate her walls, though I never thought them worthy of being displayed. I feel a bit like Grandma Moses!

  Epilogue

  In 2018, I had my 91st birthday. I lost seventy pounds over a year and a half, though I didn’t diet. Somehow, I lost my sense of taste, my sense of smell, and my appetite, and voilà—the weight melted away. It’s true that I can’t walk anymore and I lose my balance and fall frequently. I’ve lost power in my arms and hands and I have trouble combing my hair and brushing my teeth. But I’m still here.

  Harold recently closed his practice after fifty-one years. My grandchildren are all teenagers. Madison is in college, Eli had his Bar Mitzvah and will enter college next year, and Chelsea has begun eleventh grade. The preschool that Lois and I began in the 1970s at Alpert Jewish Community Center is now considered the finest nursery school in Long Beach with a long waiting list of new applicants. Its roster of students is diverse—children of different nationalities, religions, and ethnicities. Each time I enter the Jewish Center, I see happy children running, skipping, and laughing along the corridor, and their parents or grandparents picking them from school. They all seem safe in that environment. I think of the early beginnings of the preschool, and my heart swells with pride.

  Sitting in our family room and facing the back wall of our backyard garden, covered with white and red climbing roses, I’m writing the final sentences of my memoir. Nasturtiums have grown in the corner in their velvety orange and yellow colors, and the sun is shining brightly. Delicate pale pink lilies grace the coffee table, so how bad can it be? But I am still in my own house where I enjoy my garden and the beautiful California weather. Harold and I have each other, and we continue to live in our home that we built in 1965. We are still of clear mind and enjoy music, friends, and freedom—reasons to be thankful for.

  I am so grateful that my children have grown to be great human beings, smart, decent, and loving. Their children are also shaping up to make us proud and even their dogs are lovely pets, pleasant to be with.

  Fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are still living, and so as long as I have the opportunity, I will share my testimony of how hatred led to the worst genocide in history. Standing up and speaking out might make listeners better understand the horrors of the past and wish not to repeat them. That is my fervent wish. My one regret is that I will never have enough time to read all the books on my shelves.

  Gerda Krebs Seifer

  December 2018

  Long Beach, California

  Afterword

  Next to being a Holocaust survivor oneself, marriage to a survivor is the closest one could be to experiencing this horrible event. I am sure not a day goes by without Gerda thinking of her dear mother and devoted father who were victims. Gerda has spent years giving presentations of her story before students in public and private schools, in universities, and at a number of institutions. Together, we installed a memorial to her parents in an alcove at the Jewish Community Center of Long Beach. But the culmination of her work is publishing this memoir. In ten or fifteen years, there will be no living survivor, but her story can be read and should be read by the next generations to remind them: “Never Forget.”

  —Harold Seifer, M.D.

  November 7, 2018

  Long Beach, California

  Afterword

  When my Mom, my Mamusia, told me she was
going to write this book, I never doubted she would accomplish what many would have considered a daunting, if not impossible, goal. But my Mamusia has never let fear hold her back. She has had so many incredibly difficult challenges in life, and she’s faced them all with intelligence, determination, and strength. I asked her how she was able to survive the unbelievable pain of losing her parents, her relatives, and the seemingly insurmountable challenges of starting her life over in a world so foreign to her, and her answer was simply “because I had to, I had no other choice.” But she didn’t just survive; she built a life for herself and has inspired many along the way.

  I was in high school when I discovered a rare picture of my mother’s mother, my grandmother, and I instantly felt a surge of grief and sadness, knowing I would never meet her, never get to feel her warm hug or see her beautiful smile. I would never get to meet my grandfather or look into his bright blue eyes. But through my mother’s stories, I felt a sense of connection, and while it’s hard to describe, I also felt a sense of pride and love. She told me that her parents were strong, beautiful, smart and loving--so loving and so determined, they did everything in their power to protect their daughter, so that she could live to be able to tell their story.

  This is their story, but it is also many other people’s stories of survival, perseverance, coming face to face with indescribable evil, but also of fierce courage and love. I’m so proud of my Mamusia and so proud to be her daughter, and the granddaughter of Edyta and Henryk Krebs. And I am thrilled that her story--and their stories--will be read by generations to come. Never again. Never forget.