Trauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival: A Holocaust Memoir

By Gabriella Y Karin and Benjamin Karin

In this memoir, Gabriella Karin tells her incredible story of survival through the Holocaust. A Jewish girl in Bratislava, she and her family were forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Gabriella, only 14 years old, and her family spent nine long months hiding in a small apartment across the street from the Nazi-Slovak

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gabriella Karin
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578791616

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Trauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival

Gabriella Karin

Trauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival

Trauma, Memory, and the Art of Survival

A Holocaust Memoir

by

Gabriella Karin

IngramSpark

Copyright © 2020 Gabriella Karin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This is a work of creative non-fiction. All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The author in no way represents any company, corporation, or brand, mentioned herein. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

This book deals with traumatic events and death. While the author has taken great lengths to ensure the subject matter is dealt with in a compassionate and respectful manner, it may be troubling for some readers. Discretion is advised.

First edition, 2020

Edited by Lisa Rojany, Benjamin Karin, and Rom Karin

Book design by Benjamin Karin and Todd Karin

Corrected by Joey Safchik

Article transcription by Polina Divinsky

Front cover photograph courtesy of David Miller

Back cover images and artwork by Gabriella Karin

ISBN 978-0-578-79160-9 (print)

ISBN 978-0-578-79161-6 (e-book)

Published by IngramSpark

Visit http://www.gabriellakarin.com/

Preface

by Michael Berenbaum

It is an honor and a pleasure to write this preface to Gabriella Karin’s memoir. As a historian permit me to make several historical points on the Holocaust as portrayed in this memoir and then to write of Gabriella’s role as survivor, witness, teacher, and artist, and finally to say a few personal words.

The Holocaust in Slovakia had a distinct character, different in several ways from other countries. When Gabriella was born, Slovakia was not an independent country but rather an integral part of Czechoslovakia, a multicultural, democratic society ably governed by tolerant officials.

And then!

In September 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia seed the Sudetenland with its large ethnic German population, which he promised would be his last territorial demand in Europe. A conference was convened in Munich in the last days of September. The prime ministers of France and Great Britain were present, so, too, Hitler and his Italian ally Benito Mussolini, but no Czechoslovakian representative attended. The two democratic leaders decided to give in— appeasement has been the word used ever since—to Hitler’s demand. Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s leader, returned home exultant, victorious, declaring that he had won peace in our time as Czechoslovakia was dismembered. The peace was short lived, and in March 1939, the Germans marched into Prague and the takeover was complete. Chamberlain was soon gone, humiliated, his policies were a failure, and Czechoslovakia was further divided into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the independent state of Slovakia.

Headed by Catholic Priest Father Jozef Tiso, Slovakia’s policies were anything but priestly. It was the first Axis country to agree to the deportation of its Jews and the only one that paid the Germans 300 marks for their deportation. As a preteen Gabriella did not experience the upheaval in political terms but in the most personal way, in the anxious whispers and then the visibly deteriorating social and economic conditions affecting her personal life, the threats to her extended family, and the uncertainty of her life, which had previously been secure and comfortable. Her description of moving from her family’s apartment into her father’s store is the haunting way a child perceived the upheaval. She overheard conversations that a 10- or 11-year-old child could not quite understand; much was withheld from her, and only in retrospect could she fit all the pieces together.

Despite the indifference of many within the Slovak community to the fate of the Jews and despite government policies and widespread anti-Semitism, her father was the beneficiary of human decency when the Aryan partner that he had taken into his business to protect it refused to come to Bratislava and to exploit his partner’s woes. That allowed the family to endure a little bit longer. Decency was all too rare at that time and, therefore, all the more remarkable.

Unbeknown to Gabriella, probably even to her parents, the Jewish community worked together to form the Slovakian Working Group, which consisted of Jews who would ordinarily be ideological and religious rivals: an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, a woman Zionist leader, a neolog (akin to a Conservative Jew) rabbi, and a secular leader. In late 1942, after the first deportations, the group bribed a ranking Nazi official in hope of stopping the deportations. He reported the bribe to his superiors, and they played along trying to learn how great a sum they could extort from the Jews, whom they believed controlled vast wealth. Deportations were halted for a time; the death camps could not absorb Slovakian Jews all at once. Sensing these efforts could be effective elsewhere on a larger scale, the Working Group conceived of the Europa Plan to bribe Nazi officials and save Jews. When the significant sum of money promised was not forthcoming, an embittered Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl, the group’s co-leader, addressed letters to the Jewish leadership of the free world, begging them to save the Jews from deportation and all but certain annihilation. Deportations resumed in 1944 when the major killing by mobile killing units and in death camps had been well advanced and the mopping up of the few remaining Jewish communities had begun. Having escaped deportation in 1942, Gabriella’s family faced deteriorating conditions, persecution, and danger, but not until 1944, one year before the end of the war, did her immediate family face deportation.

The Working Group had one major success. Two Slovakian escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolp Vr’ba and Alfred Wetzler, worked with them in May 1944 to create the Auschwitz Protocols, eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz. Based on this account, a request was made to the Allies to bomb Auschwitz.

Gabriella describes her mother’s vital efforts at a different form of resistance, Jews helping one another. The family store was next to the police station. Gabriella writes:

Every night, a policeman would give my mother a list of names of people who were to be picked up and deported. There was a new list every day. My mother transferred the list to the Jewish underground organization.

Information was the difference between life and death, and Gabriella’s mother offered credible information that gave some Slovakian Jews the opportunity to flee or to hide. Yet for some, such as her mother’s first cousin, the information came too late. They had already moved from place to place and no longer had the strength to run again.

The policeman who gave Gabriella’s mother the information was an unknown hero. So, too, the manager who denied that there were non-Christians living in her building and the policemen who took his word for it without searching on his own. He may have been tired after a long day of work. He may not have liked his assignment. He may have trusted the manager. We cannot know his motivation. Sometimes, it took so very little to save Jewish lives. Other times, it took herculean efforts.

Read the story of Karol Blanar, her aunt’s boyfriend, who saved Gabriella and her family from all but certain deportation and death when he took the family into his apartment, where they stayed until the end of the war. He also provided a haven to others in desperate need if even for a night. Confined in an apartment there was little that the then teenage Gabriella could do but read. She learned a hard truth: Everything can be taken away from you, but nobody can take away what you have in your head. Put good stuff in it, it is yours while you live.

Israel honors gentiles who saved Jews, and Gabriella was instrumental in having Karol Blanar honored, most properly so, but there is one not insignificant downside to these well-deserved honors. As my colleague David Marwell has said: Just because Jews were powerless does not mean that they were passive.

Because gentiles are honored for saving Jews, we have not paid enough attention to the efforts of Jews to help other Jews, which was an integral part of resistance, and often far more effective in saving lives than armed resistance. Heroic as it was, courageous as it was, armed resistance was a last stand taken by doomed young ghetto Jews or by inmates in a death camps all but certain that they would not prevail but chose to die defending one’s honor and the honor of the Jewish people.

Gabriella was among the most fortunate or—to be more precise—the least unfortunate of Holocaust survivors. She survived with her parents and with at least some of her extended family. Not many were quite as blessed. Still she responded in a manner made famous in Israel, invoked in the aftermath of the Holocaust: In their death, they commanded us to live.

Read her memoir and you can feel her zest for life, her passion for creativity, her desire for joy, her sense of adventure that has added poignancy when one understands that she has cheated death, defeated the angel of death and survived. Again and again she emphasizes how she loved to dance with Ofer, her loving and beloved husband, for more than 60 years, and later with Robert, her caring companion for the last years of his life. Gabriella’s zest for life is apparent; having suffered and survived, she welcomes joy and knows how to find it in her life.

As I read her memoir, I was brought back to a final scene in Elie Wiesel’s novel Day, where a survivor friend Gyula beckons the protagonist to choose life. Victory over death should give birth to happiness. Happiness to be free. Free to provoke death again. Free to accept freedom or to reject it. This reprieve should give a feeling of well-being. Wiesel’s protagonist could not make such a choice. Gabriella is a survivor who did.

Her sense of triumph is also in recreating life in the aftermath of death. She is not alone among survivors. There is a statistic that I always found striking: the highest birthrate in all of post-war Europe was in the Displaced Persons Camps, the DP camps. Without knowing where they would live, how they would rebuild their lives, or even if Nazism was defeated once and for all, those who knew death so intimately, so pervasively, brought life into the world. Gabriella’s only child and now her grandchildren and soon her great-grandchild are her triumphs. Death did not have the final word, life—Jewish life—did. And having a child is the greatest act of faith in the future, especially for those who so well know the fragility of life.

After a career in design, Gabriella retired not from but to. She found her calling, dare we say the reason why she survived.

She began to join students on the March of the Living, an annual pilgrimage to the places of destruction in Poland, the places where members of her extended family were killed: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor. From destruction, they travel as she did on to Israel where her parents went, along with so many survivors, to rebuild their lives. Israel was her home as a young woman and young mother.

I remember riding on a bus with emotionally exhausted adults who had just been to Auschwitz when Gabriella began to tell her story, suddenly all conversation stopped, everyone listened attentively. I remember seeing the adulation that she received from the students who traveled with her for whom she and Robert were like rock stars because they were speaking from one generation to another, calling from one generation to another, communicating an urgent truth, a compelling message.

Gabriella remembered and recounted the evil she encountered, and the suffering she endured not to dwell on pain but to deepen conscience, to enlarge memory and broaden responsibility. It is thus that the ancient Israelites responded to slavery and the Exodus. It is thus that its survivors responded to the Shoah. She has enlisted young students as her allies. She speaks to all who will listen again, again, and again.

Gabriella transformed victimization into witness, dehumanization into a plea to deepen our humanity.

Gabriella has given us non-survivors and, young people she teaches, non-descendants of survivors, an important legacy and imposed significant responsibilities.

We were not witnesses, yet we have lived in the presence of witnesses.

The students she travels with are the last, the very last to live in the presence of survivors. We can become witnesses to the witnesses, we must become such witnesses, and if we do, we must be prepared to become upstanders not bystanders, creating a world that is more humane and more compassionate, more decent and less apathetic to the suffering and anguish of others.

Survivors are acutely aware that when they leave the stage of history, it will be incumbent on others to finish their unfinished task. Looking at the world around us, its brokenness, its hatred, its racism, its resurgent anti-Semitism, they understand that their task is far from complete.

Yet they also understand Rabbi Tarfon’s admonition: It is not your responsibility to finish the work but you are not free to desist from it either. (Ethics of the Father 2:16). So teach they must, and listen we must.

Michael Berenbaum

American Jewish University

Los Angeles, CA

“We Remember Them” by Gabriella. Each leaf on this sculpture represents a person from our family, 75 of whom perished in the Holocaust. The leaves have already fallen from the tree, just as those who perished are no longer with us.

We Remember Them by Gabriella. Each leaf on this sculpture represents a person from our family, 75 of whom perished in the Holocaust. The leaves have already fallen from the tree, just as those who perished are no longer with us.

Foreword

by Michele M. Gold

"The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring

people I have had the privilege to meet."

—Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The exact year I met Gabriella was 2006, and I would marvel at her liveliness and her sunny disposition. I learned a great deal about Gabriella through her artwork and our many levels of conversations. I admired her dedication and how she tirelessly shared her story to students and communities far and wide. Understanding that through powerful and inspiring storytelling, you can make a difference and that she has, making her mark on thousands of people.

In 2008 my mother passed away. It was devastating, and I’m still healing from the enormity of my loss. It was in the depth of my sadness that Gabriella and I started working together on a project about the Kindertransport. An idea that Gabriella had was to express the plight and struggle of the kinder (children) and through her creativity, capture the imaginations of hundreds of students and visitors, giving them hope and determination to embrace their pathway to a good and righteous life. My mother was one of these kinder, so for me this was not only an intensely personal project to immerse myself in to, but it also gave me a measure of comfort, and for this, I will always be grateful to Gabriella.

For many years Gabriella has been among the Los Angeles March of the Living delegation. This is an annual educational program bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice in all its forms. Thousands of students march in solidarity from Auschwitz to Birkenau, and Gabriella is there marching with them, in the forefront, as their guide, and as a firsthand storyteller. She has become the symbol of the past, present, and future.

Gabriella’s memoir is almost as captivating as she is. Her memoir chronicles her life, her resiliency, her courage, and tireless determination, often expressed through her stunning artwork. Her dedication to her beloved family and to making a difference by sharing her story, by giving talks and caring lectures, always with great dignity, are just a few of her many qualities. It is an honor and privilege for me to share with you just