Beyond the Holocaust: An Immigrant's Search for Identity

By Sylvie Heyman

Beyond the Holocaust: An Immigrant’s Search for Identity is Sylvie Heyman’s personal narrative as a refugee, with her family, from Europe during World War II. It chronicles their journey to Brazil, the harrowing experiences as they were smuggled to Argentina, the challenges faced in those dictatorship countries and the final immigration to the United States of America when the author was a teenager.
In the second part of the book, the author blends her personal experiences with scholarly theories about language, nationality, and identity to better understand the long-term struggles and challenges that immigrants face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982243128

Sylvie Heyman

Sylvie Heyman published her first book: Make it a HABIT! Creating Health and Happiness for your body, Mind, and Spirit at the age of 79 in March 2017. The book was an extension of the author’s experiences in the healthcare field, and covers a span of 50 years as a Registered Nurse, Chiropractor, Acupuncturist, and Health Coach. At the beginning of the “habit” book, the author describes her origins and her reasons for pursuing careers in the healing arts. This led to writing her memoirs about her family’s escape during World War II and how her past molded her life.

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Copyright © 2020 Sylvie Heyman.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-4311-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4313-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4312-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902860

Balboa Press rev. date:   05/04/2022

DEDICATION

T o all the women, men, and children who have been, and continue to be, victims of persecution and hate crimes throughout the history of mankind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M y deepest gratitude to my son Paul Tobin and my granddaughter, Perri Tobin, whose insistence to document my experiences as a refugee and an immigrant became the driving force for this book. A big shout-out to my editor, Susan Suffes, who helped organize the sequence of events throughout the chapters. I also want to thank Carol Gelles for her feedback in the marketing aspect of this book and Dr. Bonny Norton for her enthusiastic feedback and continued support.

Profits from the sale of this book will be donated to:

The Together Plan

The Jewish Tapestry Project

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1   Out of Europe: 1940

Chapter 2   Brazil: 1940-1944

Chapter 3   Argentina: 1944-1952

Chapter 4   Arrival to the United States of America

Chapter 5   From Dictatorship to Democracy

Chapter 6   From Who Am I to Who I Am

Epilogue: On Gratitude

AUTHOR’S NOTE

S everal years ago, my son Paul asked me if I would write my memoirs about my experiences as a Holocaust survivor. His request surprised me but not nearly as much as he was when I told him I was not a Holocaust survivor. What do you mean you’re not a Holocaust survivor! he shouted as if I had betrayed him with false information. Didn’t you tell me that you and grandma and grandpa fled from Belgium during Hitler’s invasion and travelled through Europe during the war? Sure, I said, but we were refugees from the Holocaust, not Holocaust survivors. There is a significant difference between these two."

Paul couldn’t understand the difference and he is not the only one. Many people lump the whole experience of Jews living through WWII as a Holocaust survival story. I don’t see it that way. Surrounded by a cloud of Holocaust possibilities, we were constantly on the go, running from the Nazis as they shadowed us wherever we went. But we got away virtually unscathed—at least physically. A miracle we were grateful for. That doesn’t negate the long-range effect that the war would forever be imprinted in our lives but our experience could not be compared to that of the real victims who experienced violent trauma. Still, an unexpected military attack forced us to leave our home and suddenly become displaced and in flight from one country and continent to another with fake documentation. Left behind were countless numbers of Jews, the real victims, survivors and heroes of the Holocaust. They are the ones who experienced the horrors that I did not. Imprisoned in ghettos; thrown into overcrowded trucks like cattle and taken to concentration camps for torture or death; hidden away in basements, attics, underground tunnels, churches, and orphanages; beaten, raped and starved; they witnessed the murder of their children, parents, and siblings. They lived in mortal fear, hoping for a miracle. They prayed not to be taken away to concentration camps or, too late, prayed for rescue. Experimented on and humiliated, stuck in a whirlwind of terror and despair; how can those who did not experience their lives understand how they felt?

So although my family and I lived through the war, the war didn’t live through us. And while I am a refugee of World War II—a refugee from Nazism, a refugee from the Holocaust—I could never call myself a Holocaust survivor. And that has haunted me throughout most of my life, not because I had not endured the horrors of the Holocaust but because I wished I had.

I assimilated into American culture around the same time that details of the Holocaust were becoming common knowledge. They hit me pretty hard, all those questions people were throwing at me, like I was some kind of hero for surviving the war. They listened to my story and made a big fuss. You should write a book about it they insisted. All that prodding created much attention in my life that I enjoyed but also made me feel like a hypocrite pretending to be someone I was not. There were times when I wished that I had been an Anne Frank. The guilt that I had survived was tucked deeply into my psyche and what emerged was a nationality identity conflict. In this book I focus on that conflict, and through the writing of this book I uncovered that deep-seated secret I had kept from everyone and most of all from myself.

I had thought about putting my memoirs to paper many times, not so much to share my war story but rather to use my experiences as a refugee to increase awareness of the struggles and challenges that most immigrants face as they assimilate into a new culture, initially and beyond survival. I decided to shine a light on the specific struggles of the adolescent facing life in a new country so that the issues are recognized and better understood by teachers, counselors, mental health care providers, immigration lawyers, social workers, and the public at large. I want to give a voice to the thousands of immigrants who continue to suffer silently, and often times subconsciously, from the consequences of their being uprooted, leading to various forms of post-traumatic stress syndromes.

To make all that possible, the first part of this book focuses on my personal account as a refugee of WW II, escaping to dictatorship countries and immigrating to the United States at age 14. Without this part there would be no reference for the rest of the book. The journey takes the reader from Belgium, to France, to Portugal, to Brazil, where, with fake diplomatic visas, my parents and I are smuggled into Argentina where I lived for 8 years, two of them in a convent.

The account of my family’s escape from the war is seen through the lens of my mother’s stories, told to me years later when I started to ask her questions. I was around 8 years old when the questions began to pour out of me. My parents, together with relatives and friends, were constantly engaged in intense discussions, sometimes in whispers and other times loudly with agitation. They told a puzzling, piecemeal story. It took a very long time to begin to put the pieces together and understand what happened and why.

Many years later my cousin Richard Lerner made a DVD called Out of Europe in which he interviewed several of my cousins who had gone through that journey with us and were old enough to remember details that led to their immigration to the United States. That, along with the recordings I made of Mamy’s story, revealed new details about that journey. This was an enormous help because, when the events took place, I was a toddler and had no recollection of it. Yet explosive, scary sounds haunted me for years in nightmares as well as hypersensitivity to loud noises that I couldn’t understand or explain. Finally, I found out what they meant.

Armed with all this information I thought it would be relatively easy to reconstruct the story of my family’s escape in 1940. Alas, that was not the case. Reading through all the copious notes I had taken from these sources, I became aware of several gaps of information as well as discrepancies. Unfortunately, there are very few family members left to ask questions, and those who are still alive and remember their experiences couldn’t fill all the gaps.

So the events that I am sharing were fraught with challenges for discovering exact details, times, and locations. But the drama and fear of what my family lived through is authentic.

Now is the Time to Tell My Story

The second part of the book takes place after my arrival to the United States and describes in detail my trials and tribulations as I assimilated into American society. Here is where I integrate these events with research, scientific data, case studies, and social action to give voice to immigrants who share similar experiences and to increase awareness of the complexity and impact of the immigration process.

No one who has lived through a war emerges totally unscathed. While every person’s experience is unique, he or she faces demons, terrors, and fears. Today, as I read about the millions of refugees displaced by prejudice and war, I am reminded of the burden that leaving a home—and country—can weigh on a person.

My experiences left me with deep empathy for the suffering of others, yet it did not leave scars that would never totally heal. In many ways, growing up under the hovering cloud of fear and evil helped me build faith, strength, and gratitude. I was reminded of this again on August 12, 2017, when neo-Nazis waved swastikas on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia alongside Klansmen and white supremacists, one of a series of anti-Semitic sentiments and crimes seeping out of the gutter all over the world. No matter when or where we live, there will be those who push an agenda of hate.

This book became a reality when I documented my feelings as an immigrant way past the initial refugee experience, in other words, Beyond Survival. There’s a lot that goes on after the survival mode. The refugee in crisis is in the survival mode, and it is imperative that we make room for the new wave of refugees that need assistance through the initial process. I wrote the book as a narrative story easily read by professionals and lay people with the hope that it will be a useful tool to better serve the immigrant.

My story is probably similar in some ways to that of many other immigrants. The full integration to a new society varies from person to person. For me, it was a series of personal struggles starting with language and national identity, and as I dug deeper into the caves of my memory, not knowing what I would find, I discovered an even more painful state of being, agonizing because I had kept it repressed all those years. Once I faced my demons and let them out of the closet I could resolve many issues I carried inside of me.

This book provides an inside account of the challenges and problems that immigrants may experience and reaches out to those who work with them to keep in mind the needs of their clients beyond survival. I believe that my struggles will offer insight and empathy for those that are living similar experiences. I owe it to them to tell my story.

"You who are passing by

I beg you

Do something

Learn a dance step

Something to justify your existence

Something that gives you the right

To be dressed in your skin in your body

Because it would be too senseless

After all

For so many to have died

While you live

Doing nothing with your ilfe."

Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo (1971)

PROLOGUE

A Family of Refugees

T housands of Jewish refugees have been immigrating to the United States since the 1660s from all over the world, especially those oppressed in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Like them, Mamy’s family was headed there before World War I. However, destiny brought them instead to Belgium where she was born. It was from there that we, along with my father and various relatives, were forced to leave our home and begin our long journey as refugees. The story of that journey cannot be told without describing its protagonists—my parents—first, for without them I have no story to tell.

My Mother, Mamy Jeanne (Jenny)

Lerner Greizerstein/Grey 1913-2009

In 1908, seeking refuge from escalating anti-Semitism, my maternal grandparents uprooted their large family of seven sons and one daughter, left their small hometown of Brozozów in southeastern Poland, and headed toward the United States. On their way, they stopped in Belgium where they would find life to be so good that they decided to stay there and make it their home. That’s where, in 1913, Mamy and her twin brother, the last of my grandmother’s 14 children, were born.

Too weak after a long and arduous labor and delivery, my grandmother asked a close friend, who lived in the outskirts of Belgium, to take care of her babies for a short time until she felt stronger and back on her feet. When she first took them in she had a baby of her own and it was just natural that she would nurse another set of infants alongside her own. But when my grandmother was strong enough to take them back, threats of an impending war in Belgium forced the family to flee back to Poland. It made sense to leave