Karen Treiger's Blog, page 5

Book Discussion with the Seattle Holocaust Center – May 27 1-2 PM (PDT)

I will be joining forces with educator, Paul Regelbrugge and other Holocaust Center for Humanity staff, in an engaging and highly interactive discussions about My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story.  Open to all. This will be an informal chat and is intended to examine enduring text-based questions and themes, teaching approaches and strategies, and anything else you wish to share and discuss regarding this book.

It will be on Wednesday, May 27, from 1-2 PM (pacific time).

Come and join in the discussion.  Here is the link with more information and to register to join the conversation.

https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/programs-events/593-novelideas-book-discussion-with-paul

 

Thursday, May 14 at 7 PM – First ever Zoom Book Presentation

 

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I hope this note finds you all well during the challenging time we find ourselves in.

I want to let you know that I will be doing my first ever Zoom book event with Auntie’s  Book Store – an Independent Book Store in Spokane.  I was supposed to be in Spokane this week, but that didn’t happen, so we are doing it via Zoom.

The cool think is that you can attend from anywhere.

Here is a link to the Facebook Page that has the zoom link and password:

https://www.facebook.com/events/684081002357921/

Please share with friends.  There will be a breakout room in the middle and questions and answers at the end.

Thanks. Karen

 

 

Shaya (Sam) Schloss – A Remembrance

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Shaya (Sam) Schloss died last week at the age of 97.   He died of the Corona virus that is taking so many beautiful people.  He was Sam Goldberg’s first cousin (mothers were sisters).  He grew up not far from Bagatele.  Like Sam, he was the sole survivor of his family.  He was buried last Thursday and this morning, his children, grandchildren and great-grand-children put together a beautiful memorial on Zoom.  I am grateful that we could participate, though we are 3,000 miles away.

I met Shaya and his wife Faiga 36 years ago when Shlomo and I got engaged.   They welcomed me to the family with open arms and open hearts.  But it was in 2015, when I decided to write a book about Sam and Esther’s experiences during the war, that our relationship deepened.   Shaya and I had long telephone and in-person conversations. He spent hours telling me stories about his own life and Sam and Esther’s lives.   He visited the Goldberg farm in Bagatele many times and he was at Sam and Esther’s small wedding in December of 1944 and he even lived with them in Ostrow, after war, when Fay was born.

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[Photo:  Shaya (Sam) Schloss and Shmulke (Sam) Goldberg at Föhrenwald c. 1947]

In 2015, I took a writing class at the University of Washington and our first assignment was to interview someone and write a short profile.   I asked Shaya if he would be my subject.  He said ok, so long as I only write about the early years.   I agreed.  In his memory, I share the profile with you.

Shaya, you live on in my heart and in the lives of your children, grand-children and great-grand-children.  Thank you for having such an amazing memory and being willing to share so much with me.

A World Destroyed: Profile of Sam Schloss

By: Karen Treiger

“My mother,” sighs Sam, “was beautiful, charming and sweet. The last time I saw her, she pushed me out the door screaming: ‘Run, run away — into the woods.’” Run he did, as fast as he could. It was the day after Yom Kippur, 1942. Then he was alone in the Polish woods – no family, no food and no place to sleep. He would never see his family again – his world was erased.

Now, a 93 year old great grandfather with wispy grey hair, a gentle, warm face and a welcoming smile, Sam Schloss lives in Monsey, New York. There are some stories he won’t tell, but a glimpse of his world destroyed – “this I will tell you, so you should know,” he says.

Surrounded by three acres of farm land, the Schloss family lived in a wooden house with a tin roof that was host to the Polish village’s only general store. “Our village, Jasienuce,* had three policemen, a mayor, a post office and a jail,” Sam says. Being one of only three Jewish families in the village made it a tough neighborhood. Although he had a few non-Jewish friends, most of Sam’s classmates made his life miserable.   The name calling, kicks and punches directed his way toughened him up, but was not his idea of fun. He stayed close to home after school, studying Hebrew and Jewish texts with his father and helping in the store.

When he was nine, Sam’s parents agreed that he could live with his Aunt in Komorow, a larger village – 50% Jewish.   He was thrilled to get away from the bullies. While mornings were spent at public school, afternoons were dedicated to studying at the cheder. Though he missed his parents, with so many Jewish friends, Sam felt at home. He loved his Aunt and Uncle and shared their warm and gracious home. His Aunt was a successful businesswoman, but the couple had no children. Sam had delicious food, warm clothes and hugs. Nonetheless, after a year, his father brought him home. He felt that the style of Jewish education in the Komorow cheder was not the type he wanted for his son.

Back in Jasienuce, “my father again became my teacher,” he says. Sam’s father was a Torah scholar, educated at the famous Slonim Yeshiva and in Berlin’s cantorial schools. He was sought out as a cantor in the big synagogues of Ostrow for the High Holy Days. “My father tried to make me a meshoyer to accompany him a little bit. He would sing and I was supposed to sing along – bum, bum.”

Sam’s mother, who taught him life lessons that sustained him through the horrible years of war, could daven in the synagogue and was versed in Hebrew, Russian, Polish and Yiddish. Together his parents built a life, raising four children. But this life was not to last.

The latent dragon of Polish anti-Semitism was aroused by Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The antisemites of Jasienuce boycotted the Schloss’s store and pelted rocks at their home. Sam’s mother was hit in the head, requiring stitches. They could not stay. In 1934, when Sam was 12, the family moved to the nearby town of Ostrow. Sam was delighted to live in Ostrow. It “opened a new world – Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends, Jewish schools,” he tells.   Sam attended public school and joined a Zionist Youth Organization where girls and boys gathered to listen to lectures by Zionist instructors and watched films of life in Israel. “We used to sing and play all kinds of games,” he recalls with a smile.

Between 1934 and 1939 the Schlosses settled into life in Ostrow.   Sam’s parents opened a store, similar to the one in Jasienuce. Not caring for any of the trades he tried out after graduation, Sam worked in his parents’ store.   In the store, he felt useful and satisfied that he was helping his family.

The best day of the week was the Sabbath. “We had good food and Shabbos Zmiros (Sabbath songs).” In Ostrow, the Schlosses lived in a Jewish neighborhood and their house had windows that faced the main street. “We had people stopping over in front of our windows listening to the beautiful melodies,” he described.

Then, on September 1, 1939, eight days after Germany and the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression Pact, slicing Poland in half, the Germans attacked.   Bombs exploded everywhere. Three days later, the Germans army occupied Ostrow. Nazi SS Officers vandalized the synagogues, burned the Torah Scrolls, broke into Jewish homes and shops, robbing property and beating Jews.   “They loaded up merchandise,” Sam recalls, “– truck after truck and shipped it off.”

Yet again, there was no choice. They packed up and ran three miles to the Soviet –controlled area of Poland. They found a place to live and managed to keep the family together for the next three years. They were safe – for a time.

Until that day — the day after Yom Kippur 1942 – when the Nazis ordered all Jews sent to “labor camp” — a euphemism for death camp.** That is the day, when Sam’s mother pushed him out the door, saying: “you are young, you can survive and then you will be able to tell the world.” Sam ran, ran for his life.

*pronounced Yashnitz

** Before WWII, Polish Jews made up Europe’s largest Jewish population — 3.3 million.

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[Photo:  Bruce Schloss, me, Shaya Schloss, and Jack Schloss]

Here is an old post about my visit with Sam a few years ago when the above photo was taken:

https://soyouwanttowriteaholocaustbook.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/a-visit-with-shaya-schloss/

 

The Magical Qualities of Time

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What did time feel like to Sam and Esther living in a pit in the forest during the Holocaust?

I have thought quite a lot about this since Governor Inslee’s “stay at home order” of March 23. That was 39 days ago. I was staying at home for a week before that since Shlomo, my husband, had a direct contact with a Covid19 patient and was in quarantine. This time period has at once seemed like “forever” and like “no time at all.”

Many people have discussed how the days blend together and how “time” seems like a foreign idea, a friend from the past. Time has taken on a new quality that’s impossible to define. If time has become so distorted for us during this Covid19 crisis, I can only imagine what it felt like for Sam and Esther. They hid together, in and around the Stys family properties, for a year. Esther had already been there for some time when Sam escaped from Treblinka in August of 1943. What did that year hiding together feel like for them – forever or a minute?

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I got some insight into “time” over this past month, as I have been reading Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain. One of the central themes of the book is time. The “hero” of the book is Hans Castorp, a young man who goes to a Tuberculosis Sanatorium in the Alps for a three-week visit with his cousin who is a patient there. When he arrives, his stay is scoffed at. “Three weeks were as good as nothing up here,” the narrator explains, “they had all told him that right off. The smallest unit of time here was the month.” (Mann 192)

The daily routine at the Sanatorium is the same: wake up; breakfast; walk in the mountains (“morning constitutional”); second breakfast; rest cure (laying in a lounge chair outside):, lunch; walk in the mountains (“afternoon constitutional”); rest cure; tea; etc. As each day went by, Hans Castorp began to lose sense of time. After Hans had “settled in” and had the schedule “down pat,” the reader receives this bit of philosophical wisdom:

“It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it ‘pass,’ by which we mean ‘shorten’ it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. . . . . What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony – uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling.” (Mann 122)

At the end of the three weeks, Hans Castorp is diagnosed with Tuberculosis himself and must stay on as a patient. The doctor orders that he remain in bed for four weeks. His experience as a bed-ridden Tuberculosis patient echoes what I have been reading in the paper about Covid19 patients in bed for days and weeks on end.

“[F]or now it is enough for us,” we are told, “to remind everyone how quickly a number of days, indeed a great number, can pass when one spends them as a patient in bed. It is always the same day – it just keeps repeating itself.” (Mann 217)

After Hans Castorp had been at the Sanatorium for a year and a quarter, his Uncle James came to visit, to get him to return home to “the flatlands.” Hans tells his Uncle that he was hoping for a total cure and that the doctors told him it would be another six months. “’My boy,’ his Uncle says exasperated, “’Have you gone completely crazy?’ A vacation was what it was, a good year and a quarter long, and now six months more! In G-d’s good name, a man didn’t have all that much time!” (Mann 509)

In reaction to his Uncle’s statements, “Hans Castorp laughed calmly and gazed briefly at the stars. Yes, time – as for human time, well, James would have to revise any ideas about time he had brought up here with him before they could discuss that topic.” (Mann 510)

Later in the book, we hear of a group of miners who were buried by a cave-in and remained in the dark until they were rescued. When asked how much time had passed, the miners said three days. In fact, it had been 10 days. “The phenomenon is possible,” the reader is told, “because we lack an internal organ for time, because, that is, if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating elapsed time. . . . One would think that in such an agonizing situation time would have had to have seemed longer to [the miners.] And yet it had shrunk to less than a third of its objective proportions.” (Mann 644)

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Coincidentally, I am listening to Ariana Neumann’s new book When Time Stopped.  It’s a memoir in which the author researches and explores her father’s war time experiences in Prague and Berlin.  While he was alive, her father barely spoke about his life in Europe.   In her research, she discovers that at one point, her father hides, alone, in a dark, narrow space in his family’s paint factory. She connected a conversation that they had had, many years earlier, about his hobby of taking watches apart and putting them back together.   The author asked her father why he was so interested in watches? “Sometimes you just feel that everything around you has come to an end,” her father told her, “you feel that you are completely alone. That time is frozen. And that you are invisible. . .. He explained that when he first felt this he had been isolated and afraid and had pried open his watch case to verify that time was indeed passing.”  [Neumann Chapter 10]

So, here we are in our own version of “time.” I take some comfort in the words of Thomas Mann that time is not the same for all people and in all places. For Sam and Esther, the year in hiding together may have felt like ‘forever” or it may have felt like “a minute.” No way to know. They never discussed that feeling (that I know of). For Hans Castorp, time became something to contemplate and to let go of. Hans remained in the Sanatorium for seven years, only leaving because of the outbreak of World War I.

Until the “stay at home orders” are lifted, we shall remain in our time warp. Even then, no one knows when some semblance of “the old life” will be back. But these days at home, without our usual “external clues,” we must let go of old concepts of time and embrace the life we find ourselves living. Perhaps years from now, we will tell our friends and family that the time we had to stay home because of the Covid19 Pandemic flew by “in a twinkling.”

Stay safe and I wish a full recovery to those who are ill.

Sources:

Neumann, Ariana, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain

 

 

Gratitude In A Minute – Now on iTunes

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Gratitude may not make your life longer, but it will make the life you live better.

Gratitude in a Minute, the 60 second podcast, is now on:

iTunes

Today’s Episode:  The Smile of a Baby (inspired by my 7 month-old grandson)

Gratitude in a Minute is also on:

Alexa URL
Spotify URL
Google Play Podcasts

Yom HaShoah – Lesser Known Story – Haim Arbiv and the Jews of Libya

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[Photo: Majdanek]

On this Yom HaShoah, 2020, while we are all at home pondering the meaning and preciousness of life, let us pause and remember the millions who died and those who suffered during the Shoah. Thanks to one of the highlighted survivor profiles on the Yad Vashem website, I learned about the Jews of Libya who were forced into concentration camps in 1942. This is a very different story than Sam and Esther or the Jews of Poland, but it’s meaningful to learn what happened to Jews living in different countries.

First some background:

Jews lived in Libya for thousands of years – some say since the 10th century BCE.  Between 1912 and 1943, Libya was under the control of their neighbor across the sea – Italy.

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[Photo: By Conte di Cavour – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]

On the eve of World War II, there were 22,000 Jews living in Libya. Zionism was strong, the Rabbinic Council was active, and Synagogues were filled on Shabbat and Holidays. But beginning in late 1938 and continuing into 1939, the Italians enacted anti-Jewish legislation. Jews were removed from municipal councils, public offices, and government schools. Their citizen papers were stamped with the words “Jewish Race.”

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[Photo: Synagogue in Libya (Yad Vashem Photo Archive)]

Mussolini was a great ally of Hitler. So, it’s not surprising that the German army and the SS arrived in Libya. In late 1940, the British and the Germans were battling it out in Libya. The Germans pushed the British out, and with their victory, the treatment of the Jews worsened. The Germans forced most of the Jews to move to Tripoli or Benghazi and deported many to labor camps.

Thus, enters the story of Holocaust survivor, Haim Arbiv. He was born in Benghazi in 1934. In 1942, along with thousands of other Jews, Haim and his family, crammed into trucks, were driven 1,200 kilometers to Giado concentration camp.

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[Photo: Haim Arbiv.  Yad Vashem website.]

Before the horrific journey, his parents managed to hide gold coins inside loaves of bread, suitcases and belts, hoping it would help them survive. In Giado, every family received a small amount of living space inside a shack, with only bedsheets separating them. The food at the camp consisted mostly of meager, moldy bread. Hundreds of Jews died of hunger, fatigue and disease in Giado, among them Haim’s newborn niece. Haim’s immediate family avoided starvation thanks to his elder brother and sister, who bought bread from local Bedouins in exchange for the gold coins they had smuggled from home. This trade was very risky, because the guards would shoot whoever approached the camp fences.

In late 1942, Haim learned that the Jewish men in the camp were being concentrated to be murdered. A distraught Haim ran to find his father, but the execution had been called off.

After their liberation by the British army in 1943, the family returned to Benghazi. They rebuilt their destroyed home, and Haim attended a Hebrew-language school set up by soldiers from the Jewish Brigade. His connection to Eretz Israel grew stronger.

Late in 1947, as the fighting between Jews and Arabs in Eretz Israel intensified, Jews began suffering harassment in Libya. Haim’s grandfather was murdered by rioters. The family’s home was attacked, but an Arab neighbor fired a pistol to disperse the rioters and took Haim’s family into his home until tempers cooled.

In 1949, Haim and his family went to Tripoli and boarded a ship to Israel. Due to his command of Arabic, Haim served in the IDF Intelligence Corps in capacities that involved gathering intelligence, conducting research and interrogating prisoners. He was a writer for the IDF magazine Bamahane, and when he traveled to Cairo with the entourage of Prime Minister Menachem Begin to cover the peace talks, he scored an exclusive interview with the Egyptian chief-of-staff.

Haim is a volunteer chess teacher in kindergartens and senior citizens clubs. He has a son, a daughter and five grandchildren.

This narrative tells that being a Jew in Libya was not easy during the war and it only got marginally better after the war was over. At first (1943-1951), Libya was controlled by the allied forces – the British and the French.   From 1948 to 1951, and especially after emigration became legal in 1949, 30,972 Jews moved to Israel. This was most of the Jews of Libya.

Libya achieved independence in 1951. In 1969, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi came to power, there were approximately 100 Jews left in Libya. Gaddafi confiscated all remaining Jewish property and most of the 100 Jews left. It was thought that in 2002, the last known Jew in Libya, Esmeralda Meghnangi, died. However, it was discovered that an 80-year-old Jewish woman, Rina Debach, lived in a nursing home in Libya. In 2002, she moved to Rome, where she had family. After this final exodus, no Jews live in Libya. A sad end to a long and rich part of Jewish history.

On this Yom HaShoah, let us light a candle to illuminate the darnkness and think of people who are suffering all over the world – whether from persecution, war or the covid-19 virus.   May we all know only health and peace.

Wikipedia sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Libya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_colonization_of_Libya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Libya

Yad Vashem:

https://www.yadvashem.org/

 

 

 

146th Passover in Seattle (stay with me till the end – special Passover treat)

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[Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra]

 

 

Guest Blogger – Joyce Klein – Jerusalem and the Passover Egg Miracle

 

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[Joyce Klein is my friend.  She grew up in Seattle and as an adult moved to Israel.  I share this piece she wrote because it is a wonderful story to remind us about how kindness can be a part of our world – if we just make it so.   Thank you Joyce for allowing me to share this with my readers.]

“What a world,” the Wicked Witch said as she melted. I thought I’d send you this only-in-Jerusalem story as the world seems to be melting in front of our eyes.

When they announced the lockdown, except for buying medicine or food, people here truly freaked out. Among other things, they started buying huge quantities of eggs for Passover 2 weeks ago — I mean a shopping cart full of egg cartons for a family, far more than anyone could eat. So suddenly there were no eggs to be found.

I had 5 eggs in one of those egg trays on my refrigerator door and was hoping to find more. Yesterday, I took something out of the refrigerator, knocked the tray and it fell! One egg bit the dust, but the other 4 were just cracked, and I managed to salvage them and was allocating them to the most important things I wanted to make. But I needed a whole egg for the Seder Plate!

Then Nabil called. Nabil is a Palestinian who was in my Arab Jewish Theater group 30 years ago. He is now a lawyer in East Jerusalem, and we keep in touch. He called to see how I was doing and if I needed any help. I asked him if there were eggs on his side of town. He told me not to worry, and that he would get eggs for me. I asked for 2 dozen.

He texted me to ask if they had to have a hechsher, which did make me laugh. I mean, those of us kosher people who travel all over the world rely on hard boiled eggs for survival, wherever we may be! I said no.

Then he showed up with 30 eggs, in two flats — they looked like farm eggs; there was even some chicken shit on a couple of them! And they were really big! He left them outside my door and backed up 6 feet so I could retrieve them and talk to him. He wouldn’t let me pay for them. I asked where they were from and he asked if I really wanted to know. I said yes, and that they looked like they were from a farm. “Well, they are,” he said.

It turns out that the Jews had figured out that there were eggs in East Jerusalem and emptied the shelves there, too. But Nabil has friends who lives in a village near Jericho — in the West Bank — and they have a farm. So he called the husband up and arranged to meet him at the army checkpoint on the way to Jericho in order to pick up eggs for himself and for me . As he put it, “It took a military operation, but I got your eggs for you!”

He showed up wearing rubber gloves and a serious mask — and needing a haircut, as we all do, since the barbers and hairdressers are closed. But he saved me from an eggless Pesach and he’s my hero!

That’s today’s entertainment. I hope all of you are coping, and healthy. I found out this morning that the husband of one of my sister’s lifelong friends from Seattle is on a ventilator in a New York Hospital. That’s up close and personal for sure.

But someone said to me yesterday that perhaps this awful virus is also showing that people are capable of amazing levels of chesed. Everywhere, the younger people are staying away from senior citizens (us!) to protect them — and offering to help them with whatever they need. Like Nabil.

I’m going to think about chesed at my solitary Seder and be grateful as I look at the egg on my Seder Plate.

Joyce Klein

Gratitude in a Minute – Now on Spotify

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Gratitude in a Minute, a daily, 60 second, podcast is now available on Spotify.   Listening to the podcast will only take 60 seconds of your day, so you will likely have to think of some other things to do as well!

Just search on Spotify for Treiger Gratitude – it pops right up.  Amazing.

Live it, mean it!

Stay healthy.  Karen

GRATITUDE IN A MINUTE – Flash Briefing – Launches on Alexa Today

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Our world is upside down.  I feel nervous, distracted, and worried.   One of the main themes of My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story, is gratitude.  I find a focus on gratitude more important now than ever before.  So, I am launching a podcast about gratitude.

Gratitude in a Minute is a daily, 60 second, pod cast.  It will take you on a journey of gratitude, forgiveness, kindness and love. It begins with a family’s horrific story of survival amid the horrors of the Holocaust but ends with a reminder to be grateful for every day and for everything with which we are blessed. Whatever situation you find yourself in, Gratitude in a Minute will help bring what’s important in the forefront of your mind. We are all heroes of our own lives, and we all have so much to be grateful for.

As of today, it’s available on Alexa.

Here is the URL to subscribe on Alexa:

https://alexaguy.com/gratitude

The URL below is a place where people can listen to earlier episodes (an archive) AND if you don’t have an Alexa, you can listen here (one day late).

https://gratitude.alexaguy.me

Reviews really help.  They raise awareness of the podcast.   Since it’s brand new, I would deeply appreciate it if you would write a review.  Click here to write a review:

https://alexaguy.com/treiger

Please feel free to share your thoughts and feelings of gratitude with me – info@karentreiger.com