(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Seth Katz this evening.

Dr. Katz is a very active member of the Jewish Federation, the Jewish community.

He's a professor at Bradley University and has had much theater experience as well.

And when Leslie came to us with this idea, I couldn't think of a better person to serve as our MC tonight than Seth.

So thank you Seth for being here.

- Thank you, Sue.

This evening we'll have six speakers, the children of Holocaust survivors.

Our first speaker this evening is Alan Gordon.

Alan Gordon has lived in Peoria for 31 years.

He and his wife, Beth Weinberg Gordon, have been married for 42 years and have one daughter, Shayna Weinberg Gordon, an attorney for the city of New York.

Both Alan and Beth are members of the Havakadisha in Peoria, the body that is charged with the care of bodies of deceased members of the community between their death and burial.

He'll be speaking about his father, Yakov Eliyahu Ben-Eliezer Gordon, and his family.

- One death is a tragedy, six million is a statistic.

That's the paradox of the discussion of the Holocaust today.

We need to focus on the one, each and every person who is murdered by a bullet, gas chamber, medical experimentation, stoned, axed, hung or burned is a tragedy.

Six million tragedies in all.

I'm here to share my family's story, the tragedy as well as the triumph of survival and success.

My name is a Abraham Eliezer Ben-Yakov Eliyahu Gordon.

My father, Yakov Eliyahu Gordon, Jacob as he was listed on his driver's license, Jack as he was known in the community and Yuncle among his family and intimate friends, was born Iwje, a small town in Poland, which had about 3,000 Jews.

It was near Lita and Vilna.

The seventh of eight children, he was born on the second day of Suko, September 22nd, 1918, to Eliezer and Khaya Gordon, my grandparents, hashem yikom damo, may their blood be avenged.

He joined his brother a Abraham, hashem yikom damo, and Ellie Mellakh.

Yitzker could be born in 1923 and sisters Henya, hashem yikom damo, Baila and Peninah.

Another sister Gittel died when she was about two.

Though they hailed from Iwje, around the beginning of the 20th century, Khaya immigrated to America, to New York City where she met and married Eliezer.

My grandmother was the great, great granddaughter of the Maskil Asan, Raff Abraham Maskil Asan who traced its dynastic roots to the Shlak Kodish, Rashi, King David and the prophet Samuel.

Being so deeply religious, she could not contend with the Sabbath desecration that was so rampant in New York City at that time and she begged Eliezer to move back to Iwje and he agreed and they were faded to die Al kiddush Hashem for the sanctification of God's name.

Eliezer owned a flower mill purchasing wheat from local farmers, grinding and selling in a store to both Poles and Jews in Iwje.

The Jews lived in the center of the town surrounded by their Polish tormentors.

They were poor by today's standards but they were well off.

Daddy once said that they had a two-story home in Iwje, one of the few in town.

Khaya would arise early in the morning and go to the Vasican, the sunrise minion at the synagogue to answer Amen to the men's cottages and stay for at least one more so that she could answer Amen again.

She always made sure that the poor people had challah and they had wine for Shabbat.

Daddy grew up in a loving home where everyone shared duties of work and family life.

He went to the Jewish school in Iwje and many times helped his father, Eliezer in the flower mill or his brother aver Abraham in the store.

In 1933 or 1934, daddy's two sisters, Baila and Peninah immigrated to Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, in what was the second period of immigration from Eastern Europe, the first coming the early 1900s.

They settled there, married, raised families and survived the horror that raided the rest of the family.

Somewhere between 1937 and 1939, daddy married a neighbor, a woman named Serah Asora Smoka, he would've been between 19 and 21.

She would've be been between 17 and 19.

Realizing the need to make a larger income for his new wife, he left to go to Russia for work.

He found work, packing and loading barges to go up and down the River Volga.

Until the day he died, Daddy could pack a 14 day trip in a carry on.

That is a skill he taught me.

Beth will often say, it won't fit and somehow it does.

Daddy would come home as often as he could to see Sora and his family and return back to Russia.

In 1941, daddy and Sora had a son named Coleman who was Khaya's father.

He wanted to find work closer to home but his sister Henya urged him to return to Russia.

It saved his life.

I was in my 20s before I learned that daddy had been married and had a child prior to his marriage to my mother.

Big shock.

But in Iwje, life was comfortable but changes were on the horizon.

On September the first, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Iwje though was under Russian occupation due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which was signed August 23rd, 1939, which was a non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia.

The Russians were autocratic and vicious enforcers of communist ideals and principles but nothing like the Nazis, yimakh shemo, may their names be blotted out, and they would come later.

By the end of 1940, daddy had been mobilized to serve in the Russian army.

I used to joke with him that he should have asked the Russians for military pensions, he never did.

When the Germans invaded Russia, daddy was assigned to an anti-aircraft gunnery.

He used to say that you could always tell when the Messerschmitt were coming because he said they had a whine to their engine due to the jet light quality of the planes.

By July or August of 1941, Joseph Stalin, yimakh shemo, growing distrust of the Poles and the Jews led him to issue an edict; go to the eastern front, that is go fight the Nazis or go to Siberia.

Daddy, his brother El Mellakh, Mellakh and all the Jewish men they knew opted for Siberia.

So Daddy and Mellakh spent four years working in a concentration labor camp in Siberia.

To be clear, there were numerous concentration camps all over Eastern Europe during the war.

For the most part, they aided the Nazis and the Soviets in producing material for the war efforts.

Those were quite different from the death camps whose only purpose was the extermination of Jews, most of which were in Poland.

For four years, summer with a swarming insects and the heat and the Siberian winter with the bone numbing cold, the winds, the snow, the ice, every day the men divided into teams, marched into the forest and chopped down trees to support the Soviet war machine.

And each team had a quota, a specified quota, a number of trees downed each day.

Make your quota, extra bread, extra food.

Miss your quota, substandard rations and the team leader was either abused physically or publicly or both.

Eventually daddy became team leader and from that time on, his team always, always made their quota.

I asked, "How were you able to do that?"

He said, "What are the Russians gonna do?

"Go out and count the tree stumps?"

He said, "Not a chance."

Even so, food was not enough.

Daddy said they used to make forays at night to the fields of the farms to take vegetables and some grain to supplement the rations provided by the Russians.

The physical toll on the bodies and the monotony on the minds of the men was enormous but it paled to what was happening to the family in Iwje.

After the Nazis invaded Russia, they moved on all Russian held Polish territory.

By June of 1941, the Nazis entered Iwje and began the systematic brutalization of the Jews.

Men were forced to assemble in the marketplace in the morning and the Germans would count groups of workers that were taken at the orchards and forced to pick fruit for the Nazis, tend the trees.

They might be beaten or worked without water or food.

And that gave the poles the free reign to act with impunity, they began to rob and loot Jewish homes.

They began to turn Jews into the Nazis.

They participated in the killing of Jews.

To the day he died, Daddy hated the Poles worse than the Nazis, hated.

He would always say the Nazis were on a mission and fulfilled their mission with diligence.

But the Poles, the Poles relished seeing Jews tortured and die.

He said there was a special place in gehinnom, in hell, for them.

On Shabbat, August the 2nd, 1941, Tisha B'Av, the saddest day in the Jewish year, my uncle Yitzerk was sent to weed out grass near the train station in Govia, a nearby town.

And when he returned to Iwje, there was an assembly of 225 men in the town squares surrounded by German soldiers, Polish and Belarusian policemen.

These were the best of Iwje's men; fathers, sons, brothers, mainly the spiritual leaders, professionals, all except doctors, merchants.

In short, the elite of the town.

They loaded them onto trucks and took them to the Stonewicze Forest where they were machine gunned to death.

By May, 1942, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile Nazi killing squads were sent into towns and villages to murder the remaining Jewish residents.

On May 12th, 1942, the 25th of ER 5702, the remaining 2,500 Jewish residents of Iwje were taken to the Stonewicze Forest and murdered.

My grandfather Eliezer, my grandmother Khaya, my aunt Henna, all gunned down.

Also Uncle Abraham's wife, Sora, their child, Tiba, Uncle Mellakh's daughter, wife, Devora, and the children Paya and Lubia also perished.

Only Daddy's wife, Sora and son Colman survived.

However, they were gas to death in Sobibor on September the 19th, 1943.

11 members of my family totally gone.

Uncle Yitzerk escaped from his work camp and he joined the partisans in 1942 in May and fought against the Nazis until the Russians retook Poland in 1944.

Among the groups he fought with were the Bielskis, made famous by the movie "Defiance".

When the war was over, Daddy and Uncle Mellakh sought to return to Iwje but were told there was nothing left and they should not go back.

In fact, the house was still standing.

They ended up in a displaced persons camp in Furlenforg Germany, hour and a half north of Berlin.

The DP camps were holding areas for people trying to immigrate to another country.

Daddy and Mellakh were in Furlenforge for four years and so they were sponsored into the United States.

At that time, the United States had a quota in place and to gain entry, a relative or another party had to vouch for your care once in the United States.

Uncle Mellakh got sponsored in first by a relative in Lakewood, New Jersey.

He loved the community which at that time comprised of two major industries, chicken farming and hotels.

Mellakh became a chicken farmer and he spent the rest of his life enjoying the simplicity.

Daddy was sponsored in a 1949 by an uncle in Midlothian, Texas named Jake Bender.

Bender was Daddy's mother's maiden name.

Midlothian had a population of about 1,100.

Uncle Jake had a dry good store which means the store sold everything from cotton batting for quilts to luggage, clothes, hats, shoes.

If it wasn't food or hardware, it got sold.

While Daddy was there who was befriended by the editor and the wife of the Midlothian newspaper and they taught Daddy English which was his sixth language; Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and German.

Daddy was a quick learner and by mid 1950, he was ready to be out on his own.

He and Uncle Jake heard of a dry good store being sold by two Jewish brothers in Denison, Texas, a big town of 25,000.

They came to see the store, Daddy liked what he saw and he bought what became Gordon's Dry Goods and eventually becoming Gordon's Western Wear and a career in retail began.

In either late 1952 or early 1953, Daddy was introduced to my mother when she came to Dallas to visit her brother and sister-in-law.

They dated, wrote letters back and forth.

Daddy traveled to Oklahoma City a number of times and in August 1953, they married and spent the next 48 years in Denison raising four children in a home like Daddy's imbued with Yiddishkeit, love for Israel, and a commitment to the Jewish people.

We kept kosher, celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Shabbat, Hanukkah and the holidays.

And even though there were no eligible marriage partners in Denison for me and my three siblings, each one of us married Jewish spouses and continued to raise our family as Jews.

If there's a sad note in this story, it's that Daddy's name, Gordon, ends when my brother and I die.

Neither of us had sons to carry on Daddy's family line but Daddy's name and memory will not die out.

Today there's a grandchild, my sister's grandson, Jack, who proudly carries the name Yakov Eliyahu.

This is why it's so important to tell this story, to preserve the story for future generations.

To know that there were no statistics, there were people just like you and me, each of them adding up to six million tragedies.

- I'd like to welcome now Mike Bailey, editor-in-chief of Peoria Magazine who will be reading Stella Grimminger's story.

- So as you just heard, I am Mike Bailey.

I am editor of the Peoria magazine.

But far more importantly, I am here representing Stella Grimminger who I spent some time with just yesterday and talking to her and learning about her family's story and more specifically her parents, Jack and Mary Teva.

Beyond them, we are here for her grandparents, Kim and Esther Teva, her Aunt Eddie and uncles Jacob, Marcel and Australia, all of whom perished at Auschwitz during the Holocaust of World War II.

They deserve to be named, all were among the six million Jews of the then nine million Jews on Earth who died.

Only her father Jack survived, the last of the Teva family to serve as a living witness to what transpired.

He survived because really a stroke of luck, if you can call it that.

Her father had enlisted in the Greek military in 1942 when the Nazis showed up in his hometown of Salonika, Greece in 1943, rounded up his family and put them aboard trains to the concentration camp.

He was in Athens with the Greek army.

Injured and presumed dead, he would never again see his parents or his siblings.

He himself would be thrown on a cart with other dead bodies where he remained overnight until it became safe to escape.

He suffered frostbite to which he would ultimately surrender his toes, a lasting wound from the war among others.

A Greek family in Athens and I would love to pronounce this name but I'll try, the Carpine Yatotis, I believe, they hid him at great personal peril from the occupying Germans.

He would be forever grateful to that family and would maintain contact with them for the rest of his life.

In 1951, he immigrated to the United States, ultimately settling down in Denver, Colorado with his wife and three children, Stella among them.

He would return to Greece after the war to search for his family, only to discover that they were not coming home.

Then he came back to the States and like our previous speaker never really talked about it.

It's not uncommon among survivors of that era.

And speaking with Stella and I really thank her and her courage in sharing her story, she just wants people to know that in an era of rising antisemitism, when so many are sowing seeds of doubt, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary that it really happened.

She said to me, just like we do not want to forget the Twin Towers of 911, you do not want to forget the Holocaust.

It's important.

Though she had no direct experience with the suffering her father endured, the trauma of the Holocaust changed her, became part of her DNA.

Though she would never meet the members of her extended family, the loss of them, their absence at holiday gatherings, at birthdays and graduations and weddings, the absence of their influence made a difference in her life.

It creates a hole and she wants people to know that the experience, even if you didn't experience it directly, it changes a person.

"When I hear of people being turned away "who are mistreated badly in other countries," she said, "it breaks my heart."

You know, the golden rule applies across virtually all religious traditions.

What she wants you to know and what I wanna share with all of you tonight is that if only more of us followed it, the world would be a far, far infinitely better place.

On a personal note, I would say that many of us lost grandparents or other family members sometimes before we were born.

We were deprived of their attention and their influence and it makes us different people.

But with the Holocaust, there was a loss to mankind and that loss was of the achievements in science that never occurred, in music and literature and so many other disciplines.

But there's also something far more difficult to quantify and that is the damage it did to our souls.

The world is a lesser place for the loss of 2/3 of the world's Jews 80 years ago.

And it is critical that we continue to provide testimony as we're doing tonight and indeed that the world never forget.

So thank you.

(audience applauding) - Our next speaker, Sheldon Katz, is the oldest of four brothers who grew up with a father who survived the camps during World War II.

As with many in the second generation, very little was spoken or known about his father, Manfred's experiences until much later.

Sheldon has lived in the Peoria area since 1984 and has been active in the Jewish community as a member, board member and officer of Agudas Achim Synagogue, a Jewish federation donor and volunteer and he has participated in the design and construction of the Peoria Holocaust Memorial.

Sheldon Katz.

- Thank you Seth.

First I'd like to also thank Ken Burns for making the documentary.

You know, Ken, if we had only known back in Ann Arbor at Pioneer High, we could have talked about this.

But the fact of the matter is, as you heard, my father didn't speak his experiences during the war, at least not as we were growing up.

He told me later that when he first came to this country, he did tell people, but they thought he was crazy and so he shut up.

It wasn't until 1992 that he'd found the time and the courage, the energy to write down his story which I read last night again, stayed up too late.

As we were growing up, we didn't think about the unusual things about our household, that's just what we knew.

I didn't understand that there was anything unusual about laying out my clothes on the chair as I went to bed, I thought for the next morning.

I realized much later that it was just in case we needed to flee in the night.

We like I believe other second generation, we'll tell you the food at our house.

We did not say, I don't like that, I'm not gonna eat.

We enjoyed everything we were served and nothing was ever wasted and that's something I can't shake to this day.

There are many other things that I'm sure I and the others whose parents endured this will gradually realize about themselves.

There's a lot being researched about that but I'm not ready for that yet.

Don't know much about it.

My father was born in a little tiny town in Germany called Bicefort.

It's not too far from Kassel.

There were approximately 300 people in this little village surrounded by Green Mountains.

It was agricultural.

My grandfather had a small, well, call it a farm, it was about three acres.

And they grew everything they needed to eat and use in the household.

They had chickens, they had goats, they had other livestock.

And my grandfather, although trained as a baker, made a living primarily by buying and selling horses.

And they grew hay for the horses in another plot of land and they had a fairly large house in the town with what mounted to a drainage ditch out front and there was a river running through the town and there were two, essentially two Jewish families in that town, five households.

There was my father's family and his uncles, a couple of uncles and aunts and cousins on his mother's side.

And then there was another Jewish family in town.

And they had a small synagogue.

They did not have a rabbi.

Many of their experiences are like small communities in this country in fact, trying to maintain their religious identity.

And they got along with their neighbors.

They bartered for the things they needed with the things they grew.

And my father did tell us about how they used to make sausages and prepare smoked meats and things like that.

And that's probably where I picked up my gardening.

Although we didn't have much of a garden when I was a kid.

Of course, you probably all familiar with history what happened in the 30s and the laws that started restricting Jews.

My father and one of his cousins were the only Jewish students in the school and they had to sit in the back because their teacher was already long before Hitler came along anti-Semite and things only got worse.

As long as the two of them stuck together, they could fend off their classmates.

But his cousin, Lotar and his family left for South America and my dad was on his own.

Things became untenable at the school.

My grandparents tried to arrange as every Jewish set of parents did in Germany for their children to go somewhere else, anywhere else but the world was not inviting.

They did finally get papers for both of them to actually to go to Montevideo Uruguay where the other side of the family had already relocated.

But on Kristallnacht, the papers were destroyed and so was their house for all intents and purposes.

And they fled, coming back only a few days later to see their ruins, gather up a few things and go back to Kassel where my father's older sister, my Aunt Elsa, had been hired as a maid by a Jewish family there.

And they all moved into one room in the family's home.

It wasn't really big enough because shortly before all this, my father had another baby sister arrive, Doris.

And with the baby and the older sister and him and parents and another family member, there just wasn't room so my father had to go live in an orphanage in Kassel.

But there was a Jewish school which was a vast improvement over what he was used to.

And he attended that.

Things deteriorated further and eventually they got what most Jewish families in Germany got the orders to be resettled.

And they got on a train with what little they could carry and rode for three or four days under terrible conditions although it was a passenger train, and arrived, they didn't know where, turned out to be Riga in Latvia.

And they were ushered into the Riga Ghetto which had recently been cleared of the Latvian Jews.

As you heard earlier, most of the Jews were exterminated by being marched into the woods, digging trenches and being shot and killed into those trenches.

They're still discovering mass graves in Eastern Europe.

And the number has far surpassed the six million that is commonly referred to.

I don't know what they're up to yet but I wouldn't be surprised if they reached seven million.

In Riga, things were terrible.

But they scavenged what they could, moved into a room that had been recently vacated in a house and there they subsisted for several months until my father received notice that he had to leave and he was transported by truck to one of the concentration camps.

One of the distinctions I'd like to make at this point is it wasn't Buchenwald, it wasn't Auschwitz that you've commonly heard of, there were many, many camps.

And one of the things that I mistakenly thought of is, well, great, he wasn't sent to an extermination camp.

He corrected me and said they were all extermination camps.

They didn't all have gas chambers, they didn't all have crematoria.

They all had a systematic approach to working or starving the Jews to death.

And that was the intent.

Every survivor has an amazing story, otherwise they wouldn't be a survivor.

And every page I turned was another revelation of what luck.

But of course, these things happened otherwise I wouldn't have happened.

He got various work details in a fishery.

He had never heard of sushi so he tried to stick with the smoked fish.

He tried to smuggle things out.

Of course, that was extremely risky.

But he had good fortune to run into one of his uncles at one of the camps.

And his uncle was a great benefit to his morale because at that time, the time he first left his home in Bicefort, he had not been bar mitzvahed yet.

He had his bar mitzvah when they were living in Kassel.

And he went to Riga, approximately he was 14 and went through the camps 15, 16, 17, 18 years old until the end of the war.

He had other details of where he was fortunate and able to get some extra food.

Finally, after three moves, he ended up in Danzig in the shipyards.

He was told by a French Jew, you need a skill to survive.

And he was taught welding.

And the arrogance of the Germans was amazing.

They had Jewish concentration camp prisoners responsible for repairing and building submarines.

There I will digress for a moment to when I was a kid, my family, me and my three brothers took a trip to Chicago to the museums, the Science Museum for instance.

And we saw the sign for the submarine, captured submarine, and of course, we kids we loved that idea.

And we kept pestering as only three, me and my three brothers could do that.

We'll go see the submarine, let's go see the submarine.

My dad didn't wanna go see the submarine.

We finally dragged him and we went through the submarine.

Have any of you been through that?

And I heard him say, and later he doesn't remember this, but I heard him say, "I know why they captured this one."

He learned to weld so well, he knew how to make a really rotten weld look fine.

And he and his fellow welders sabotage every submarine they worked on.

Heavy repair, went out to sea, had to come right back, be repaired again.

None of the new ones worked right.

This ties in well with the fact that after the war, when he came to the United States, well, we'll get to that.

They finally, as the war progressed, started hearing rumors of the allied advancing, especially the Russians advancing.

And they started to have some hope of liberation.

At that point, hope had long had been lost.

And as the allied forces advanced, they were marched out of the camps and into the countryside by their mostly Latvian guards, supervised by the SS.

The guards didn't have the heart for it but the SS certainly did.

And as emaciated as they were, they were forced to march in the winter from barn to barn, from place to place that had been abandoned by the local civilians fearing the advancing Russian army until one night they heard wrestling but they were too weak to look into it.

And the next morning discovered the guards had vanished and so did the SS.

And they did not consider themselves free, they gradually came to terms with being refugees and continued to scavenge for food.

Were nearly killed by the Russian army until one Russian officer came up to my father and pointed to him and said, "Yid?"

And my father nodded, "Yid."

And that's when they could stop hiding the women that were with their group because of the Russian soldiers.

He said they wouldn't have any more trouble from the Russian army but they couldn't provide much help either.

My father, as I mentioned, was sort of a farm kid, right?

They came upon a cow.

How there was a cow wandering on about in the midst of all this, I haven't asked him yet but no one knew what to do with the cow.

There was a lot of debates, should we milk the cow or should we eat the cow?

And it fell to my father when they decided to eat the cow to figure out how to go about that.

Well, he had never actually witnessed the shochet in the ritual killing of the cattle that they raised and used for meat but he had a good idea of how it went and they were able to eat.

But they had to be very careful because after starving for so many years, my father estimated that his weight at that point was about 65 pounds.

If you eat too much, you could die from it.

And some of them did.

They also had the presence of mind to realize that the Russian area where the Russian army was, was no place to be after the war.

So they decided to move west.

They didn't get as far as the allied occupied areas when Russia closed down the border in Germany but they managed to sneak through anyway and were greeted by American soldiers.

At this point, from what they had scavenged along the way, they were in a little bit of shape and my father had picked up Yiddish prior to that.

He spoke German, of course, liturgical Hebrew but they didn't speak Yiddish at home.

He learned that mostly from Latvians in the camps.

And he even picked up a little Russian and he studied some English when he was in school.

And so he offered up his services to the allied forces to interpret and to the American consulate.

And he worked for the Army for a little while.

And he worked for the American consulate because you can imagine what they were dealing with, so many displaced people speaking so many languages, he could help.

This was his first opportunity to have access to the postal system.

And so the first thing he did was write a letter to his older sister who had, excuse me, ah, yeah, my Aunt Elsa and Uncle Frank.

That's a good time to put that picture up.

His sister had gotten out before the war started, was sponsored by a family in Delaware who didn't have any children of their own and had the means and so she went to live with them.

So my father knew she was in Delaware.

So he wrote a letter Elsa Katz, care of the Jewish Federation of Delaware.

And you know, she got the letter.

And that is why I dedicate so much effort to Jewish Federation to this day.

That's what the federation does.

She got the letter, discovered she did have a living relative and spent the next month working to bring him to the United States but they didn't exactly know where he was.

So my Uncle Frank being an Air Force lieutenant, on every leave or even without leave, he would get on a plane, go to one of the displaced persons camps and check the lists looking for Manfred Katz.

And he found many that were not my father until the high holidays in Frankfurt.

And Uncle Frank got on a plane to Frankfurt, he was not exactly supposed to be there, he was hiding in the back until one of the officers on the plane decided to stand up and stretch his legs and walked to the back of the plane and discovered him there and asked, "Are you supposed to be here?"

And of course he said, "No, sir."

They said, "Why are you here?"

And my uncle Frank explained and the officer said, "Well, when we land, you'll have use of my Jeep "and I wish you luck."

It was General Eisenhower.

You should look into Eisenhower's memoirs and writings about what he found when they won the war.

So in Frankfurt, Uncle Frank started asking around and he saw another Manfred Katz on the list.

And where do you go on Yom Kippur if you're a Jew?

Even a Jew who at this point wasn't sure God was involved in anything on this planet.

My father went to shoal and standing there towards the front, he eventually felt a tap on his shoulder.

And there was a guy in the American uniform and asked, "Are you Manfred Katz?"

He said, "Yes."

"Do you have a sister named Elsa?"

He said, "Yes."

He had been found and they proceeded with getting him to the United States.

He was on the first transport of European refugees to the United States.

Did I leave anything out?

Yeah, I left a lot out.

I hope your questions will bring it out.

- Thank you, Sheldon.

Our next speaker is Julie Luner.

Julie's mother, Gerda Nothmann Luner, was a Holocaust survivor.

She was the only survivor in her immediate family.

She was imprisoned in many concentration camps and extermination camps including Auschwitz.

Gerda wrote her memoirs in 1978 and these were later published.

Julie has lived in Peoria since 1994 where she has been active on the Holocaust Committee of the Jewish Federation of Peoria.

She presents about her mother's experience to school groups at the Peoria Riverfront Museum and at schools.

(soft somber music) (soft somber music) (soft somber music) - She's six years old, she goes to the park with her parents and she sees that they're taking down the German flag and raising the swastika.

And she has no idea what's happening.

She is a six year old child but she can tell from the looks on her parents' face that something very bad was happening.

Things got worse and worse.

Mom is a six year old, her sister is a four year old.

She has friends who say, "I can't be friends with you anymore "because you are Jewish."

Her father is immediately fired from his position as a federal judge losing their source of income.

My mother was no longer invited to birthday parties.

My mother and her sister were no longer allowed to attend public school.

Imagine, no, you can't go to your regular school so a Jewish school was set up.

And her friends, her former friends were at the other school.

Got worse, Jews needed to carry identity cards.

Jewish synagogues were burned, the Jewish shops were destroyed.

Life became very desperate for my mother's parents.

They wanted to come to the United States but the United States didn't want them.

They had a quota and they had met their quota of Jews.

They tried Canada but they didn't want any more Jews.

They tried Ecuador, Argentina, India, China, anywhere but nobody wanted any more Jews.

So things were getting very dire and so my grandparents decided to send the two girls to the Netherlands where they had a contact and to live with foster families.

It had to be two separate foster families but safe in Holland until they were able to reunite as a family.

And they always thought that they would reunite as a family.

She had to learn Dutch.

She was put be a year behind in school.

But she did love her foster family very much.

And she continued to be able to see her sister Vera during school breaks.

(soft somber music) (soft somber music) She had to say goodbye to her foster family and she was all alone in the world.

She's in a concentration camp, just the end of living for her.

She's psychologically shut down.

And my mother had an opportunity to work for the Phillips Company, the electronics company you know about.

Mr. Phillips, Fritz Phillips had decided to save as many Jews, Dutch Jews as he could.

And my mother was able to be part of that group making electronics for the Phillips Company which they had persuaded rhe Nazis were very critical to the war effort.

They were still sent from camp to camp, six or seven in total including Auschwitz, she was in Birkenau for an entire month.

That's where they had the gas chambers.

They saw the selection of other groups getting off of the freight trains with men here, women there and you know you go in this line.

(soft somber music) Birkenau was a desolate place, there was no tree, no blade of grass, not even a weed anywhere.

We were marched into a large hall where we were made to strip and then sat around and waited for hours.

First there was disbelief, then a kind of shock set in which numbed each of us.

There were no tears though at that moment, we realized that all those who had come before us were dead and that it was highly unlikely that we would fare otherwise.

And she realized once she was there that she was all alone without her family anymore.

It was at Auschwitz that she learned that her parents transport of everybody had been murdered.

And then she was also able to find out when she was in Auschwitz that her foster family had also been murdered.

So here she is in Auschwitz, Henya, the barracks elder decided to put us to work.

She made us run back and forth with bricks in our hands.

We all lost weight rapidly.

We knew that there was only one way out of her canal.

Why did we fight to save a lot?

Why did we fight to stay alive?

Why did we not drink the infected water when we were so thirsty?

I remember one night when I had to use the bathroom badly, I squeezed my way, excuse me, I'm gonna cry.

(sobs) I squeezed my way out of the shelf and asked the guard for permission to step outside to relieve myself in the wheelbarrow.

I stepped outside, suddenly here I was alone.

The electrified barbed wire seemed to hum softly to glow.

I saw the soldiers on the guard towers outside the camp.

I watched the flames coming steadily from the chimneys nearby.

And I looked up and saw the cloudless sky and saw the constellations that my fati had shown me and about which he had told me stories.

It was one of the strangest moments in my life.

The silence, the absence of others, the chimneys and the stars above.

It was one of the strangest moments of my life.

A moment that often comes before my eyes even now.

(soft somber music) (soft somber music) (soft somber music) She got married to my father, Charles Luner who helped her greatly in her recovery.

Gave birth to my sister and myself, loved being a mother.

My mother did suffer from depression and low self-esteem.

She always wished that she had been able to get some proper psychiatric help which wasn't available after the war.

And I remember when they started, when the Vietnam vets were coming back and they started talking about PTSD.

My mother read about it and she was like, "Well, I have that."

You know, she had all the symptoms of it.

You know, she had nightmares.

She was triggered by seeing large German shepherds.

She was triggered by seeing people in uniform.

As the the years went on, I saw growth.

She tried very carefully not to traumatize my sister and myself.

And so she didn't want to tell us horror stories.

I mean, we always knew she was a survivor, she had a number on her arm.

We always knew we were Jewish and that the Holocaust was a big part of our life.

(soft somber music) In 1978, there was a docudrama on TV called "Holocaust", about a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

And it was very widely watched in the United States.

And my family watched it.

And it was unreal because it was everyday people and showing healthy people in a concentration camp, it was just so whitewashed compared to what we would see today.

And so she decided to write her memoirs for her family, for Vera and myself.

This was the first time, I was 18 years old.

My sister was 21.

And this was the first time we had heard those stories.

For my mother was very emotional.

And I remember she would sit at her typewriter and type all day in the little elite type.

And I'd come home from high school, I think I was a senior, and I'd immediately go and read what she had written that day.

And so I was very interested in finding out