Human Rights & Holocaust Art

Yom Kippur Service
September 30, 1998

Background note by A. K. Segan, March 31, 2021:

This is the text of a 2 person reading I assembled for reading during the day service at Yom Kippur, at Congregation Eitz Or, Seattle, Wednesday, September 30, 1998. Ms. Chapman and I read this during the Yizkor (memorial) portion of the service.

LYNN: My name is Lynn Chapman… (introductory remarks)

AKIVA: My name is Akiva Segan, Some of you may know me by my English name Ken. Many of you may be familiar with the Holocaust education art series I’ve been working on for some years now called Under the Wings of G-D. The drawing on the easel, near the stairs to the balcony, is from the series. It depicts Giettel, who you will hear about in our presentation, when she was a baby. Please take a few minutes between services to view it. I’d like to reassure parents here that the “wings” drawings offer a safe format to introduce the Holocaust to children.

In the summers of 1984 and 85 I studied in Cracow, Poland… I traveled through the Polish countryside and elsewhere in Europe where our people were hunted down and murdered. In autumn 1985 I returned to Cracow and lived in a dormitory that had been a Gestapo torture and killing center. My time in Poland had a profound impact on my life. The blood of our people saturates Poland’s cities, towns and countryside, and the bones of our people are buried under the rubble of its cities and in its soil.

LYNN: Buried in the chaotic building rubble that was once Jewish Warsaw are bodies of thousands of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Above are giant concrete apartment buildings, the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters, and a couple of metal plaques on building walls noting the ghetto fighters headquarters and the Jewish writers guild.

AKIVA: To walk around this part of Warsaw today you would not know that hundreds of thousands of people were crammed into a few square blocks here 50-something years ago. One hundred thousand of our Jewish family died in the ghetto, several hundred thousand more at the Treblinka death camp, where many of Warsaw’s Jews lie now. No one prepared the bodies for proper religious burial, nor was Kaddish recited. They were grandmothers and infants, brothers and sisters, assimilated city dwellers in modern European clothing, Chassidic Jews in 18th century garb, and poverty stricken farm families from the countryside. Many were Jews from other European countries deported by train to the ghetto prior to deportation to Treblinka’s gas chambers and other camps.

LYNN: Today we remember. Today we will say Kaddish for the murdered, and for the one million or more of our people who perished for whom we have no names. But we know that each of them had a mother and father, each once had a name. It is our legacy to remember them today to offer us some meaning to their shortened lives.

AKIVA: I have seen pieces of bone of our Jewish family in the earth at the Auschwitz death camp site, and I have walked through some of the barracks still standing at the Birkenau death camp. I felt the presence of the dead that Elie Wiesel so movingly wrote about in NIGHT, his first book of Holocaust memory drawn from personal experience. It is said that even today, no birds chirp there.

I walked up the guard tower and looked down at the railroad tracks where the Nazi Angel of Death Josef Mengele made the selections: gas chambers or slave labor. I gazed at the remains of a vast city built for the sole purpose of mass murder, what Wiesel calls the Kingdom of Night. I looked at a place where Jew and gentile alike perished in a Hell on Earth, where pure evil held sway over goodness for too many long years.

I got off a bus in a small Polish city near the Czech border where the Jews had been gathered one morning and shot. I stood there on a hot, sunny and dusty July day 52 years later, closed my eyes and tried to imagine this.

This is our collective Jewish story, our loss and our, sorrow, and we address it at Yom Kippur.

LYNN: The Holocaust is typically dealt with at our Pesach Seder’s and at Yom Kippur through the recitation of city and town names whose Jewish populations vanished and the names of concentration and death camps where many perished. They have strange sounding foreign names like Chelmno, Drancy, Sobibor, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Reciting names becomes an abstraction similar to the murder of 6,000,000. As we find it difficult to understand the killing of 10,000 people, how can we understand the systematic slaughter of millions?

AKIVA: To make the Holocaust something more than numbers and a rote teaching of history, Lynn and I will read excerpts from an interview I arranged in 1994 between a student reporter for the UW Daily, named Inara, and Mrs. Chana Lorber of Seward Park.

LYNN: Mrs. Chana Lorber is the only survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto in Washington state. Over the years Chana turned down numerous requests for interviews, but she finally agreed to be interviewed then because she couldn’t stand hearing about Holocaust deniers and their hate campaigns against Jews targeted to children and teens. I will read excerpts from quotes in the article by Chana, and Akiva will read excerpts which will provide you with background information.

AKIVA: Chana Lorber was born in Warsaw, the youngest of seven children. Her parents owned a butcher shop in the Polish district of the city. The nine - member family lived in a two - bedroom apartment at the back of the store.

LYNN: “We were all very close. We were always together.”

AKIVA: In 1940, one year after the Germans invaded Poland, Lorber’s family was forced to leave behind their business and home and relocate to the ghetto.

LYNN: “We only had time to pack a few clothes when they told us that we had to leave”

AKIVA: Two of Chana’s sisters and one brother were taken away to a concentration camp in the 1st year of her family’s 3 years imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto. On April 27, 1943, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the family members who were still alive were together for the last time, and they were taken away by cattle train to the Majdanek death camp. Chana’s mother had already died in the ghetto of starvation or disease.

LYNN: “One hundred and forty people were shoved into each car…they did not give us any water.”

AKIVA: Chana’s father was murdered on arrival at the camp.

LYNN: “The Nazi’s took one look at his long beard, his sidelocks, and they shot him right before my eyes. It was so sad, because my father had always believed in the Germans, all through what was happening. He trusted them. He was convinced they were going to help us. He carried a backpack with him at all times, packed and ready for the day when the Germans would come and save him.”

AKIVA: Men and women were split up on arrival, and mothers from their children. Chana’s five year old niece Giettel was taken away from her mother, one of Chana’s sisters.

LYNN: “I saw Giettel once. I tried to pass her food through a fence that was dividing our parts of the camp. She grabbed onto me through barbed wire and she would not let go. She was

screaming and crying in Polish, ‘I want to live. I want to live.’ Even at five years old, she knew what was happening. After Giettel died, my sister didn’t want to live anymore.”

AKIVA: When it came time for the Nazis to identify “the unfit” camp members who would be sent off to the gas chamber, Chana’s sister wordlessly slipped into the line of those who had been marked hor death. Chana was eventually shipped from one death camp to another: Auschwitz.

LYNN: “There were so many crematoriums at Auschwitz. They were everywhere you looked, running at all hours of the day, no more than 100 yards from you.”

AKIVA: The word “Holocaust,” according to Webster’s dictionary, is derived from the word “holocaustum,” which means a whole burnt offering. Everyday, Chana watched people around her disappear.

LYNN: “You would go off to work in the fields and come back to find that half the people in your barracks were gone. Forever.”

AKIVA: The key to one’s survival at the death camps often lay in another’s death, she explained.

LYNN: “When we arrived at a camp, the SS guards wold tell us that if we wanted to live, we would have to wait for someone else to die. We had nothing. Our only means of survival was to steal from someone who had died – a blanket, a piece of bread.”

AKIVA: In 1944 Chana and another surviving sister were transferred to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and later from there to a munitions factory in Germany where they were slave laborers. She still regards the day the Red Cross came to liberate the prisoners at this factory with disbelief.

LYNN: “We just couldn’t believe that they were there to save us. Any time anyone had ever come for us before, they were taking us to a death camp.”

AKIVA: They were taken to Sweden, where they were given food and clothing.

LYNN: “There was so much food, our bodies could not handle so much food. Some people died from eating too much. The Swedish called in doctors, who determined how much we should eat. We were so angry. What could they be doing with all the food they weren’t letting us have? Giving it to the pigs?”

AKIVA: In Sweden, Lorber saw children again for the first time in two years.

LYNN: “We weren’t allowed to see any children in the camps. Whenever I saw a child in the street, I would cry.”

AKIVA: In 1952 Chana and another sister who had survived with her in two concentration camps and as a slave laborer in the German factory moved to Seattle where they had an aunt. She marrried another Holocaust survivor, and they owned a men’s clothing store in the Pike Place Market for 38 years. Chana never talked about her Holocaust experiences. Sometimes at night, as she and her husband were falling asleep, they would tell each other stories about what had happened, but Chana left her tellings to the darkness. Until now.

LYNN: “Maybe five years from now, there won’t be anyone left to tell this story. No generation must ever forget what happened to me, to my family.”

AKIVA: She wants to make sure that no one forgets what happened to her mother, father, sisters, brothers, and niece: images of the dead that will never smile at her from a shelf above the mantelpiece. A roll call of names, faces and ages that all bleed into one – a permanent black mark on the face of history, as indelible as the numbers on Chana’s left arm.

P.S. note by Akiva, March 31, 2021: Following the reading we asked the congregants for a minute of silence and to breathe deep and exhale. Then we led the community in singing Hnei mah tov.