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Children of the Holocaust Memorial in Ramat-Hasharon (photo: Avishay Ticher) |
On Holocaust remembrance day this year,
Ma'ariv newspaper published a special supplement dedicated to stories of some Holocaust survivors living among us in Israel. Every such story, folded in a concise double page spread with a photo of the survivor as a child and of photo of him or her nowadays, could have feed a whole book or an entire movie full of drama and tension. And who knows how many such stories have not been told even in a newspaper?
Such, for example, is the story of choreographer
Ruth Pardes, a pioneer of dance therapy, born in the
ghetto of the Polish town Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, February 1940. Following her husband's advice, her mother left the town with her baby Ruth, still too young to understanding the horrors around her, and moved to the capital Warsaw, hoping to find a safer place. The mother pretended to be a Christian woman, and during the air raids ran with her baby to the city shelters.
In 1942, when Ruth was two years old, her mother learned that her husband was still alive, in the ghetto of
Sambir. She took her daughter and went there. After she wrote a letter to a relative, asking him to send clothes for her and for her daughter, a Polish man named Alojzy Plewa who served in the German army, arrived to the ghetto, carrying a suitcase with clothes sent by the relative. Ruth's mother dared to ask him if he would come the next night to take with him the two-year-old girl. Plewa agreed and the next night came near the wire fence to receive the girl transferred to him over the fence.
First Alojzy took Ruth to his home, but when it raised the suspicion of Poles who knew he was not married, he gave her to his parents in a pro-Nazi village near Gdansk. His parents were devout Christians, and since Plewa told them that Ruth was his illegal daughter, they called her Antoska and nicknamed her Saint Mary's daughter.
In 1945, after the war was over, Ruth's mother – whose own story of survival is too long to be told here – came to collect her five-year-old daughter from Plewa's parents. They traveled to Warsaw, where the mother arranged a counterfeit pass for herself and for her daughter, previously owned by a woman who perished in the Holocaust. Then, the mother found another child to join them – since according to the dead woman's pass she had two children – and they all boarded a ship en route to Eretz-Israel.
In 1978, after Ruth's mother applied for
Yad Vashem to recognize Alojzy Plewa as a
Righteous Among the Nations, he came to Israel and Ruth first met the man who had saved her life and the lives of other children. Plewa said that after Ruth left the his parent's village she became a Christian saint there: After the war, when the Soviet army arrived to Polish villages which collaborated with the Nazis – the soldiers used to burn, pillage, rape women and sometimes even murder. But when they arrived that village, some villagers ran to them, asking for mercy due to the rescue of a Polish girl – Antoska. The Soviet soldiers acceded to the request and went away. Following this occurrence, the villagers erected a large cross on a hill near the village and called it St. Antoska Hill.
Another story in the mentioned above supplement is the survival of the Israeli demographer
Sergio Della-Pergola. Sergio was born in Trieste, the grandson of Rabbi Raphael Della-Pergola of Florence. In September 1943, when he was one year old, Sergio's parents were forced to flee Trieste that was already occupied by the Germans, and went to Florence, hoping to find help from relatives and friends.
When all their documents specified "belongs to the Jewish race", they stayed for a few days in a small pension, and then had to leave to a mental hospital directed by a friend of Sergio's father. When one day the place was surrounded by German soldiers, Sergio's father turned to the guard at the gate in German, and firmly, as if he were a senior, told him: "I'm going now to find a taxi. When I get back – open the gate and let the taxi come in!". The guard saluted, Sergio's father returned with a taxi and took his wife and child back to the small pension.
From there they moved for six weeks to the apartment of a kind lady, while she left for a while to stay in a convent and teach religion. In one of his secret "sorties" outside, to buy bread and milk under the watchful eyes of the Germans, Sergio's father made a contact with the Italian underground aiding the Allies, and supplied them information he learned from listening to conversations between German soldiers hanging around, confident that no one might understand their language. After providing valuable information, the underground helped him move with his family to neutral Switzerland, with other Jewish refugees, soldiers deserting from the Italian army, and British and American pilots escaping from captivity.
The instructions given to them by the underground were as follows: During the drive to the border the train would be so-called bombarded from air, to make the German soldiers ran away from it. The escapees will have to jump out of the coaches, look for an immediate hide and after a few minutes return to continue the journey to Milan.
In the small village of Canova, near the border of Switzerland, Della-Pergola family went down with the other escapees and according to a command they began to run to the boats dock, where they met an unknown person who ordered them to run toward the nearest mountain. Near the mountain another unknown person informed them that at night they would cross the border to Switzerland by skilled smugglers. The head of baby Sergio was covered with a sack. It was 24 December, Christmas Eve. Snow around and sharp cold. On the other side Swiss policemen were waiting for them to lead them to the police station. Sergio's mother was told that she and her baby could stay but the men would return to Italy. When the woman began screaming, the restrained Swiss men were alarmed and phoned their superiors in the capital Bern. Then they said: "Since it's Christmas day, we decided to let all of you enter our country".
After the holiday the woman and her baby were sent to a rural boarding school, and the men – to a refugee camp where they had to work draining swamps. Those nights, on the wooden bed at the Swiss work camp, Sergio's father, Massimo Della-Pergola, formulated the idea of Toto Calcio – the legal football betting, and invented its form and its check method: 1, 2 ,X – which is used until today.
After the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Swiss took the refugees to another village, more comfortable, where Sergio's father became a local sports reporter. When the family returned to Italy he became the editorial secretary of Gazzetta Dello Sport, while establishing the first toto betting company - Sisal.
These are, as noted, only two out of hundreds, thousands and perhaps tens of thousands stories of Holocaust survivors.
