Holocaust survivors hope their stories outlive them

Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Forty years ago, Fred and Miriam Hoffman belonged to a close-knit group of people who had seen humanity at its worst.

At least once a month, the couple gathered for dinners, parties and religious celebrations with Holocaust survivors who had started a new life in Denver.

Today, the social gatherings are rare.

"Forty years ago, we celebrated births and bar mitzvahs," said Miriam Hoffman, 70, of southeast Denver. "Unfortunately, now we go to funerals."

Most people who made it out of the Holocaust are now dead.

Of the estimated 500 survivors who settled in the area, about 150 are still alive.

Within a decade or so, Holocaust experts predict there will be few living witnesses to the worst genocide in modern history.

"Twenty years from now it will be a stronger movement to deny the Holocaust ever occurred," said Miriam Hoffman, whose family assumed Christian identities in Greece to avoid the death camps.

"This is what is scary about it. We are the last witnesses of the horror."

Fred Hoffman is a 78-year-old retired tailor who survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. Every time he hears someone question whether the Holocaust really happened, he said "it feels like you take a knife and put it in my heart."

Recently, the Holocaust denial movement made international headlines.

At a highly publicized December conference in Tehran, Iran, participants argued that the genocide did not happen or was immensely exaggerated. The conference was supported by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called the Holocaust a myth and said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

In response, the United States plans to circulate a draft resolution at the United Nations condemning denials of the Holocaust. The U.N. will observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 29.

Many survivors are taking personal steps to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten.

They are trying to recruit sons and daughters and friends who are willing to tell the death camp stories to students and civic groups.

They are recording their memories about that horrible time and their lives since then. They are collecting artifacts and records from the war that are being used by a growing number of Holocaust researchers and museums.

"Survivors have to realize and find hope in that the end of their part of the conversation is not the end of the dialogue," said Dan Napolitano, director of education for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"They need to rest securely in the fact that they have spoken well during their time and that their legacy will continue through the voices and persons and hands to whom they have entrusted their stories."

Bernie Sayone

"A lot of people ask me why we didn't fight back. This is my way of fighting back. I'll do this as long as I can walk and talk."

Most days, Bernie Sayone puts on a little gold pin with the Hebrew letters for the word "remember" before he leaves his home in southeast Denver.

Thirteen hundred miles away, his daughter, Barbara Murray, wears the same pin, except hers is silver.

For this father and daughter, the pin is a symbol of one of their most important missions - to make sure people don't forget the Holocaust.

Sayone, 84, has spent the last three dec-ades speaking at schools and memorial events about his experience.

"A lot of people ask me why we didn't fight back," said Sayone, a Polish Jew who lost most of his family in the death camps. "This is my way of fighting back. I'll do this as long as I can walk and talk."

His daughter has done occasional speaking engagements about the Holocaust at community events in the Seattle area, where she works as an office manager. She plans to step up her efforts after her father dies.

"I'm mindful of where I came from and how fortunate I am to be here," she said. "I'm going to carry it on because people need to know it happened.

"When there are no eyewitnesses left, unless somebody steps up . . . people aren't going to believe it."

Murray, 54, has encountered plenty of disbelievers. It goes back to the pin.

Acquaintances and strangers would ask her what it meant.

When she explained, people would ask her "Did that really happen?"

Sometimes, the response was harsher.

"I get a lot of people that say, 'You know what? That's a long time ago and Jewish people need to get over it.' "

Murray also keeps other visible reminders of the genocide.

Years ago, she took a close-up photo of her father's left forearm, which still bears his prisoner number from the camps. She hung the picture on a wall in her house.

She said many people would cringe at the photo, saying things such as, "That's a really disgusting photograph."

For her, "it's a very important picture."

Murray is proud of her father's public speaking. He wasn't always so open.

"It took a long time for him to deal and to be able to talk about it and share it with us," she said.

When Sayone and his family arrived at Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele sent him to a line that had formed to the right. His family was assigned to a line at the left. Everyone in that line went to the gas chambers.

During those last moments, his father told the family to try to stay alive to serve as witnesses. That's what kept Sayone going.

"I had to keep telling myself, I got to survive and I got to tell the world what one human being can do to another."

Sam Kutner

"For me, it is important to carry on the memory of my parents and their families and to teach children about the Holocaust."

As a young boy, Sam Kutner knew his family was unusual: He had no grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins.

Both of his parents lost their mothers, fathers and siblings in Nazi death camps.

But Sam and his brothers enjoyed a life that blossomed from the ashes of the Holocaust. They were spoiled by parents who exuded kindness despite the horrors they experienced.

They came to see other Holocaust survivors as extended family. And they heard stories of the war so often that, dec-ades later, they can retell them with more detail than their mother and father.

Now 46 and a father of two, Sam Kutner is working to ensure that his parents' stories don't go with them to their graves.

Zachary Kutner, Sam Kutner's father, was 14 when he was taken from his home in Poland to a series of camps, including Ausch-witz. He spent much of the next several years building factories. He recalls wrapping bags around his torso for warmth and wearing wooden shoes that left scars on his ankles.

Shortly after the war, he met and married Frieda Kantor, a Polish Jew who made thread in factories for Nazi uniforms. She died in 1992.

Since the late 1990s, Sam Kutner has helped organize local memorial services and has served as chairman of the Holocaust Awareness Institute at the University of Denver.

"For me it is important to carry on the memory of my parents and their families and to teach children about the Holocaust," said Sam Kutner, who lives in Arapahoe County. "I also feel that by leading by example . . . my children will see how important this is to me and will hopefully carry on the tradition."

But Kutner is running into apathy and a feeling among some children of survivors that they don't have standing to tell their parents' stories. Attendance at memorial events is shrinking and he's struggling to find people to do speaking engagements.

"The farther removed that we get from the Holocaust, from the generations that are slowly dying off, it's going to be more and more difficult," he said.

"If we can't get second-generation people to speak on behalf of their parents, that is a problem. There's no doubt."

Sonya "Toni" Binstock

"It breaks my heart, that they had to go through that, and only because they were Jews."

Black-and-white photos of dead bodies. Names and prisoner numbers scrawled on white scraps of paper. Documents from an Israeli museum naming victims and where they died.

These are some of the thousands of artifacts Sonya "Toni" Binstock has collected during the past two decades and stored in closets and shelves throughout her southeast Denver home.

The 76-year-old psychotherapist did not experience the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Neither did her immediate family. Nevertheless, she has become the unofficial local expert-archivist on the Holocaust and survivors who settled in the Denver area.

Throughout the years, Binstock videotaped interviews with more than 50 survivors and liberators for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a national organization created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Established after the release of his Schindler's List, the foundation has recorded interviews with 52,000 survivors across the world.

She has helped assemble exhibits for the Holocaust Awareness Institute at the University of Denver and other organizations and has interviewed local survivors for the Shoah tapes.

"If my father had not come to this country (before World War II), I would have been one of them," she said. "I don't know that I could have made it. I don't think I could have done what they did."

Binstock first became interested in preserving Holocaust accounts in 1976, when her husband's cousins came to visit from Israel. After hearing about their war experience, she recorded their accounts to keep for the family. Binstock and her husband lost extended relatives in the war.

At her home, she opened a photo album stuffed with documents and images.

"This one killed me," she said, pointing to paperwork given to her by a survivor in Lubbock, Texas.

The woman was a young girl when the Nazis stormed a family birthday celebration at their home in Bulgaria and took more than 100 relatives to the death camps. She was the sole survivor.

At the camp, "She saw her mother on top of a pile," Binstock said. "That one, I cried."

Then there's the quirkier details.

"Do you know there's different color lice?" she was asked by one survivor, from Lubbock, who spent five years of her childhood in Dachau.

"We used to take them off our bodies and race them by color," the woman told her.

Binstock is amazed by the fortitude of those who made it out of the camps - especially the children.

"That's one of the things that's so precious to me - how they were able to survive," she said.

"When I think of Eric Cahn (a hidden child who still lives in the Denver area) for two years being in a basement and not making a sound, not having a mommy or anyone to hold him, I think of my children and grandchildren and what it would have been like for them," she said.

"It breaks my heart, that they had to go through that, and only because they were Jews."

Where to go for more information

To learn more about the Holocaust or to get involved in education, contact:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., at www.ushmm.org or 202-488-0400

The Holocaust Awareness Institute at the University of Denver's Center for Judaic Studies at www.du.edu/cjs or 303-871-3013.

Yad Vashem, Israel's museum, memorial and international research center for the Holocaust, at www.yadvashem.org.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, at www.wiesenthal.com or 1-800-900-9036.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

• April 21, 2008

  6:11 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  saraturner writes:

  I have always wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor, but I don't really know how to go about it. If someone could send me some information I would really appreciate it. The Holocaust is something that has gripped me and affected me deeply since I was a little girl.