Wish Book: Offering peace and dignity to South Bay Holocaust survivors in the twilight of their lives
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No, no, not here, she thought, when gunmen burst into synagogues and targeted worshipers in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, the deadliest attacks on Jews in U.S. history.
“I didn’t believe it could happen in America,” Tamara Brandman Noten says through a strong accent that prompts the curious to ask who she is and where she comes from.
“I’m Jewish,” the 89-year-old proudly tells them. “From Russia.
“Now I understand the difference.”
When she was 10, growing up in Soviet Ukraine with a father who worshiped Stalin more than religion, Noten had no idea she was a Jew.
She didn’t understand when Jews fleeing the Nazis started arriving in her beloved Black Sea birthplace of Odessa or when her parents took her on a harrowing journey to Siberia to escape the invasion of Hitler’s Axis allies.
Only later did Noten realize that she was driven from her home and cut off from so many family members who perished — all because she was Jewish. But it was also her Jewish heritage that ultimately brought her to the United States and into the embrace of a virtuous community that — through a program called “Operation Dignity” — is doing all it can to help Holocaust survivors recover and thrive.
“How can I not appreciate it?” Noten says surrounded by family photos in her apartment in Campbell.
Noten is one of about 180 Santa Clara County residents who survived or escaped the Holocaust and now receive everything from food and housing assistance to counseling and therapy through the nonprofit Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley. Wish Book donations would provide funding to assist up to 50 survivors.
“We only have a few years left with these courageous individuals, and we feel it is our responsibility to take care of them and offer them peace in their final years,” said Mindy Berkowitz, the organization’s executive director.
Like Noten, many of Operation Dignity’s beneficiaries share horrific childhood experiences in war-ravaged Europe, and hopeful stories of rebuilding family and faith as adults in America. But as they age, their needs grow, their health declines and their numbers are dwindling. And the trauma of their unthinkable pasts suddenly feels too familiar in their adoptive country where they had always felt safe. Donations will help increase both counseling and home visits.
“For some, it really does bring back days they thought were gone,” said Berkowitz. “We are extra careful to check in with survivors during some of these difficult periods to see, ‘How are you doing?'”
One woman who normally gets around on public transit is too scared to ride the bus. Another whose father was killed in a German concentration camp recently started fearing she could be deported any day, even though she has been a U.S. citizen for years.
“Some are so traumatized that they have trouble showing affection,” said Hilla Flohr, a clinical social worker with Operation Dignity who visits the survivors to provide therapy and arrange other services they need.
For a survivor named Manya, the program helps pay to heat her apartment. As a child, she was forced by the Nazis to march through cold winters and to this day has trouble feeling warm. So Operation Dignity gave her a specially made scarf and blankets.
Flohr regularly visits 89-year-old Marie Donner at her Sunnyvale apartment to offer emotional support for health issues.
Donner’s story of survival is both extraordinary and so typical of those who lived through one of history’s worst mass murders.
She remembers vividly as a child the freezing day that Hitler came to her hometown of Linz after the Germans annexed Austria, and the horrific night that soon followed known as Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — when rioters destroyed hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Nazi-controlled Europe.
She remembers how the uncle who raised her was forced at gunpoint to destroy the Torahs and other religious objects in the synagogue and how Nazi youth locked her family inside and told them they would be shot if they tried to escape. But when one boy returned with the key, he told them to run, starkly warning: “It’s better to be shot than to be burned alive.”
She remembers her frantic screams as they emerged from the synagogue to see flames shooting from the roof and nearby Jewish businesses, and the neighbors on the sidewalk, the barber, the butcher, the others, all smiling and shouting, “The Jews are burning!”
“‘Why are they happy because they think we are burning?'” she asked her mother. “She just cried. What could she say, really?”
By the time Donner was 10, she had been sent alone to a school in England, survived bombings, and crossed both the ocean and then the North American continent unaccompanied to join family in San Francisco, arriving the night Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president for the third time.
In a surreal bookend to her life, Donner returned to that street in Austria last year where she watched the synagogue burn in 1938. This time, she was a guest of the government, invited as part of an effort to document what happened to the Jews during one of Austria’s ugliest periods. She even spoke at the reconstructed synagogue. “It was beyond creepy,” she said.
But back home in the U.S., reports of extremist attacks against Jews are at record-levels in the year since a gunman killed 11 and injured seven during services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, according to the Anti-Defamation League. This month’s deadly attack on a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey, has been linked to members of an anti-Semitic hate group.
“You cannot help but connect it when you see synagogues burn and people shot,” Donner said.
For many of the survivors, the list of triggers that can bring back trauma can be much more benign than an anti-Semitic act. “It can be a dog. Just the sound of the barking can bring them back to the camp,” said Flohr, a native Israeli who says many of the survivors light up when she greets them in Hebrew.
Noten’s smile brightens when Flohr arrives at her door for a visit. Being Jewish has defined so much of Noten’s life in ways that looking back, only now, are truly evident.
When she flips through her family photo album, there’s an image on every other page of a face frozen in wartime Eastern Europe, an uncle, an aunt, her husband’s parents, “killed,” she says, photo after photo.
There is no picture of her grandmother, but she can’t shake the image of their final goodbye as Noten and her parents began the treacherous trip by cargo ship and train to Siberia.
“I will never, ever forget, when we started moving, grandmother running, crying, waving at us,” Noten said, “because she knew it was the last time we would see her.”
They had escaped the Romanian occupation of Odessa just before more than 80,000 Jews were deported to camps and ghettos or murdered, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, many burned alive in a public square or while locked in warehouses.
After the Soviet army liberated the city in 1944, it was time to come home. Noten’s mother bribed a telegraph operator to fake the mandatory invitation to return to Odessa, and the family sold home-grown potatoes to afford the passage back.
Only then did she start to understand her family was different. Jews were not welcome back home, she said, and for most of her life, as a teen, a young bride, a mother, an engineer, she lived in the Soviet Union with the stigma of being one.
Not until the thaw in the Cold War did Noten finally get to immigrate to America, sponsored by a Jewish family in California and a community to whom, she said, she will always be indebted. “I wouldn’t live my life one day in such comfort as I live here.”
THE WISH BOOK SERIES
The Wish Book is an annual series of The Mercury News that invites readers to help their neighbors.
WISH
Donations will help Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley provide Holocaust survivors with assistance for basic necessities along with counseling, care planning and care giver support. Goal: $25,000
HOW TO GIVE
Donate at wishbook.mercurynews.com or mail in the coupon.
ONLINE EXTRA
Read other Wish Book stories, view photos and video at wishbook.mercurynews.com.