Danny Adams (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} madwriter) wrote,@ 2008-03-26 22:47:00 |
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| Entry tags: | holocaust, holocaust survivor, nathan kranowski |
Never Forget
I've read a great deal of Holocaust survivor literature, and last year I was lucky enough to hear a survivor speak in person. But yesterday was the first time I had the good fortune to break bread with one.
Nathan Kranowski.
His parents were Polish immigrants to France,
where he was a small boy when the Nazis came.
He lost both of his parents to Auschwitz.
Meeting him was both blessing and fluke: the teacher who runs our Holocaust program here on campus and invited him, Dr. Marcia Horn, happened to be in the library close by and talking about him--how the local media was coming to videotape him speak to her Holocaust class--while I was there. She told me about taking him to lunch the next day and invited me along, so of course I jumped at the chance. And naturally I also had my camera ready (which pleased Marcia, as nobody else had a camera handy come lunch time).
Meeting our dean (and a former professor of mine
at Roanoke College), Dr. Leslie Lambert.
Meeting Ferrum's president, Dr. Jennifer Braaten.
With one of our religion professors, Dr. David Howell.
Profile of Nathan's wife, Muriel.
The Holocaust survivors I'd heard speak before had been adults in Europe during WWII, and spoke with a pronounced accent, usually Polish. Nathan, however, had come to America young and had long since lost his French accent to New York. Over lunch we did discuss the Holocaust in some detail, including the theft of Jewish-owned art by the Nazis as well as the ongoing mystery of the famous Amber Room, and pictures that my G.I. uncle, Rodney Riley, took of the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria after helping to liberate it. But Nathan is a man of many interest and talents, so we also talked about everything from politics to the Virginia Tech shooting (he and Muriel live in Blacksburg, and Muriel still works at Tech), to the possible imminent demise of our local open-air living history museum, the Explore Park, to language classes in colleges (and their regular demise) to his time as a professor at two local colleges (Hollins and Radford).
His life story he told to Marcia's class.
Explaining how he learned what happened to his parents years after their deaths.
Showing pictures of his parents, and himself as a child.
The Germans, Nathan told us, never came for the Jews in France--that was the job of the French gendarme. There were few objections when the yellow Stars of David were given out, because after all, many figured it was only a patch, not worth making trouble over. When Jewish men were taken, he said, there wasn't much resistance because it wasn't like they were taking women and children. Then the French police would come for Jewish women...and eventually whole families. There were nearly twenty detention and concentration camps in France during the Second World War, but the biggest and most infamous was Drancy. It was the direct line from France to Auschwitz.
They came for Nathan's father in 1940, the same year the Germans invaded. He spent 11 months in Drancy before being shipped by train to Auschwitz, were he died a few days later.
Almost exactly one year after his father was taken from Drancy, they came for Nathan's mother. She too went to Drancy, and was there only a few days before going east. She too died within days of arriving at Auschwitz.
When they came for her, they didn't take Nathan, and to this day he doesn't know why. Perhaps, he said, it was because they hadn't yet started taking the children too. Perhaps the French officers thought he was cute. At any rate, they left the little boy alone.
Somehow he made his way to his aunt in Paris, though he has no recollection of how he got there. But it wasn't long before his aunt started feeling that keeping the boy was dangerous, and Nathan was sent off to a family south of Paris who disguised him as a Christian and gave him the name "Pierre". He lived with them for the rest of the war while his aunts and uncles died. Of several siblings his father had, only the aunt in Paris survived.
After the war he returned to his aunt in Paris, but she had been emotionally ravaged by the war and eventually decided she could not raise a child, so he was sent to family in New York. Ultimately he would make his way to Virginia, where he first taught French at Hollins College in the early 1970's, then spent a quarter-century teaching accounting at Radford University before retiring.
Talking about the Germans falsifying reasons for death on death certificates (typhus was a popular "reason") led to a small but indelible aside about Holocaust deniers, since these certificates are used as so-called evidence that the Holocaust never happened. Nathan pointed out that Eisenhower ordered as many Germans from the areas surrounding the camps to walk through them as possible, so there would be as many witnesses as possible and to minimize the possibility of it being denied. But there have been deniers since the beginning--and, he told us in few words but with an adamant tone, there are people in the world who won't open their minds to the truth no matter what evidence is placed before them.
It was decades before he learned what happened to his parents. What finally gave him the information was a book memorializing the French Jews who died in the war--about 72,500 out of 75,000 deported--by Serge Klarsfeld, who spent years tracking down and deciphering worn, faded, damaged, and sometimes simply scratched out records (which, Nathan mentioned, the Germans kept in quadruplicate). In that volume Nathan found out where his parents had gone from their home, and what ultimately became of them.
His road to Judaism was a long one. He had no knowledge of Judaism as a child--no memory of being taken to the synagogue--and so it meant little to him growing up. His bar mitzvah was a rushed affair missing many of the basic elements. It was only much later when he decided to become a practicing Jew again...and he made the decision to honor his parents. They had died, he told us, for no other reason than being Jewish, and so this way did he remember and revere them.
With Marcia, concluding his talk.
We're more than sixty years removed from the end of Nazi Germany's extermination of the Jews, but that isn't so far away. There are still numerous survivors scattered throughout the world. It is still an atrocity of unimaginable proportions close enough to touch, close enough to speak to you. Close enough for you to break bread with. Close enough to remember.
It won't always be that way. My generation will see the last of the Holocaust survivors pass away, so then the duty becomes ours to remember and then pass along the flame of remembrance to our children. If we know the words we can entrust them to the generations who will follow us.
