All That Remains

There is a gaping hole in most every survivor's life. In the rush to the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary, Agnes Aranyi, seventy-three, left behind the family photos. Far worse, of course, she lost aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives. And when Abraham Groszman was taken away to a forced labor camp when she was five or six, Agnes Groszman as she was known then lost a father.

In reality, she says, "I didn't have a father." In the sixty-seven years since they took him, Aranyi built a good life: two marriages (her first husband, Laszlo, died of lymphoma), children, grandchildren, a career as a social worker, an elegant apartment in Myers Park after moving to Charlotte to be closer to family. Most of the survivors in Charlotte know each other through synagogue, speaking engagements, or social functions. It's a small world among the 10,000 or so Jews in Charlotte -- she's played bridge with fellow survivor Susan Cernyak-Spatz. Those several months she spent in the ghetto with her mother, Alice, before the liberation in 1945 seem like forever ago. "We were always in the basement because of the bombing." Luck, she says, is all that kept them out of a death camp. But the luck of the survivor is tempered always by the loss -- in this story, a loss marked by only fleeting flashbacks of a father. She looked him up at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He disappeared somewhere in Hungary.

Today, the only image she can summon is that of her father measuring the length of some cloth while she holds a yardstick. He was in the wholesale textile business, Aranyi says.

Was he short or tall?

"To me," she says, "he was a giant."

Such is the Holocaust: you live a long life, God willing, and still everything turns on one moment sixty-five years ago.

On May 11, 1944, in the Jewish ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, Solomon and Riva Baicovitz dressed their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Suly, in a coat with a fur collar. They placed her in a potato sack, put the sack on a potato cart, and went to a prearranged meeting place. They took the sack holding their daughter out of the cart and handed it over a barbed wire fence to a Jewish woman named Miriam Shulman.

"I didn’t know where I was," the child in the potato sack recalls, "but I didn’t open my mouth."

And that is how Suly Baicovitz—now Suly Chenkin, sixty-nine, married to Richard and living in a town home in south Charlotte—escaped the Holocaust.

The journey that followed took her to a displaced persons camp, Palestine, Cuba, and, finally, to America. Chenkin's savior, Miriam Shulman, died a decade ago in Israel. Chenkin's parents, the ones with the foresight to hand their only child over that barbed wire fence, reunited with their daughter a few years later.

They lived a happy life together until their natural deaths.

"I lucked out in every manner," she says. "I was saved. My parents survived."

All these years later, the little girl can hear her father crying that day at the barbed wire fence. She can recall how it often got chilly in May in Lithuania, which explains why her mother and father dressed her in a coat with a fur collar for the journey that began in a potato sack.

"It isn't a distant memory," Chenkin says.

"I 'm slipping," Henry Hirschmann says.

Eighty-nine and living alone in their home near Shalom Park off Providence Road since Blanche died, he still aches to tell his story: born in Germany, he survived five months in Buchenwald. But his parents, Maier and Ida, and two younger brothers died in Minsk. "For some reason," he says, "they were schlepped to Russia." Paul was the handsome brother. "All the girls ran after him. None ran after me." The youngest, Lothar, "he was a cute little kid." Hirschmann arrived in New York in 1939 to begin a new life, a sales job in the gift industry bringing him many years ago to Charlotte. He and Blanche raised two children and had four granddaughters, their photos filling his den.

He still misses his beloved wife of fifty-seven years, who died in 2008. "Blanche was a wonderful girl," he says, sitting at a kitchen table filled with stacks of old mail, photos and papers, just a fraction of the stuff he can't bring himself to throw away. He wishes he was twenty years younger, so he'd have the energy to go through what he calls his "stuff."

He has recited his biography to enough school groups and other audiences that he can summon the basic facts. But over nearly two hours, Hirschmann's answers begin at one place in his life and meander to another, twists and turns that come with the wear and tear of the years.

The power of Henry Hirschmann's life, though, isn't found in the dates and other details of his story. It is found in his presence. He is here, still here, still willing in 2009 to try to keep alive the memories some would rather keep dead and buried.

That's the power of all the survivors.

They are here, still here, at least today.

Says Hirschmann, "Who knows how many more years are left for us to tell our stories?"

"Leave religion out," Walter Marx says.

He is comfortable recalling how he was one of 10,000 Kindertransport children, as history now knows them, who was shipped to England and saved from the Nazis. Marx, an only child, was thirteen when he left home in Munich and spent two years with a family outside London. It was a difficult time, he says. He missed his family. He struggled to learn English. He had to look at his parents' picture to remember what they looked like.

Marx, though, is a wise man, an avid reader of nonfiction, a regular BBC viewer. He appreciates that his story isn't nearly as horrible as millions of others. He reunited with his parents, came to the United States as a teenager, settled in Charlotte thirty-seven years ago, raised a family, continues to enjoy a long and successful life.

Marx, eighty-four, will talk freely about the nature of man, believing that we must guard against another Holocaust targeting another group of downtrodden people. All you have to do, he says, is watch what's happening in Africa to see prejudice and violence at work in places like Darfur.

"The cruelty of man," Marx says, "knows no bounds."

Just don't ask him about religion, he warns, and where God fits into the state of the world, if He fits in anywhere at all.

How did a self-confessed whiny only child from Vienna survive three years in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck? And why now, at eighty-seven, when a knee replacement forces her to use a stair lift in her apartment near SouthPark, does Susan Cernyak-Spatz continue traveling the world, warning that it could happen again?

"I always wondered was it in my DNA or was it the years in camp that made me tough," she says. "How the hell did I get the guts or survival instinct? How in the hell did I survive this?

"I just refused to die."

Susan Cernyak-Spatz—Suse Eckstein growing up—was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945. She arrived in New York on the Fourth of July in 1946, at age twenty-three.

She came to Charlotte in 1972 when UNC-Charlotte was looking for someone to teach French and German. Perhaps the Carolinas' most visible survivor, Cernyak-Spatz has given hundreds of lectures, taught a Holocaust class at UNCC, and written an autobiography. In keeping with her no-nonsense persona, she titled it Protective Custody Prisoner 34042. The seemingly minor detail she shares on page 112 is the one she says rocks the schoolchildren's world every time—about the metal bowls the Nazis gave to each inmate for food and water, as if they were animals. "The sole personal possession of the inmates," she writes, "was the symbol of the lowest level to which the well-thought-out calculations of the Holocaust planners reduced their victims."

From Cleveland County Community College to Heidelberg, she brings rage and bluntness to her story, galvanizing audiences with a stubbornness that brought her to this day. Those qualities survive, because age and frailty will never be able to take it from her.

When you survive the camps, you feel free to say whatever comes to mind—and to say it gruffly, as some who are meeting Cernyak-Spatz for the first time might observe. And you never tire of speaking up, or as she writes in her biography: "My children think that is just my nature, and that I am just a ‘rude' person."

"I can't afford to get tired," says Cernyak-Spatz, aiming her rudeness at the Holocaust deniers and doubters. "They don't get tired of doing their bit, so I don't get tired of doing my bit.

"Don't forget. It doesn't always have to be the Jews. There are plenty of other minorities."

Henry Vogelhut, eighty-five, sits in his apartment in a retirement community in south Charlotte and taps his fingers on a table in frustration as the answers to the questions elude him.

"Where's my mind?" he says, choosing instead to turn to the lessons of his Holocaust story when the details of his life fail to emerge from the distance. Vogelhut forgets dates and places. The reason he believes he sits here in Charlotte—that he will never forget.

"How did I survive? Luck. Millions of us never made it."

Vogelhut, from Krakow, Poland, spent five years in concentration camps, including Buchenwald. From age fifteen to twenty, he chipped away at a mountain of stone in a quarry and performed other backbreaking jobs, moving as fast as he could each time the guards screamed "Schnell!" ("Quickly!"), because he knew what would happen if he didn't.

"If you couldn't make it," he says, "they'd put a bullet in your head. We were treated like animals."

Like so many others, Vogelhut's life (he worked in his family's sweets and imported fruit business as a child) was shattered by the Holocaust. He lost nearly everyone and everything. He felt alone when it was over. Then he did the only thing left to do: he started over. He met his wife, Runia, in a displaced persons camp and was married for fifty-two years before she died of cancer in 1999. He managed a children's clothing factory. He raised a family. He filled his home with his grandchildren's pictures.

Looking back on a life that eventually filled with blessings, Vogelhut says, "Knock on wood, I did all those things."

But life can never distance itself from the past. His fingers tap the table again as he tries to jog memories he doesn't want to forget.

More than seventy years after Kristallnacht ignited the Holocaust, one elderly man in Charlotte remembers. A grainy piece of news footage, a passing mention in the paper, that's all it takes for that night to come back to Irving Bienstock.

The Night of Broken Glass, as history now knows it.

"Mobs of people in the street," Bienstock recalls. "The synagogue burning. The Nazis coming into our home. My mother asked a policeman, ‘You're supposed to be protecting us.' He said, ‘You dirty Jew, we told you to get out of Germany.' "

Bienstock was a twelve-year-old boy in Dortmund, Germany, when the systematic murder, arson, and herding of Jews into concentration camps began. His family got out in time, first his father and then the rest of the family, which boarded a ship in Rotterdam and escaped to New York just before the Germans invaded Holland.

Irving Bienstock, eighty-three, and his wife, Lillian, came to Charlotte long ago from Brooklyn. He managed a knitting machinery plant in Monroe. If Charlotte hadn't had a kosher butcher, he says, they might still be in Flatbush.

Like so many, the Bienstocks have lived with grace. They have refused to dwell on the Night of Broken Glass and all the murderous nights that followed. If there is bitterness, it is buried where it can do no harm. But they don't forget. And when asked why we should remember, they are ready with the answer.

"Because it happened," Bienstock says, looking back to his native Germany. "This was a civilized country that had high culture. And they did this to us. It can happen anyplace."

Ask Lore Schiftan to look back and she recalls the colorful spices that filled her father's sausage factory before the war in Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany.

"Good stuff," Schiftan says, speaking of the spices and the meats, and also of the life she led before Hitler, and after.

History should never slight the suffering of survivors like Lore Schiftan—Lori Vohs way back when. They lost loved ones, lost their homes, had to start over in a foreign land. Even those who managed to rebuild their lives have had to live with bitter memories. But in the telling of the stories, history should leave room for the sweeter memories, too.

Schiftan, ninety-two, understands that she is here now in a two-bedroom apartment in a south Charlotte retirement community because of timing, luck, and perhaps God's grace.

At first, Josef and Henni Vohs were going to stay put in Germany with their four daughters. Her father, an eternal optimist, thought he could outlive Hitler.

But then came the violence of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and they realized that they needed to get out of Germany. Schiftan, twenty-one at the time, and one of her sisters left first and wound up in New York. The rest of the family came later, making their way through Moscow and Siberia and finally reuniting with the girls.

"Very lucky," Schiftan says. "Very lucky."

It has been a life of good fortune.

She and her husband, Herbert, a German Jew she met in New York ("I dated mostly German guys"), were married for nearly fifty years before he died. They had two children, three grandchildren, and a good life together in Asheville.

Today in Charlotte, closer to her children, she plays bridge with friends. "And I play well." At ninety-two, she's on the computer in her den, sending e-mails and playing solitaire.

She shrugs when asked if she thinks often about the Holocaust, as if to say that it doesn't leap to mind often. But when it does, she thinks of her happy childhood, the colorful spices and the scrumptious meats in her father's factory, even if sausage isn't in her diet these days.

"I'm not supposed to have too much salt," she says, mentioning her pacemaker. "But I like a corned beef sandwich on rye, if it's good rye bread."

Watch the tape, Simon Wojnowich says, an order seconded by his wife. After he told his story to the Shoah Foundation, Mary Wojnowich says, "He didn't talk for two weeks, and we didn't know what to do. Thank God he came back." Says Simon, "I want to avoid it."

But even as he declines to recall the twenty-two months he hid from the Nazis in the Polish woods, Simon Wojnowich begins to get wound up all over again. It's as if the memories are a volcano that erupts each time he is asked to remember. And so, in an accent that time cannot dilute, he shares a few details from those days and nights from 1942-44. Lying still under brush for days at a time with his brother even as the Nazis lurked yards away. "We thought, ‘This is the end of us,' " he says. Devouring the bread that sympathizers in the Polish countryside left for them. Enjoying eggs when they were lucky enough to find a hiding place in a barn.

Wojnowich (pronounced voy-na-vich) is eighty-six. He made his way to Charlotte long ago after settling in Cuba after the war. He wears his yesterdays on his sleeve, to the point that Mary gently rubs his head as she reminds him that he doesn't have to recall the details yet again. He is one of 52,000 survivors who has talked to the Shoah Foundation, which was created by Steven Spielberg after he did Schindler's List. Each story is preserved on film, and the Shoah Foundation and other groups are conducting more interviews with as many survivors as possible.

And so as quickly as he begins to remember, Wojnowich is just as quick to stop and say, again, "Watch the tape."

Wojnowich's memories fill the two-hour tape from start to finish. At the end, at about the time he kisses Mary on camera, Simon Wojnowich explains the moral of his story.

"You've got to fight for your life …"

Julianna Toth appreciates the importance of telling her story, how she hid for five months in a cellar in her native Budapest, Hungary, when she was two-and-a-half years old. But that’s not why she stepped forward after reading profiles of nine Holocaust survivors on Charlotte magazine’s Web site.

Toth, who lives with her husband, Tom, in Lake Wylie, S.C., wants to tell the world about her life. But first she wanted to tell survivor Agnes Aranyi.

Toth’s eyes brightened when she read that Aranyi is also from Budapest. The two connected by telephone and set a date to meet in person, each thrilled to find a soul mate with whom to share a common heritage, and suffering. “She started to speak Hungarian to me and she was overjoyed,” Toth says. “She’s a kindred spirit.”

Toth, sixty-seven, appreciated Aranyi’s story of surviving life in the ghetto in Budapest before liberation in 1945. To escape the bombing, Aranyi and her mother often took refuge in a basement.

Toth can relate.

Julianna Schonwald, her given name, lost her father, Laszlo, when he was whisked away in 1944 to a work camp for Jews. Like so many, the details of his death were never known. She still has post cards her father wrote home, kept in a leather pouch that once was his.

For five months in 1944-45, she hid in the cellar of a house belonging to a Jewish sympathizer in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Because she was so young at the time, Toth has few memories. Most of what has stayed with her came in stories from her late mother. By day, Martha Schonwald worked in the house as a maid, leaving her only child in the cellar with orders to keep quiet. “My mother said I was a good girl. I never uttered a word.” At night, her mother came down to the cellar, where the two of them ate potatoes, urinated in a bucket, and passed the time reciting children’s stories they had memorized.

The cellar had a dirt floor and a few sticks of furniture. They used candles for light. Julianna wore a wool jumper and wool cap, but it was always cold. She thinks that might be why she suffers from bad circulation today. One thing she remembers on her own is the doll that served as her constant companion.

“It was like a Raggedy Ann,” she said.

Mother and daughter emerged from hiding after the war. Julianna married Tom Toth, a fellow Hungarian, in Budapest in 1964. They came to the United States in 1967 and settled at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught veterinary medicine. She did research in microbiology. Retirement¬—and the weather, Lake Wylie, and international airport—brought them to the Charlotte area two years ago. They have no children.

Sitting in the dining room of her home on the River Hills golf course, Toth shares a cruel truth about her life: though she remembers little about the five months in the cellar, she believes it helped shape the person she is today: fearful, shy, nervous, and troubled by nightmares, the details of which she prefers not to share. It’s all too much to deal with in therapy, she says. “I don’t think I can ever, ever get over it.”

That doesn’t mean she tries to avoid thinking about her childhood, or that reading about Agnes Aranyi and the eight other Holocaust survivors in the magazine brought her fresh pain.

The pain, she says, is always there. People should understand that about her and others who survived the Holocaust.

“It’s my experience. It’s part of me.”