Rachel remembers the selection process
at Auschwitz, as the Gestapo filtered out
those who would live and those who would
die, as though it were yesterday. “When
the Gestapo divided us and said you go
left and you go right, my mother went
right with a baby in her arms and my two
little sisters,” she says. “But she pushed
my brother and me [towards the left-hand
line] and said, ‘Stark, stark,’ which means
strong in German. How did she know to
do that? She must have known something.”
Rachel never saw her mother or other
three siblings again.
Each survivor is of course different.
Manfred is contemplative and
expressive; Rachel more matter-of-fact.
Yet as with so many of their peers, both
were unable to tell their stories for decades
afterwards, perhaps aware of the
frightening power of their trauma.Soon after the war Manfred decided he
wanted his life to be as normal as possible,
which meant not dwelling on past horrors.
Instead he suppressed them. When he
finally agreed to give a talk about his life
to his synagogue decades later, it all came
rushing back. “Before that I hadn’t been so
troubled,” he recalls. “But for weeks I had
the most vivid images each night before
I went to sleep. Remarkably they had not
dimmed with age, even though many
other much more recent memories are
beginning to fade. Those experiences
almost seem to inhabit a different
compartment of the mind that is not
affected by age. But I just couldn’t speak
about it publicly.”
Manfred’s wife, Shary, recalls how it took
him weeks after the talk to calm down
again, as images of ghettos and camps
began to churn in his mind. Even today,
when he gives Zoom talks about his life,
he spends several hours composing himself
in his armchair before speaking.
For decades after the war even Rachel’s
husband, Phineas, was left in the dark about
what she’d been through. She suffered
migraines and night terrors but couldn’t
bring herself to open up. It was only in
1988, aged 58, at a survivors’ conference in
London organised by Elisabeth Maxwell
(wife of the press baron Robert Maxwell),
that she first attempted to tell her story.
She immediately suffered an intense bout
of nausea and vomiting and had to receive
medical aid. Eventually, though, in the
years that followed, she began to talk.
Now she speaks about it all with a steady
composure, even when telling the story of
seeing her mother for the last time.Manfred’s mother
was saved by running
naked from a group of
condemned prisoners
to hide herself among
those selected to live
Manfred, 91, was sent to a Nazi slave labour
camp in Latvia aged 13. Left: with his younger
brother Herman, who perished in 1943were spent surviving the Nazi abyss. The
paintings will hang in the Queen’s Gallery
at Buckingham Palace and the project will
also be captured by a BBC documentary,
which airs on Holocaust Memorial Day,
this Thursday.
Charles is patron of the Holocaust
Memorial Day Trust and this project has
grown out of his enduring interest in the
survivors of Hitler’s death camps. The
paintings, however, also acknowledge
a sad but inevitable reality: the survivors
will not be with us for much longer.
You think you know these stories. You
can watch Schindler’s List, Life Is Beautiful
and Son of Saul at the flick of a switch.
You can read Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and
Anne Frank. You can visit the chilly,
macabre expanse of Auschwitz and see the
piles of human hair and discarded shoes.
Certainly in my Jewish household I grew up
immersed in tales of the Holocaust, listing
off concentration camp names as though
they were kings and queens of England.
Yet nothing, really nothing at all, can
prepare you for the staggering, almost
overwhelming sensation of hearing this
testimony first hand. In Manfred’s case,
a small, kindly old man in his favourite
armchair, surrounded by his loving wife
and a teeming gallery of family photos,
sipping on a cup of tea, sharing an account
of unimaginable cruelty and resilience
from humanity’s darkest chapter. How his
mother saved herself by running naked
from a group of condemned prisoners to
hide herself among those selected to live.
How he kept himself alive by pretending
to be 17, not 14. How his Hebrew teacher
managed to give him bar mitzvah lessons
in the Riga ghetto, somehow corralling ten
men together to make the quorum needed
for Manfred to become a Jewish man. The
moral power of this witness is simply
immense. And unique. Yet we can’t rely on
it indefinitely. It is no disrespect to Manfred
and his odds-defying peers to acknowledge
that the last survivors will soon be gone.
Living history will become just history.
Then it’s up to the rest of us.T
hese stories were not
always so easily accessible,
nor so familiar. Just down
the road from Manfred’s, at
the Selig Court Jewish Care
home in Golders Green,
I meet Rachel Levy, a 91-year-old survivor.
She is elegant and collected, but it’s not
difficult to discern the strain she still feels
when telling her story.
Born in 1930 in Bhutz, a tiny Carpathian
village in modern-day Ukraine, Rachel
lost almost her entire family in the
Holocaust. Her father was taken away
along with all the young men of the village
in 1942 and she never saw him again. She
ended up a prisoner at Auschwitz with her
LAURA PANNACK FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEmother and four siblings.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 21