April 1, 2009

Working in a factory at the Reichenbach labor camp, Eva Klein David manned a soldering iron, fusing wires together to make parts for radios. The dexterous teenager was good at what she did. That, she believes, is why the Nazi soldiers didn’t kill her when she began fainting at work due to hunger and stress.

Living quarters were filthy and cramped. There was no soap. The girls only had time to wash themselves on Sundays, with ice-cold water and a dish of chemical bleach.

The girls’ heads had been shaved back at Auschwitz. David missed her curly tresses, but at least there were no lice. Now the prisoners’ hair was beginning to grow back, and with it came the threat of disease. “If people got lice, then there would be an outbreak of typhoid fever,” David, 82, said recently. “Then we would probably die.”

When the factory foremen weren’t looking, David put down her radio parts. She soldered a comb with fine wire teeth so the girls could pick out the nits between washing days. She passed the comb to whomever needed it, helping women tease out and squash the tiny insects. In this way, the prisoners staved off sickness.

“It was a great service to the community,” said David, who still keeps her gray ringlets long. “You fight with whatever you can. We fought back.”

David was always skilled with her hands. Urged into seamstress school by her aunt at age 14 in Oradea, Romania, she quickly rose to the top of her class. David was so proud of her talent that she even stuffed her trade school certificate into her bag as she packed for Auschwitz.

Dressmaking turned out not to be a skill David needed in the concentration camps. But more than once, her manual deftness saved her life — and aided countless others.

Forced to move to a Jewish ghetto with her parents and two sisters in 1942, David slept on the kitchen floor of an apartment shared by dozens of other Jews. When the order came to prepare for Auschwitz, everyone was allowed one bag — but few people had bags to pack. David sewed a backpack from a square tablecloth, folded over many times so she wouldn’t have to cut off the excess material.

“I didn’t want to cut, because in the old country, everything was expensive. A tablecloth was treasure,” she recalled. “Even then I was optimistic that this would not be forever. I thought we would come back, and then I could open up the stitches and we’d have a tablecloth again.”

David made backpacks for the rest of her family, and then for her father’s cousins and anyone else who could bring her a bed sheet or a length of cloth. She was still sewing bags when Nazi officials ordered the family to line up in the courtyard to board the train to Auschwitz.

David’s mother and younger sister were killed in the gas chambers immediately. Her father died in the camps later on. She managed to stay together with her older sister, Lily, and a former schoolmate she recognized and adopted as an honorary sister.

The three girls were selected for labor at Reichenbach. David learned to solder while Lily prepared the wires. The factory was in the city, but the prisoners were stationed to sleep in the outskirts of town. They trudged through deep snow and wind to get to work each day. David had a woolen coat that she was given at Auschwitz, but it was cut too full for her thin frame, and the back billowed up over her head.

“I was freezing cold. I thought, if I had a belt or a string to tie it, the wind wouldn’t blow it up on me,” she recalled. “My sister said, ‘You could make a belt for yourself.’”

David found some black plastic tubing, used in the factory to encase wires, in a garbage bin. She bundled strands of the tubing and wove a sturdy belt, soldering a buckle from scraps of wire in the factory. It kept her warm and was practice for the lice comb she would craft later.

That comb was eventually lost when someone didn’t return it. But David made another comb to wear as an accessory in her thick hair. One day, one of the forewomen at the factory noticed the luxury. “She said, ‘Eva, Eva.’ She couldn’t get over it,” David recalled. “She saw the wires and knew that I made it, but she did not report me.”

Soon after, Allied forces began bombing the city. The guards took David and the other prisoners on foot to the Parschnitz concentration camp in the Sudetenland, where she was liberated in 1945 at age 18. David brought the comb and belt with her when she and Lily immigrated to Israel in 1946, and later to the United States, where she came in 1966.

“God blessed me with handicraft,” said David, who still tears up when she looks at the pieces. “When I see them, it gives me the shivers. I’m still here. I can’t get over it, but I’m still here.”

When Nazi officials confiscated the faded white Torah covering, they stamped the Reichsadler — the emblematic German eagle and swastika — onto the inner fabric. The valuable 1868 piece, stitched in Transylvania, was intended for display in the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, what Nazis conceived as the “Museum and Historic Archive of the Extinct Jewish Race.”

Recently, L.A. lawyer Lisa Stern shook her head while contemplating the piece, now part of her and her husband’s extensive Judaica collection.

“They said we’d be a vanished people, yet we’re the ones who are still here and they’re not,” she said.

Collecting since 1992, the Sterns see their work as more than the gathering and restoration of antique ritual pieces. For them, it’s about preserving a tangible link to a rich heritage from which there are precious few relics.

“Life was always very tenuous for Jews. There were pogroms, expulsions. Despite our 5,000-year history as a people, there is relatively little in terms of books and artifacts,” Alan Stern said. “As American Jewry assimilates, for a lot of people, these things don’t hold much value anymore.”

Through loans to museums, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Sterns hope to change that. They don’t collect items just to mothball them — they encourage viewers to read from the timeworn 18th century Torah scrolls, and to feel the heft of a Kiddush cup or the leathery thickness of centuries-old parchment.

Among the pieces in their collection is a unique late 19th century yad (Torah pointer) made in St. Petersburg by renowned Fabergé craftsman Michael Perkhin, who created some of the company’s iconic Imperial Eggs between 1886 and 1903. The piece is of deep green nephrite, ringed with pearls, featuring gold threads and a ruby ring on the delicate hand’s index finger.

The Sterns have an original, first-edition printed Talmud from Venice, Italy, published by Daniel Bomberg in 1522 after the Belgian printer got permission from the Vatican to print Hebrew-language books. They own a collection of eight antique shechita knives, used in the kosher slaughtering of animals, and a 17th century Dutch brit milah set, used for circumcisions. They also own rare sifrei Torah and illustrated Megillah scrolls, Torah breastplates and traditional oil-burning menorahs.

Many of the artifacts in their collection survived the Holocaust through their owners’ ingenuity — they were smuggled out to friends and neighbors, hidden in attics and walls or buried in the ground. Many were sold during and after the war, when families needed money for food and clothing. Nazis targeted some of the most valuable Jewish ritual pieces to display in museums they envisioned to commemorate the “defunct race” of Jewish people, Alan Stern said.

“One never knows where treasure is to be found,” Lisa Stern added. “Sometimes we get calls from a family who wants to make sure that a particular piece or heirloom gets to a person who treasures it, who cleans it, who preserves it and then puts it into public display. It’s our greatest pleasure to see our artifacts in various public settings — we get a lot of nachas seeing the education that is spun off from exposure to these artifacts.”

Each piece boasts its own story of loss, determination and hope.

Lisa Stern received a tattered German haggadah from a legal client that once belonged to Heinrich Stahl, head of the Jewish community in Berlin during the Third Reich and founding director of Victoria Insurance Group, one of the oldest still active in Europe. Stahl died at Theresienstadt in 1942, after penning a living will instructing his descendants to protect their legacy. Stern’s client, Gaby Stahl Lansing, was Stahl’s granddaughter.

“Everyone comes from a proud tradition. Everyone’s family comes from somewhere,” Lisa Stern said. “What better way to hone in on that question than seeing a piece from history, tying it to where we are today, and recognizing we are links in that chain?”

A belt. Sheet music. A miniature 18th century Megillah scroll, its parchment worn and browned.

People hung onto whatever they could through the Holocaust, hiding items in walls, in attics or burying them in the ground. Many gave valuable heirlooms to non-Jewish neighbors for safekeeping, hoping to reclaim them one day should the nightmare ever end.

Then, for decades, these items sat forgotten or stowed away behind glass in private collections. Inert, they were worth the sum of their materials, provenance and craftsmanship. But brought into the public arena for new generations to see and touch, they could be priceless.

In honor of Yom HaShoah this year, Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries is asking members of the community to come forward with these salvaged items. Through a project called Keeping the Testimony Alive Through Artifacts, Stories and Music, the institution will bring together Holocaust survivors and Jewish families to shine a spotlight on these objects’ unique histories and shared educational value.

“We know there are many things that people brought out of the Holocaust that sit in their homes,” said Leonard Lawrence, general manager of Mount Sinai. “We’re interested in the stories behind them: How did this get here? What did it mean to the family? What does it mean to the community? And what lesson do we learn from it for the future?”

The event, which will be held at Mount Sinai’s Simi Valley campus April 19, will resemble “Antiques Roadshow” with historians on hand to contextualize items and explain their significance.

“We’re in the history business — we’re not just in the business of burial,” said Martha White, director of sales at Mount Sinai. “Cemeteries are repositories of all kinds of cultural artifacts. They are also a place for consoling the living.”

That consolation, for Holocaust survivors, often comes from the knowledge that their stories won’t die when they do.

Lawrence recalls a gathering four years ago of Café Europa, a Holocaust survivors’ social network created in 2001 by Jewish Family Service and The Jewish Federation’s Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership, which is named for a Stockholm cafe where survivors looked for lost relatives after World War II. Jewish high school students had come to speak with the survivors during the event, and Lawrence remembers seeing a member speaking with two teenaged girls who had never conversed with a survivor before. The man rolled up his sleeve to show the numbers on his arm to the students, and they reached out to touch the tattoo.

“We’re tying these stories together in a physical way that people can touch,” Lawrence said. “We’re losing this generation. The survivors are now in their 70s, 80s, 90s. We think it’s important to keep their stories alive. It’s part of our role as a Jewish organization to help preserve these things.”

Keeping the Testimony Alive expands on the concept that fueled Mount Sinai’s Yom HaShoah project last year. Officials invited community members to create personalized squares for a Shoah Quilt to commemorate individuals and families touched by the Holocaust. Project coordinators received so many squares that they had to sew three quilts.

This year, the items on display will include letters, articles of clothing worn in concentration camps and the formerly lost music of famed Russian cantor and composer David Nowakowsky. The exhibit will also feature a Writer’s Shelf, where authors of published and unpublished Holocaust books or poetry can bring their works to share.

“Our goal is to shine light back on these items so that they can continue to speak, even as more and more of our survivors are no longer with us,” White said. “These items have a voice, and it should be heard.”

Young people in the Jewish community have less and less first-hand contact with Holocaust survivors, said Lawrence, who recalls hearing stories about the Shoah from his barber while growing up in New York.

If there’s one wish he has for the project, it’s that viewers of all ages gain a deeper understanding of the determination, personal strength and enduring human spirit evident in the stories of survivors and the objects they rescued.

“There is a generation of people who still feel deeply touched by the events that happened in their country or in other countries,” Lawrence said. “If people come away with the sense that the stories of these survivors are important to keep alive, that’s fabulous.”

Keeping the Testimony Alive Through Artifacts, Stories and Music. Sunday, April 19, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Mount Sinai, 6150 Mount Sinai Drive, Simi Valley.For more information, call (800) 600-0076or visit Heirlooms, Antiques Keep Shoah Testimony Alive Read More »