How My Father Survived the Holocaust

   The Story of How My Father Survived the Holocaust

 Guest Writer Alan Schlesinger

Now that I am retired, I have finally had the opportunity to write my father’s memoir more than thirty years after his death and almost fifty years since he told me about his experience during the Holocaust. I have titled the book Resilience: The Story of How My Father Survived the Holocaust.

My father, Joseph Schlesinger, had a remarkable life. Born in Hungary in 1910, he survived two world wars and the Nazi Holocaust, emigrated to the United States, and started a family. While anyone’s survival of the Holocaust is a miracle, my father’s story is in many ways even more incredible. He survived the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Still, before that, he endured seventeen months of forced labor during the Russian invasion by the Axis armies and the Soviet offensive that eventually expelled the invaders. Few forced laborers survived the atrocities at the eastern front and the brutally cold Russian winter. Yet my father endured returning to Hungary just before the mass deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.

After six months in Auschwitz, where his parents were victims of the Nazi extermination plan of the “final solution,” he was eventually transferred to Nordhausen concentration camp, where he worked as a slave laborer building underground tunnels to produce the V-2 rockets.

After escaping during a British bombing raid, he began his harrowing escape from the Nazis and the advancing Russian Army to reach the American occupation zone at the war’s end.

Alone (an only child) and weighing under 100 pounds, he began rebuilding his life. He was placed in a displaced person camp in Eschwege, Germany (“Displaced person” or “DP” was used by the American government for the refugees after World War II). As a physician, he started a medical practice in the self-governed DP camp, caring for the other DPs.

While beginning to heal physically, he realized that to survive emotionally. He had to let go of his anger, be grateful for his blessings, and build a new life with hope for the future.

The book has many examples of my father’s choices to live a grateful life rather than harbor resentment. Perhaps the most moving was the following story told to me by my mother (they met in the DP camp) after my father’s death. Once my father established his medical practice for the other DPs, it was decided by the American occupation government that the US Army doctor would care for all of the US Army personnel at the Army base in town. The local German civilian doctors would care for the German civilians in the city, and my father would care for the DPs in the camp.

 A problem arose when the local physicians in town did not want to treat those civilians who were former Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or suspected Nazi sympathizers. They asked the Army doctor if he would treat them, but the Army did not allow him to do so. My father volunteered to care for these people, stating that they would have defeated him if the Nazis could take away his humanity and make him break his Hippocratic oath. He had decided that to move forward and fully heal, he must not seek vengeance but instead try to forgive.       

Among the many stories of survivors from the horrors of the Holocaust, I believe my father is unique. Beyond his physical survival, his emotional survival and ability to start a new life celebrating life with optimism and joy represent an amazing triumph of gratitude and forgiveness over anger and resentment.

 This photograph, taken on our boat in New Hampshire in 1968, reveals his complete physical and emotional survival. He had been swimming in Lake Winnipesaukee and climbing the ladder to return to the boat. Someone said something funny, and my father laughed so wildly that he was falling toward his right and almost out of the photograph’s frame. He is filled with joy. Despite the number tattooed on his arm clearly visible, and the loss and pain it symbolized, his joy cannot be contained. He has healed—healed completely—and will enjoy every moment of the rest of his life.

* https://www.amazon.com/Resilience-Story-Father-Survived-Holocaust/dp/B091F5SLP3/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Alan+e+schlesinger&qid=1620837617&sr=8-1

Alan Schlesinger

Joanna joannaseibert.com

A Senility Picaresque

A Senility Picaresque

     Well into the 8th decade, my creeping forgetfulness of people and place names is disturbing. Memory lapses derail and complicate conversations, writing, and even daydreaming. In medical school many years ago, Alzheimer’s Disease was taught to be the early-onset at age 40-50 of dementia. No longer --- memory loss, disorientation, general confusion, and other symptoms are all named “Alzheimer’s” whether the afflicted are in their 40’s or their 90’s.

Remembering Monhegan Island

     The first signs of beginning senility arose several years ago when I, in the midst of relating facts or telling a story, suddenly couldn’t recall an important name or a key event. To cover my deficit, I began using the tactic elderly writer Roger Angel once recommended: “I send an Indian scout into the unspoken next sentence to warn of missing names or items --- and modify or change my words to avoid the impending deficiency.” Alzheimer’s runs in families, and my father suffered progressive dementia, finally requiring hospice care. There is reason for my concern.

     The novel Still Alice is a brilliant description authored by neuroscientist Lisa Genova. She realistically and artfully describes the fictional progress of a 50-year-old Harvard Professor woman who progresses through all the stages of Alzheimer’s disease, showing its effects on her profession, her family, and her self-esteem. I recently chose to reread the book, hoping for some insight.

     In the book, Alice had been barely, but bravely, adjusting to her progressive dementia for a decade when she was persuaded to attend a Harvard Graduation Ceremony. The event’s featured speaker, a Spanish actor, talked about his life’s adventure ---what he called a “picaresque … a long journey that teaches the hero lessons learned along the way.” He offered a requisite five goals: “Be creative, be useful, be practical, be generous, and finish big.” Alice, in the book, reflects on that advice but doesn’t comment on an obvious concern: how could anyone in the throes of dementia ever hope to “finish big?”

     That admonition ”to finish big” was puzzling and distracting for me. What might that entail, and how might it be accomplished in anyone’s life afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease? The usual slow but progressive drift into senescence would seem to make finishing strong a remote consideration.

     Still perturbed days later, I continued reading, hoping an answer to my consternation would be offered. Instead, quite providentially, an answer literally fell out of the book. It was a newspaper clipping I had left in the back pages during a previous reading of the book years before. The short article “The Joy of Taking the Family to Dinner” was authored by psychiatrist and long-time Boston Globe contributor Elissa Ely. In the piece, she described family dinners with a friend’s octogenarian father, who was severely Alzheimer’s afflicted and no longer verbal, who consistently became agitated at the finish of family meals in his care facility:

     “Whenever the family eats with him, my friend’s father picks up the tab that does not exist. He signs on the napkin or a scrap of paper someone remembers to bring or other receipts conveniently pulled from a pocket. I don’t know if the writing is legible or if he can read the name he signs. But he signs with finality and satisfaction. The very action makes him content. He is taking his family to dinner.”

     So there it was, ---the answer I sought. Despite being lost in the fog of dementia, and near the end of his life’s adventure –his own picaresque –the father had found a way to “finish big.”

      It also became evident that I had noted this remarkable lesson years ago and saved the article … but had forgotten.

I have painted in the summer on Monhegan Island for about 15 years, usually realistically. Last year, I had an impulse to paint a section of the Monhegan Harbor shoreline and its houses in a semi-abstract way. It occurred to me that the painting could be a metaphor for memory loss.

Ken Fellows

Joanna      joannaseibert.com  https://www.joannaseibert.com/