For the tenacious, eighty-six year old Yehoshua Neiditz, surviving has been a way of life: evading Nazis in his native Poland and hiding out with the Partisans, logging one lucky escape after another. But his entire family number among the estimated six million Jews murdered in the Second World War.
“I never wanted to think about it,” says Neiditz in his small, tidy flat in Tel Aviv. “It makes me anxious to relive it. It’s not good for my mind.”
Sixty-seven years later he has at last found the courage to dig up painful memories, share his testimony and record the names of family members from his hometown of Pinsk in the main database of the Nazi genocide.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum has launched what may be the last viable campaign to get remaining Holocaust survivors to record the names of Jews murdered in the war.
A media campaign across Israel, the country with the largest living concentration of Holocaust survivors, has urged them to come forward and give the names of those who died. According to the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, an estimated 327,000 Holocaust survivors eventually received Israeli citizenship. About 167,000 are still alive today and the majority of them are over 80 years old.
When Yad Vashem was founded in the 1950s, it was guided by the principle that “every victim has a name,” and thus began the monumental task of identifying the victims of the Holocaust.
It got off to a tough start. In the early years of the state, native Israelis ridiculed Holocaust survivors for not having fought the Nazis. The stigma caused many to hide their past. As of today, Yad Vashem has collected the names of nearly four million victims and is trying to recover as many more identities as possible while survivors still live.
“A name is essentially a person’s soul,” says Cynthia Wroclawski, manager of the Holocaust Victims’ Names Recovery Project at Yad Vashem. “It is their identity. The Nazis tried to wipe off every memory of their victim … and when we try and create a personal commemoration to each and every victim we are in a sense recreating the great tragic loss of six million of our brothers and sisters who were taken from us brutally.”
The present campaign in Israel has included broadcasts on national radio stations and has generated hundreds of telephone calls a day. Identities can be added on the Yad Vashem Names Internet site, but volunteers are also dispatched to the homes of survivors to help them fill out the forms.
“We are really in a race against time,” says Wroclawski. “Time is passing and we don’t know how many more years we have left to speak with actual witnesses who still remember this information.”
Volunteers, like Zahava Schwartz, whose parents went through the Holocaust, have been reaching out to survivors. She says approaching death has caused some survivors to finally speak before it is too late.
“Now they feel that they are old and they have to talk about it, otherwise it will be forgotten,” Schwartz says. “Every person is a new story and every person is a sad story so it is difficult and sometimes we cry together and sometimes I go home and then I cry.”
Wroclawski says there are about 250 volunteers from across the country helping with the program. Most of the missing identities come from areas of the former Soviet Union and eastern Poland. Also, the ultra-Orthodox community, which often shuns national institutions, has been hesitant to register names with Yad Vashem.
“For many survivors this really is the last opportunity to bear witness to what they know,” she says. “If they know the help is there they will reach out.”
Drinking hot water, Neiditz, a retired barber, seems like a bundle of energy and much younger than his 86 years of age. It is as if he has been holding inside of himself his stories of survival for decades and they are now bursting out almost uncontrollably.
“My mother held on to me, saying ‘they took your father and brother. You have to stay with me,’” he recalls. He describes how he hid under the floorboards as a Nazi officer came in and bellowed “‘Ver ist der manner?’ ‘Gone to work camps’ my mother said. The officer knew that meant they had been sent to their deaths and said ‘Das ist gut.’”
“The most important thing is for a person who has suffered through this to tell it like it was during the Nazi times, the annihilation of the Jews, and that this be documented by the media,” Neiditz says. “To see it and hear it, and for it to be told for another 200 years.”
Asked why he waited until now to give the names of his parents and siblings, Neiditz sits back in his chair and says, “The train has already left the station. There’s nothing to say. If I say, ‘what a pity’, will it help? No. What I’m doing now is better than nothing because we are only a few remaining Holocaust survivors in our old age.”
Thelma Ophel, the volunteer helping him fill out the forms, says she has seen in Neiditz and other survivors a character trait of living in a perpetual state of survival, manifested by burying the past and concentrating on the task immediately at hand.
“What he did from the moment Nazis entered the ghetto is live his life in order to survive,” Ophel says. “I think character, his great zest for life, his ability to get by and stay alive despite everything has continued until this day. Other matters like recording his family members with Yad Vashem were not important. He just lives his life.”
Neiditz smacks her hand and says, “Exactly. It’s exactly as you say.”
Yad Vashem says it has no dialogue with Holocaust deniers, but there is no doubt the list could serve as a rebuttal to those who say it was exaggerated.
“I know that the issue of Holocaust denial, which is rampant today, is an incentive to some of the survivors to say ‘listen this was my family. I know who they were,’” Wroclawski says. “Each page of testimony with the name of the person who actually knew that individual is in itself a testimony against Holocaust denial.”