MARKED FOR LIFE

Miami Herald, The (FL)
September 1, 1991
Author: MEG LAUGHLIN Herald Staff Writer

WE SEE THEM IN THE CHECKOUT LINES AT PUBLIX. THEY'RE IN THE CONDO ACROSS THE HALL. THERE ARE 15,000 OF THEM IN SOUTH FLORIDA. EXCEPT FOR FADED MARKS ON THEIR ARM, THERE'S LITTLE TO SEPARATE THEM. BUT DON'T LET THAT FOOL YOU.

IT'S NOT JUST THEIR SKIN THAT'S TATTOOED

IT'S THEIR SOULS

It was late summer of 1941. There were still melons to pick and fields full of flowers and picnickers. You could Double Dutch jump rope without a sweater and play soccer right up to dinner. Soon, school would begin. Despite the war, life went on.

The edict was issued in Germany on Sept. 6, 50 years ago this week, and spread through Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary over the next three years: "Jews who have completed their sixth year are forbidden to show themselves in public without the Jewish star. This consists of a six-pointed star, outlined with black subscription, 'Jew.' It must be worn visibly and firmly sewed to the left breast of clothing."

The eight people pictured on the cover and in the following pages were among the millions of European Jews ordered to wear their faith on their lapel. A half century later, they are among the rapidly dwindling thousands who remember cutting the stars out of felt and satin. Cotton and wool.

They should be durable, Judy Freeman's mother decided. Cheap, flimsy cotton will do, Phil Steinbok's father said. They basted them on at the six points. They sewed them on with a hundred tiny, neat stitches. Pinned them on with straight pins and safety pins. From sweater to jacket to coat the stars went. Permanent stars. Portable stars. Wear them, get shot or go into hiding. Those were your choices.

This will be short-lived, they said. This will get worse, they said. Who really knew? There were rumors. But who could believe them? After all, where were people more educated and civilized than in Germany and the surrounding countries?

It was the glass breaking that woke up 15-year-old Hinda Steinbok. Before she could get out of bed, a man in a green uniform had hold of her nightgown. Outside, he yelled. All Jews out. Can't I get my coat, she asked. The navy pea coat with the yellow star. It's required, she sobbed. Not any more, he told her. There is a new plan.


Josef Koestman

When he was a kid, Josef Koestman didn't think it was so great to be short and small-boned with narrow hips and shoulders. But when the Gestapo came to his town in Poland, he changed his mind.

While people all around him were being sent to the ghetto, then on to the death camp, he could slide through basement pipes into the cavernous sewer system under the town and hide for days. And, when he was caught and forced into the ghetto to starve, he found a hole in the barbed-wire fence too small for a German shepherd, that was big enough for him.

Finally, though, the Gestapo caught up with him in late 1942 and herded him onto a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Spotting a metal grate, he got some guys in the car to lift him up to it, and fiddled with the grate until it came off. As the train sped through the Polish winter toward death, he jumped from the roof.

He kept moving. Slipping into towns and crawling through holes in ghetto fences to get clothes and jewelry to sell. Sleeping in abandoned rooms and sheds, always staying one step ahead of the Gestapo. He worked with a team of German engineers who gave him room and board and a train ticket when the job was over. He hopped trains, wagons and bicycles, and walked for days, finally hiding in the mountains until the Russians came.

When he got to the United States in 1950, he still kept moving: From busboy jobs on the Lower East Side to waiter jobs in the Catskills, to captain jobs uptown, then down to Miami Beach to be a maitre d', then a restaurant manager. Always, he says, he has traveled light. Kept his options open. Steered clear of commitment in his personal life so he could get out in a hurry. Like some people keep old photographs, he keeps a bag full of immigration cards, check stubs, car titles, apartment leases and driver's licenses that prove his mobility. When he shows them off, he does not hand them to you. Instead, he holds each one to his chest, like a badge of survival.


Carol Tellerman

Before the Germans ever got to her town in Poland, Carol Tellerman says she was starving. By the time she was 15, both her parents were dead and she and her seven brothers and sisters would go days without bread. They'd boil a pot of water on the stove in the late afternoon to make the neighbors think they had food.

The trick was to divide a piece of bread into thirds so you'd have three meals. Never eat the whole thing. That way you'd have something to look forward to. Even now, she carries a Swiss army knife in her purse, so she can divide her food and save some for later. When her three children were little and they were living in New Jersey, she'd buy one ice cream cone and cut it into thirds.

"In my freezer, " she says, " I keep enough food to hide inside for a month."

Nov. 2, 1939: She announced to her older brother that she and her boyfriend were getting married that day. He told her that, at 16, she was too young. If she did, to consider herself disowned. That same day, right after a brusque civil ceremony, the Germans came into their small Polish village. Fast and motorized. With incredible force. Carol can hardly talk when she thinks about it. Married 52 years, and they've never once celebrated their anniversary.

She never saw anyone in her family again. She went into hiding, and they all died in the camps. Sometimes, she and her husband would travel together. Sometimes, they'd split up when it was easier to hide alone. She lived in abandoned basements and cars, in woods, in ditches, in sheds. Her right leg froze one night. At 17, she hid in a barn by herself and stuffed rags in her mouth so no one would hear her screams during childbirth. Six months later, her baby girl died while nursing. Just coughed and gasped in her arms. Her head fell back, away from Carol's breast. She sobs when she tries to talk about it.

She could sing. How she could sing. La Traviata: She knew the parts of Violette and Alfredo. She could practically put the entire opera on single-handedly, but what good did it do? No one was eating, much less paying for opera stars.

"You don't know how much you can take," she says. "You don't know how deep the will to survive runs in you. With a gun to your head, you can live. In such terror, you can live, as long as the bullet doesn't go through you."

Maybe it was her petite features and blond hair. There was no one left to say she was Jewish. She could speak German and sing the Mass in Latin. She got so used to being Catholic during the war, that even now, she sometimes dreams she's in a stained- glass room singing Ave Maria. She did what she had to, stories she won't tell. But she made it.

After the war, in her early 20s, she came to America. She put snaps on straps in a garment factory on the Lower East Side. She always confused the word "refugee" with an English word that sounded just like it. She would tell people: "I am a Polish Frigidaire."

The German foreman at the garment factory would make fun of her and "always give her the business." Carol hated her -- that is until the day Carol turned 25. On this day, the woman did something Carol couldn't believe. She brought in a cake. A round sponge cake with a hole in the middle and sugar drippings, complete with candles. All the women left the assembly line and sat around her at a table. They sang to Carol and made a big to-do over her.

"It was one of the few times in my life," she says, "when I felt like I belonged."

It made her so happy that she sang part of La Traviata for them, which she sings again this day in June, 40 years later. She is Violette, French prostitute, in a country villa, begging Alfredo to understand her. She is Carol Tellerman, Polish Holocaust survivor, in a Hallandale condo.

"Forgive me," she sings, in a clear, passionate soprano. "You don't know what's in my heart. You don't know what I've been through."


Judy Freeman

Life was good when she was a child. Her dad's bakery, which specialized in a poppy seed crescent roll, did well enough. They were never hungry: roast goose with pickles and mashed potatoes in winter, cold yogurt cherry soup with bow tie noodles and cheese in summer -- always with plenty of bread and butter.

She went to public school, where Catholics, Jews and Lutherans mixed easily. Czechoslovakia under Masaryk: What was not to like?

Even in 1943, after her area was annexed to Hungary and under German control, she had no sense of war. Sometimes there were rumors about Jewish people being relocated, being made to work, but her dad suspected these were poor Jews who probably needed the work, anyway. It wouldn't happen to Jews like them, he told the family.

She remembers taking off the little drop-diamond earrings she'd gotten for her 12th birthday and putting them in a bag with the family radio, her mother's diamond ring, the gold candlesticks off the dining room table and her father's violin. They had to turn all their valuables in to the German security forces to help the war effort. They didn't like it, but they went along, certain that their loyalty would mark the end of this awful infringement into their personal lives.

Next, they were ordered to move to the town brickyard. Give up their house and live in a small open shed with two other families. Judy's mother packed a suitcase with heavy clothes for the family, fearing they'd be out in the open during winter. Her father packed a suitcase full of hard poppy seed cookies, thinking they'd need food. Judy, still the idealist, packed books, which the guards took from her the first day in the brickyard.

She remembers the day the Hungarian guard sneaked his daughter Eva in, to visit her. The two girls had been close friends in school. But a month of sleeping in the brickyard had changed Judy. She was thin and serious and self-conscious. She could not get into giggling and whispering with Eva as they had always done. It was from her schoolmate that she learned the family would be loaded on a train and taken far from the Czech border.

To this day, Judy gets hives when she hears a metal door clank shut. It is the sound of the guard locking the train door. It is the sound of the beginning of the end.

They rode for days without food, cramped together in a cattle car, forced to urinate and defecate where they sat. In a mad frenzy, a guard shot a woman near Judy, and Judy stared at the corpse for two days, as it bounced and flopped with the rhythm of the train. It was her best friend's grandmother.

Her father kept telling them that the worst would soon be over. Not to worry. It would be better when they got to Auschwitz.

She didn't say good-bye to her father. The moment he stepped off the train, the guards took him. It happened so fast, she didn't see him go. No final word. No look. At least with her mother and little sister, she squeezed their hands before they were taken away. But with her father, her favorite person in the world, nothing.

They stripped her naked. Shaved her head. Shaved her pubic hair. Painted a red stripe down her back. Tattooed her with a number. Put her on a wooden shelf with 10 other girls in a cavernous room with a thousand other teen-agers.

Her mother and father went to the gas chamber because they were past 40. Her sister went because she was under 15. Those who limped went. Those who bent over went. Those who stared wrong went. Every third person went. You went because you looked too meek. You went because you looked too proud. To the left to the right. Who could say why? She waited her turn.

She cannot say the hour, the day, even the month when it came because there was no way to mark time. But she can say what it was like as she sat naked on a bench outside the room where they dropped the gas canisters into the shower heads. For the first time in ages, she was not in a daze. Something about imminent death, she says, fills you with life. She felt extraordinarily self-aware.

Just as the guards were marching her into the gas chamber, an air raid siren went off. The guards ran. Everything fell apart. The girls ran out. A few days later she was shipped to another camp. From there, she and the other camp residents marched for 10 days at a time, through the frozen countryside outside Berlin. She got dysentery. She got typhus. The girls around her dragged her. Finally, they got to their destination.

In a big hardback book called Bergen-Belsen, she points to a photo of herself in a room full of emaciated women: "Here I am. I weigh 60 pounds."

A British soldier took the photo, when his battalion liberated the camp, a few days later. She stares hollow-eyed into the camera. She is not young or pretty. She is ageless. She is dying. She is 16.

They put her on a cot and gave her broth. She asked for a mirror. This is not me, she said, touching her face. This skeleton will not make it.

But 46 years later, a smiling robust woman sits in her Miami condo, holding up a bronze plaque: "Holocaust Survivor."

"This," says Judy Freeman proudly, "will go on my gravestone."


Halina Laster

After a year in prison, a year in Auschwitz and a year in forced labor, Halina Laster found herself, at 20, on a train speeding to freedom. When it pulled to a halt in Denmark, she watched people get off. Everyone was running into someone's arms, kissing and weeping. Lovers. Families. Friends. All reunited. But all she could think about was that there was no one out there for her. Her family in Poland had been completely wiped out. All she had gone through -- and for what? She was alone in the world.

When she tried to get off the train, her legs buckled. They must be asleep, she thought, rubbing them and shaking them, but it didn't help. She had to be carried off the train on a stretcher.

From a wheelchair in a Danish hospital, she spent her days looking out the window. If a nurse brought her food, she ate. If an orderly turned the radio on, she listened to it. If she needed to go to the bathroom, she waited until it occurred to someone to take her. She was so in the habit of being at the mercy of others, it did not occur to her to ever say what she wanted.

It had not always been that way. The child of a well-to-do textile manufacturer, she was not used to being pushed around. She talked back to the Gestapo in Lod. Refused to wear a yellow star. Worked for the resistance, sneaking intellectuals and Zionists to Warsaw. But at 17, she got caught and was imprisoned for being a Jewish sympathizer. At 18, she was sent to Auschwitz, when the authorities figured out that this arrogant blond girl who spoke High German and wore a cross, was a Polish Jew.

She would look at the camp officials who decided who would live and who would die and wonder: Do they go home to classical music and a fireplace? A couple of children climbing on them and an after-dinner pipe? Murder during the day and family at night. What got them to this point?

After a year in Auschwitz, she was sent to an airplane parts factory. Already sick, the three-day march, through mud and without food, to get to the train, made her sicker. After a few months, she was put on another train. Farther away from nothing. Farther toward nothing.

By April 1945, she had lost all will. She had no idea that the war was over or where she was headed when she was put on the train for Denmark. Nor did she care.

But a couple of months into her hospital stay, when she was sitting, as usual, looking out a window from her wheelchair, she noticed a man on the street beckoning to her. He had a bag under one arm and was motioning furiously at her, pointing at his bag.

There is something in that bag from my family, she thought. He has some word for me from them. Without thinking, she jumped out of the wheelchair and ran out to him. It did not hit her until she saw what was in the bag, what she had done.

He had nothing from her family. He had seen her in the window and thought she was pretty. He had a box of candy for her. The paralysis had been in her mind.

The first thing she did when she left the hospital was set a task for herself that required a decision. She went shopping with the few crowns Brigitte, a newly-made Swedish friend, had given her. Halina's plan was to buy something for life in Israel, where she planned to go to be a pioneer in the promised land.

But when Brigitte saw Halina's purchase, she told her to reconsider Israel. Maybe, Brigitte advised, you should go to a country more suited for someone who spends all of her money on a pink lipstick.

"And that," says Halina Laster, "is how I ended up in the United States."


Phil Steinbok

One of Phil Steinbok's jobs at Auschwitz was to clean up. He'd go in the room where prisoners, on the way to the gas chamber, left their clothes and bundle them for rags. With a little pair of scissors he'd found in the washroom, he'd cut pieces out of the clothes, always trimming around the red stripe painted down the back. While marching to the coal mines to shovel coal, he'd use thread, pulled from his blanket, to sew the bits of material into caps that he'd sell to the guards for extra bread.

His whole life has been making caps. He'd dropped out of school at age 10 to help his father and brothers sew caps in the family kitchen. When the Germans took over their small Polish town, and forced him into a road-building camp, he managed to survive while the young men around him were dropping like flies.

"Always," says Phil Steinbok, "I'm getting by, making the caps."

The same was true when he traveled for days in the back of a wagon, sitting on the bodies of his fellow camp mates. A cap for a piece of bread. A little here, a little there. Enough to keep going.

From Auschwitz, he was sent to an airplane parts factory where a guard warned him if he didn't stop making caps he'd hang. That's when Phil learned to make them at night, fumbling in the dark.

When he came to the states in the '50s, he sold caps "for nice money" out of his apartment in Brooklyn. In fact, even now, from his condo in Hollywood, he makes a few caps a week. A lot of Northerners vacationing in the complex come to him. Like the guy from Canada who knocked on his door last winter. Steinbok immediately recognized him from one of the camps, but couldn't place him until the guy's wife called him by his Yiddish name. Then, Phil realized he was the very guard who had threatened to see him hang for making caps, 47 years ago.

"When I told him," says Steinbok, "I knew he'd been a guard, he ran out in such a hurry, he forgot his cap."


Hinda Steinbok

Do not expect much from me, Hinda Steinbok, Phil Steinbok's wife warns: "I cannot sit long because of my back. I black out when I try to talk about Auschwitz. I am not a happy person. Beyond that, I have nothing to say."

She will tell you that no matter how bright and happy the other people who lived through the Holocaust seem, they are not truly that way. You could not go through Auschwitz, she insists, and come out whole. You could not come out with any joy in your life. Ever.

"For all of us, whether we lived or died, life stopped in the camps."

She can make you a great turkey sandwich on rye. She plays a mean game of rummy. She likes going out to eat and to her Hadassah meetings. She's a fanatic about keeping up with world news. She is fluent in five languages. But she always comes back to one thing: She is messed up. Damaged beyond repair.

The grandchildren call. There are pictures everywhere of them. Weddings. Bar Mitzvahs. Anniversaries. She is in silk, satin, brocade. She holds her head high. She smiles. She is dignified. Proud. Thoughtful. But it never changes: Her guts are always churning. She cannot sit and get away. She cannot stand and get away. Alone or with people, it is all the same. Life is an apparition. Whatever she was, she left in the war.

"What I regret most," she says, "is what I've done to my children. I have ruined their lives, too. Always, we talked about it when they were growing up. Finally they say, 'Ma, no more Holocaust. No more camps. We cannot stand it. Enough. Enough.' "

She and her husband, Phil, went to a psychiatrist in the '60s. They still take pills to calm down. How long can we be so sour, he asks her. Isn't 50 years long enough?

"Nothing is enough," she says digging her fingers into her cheeks and shaking her head. "Not in all of this big, rich America is enough paper to tell what we went through. Not enough paper to make people understand that if this could happen in Germany, it could happen here."

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 7
Copyright (c) 1991 The Miami Herald