Press-Enterprise (subscription), CA
May 4 2005
Inland residents recall painful past
REMEMBRANCE: Inland residents work to ensure that such a tragedy is
never repeated.
By BETTYE WELLS MILLER / The Press-Enterprise
Never forget.
As Inland Jews prepare to observe Yom HaShoah — Holocaust
Remembrance Day — on Thursday, the observance becomes more important
as time passes and the number of survivors dwindles, residents said.
“Never forget, never forgive,” said Claude Erlanger, an 82-year-old
Lake Arrowhead resident who returned Monday with one of his three
sons from a trip to Israel and former concentration camps in Eastern
Europe.
Erlanger, born in Mannheim, Germany, fled the Nazi regime with his
parents in 1939 at age 16.
He lost 19 aunts, uncles and cousins as German soldiers rounded up
Jews and sent them to die in concentration camps. He has not returned
to Germany since.
“Never forgive, never forget so that it never happens again to us or
any other people,” Erlanger said by phone.
2004 / The Press-Enterprise
Gussie Zaks survived concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen and
Treblinka. Zaks, 78, said she visited Treblinka last year.
The trip to Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia was a sort of
pilgrimage and a way to help his 52-year-old son, Steve, better
understand the horror of 6 million Jews and millions of others who
died because of the Nazi regime, he said.
“There are so many murderers in this world, in Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq
under (Saddam) Hussein. The massacre of Armenians. … We cannot
forget,” Erlanger said.
Gussie Zaks, of San Diego, who survived concentration camps such as
Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka, said she speaks to thousands of students
in the Temecula Valley, San Diego area and elsewhere to keep alive
the memory of a tragedy that many schoolchildren are not aware of.
“I am 78,”she said by phone. “In another five to 10 years, there
won’t be any survivors alive.”
Last year, Zaks said, she and her husband, two children and four
grandchildren visited Auschwitz and Treblinka at the urging of one
grandson who wanted to see some of the concentration camps his
grandparents survived.
Zaks said she resisted at first because a trip 19 years earlier had
been so painful. But she agreed to help her children and
grandchildren experience the camps where starvation and desperation
almost claimed her life.
“It’s important for the next generation to carry on,” she said.
For Heddy Salerno of Norco, memories of the Holocaust were too
painful for her parents to share as she was growing up, even though
her mother bore the tattoo that identified her as a survivor of
Auschwitz. Her father survived Dachau.
“I was 40 before I found out my father was married and had a child
before the war,” said the 48-year-old mother of two teenagers. “His
wife and daughter were both killed.”
While some Auschwitz survivors had their tattoos removed, her mother
did not, Salerno said by phone.
“I think my mother kept it so she would remember and so I would see
and remember,” she said. Her parents told her “that we had to do
whatever we needed to do to make sure this would always be
remembered, that the world should never allow this to happen again.”
Before Alzheimer’s disease began to steal her mother’s memory in the
1990s, she wrote about events that happened before, during and after
the war.
Salerno read some of those stories at her daughter’s junior high
school five years ago and told students how it felt to grow up with
no extended family.
“My American friends all had grandparents,” she said. “I had
nothing.”
Keeping her parents’ stories alive is especially important when so
many people deny the existence of the Holocaust or never heard of it,
she said.
“Even to this day I can’t believe the atrocities that happened and
nobody did anything about it,” Salerno said. “I think it could happen
again in a heartbeat. All you need is one fanatic and a bunch of
people thinking he’s the best thing since sliced bread, somebody who
makes them feel better than they are.”
Karen Spiegel’s late mother-in-law was the only member of her family
of five to survive Nazi concentration camps. The mother-in-law spoke
little of her experience with her children.
But Spiegel, of Corona, said she has made a point of educating her
own children about the Holocaust. Each of her five teenagers has
visited at least one German concentration camp, she said.
“If we don’t remember, it’s all for naught,” she said by phone. “It
could happen again. Part of remembering is acknowledging it. …
History repeats itself, and we can’t allow this to be repeated. …
We need to encourage people to document it, particularly as years
pass and it becomes more distant. It’s now our responsibility to take
what they shared.”