This article in a slightly smaller form appeared in the Feb. 15, 2008 Jewish Advocate.

Terezin survivors share postwar experiences at Clark panel

by Susie Davidson

Survivors of the Holocaust are emotionally vulnerable people who cry easily, but also have great strength. Following their hellish ordeal, they educated themselves, worked hard and raised families, tending to rebuild, rather than wallow, despite usually arriving in new countries with little except painful memories.

On this past October 19, students at the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University got a first-hand look at four such men: Michael Kraus, Jan Strebinger and Harry Osers, who were together in Terezin, Auschwitz/Birkenau, Mauthausen and Gunskirchen, Austria (a subcamp of Mauthausen). With Terezin survivor Michael Gruenbaum as moderator, they led a panel entitled "Holocaust/Terezin Survivors On Their Post-War Reintegration and Emigration." Strebinger and Osers had traveled, respectively, from Brazil and Venezuela. Kraus and Gruenbaum are Brookline residents; Terezin survivors and Newton residents Edgar and Hanka Krasa attended as well. All are originally from Czechoslovakia.

Each man faced postwar obstacles that included language, culture, and customs, and ultimately became successful. But the biggest obstacle was the one they overcame simply by being part of the Holocaust. Strebinger and Gruenbaum were part of "Nesarim," or "Eagles," at Terezin, whose stories are chronicled in "Nesarim: Child Survivors of Terezin," by Gruenbaum’s late wife Thelma. "We were 40 boys in an old classroom," Strebinger explained. "About 10 survived." All three panelists were among 89 boys who passed the selection by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz-Birkenau, thus avoiding the gas chambers.

"I almost never thought about reintegration prior to this presentation," said Kraus, an architect who constructed the stages of his transition: realizing that his parents had been killed, accepting orphanhood, working through anger and helplessness, reconciling dreams of the pre-war world, resuming his education, recording war experiences, starting over in Canada with total strangers, learning English, moving to America to the family of a distant relative, returning to Europe alone. Ultimately, he met his wife, Ilana Eppenstein, an Israeli medical student at the University of Geneva, and gained a large family, then began one with the birth of two daughters, whom they raised in the Boston area.

Strebinger, who owns a chemical plant that employs over 50 Brazilians, was taken in by non-Jewish friends of his parents following the war and returned to school, which wasn't to last long. "One day, a big fellow made a joking, anti-Semitic comment. I beat him so badly I broke his front teeth." He left for England, where a distant cousin lived. With a group of mainly war orphans, he learned to repair shoes, became an electrician, and trained to go to Palestine but wound up in Rio de Janeiro, where an aunt lived. "With a practical profession, I had a chance to survive," he said. "During the war, having a degree held no advantage.

He learned cultural skills as well. "I didn’t know proper table manners," he said. "I worked for the airlines, and learned what fork and knife to use." Friends would joke with him, some even playing his tattooed number in lotteries. He worked for a chemical company. "To get ahead in life was my raison d’etre," he said. He ended up purchasing a company that made specialty lubricants. "Many people want their kids to be a doctor, an engineer," he said. "It is very important to study, but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world."

Osers left Czechoslovakia for Venezuela in 1949, on the day he got his high school diploma. He told the students that he had had luck, as his mother and sister survived. He met a woman in Caracas who had also been in Terezin; they married five years later. "We were happy because we understood each other," he said, continuing in an animated style, with dramatic facial expressions. He was able to pass his high school equivalency tests because he read a book on Simon Bolivar. When he said "Simon Bolivar liked the ladies," they told him to stop talking and gave him a passing grade. Osers has been a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Caracas for 50 years; his six books on civil and structural engineering are still used today.

Kraus and his wife were reunited with Osers and his late wife Dorit at a 1994 reunion of "Birkenau Boys" in Prague, and met them twice in Brookline. One winter, they actually skied together at Club Med in Copper Mountain, Colorado. "Although Jan also belonged to the ‘Birkenau Boys’," said Kraus, “he has never come to its reunions, as he is very loyal to the Nesarim." Strebinger agreed that Nesarim held happier memories than the later concentration camps. "I spent five months less in Birkenau than Harry Osers and Michael Kraus, but in the last 10 months of our internment we shared the same fate," he said. All three were liberated in Gunskirchen, in May, 1945.

The men email, but this reunion was very meaningful, said Gruenbaum. "Each of the three had a very different emphasis," he said. "Because Harry’s mother and sister survived the camps, his transition was easier, so he concentrated on academic success closely coupled with social status recognition. As Strebinger lacked education, he sought economic success as compensation."

Clearly, the men retain deep feelings for the innocence of their childhoods. Kraus uses the name of his home town, Nachod, as his email address. "There has been a certain sentimental attachment to the place of my childhood that symbolizes normalcy, happiness and a large extended family, almost all of whom were killed in the Holocaust," he said.

Clark senior Naomi Sully, an International Development major concentrating in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, is the Co-Director of the Clark chapter of STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, and recently returned from Rwanda. "When studying the Holocaust and other genocides in an academic setting," she said, "the focus is often on aspects of the actual event." She favors a psycho-social outlook. "As scholars, global citizens and relatives, we can respond to survivors in a way that reduces trauma and provides security, so that inter-generational effects of genocide can be decreased and eventually, maybe even eliminated," she said.

Last summer, Sully researched re-integration of Czech Jewish Holocaust survivors into post-war Czech society with the Clark University Prague-Terezin program. Bryan Angelilli also visited Prague with the group and took courses at Clark on the Holocaust and genocide." I am not Jewish, so unlike many of the students who went on the trip, I did not have a direct connection to the Holocaust," he said. His research concerned the false beautification of the Terezin ghetto for a 1944 Red Cross visit. He still questions. "Did the Red Cross actually believe that Terezin was a microcosm for all the Jewish ghettos? Could they have put together a more damning report that would have placed the international community up in arms as to the living conditions?"

The panelists asked questions, too. "Why did you choose this field?” said Osers. Hannah Salzman-Gubbay answered that while she grew up Jewish-American, she sought a richer, "guided, rather than generic" experience. Stefan Ionescu, a doctoral student from Romania, cited studies that had been done on Gypsies under Hitler, in response to a query from Strebinger. "I believe that the students fully recognized the enormity of the panelists’ success, and the applause after each individual presentation showed they understood the message about how to overcome adversity," said Gruenbaum.

"My students learned how these former child inmates of Terezin and other concentration camps negotiated complex postwar situations, both personally and politically," said Strassler program manager Dr. Tatyana Macaulay. (Strassler is the only U.S. institution to offer a doctorate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.) She cited survivors she had known who remained in Czechoslovakia and prospered as artists, businessmen or educators. "They taught me to appreciate life, and the power of humor,” she said.

"We enjoy life," said Osers. "By the law of probability, we should have been dead 65 years ago."

Strebinger noted that they had a lot in common. "We were really fighters for opportunity in life." He said he has taken bread from restaurant bowls to birds, still upset to see food thrown out.

"Starting with absolutely nothing when they miraculously returned from the camps, having lost their entire families, friends, all their family property, six years of formal education and their youth," said Gruenbaum, "it is truly admirable that they were able to overcome such enormous adversities and become such phenomenal role models to everyone around them."

Osers left some final advice for the students. He explained that in the camps, people would trade their last piece of bread for half a cigarette, and die of starvation. "It is not necessary to smoke," he said, “but it is necessary to eat!”