Synopsis: An 11-year-old boy who has hidden his family asks several women during a ghetto roundup to pretend he is their child. One woman finally agrees, at great risk to herself and her two daughters. She saves him by pretending to be a nurse with her three children. The two families then survive separately in the Belarus woods for over two years. Eleven years later, in America, a friend of the older daughter (who was among the Bielski partisans featured in the 2008 film “Defiance”) tells the story to a young man at a wedding. He says that he is the boy. He reunites with and marries the older daughter, and becomes a prominent Conn.-based Rabbi (he is Chaplain of the Conn. State Senate as well as the Hartford Police, has authored six books and is Rabbi Emeritus at Beth Hillel of Bloomfield, among many other distinctions). They have three sons and eight grandchildren.

The panel at the screening will include all family members and Julie Hock, the New England Regional Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Story:

A hand to hold, a tale of survival and love

By Susie Davidson

Those who made it through the living hell of the Holocaust tend to attribute their survival to sheer luck. Often, there was also ingenuity. Sometimes, coincidence as well. And even in such nightmarish surroundings, a little basic humanity.

All of these elements came together for a quick-thinking 11-year old boy in the Zetel (Poland) Ghetto. The year was 1941, and as the oldest child in his family, he had just closed the trap door to their hiding place when Nazi soldiers confronted him. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “I just came back to get a coat,” the boy replied. “You won’t need one where you are going,” they said, before taking him to the market center, where they checked the papers of those they had assembled. Once there, he asked several women to pretend that he was among their children, and finally, under great risk, one woman agreed.

This selfless gesture is the central act of the unimaginable, heartwarming memoir “Faith and Destiny,” the sixth book by Rabbi Philip Lazowski, born in 1930 in　Bielice, Poland (now in Belarus),　who is　Rabbi Emeritus at Beth Hillel Synagogue in Bloomfield, Conn. and Chaplain of the Connecticut State Senate. A short documentary film based on the book, produced by his son　Alan Lazowski and directed by Hartford-area filmmaker Steve Shaw, will　be screened on Sept. 18 at the Brookline Public Library. Following the screening, a discussion will be held with sister-in-law Toby Langerman and son David Lazowski, both Brookline residents. Panelists will also include Rabbi Lazowski, his wife, Ruth, and Julie Hock, New England Regional Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Toby and Ruth were on the other side of their mother, Miriam Rabinowitz, when she performed her act of courage and compassion. Today, Ruth and Rabbi Lazowski have three grown sons (Barry, Alan and David) and seven grandchildren. The path to how they got there was both fortuitous and incredulous.

Ruth, who was 7 that day in the market center, remembers her husband as a boy. “I do remember when he came, wearing the yellow star those over the age of 10 had to wear, both in the front and on the back,” she said from her summer home in Canaan, N.H., while noting that the so-called “market place” was actually the old Jewish cemetery for the town of Zetel (now　Dzyatlava, Belarus).　"His star on the back was a little torn off, and my mother somehow found a safety pin. She knew that if it fell off, he would be hit by the Nazis.”

During the bustle and confusion, the Rabinowitz’ father was separated from them. As the mother, sisters and boy approached the German officer who was assigning people into the infamous right and left areas, they saw their father on the side where people were to live. “My mother pretended to be a nurse,” recalled Ruth Lazowski. “She knew medication. I remember there was an old peoples’ home in the ghetto, where she gave medicine to people. We all tried to make believe that we were living a normal life.” The Nazis looked at her mother and put all of them on the same side as the father. “After about 20 minutes, they told us to go back to our homes, and the boy just ran away at that point,” said Ruth.

“We went back to our house in the ghetto, and he went back to his house in the ghetto,” said Langerman, a long-time Brookline resident who owns The Antique Company in Brookline Village, raised her two children in the town, and has served as a longtime Town Meeting Member, PTO President of the Driscoll School, and on the Town Advisory committee, Planning Board, and the　Human　Relations-Youth Resources Commission. “My mother didn’t even know his name,” she continued. But about two weeks later, Miriam took 5-year-old Langerman to a doctor for an ear problem. “The doctor happened to live on the same street at my future husband,” said Ruth Lazowski. “He was looking out the window and noticed my mother going by. ‘That’s the woman who saved me,’ he said to his own mother.” The mothers met, and the boy’s mother blessed Miriam for her kindness. “My mother introduced herself, and so he then knew her name – Miriam Rabinowitz,” said Langerman.

“She couldn't jump with my brother and sister from the second floor, because they were small,” recalled Philip from his home in Hartford. “So they were taken by the Nazis and herded onto a truck like cattle.” He added that　Polish　townspeople were standing and clapping for joy. “Later, we found out that everybody was shot and thrown into a nearby pit. After the war, we visited the grave,” he said.

“My father was not with us because he was working,” he continued. “When they surrounded the ghetto, he couldn't go back, and he realized that no one was left anyway. So he returned to our home town of　Bielice,　where the only way to survive was in the woods.

“When I jumped from the window, another boy followed me, and like stupid kids, we went back to the ghetto. We were thinking that maybe people were left there." The only way they could leave the ghetto was to help a man who was one of hundreds stealing furniture from the ghetto. "We mingled among the help," said Philip. "But we were found out and so we told the man that the Germans would take the merchandise so we offered to watch the truck. When he went for more furniture, we fled." They decided to head to another ghetto, Dworetz, where they had long heard that an airport was being built, so it was thus still in existence. They first went into the cornfield and hid amongst the corn rows, until they began walking in the quiet of dusk.

“But it was night,　and we realized we would never make it to Dworetz,” the rabbi recalled. “So we went into an area of woods, but during the night, I couldn't sleep and feared animals might eat us alive.” His young companion also panicked, saying he didn’t want to live. “I said we have to have hope.” The boys got to the ghetto,　and at the barbed wire,　they followed a group of returning workers. Inside the ghetto,　Philip found his brother, who had hid in the latrine, as well as a cousin his brother had found.　

“While we were going out to work each day, we would tell the vendors at the marketplace along the way to tell any Lazowskis that the two sons were still alive. My father had come to one of them for bread, and he relayed the message.” But his father was ill, so he hired someone to go, with his brother-in-law, into the ghetto to get the boys. They reunited in the woods, and there, they spent the next 2 ½ years.

Meanwhile, the Rabinowitz’ also escaped to the woods. “There was another passport check, and by then, we knew that people weren’t coming back, so about 50 to 60 people went into a hiding place,” recalled Langerman. “We stayed there for two days and one night, and then we heard quiet.” The townspeople had been outside the hiding place, looking for the riches that Jews had left behind. “We heard them say ‘Jews lived here, so we’ll come back and dig,’” said Langerman. The large group went to the woods. “The first entire night of walking turned out to be in circles,” she said. But they found their father as well. He had been among those rounded up, but had managed to escape and joined Miriam, Ruth, Toby, an aunt and a cousin. Although the cousin was later killed while serving with the partisans, the rest survived.

They were among the few and fortunate. “Two thousand of us went in, and 200 came out,” said Langerman. “Many died due to typhus fever and gangrene from frozen feet.” Her father was in the lumber business, and knew the woods very well. He was also friendly with the forest ranger, who was not Jewish and helped them, telling them where the Nazis had been and would likely not return. A farmer her father knew would give them potatoes, and the partisans would also give them food. In the summer, they would find mushrooms and berries.

For their own two-and-a-half years, they stayed one step ahead of their pursuers. “We may have been the only family to survive; my sister and I were certainly the youngest,” said Langerman. Finally, someone came on a white horse and announced that the Russians had taken over. They were liberated by the Russians in the summer of 1944.

Philip Lazowski was in a D.P. (Displaced Persons’) camp in Austria, and the Rabinowitz’ were in one in Italy. An aunt, uncle and cousins in Hartford sponsored them, but they waited three years until they had a place in the quota.　“We wanted to go to Palestine, but it was illegal then, and they weren’t thrilled about taking children,” said Langerman.

Also at the camp was Ruth’s friend Gloria, whose family had survived with the　the Bielski partisans　featured in the 2008 film “Defiance.” In 1952, Gloria, who lived in New York, told them she was going to a wedding of a family from　Bielice. Gloria ended up sitting at the same table as Philip Lazowski, because neither of them danced. She told him about how her friend’s mother had once saved a boy from Bielice, in the Zetel Ghetto. “I’m that boy,” he said.

He came to the house in Hartford right away, with a cousin. Ruth was a senior in high school; he was five years older.

“A week after the wedding, Gloria went to the cleaners and was killed by a drunk driver,” recalled Ruth, fighting back tears. “I just located, and spoke to her sister and brother-in-law in New York,” she added.

Philip　had emigrated to Brooklyn in 1947, because his father had two sisters and a brother who had come over in the 1920s. “He was with a family in Austria who were religious,” said Ruth. “He graduated from Erasmus High School, and wanted to be a Rabbi.” He served as Educational Director at Beth Hillel, and was well-liked. But she didn’t want to be a Rebbetzin (Rabbi’s wife in the community). “Although I went to Hebrew School in Italy and had a very good Hebrew background, I was not as observant as he was, and I didn’t want all the attention,” she said. But as they were already established in Hartford, she felt that if he served there, people already knew her as Ruth. She had graduated from Boston Teacher’s College, taught at Beth Hillel Synagogue, and also taught Yiddish at the area Jewish Community Center.

Rabbi Lazowski is　Past President of the Education Council of Greater Hartford and the Educators Assembly of Connecticut, and Past Chairman of both the Rabbinical Fellowship and the Bloomfield Clergy. For the past 18 years, he has also served as Chaplain at The Institute of Living, and for the past 25 years, Chaplain for the Hartford Police. He taught Modern Hebrew at the University of Hartford, and his board memberships include the school’s Board of Visitors at the Maurice Greenberg Center of Judaic Studies, the Greater Hartford Jewish Federation, the Hartford Jewish Community Center, and the Solomon Schechter Day School in West Hartford.

His other books are: Rediscovering the Prayerbook:　The Daily Service; A Home Guide to Jewish Rituals, Holidays, and Prayer; From the Depths to Redemption: A Passover Haggadah; Reflections on Faith; Faith and Destiny; and Understanding Your Neighbor's Faith.

The Brookline Library panel will address what it was like to survive in the forests during the war, the importance of family and community to survival, and the importance of remembering and telling the story. The program will be moderated by David Lazowski, who is a managing partner of the Boston branch of a national mortgage banking business. “It has been a dream to make this film a reality,” he said. “Given our parents’ ages, we wanted to give them something they could see.” The original intent was for the film to be a learning tool. “It’s purposely only 20 minutes, so that it can be shown in junior high and high school, within a 45-minute class,” he explained.

Alan Lazowski spearheaded the making of the film and brought in Shaw, who heads Shaw Communications Group of Hartford. Shaw said that an expanded screenplay is currently being considered by Playtone Pictures, actor Tom Hanks’ production group. “The book and the documentary were used to develop the screenplay, and were made part of the package initially submitted to Playtone,” he said.

“It’s an amazing perspective that you get, knowing your parents went through this and were lucky to survive,” said David Lazowski, whose daughter Michaela, 12, has recently become involved in Boston 3G, a group for grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. “It is our story, reflecting on our own characters and perspectives, giving us the sense of what is important and not important in life.”

“Faith and Destiny,” billed as “A　Tale of Survival, An Act of Bravery, A Love Story,” will be screened on Sept. 18 from 2-4 p.m. at　Hunneman Hall, in the　Brookline　Public Library Main Branch, 361 Washington St., Brookline.　Light refreshments will be served. Seating is limited. For more information, please call 617-730-2370.