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Young heirs carry Holocaust's torch

BY LISA SCHIFFMAN | lidesk@newsday.com

On the international March of the Living's annual trip to Poland in 1998, Holocaust survivor Irving Roth saw his name among a list of camp inmates inscribed on a wall in one of the museum buildings there. Most of those listed had been killed by the Nazis during World War II.

With sadness, Roth realized that, for the adolescents standing next to him, the names were anonymous statistics of the 6 million Jews who had perished. They had not known the kindness of his grandfather, Shimon, or heard his beloved brother, Bondi, play the violin.

"I thought of how the students would just remember these people as bodies, corpses," Roth recalled. "I realized what these kids had to know about the Holocaust. This was not simply a mass of humanity who perished, but individual human beings."

He turned to the teenagers and told them about his grandfather and brother. "Go home and speak with a Holocaust survivor," he implored them. At that moment, the Adopt a Survivor program was born.

Roth, of Williston Park, had survived the unimaginable. He was born in 1929 and had lived with his family in Humenné, Czechoslovakia, before the war. His family owned a successful lumber business. Roth went to school, played with his friends, enjoyed soccer.

But after the German occupation in 1938, life unraveled. In 1942, Humenné's 1,800 Jews were split up and sent to German concentration camps and death camps in Poland.

After the deportations, Roth's family fled to Hungary. His parents survived the war, hidden by a courageous Christian woman. The rest of the family was deported by cattle car to Birkenau, where Roth's grandfather was sent to the gas chamber. Roth and Bondi endured starvation, hard labor and the death march to Buchenwald before being separated there. Roth never saw his brother again. When the camp was liberated by the U.S. Army on April 11, 1945, the teenage Roth weighed only 75 pounds.

He couldn't forget

"Whatever happened over there, let it sink into the ocean," his uncle advised him after he and his family immigrated to the United States in 1951. "He meant well," Roth recalled. "I suspect it was partially true that forgetting was an easier way out, but the experience was so seared in my brain I couldn't do that."

After returning from the trip, educators at Temple Israel's Hebrew High School in Great Neck and the Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence (both of whose students are Jewish) were receptive to the Adopt a Survivor program. Roth instituted a pilot program at the schools, speaking to students about his own experience. One year later, he implemented the program at Cold Spring Harbor High School.

After being appointed director of the Holocaust Resource Center at Temple Judea of Manhasset in 1998, Roth fine-tuned the Adopt a Survivor program and its art program. (The center's annual art exhibit showcases professional and student artists' original interpretations of survivors' stories.) He organized a network of Holocaust survivors to serve as adoptees for students. Its mission: to address the issue of Holocaust education when there will be no survivors left to tell their stories.

This mission is vital, he emphasized, for, despite the extensive written material and archival film on the Holocaust, there is no substitute for the testimony of a living eyewitness. Survivors alone remember the hardship of the ghettos and concentration camps, the constant risk of death and the heartbreak of losing loved ones. And they were the last persons to have been part of the vibrant Eastern European Jewish communities that existed before the war.

Few survivors left

The number of survivors is dwindling. According to statistics compiled by Ira Sheskin, director of the Jewish Demography Project at the University of Miami, there are fewer than 900,000 Holocaust survivors left worldwide, residing primarily in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union. Of that number, 175,000 survivors ages 65 and older live in the United States. Within 40 years, there will be none left.

Before that happens, Roth is determined to impart their stories to young people who will carry on their legacy.

Roth's own program addresses students age 12 and older; the focus is on educating teenagers in the hope they will carry on the program's message to the next generation.

Students are paired with survivors, and together they take a joint journey of the survivor's life before, during and after the war. Roth explains that the journey begins with a dialogue between survivor and adopter. Adopters are given a 30-page brochure with prepared questions they must answer after extensive discussion with their survivors.

"The questions explore every aspect of the survivor's life, from knowing the person's name and that of their parents, to understanding their family structure, to their relationship to the Jewish world and the outside world," Roth said. "Essentially, the booklet becomes a journal."

The process takes from one semester to a year, although many adopters stay in touch with their survivors afterward. The student becomes a surrogate survivor, committed to telling his or her survivor's story to the next generation.

"Fifty years from now, survivors will be gone, but the adolescent now absorbing their stories has full insight into this one person," Roth explained.