Remembering the Holocaust

At that moment, we could not have imagined that we would never see her or our much younger sister again.”

Helen Weiss, Holocaust survivor

In memoriam of the millions of lives lost during one of the largest genocides in history, people across the world joined in solidarity to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

The Holocaust began in 1933 and lasted until 1945, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and the first official Nazi concentration camp opened in Dachau, Germany. In 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Führer und Reichskanzler, German for "leader and Reich chancellor."

Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939 and invaded Poland less than six months later, which marked the beginning of World War II.

Auschwitz concentration camp, located in German-occupied Poland, opened in 1940 and was the largest of all the Nazi concentration and death camps, where Jews were executed using gas chambers, ovens, mass shootings, deprivation, and other inhumane practices.

Out of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were Jews. Approximately 960,000 Jews were killed at the camp, according to History.com.

The exact number is unknown, but it is estimated that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust in total, which accounted for about two-thirds of the Jewish population living in Europe during that time.

Reliving the past

In a 2024 article, The Times of Israel reported approximately 272,000 living Holocaust survivors, 30 of whom live at the assisted living facility Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Living.

Jacqueline Kimmelstiel, 97, was born in Germany and moved to France when she was five years old. As a child, Kimmelstiel and her mother often had to pick up and relocate to escape persecution after Germany invaded France during World War II. Kimmelstiel’s father was sent to Gurs Internment Camp in France.

“We had to be careful with everything we said and make sure not to say any Jewish words,” Kimmelstiel said. “If any of us said the wrong thing, we would be arrested, and the consequences could be drastic.”

Kimmelstiel was arrested in France twice during her adolescence but was able to talk her way out of being imprisoned both times by speaking to the officers in French.

She moved with her family to the U.S. in 1945 before the end of the war and said she is still very careful with everything she says, 80 years after the Holocaust ended.

“It somehow stays with you all these years later,” Kimmelstiel said. “I always think about it.”

Helen Weiss, 102, of RiverSpring Living, was forced to flee what was then known as Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the two countries peacefully split in 1992.

Weiss’ father worked for benzene and petroleum refineries in Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. During the week of Pesach (Passover) in 1944, Weiss’ father arranged for a farmhand to transport her and her two sisters, also dressed as farmers, over the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border, leaving their mother and 10-year-old sister behind, both of whom were executed.

“Our mother reassured us that we would certainly be back in a few months when the war was over,” Weiss recalled. “At that moment, we could not have imagined that we would never see her or our much younger sister again.”

After they crossed the border and arrived at the farmhand’s house, Weiss said the farmer hid her and her two sisters under piles of hay in the loft of his barn, despite being denounced by his neighbors for helping Jews across the border. Soldiers appeared at the property and jabbed the haystacks with pitchforks to find anyone hiding in them.

“Miraculously, the pitchforks did not meet their human targets, and we were spared,” Weiss said.

The next day, Weiss and her two sisters were taken to the home of their father’s business partner, where he provided them with identification papers. A Catholic dentist with two children living in Czechoslovakia later took Weiss in.

When her cover was blown by neighbors who eventually realized she was Jewish, Weiss needed to move to a place where she wasn’t known and where her false papers would protect her.

She made it to Bratislava, where she took a job making and selling hats at a small shop. The job required someone who spoke Hungarian, Slovak, and German.

Since she was the only one fluent in German, Weiss was sent to wait on German officers who came into the store.

“I cannot describe the terror I felt when I had to interact with those men, who gladly would have sentenced me to my death had they only known who I was,” she said.

Following those interactions, Weiss was unable to hold a needle without shaking and was fearful someone would notice her trembling.

“Another miracle — no one noticed my distress,” she added.

One day, Weiss was onboard a trolley carrying food she bought for a Jewish family in hiding, along with two soldiers from the former auxiliary military formation SS-Heimatschutz Slowakei.

The two soldiers became suspicious and interrogated Weiss before sending her to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, where one of her sisters was brought five days later.

After surviving several months of hardship, deprivation, and terror, they were freed by Russian authorities.

Despite freeing Jews from the concentration camp, Weiss said the Russian soldiers were brutal to the liberated prisoners and also raped women.

Except for her father, sister, and younger brother, Weiss realized upon her return home that everyone in her immediate family had been killed.

Weiss later married Joseph Mermelstein, a fellow survivor.

Building the future

Next month, eighth graders at Salanter Akiba Riverdale (SAR) Academy will partner with local charter school Atmosphere Academy to work on a Holocaust documentary as part of the “Names, Not Numbers®” program. Students will have the opportunity to interview Holocaust survivors in person and document their stories on film, preserving their stories for future generations.

“It’s a great opportunity for them (the students) to learn about the history of their own story while they build on their filmmaking skills like writing, interviewing, and camera work,” Rabbi Binyamin Krauss said, principal at SAR. His parents survived the Holocaust in Germany and Romania.

SAR Academy will hold a culminating event in June to honor the survivors and showcase the students’ work.

“Names, Not Numbers®” founder, Tova Rosenberg, collaborates with a different school each year to allow more students to learn new skills, including writing and interviewing techniques.

“It’s important these students understand the rationale of why they’re doing this project,” Rosenberg said. “It’s about documenting the journey of the survivor but also about the journey of students as they are filmmaking.”

“Names, Not Numbers®” has enrolled 8,000 students since it was established in 2004.

Ahead of the day of remembrance, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale hosted a screening on Jan. 25 of a new film, AFTER: Poetry Destroys Silence.

Janet Kirchheimer, the producer of the film, is a Riverdale resident and daughter of German-born Jewish parents who fled Europe separately in the late 1930s.

“I was always curious about it,” Kirchheimer said of the Holocaust. “What poetry did is it helped me unleash that trauma; it was also an escape.”

Kirchheimer began writing poems about the Holocaust at age seven and continued to get inspired while using poetry as a creative outlet for the pain.

In 2007, she wrote a Holocaust-inspired book, How to Spot One of Us, which contains more than 90 poems. She began working on the documentary after she met film director and editor Richard Kroehling over a decade ago.

She said the movie provides “hope” and “the ability to heal” while generating more Holocaust awareness.

The 90-minute film uses both black-and-white and color scenes and features 11 poets performing works specifically written about the Holocaust. One of the actors, Géza Röhrig, published eight volumes of poetry and is known for his role in the Hungarian film about Auschwitz, Son of Saul (2015), which won both a Golden Globe and Academy Award.

Among the list of poets, all of whom have connections to the Holocaust, two are posthumous: Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most famous poets, and Paul Celan, a late poet who survived the Holocaust.

“It’s also a way to reach younger generations through arts, poetry, and cinema,” Kirchheimer added. “When poetry is on film, something magical happens and it always invokes a lot of emotion.”

Community leaders, along with temples and synagogues, including the Riverdale Temple, acknowledged the meaning behind the day of remembrance while showing support and advocating for those who perished, survivors, and their families.

“In these times, every day and every week feels like Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Rabbi Thomas Gardner of the Riverdale Temple said.

The Riverdale Temple holds prayer services twice on Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest) for the safe release of some of the hostages, the well-being of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and peace and healing for the people of Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon.

“The Oct. 7 attacks, the hostage situation, and the rise of antisemitism have made it too easy to remember the Holocaust,” Gardner said.

The Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale holds their commemoration on Yom HaShoah in the springtime.

“During the Holocaust, six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies,” Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale Rabbi Barry Dov Katz said. “In Nazi Germany, antisemitism and hatred of Jews were normalized and ultimately legalized — which led to killing more than a third of Jews worldwide.”

According to Katz, “Remembering the Holocaust reminds us of the relentlessness and stubbornness of the hatred of Jews, and thus awakens us to how vigilant we must be to ensure such hatred — and all hatred — is defeated.”

At Thursday’s City Council Stated meeting, Councilman Eric Dinowitz passed Resolution 0713, recognizing Jan. 27, 2025, as the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation.

“Only a few thousand survived,” Dinowitz said about those who lived through Auschwitz.

“In time for the 80th anniversary, New York City now officially recognizes Jan. 27 as the anniversary of when Holocaust survivors were liberated from Auschwitz,” Dinowitz said.

“Remembrance is active, not passive,” the councilman added. “The whole point is to remember and make sure it never happens again as we look forward,” Dinowitz concluded.

Despite the extensive evidence and documentation from the genocide, there is still a portion of the world known as Holocaust deniers. The movement of Holocaust denial was spearheaded by Americans and Nazi supporters Francis Parker Yockey and George Lincoln Rockwell and facilitated by another American, Holocaust propaganda advocate, Willis Carto.

Holocaust denial, which began immediately following the end of WWII, was started to “rehabilitate Hitler’s image,” according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website.

“As you go through your life, no one will ever be able to tell you the Holocaust did not happen, because you have now met a woman who survived the terrors of the Nazis,” Weiss said. “Me.”