While the skies over Israel remain closed, we are taking advantage of opportunities right on our doorstep to be a blessing to the Jewish people. Every major city in Germany has a Jewish community and Holocaust survivors. Our staff brought sweet and floral CSI greetings, touching the survivors deeply with their message.
By Anemone Rüger
My phone rings: an unknown Berlin number. But instead of an insurance company trying to sell me something, it's Tanja on the line. Tanja runs the meeting place for Holocaust survivors in Berlin and has invited us. Like most survivors, Tanja, a member of the second generation, came to Germany in the 1990s – from my favorite Ukrainian city, Chernivtsi. Her father was born an Austrian citizen when Chernivtsi was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his native language was German.
Almost every one of our preparatory phone calls ends with Tanja giving me a pep talk: Is it really necessary to spend so much money on flowers? Eventually, I can say: Too late, the flowers are already ordered. My new colleague, Livia, has found one among the hundreds of florists in Berlin who isn't far from the meeting point and makes a good impression. When the four of us – Dana, Paula, Livia, and I – are looking for the address on Thursday afternoon, Tanja comes up to us, beaming. "The flowers have just arrived! That's my florist! I immediately asked him when he's going to decorate my balcony." Good humor.
No two meetings are the same. This, too, is a first in a new city. And every time, I ask and pray whether we will again succeed in finding a way to the hearts of the 30 survivors we have never met before, all within two hours. Everything is in Russian. And this time, too, we experience a miracle. After briefly explaining the name "Christians Standing with Israel" and introducing ourselves, the ice is already broken.
Rita's pain
Rita arrived early so she could tell us her story in peace. Her bright orange hair and well-groomed appearance initially distract from the pain that, upon closer inspection, one reads in her eyes. Rita takes a bag of papers from her handbag; with a fleeting glance, I recognize the Yad Vashem logo.
“I was born in 1938, a few weeks before Kristallnacht,” Rita begins. “The older I get, the more I realize what we experienced. Back then, people hardly talked about things. We lived in Pervomaisk, in the Odessa administrative district. My mother’s name was Manya and my father’s was Mikhail, Mikhail Solomonovich. My mother called him Motya. My parents were still very young when the war started. My father wasn’t drafted because he couldn’t see well. I was three, my brother was five, and my mother was pregnant with their third child.”
On September 11, 1941, the war came to Rita's family home. "We all lived close to each other. That day, they took almost everyone away—Dad, his two sisters, my maternal grandmother. They were told they were being taken to work. Within an hour, they were all dead. They were shot at a mass grave that had been prepared outside the city. My aunt's two children were also killed—my cousin Sofia and my cousin Wilja, they were five and eight. They were buried alive with the other children."
"I am one of the last."
To this day, Rita cannot explain why she, her mother, and her brother were spared. "We should have been murdered too; Mom was Jewish as well," says Rita, who bears the name of her murdered aunt. "But for some reason, they didn't take us."
Together with her grandfather, who hadn't been home, the small family set off to escape, pulling a horse and cart. They made it as far as Kirovograd. "That's where the Germans caught up with us," Rita continued. "They sent us back to where we came from. By then, Pervomaisk had already turned into a ghetto. We were there for two and a half years. How did Mama manage to keep us alive? I don't know. There's a little book, 'The Majdanek on the Bug,' where the author compared our camp to Majdanek. There are hardly any survivors left like me who can tell these stories from their own experience. I'm one of the last..."
Rita apologizes for her rambling story and for constantly bursting into tears.
Survival with a few vegetable peels
"My brother was born there in the ghetto. That is, we were sent out by the Romanian guards for the birth. A Ukrainian woman took my mother in for the home birth. I still remember how frightened I was when I saw the blood. That's how my little brother came into the world. Then we went back to the ghetto. Tomorrow is his birthday. He has become a famous artist."
Gradually, fragments of memories surface about ghetto life, which Rita consciously experienced. “We were crammed together in one room, packed tightly together. Families separated their sleeping areas with a bedsheet. We slept on the hard wooden planks. We only survived because our grandfather was a skilled shoemaker; the tradesmen spared their lives. His name was David Kessler. He only spoke Yiddish with us; he couldn't speak any Russian at all, until it was forbidden by the Soviet authorities.”.
Every now and then, a woman would throw us some vegetable peelings over the barbed wire fence. If we were lucky, the Romanian guards would turn around. If we were unlucky, they would snatch the things away. Sometimes they would send children out to beg for money for them
The end of the war and a dignified life in Germany
One day in March 1944, the Romanians opened the ghetto gates and shouted to the Jewish inhabitants: “The Germans are retreating. Run! Or you’ll all be shot!” Manja and her three children found shelter with a woman named Wasselissa. “She hid us children on the stove,” Rita recalls. “It was dirty there, full of cobwebs. But that’s how we survived.”
Rita's mother died at only 56. She couldn't speak about the war years, only cry. "If you only knew what a wonderful father you had!" she often told the children. "But each of your children turned out alright," the neighbors would console her. Rita's older brother became a mathematics professor. She herself earned three degrees, as a teacher and choir director. When the whole family came to Germany in 1994 at the initiative of her now-deceased husband, she founded the Berlin "Veterans' Choir," which she led for decades.
Rita, who today has two daughters, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, is grateful for the support she receives. "Thanks to the compensation payments, I can afford a dignified life today. If only my mother could have lived to see this!"
Then there are flowers. Magnificent, lavishly arranged bouquets, accompanied by greetings from the many supporters of Christiansstanding alongside Israel. They do not fail to have their effect. Rita's orange bouquet, too, shines brightly, vying with her smile.
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