JANUARY 13, 2017 | OLAM 9

At a family simcha

F E A T U R E

called Leah, insisting that she speak up. “She harassed me. She kept on telling me that by not speaking I was a Holocaust denier. And she was right. When the Holocaust deniers became more vocal, we all had to come out.”

At that time, Yehudi Lindeman, a professor of Literature at McGill University, was arranging meetings to allow hidden child survivors to tell their story. When Leah came to the first meeting, she was astonished to see a room filled with half of the parents of her students and many other members of the community. There were law-yers, doctors, all highly educated and accomplished who hadn’t known of each other’s hidden identity. Professor Lindeman himself had survived as a young child hidden in Holland.

Leah started to speak and spoke to her listeners’ hearts.

“When I spoke to children, I would tell them about the children of the Ho-locaust, and they knew I would only tell them the truth. I would also use the powerful text I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Children’s Drawings and Po-ems from the Terezinstadt Concentration Camp, 1942-1944.

“Once, in a classroom, one of the children handed me a slim pictorial book, Where is Willy? Even though I had never seen it before, I agreed to read it to them.

“On the first page, Willy is seen sitting with his family, his parents and his sister. ‘Willy is happy at home,’ read the text.

“On the next page, Willy is sitting in a classroom wearing a yellow star. ‘Willy is not happy.’

“Then, on page three, Willy is behind gates in the Warsaw Ghetto. His sister is on the ground, both are hardly alive, and death is all around them. Willy is trying to put some food into her mouth.

“The last page is blank. The chil-dren were horrified. They cried out in unison: ‘Where is Willy?’ I could not answer them. I said: ‘Class, you tell me: Where is Willy?’

They broke out weeping. The principal asked me: ‘What have you done to your class?’ I told them about a child, just one.

“That is how we should teach about the Holocaust – one child at a

time. Children, even adults, cannot relate to the incredible numbers of people who were destroyed, but they can relate to one child, like Willy, like me. I am the one child I talk about.

“My mother charged me with the mission to “Live! Remember! Tell the world! And that is what we Holocaust survivors had to do. First, we had to live. We needed time to build our lives and our families within the context of a Jewish home and to inspire their Jewish connection through Torah education. Only when we saw conti-nuity, could we start to remember and mourn and later to tell the world. I was twelve when the war ended, but I didn’t speak about it to anybody until 1995, fifty years later. Every time one of my children reached the age of nine, I quietly revisited my pain and thanked G-d for his happy childhood. I am grateful to Hashem that I had the strength to hold back from shar-ing my trauma and that I thus didn’t scar the tender souls of my children and students with the horrors of my childhood experiences.

“I first spoke publicly after I re-tired. The Montreal community was very surprised but extremely sup-portive. People started to call me non-stop; they had never known I was a survivor. They had never heard of Transnistria.

“After making aliyah, I connected with Aish HaTorah and began to speak at universities, seminaries and even for members of the IDF. I would meet my former students everywhere. They were horrified to suddenly find this out about their former teacher.

“I have been asked many times how could I still believe in G-d. I can only answer: How could I not believe?

G-d was right there with us, every step of the way. I lived from miracle to miracle, only because G-d chose me to live for a purpose: to tell the beauty of the Jewish way of living.

“Speech cannot do justice to the hell of the Holocaust. On the death march, I had to witness my school-mates fall. I had to walk over their bodies to survive. My mother made me promise to live. I was afraid to stop. Hashem gave me the strength. It would have been so much easier to

just die. I was nine and a half and tiny. “There were so many miracles.

At the start of the death march, the Nazis tried to grab me and accused my mother of stealing a German child. Miraculously, they let me go, but I in-ternalized that I could pass as an Ary-an; amongst my dark siblings, I was the only one with blond hair and blue eyes. The Germans forced us through the most difficult path, through thick mud or up mountains. The death march continued for months! The Germans sat on wagons, striking Jews

with a stone-tipped whip. I searched among the Germans for someone whose eyes looked compassionate. I saw a tall soldier gently patting his horse. I ran to him. I remember the hu-manity on his face. I tugged at the bot-tom of his jacket which I could barely reach. ‘Little girl, what do you want?’ I answered, ‘Will you let me sit on the wagon? If not, don’t let me suffer any-more and just shoot me.’ He picked me up, as dirty as I was and, with my stomach swollen, a sorry picture. He put me on the wagon and even put a blanket around me, enabling me to be amongst the few survivors of the death march. People who witnessed my chutzpah and salvation didn’t envy me. Nobody said a word. I felt they hoped I would survive and tell of the communities wiped off the face of the earth as if they had never existed.

“I used to have a busy schedule speaking around the world. Now I have few engagements. I’m afraid people are worried about my age, and my health, but I need to speak. I need

to communicate how G-d was and is with us, and about how He saved and saves us. He performs numerous miracles for each and every one of us every single day.

“My mission is to inspire Am Yisra-el with the love for G-d and His Torah. G-d saved me to tell young people: Choose life! Be committed Jews. Live Jewish lives. Marry a Jew. Raise Jew-ish children in a warm Jewish home with a solid Torah education. Build Jewish homes and communities. Am Yisrael Chai.”

Leah with her sons and with her husband a”h