Memorial elicits art of living
They flushed us out. They put fire to the buildings. The German officers greeted us with smirks on their faces. They marched us to the train depot where cattle cars were waiting for us and they packed us in like sardines with two buckets, one for refuse, one with water, and we were about 100 people in one of the cars.
Eva Lassman of Spokane, Holocaust survivor, has told her story at least 500 times in the Inland Northwest, mostly to schoolchildren. She held her story inside until 1983. That year, at a Holocaust gathering in Washington, D.C., writer Elie Wiesel said that if the survivors don’t tell their stories, then those who died in the Holocaust die a second time.
Later, after listening to the story for two hours, it dawns on you: Eva recites her story like a prayer, and this is its power.
They took us to a big hallway and stripped everything – gold teeth, gold rings, anything of value. Each woman received one garment. Mine was a blue flannel dress. We were fed three meals a day, if you call it meals. Imitation coffee and bread more like clay than bread. At lunchtime, a bowl of soup, pure water and a few vegetables. Very seldom would you find a piece of horsemeat in it, very seldom.
Eva is 86. When she tells her story to you, she becomes ageless. The story transcends the storyteller. You see the 23-year-old woman hiding from the Nazis in the crowded room in Warsaw, Poland. You see her transported among three different concentration camps in Poland over the course of two years. You see the weary woman, finally liberated from hell, wandering through her hometown, desolate. All her family members gone. You see the young wife, married to a fellow survivor. You see the immigrant, mother of three sons, adjusting to life in Spokane in the 1950s.
When you see Eva again Thursday evening, at Temple Beth Shalom on Spokane’s South Side, her 86 years have settled back upon her, and she looks radiant in a black skirt, black blazer, a yellow orchid pinned to her lapel.
Eva and dozens of others worked toward this night for many years. The Spokane Community Holocaust Memorial, created by Russian-born artist Simon Kogan, is finished. The memorial is bronze, abstract, interactive. You face it and place the palms of your hands on the hands etched into the memorial. You lift your face up and peer through an opening in the bronze prayer shawl at the top. There, you see the sky.
On January 17, 1945, we were at the train station waiting to be deported to Germany and a miracle happened. They marched us back to the barracks. The Russians were shooting and the Germans returned fire. Then around 7 p.m., the shooting stopped and one of the young people came running saying, “We’re free!”
You hold back the tears throughout the somber dedication service, but then the Jewish children file slowly down the aisle of the synagogue, candles in hand. They are dressed in black and white, yarmulkes upon their heads. The stream of candle bearers goes on and on, as if in a dream. The children are beautiful.
In her talks, Eva grieves for the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis. She wonders which of them would have been another Jonas Salk, another Einstein. When the candle procession finishes, Eva’s lovely granddaughter, Rachel Lassman, introduces Eva to the more than 200 gathered in remembrance.
As Eva speaks, you finally understand that her words have become a living memorial in our community. They are as permanent as bronze. You can place your hands on them and see the sky.
Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning,” said that the survivors who did not grow bitter realized that “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
Hate is cancer. Hate consumes you. I lost everybody. But if I would hate and blame, I wouldn’t have married. I wouldn’t have had children. And look what myself and the world would have missed.