The Voice Of Survival

Raizel Posalski, then age 7, with her younger siblings, Nacha, right, and Yosef.

by Elicia Brown
Special To The Jewish Week

Raizel, then 9, lay very still on her stomach, aware that these might be her last moments, here in this patch of Polish potatoes. It was the summer of 1942, and the German Shepherds were sniffing and barking in the night air, hunting for hidden Jews.
But just when Raizel noticed a dog a few feet away, she heard the short, piercing blasts of the Germans whistling for their animals to return. It was the first of many miracles that Raizel Posalski, 75, recalls saved her life in the Holocaust that killed her father, mother, little brother Yosef — and perhaps, though still not certainly, her little sister, Yosef’s twin, Nacha.

We are sitting in the cool quiet of Raizel’s air-conditioned dining room in

Riverdale, as Raizel — with just a drop of orange juice and seltzer for sustenance — reaches deep into her Polish past. She talks without pause for more than two hours, at times breaking down to sob. At times I cry too. Never before has she spoken so vividly of her experiences as a child during the Shoah, she says.

She tells of her earliest memories in the small town of Uniejow, near Turek, where the River Warta and a castle drew tourists to the restaurant her family owned. And she tells of Liberation Day in January 1945, when the snow reached her knees, and the Russians stampeded into the farming village where she survived the war by pretending to be a Catholic orphan.

When Raizel, a friend of a friend’s parents, first approached me in late spring, I politely declined to interview her. To be honest, I hoped the issue might just fade away. “It’s too bad you didn’t call before Yom HaShoah. Maybe we can talk next year?” I said.
Raizel says her rabbi expressed a similar sentiment when she inquired about speaking to her congregation.

“I’m getting old,” she sighed. “While my mind is good, I feel this should be done. A year at my age — you never know what will happen.” She is ready to unearth those memories now, she explained, because her husband recently passed away.
Perhaps the Shoah Foundation might be of help? But when I contact them I learn that after videotaping the testimonies of nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses, they’ve turned to new objectives. Other Jewish institutions I call say that limited funding prevents them from recording every survivor’s story.

But after speaking to Raizel, I’m wondering whether volunteer interviewers, perhaps even trained high school students, might step forward during this short stretch before the last survivor slips away. These stories still resonate at any time of the year — not just April when our calendars reserve a day for Holocaust remembrance, or August either, when the Three Weeks before Tisha b’Av engender a season of sadness.
Raizel recalls the day her mother pushed her away forever. She stood in the doorway, says Raizel, admonishing, “You’re not to come back.” Before doing so, she made sure that Raizel spoke impeccable Polish, and had repeatedly rehearsed an invented tale of how her Catholic parents had perished in a town near Poznan, which had really been ravaged by the Germans.

What followed were three tense years during which, as Raizel tells it, she lived out that lie, finding shelter with an anti-Semitic farmer and his wife. She memorized the catechism while tending to the corn in the fields. She had to go to Holy Communion.
Once when she slept, she muttered in Yiddish. When questioned, she thought quickly. “I dreamed I was playing games with the neighbors about Jews,” she says she told the family. “I had to be an actress. I had to think before I uttered a word.”
I can’t verify Raizel’s recollections. Memories, after all, can grow murky over the decades. But I do find her story persuasive and powerful, and when I leave Raizel’s home that afternoon, I’m haunted by images of a childhood lost.
That night I dream of dogs and Nazis and summer fields. n

Following are several organizations where Holocaust survivors can record their testimonies: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies: (203) 432-1879, fortunoff.archive@yale.edu; Yad Vashem: 972-2644-3400, general.information@yadvashem.org.il,; Jewish Heritage Project: (212) 925-9067, alanadelson@verizon.net.
Elicia Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization