Leo Wolf doesn’t know when he became an orphan or when his two younger sisters died. But every year he marks their deaths on the same day by saying kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning.
The day he chose to remember his siblings and parents is the anniversary of the day in 1942 that his father found him as Leo was being taken away by the Nazis in Lodz, Poland, stuffed the young man’s tefillin, or prayer gear, into his pocket and told him not to forget that it was Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul.
The anniversary of that day came a week ago, and Wolf said kaddish in a suburban St. Louis synagogue light-years from Lodz and the ghetto where he last saw his father. Coincidentally, it was just one week before another anniversary–Sept. 1, 1939–the day the Germans invaded Poland and turned Wolf’s life inside out.
On that last Friday afternoon in August, Wolf spent some time honoring his family another way, as he showed a stranger through a museum that exists because they died along with millions of others: the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in west St. Louis County.
More than 10,000 people, most of them junior and senior high school students, have toured the 5,000-square-foot museum since the official opening last May. Housed in an addition to the Jewish Federation of St. Louis building on the I.E. Millstone Jewish Community Campus, the Holocaust center is more than a memorial to those who died. It is a monument to those who survived, especially the 350 known survivors who came to St. Louis after the war and learned to call the Midwest home.
It took decades of effort on the part of Wolf and many others to make this museum a reality. They had to overcome the objections of those who thought the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., made a much smaller museum in St. Louis redundant. They had to raise nearly $2 million to build the museum and create a learning center.
“This is here for one simple reason,” Wolf explains. ” all my family nobody’s alive me. I’m left with some kind of a reason. The reason is I have to be a reminder to the world, to the new generations, to the Jews and non-Jews. . . . I wanted to have something for generations to come.”
“You have to remember we are all getting older. It’s 50 years after the war already. We’re all in the 70s, maybe the youngest ones that we have are in the late 60s. We cannot live forever, so if we cannot live forever I worked very hard that we will have something.”
“Something” is a modest yet elegant series of rooms built around artifacts and memories of survivors who live in St. Louis. Their voices guide visitors from life before the war to life in the ghettos, life in the concentration camps and finally life after liberation.
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“Suddenly the woman who stands next to me says, `Hey, somebody is kind of pointing towards you,’ and I looked in the distance and I saw my sister . . . tears streaming down her face and mine, and she said, `Hilda, how did you come here? Where is mother and father and our brothers?’ And I said, `I lost them.’ . . . ater on she found out that our mother and the two brothers were with other mothers in Barrack 1, and we went in there, and I remember my mother, she looked at me and she said, `Mine kind, my child, remember our God. Whatever you have to go through promise me you’re going to try to stay alive.’ And she said, `Don’t forget me. I love you, and my soul will always be with you.’ “
–Hilda Lebedun
A quiet rotunda with framed photographs hanging in a row on two curved walls introduces visitors to the survivors’ families. From a distance they look like the treasured photographs of family and friends any of us could have on our wall or mantlepiece. But a close look at the blocks of text describing each picture tells a horrible truth. These are tombstones for people without known graves:
– A 1939 class photo of 36 Hebrew school students and teachers in Munkacs, Czechoslovakia. Gustav Schonfeld, a small boy in the center of the picture, will be the only survivor.
– Chaika Wolf looks down at her son with eyes that will never see him married, never see his three sons or his six grandchildren.
– An extended family of 10 pose for a casual, outdoor portrait in late-1920s Germany. Of the 10, only a small child survives.
Inside the exhibit area, cutouts of some of the survivors as young people taken from pre-war photos are introduced as “guides.” One cutout of a young girl is blank, bearing only the stark caption, “No pre-war photos survived.” Often Wolf and other survivors lead tours. When they are not available, at every station a press of a button brings forth their voices. The carefully edited snippets of what Wolf calls “testimony” make history real to visitors.
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“The train stopped. They opened the door and it was Auschwitz. Right away, you know, they took care of our belongings and they pushed us forward. In front of us were tables with dignitaries, soldiers lined up. They asked us to take off all our clothes, which we have to do. We were standing up, my sisters, my mother and I. He looked us over from top to bottom and he had a gesture, reicht, links, right, left. I was the only one who went to my links, the others went to reicht. I never saw them again in my life. They grabbed me, shaved my hair, checked my gender, what I have hidden there, put a smelly substance on me and let me go out through a door. To my left was a truck. The first I saw was my mother straight out on the truck, dead. I didn’t see my sisters or the children. We were there a couple of hours. An officer–I still remember his name was Bruno Kaiser–came and looked us over and focused me. He said to me, `Show me your hands,’ and I did. He started walking with me to his house, about a half a mile. There were dogs and roses, the most beautiful roses I ever saw. Out there the German woman told me I’m going to work for Herr Bruno Kaiser, take care of his roses. He loved Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. He could hit me over my head, the blood was running, but at least, you know, I lived.”
–Leah Sjoberg
The survivors are an integral part of the museum, explains Karen Kohn, who designed the exhibits along with Lea Embry. Both women are Chicago exhibit designers.
Kohn explains: “One of the questions we had to answer for ourselves was why should there be a Holocaust museum in St. Louis? There’s already one in Washington. Isn’t that enough? We decided that we had to make it local. They had survivors in their own community, and we decided to emphasize that.”
Kohn and Embry knew one other thing. “We did not want this to be a museum about the Nazis. We wanted the viewer to identify with and empathize with the victims. We were very careful to keep the attention on the victim and not to glorify the Nazis.” In fact, the only glimpse of Adolf Hitler is a brief moment on a video.
But reminders of Nazism’s effects abound, from a park bench marked “Nicht fur Juden” (“Not for Jews”) to a color chart of badges worn by concentration camp prisoners. One display traces the tortured, 1939 journey of the SS St. Louis as its passengers, who had managed to escape Germany, were rejected by the world and most were forced back to Nazi control and death.
Another exhibit shows a scale model of the Lodz ghetto, wartime home to Wolf, his future wife, Sara Najman, and many of the survivors who came to St. Louis. Building walls are sliced away to show the daily life of the teeming ghetto. “We lived like animals,” says Wolf, as he points to tenement rooms packed with people, sometimes four or five families squeezed into a tiny apartment. During the day, workers trudged over pedestrian bridges to the factories; at night, anyone on the bridge was fair game for guards.
Wolf’s deportation from the ghetto was the beginning of a journey through a dozen concentration and work camps, from Auschwitz to Dachau. Part of that journey was immortalized in a picture taken on April 29, 1945, of prisoners on a death march from Dachau. Wolf saw the picture for the first time during a visit to the Holocaust memorial in Washington. He was reading captions when he recognized the name of the town where the photo was taken–Gruenwald, Germany–wondered if he knew anyone in the picture, then realized he was part of the scene, a small figure in striped pajamas and a cap, shoulders hunched by years of hard labor.
A large version of that photo now hangs in the St. Louis museum. “A day or two later I escaped,” he recalls. The guard, a Pole from a small town near Lodz, looked out for him a bit and warned one day, “I have to kill you tonight.” The guard told him how to escape and left him to his fate. A wrong turn put him back in German hands, but in the chaotic last days of the war he was able to escape again and again until the Americans came. The first one was a Jew who spoke Yiddish, another miracle.
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“April 14 of 1945 we just knew, we could feel it that this was going to be the day. We all stood outside where normally we would stand on the roll call. We were just standing and waiting silently. You couldn’t hear the airplanes. The railroad was not running, and guns were not shooting. It was completely silent, and then we saw the dark green tanks with the white stars march across the double barbed wires through the gates, and there was an enormous cry. We all started screaming and yelling and whooping and everything to greet our liberators, the American soldiers.”
–Mary Lou Ruhe
The tour through the maze of rooms ends where it began–in the quiet rotunda with its photographs of days long past. The visitor has met the families and followed their stories, and now it is time to say goodbye.
“What could we leave a better legacy than to have something like this?” asked Wolf. “Twenty or 50 years from now people will come in and see what happened. They’ll know what happened.”
