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| Paul Loewner |
"My mother wanted me to escape through the window, and I was ready to go, but my father said it was too dangerous," Loewner said last week as he sat in a cushioned chair in the Cedar Crest Retirement Community’s TV studio. "I couldn’t do it…but I should have listened to my mother."
Loewner did not escape, and he and his father were herded into a cattle car and sent from his small village outside the Slovakian capital of Bratislava to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.
Eventually, the Nazis tried to separate them so they could be put in different cell blocks; when a scared Loewner wouldn’t let go of his father’s hand, a guard struck him behind the ear and knocked him down.
He would see his father just a few more times before being sent to Buchenwald. After that, he never saw him — or his mother — again.
"They probably killed him the way we watched the others [get killed]," he said, looking away.
He scraped by in the dismal camp, seeing other inmates being starved and shot and murdered, until the American tanks from General George Patton’s Third Army liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.
"We were safe. We were liberated," he said with a slight accent, a jubilant smile crossing his face. "I thought it was the greatest happiness in my life up to then to be liberated."
Although the comfortable TV studio is a far cry from the cold floor of a cattle car, after seven decades, Loewner finds his memories are vivid.
And it’s memories like those that he, along with 18 other residents from the retirement community, have shared in the 90-minute documentary about the Holocaust entitled "Never Forgotten."
It was Cedar Crest producer Mike Dygos’ first feature-length production, and he called it a "huge accomplishment," especially because he already knew so many of the residents.
"To sit here and hear these stories coming out of these residents’ mouths — we see these people everyday, we see them in the hallway, and then all of a sudden they’re telling this crazy story that you can’t believe anyone would be able to survive… To attach a person you know to a story like that, it really makes the Holocaust real," the 26-year-old Dygos said.
Producer and coordinator Larry Curan, also 26, agreed, and said that learning about the Holocaust from books, as he had in school, was nothing like hearing the stories told in the voice of one who’d lived through it.
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| Loewner, as a child, with his sister |
"That’s why this piece is so powerful: because every single one of these is a first-hand account of what actually happened," he said. "It was amazing to hear some of the things that we heard people say."
Producer Doris Sinofsky, age 85, was in high school during World War II, and said that she, like most Americans, had no idea that the Holocaust was even going on in Europe.
Although she would eventually marry a Jewish man, she still hadn’t heard the stories of the concentration camps in such an up-close-and-personal way until she watched the interviews being recorded.
Sometimes, she said, she had to leave the studio during the filming — especially when the women told their narratives.
"The things that they went through was just beyond comprehension. It was awful," she said.
The producers agreed that the hardest seat to be in, however, was not in production — it was on stage, across from the survivors, prompting them to relive the greatest horrors of their lives. The man who occupied that seat, they said, quickly became the axle around which the project revolved.
Bert Moore, the community’s 63-year-old pastoral ministries manager (a position he described as "essentially a chaplain"), came to Cedar Crest five years ago after a 25-year career as a Navy chaplain, and had already formed relationships with many in the Jewish community. After putting out the initial word that the production team wanted volunteers to speak about the Holocaust for a documentary, it only seemed natural that he would conduct the interviews.
"It kind of fit right in," he said.
In the end, about 35 hours’ worth of interviews were recorded, and all three producers were effusive in their praise of how Moore handled what could have been a difficult job.
"For someone who has never done interviewing on TV before, he really fit the role perfectly, and it had to do with his compassion," Dygos said. "Him being able to ask the right questions, and then listen to the people and be able to off their stories… We got a lot of things we really weren’t expecting."
Sinofsky agreed, and said that there were several points where, during a given interview, she would think that there was simply nothing left to say — and then Moore would ask a poignant question and the floodgates would open once more.
The chaplain simply said he tried not to make the residents feel uncomfortable.
"I don’t know that I necessarily thought it through that much," he said with a laugh. "I guess it was that I would listen to their story, and ask a question that would take them to the next step — if it seemed to me like there was a gap, I would try to bounce back and say, ‘What happened here?’"
It was also important, he said, to focus on not only the residents’ experiences in the Holocaust, but on the post-war years as well — when they immigrated, when they married, what they did for a profession, and how they ended up at the quiet retirement community in the woods of northern Pequannock. Their resilience throughout their lives, he said, was astounding.
"The thing that kept coming back to me was how amazing it was that they could have this kind of life experience, and be able to put that behind them, and move on, and have successful lives and raise families," he said. "To see how they could survive that, and turn their lives around, and I would say contribute to society in a very positive way — it was such a huge dichotomy."
There seems to be quite an audience for that sort of message. Sinofsky said the documentary has already been sent to a number of libraries and schools, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., may eventually store the dozens of hours of raw footage. "Never Forgotten" has even won a Telly Award, which honors the "very best film and video productions" from local, regional, and cable TV," according to its website.
But perhaps the most important part, said 84-year-old resident Leopold Lowy, is what can be gained by exposing the public to the horror of the Holocaust: the assurance that such a thing will never come to pass again.
A Czechoslovakian native, he lost both parents during the war years, and was on his own in a Jewish orphanage at age 12. Later, he was sent to the infamous Auschwitz before ending up at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
A lifetime later, Auschwitz remains an open wound.
"No word, no book, no pictures can describe hell on earth… That’s all I have to say. Buchenwald was very close to it, but at least in Buchenwald, they may have starved you to death, worked you to death, but not gassed," he said, his face darkening for a moment. "But this is all past. I came here, and I started a new life… You can’t live in your past. You have to look to your future."
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/community/218318131_Pequannock_residents_share_Holocaust_experience_in_Cedar_Crest_documentary.html?page=all
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