Nazis' Survivors Deal With Past Pilgrimmage To Poland Has Therapeutic Impact On N.O.
Family
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	11-27-1998


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Ralph Rosenblat sat nervously on the edge of his seat as the rented van approached the
Polish town of Zwolen. The last time he had seen his hometown was in 1945. Then 23, he
had returned from a five-year exodus to find his family holdings stolen, his synagogue
reduced to rubble and his parents and four of his seven siblings dead, victims of the
Nazi Holocaust.

Half a century later, he had misgivings about returning with his family to a place that
held so many terrible memories, but the Rosenblat family patriarch is nothing if not a
survivor, a man blessed with great strength.

He had called on that strength in escaping a German work camp and fleeing to Russia
during the war. It had sustained him through four years in a Siberian coal mining camp
and another year fighting his way back to Poland. That same strength had enabled him to
start a new life and family in New Orleans after the war.

Three generations of his family filled the back of the van this past August during the
Rosenblat family's pilgrimage to Poland, a pilgrimage that has played heavily in their
thoughts during this Thanksgiving season. Like the Mayflower pilgrims, their lives had
been shaped by religious faith and persecution. But this was a pilgrimage not to the
New World but to the old, a pilgrimage in search of their past.

Bumping along the roads of central Poland, the family chatted noisily, while the
patriarch eyed the road ahead, not knowing whether there would be anything left to show
his children and grandchildren, anything to remind his wife, Gertrude -- also a
Holocaust survivor -- of what his life had been like "before the war came."

And then suddenly, as the van crossed a small bridge, a building to the right caught
his eye and something clicked in his mind. As a teen-ager Rosenblat had worked with his
father, a butcher, herding cows to slaughter in Zwolen, then carrying the meat several
miles to market in Radom.

Even before the van fully stopped, the fiery 76-year-old hopped out and was trudging
toward the mesh-wire gate. In disbelief he gazed past it at buildings notably unchanged
by the intervening decades. The old lock on the gate was the same one his father had
fumbled with.

Rosenblat's astonishment set him to bellowing: "This is the slaughterhouse!" he yelled
in his still thick Polish accent. "This is the slaughterhouse!" His eyes filled with
tears, and as his family rushed toward him, he said it again -- "This is the
slaughterhouse!" -- as if trying to convince himself it was really true.

Ralph and Gertrude Rosenblat are only two of a wave of Holocaust survivors who arrived
in New Orleans to rebuild their lives after the war. "About 100 to 150 families may
have settled here," Tulane history professor Lawrence Powell said. "They made homes for
themselves, raised successful kids. It's an American success story."

The Rosenblat success story began in May 1948 when Ralph and Gertrude arrived nearly
penniless in New Orleans with an 18-month-old daughter, Ruth. Through a local Jewish
agency, he found work as a butcher at Canal Villere. "I found a job doing what I knew,"
he said.

After three years at Canal Villere, and with their second child, Henry, only a year
old, Rosenblat had saved enough money to go into business for himself. He ran two
different grocery stores before starting New Orleans Meat and Deli. "When I started
there were a couple of kosher delis but they got out after I started," Rosenblat said,
"I was the only one in the city for almost 40 years."

In 1954, Mrs. Rosenblat joined her husband at the deli and worked side by side with him
until 1990, when they retired. By then they had seen Ruth and Henry graduate from
Tulane University, marry and have children of their own. "They provided us with
everything we needed and wanted," Ruth Rosenblat Loeffelholz, 51, said of her parents.
"We love them very much."

Yet while the Rosenblats provided a loving household, their children say they knew
something was different about the family. "I wondered why I didn't have as many cousins
and aunts as my friends, and I got to the point where I wished for that," Ruth said.

The Rosenblats tried to fill the gap by keeping in touch with other survivors. "I made
up stories when they were little. I didn't want them to suffer because they had
nobody," Mrs. Rosenblat said. "I made up aunts and uncles out of our friends. ... Then
when my daughter was older I said, 'I can't lie to you. I have to tell you what
happened ... I was in the camp and I lost my whole family in the gas chambers. Don't be
sad. You have me. I don't have a mother, but you have me,"' she said.

The youngest of eight, Gertrude had been 13 when the Germans invaded. After five years
working in camps near Czestochowa and Skarysko, she returned home to Radom to discover
that she had lost her parents and all of her brothers and sisters. By chance she caught
up with an old acquaintance in Radom -- Ralph Rosenblat. They escaped to the American
Occupied Zone in Germany where they married and where Ruth was born. In 1948 they set
off for America.

As children, Ruth and Henry often heard stories about their parents' experience: How
their mother lived in constant fear in the work camps. "They used to take us out in the
morning and count us. If one was missing they killed six," Mrs. Rosenblat said. How the
Nazi's killed Gertrude's cousin when she became too ill to work, nearly destroying
Gertrude's will to live. How Ralph suffered in Siberia. "The only difference between
the Germans and the Russians was that with the Russians you weren't afraid they were
going to kill you," he said. And how they returned home nursing hope -- "I survived,
maybe they did too," Rosenblat remembers thinking -- only to find their families gone.
"You never dreamed that your whole family was dead," he said.

But as Henry Rosenblat, now 48, explains, "My whole life I heard stories, but it wasn't
real to me. They were still just stories." That's why, a few years ago, the Rosenblats
began thinking about a trip to Poland. "I just wanted to see it once more before I die,
to show my children," Mrs. Rosenblat said. "I wanted to show them and let them
experience it for themselves."

Rosenblat took convincing. "I never wanted to go back all these years," Rosenblat said.
"We hated the Poles for their anti-Semitism." In 1939 there were 3.25 million Jews in
Poland and it is estimated that 3 million of them died during the war. All six Nazi
extermination camps were in Poland. "Poland is one massive Jewish graveyard," Powell
said. "There are many embittered feelings towards the Poles that they did not do enough
to stop the killing."

And Mrs. Rosenblat had doubts of her own. She wondered if some Poles might be wary of
returning Jews for fear they would try to stake claims to the large amount of Jewish-
owned property expropriated during and after the war.

But to the Rosenblats' surprise, their reception in Poland was a warm one. "The people
we came in contact with were extremely helpful," Henry Rosenblat said. "Even the older
generation, the ones who were there during the war, were smiling and showing us
around."

Deep fears began to ease. "They could see the Polish people weren't monsters," Henry
Rosenblat said, though "nothing will ever make them forget what they went through."

The visit to the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek promised to be
the most grueling part of the trip.

Fighting his way home in the Soviet and Polish armies, Rosenblat had passed through the
newly liberated Majdanek camp in 1945. Fifty-three years later, he stood by the ovens
used to cremate inmates after they had been gassed. "When I got here, they were still
hot," he recalled quietly.

Both Gertrude and Ralph Rosenblat believe several of their family members may have died
at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Two of Rosenblat's surviving sisters had serial numbers tattooed
on their arms at Auschwitz.

The Rosenblat family wept quietly and stopped from time to time to pray as they walked
the grounds where more than 1.5 million Jews were murdered. "In the Jewish religion
when one dies, you say a prayer that is called Kaddish," Rosenblat said.

In a particularly poignant moment, Rosenblat said Kaddish in front of a memorial in
Majdanek that contains literally tons of human ash. "My parents don't know the dates
their relatives died so they don't know what days to respect. So to stand in front of
those ashes was very emotional," Henry Rosenblat said.

The power of her religion had seen Gertrude through a wartime hell. "Even though I was
destroyed, I never lost my faith," she said.

Another source of her strength was a passion to bear witness against what she and all
the camp victims had endured. "What kept me surviving was to tell my story: how I was
treated and how I survived."

During their five days in Poland, the extended Rosenblat clan found old houses where
their families and friends lived, the grade school Gertrude attended and an old flour
mill that Gertrude's sister owned with her husband during the war. "When I saw the
mill, my heart was going," Mrs. Rosenblat said. "This is where I played with my nieces
and nephews."

The most moving part of the trip for Ruth was seeing her mother's childhood home. "This
was the place that she had described to us, and here I was standing in the house," Ruth
said.

All in all, the pilgrimage had a healing effect, one that has been shared by other
Holocaust survivors during visits to their homelands. "It's part of a collective self-
therapy that's taking place," Powell said. According to Henry Rosenblat, that therapy
was long overdue. While their children say tragedy toughened Rosenblat, it also "made
him not trust anyone," Henry's wife, Susan Rosenblat, said. "I don't know if he's
allowed himself to be vulnerable."

Surviving the Holocaust took a different toll on Gertrude. "My mother has a heart of
gold and she still believes in the good in people, but she takes it all and puts it on
herself," Henry Rosenblat said. "She has enormous amounts of guilt." This guilt, common
among Holocaust survivors, is apparent in Mrs. Rosenblat's comments: "I always say,
'Why me, God? Why do I deserve to be the one to tell the story?'"

The question is imponderable, but, as she knew even amid the wartime horrors she
endured, the story had to be told and it is not the story of her life alone.

"I pray every night for my family," she said, referring to those who did not survive.
"I say their names. I don't want to forget their names and when I say the names I think
I'm with them."

Rosenblat too knows the irreplaceable value of names. "We built a family with two
children, four grandchildren," he said, , summarizing the life he and his wife snatched
back from the Holocaust. "We can look forward that it will grow and that the name will
not be forgotten."

"We're never going to forget, but we made peace to build a family."