Daughter of holocaust Survivors tells of trauma

“During my childhood, I was angry with God,” remembers Iris Tzafrir. 

Tzafrir’s parents, both Holocaust survivors, married in Israel in 1949 and went on to raise two daughters and two sons. Tzafrir’s childhood anger stemmed from what seemed like odd behavior on her parents’ part.

“Why did I have to eat every scrap of food on my plate?

“Why were my parents terrified of dogs?”

But more than that, she said, her household was filled with a sense of “sadness, aloneness, and loss.”

Tzafrir spoke the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 27 in Waseca’s Grace Lutheran Church as part of the congregation’s outreach program; an audience of at least 50 attended. Born and raised in Israel, Tzafrir moved to Minnesota more than 30 years ago, is married, and has an adult son. According to committee member Carlene Rosenthal, Tzafrir had also previously spoken in Waseca about seven years ago.

Mingled among Tzafrir’s descriptions of her own experiences was a warning:

“The distance between hate speech and murder is very short.”

Tzafrir cautioned that those who use hate speech are good at “blaming and making up lies” as part of the process of “categorizing people as ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

“History has taught us that, if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will believe it,” she said.

Tzafrir cited the example of 1930s German “minister of propaganda” Paul Goebbels, who said the influence of radio–the only mass media available at the time–was comparable to that of the world’s largest governments, calling it the globe’s “eighth great power.”

Using lies, and by blaming jews, gypsies and members of the LGBTQ community for the country’s economic collapse, Tzafrir summarized, the Nazi regime was able to create the atmosphere of “us” against “them” that paved the way for the imprisonment, enslavement and cruel murder of millions who had once been neighbors and productive members of society.

“A world without genocide starts with each of us,” she suggested.

The first steps she offered included “participate in government. Exercise the privilege of voting.

“Don’t take your freedoms for granted.”

She observed, “Neutrality helps the oppressor,” and suggested that anyone who hears hate speech about any group should “see their humanity.

“Choose and put into practice the eleventh commandment: Do not be a bystander.

“Go out and learn.”

Tzafrir is the author of “Touching the Trembling Places,” a reference to feelings and memories which are frightening to recall.

In it, and during her talk on Oct. 27, are details of her parents’ lives, although mostly only her father’s, since her mother would not speak about the time of the Holocaust.

Her father Yehoshua, 17 at the time, had been part of the infamous death march from Nazi forced labor and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, in modern-day Poland, to Buchenwald, about 425 miles westward in Germany. Most of the 10,000 prisoners who were forced to run out of Auschwitz in January of 1945 perished: Only 3,000 arrived. The event is described in the iconic Holocaust era novella “Night” by Elie Wiesel.

He was also held for a time at Plaszow camp near Krakow, Poland. Plaszow was the location of the events which led to “Schindler’s List,” the historic description by writer Thomas Keneally which contrasts the extraordinarily cruel behavior of camp commander Amon Goeth with that of industrialist Oskar Schindler. A movie version of the book was released in 1994.

During her presentation, Tzafrir played a video of her father during a visit to Plaszow in 2010, a trip he took in the company of all four of his adult children. He described a memory of being on the field as a slave laborer and seeing Goeth shoot a man selling cookies though there was no apparent motive to do so.

After World War II, Yehoshua emigrated to Israel and spent the rest of his life there; he was a newspaper writer who also published books of poetry in the Hebrew language. He died in 2015.

During the 2010 visit to Europe, Tzafrir said she and her siblings decided to look for a way to make a connection with the many people their father had lost–his parents and all his siblings. They went to an official agency and–with considerable difficulty–were able to acquire his birth certificate and those of his brothers and sisters, as well as his parents’ marriage certificate. When Tzafrir continued her research, she made the surprising discovery that her father’s sister, her aunt, had survived the war and also moved to Israel prior to 1950. She had married and raised children, surviving until 1974. Impressively, she had even read her brother’s poetry, but had not known it was his because the Israeli government had encouraged Holocaust survivors to adopt Hebrew names, rather than those their families had used in Europe. Born Yehoshua Lieblich, he had converted his last name to the word meaning “a morning breeze,” and continued his life under that name.  In the same way he had assumed she was dead, she had assumed the same of him, and had no way of knowing about the name change.

“For the first time in our lives,” remembers Tzafrir, “we were no longer alone. We had cousins.”

Yehoshua was able to meet his nieces and nephews. “It was a moment of tremendous joy,” remembered Tzafrir.