Pair's Holocaust stories have spanned the generations

VIRGINIA BEACH

Jesse always sat in the back of the classroom. She never did much work, her teacher said, never showed much drive. Not until the letters arrived.

Jesse was an 11th-grader at Port of Los Angeles High School in San Pedro, Calif. Kate Roughen, 28, taught there for two years.

Her recent lesson on the Holocaust, with its unexpected connection to two survivors in Virginia Beach, lit a spark inside Jesse and captured the enthusiasm of the class in a way the teacher never thought possible.

“They realized: 'I’m in charge of my own happiness,’” Roughen said.

The class was Introduction to Film. Twenty ninth-graders and two upperclassmen were studying a 2004 documentary called “Paper Clips.” It’s the story of middle school students in Tennessee who collected 11 million of them to represent the 6 million Jews and 5 million gypsies, homosexuals and others killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Paper clips were used in Norway to symbolize resistance to Nazi occupation.

When Roughen learned that her boyfriend’s mother, Linda Dadon, knew Holocaust survivors at Beth Sholom Village in Virginia Beach, she seized the opportunity to have them share their experiences with her class.

In May, Dadon sent profiles of the survivors, Ruth Lida, 85, and Abe Zimmerman, 88, to the students in California.

Ruth doesn’t like to tell her story. But for the kids, she made an exception. She speaks slowly, in a voice raspy with years and unmistakably kind.

Ruth grew up in Kraków , Poland, where her father’s candy factory provided a comfortable life for the children. She will never forget the date everything changed: Sept. 2, 1939.

“They came with motorcycles. Nobody expected; nobody.” She was 16.

Her older sister was shot in 1941 for not having identification papers, and her father was gunned down later, in another town.

In 1942, the day before her mother and younger sister were sent to death camps, Ruth escaped into the woods. After two days, she found shelter with a Jewish family in a town outside Kraków.

When the Nazis came there, she dressed like a boy – to get sent to a work camp instead of the gas chambers.

Ruth spent the next few years working in three camps: breaking stones, washing blood from the shirts of the dead, helping to build munitions.

In April 1945, with the Nazis on the verge of defeat, the prisoners were marched out of her camp in Leipzig , Germany. They trudged for days, until their captors abandoned them. She continued walking, all the way to a displaced-persons camp in Dresden.

After the war, she married Szaja Lida, whom she had known since childhood. They had a daughter, Anna, and relocated to Norfolk in 1950. They opened a grocery store and lived in Wards Corner until Szaja died in 1999. Ruth has one granddaughter, Rachelle.

Ruth’s brother, Samuel, was the only other relative to survive the genocide, and he died years ago.

“I see my family, I see so many people before I go to bed,” Ruth said. “When I see them, I sleep. They come by my bed. Then, I open my eyes, and they disappear.”

Mention the Holocaust, and Abe starts right off:

“I was in Auschwitz , 3.5 million killed, five boys, all my friends, we survived.”

That he can say with certainty. What happened to his family, no one can.

Abe grew up in the Polish town of Pabianice , the eldest child of five. In February 1940, at age 20, he fled to the Eastern border town of Bialysto k to escape the Nazis. There, he felt a twinge of guilt at seeing families huddled in the cold and turned back to get his relatives.

“When I made it home, there was nobody home anymore. My family was gone.”

He was arrested and sent to the Jewish ghetto, where he cleaned offices and polished Nazi boots for pickles and bread. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was taken to Auschwitz, a death camp.

“What can I tell you more about Auschwitz?” he said. “I never gave up. I ran all over the camp, from one end to the other.” Young, busy workers were less likely to be killed.

The Nazis removed Abe from Auschwitz in the winter of 1944, and by May 1945, he’d been transported to Neustadt in Holstein , a city on the Bay of Lübeck, which empties into the Baltic Sea.

He narrowly escaped death aboard the Athen, one of three ships full of prisoners the Germans intended to sink in the Baltic. The other two, the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek , were devastated by friendly fire from Britain’s Royal Air Force on May 3. The Athen sat in the harbor, unscathed.

After Germany surrendered, Abe moved to a displaced-persons camp, where he married Helen, a girl he knew from Pabianice.

They moved to the United States in 1950, and settled in New York City. Abe ran a candy store in the Bronx until 1982. The couple moved to Boca Raton, Fla., in 2002, and remained there until January, when Helen died. They had two children: Sol, 60, now in Virginia Beach, and Leonard, 54, in New York.

The students in California composed letters back to Abe and Ruth.

Simone wrote to Abe: “I can never stop myself from thinking how much easier my life would be if I just ended it. Then I stop and remember other persons’ lives. My burden becomes significantly smaller and more trivial.”

Lucero wrote to Ruth: “I think that there’s no imagination big enough to truly know what happened there. I’m very happy to know that right now you’re in a safe place and that you’re living in peace.”

Anthony wrote to Abe: “How you can live your life after losing your whole family is amazing to me because I probably would have given up.”

Jesse, the student from the back of the room, began her letter to Ruth: “Hello am writing to you because it’s a class (assignment), I don’t have much to say because things happened for a reason.”

Later she warmed up: “I would of gave up but you dint and that’s really brave of you to keep going after all the pain you were put trough.”

Dadon, 60, read the students’ letters to Abe and Ruth, wrote down their responses, and sent them to the class.

“Ruth feels a great connection to (Jesse), because she, too, likes to 'tell it like it is,’” Dadon wrote. “She also thinks Jesse has a rare gift for recognizing what is hidden deep within people and … will put it to good use one day, perhaps by becoming a psychologist or a detective.”

Those words made an instant change in Jesse, said Roughen, the teacher.

“That little boost of confidence made her believe in herself, I think.”

In a thank-you note to Dadon, Jesse wrote: “It made me happy what (Ruth) said and you wrote because I’ve told my family I wanted to be a psycholgist/detective but all they did was laugh at my face and tell me am not talented am just a waist of space.”

The correspondence continued, with both sides exchanging DVDs and Dadon uploading a video of Abe and Ruth to YouTube.

In one of the videos, Abe tells the students: “The most horrible thing in this world is hate. Hate is the biggest horrible.”

That’s the lesson Roughen wanted her class to learn.

“We talked about how, in high school, hate is contagious. It’s kind of like the bandwagon. And if all those people hadn’t decided to jump on the bandwagon and hate the Jews with Hitler, these people wouldn’t have gone through what they went through.”

School is out, but seven students plan to continue writing letters, Roughen said. Abe insists he wants to visit the students, but relatives have said he is too frail.

Although his body may be fading, he says he’ll walk to California if he has to, to meet the teenagers who touched his soul.

Greg Gaudio, (757) 222-5125, greg.gaudio@pilotonline.com