Local Holocaust survivors' stories preserved in digital archive

Posted

This year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Jan. 27, will mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers.

Over a period of 14 years beginning in 1982, the Second Generation of Long Island — a group of descendants of immigrants from Germany and other European countries in the late 19th and 20th centuries — made a series of documents focusing on Holocaust survivors and their liberators. Cedarhurst resident Syd Mandelbaum, the son of two survivors, led the project after creating the organization in 1981.

“I founded Second Generation of Long Island, Children of Holocaust Survivors,” Mandelbaum said. “I had just come back from Israel, where I attended, with my father, the First World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.”

Mandelbaum and others interviewed survivors and camp liberators on Long Island, in New York City and in Israel, from 1982 to 1995.

“It’s a validation, this idea that I had 40 years ago, and we already have had the most success in having the collection widespread, and now (its) being housed on Long Island is very important to me,” Mandelbaum said. “This is very important, as many of the subjects were Nassau County residents.”

The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, in Glen Cove, now own the rights to the digital collection of documentaries.

“We’ve been using them and incorporating some of them into our own brief stories,” the center’s executive director, Bernard Furshpan, explained. “Right now the museum is one of the members of the coalition that (County Executive) Bruce Blakeman put together to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.”

As the son of two Holocaust survivors himself, Furshpan wants to keep these stories alive. “As these liberators and survivors are dying, there’s very few left,” he said. “It’s an honor to keep the legacies alive.”

There are 47 documentaries in total, of 41 survivors and six liberators. The average age of the survivors when they were interviewed was 57, and they recalled their experiences in vivid detail.

“In 1983, we starting donating our collection to the Video Archive of Holocaust Testimony at Yale’s Sterling Library,” Mandelbaum said. “In 1993, when the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum opened, our collection was shared and housed there. In the past decade, the collection was made available to the World War II Museum in New Orleans and the Jewish Museum in Warsaw, Poland.”

In 1993, Mandelbaum flew to Los Angeles and gave director Steven Spielberg’s organization, the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the documentaries to get them started. Mandelbaum granted the Shoah Foundation permission to use the collection in April 1995, when he served as commissioner of the Nassau County Commission on Human Rights.

Mandelbaum recalled a special interview with Frances Purcell, a U.S Army liberator of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and former Nassau County executive and Malverne mayor, on Jan. 15, 1985. Purcell’s interview, along with many others, took place at Lawrence High School, in a small studio.

“Our first interview was with my father, Joseph, in the beginning of 1982, and it was done by Doris Simon, who had taken interviewing classes with us,” Mandelbaum said. “We became very good at this, and over the next 10 years we had produced 40 documentaries.”

Dagmar Fodiman, 77, the daughter of two survivors, shared the story of her mother, Serena Stern, being on the first transport to Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia, in the spring of 1942. Fodimab, a Woodmere resident, said she thought the Second Generation of Long Island had a very important mission.

“We felt that it would be important to get documentation and testimony as the survivors got older …,” Fodimab said. “In light of all the claims made, that (the Holocaust) never happened, people wanted testimonies of people that were there and to tell the true story. This did happen, and people have numbers on their arms, and to tell the story of what the Jewish people went through.” 

Fodimab urged people to seek the truth, especially given what is going on in Israel now. “Our story has to be told, and it’s most important the truth be told,” she said. “There’s only one truth when you talk about history. The truth that what happened is not somebody’s interpretation. These were facts from people that survived.”