By:REBECCA SHALOMOFF
Hundreds of Jews in the area came together last week to commemorate Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. With heavy hearts and mournful spirits, they prayed for the six million Jewish martyrs who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway choir students sang laments in Hebrew and English. Children and adults united in an effort to remember the unforgettable.
But it was the stories told by survivors, Irene Hizme and Marion Blumenthal Lazan, that enabled everyone to image again what the nightmare of concentration camp life must have been like.
On Thursday evening, April 19, about 600 gathered in Congregation Beth Sholom in Lawrence. For the past seven years, congregants from more than 20 local synagogues have joined together as a united Jewish community to commemorate Yom Hashoah. This year, participants remembered the tragedy by hearing about a distinctly horrific experience that took place in the concentration camps.
"It is a tale that many survivors know little about. A tale of a Holocaust within the Holocaust," said Irene Hizme, a survivor of Joseph Mengele's infamous experiments on twins under the Nazi regime. Accompanied by her twin brother, Renee Slotkin, Hizme told her story on a dark stage with her face lit up only by candlelight.
At the age of 6, Hizme and her brother were brought to Auschwitz in December 1943. Stripped from their parents and then each other, they were saved from immediate death because they were twins. Three-thousand twins, mostly children but ranging in age up to 60, faced torture in addition to the starvation, illness, abuse and slave labor inmates experienced in the camps.
"The Mengele twins were the most exclusive club," Hizme said. "We were human guinea pigs in his search for perfecting a master race."
They were poked, prodded and injected with all sorts of viruses over and over. Only 160 survived.
In January 1945, the Russian Army liberated Auschwitz. Hizme's parents had been killed, but she and her brother lived through it. She was sent to America to live with the Slotkin family in Lawrence, who set out to find her brother. They were reunited at the age of 12.
"The most important lesson is that it can never happen again," she said. "Holocaust survivors are dwindling. We implore young people to continuing our tale until it becomes an inseparable part to world consciousness."
The following day, students at HAFTR High School heard the story of another survivor, Marion Blumenthal Lazan. With incredible strength and vitality, Lazan told students of the inhumanity she lived through.
"There is no way that this could accurately be put into words or pictures," she said. "It was truly remarkable how any one of us could survive under such conditions."
After being ostracized and forced into ghetto life because they were Jews, Lazan and her family were thrown in cattle cars and brought to the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. Lazan recounts seeing wagons filled with dead, naked bodies and electrocuted bodies of those who failed to escape.
In the camps, "death was an everyday occurrence," she said.
For two years, she could never brush her teeth. Her hair was infected with lice. To eat, inmates were given hot water, and bread only once a week. By the age of 10, Lazan weighed 35 pounds.
Her father died weeks after the camp was liberated in April 1945, but her mother and brother are still here today. Lazan, a Hewlett resident, had a difficult time readjusting to society after getting her freedom back. She moved to America at the age of 13, and was introduced to English for the first time. But no obstacle could bring her down. Lazan graduated from high school after having completed her studies in only two years, and ranked eighth in a graduating class of 265 students.
Lazan, co-author of "Four Perfect Pebbles," her account of life under the Nazi regime, tours the country speaking about her experiences to make sure no one, especially young people, will ever forget what happened.
"Their memories that we cannot forget keep us awake at night," said Rabbi Mordekai Shapiro of Congregation Ohr Torah in North Woodmere, who addressed the large audience on Thursday night. "We remember. This gives our people the strength. The memories of the unspeakable horrors gave us the courage to build successful businesses and Jewish communities that flourish never in the history of our people. To build the modern state of Israel and to continue to support and build it. We will always remember."
