The crematorium explodes, shooting fire into the sky. The prisoners at Auschwitz cheer in jubilation, peering through electrified barbed wire at the conflagration. Amid the alarms, SS guards rush, rifles out, at the imprisoned Jews. “Inside!” a guard barks. “Everyone inside the barracks! Schnell! Schnell!”
Until the late 1970s Schindel thought he was alone. He came to America in 1950 and changed his name from Salomon Schindelheim. For years he lived among his few surviving relatives who had left before the war, all of whom are now dead. In their place he has found a community of fellow Holocaust survivors.
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In the foundation office at 4255 Main in Skokie, the story of the Holocaust is told by the walls. There, in grainy monochrome, are the Jewish prisoners. They starve on the trains from the Buchenwald concentration camp. They are corralled for execution in Lithuania. They lie in a mass grave, one emaciated body haphazardly tossed upon another, at the camp at Bergen-Belsen. The pictures are no starker than the book and film titles in the library: Night. Prisoner. Genocide.
“There were many similar stories, all of which adds up to a clear picture, a fabric–that in utter desperation, they did not give up their religion, they did not give up their faith.”
“My son Alan, he was in kindergarten,” Gans says. “After Thanksgiving all the children were talking in show-and-tell about what they did. My son came home and said, ‘How come we have no family? How come we have no grandparents?’ I could not answer.”
Schindel, who was arrested by the Germans when he was only 16, witnessed the deaths of hundreds of Jews during the five years he spent in the camps. His survival was not heroic–heroes quickly became martyrs. He beat the odds a day at a time. Schindel always has with him two reminders of those days. The number 161628 is still burned into his arm, and he wears an ornate gold ring. Its original owner was an SS officer, whose hand Schindel and a Russian prisoner cut off after the camps were liberated in 1945. Schindel will never part with the ring.
The survivor community here uses the foundation to teach others how the Holocaust happened. The foundation sponsored the current exhibit at the Field Museum that portrays a boy’s view of the Holocaust. Among those who attended the exhibit’s opening was Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who has long supported the survivors. The Vatican was silent during the Holocaust, but his efforts have brought Jews and Catholics closer together.
