This week we are asked to write about our forebears’ refugee/immigrant experience. I wrote what I know about how my maternal grandparents came to this country several years ago and will link to that story at the end of this essay.

I wanted to tell a more urgent story, given that this story will go live four days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, what we are witnessing at this moment in Ukraine, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. This story is real and urgent. We will NEVER forget. It is a compelling story of inhumanity, ultimate survival and redemption. It is the story of how a close friend (Henry) came to this country as an infant refugee. I have his permission to tell it. He related it to me in depth a few weeks ago.

In the Krakow Ghetto there were five siblings in the Ferber family; four sisters: Erna, Cecile, Geiza and Rose, one young brother and the two parents, along with an aunt and her baby boy. After the fall of the ghetto, they were rounded up and sent to Plaszów, run by Amon Göth, as depicted in “Schindler’s List”. Henry told me they really did live in fear every day, as Göth would wander onto his balcony with his rifle and randomly shoot at anyone passing by. They were soon processed and sent on to Auschwitz.

In Auschwitz, the parents and brother, aunt and baby were immediately gassed. The sisters were in their teens and were useful workers, so sent to Birkenau to work. Every day they had to line up first thing in the morning to be accounted for. On one particular morning, Rose, the youngest was ill with dysentery, or something similar. The sisters took care of her and helped her out to the line-up. Anyone who couldn’t work would be murdered. They were the last four to line up that day.

As it happened, a train of 800 Jews, headed for slave labor at a munitions factory, stopped at Birkenau that day. 20 had died on the trip and the Germans needed replacements. They took the last 20 from the line-up, including the Ferber girls. Though freezing and starving, they spent the rest of the war in relative safety, working at a munitions factory. Rose’s illness saved them at that moment.

The end of the war was near. The Germans knew they had to hide their atrocities so rounded up their prisoners and began “the Death March” back into Germany from Poland, knowing that many of the woman would die from starvation or exhaustion along the way, or they would be randomly shot. But that way, there would not be mass graves to be discovered. The sisters could barely make it, but leaned on each other for support. One cold night, all the prisoners took refuge in a barn. The sisters found a few loose floor boards. They hid under them, swearing everyone to secrecy. The next morning, the German soldiers came to roust the prisoners to move on. The sisters didn’t move. They could see the soldiers’ boots through the cracks in the floor above them. They remained silent. No one revealed their hiding place. They stayed put all day, fearing a soldier might come back to look for someone who tried to hide. They didn’t leave their hiding place until night fell. They had hidden for 24 hours.

Exhausted and starving, they made their way through the dark woods. They walked on and finally saw a light, glimmer in the darkness. A farmhouse came into view. They didn’t know what or who they would find. It was occupied by an old woman who greeted them with an American flag. They were saved. Her husband had been conscripted into the army, she was alone. She fed them and allowed them to rest, but only for a few days. The Russians were about to liberate Poland. It was better to be in Czechoslovakia which would be liberated by the Americans, so the sisters moved on and took to the road, just before American troops arrived to liberate them. They were finally free and had survived together; miraculous.

Cecile moved on to Germany, working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) in Tirschenreuth, as a child welfare worker. Roman Kriegstein, another Polish Jew who, along with his mother, had survived the war, roared into town on a motorcycle with a sidecar. He had studied to be a dentist before the war and was on his way to reclaim his dental tools, but stopped for a moment. He laid eyes on Cecile. She helped him find a room for the night and invited him to come to a dance that evening. He never returned to Poland to get his dental equipment. He found love and stayed with Cecile, but he did need to make money.

He met a man named Skeresky who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He had a bus that ran on wooden fuel. Together they started a bus line, as transportation was scarce. It grew and grew. They named it “ESKA” (from their initials). Eventually, they sold it to raise the funds to get to America. It still exists today.

Cecile and Roman were married in Germany by an American Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Eugene Lipman, who was with the first group of liberators. He became very close with them and married everyone in the family, including my friends. Twin sons Henry and Arnold were born on March 31, 1949. Eight months later, sponsored by Roman’s Aunt Lucille (refugees had to have sponsors already living in the United States), they made their way to New York.

The new Americans originally lived in Washington Heights. Roman worked as a dental assistant and commuted every day into lower Manhattan. On the long commute, he made a friend, Sam. Sam designed jewelry and had two daughters. They had a long time to talk. At that time, the only people who could acquire gold were people in the dental business (for fillings) or jewelers. With his delicate dental skills, Roman knew how to work the gold and began designing jewelry, which he and Sam sold over their lunch break. Soon, they were doing so well that they quit their “day jobs” and rented space downtown to design and sell the jewelry.

Within a few years, even that space was too small and they looked for a factory to buy. A watch case factory on Long Island became available. The watch case houses the movement of the watch. It is made of gold and was a good business for the remainder of Roman’s life. He used his knowledge, savvy, and very hard work to live what used to be called the “American Dream”.

The family had moved from Washington Heights to Teaneck, NJ when the boys were still young, but now moved to Roslyn, New York. Henry and Arnold went on to Harvard and Yale, respectively and both became doctors. Their parents had one more son, much younger than the twins. Roman and Cecile were devoted to each other for their entire lives.

Henry is an ophthalmologist with a speciality in the retina. He practices on the South Shore and Cape Cod, lives on Martha’s Vineyard all summer. We have traveled extensively with him and his wife. Many years ago, I began seeing light flashes in my left eye and knew the signs of a problem with my retina. We have no help for this on the Vineyard. I pondered what to do and had a “eureka” moment. I asked Henry if I could leave the island with him on the early ferry, come to his Cape Cod office and be examined. He found a hole in my retina, lasered it closed and we returned to the Vineyard together that day. He literally saved my eyesight. He is a brilliant, gentle man.

 

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Written almost five years ago, here is the story of my maternal grandparent’s immigration to the U.S.

My Grandparents’ Story

 

 

Through our years as active art collectors, we attended many art auctions, but rarely bought anything. An exception were the two works we bought from the Mass College of Art in 1994 done by celebrities that we hang in our bathroom, just for fun. We both love Gregory Peck and Steve Martin, so these were “no-brainers” for us. They were not expensive and a great way to support the school.

In 1995, with a vibrant committee, I helped start a group called the “Young Patrons of the Rose”. We developed a wonderful three-part program; a tour of the museum followed by dinner, a visit to a collector’s home, and a visit to an artist’s studio in or around the Boston area. We had the formula down and the program was a great success. The Chair of the Rose was deeply involved and suggested we plan a fundraiser – an art auction.

We put together a great committee, headed up by the Chair’s step-daughter. Including the Brandeis Development Officer involved with the arts, there were 11 members of the committee, which began in 1999. I brought on the director of one of the leading galleries in Boston. She connected us with her stable of huge artists.

We met at least monthly, frequently more often. We batted around ideas and quickly came up with a winner – making boxes – 8″ wooden cubes, with the top left off, to give to an invited group of artists to be auctioned off, with the top-tier (10 of them, including Sol LeWitt, Shellbourne Thurber, Michael Mazur, Annette Lemieux, Philip Taaffe, who had just had a solo show at the Rose, and a few other notable local artists) auctioned live, the rest going silent from bid sheets. We put together a wish-list of artists and assignments to committee members to contact the various artists we wanted to make us the boxes to be auctioned off.

We called the event “Out of the Box”. We set the date of the event for Sunday, November 5, 2000. It had to be at a time when the Rose galleries would be empty (there was no Lois Foster wing at the time), as we took over the entire building to display the boxes and bid sheets. We erected a tent on the lawn in front of the museum (where the Chris Burden “Light of Reason” sculpture now resides, erected in 2014) for dining after the silent auction.

I was still an active collector at the time and knew all the top galleries in Boston, so approached many and got some of the top artists in Boston to participate. It was only a short time since the long-time and well-respected Rose director, Carl Belz, had left. I remained in touch with him. Most of the area artists knew him well. I used that relationship to leverage my “ask”. Many of these artists had work in the Rose collection, or I had bought work from the galleries I contacted.

Once we had all the boxes handed out and knew who all the participating artists would be, I was assigned the role of “artist wrangler”. I was in contact with the entire list of artists to make sure they completed and returned their finished works before the auction so we had time to inventory, price and our curator (the current Rose curator at the time) could figure out the installation.

We asked 66 people to make art work (including the president of the university and some of our committee members). I had a spreadsheet of who had picked up the boxes, when were they returned, how often I called them, etc. This was before the days of essential use of email, or even cellphones. I had studio phone numbers, addresses; people came in person to pick up and drop off boxes. I tracked it all (and still have the worksheets to prove it).

Others on the committee worked on catering details (cold food given out in boxes, of course), invitations, lists of people to invite, etc. Putting on any sort of a fundraiser is a huge endeavor. Reaching out to people who will spend money on art boxes is a specific crowd, but our “Young Patrons of the Rose” committee had been together for some years now and we had a built-in audience. And of course, we tapped the broader Rose membership and the Boston-area art world writ large. We had excellent artists doing interesting work. We spent 18 months putting it all together.

The curator put together a fantastic-looking show. Other members of the committee put the bid-sheets together and had the team ready to check out the winning bidders and wrap up the boxes efficiently for the trip home (at least they were relatively small and not too fragile). Through friends in the auction world, a professional auctioneer donated his services for the live auction. Dan and I bought two tables to the event to help ensure good turn out and some interesting people who could talk up what was valuable.

Of course it was a rainy, blustery November night. Inside the museum it didn’t matter. Getting under the tent…well, we all had fun. Just before the event was due to begin, we realized we needed someone to make announcements “hawking” what was available in each room, urging people to buy, and most of all, closing each room (there were three) where the silent auction took place. We looked at each. Yes, I was the theater person who could speak the loudest. I volunteered for the assignment and spent the evening hollering from the center of each room (upstairs and downstairs in the main Rose building, then in over the the Lee wing). We closed each room 15 minutes apart from the next. Much to my delight, Dan got into the spirit of things and bought one box from the silent auction, a lovely Jim Stroud black on black work. He is mostly known for his print making, but this a subtle beauty.

We trudged through the inclement weather to the tent for some food (admittedly, the low point of the evening), libation, and the live auction. Dan got more excited by bidding wars going on for some of the well-know artists. The Sol LeWitt box, which he had de-constructed, was purchased by a Rose Board member and one of the largest contemporary art collectors in the US (he was fondly reminiscing about it to me earlier this year – it remains on his coffee table today). Others went for large sums of money. Dan got excited about the Shellbourne Thurber, a conceptual artist, whose work we followed at the Krakow Gallery in Boston. She had covered her box with pages from Freud and inside, placed a mechanical toy, turned on by a switch underneath the box. When activated, the toy rattled the box and said, “Help me, help me! Will you let me out of here?!” We loved it and paid a goodly sum of money for it. Dan hosted one table, I hosted the other. Our friends cheered us on, as Dan bid for the box. It was a heady experience.

In my file, I find a letter, written the day after the auction, thanking all the artists for their participation in our successful event. Of course, we found as many sponsors as we could to help underwrite it. We charged to attend, but the sale of the boxes was what made us money, as we had lots of expenses associated with the effort. I’m sure just renting the tent was very costly. In all, I believe we made a profit of about $40,000. The proceeds were used to underwrite the first show in the new Lois Foster Gallery, which opened in September, 2001, the Rose’s 40th anniversary year.

On a recent shiva call, I was in the home of one of my fellow committee members. Highlighted on shelves surrounding a fireplace in a condo full of exceptional artwork were two boxes from that evening. Another world-class art collector and I commented on them. She told me she still has her Gerry Bergstein, a box bought during the live auction. It is good to know more than two decades later, these boxes still have pride of place in the world.

 

 

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