MANSFIELD, Ohio — People are typically quiet when visiting the library, but Thursday night at the Mansfield-Richland County Public Library, they were extraordinarily quiet as a Holocaust survivor spoke about her experiences.
With few vacant chairs in the library’s community room, some attendees reclined on the floor as Helen Marks, a survivor who was hidden with a Catholic family during World War II, told the story of her Jewish family in the Holocaust.
“We were honored to hear Helen’s story,” said Keli Dotson, the library’s adult programming director. “She kept the audience captivated.”
Born in 1941 Antwerp, Belgium, Marks was less than 2 years old when the Nazis separated her family. In the middle of an August night in 1942, they woke up to shouting. People were forced to pack a suitcase for “relocation.”
Her father went one direction; she and her mother went a different one.
“How she managed to carry a fat baby and suitcases, while she was wearing a nightgown, bathrobe and for some reason a fur coat, I don’t know, (but) she managed to do that,” Marks said.
After three days with no food, besides the one boiled egg that a guard provided for the hungry baby, Marks’ mother was given a chance to speak with the commander. In a daring move that could have ended in tragedy, she told the guard, in a “mad, disrespectful” manner, that she had papers to prove that she was mistakenly brought there. She was released to get these papers but had no intention of returning.
She left her daughter with a Catholic family in Belgium, while she hid elsewhere until after the war.
Meanwhile, her father worked in coal mines. He broke his arm at one point, but wrapped a can around it with a wire and went back to work after spending only a few days in a make-shift hospital because he feared to stay longer would be a death sentence.
Yet this man, who would enter the camp at 175 lbs. and leave at less than 95 lbs., hit a breaking point, nearly committing suicide.
“He imagined me as an adult under a wedding canopy,” Marks said, “and he decided not to commit suicide.”
This family was reunited and moved to the United States, where they rarely spoke of what happened during the Holocaust.
“Some of the experiences were too ugly to live with,” Marks said. “I didn’t want to deal with it, so in my mind, I put it in a box, put it in a file cabinet and put it in a closet.”
She started to share her family’s story later in life so people would be informed. As a “hidden child,” she didn’t see first-hand some of the horrors, she grew up without a childhood. She spent her youngest years in fear.
“Everything that happened to me since age 2 and a half had a definite impression,” Marks said.
She was included in the David Beckman’s 2013 documentary “White Rose Black Rose,” which featured eight people who’d been directly affected by the Holocaust.
She hopes if younger generations don’t have the chance to hear from survivors like herself, that they will turn to books and museums to become educated on the history.
