MANSFIELD, Ohio–“I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more,” wrote Anne Frank in her diary in 1944.
And today, Anne Frank is remembered as one of over one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Members of the Mansfield Jewish community, local officials, local religious leaders, and area residents remembered those who died in the Holocaust during a memorial service, Yom Hashoah, an interfaith service at Emanuel Jacob Congregation. Dr. Yoram Eckstein spoke at the service, not as a hydrogeologist or as a professor at Kent State University, though he is both, but as a Polish survivor of the period of the Holocaust.
Rabbi Michael Oppenheimer introduced Eckstein.
“One of the attempts that we’ve had over the years at these commemorations is to present different stories and Yoram’s story is quite different. When I heard of his situation in Europe, I realized that I had forgotten, in all of the years that I taught Holocaust, that there was another dimension to the Holocaust—not from Germany, but from Russia, and Yoram is here to share that story.”
“My story is more a story of surviving the period of Holocaust. It’s a little bit unknown chapter in history when the Germans invaded Poland from west, south, and north,” Eckstein said. On September 17, we were met by the Soviet Red Army, which under secret treaty with Hitler, invaded eastern Poland and promptly annexed the territory into the Soviet Union. By November 1939, we all found ourselves under Soviet regime and were offered Soviet citizenship. Ninety-nine percent of the population refused.”
Soon after, he said, they were declared enemies of the Soviet government. Between February and June 1940, 1 million 7 hundred Polish citizens were deported to slave labor in Siberian forests, coal mines, gold and other metal mines, and to agricultural labor in Kazakhstan and Asian republics. He said 200,000 of those Polish citizens were Jews.
Eckstein’s father was forced to work as a lumberjack.
Eckstein described starvation diets and withholding of food for refusal to work. People like his mother, who had to take care of Yoram as a child, received only 400 calories of food a day. He described being transported in box cars by railroad. And when the Germans attack the Soviet Union in 1941, the conditions of truce included release of all of the Polish citizens.
“The guards simply opened the gate and said, ‘Go,’” said Eckstein. Except to “go” was to go through Siberian forests where there were no roads and dangerous wildlife with wolves and bears. But many families trekked along the river for miles to the train. Eckstein’s father knew Yoram was too little to walk the distance and his father and his siblings with their children constructed a raft and traveled down the river to the railroad.
They travelled south through Kazakhstan and eventually arrived at Bukhara, Uzbekistan. They first lived at the railroad station and gradually found a room to live in and then had to find work. His father resorted to Black Market trading to care for his family. In the winter of 1941-42, typhus struck and many died but Eckstein and his family survived. They lived there until 1946 when their people were allowed to return to Poland.
“I am blessed with an exceptional memory.” Eckstein said. “I remember I was reminding my mother of the name of the commandant of the Siberian camp. I remember his face. I remember my conversation with him. That’s why I can go on infinitely collecting episodes of that survival. And I cherish dearly that memory and memory of people who didn’t make it, who were left either along the tracks of the railway, because there were many who died in transport, and people who succumbed to hunger in Siberia or typhus in Bukhara.”
Paul Hyman, Emanuel Jacob Congregation president, said that by remembering what happened, we can hopefully avoid the same path of genocide in the future. Yet recent history, he noted, portrays continued persecution and racial division in the Charlie Hebdo in France, attacks in Denmark, attacks on Jewish sites, terrorism in Africa and in the Middle East, and the recent warnings in Israel during the elections for Jews to go to the polls and vote “because the Arabs were voting.”
“Whether bullets, whether it be Tweets, intolerance and blaming of others still continues today,” he said.
Area religious leaders and local government officials participated in the service, and Richland County Commissioner Marilyn John and Mansfield Mayor Tim Theaker each issued proclamations designating periods of remembrance and encouraging residents to strive for tolerance and peace.
Rabbi Oppenheimer closed the service, thanking the area religious leaders and noting that there was a time when they would not all have gathered in a service together.
“I realized that I had forgotten, in all of the years that I taught Holocaust, that there was another dimension to the Holocaust—not from Germany, but from Russia, and Yoram is here to share that story,” Rabbi Michael Oppenheimer said.
