Holocause survivors to share stories during annual Ricklis Memorial.
By: Leon Tovey
MONROE There is a compelling sameness to the stories of most Holocaust survivors. Each is a vivid, harrowing ride through fear, horror, outrage and sorrow into hope and, eventually, a transcendent love of life tempered by lingering memories of those lost and a burning desire to keep those memories alive.
Sol Lurie and Dora Perel have two such stories, and along with four other survivors will share them with township residents on June 5 as part of the Henry Ricklis Holocaust Memorial Committee’s 2005 Holocaust Commemoration.
The topic of this year’s event, which will be held at the Richard P. Marasco Center for the Performing Arts at the Monroe Township High School at 1:30 p.m., is "Sixty Years after the Liberation of the Death Camps: Never Again."
It’s a message both Mr. Lurie and Ms. Perel say they can stand behind.
Mr. Lurie, a Lithuanian Jew who was born in Kovno, survived the occupation of his home city, life in the ghetto and three of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald.
He was only 11 in June 1941 when the Nazis occupied Kovno, but he vividly remembers the cruelty of the Nazi soldiers who tossed his cousin’s baby into the air and "caught it on a bayonet." He still remembers a terrified moment of guilty relief after a Nazi commandant at Birkenau pulled him and another boy from a line of Jewish prisoners who were then marched into one of the camp’s gas chambers.
He can still laugh when he tells the story about how he got himself chosen for field work at the camp by stuffing his shoes with straw to make himself look taller. And he still speaks with tender awe of his mother’s loving embrace one day in the ghetto when he returned home, covered from head to toe in "human waste" after hiding from Nazi soldiers in an outhouse.
He still has the tattoo he received in the death camps (2858) and said that more than anything, he wants to tell his story to encourage people to take action against the kinds of attitudes that led to the Holocaust.
"I want people to stand up against bigots, to stand up against racists," says Mr. Lurie, who has told his story at schools and universities around the country, most recently at an East Brunswick middle school. "I want to tell to children that if you take a picture and if you add more colors to it, the more beautiful it becomes. We are all God’s children."
Ms. Perel, who was born in Minsk, Belarus, and survived that city’s occupation (during which 90 percent of the city’s Jews were murdered), expresses a similar sentiment.
"I want to keep the Holocaust alive in the memories of people who were never there, so that they will look out for the bad signs," she says. "It can happen again; look what happened in Rwanda that’s not Jewish people, but any time people are being persecuted and killed because they’re different, I suffer with them. We all do."
Like Mr. Lurie, Ms. Perel was a child when the Nazis invaded her home country in 1941 (she was 7) and although she was never sent to a concentration camp, she carries memories of the Minsk ghetto that are as vivid and awful as any the human mind could imagine.
"There weren’t ovens like there were in the camps, but the result was the same: People disappeared and we knew they ended up in mass graves," she says.
She recalls hiding under the bed of her family’s tiny apartment in early 1942 as a Nazi soldier murdered her great-grandmother. She was saved when the soldier decided not to check under the bed, which was covered with "all the brains and all the blood dripping down onto the floor."
"I guess it was too much blood for him," Ms. Perel says, her voice filled with grim irony.
The happy ending of both Ms. Perel’s and Mr. Lurie’s stories is that each survived and eventually immigrated to the United States, grew up and started families. Ms. Perel, who now lives in Encore, has three children and seven grandchildren, while Mr. Lurie, a Greenbriar at Whittingham resident, has three children and two grandchildren.
But while the stories of Mr. Lurie and Ms. Perel ended well, the stories of 6 million other European Jews did not, says Jay Ellis Brown, a member of the Henry Ricklis Holocaust Memorial Committee.
Mr. Brown says the stories of Mr. Lurie and Ms. Perel, as well as those of Esther Clifford, Carl Lustbader, Judith Sherman and Frida Herskovitz, are a tribute to those 6 million dead. He says the June 5 event, which also will include interpretive dancing and songs, is meant to remind people that while the Holocaust was a long time ago, some of the attitudes that led to it are alive and well around the world.
"Some people even Jews say it’s 60 years ago, enough already," Mr. Brown says.
"But we don’t want this to happen to anybody ever again whether it’s in Bosnia, in the Sudan, anywhere," he continues. "That’s the message of this year’s event: We don’t want it to happen again."
The commemoration will start with a candle-lighting ceremony at 1 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

