David Kilby, Managing Editor
MONROE — In observance of Holocaust Memorial Day, Monroe Middle School students on Monday participated in the program “Speak up, Speak Out,” where they learned about Holocaust refugees through a book and the firsthand testimony of Ilse Loeb, a Monroe resident and Holocaust survivor.
A team of 100 sixth-graders have been reading “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry in Susanna Sullivan’s class, and Ms. Sullivan believed Ms. Loeb’s story was ideal for the lessons they were learning.
When Nazis came to Ms. Loeb’s house in Vienna, Austria, she said they took her parents, but let her go free.
The Nazis took almost everything her family owned. Before her mother was taken away, she told little Ilse to retrieve and protect a gold watch, a family heirloom. Ilse managed to sneak the watch into her pocket. She still has the watch today, but it’s one of the only family items that were saved, she said.
Ms. Loeb played the piano as a girl, and when she was told they were taking her family’s piano, she asked if she could play one last song on it. They allowed her to, and while she was playing, she cried out to the officers and said she didn’t want them to take her piano. She won their sympathy, and they allowed her parents to give the piano to one of their family friends.
”One big difference between Anne Frank and me is that Anne Frank was betrayed,” Ms. Loeb said. “I was not, and that’s why I was able to survive.”
She had the opportunity to escape by train to Holland.
But before she avoided capture in 1938, at the train station a Nazi officer stopped her and said she was old enough to go to a labor camp, and he stole her passport. She told him she was only 13, but he didn’t believe her.
”My passport was my only link to freedom,” she said to the students.
She followed the man, and that is when she met her first “lucky star” who helped her to escape to freedom. Another Nazi who was the other officer’s superior told him to give back the passport, and he listened. But by the time she got her passport back, the train already was pulling out of the station.
When she finally safely got to Holland, she first lived with foster parents that recently had lost a child.
But she said it didn’t work out well with this family because they expected her to fill the void of their baby, and Ilse was a grown child.
So she was sent to another foster family that was able to help her out much more. She said she still keeps in touch with the grandchild of this second foster family.
To give a little bit more of a backdrop for the students, Ms. Loeb then explained to them how the Nazis weren’t only trying to conquer countries on the battlefield but also in the market. They created counterfeit English pounds in attempt to reduce the value of the currency and eventually bring down the English economy. She said if the war had lasted a bit longer, they would have succeeded in this task.
As the months went by and turned into years, letters from her parents stopped. Soon after that, while in Holland, she received a letter from the Nazis telling her to go to a German labor camp.
”In 1942, we really didn’t know what was going on in the labor and extermination camps,” she said. “We didn’t know about the gas chambers. I was not prepared, but my foster family and friends said don’t go. They said you have to just disappear. How do you do that? How do you just disappear from the earth? You need someone to provide food and shelter for you.”
She said it also was difficult to find someone willing to hide Jews because anyone who was caught doing so suffered the same fate as the Jew they were caught hiding.
”And yet people did help,” she said. “They didn’t think of the consequences. I later asked myself as an adult ‘Could I have taken the responsibility at the risk of getting caught?’ I don’t know, but I know that I’m thankful there were people willing to do that for me.”
She took the advice of her foster family and went further into hiding by moving in with her cousin and his fiancé. They were a part of the Dutch Underground Movement, and they provided her with a new identity.
”I brainwashed myself to be that other person,” she said, “for all that time I was in hiding, three years. That’s 1,000 days. That’s a long time for a teenager. I totally forgot about where I came from.”
She said in Vienna she was an honor student, but while in hiding, she forgot most of what she learned in school.
”I was only concerned about one thing: not to be caught,” she said.
She never went near a window and only went out at night when it was pitch black, she said.
She said students often ask her what she did for all that time in hiding, and she tells them that hiding from the Nazis kept her quite occupied.
”Hope is very important,” she said as she explained how a little radio in her cousin’s attic brought her hope. Radios were strictly forbidden by the Nazis.
On the British Broadcasting Channel, they listened to the announcements of English troops coming to liberate Holland and attack Germany.
”Without that hope, I don’t know what I would have done,” Ms. Loeb said. “That made me go on another day and another day.”
But that hope constantly was tested. The mayor of the Dutch town she was hiding in showed allegiance to the Nazis, and he sent police to go looking for her.
Her cousin and Nicky, his fiancé, hid her in a hole in the wall made for such occasions, and she wasn’t found. Nicky knew how the Nazis often come back to the same place a few hours later to try to catch those hiding off guard. So she sent Ms. Loeb to a friend down the road that didn’t even know the young Jewish girl, and there she hid when the Nazis came back to Nicky’s house a few hours later.
She said her hope helped keep her calm when the Nazis were so close to finding her.
”No matter how bad something is, hope can get you through it,” she said. “With hope, one can think, hope and dream. If you have hope, you have everything.”
But that hope continued to be tested. The winter of 1944 to 1945 was one of the coldest of the century in the Netherlands, and Ms. Loeb’s cousin had no gas and very little food.
When the war was over, Ms. Loeb went on a quest to find out what happened to her parents. She had a feeling they didn’t make it out of the concentration camps, but she never found out where they died until she spoke to a Polish author and diplomat in the 1980s who wrote a book on the Holocaust in Poland.
Ms. Loeb found out her parents were sent to Poland in 1942 and died in a holding camp with 600,000 other Jews. Holding camps were where Jews were sent when there was no room in the concentration camps.
”You have now heard a survivor speak to you,” she said. “You can now be witnesses. We survivors are dying off. It’s your responsibility to speak up for us.”
She explained how the Nazi regime began with small acts of violence, similar to bullying in school, and recalled a time when a classmate spit at her and called her a “dirty Jew.”
”Hatred isn’t something you’re born with,” she said. “It’s something you acquire little by little.”
As soon as the war was over, Ms. Loeb retained her Jewish identity, but she still forgot most of her education, including how to play piano.
She explained how lovely Vienna was before the war and mentioned many of the virtues that shined through all the war’s adversity. For instance, she recalled how Belgium was a great refuge for children because it had many orphanages and convents where they could hide.
She said she knew of a priest who saved about 300 children by fostering them until the war was over.
The Monroe School District usually has Holocaust survivors speak only to eighth-graders because of the intensity of the concentration camp stories, but Ms. Loeb’s story was one of a refugee who had to keep relocating to escape the camps so teachers saw it as an opportunity to give the students a different, milder perspective of the Holocaust.
”You need to take a different perspective with each age group to make sure it’s age-appropriate,” said Chari Chanley, principal of Monroe Middle School.
At the end of her talk, the students gave a pledge, saying, “As part of my commitment to ending the language of hatred, I will remember those whose lives have been destroyed through hatred and exclusion in the Holocaust, under Nazi persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
”(I will) challenge the language of hatred when I hear it and never use it myself (and) carefully consider how I use my voice and will tell others how I feel in a way that does not harm or offend whether I am speaking to others, online or in writing.
”(I will) give voice to the voiceless and use my words to draw attention to the experiences of others (and) work with my friends, family, colleagues and my community to create a society, which is free from the dangers of persecution and hatred.”
”It started with the book ‘Number the Stars,’” Ms. Sullivan said.
In the book, members of the Danish resistance used fishing boats to get more than 7,000 Jews to Sweden.
”I heard Ilse’s story before since she came here for the eighth grade,” she added. “I thought since she was a hidden child, her story would be good for the sixth-graders. They’re so innocent that it’s hard for them to wrap their heads around, but at least getting (Ms. Loeb) makes (the Holocaust) more of a reality.”
After the students’ pledge, Rishub Handa, one of the students, played Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” for Ms. Loeb on the grand piano in the auditorium as a memento to the Holocaust survivor’s love for the piano and classic music.

