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Monday May 2, 2005

The victims remember

Up to 400 local survivors to be honored at luncheon

by dan pine
staff writer

Abraham Kaff stares at the tattoo cut into his forearm courtesy of the Third Reich. The serial numbers have faded slightly over the past 63 years, but not his memories of life in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

For most of the war years, the Polish-born Kaff was a slave laborer assigned the most gruesome of tasks: He was forced to help build the crematoria that incinerated more than a million Jews.

“I handed bricks to the bricklayer,” he says. “I didn’t know in the beginning what it was. Later, in the camp, I found out it was a crematorium.”

Kaff, 80, today lives in comfortable retirement in San Francisco. But he couldn’t have gotten here without first surviving the very worst humanity had to offer. He attributes that survival, in part, to his youth and strength at the time.

But he cites an even more important reason.

Early in his imprisonment at Birkenau, after his entire family had been killed, Kaff had a dream while sleeping on a wooden bunk with a dozen other starving inmates. “In my dream,” he recalls, “my father told me, ‘Don’t give up. You will live through.’”

Kaff is among the last Holocaust survivors now living in the Bay Area. Sixty years after their liberation, close to 400 of them are expected to attend “Eyewitness to History,” a community-wide luncheon to be held in their honor.

The event takes place Sunday, May 15, at the San Francisco Hilton’s Continental Ballroom. Sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Holocaust Center of Northern California, the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation and the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the luncheon is a community-wide labor of love.

Leaders from government and major Jewish organizations will be there. ABC7/KGO-TV anchorman Dan Ashley will emcee, and singer Bruce Adler will entertain.

Hella Weiss will also be there. She has lived in San Francisco for more than 50 years, and is a long-time member of Congregation Ner Tamid.

But she was not born here. She was born 70 years ago in a small town near Hanover, Germany. By the time she came into the world, Hitler already had a firm grip on power and was making life a living hell for Germany’s Jews.

“I remember everything,” she says. “In 1939, my sister and brother and I had to go to Holland. I was five. In March 1940, we were all sent to Westerbork [a Dutch work camp].”

She and her siblings lived there with their parents who, she says, “protected me very nicely.” But in early 1944, the family was deported to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.

In October of that year, her mother was supervising at a nearby factory, but the younger Weiss and her father were abruptly hauled away for deportation to Auschwitz.

“When mother came home, she didn’t see me,” recalls Weiss. “But she knew where I was. She went to the cattle car, found me and took me out. A Nazi came and said, ‘I’m sorry, you cannot do this.’ She said, ‘Then I go along too.’ He said, ‘No, you cannot.’ So we said goodbye to each other. My mother turned and walked away. A few minutes later, the Nazi said, ‘I will save your daughter.’ He took me to his Czech girlfriend.”

Sadly, Weiss’ father remained on the train and perished at Auschwitz. But the rest of the immediate family survived the war intact.

Another survivor planning to attend the luncheon is Sonia Korn-Grimani. She is today an elegant, accomplished San Franciscan, fluent in several languages, and holds a doctorate in French literature and applied linguistics. But she, too, was not born here.

Korn-Grimani remembers the day in 1939 the synagogue in her hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, was burned to the ground. After her father fled to Belgium, her mother spent every penny to smuggle the children out as well.

“They were very rough,” she recalls of the smugglers. “We were thrown out of the truck and told to walk on the railway lines. We walked the whole night.”

Members of the underground took Korn-Grimani and her brother to Brussels where they reunited with their father. “Brussels was not yet occupied by the Nazis,” she says, “and it had the fresh air of freedom.”

Soon her mother joined them. From 1941 on, the family members scattered in and around Brussels, by then occupied by Germany. The kids lived with a cruel woman who barely cared for them. Their mother assumed a false identity as a non-Jewish Flemish woman, while their father hid in attics.

That proved so trying for Korn-Grimani’s father, that one day he couldn’t take it anymore and went out into the city. He was immediately picked up by the SS and deported to Auschwitz. Somehow, he managed to jump out of the train. Though he’d broken his leg, the Belgian resistance picked him up and returned him to the city.

The family lived this way until liberation. Though most of their relatives died, the Korn family eluded capture and deportation.

Not quite as lucky was Lily Spitz of San Mateo.

A native of Satu-Mare, Romania, Spitz and her family were relatively far from the center of the Nazi maelstrom, but eventually it reached their remote outpost. In 1944, she and her family were herded into a local Jewish ghetto.

“After a few weeks, they started transportation,” she recalls. “We had a long walk to the railway station and they put us in the cattle cars.”

They did not know where they were headed, but when the train finally stopped, Spitz remembers staring at the gate in front of their destination, with a legend that read “Arbeit Macht Frei (work brings freedom)”

Says Spitz: “I saw my mother when she was going to the crematorium on the left. Because we were young and strong and tall, we went to the right.”

The next 10 months at Auschwitz were a nightmare, but Spitz and her sister Rachel stuck together throughout. They worked on various details, hauling corpses and cleaning out sanitation trucks with their hands.

By January 1945, the Russian army began closing in. Allied bombers filled the skies. The sisters were relocated to Mauthausen camp, but as Spitz dryly puts it, “They didn’t have time to kill us.”

She remembers with crystal clarity the day an American jeep rolled into the camp. After liberation, the sisters were taken to a displaced persons camp in Austria.

After waiting many years for a passport, Spitz came to the United States in 1964. Her sister Rachel Braun lived in Israel for more than 30 years, but now lives in San Mateo. Their arms are tattooed with a lasting reminder of their imprisonment. Lily’s number is 10785; Rachel’s is 10786.

And then there is Abraham Kaff. He was born to an observant family in the Polish village of Plonsk. Within days of the 1939 Nazi invasion, Kaff and his family were forced into a small ghetto where they lived until deportation in 1942.

“When we got [to Auschwitz-Birkenau],” he recalls, “they separated us. My mother and brother went to the left side, to the gas chamber. I went to the right.”

In addition to building the ovens, he also worked to load and unload trucks full of corpses. “In the morning they gave us a piece of bread and some black coffee,” he remembers. “For lunch, some soup made from I don’t know what.”

Near the end of the war in early 1945, Kaff and other inmates were transferred to a camp near Buchenwald in Germany. But before they could be killed, Allied forces had closed in and the Nazis deserted the camps.

“I was left alone and hungry,” he says. “I looked for food in the doghouses.”

Finally, in April 1945, American soldiers liberated the camp. Yet the then-20-year-old Kaff, having nowhere else to go, stayed on for nearly a year. There he met and married his wife Greta, a fellow concentration camp inmate. The couple eventually relocated to West Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1950.

They settled in San Francisco where they raised a family. Kaff was a storeowner in Noe Valley for many years before his retirement.

According to Holocaust Center executive director Leslie Kane, the upcoming luncheon will be a joyous event despite the survivors’ past and present sorrows. But she knows time is pressing when it comes to survivors. “In 2005 so far, three survivors active at [the JFCS'] Café by the Bay have died,” she says. “Because they are aging and spread out, it’s not easy to get them to come to events, but for this one there was a tremendous outpouring of interest.”

Perhaps it’s because it provides the survivors a chance to reconnect with each other. Most have plenty of post-Holocaust stories to tell. For most of them, life went on to provide much well deserved happiness.

Korn-Grimani married a world-renowned audio engineer. She became a musician, linguist and woman of letters. The couple reared two children, worked for UNESCO and lived all over the world, from Australia to Malaysia, from Paris to Barcelona. She was even made a dame and officer of the French government.

Eventually the couple settled in Northern California to be close to their children and grandchildren. Korn-Grimani wrote a book about her experiences. Titled “Sonia’s Song,” it has been published in Germany and the United States.

Hella Weiss came to America with her mother in 1953 to join her sister and brothers. She, too, settled in San Francisco, married and had three daughters. Today all are living in San Francisco.

Weiss spends much of her time going to classrooms to teach Holocaust education. “I’m very strong in that,” she says. “History has to stay. It should always be taught and not forgotten about. I always said after the war, this is not the end.”

Lily Spitz lost her husband eight years ago, but she has a daughter in Los Angeles. And she has her sister Rachel, her companion through the best times and the worst.

The May 15 luncheon honors them all. And though the event is meant to be a happy occasion, the guests of honor will not be able to forget the underlying pain.

“I carry in me sorrow of my memoirs, of the people I lost and the Jewish people who died,” says Korn-Grimani. “I carry in me longings for a normal childhood and praying for my grandchildren to keep having that. My Jewishness has always been with me. I would die for it.”

And as for Kaff, though he lost his wife four years ago, he still meets weekly with fellow survivors at Café by the Bay. He enjoys the camaraderie there, and expects more of the same at the big May 15 event.

“Some of my friends will be together,” he says, “which makes you feel better. You try to go on with your life, but nobody can imagine what happened. It was beyond imagination. You try to forget it but it always comes back to haunt you.”

“Eyewitness to History” takes place 11:30 a.m., Sunday, May 15, at the Continental Ballroom, Hilton Hotel, 333 O’Farrell St., S.F. Tickets: $125. Information: (415) 957-1551.

A face for the forgotten

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