63 Years Can’t Erase Memories of Holocaust--or Friendship

Theirs is a story of the persistence of friendship. Of the longing for truth. Of overcoming a hideous past and finding in one another a peace despite so much pain.

In the black and white snapshot of the doomed children stands a small, shy girl with haunting eyes. She is Susanne Zandberg. To the lower left is Anni Silberberg, stout, athletic, her round face hinting aspirations of great mischief.

It is 1934 and their universe of jump rope, horse and buggy rides and celebrating the Sabbath is collapsing.

Of the 22 children in the schoolyard photograph, at least 11 will die horribly in the short years ahead. The others will be scattered like straw in a violent storm.

Anni’s family escapes to America just in time. Susanne, her mother, father and sister are captured and herded into German concentration camps. She alone emerges four years later, weighing 69 pounds, having nothing and no one.

More than 60 years pass. Anni and Susanne are in the autumn of their lives. There is a chance meeting with a stranger on a bus and the stirring revelation that their journeys have placed them, in old age, a mere hour from one another--Anni in Mission Viejo and Susanne in West Los Angeles.

It is just weeks since fate or fluke reunited Anni and Susanne, who, over the years, became Ann and Susan. They sit closely on the couch in Susan’s apartment, their husbands quietly looking on, and stare down at the class picture.

“This is Jacob,” Susan points. “We can still find him. He’s in Detroit.” Then, one by one, she touches the images of the dead and tears glisten in her eyes. Ann gently pats her friend’s knee.

Susan mentions how her father taught her to waltz and about all the times she played at the Silberbergs’ house in Kassel, Germany, the one with the big garden and all the animals.

Ann, her trademark exuberance bubbling over, talks of an old boyfriend, her family’s religious devotion, her father’s bravery.

Just when the past somehow seems to take on a glow, memories turn dark and the joy of rediscovery is pierced by a profound sadness, not only for the many murdered, but for the living.

Ann and Susan and the survivors of Hitler and the Holocaust are fading away and they know it. Against the advance of time, many are still desperately trying to find long lost friends or learn exactly what happened to their families so they may know on what day to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

That Ann, 76, and Susan, 77, found each other is a statistical longshot. Of the 27,000 inquiries the American Red Cross’ Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center has received since it began in 1990, only about 800 people sought have been found alive. More than 7,000 others sought have been confirmed dead or deported.

So little time is left. “We’re dying out every day,” Susan says.

Thrown Together by Nazi Oppression

Long ago, frightening things began to happen in Ann and Susan’s hometown, Kassel, where Jews had lived fairly peacefully for generations.

When Hitler came to power, shop owners put up signs, “Juden Verboten”--Jews Forbidden. Nazis marauded in the streets, often provoking bloody confrontations with Communists. Jews were pushed, pelted with rocks, jeered, taunted and cast from the public schools.

The two young lives converged, in 1933, at a Jewish day school many children attended when there was nowhere else to go. Ann was 11, Susan, 12.

“Susan and I never would have met if it hadn’t been for Hitler,” Ann says. “That’s the funny part.”

The lively one and the quiet one bonded and enjoyed nearly four years together at the school. Susan regularly departed the confines of her parents’ apartment in town for Ann’s spacious house on the outskirts, with the fruit trees, Else the horse, cows and a goat. Susan’s father was a tailor; Ann’s a cattle broker.

Ann remembers the absurd juxtapositions of the time: first, the delightful horse and buggy trips to nearby Niedenstein. In the next instant, she recalls her Nazi-sympathizing neighbors, a family of four, often placing a phonograph on their balcony, facing Ann’s yard, and loudly playing anti-Semitic songs.

Ann angrily recites the lyrics: “Wenn’s Juden Blut vom Messer sprizt, dann gehtsnochmal so gut” (“When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, everything will be twice as good”).

Her friendship with Susan was a respite from the hatred and dread. She produces a book in which students wrote passages to one another. One year, Susan neatly penned, “Two supports you always need in life, prayer and hard work.”

Ann’s parents knew the moment to leave was fast approaching, a realization especially hard for her father, who, like other Jews, had fought for Germany and the Kaiser in World War I.

They corresponded with family members who went to America at the turn of the century and settled in Memphis, Tenn. But the issue of escape wasn’t clear until the day in June 1935 when the Gestapo came to the door and accused Ann’s father of calling the neighbor’s daughter a name.

He was released after more than a week and the family hurriedly arranged visas and passage for an Atlantic voyage to freedom. Seven of them--Ann, her parents, two brothers and two grandparents--prepared to flee their homeland in April 1936.

Worried that something ill would happen, they worked their plan in secrecy. Not even Susan knew.

“The last time I saw Susan was in the class,” Ann says. “I knew I was looking at all of them for the last time. Don’t ask me why I didn’t tell Susan. I don’t know.”

Susan wasn’t surprised to discover one day that her friend had vanished. “A lot of people left,” she says. “In a way, I felt good. They saved themselves. My parents couldn’t get out.”

Surviving the Holocaust

Jews could come to the United States if they had a family member to sponsor them. For the many who didn’t, including Susan and her family, the Holocaust awaited.

The Nazis came for the Zandberg family in December 1941, the month America entered the war. They were taken to the Riga ghetto in Latvia, and then to concentration camps nearby.

Susan is unable to talk about what happened in the camps without being overcome. She reveals only a little before the subject needs to be changed. Her family was exterminated.

“I always knew they killed my sister on her birthday,” she says.

Where Susan is silent, history, of course, isn’t: Of the 9.5 million European Jews, 6 million perished. The camps claimed another 4 million people, including trade unionists, political dissidents, clergy who opposed Hitler, Gypsies, male homosexuals, and the retarded or physically handicapped.

Susan endured four years of confinement at two camps, including Kaiserwald, until the Russians liberated the camps. Susan worked briefly in a Russian hospital at war’s end and made her way to New York in 1946.

She met her husband, Leon, at a tango in 1949, and they married the next year. They have two children and four grandchildren and moved to Los Angeles 12 years ago because the children are there.

Ann adjusted to her new home and flourished. She married a GI, Morris Rothstein, had three children and eventually moved to Hermosa Beach. He drowned while skin-diving in 1968 and Ann later married David Goldin. They have lived in Orange County for 16 years.

It would be poetic to suggest Susan and Ann shared the same passion to find each other. But for Susan, it had to suffice just to know her friend had somehow gotten out safely. Her heart was too full of sorrow to have felt more.

Ann, on the other hand, never knew for certain what fate befell her childhood friend. She tried to find out. When a book was published in 1982 about the Jews of Kassel, Ann searched for Susan, but learned nothing.

Everywhere Ann lived, everywhere she traveled and visited, she kept her ears open for someone who spoke her native tongue. Always, she would ask where they were from, hoping it was from her town, hoping for any shard of information.

‘I Have a Friend From Kassel. . . .’

And so, Ann says, in a chance encounter in 1997 on a bus ride from the Jewish Community Center in Costa Mesa to a concert in Los Angeles, “a guy just in front of me was talking with a heavy German accent. I told him I am from Kassel. He said, ‘Gee, I have a friend from Kassel. Her name is Susan.’ ” He gave Susan’s married name, which Ann didn’t recognize. It seemed like a dead end.

Then, recently, Ann met the man again. He asked whether she ever heard from Susan, to whom he had also given Ann’s married name. No call, Ann says. So he tried again to link them up.

This time, he provided Susan the key--Ann’s maiden name.

“I immediately called her,” Susan says. “The chills . . .” She smiled and shuddered a little.

She told Ann on the phone, “You have black hair and you’re a little chubby.”

“I’m still chubby,” Ann replied.

They soon met. “We hugged each other and began crying,” says Ann.

“Where have you been? Do you have children?” each asked the other.

Ann produced photos of the old days, photos Susan hadn’t seen for more than half a century.

“I had all the pictures; she had nothing,” Ann says.

“We started talking,” Ann recalls.

“Who else do you know, who got out?” Susan inquired.

“I don’t know,” Ann said. “I’ve been wondering all my life.”

A second visit took place just over a week ago. With 63 years of catching up to do, an outsider can barely slip into the conversation. Amid the deeply bittersweet memories comes an unsettling reminder that the past is alive.

Leon, Susan’s husband, who also survived the death camps, is becoming upset. He is firm that Susan’s maiden name, not her current last name, be used in the newspaper.

“Don’t mention the second name,” he says. “The Nazis . . .” His voice trails off.

“He’s still afraid,” Susan explains. “I don’t feel that way.”

Even, so, she adds: “You never forget. You go to sleep with it and you get up with it.”

It is time to go. Ann whispers, “When will I see you again?” Susan isn’t sure because Leon recently suffered a stroke and needs extensive therapy.

As Ann and husband David pull away from the curb, Susan stands, crying.

Ann takes a long look back.

There will be a next time.