Eternal Flame Presents: An Evening With a Survivor: Agnes Adler

Last evening, I took my son to see a Holocaust survivor, Agnes Adler, speak about her experiences. It was important to me to take my son to see this, because the Holocaust was a long time ago, and the chances to see actual survivors now almost eight decades after the fact are admittedly getting few and far between. While I had seen some Holocaust survivors speak of their experiences before, including Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, Eva Schloos (Anne Frank’s stepsister), Marthe Cohn, and Dr. Jacob Eisenbach, this was the first time that my son got to see a Holocaust survivor.              

Now, I should mention that he and I went to see another Eternal Flame event, and heard Sergeant Alan Moskin talk of his experiences when liberating the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany towards the end of World War II. That was an informative evening, and I was very glad to take him to see that. However, Moskin was an American soldier, and thus a liberator. So although Moskin is Jewish, he is not a survivor, per se, of the Holocaust, even though he was an eyewitness to it.              

This event was different. Here was an actual survivor, someone who had been living a normal life in her home city of Budapest, Hungary, before the outbreak of World War II. This, too, I hoped would help to make this history feel more real, and less distant, since he and I had gotten to visit Budapest a few years ago.              

Now admittedly, much of what I will write from here on out is taken from the internet. You see, I was sitting towards the back of the room, and it was difficult to hear Ms. Adler. Both my son and I felt that we had a good idea of most of what she was saying and talking about. So I will write of what we heard from the talk.              

Some of what I personally did hear, however, was that while she was in Budapest when the Russians came to liberate that city, they were not especially nice about it. Russians might not have been rabidly anti-Semitic and driven to exterminate the Jews, like the Nazis. However, they still did not look too kindly on Jews, either. She had a better time during the brief period when she lived in France.              

She tried to make it to Israel, but her boat was sunk by the British Navy, which surprised me. After that, she was effectively a prisoner, albeit briefly, and denied access into Israel.              

Given that it was hard to hear much of what she spoke about, however, it felt like it would not hurt to actually do a little bit of research and see if I could find out more about her story online.              

Sure enough, I found some stuff.  You can also learn more of her story with her self-published book, “On Swallow's Wings The Personal Journey of Agnes Adler.” However, copies are not easy to obtain. She did sign copies at the end of the talk last night.

She was asked by a teenager why it is still important to learn about the Holocaust. She answered that it is because, according to her, it is still going on, by which I believe she meant that hatred and violence is still very much alive in the world. This is my own conjecture here, but my suspicion is that she meant that after the Holocaust, the common sentiment that prevailed was “Never Again.” But we seem to have forgotten that message in time, and we seem edging closer to allowing the kinds of hatred and violence that allowed the tragedy of Holocaust to exist in the first place. But I do not want to expand on that, because that is only my interpretation of how she answered. And remember: I could not really hear her all that well, so what she said after it is still happening may have been lost on me.              

Adler was born in Budapest in 1930. Her father was a mathematician, and her mother a teacher. Her father was taken to a work camp in 1940. So Adler remained with her mother after that. Things kept getting worse. She mentioned during the lecture that there were new restrictions placed on Jews pretty much on a weekly basis.              

As a 13-year old back in 1944, she defied her mother for the first time in her life, not going with her to the Budapest Ghetto. She did mention during the lecture that she sensed that when Nazis were gathering a bunch of Jews in a given place, it generally was not a good thing. Indeed, this may have been a decision that saved her life.              

She spent months in hiding, managing to elude capture by the German authorities. She tried to minimize anything that would give herself away as a Jew, although she said that she had a Jewish Star of David, an identifying marker that Nazis made it mandatory for all Jews to wear in their occupied territories at the time.  

Almost by chance, she encountered Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish man now famous for having saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. He gave her a card with his name on one side, and an address on the other. This led her to a home, and shelter that allowed her to get through the threat of capture by the Germans, until the Russians came and liberated the country from Nazi German rule.  

After the war, she did manage to reunite with her parents, a rare gift for family members to have survived such a horrific chapter in history. She continually was separated from her parents, and lived in numerous countries after the war. She had tried to get into Israel, but after that did not work, she came to the United States, where she has stated since. Eventually, she fell in love with and married a fellow artist, David, who was a sculptor.  

This was a rare evening of being able to hear a Holocaust survivor tell her story. Again, as mentioned earlier, the chances to do this with a real, living person are getting rarer as time goes on. So I was pleased to be able to share such an experience with my son. Adler’s experiences were different than a number of other Holocaust survivors who I have seen and/or read accounts of. For one thing, she was never taken to one of the dreaded camps, most famously Auschwitz, but also Treblinka or Dachau, or any of the other infamous Nazi camps that have come to symbolize this darkest chapter in human history.  

Indeed, Adler is correct. We do still very much need to hear these stories of survival. After all, it is by surviving and continuing to live their lives that Adler and other Holocaust survivors actually defeated Hitler and the Nazis. These stories can serve as both a warning, as well as a beacon of hope and survival. Because we never know what will happen, how the future will materialize. And in concluding this particular blog entry, it seems most fitting that the last words should belong to Adler herself.  

Everything that she went through was a learning lesson:

“You develop a defense and you don’t feel so strongly. When I was 10, I was very sensitive. By the time I was 34 – not that sensitive. I’ve had enough tragedies in my life but somehow I kept myself on an even keel.”     

So here are her own words that seem to sum up the Holocaust, and how the ordinary lives of so many people were so severely interrupted, and forever changed and left their mark on an entire generation of people of the Jewish faith:

“Nobody dreamed what the future would bring. Nobody thought the world would turn the way it did. All the dreams we had that we were going to be something when we grow up did not materialize.”

Pictures From An Evening With a Holocaust Survivor: Agnes Adler Shares Story of Courage

Much of the information not taken from last night's discussion were taken from the following sources, with the quotes used above in particular being taken from the North Jersey article (see link below):

Holocaust survivor shares story of courage by Sarah NolanStaff Writer, April 25, 2017:  

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/bergen/woodcliff-lake/2017/04/24/holocaust-survivor-shares-story-courage/100838712/     

https://tepv.org/holocaust-survivor-shares-story-of-courage/  

Agnes and David Adler: 

https://www.raoulwallenberg.net/wallenberg/testimonie/interviews/agnes-david-adler/     

“I was a stubborn little girl”  (Video clip of Agnes Adler):

https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=3951064388265173&_rdr