4 area authors share Holocaust tales at S.F. book fest

Were "Life is Beautiful" and "Schindler's List" the last words on the Holocaust? What more should be written?

Four Berkeley authors, three of them survivors, insisted Sunday that important stories remain to be told. "We need to tell our story, whether by speaking or by writing," said Auschwitz survivor Dr. Dora Apsan Sorel. "And the children will go to the books and learn more."

The four writers, all women, participated in a panel discussion on Holocaust literature at the San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival at Fort Mason.

They addressed the experience of women in the concentration camps, the persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany, survivor shame and the promulgation of racism on the Internet, among other subjects.

One theme was universal: the need to remember.

The event, titled "Remembering Tomorrow: Why the Holocaust is More Relevant Now Than Ever," was presented by the Holocaust Center of Northern California and moderated by Ali Cannon, the center's program director.

Each of the writers brought a particular perspective to the discussion. Sorel serves on the Holocaust center's speakers board. She recounts her own journey from Sighet, Romania, to Auschwitz, to communist oppression and finally to freedom in her book "Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam."

Another speaker, musician and poet Kathryn Winter, cast herself in a fictionalized memoir, "Katarina." The young protagonist hides from the Nazis in Slovakia, as Winter did. Ironically, Katarina learns the very survival skill that will later prevent many of Winter's contemporaries from sharing their own stories -- the ability to remain silent.

Following the Holocaust, Winter said, many survivors feared drawing attention to themselves in any way, even by simply having the first TV antenna on the block or letting a friend park a new car in front of their apartments. As a result, they hid their experience of the war.

Fear and shame prolonged the pain of the Holocaust in shocking ways, Winter said. She recalled being rejected by the parents of a Jewish American suitor when they discovered she had been interned in the camps of Central Europe.

"You did not wear a yellow star, but you were severely blemished" as a Holocaust survivor, Winter said.

When Winter moved to Israel in the late 1960s, she noticed a similar reluctance to face the Holocaust's legacy. "Victimhood was regarded as a stain that was to be erased, or at least overlooked," she said.

Israelis have grown more sensitive to Holocaust survivors' pain over the decades, Winter added. Panel organizer Renata Polt credited a "change in the spirit of the times" with fostering the current wave of Holocaust texts. Polt traced the trend back as far as the novel and miniseries "Roots," which sparked a desire to understand one's cultural heritage -- the suffering as well as the triumphs.

Polt translated and edited "A Thousand Kisses: A Grandmother's Holocaust Letters," the story of a woman living in Nazi-occupied Prague.

"A Thousand Kisses" tells one of a great many Holocaust stories that panelists said have often been overlooked: those of women.

Men have published most of the scholarly texts, said panelist Lucille Eichengreen, either because publishing houses don't take women as seriously, or because women themselves are reluctant to speak out. She is working to change that situation through self-publishing and other means, including serving on the speakers board of the Holocaust center.

Eichengreen endured the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. She regrets the absence of statistics comparing the survival rates of female and male camp internees, but conjectured that women were more likely to live. "This was due to the support we gave one another," Eichengreen said.

Women may also have lived longer in the camps because Nazis did not force them to work as hard as men. Ironically, even in the death camps Nazis may have regarded women as the "weaker sex" and treated them accordingly, she added.

Eichengreen recently returned to Poland, where she said anti-Semitism remains. In Germany, she said, anti-Semitism is more subtle. "The anti-Semitism in Germany is there, but it is not out in the open."

In light of the persistence of Jew-hating more than 50 years after the Holocaust, Eichengreen said, the subject of Hitler's final solution remains relevant. The attitude of "forgive and forget" does not appear to solve the deeper problems, but leaves one "without an answer."

Hate crimes and bigotry continue to proliferate and demand attention, the panelists agreed. Some suggested that U.S. anti-Semitism is less organized, and perhaps less virulent, than it was decades ago. Nevertheless, all were stung by the recent synagogue burnings and other attacks against Jews. And all agreed that by remembering the Holocaust people can help prevent atrocities against any group.

"The Holocaust challenges our definition of what it means to be human," Eichengreen said. "It is an affront to the image we hold of ourselves as humans."