Survivors’ voices bringing passion to S.F. Web site

"Numb. No feelings. No prayer. No tears. No feelings."

It's one thing to see the words written in newsprint. But it's even more powerful to hear them uttered, at barely a whisper, by Lucille Eichengreen, her large eyes glassy and distant as she recalls the day she buried her own mother in the Lodz Ghetto.

Holocaust literature from survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi is available in every bookstore, as are countless scholarly studies. And the Shoah continues to be a favorite subject of commercial media -- check out Adrien Brody in "The Pianist," for example.

But the number of survivors is dwindling, and few Americans -- or, for that matter, few people anywhere -- will ever have the opportunity to hear from them firsthand. Until now.

Students at San Francisco's Urban School have created a

Web page -- http://www.tellingstories.org -- in which six local survivors and refugees recount their long, painful war memories. In addition to a complete written transcript, virtually 100 percent of the lengthy interviews can be seen and heard on the computer, just as if one is sitting in the survivors' living rooms.

"They will see my face; they will see how painful it still is 50 years later. How much damage those years have done to a human being. Some of us function more, others less. But I would say nobody is without any kind of damage," said Eichengreen, who survived Lodz, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and lost her entire family.

"They will see man's inhumanity to man. They will see, listen and, hopefully, learn."

The interviews were a life-changing learning experience for the high school students, who spent 12 weeks studying the Holocaust with instructor Deborah Dent-Samake in addition to planning and filming their interviews -- some of which were as long as six hours.

The remembrances of Eichengreen, William Lowenberg, Freda Rosenfarb Reider, Max Garcia and Karl and Gloria Hollander Lyon are the first in Urban's oral history archives.

"Since we are the last generation who are going to be able to interview Holocaust survivors, I wanted to be a part of that," said Eve Myers, an Urban High sophomore.

"I've heard survivors speak to huge groups, and I felt it was easier for them to tell their stories with just the four of us in the room. They felt comfortable showing their emotions and really sharing."

The stories were not always easy to share.

Gloria Hollander Lyon leaped from a moving truck heading for the Auschwitz gas chambers, and spent more than a day hiding, naked in the dead of winter, in a drainage pipe.

"And so I said, 'Who will come with me?' but nobody responded," she says on the Web site. "You see, they lost their entire families. And the belief was that we would all succumb to this eventually. So as long as they didn't have anyone to live for, they just decided to go. Besides they probably thought, 'I don't stand a chance to escape from here.' But I was very young yet and foolish, took many more chances. And, I just said goodbye. And I jumped off that slow moving truck, and I leaped down the embankment...

"But here I was in the culvert and I thought, 'I have to do something about this situation because I'll either starve to death or I'll freeze to death.' So I decided to leave my hiding place and go back up to the road and see if I can see anything. And in the distance I saw a tiny little light that looked like a little star. And I followed that little star really not knowing if it would lead me into a safe place or straight into SS headquarters, or maybe to a men's barrack because, frankly, I lost my sense of direction. But I believe that that God must have been walking alongside me, and he led me to a barrack."

Lyon, who was 14 at the time, was eventually given clothes from a corpse ("not an unusual way for us to improve our wardrobe"), and deported to another camp. Of her 39 immediate family members, 15 survived the Shoah -- an "unusually high" figure that Lyon still marvels about.

Of course, Lyon's husband, Karl, got to do something the rest of the survivors could only dream about -- fight the Nazis.

He was born in Germany but escaped to America in 1937. Living with an uncle in Kansas City, he was drafted and sent back where he started, fighting his way across Western Europe with the 103rd Infantry Division. At one point, he was only 10 miles from his birthplace in Baden.

"You might want to know how I felt about being an American soldier and fighting against Germany. I sort of knew what I was fighting for...When we were in Marseilles, I bought a bottle of wine, French wine. And I took it with me -- didn't drink it. Every morning I rolled it up in my bedroll. Every evening I took it out of my bedroll and set it right next to me while I was sleeping. Nobody stole it," Karl Lyon says on the site.

"So I took this bottle of wine with me and for weeks I handled it that way. Then, in Alsace, when we got close to the German border, I said to my battalion commander, 'Colonel, when we fire the first shot across the German border, I want to be the one who fires that shot,' with our howitzers, with our big guns."

Lyon went on to fire the first shell across the German border, and that night he "killed the bottle of wine" with his company.

The Web site was a longtime dream for Howard Levin, Urban's director of technology and a former Holocaust educator.

"This is my spark; I've been thinking about this for several years. Finally, the technology is available to do this. We could not have done this five years ago," he said.

"The beauty is, three or four years from now when Internet technology is much faster, we can redo all the video so it comes out much smoother. Ten years from now, you'll be looking at full-screen video."

With their wrenching memories now preserved for posterity on the Net, the survivors say they hope their experiences will teach lessons for years to come.

"I am hoping people will accept the fact the Holocaust happened, No. 1. Secondly, I hope they examine their own thoughts toward other human beings, because of the ripple effect hatred and discrimination can have in society," said Gloria Hollander Lyon.

"We must change and improve society step by step. Start with one human being. I don't know if there's another way."

Added Eichengreen: "I hope whoever clicks onto the Web page will look, listen and learn from the past. We have learned very little from the past. I hope people make use of the materials these young people created and will learn from it."