Over the past few years, 82-year-old Shlomo Ronen has contacted several Tel Aviv high schools asking if he can come and speak to the students about the Holocaust and share his personal story, how he evaded the Nazis in occupied Europe.
He says he wants nothing in return from the schools except a ride to and from his lectures. However, no school has returned his call. “Maybe they don’t want me to tell them how a Jewish woman strangled her baby with her own hands so that it wouldn’t cry and reveal our [hiding] place,” he said.
A detailed account of his story appears in a book he wrote and published on the Internet in Hebrew and English, “Tlebanowka Hill of Death.” It recounts the Nazi invasion of his town of Trembowla, Galicia, the collapse of his family, life in the ghetto and his escape to the forests.
Ronen thinks the schools did not respond because they do not feel their students need to hear detailed stories of the atrocities. “The Holocaust is a lot more than today’s adolescents can take,” he said. “They simply don’t want to hear. I endured horrible things there, horrible.” He says the superficial treatment given to Holocaust studies is not enough.
Ronen lives in a one-room apartment with three cats and shares a kitchen with his neighbor. He receives a weekly food package from the Association of Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors that lasts him a week. The group also sends cat food, because otherwise “he will simply give his [own] food to [the cats] and remain hungry without saying a word,” said an association volunteer.
The volunteers are among the few people with whom Ronen has contact. He hasn’t spoken to his family for a long time. One son died of diabetes two years ago, and his two daughters became religious and their rabbi forbids them to speak to their father. Even his 13 grandchildren do not call.
Ronen is not angry or embittered. “I am already old and sick, but whoever wants to come to me, to talk, to listen — my door is open.”