If she were put in a similar position as the non-Jews who risked their own and their families' lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller says she believes she would take such a risk. But the choices that people would like to think they would make are not always the ones they carry out when put to the test in extreme situations, admits the Holocaust survivor.
In a talk on Oct. 23 at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, Ms. Heller described the five years she spent in hiding while living in constant fear of being found by the Nazis, and recounted some of the choices made by people around her during those years of horror. She told, for example, of a couple who asked their older child to smother a five-month-old sibling so the baby's cries wouldn't put them in danger of being found, and of how her own grandfather revealed to a German soldier the location of a bunker where his wife and other Jews were hiding, thinking his betrayal would spare his own life he was shot after being forced to watch the others being killed .
Ms. Heller's own survival and the lives of her immediate family, she said, are "owed" to the courage and kindness of two non- Jews -- a Ukrainian militiaman who endangered his own life and suffered humiliation at the hands of other Ukrainian soldiers and his relatives for helping the Gottesfeld family; and a Polish peasant who, at great risk to himself and his family, provided a hideout for Ms. Heller, her parents and her brother despite daily scolding from his wife, who vehemently opposed her husband's decision to rescue Jews. Only 15 years old when the Holocaust began, Ms. Heller also recalled how the war years robbed her of her own freedom to make typical teenage choices. "To choose is a very empowering act," she said. "For me, these choices were subverted by the choice of life and death." During her visit to Yale, Ms. Heller touched upon some of the events that she chronicles more fully in her 1993 book "A Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs." The book has been controversial since its publication, and has particularly been criticized by other Holocaust survivors, Ms. Heller said, because her "honest" account doesn't depict all Jewish survivors in a "positive" way.
"Some critics feel it was sacrilege and that it desecrated the memories of survivors, particularly my grandfather's portrait," explains Ms. Heller, referring to her telling of her grandfather's choice to turn in his wife in an effort to save himself. But her book, she said, is true to her own memory and portrays "what humans can do in strange situations." "It was an upside-down world, and you couldn't judge people by normal standards," Ms. Heller commented.
Ms. Heller focused much of her talk on remembering the goodness of Jan, the Ukrainian militiaman who had fallen in love with her and protected her during the war, and the illiterate peasant Sidor, who provided a hideout for her family in his barn and who, she said, "shared his last morsel of bread with us."
They "had the ability to see us as human beings," recalled Ms. Heller, who was one of only 45 survivors out of the original 1,500 Jewish residents in her hometown of Skala, Poland. Plagued by severe hunger, lice, cold and filthy conditions while she and her family shared tiny spaces in barns or attics, Ms. Heller remembers that her mission was always to live. She recounted how on the eve of her 18th birthday, she and 18 members of her family and extended family spent two days under the ground in a tiny hideout when Nazis came to Skala in 1942 and conducted their first mass murder in the town. On the one hand, she said, she hoped that the Nazis would not strip her of her "last vestige of dignity" by discovering her with curlers in her hair, which she had set in anticipation of her birthday and left in when her family rushed to its hiding place. Then, she said, "I wished for one moment they would come, get us, kill us and get it over with." A moment later, she realized that to wish for that was also to wish for the death of the 17 others hiding with her. "I quickly took back my wish," Ms. Heller recalled. From then on, she struggled to stay alive.
During the years when her family was in hiding, some of her most soothing memories are of the times she spent with Jan, who visited her and her family often in their hiding places and brought what little bits of food he was able to scavenge. "I told him stories uncensored because I felt if I didn't tell him, maybe no one would hear," remarked Ms. Heller. After the war, she said, she was confronted with a difficult decision: whether to marry Jan, a shoemaker by trade, and have children who could not be raised Jewish, or to set her sights on what remained her dream throughout the war, studying medicine in Paris. She made the painful decision to leave her rescuer and later married Joseph Heller, the sole survivor of a Jewish family of 13.
While she never realized her dream of becoming a doctor, Ms. Heller immigrated to the United States in 1960 after living in different European countries, and later earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy and psychology, respectively, from the New School for Social Research. She recalled how after deciding to see a psychoanalyst in 1969 in the hope of coming to terms with some of the disturbing thoughts she continued to have since the Holocaust, it still took her two years to tell her therapist that she was a Holocaust survivor. "I was so afraid of rejection," she said.
Even today, she is sometimes shaken by irrational fears, ignited by such sights or sounds as a dog barking, a whistling train or a policeman in uniform, Ms. Heller revealed. And in spite of the pain of reliving some of her Holocaust memories in talks around the country and abroad, she says she is "resolved to teach the lessons [she] has learned" and feels "an urgency to record for posterity the events of the most tragic period of our history."
"I have an obligation to bear witness," says Ms. Heller. She has never forgotten her rescuers, and while she was unable to locate either Jan or Sidor after the war, she has since learned that Jan, Sidor and his wife are now dead but that Sidor's daughter, who was only six when Ms. Heller and her family were sheltered in her home, is alive and living in Skala. "Plans for a reunion are now in progress," Ms. Heller said, smiling as tears welled up in her eyes.
-- By Susan Gonzalez