Arts & Culture
(2009-11-04)
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RICHMOND, KY
(WEKU) -
Many of the Holocaust survivors who came to the United States settled in New York or other major metropolitan areas. But Kentucky has a small population of survivors. WEKU's Julie Schindall met with a Holocaust historian and some survivors who live in Kentucky. She has this story.
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Approximately 140,000 Holocaust survivors came to the United States during and after World War Two. Two-thirds of them settled around New York City. The rest mostly went to mid- or large-sized cities with Jewish populations.
But some survivors came to Kentucky. On an autumn afternoon, I drive to a Lexington bookstore to meet John Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Prestonsburg, Kentucky.
Rosenberg talks vigorously, despite his 78 years. Born in Magdeburg, Germany, Rosenberg came to New York at the age of seven. He is one of nine survivors featured in the 2009 book This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak, by oral historian Arwen Donahue, and photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell. At our bookstore interview, Donahue points out that while John Rosenberg was born in Germany, today, he proudly calls himself a Southerner.
A Southern Jewish Holocaust survivor - that's a pretty unusual identity. Kentucky, and the greater South, is not known to have a large Jewish population. Today, there is a good-sized community of Jews in Louisville. Lexington has two synagogues. But even among Jews in Kentucky, there are very few Holocaust survivors. In general, there are few Holocaust survivors in rural America.
A little over six months after arriving in the US, Rosenberg's family moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina. New York was overcrowded with war refugees.
"When we first went to Spartanburg, as the kid who came from Germany, people wanted to know about that experience. They used to ask me to go around and talk to classes. Kids were interested about this ship that came across. What happens if you go South as opposed to being in New York, there's this tradition of friendly folks and people being pretty down to earth, and that sort of German heritage wears off," Rosenberg says.
Rosenberg says if he ever felt distinct from his classmates or other families in town, it was because his family was pretty poor. He served in the Air Force and worked his way through Duke University. During the 1960s, while working for the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, Rosenberg worked cases involving the Ku Klux Klan and other race-related crimes.
"I don't want to say it's a sad chapter, but it's interesting, at least, that Jews in these Southern communities put up with the segregated society they moved into. But their choice was, they knew if they decided to actively do something about it, at least in the early days, they were either going to get the house bombed, or their store would be picketed and they would lose their economic viability. They had a tough choice," Rosenberg says.
While Rosenberg relishes life in Appalachia, Sylvia Green freely admits she's always preferred the big city. Green was born in Karlsruhe am Rhein, Germany in 1924, and survived the Krakow ghetto, the Plaszow concentration camp, Auschwitz and the Bergen-Belson concentration camp. Green and her Aunt Mina were liberated by Allied forces on April 15, 1945.
Green had relatives in Kentucky, named the Urbachs. By 1946, Green, her aunt Mina, her brother, and a cousin were reunited in New York City. Almost all Holocaust survivors entered the United States by ship, in New York.
"I fell in love with New York. I wanted to stay there. I loved the hustle and bustle and the running around. Eating out in restaurants, oh wow!" Green recalls.
But Green's brother insisted they go back to Kentucky.
"He said no, we're going to settle in Kentucky, it's a beautiful state. We're going to live in Lexington. We're going to start a family. Our whole family was gone. 26 were gone," Green says.
In 1947, she met Jake Green, a Kentucky-born Jew. They married in 1949, and settled in Winchester.
"I had the wrong impression about Winchester. But then, what I went through, I thought they were anti-Semitic, because people ignored me. The first woman I met, who became my best friend afterward, lived across the street. When we came back from our honeymoon, she came to meet me. She said 'I never met a Jew before.' Just like that. I said, oh my God. Here's another anti-Semite. I said, look, Margaret, no horns, I look like you. We became best friends," Green recalls with a smile.
She recounts a story in which a local storeowner, and devout Baptist, hounded her to convert. If she accepted Jesus, he said miracles would happen.
"I got hot under the collar. I said, 'Look at me. I'm a miracle standing right here in front of you. I survived and there has to be a reason for it. So why should I convert?' That was the last time he tried to convert me. He just stood there with his mouth open. He may have felt like a fool. I don't know. But here in the South, they're pretty strong about their religion. I'll let them have their religion. I'll have mine," Green says wryly.
Kentuckians, especially in her small town of Winchester, are a lot more educated today about Judaism, Green says. She has a good reputation in her town, and despite the challenges, it's her home now.
At this point, Donahue suggests Green's presence in Winchester has changed the town's residents for the better - and the town has, in turn, changed Green. It has healed her of her cynicism and hate after the trauma of the camps.
Sylvia Green and John Rosenberg, like many of the 140,000 other Holocaust survivors who came to the US, have built meaningful lives for themselves after the trauma of the war. But they branched out to locations far-flung from their fellow survivors and Jews.
As Arwen Donahue puts it, Holocaust survivors in rural America have passed through several different worlds, from Europe to New York to small towns in America. But Donahue asserts these survivors have fully inhabited each world in which they have lived. And now, this place, here in Kentucky, is their home. © Copyright 2012, WEKU
