More than a half-century after World War II, survivors of Nazi killing factories continue to live and work in Montgomery County. Although the exact number of survivors here is unknown, several dozen county residents are members of the nonprofit organization Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington. The group’s co-president, Nesse Godin of Silver Spring, survived a Lithuanian ghetto, a concentration camp, four labor camps and a death march. “We suffered, but we don’t walk around angry and hate-filled,” says the 79-year-old Godin. “We try to teach young people to be better human beings. Our aim is to make a mark on our community and the world.” A traveling photography exhibit by Montgomery College students and faculty titled “Portraits of Life” depicts more than 30 local Holocaust survivors. Here are the stories of seven of the survivors.
Henry Greenbaum, 79
Bethesda
It was, in part, a family talent for tailoring that helped at least a thread of the Greenbaum family of Starachowice, Poland, survive the Nazi’s annihilation efforts. For 79-year-old Henry Greenbaum, the son of a tailor, that familiarity with fabric led to his own dry cleaning business in Chevy Chase when he came here after the war. Greenbaum, who retired in 1997 after 44 years, is a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and speaks regularly to groups about his extraordinary experiences. He and his wife of nearly 60 years, Shirley Greenbaum, have been residents of Bethesda since 1961. They have four children and 12 grandchildren. 
The youngest of nine brothers and sisters, Henry Greenbaum lived with his mother in a small Polish town. (His father had died of natural causes shortly before World War II.) When Greenbaum was 12, the Nazis invaded, and he and others were snatched off the street and forced to dig trenches. The Nazis then placed barbed wire around the Jewish neighborhood to create a ghetto, and brought in more Jews from the outlying area. Quickly, the ghetto became overcrowded. Food supplies ran out and typhoid was rampant. The Nazis tossed the sick into the trenches and shot them.
Young children, pregnant women, the handicapped and the elderly were sent to cattle cars lined up on the train tracks. Only those deemed able-bodied—Greenbaum and three of his sisters—had a chance of survival by working in slave labor camps. (A brother and a sister had managed to escape earlier and eventually made their way to the United States. Another brother, drafted into the Polish Army, also survived.) One of his sisters was forced to separate from her 5-year-old daughter. The 5-year-old, Greenbaum’s mother, and two other sisters were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp and Greenbaum never saw them again.
Sanitary conditions were terrible at the labor camp, and one of Greenbaum’s sisters died there of typhoid. Her body was thrown into a nearby stone quarry. Another sister also became ill; she was shot and killed by a roving Nazi “killing squad.”
The Nazis needed tailors to sew high-ranking SS officers’ uniforms. His sister Faiga volunteered and received a bit more food, which she shared with her little brother. Greenbaum believes it may have been that minute amount of sustenance that gave him the strength he later needed to survive.
When an SS officer told Faiga that the inmates were soon to be sent to a death camp, she and the other tailors organized an escape plan, taking advantage of the fact that the camp’s barbed wire fence was not electrified. On the night of the escape, participants were supposed to knock out the lights and take out the guards. The lights went out, but it was the guards who had cut them because of an air raid. Greenbaum, Faiga and the others ran for the fence. Suddenly, the lights went on and they were caught in the glare. Shots rained down, and a bullet grazed Greenbaum’s head to the bone. He bled furiously.
Greenbaum ran back to the women’s barracks to look in vain for Faiga. A woman inside managed to slip him some rags to help stop the bleeding. Two hours later, roll call began. Anyone found wounded or hiding in the woods was promptly shot. The guards made the inmates look at the hole cut through the camp’s barbed wire fence, and Greenbaum saw his beloved sister lying dead on the other side.
“She made it to freedom,” he says simply.
Greenbaum used a beret to conceal his 2-inch head wound from the guards. He and some of the others eventually were deported, stuffed into a pitch-dark, airless rail car for three days with no water or bathroom facilities. When the doors finally opened, the 15-year-old Greenbaum found himself at Auschwitz.
Half of the transport went directly to the concentration camp’s crematorium; his half was sent to the barracks. “I didn’t know what the smoke was, and what the smell was,” Greenbaum recalls, until the inmates who wielded large pushcarts piled high with dead bodies, like sticks of wood, explained the source to him.
In 1945, Greenbaum was being transported to another camp when bombing by U.S. forces made the rails unusable. He and a group of about 150 men were forced to march through the German countryside for nearly three months, their only food a few leaves and an occasional raw potato scavenged from a farm.
Salvation finally came in the form of low-flying planes strafing the open areas. The men were forced to sit in the woods and then watched in confusion as their guards abruptly ran off.
Suddenly, a tank veered off the main highway and came toward them.
"They must have seen us [in the woods]. We thought they were Germans. Instead, a beautiful American soldier, maybe 20 years old with a blond crew cut, squeezed out of the hatch and started throwing rations at us,” Greenbaum remembers vividly.
“I called him my angel, that soldier in the tank,” says Greenbaum, who was just 17 when he was liberated.
Today, Henry Greenbaum says firmly, “Dear Lord, how lucky am I to raise a beautiful family and make something of myself.”
Erika Neuman Eckstut, 79
Potomac
At age 3, Czechoslovakian-born Erika Neuman moved with her father, Efraim, mother, Dolly, and older sister, Beatrice, to a town in Romania where her paternal grandparents lived. After Romania joined the Axis late in 1940, local mobs began attacking and killing Jews.
“[One day] we were led out of town to a field. A rabbi and his two sons were shot in front of us. People started chanting the prayer for the dead. Eventually, the soldiers ran out of ammunition and had to kill one man by hand,” Eckstut recalls. 
Her father was a well-respected and prominent lawyer, and a townsman who recognized him escorted the family back to their home, which they found vandalized, her father’s precious books thrown onto the floor.
The local chief of police, who admired Erika’s father, later helped the family flee to the town of Czernowitz. Once there, they were forced into the Czernowitz ghetto. Erika was 12; Beatrice was 17. The year was 1941.
“The ghetto was a terrible place,” Eckstut says. “There was absolutely no food to eat. But my father said that in the Jewish religion, if children did not learn anything, [life] is not worth living. So he started to teach us—he began with the French Revolution, all about Napoleon and Josephine, but I could not pay attention because I was too hungry. I just dreamed about bread all the time, and he was very upset I wasn’t learning.”
One day as the family was waiting to board a train that was to take them to a concentration camp, a soldier knocked down her father and began beating him. “Father had been wounded in the First World War and walked with a cane,” Eckstut says. “I climbed on top of him to try and protect him, and the soldier beat me, too. I passed out, and later, when I awoke, I thought I was in the concentration camp but my mother said no, there had not been enough room in the cars and we [including her father] had been left behind.”
Desperate, Erika’s father sent his blond-haired, blue-eyed, German-speaking wife to ask a local priest for help to save their daughters. Both girls were also blond and blue-eyed, and had been taught by their mother to speak fluent German. The priest gave them false papers showing that they were Christians, along with two crosses and instructions on how they should cross themselves if necessary. By now, Erika was 14, and Beatrice was 19.
After escaping from the ghetto, the two sisters made their way to Kiev. But a Russian policeman, overhearing the girls speaking to each other in German, arrested them. They were put in jail, and Beatrice—who kept a razor blade in her shoe—said they should kill themselves rather than face what was ahead.
“While I was trying to decide what to do, a policeman asked us if we had celebrated Easter,” Eckstut says. “Since my father had taught Beatrice to always tell the truth, she told me not to lie, and I had to listen to her because she was the older one. So I told the policeman that we celebrated Passover. The policeman turned out to be Jewish and let us out of the cell. It was a miracle. It saved our lives.”
After the war, Erika and Beatrice returned to Czechoslovakia and eventually were reunited with their parents. Eckstat settled in Prague, where she worked in a hospital, married and had two children. She also completed a year of medical school before her husband’s illness and subsequent death ended her education. In 1960, she and her children finally received permission to leave the Soviet bloc to reunite with her mother and sister, who had settled in New York. (Her father had died.) In 1963, she married a U.S. Marine named Donnie Eckstut and moved to Montgomery County. The couple has lived in Potomac for the past 37 years. Since retiring as a medical technician, Erika Neuman Eckstut, 79, continues to work as a volunteer at the Holocaust Museum.
Eckstut is especially proud that her two children are both highly educated and were “very, very good students,” which would have pleased her father. She also has six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Regina Spiegel, 81
Samuel Spiegel, 85
North Bethesda
At 81, Regina Gutman Spiegel remains a beautiful woman, looking remarkably fit and energetic. Both she and her husband of 61 years, Samuel Spiegel, 85, exude a spirit of joy and wonder at the miracle of their life together, despite the grim circumstances they endured in Europe during World War II.
Clearly, Samuel Spiegel is as smitten today as he was when he first met Regina, then a 15-year-old Polish girl, in the slave labor camp where they both toiled in 1942. Samuel, a brash 19-year-old at the time, was determined to win her heart.
Says Regina, “I had just lost my sister and her baby the week before [both were shot by the Nazis] and it was a wonderful feeling that someone cared for me. In a miserable place like that, it was nice to find love.”
The young couple met secretly because they weren’t supposed to be together, but Ukrainian guards caught him in the tiny room she had been sharing with her sister. They dragged Samuel away and gave him more than two dozen lashes. 
Regina and Samuel each endured a succession of forced labor camps, concentration camps, death marches, painful separations and miraculous escapes.
