For Samuel, the war began in 1939, when a bomb fell on his family’s home in Kozienice, Poland. The family was safe, if only momentarily, but they lost everything except for the clothes on their backs. Ultimately, after spending time in the town’s ghetto, Samuel was sent to work in the munitions factory at the labor camp where he first saw Regina.
In 1944, Samuel and Regina were transported to Auschwitz, where they were separated with shouts of “men to the right; women to the left!” As they exited the cattle cars, Regina remembers a man shouting, “‘They’re burning them alive there—don’t go!’ But we didn’t believe him,” she says. “We thought he was crazy. Germans were the most educated people in Europe in those days. How could they do such things?”
After a series of “resettlements,” away from Auschwitz, Samuel was put to work in one of the largest train factories in Germany, where the mechanically-inclined Young man learned to work with sheet metal.
On April 20, 1945—Hitler’s birthday—the Allies bombed the train tracks leading to Berlin. Regina and her fellow prisoners were on a train when several bombs fell on it, splitting open the rail cars and killing hundreds of women. Those who could “ran like little rabbits” into the woods, Regina says.
The women hid for three days with no food or water, until they saw some Russian soldiers who told them to go home—the war was over.
After returning to his hometown in Poland, Samuel learned that Regina was alive and had returned to her hometown of Radom, 35 kilometers away. He arranged for a man with a horse and buggy to bring her back to him. Not until the moment when they could actually reach out their arms and kiss did each finally believe the other was alive.
Poland, however, was still an inhospitable place for Jews, and they decided to leave their birthplace. Regina’s uncle in America was able to sponsor them, and in 1947 the couple eventually made their way to their new home, after first marrying in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria, Germany.
The metal-working skills Samuel learned in the train factory served him well in his new life in the Washington, D.C. region. He quickly found a job in a sheet metal factory and before long was able to start his own sheet metal business in Prince George’s County. He and Regina raised three daughters and have nine grandchildren.
Remarkably, Regina and Samuel Spiegel’s sense of themselves remained intact despite horrific circumstances. “You always lived life as if your mother was right behind you, watching you. We kept the same values—we didn’t turn into the animals they tried to make us,” Regina explains.
“At Auschwitz, it was so easy to kill yourself on the electric fences,” she says. “Instead, we decided, ‘We’ll show you. We’ll stay alive.’ It was so important—if they kill us, Hitler will get away with what he did. We decided to help out one another, to stay alive, like a pledge. Someone has to live to tell the story.”
Susan Strauss Taube, 82
Herman Taube, 90
Bethesda
For Polish-born Herman Taube of Bethesda, the years since World War II have been filled with his efforts to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust. A prominent writer and journalist for 60 years, he is the author of 23 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was White House correspondent for the Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper founded in 1897. He also taught Yiddish and Yiddish literature at the University of Maryland and at American University. Today, at 90, he continues to write, as well as translate documents for the Holocaust Museum.
For Susan Strauss Taube, Herman’s wife of 61 years, the nightmare began on Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) in November of 1938 in Vacha, Germany. Nazis vandalized the Strauss family’s general store and imprisoned her father in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. (Her father, a German World War I veteran, was later permitted to leave the camp but was expelled from the country without his family.)
During the war, Susan was conscripted for slave labor, and in 1942, along with her grandmother, mother and sister, was sent to the Riga ghetto in Latvia. Her grandmother and other elderly Jews were immediately taken to the nearby woods and killed. Her mother later perished in the Thorn labor camp in Poland; her sister died at the Stutthof concentration camp, also in Poland.
As voluble and eloquent as Herman is about his wrenching experiences as a medic in the Polish army, Susan is more circumspect and guarded about sharing her painful past. “It’s like pulling a Band-Aid off a wound for her,” Herman explains. As a volunteer at the Holocaust Museum, it is only in recent years that Susan has been able to speak to groups about her early life; after speaking, she often has nightmares.
Herman, who was not sent to labor or concentration camps, was orphaned as a young boy, and was raised in Poland by his grandparents. Looking to subsidize his education, he took a job at a Lodz hospital as an assistant medic. In 1939, he was drafted by the Polish Army and became a field medic. After the Russians invaded, he was sent to Siberia, where he worked in a first aid station with minimal supplies.
After his release from the Polish Army, he ended up in a border town in Uzbekistan close to the Afghanistan border, where he worked in a malaria station for two years, as starving refugees streamed through from all over Europe. When he complained about the lack of medical supplies, he was drafted into the New Polish Army and sent to a city in Russia where he was assigned to an ambulance service. Along the Russian front, his vehicle hit a land mine. The driver and a nurse were killed and Herman was badly wounded. After coming close to having both of his legs amputated, Herman began to recover. He finally was discharged in 1945.
Herman soon learned that of the 230,000 Jews in his Polish hometown of Lodz, only 800 had survived the war. Not knowing what else to do, he returned to his work as a medic, this time helping to open one of the first Red Cross stations for civilians in a part of Poland liberated by the Russians. His first task was to bury piles of bodies to prevent the spread of disease. Next, the living had to be helped, but there was a critical lack of medication.
Herman decided to raid the medical supplies stored in a nearby warehouse. A young German woman offered to come with him; her friend was near death with scarlet fever and needed medicine. With their mission concluded and the sick girl on her way to recovery, Herman said goodbye to the woman who had helped him.
Later, on his way out of the town, he saw the same young woman again, this time standing on the train platform. Unwilling to be sent to Russia, she said to Herman, “Get me out of here.”
He managed to secure an army jeep and, lacking the necessary permit to travel, told guards he was transporting a typhoid case while the young woman pretended to be sick. They later arrived at a displaced persons camp where they lived for a short time before marrying in 1946. Susan was 20, Herman, 28. The couple managed to locate Susan’s father, who had made his way to the United States and was able to sponsor them. They settled in Baltimore in 1947, remaining there for 20 years before moving to Montgomery County. They are the parents of five children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
In his poem titled “Commemoration,” Herman Taube writes, “I am the eyewitness and the victim…I am hunted by voices, calling, Remember Us.”
Rita Lifschitz Rubinstein, 69
Rockville
Rita Rubinstein of Rockville is like a hummingbird: busy, purposeful and nearly always in motion. Since the Holocaust, she has committed her considerable energies to raising a family, teaching, tutoring local Jewish students to read the Torah and participating in a variety of Jewish service organizations. Widowed in 1995, she has three daughters and eight grandchildren, all of whom live near her. Not one to sit still, she spent three weeks this past summer in Israel repairing helmets with other volunteers on a military base. It was her eighth trip to the Holy Land.
Born in 1938—the year of Kristallnacht—in a small town in Romania, she was just 31/2 years old when her world changed. Her father was drafted into the Russian army; he was never seen again. Rubinstein, her mother, several aunts, uncles and cousins were about to be transported by train to a concentration camp. An uncle heard about a nearby labor camp, and by bribing some Romanian soldiers, got the family on a river barge to the camp.
On the boat, soldiers started throwing young children—deemed worthless as laborers—into the water. “I was blond then, and a soldier had mercy on us when he saw the look on my mother’s face,” Rubinstein recalls. “He said to her, ‘I have a little girl just like this at home.’” Rubinstein’s life was spared.
At the Shargarot labor camp in Transnistria, Ukraine, nine family members lived for three years in a one-room mud hut with no running water or bathroom. “I’ll never forget the cold. There was not even an outhouse. We used pails,” Rubinstein remembers. Meals—if they could be called that—consisted of a piece of bread with oil and a potato.
In 1945, they were liberated by the Russians and returned to their hometown, where they were able to retrieve from the attic of their former home a hidden cache of money, photographs and the tallit (prayer shawl) that had belonged to Rubinstein’s father. (Years later, that same tallit was used during the bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs of Rubinstein’s grandchildren.)
It quickly became clear that there was no future for Jews in Romania, so after obtaining falsified papers Rubinstein and her mother traveled in secret for three months until they reached a displaced persons camp in Germany.
At the camp, doctors discovered that Rubinstein, then 9, had tuberculosis and placed her in quarantine for four months. She underwent emergency lung surgery and eventually received antibiotics, which had become available only recently.
After waiting three years in Germany, Rubinstein and her mother finally boarded A U.S. Army transport ship bound for New York. Seasick the entire voyage, the only time they left their bunks was when they went on deck to see the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Mother and daughter both cried at the sight.
They settled in Brooklyn, and Rubinstein eventually attended Brooklyn College at night, earning a degree in education. While working days in a real estate office, she met her future husband, Nathan Rubinstein, who worked as a driver for a local landlord. Nathan was a Polish immigrant who had survived the transports by escaping to Siberia. He was 20; she was 18. They married in 1959 and moved to Prince George’s County in 1960 so that Nathan could work as a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland and continue his studies. He later became a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The couple settled in Silver Spring, where they remained for 30 years until Nathan’s death from lung cancer. He was 57.
“We had 35 wonderful years together,” Rita says, adding that for these two ‘greenhorns,’ America was truly the land of opportunity.
Writer Lisa Braun-Kenigsberg lives in Potomac.
