The Value of Small Victories
Shoah Legacy Writers
American Jewish University
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 12pm

Thank you, Alyssa, and welcome to this Yom HaShoah Commemoration 2025 on behalf of Shoah Legacy Writers. Shoah Legacy Writers began in 2022, inspired by the teaching of our founder, Michele Gold, Honorary Director of Holocaust Museum LA. Our group is made of members of the Second Generation after the Holocaust, all of whom write and speak about our parents’ stories and the effects they have had on our own lives.

She sat before the doctor, her body as limp as the gown that draped across her shoulders. The Obstetrician’s eyes peeked out from under his 10-gallon hat, then back into his chart, then out again.

“Mrs. Schneider, when bleeding happens this late in a pregnancy, well, it’s no good.” “I can’t really remember a case when I could save the baby…”

He picked up an old-fashioned stethoscope that attached to his forehead like a pair of tefillin and began to listen. It was 1956 and medical ultrasound had not been invented yet. As he closed his eyes to listen, she closed her eyes to remember…

She remembered back at home in Sanok before the war, when her brother Gedaliah was diagnosed with water on the brain, and her mother and father took him to the big city, Krakow, to find a special doctor who could operate. Only in the end, it was too late to operate, and they could not save him. They buried him in Krakow.

She remembered when she was in Soviet Exile during the war, when her parents had already starved and died, and she and her sister both came down with typhus in Siberia. There was no shelter, no food or work. And to get into the hospital, she had to scavenge a few potatoes to try to pay the doctor to treat her. She would always say that if you are going to go to the doctor, you had better bring potatoes to bribe him. She used to say that much as she loved America for giving her a home as an orphan, Americans did not know how to be hungry. She knew how to be hungry, for she knew how to find scraps of food along the roadside, to buy a potato with a penny found on the road. She knew what it was to run after a stray dog that she could kill when starving. She knew what it was to no longer have parents who could provide for her.

She remembered, after delivering her first baby, my brother Harold – named after her father whom she had loved so dearly – when a Catholic nun came to her in the hospital and asked if she could pray for her. My mom, only 10 when the Nazis marched into her town, had a sum total of 3 years of education in Polish school. She had never been in a church and had an intense fear of nuns and priests, even that they might take her baby. She had to protect him after already losing everything in her life. She had to protect him to begin again. But she gave in to her better nature and accepted that if she said she wanted to pray for her, maybe she really would pray for her. And maybe that would be ok. It was ok.

The Doctor looked straight at her again and said, “I am sorry, Mrs. Schneider, the baby is dead.” I will have to take it out tonight.

My mom’s body, once limp and afraid, rose and lifted the gown up by her shoulders. “I will come back tomorrow; I have to go home and make dinner for my husband and the kids - Harold and Irene.”

Caught unawares, the Obstetrician was incredulous. At that time, patients did not speak back. “Mrs. Schneider, you do not understand, you need to have the operation tonight, you may die!

“Doctor, you do not understand, I need to go home and make dinner.”

Returning the next morning, my mother again sat in front of an Obstetrician - another one this time. He again listened with the stethoscope and this time smiled. “I don’t know Mrs. Schneider; the baby is fine!”

Our family joke is that Diane was born because mom went home and made dinner. I came around 7 years later.

Why did mom go home against the doctor’s advice? She certainly did not suspect that he was medically wrong, or have problems recognizing his authority or want to just create drama? She never really told us in so many words, but I believe that at that time in her life, there simply was nothing in life more important than being a good wife and mother, even more important than her own life. Her act was a redemption of a once-ruined life, now reborn after the Shoah and put to purpose. – the purpose of recreating a family. Was my mom’s act truly redemptive? Maybe it was just good luck, or fear, or maybe she just felt like cooking? No, I think it came from somewhere deep inside, so deep that she couldn’t tell the doctor what or why. She was undoing the extinction of herself and her family.

You will now hear from four of my colleagues who will tell you stories of their parents and the value of small victories in their lives. Believe me, each of these victories, while small in appearance, was actually huge to the survivors, and to the second generation. And therein lies the paradox of today’s conference. Small victories – huge victories.

Our first speaker today is Aviyah Farkas. Aviyah was born in 1948 and deeply shaped by World War II. Her Jewish father survived the Holocaust with help from her Christian mother. Aviyah published the award-winning book Overcoming Deepest Grief, a Woman’s Journey.

Our second speaker today is Debbie Beckman. Both of Degbie’s parents were survivors. They were born in small neighboring rural farm villages in Czechoslovakia. Since 2016, she has been involved with Holocaust Museum LA as a docent, volunteer and part-time employee.

Our third speaker today is Fern Topas Salka. Fern’s parents married before the war, lived in, then escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, lived in and survived living in a wall, then a sewer and enslavement on a German pig farm.

Our last speaker today is Eli Eldan. Eli’s father, Shaul, joined the Polish army and was wounded while fighting the Nazi Germans during their invasion of Poland. Escaping to the Soviet Union, he was detained and sent to the Pechora gulag in Siberia, and when he returned home after the war, he discovered that most of his family had been killed.