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A real survivor By Judy Labensohn (May 1) - Leah Paz went wild over the beauty of Haifa. The sun was beginning to cast a glow over the Carmel mountain range. Enormous flames burst from the oil refineries just blown up by the Hagana. People were on the rooftops of their houses singing "Hatikva" - The Hope. "We sang 'Hatikva' too," she recalls with a smile. Indeed, Paz and the other 1,500 illegal immigrants - all Holocaust survivors - aboard the ship Patria ("homeland") would need as much hope as they could muster to fulfill their dream of living in Palestine. The British had discovered the small cargo ship at sea carrying illegal immigrants and tugged the boat into the port of Haifa. Then the soldiers immediately transferred the motley survivors from their stinking quarters to a floating prison and shipped them to Cyprus. But by this time, 1947, 17-year-old Leah Weitzner, as she was then, had survived being thrown from a cattle car destined for death, three years of lying about her identity while living with Catholic families in her native Poland, and a treacherous two-week voyage from Bari, Italy, to Palestine. Cyprus would be, simply, another arena for miracles for the Youth Aliya orphan. Paz, now 70, is a natural storyteller. She has told the survivor's tale to her two children, five grandchildren, Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and for the past 14 years, to the children she cares for during the afternoons in her Ramat Chen home. She lets no one forget, especially on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. Born in Lvov, Paz was the only child of a judge in the Polish government who died when she was five. She grew up at her grandfather's estate in Kochavina, a Polish village in Galicia. In September 1942, the Germans invaded her village. Her grandfather and uncle ran away, but she, her mother, and grandmother were rounded up with other Jews in the area and stuffed into a cattle car heading east. "It smelled like an open grave," she recalls, sitting on her living-room couch, her small white dog next to her. "Babies, pregnant women, young, and old were crying and screaming, collapsing, and falling over each other. My mother held me close to her. She sensed the Germans were going to kill us. "'YOU ARE an only child,'" she said to me. "'I gave birth to you and therefore I have the right to do this. I will not let the Germans touch you.' The train moved slowly through the Polish countryside, into the night, towards Russia. 'We will throw you out of the window of the train. You might not live, but if a miracle happens, and you survive the war, don't tell too much. No one will understand. Just say there was a time when mothers were willing to kill their only child. This, they will understand.'" The stairs leading to the window of the cattle car were made of dead bodies, piled one on top of the other. That night, the 12-year-old girl was thrown out the window of the moving train. "I felt like I was the only one left in the world," she says. Alone in the forest, she hid by day and walked back to her village along the tracks by night, all according to her mother's instructions. She ate acorns. She stole potatoes and carrots from Polish farms. Within a week or two or more - she can't remember how long it took - she reached Kochavina. Her grandfather and uncle had returned to the estate. That is when her uncle, Mundek Feldman, began working on the next miracle. "Never look behind you as if you are afraid," went the first part of the advice trilogy he offered. "Don't ever answer anyone immediately. Always say, 'What?' as if you didn't hear. This will give you time to think." The advice would be her survival kit during the Holocaust. Part three: "If you get caught, never admit that you're Jewish. Even if they take off a hand, don't tell them. If they take off a leg, don't tell them. You can still see Palestine without a hand or a leg. Only if they threaten to take out your eyes, then, only then, admit to being a Jew, because then, you'll never be able to see Palestine." The uncle, an architect who had made aliya from Poland in 1926, was caught in Poland during World War II while visiting family. He never returned to Palestine because he and Paz's grandfather were shot by Germans two months before the end of the war. HIS NIECE, though, remembered his advice as well as the Catholic prayers he taught her. The lessons kept her alive, even though there were times she wanted to kill herself, so tired and dejected was she from living a life of lies. With the help of a Polish priest who ran the local orphanage, Feldman arranged for Leah Weitzner to become Helena Lachovich. Thus, she spent the war years with Polish Catholics, Felix and Stephania Plawuszewski from Stary Sambor and Stephania Gosch from near Lublin - recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem. "After the war, never go anywhere except Palestine," Feldman coached her. "Always go towards Italy, because from there you can get to Palestine. Always go towards the sea." Paz smiles now, remembering the travel directions. After the floating prison reached Cyprus, Paz was shot in the leg by a British soldier. She and the 40 other members of her Youth Aliya group, Lamatara ("To the goal"), were demanding water. "We were all filthy. The Patria was a boat for 200, and we had been 1,500 survivors crowded together. When one person vomited, everyone vomited. We had vomit in our ears. It was hot and stinky. There was no water for drinking or showering. You couldn't move. "But once I was shot in the leg," she stops the story to show me the scar above her right ankle, "the English took me to a hospital. I got a bath and good food and as much water as I wanted. It was a miracle." Paz pauses, then chooses her words carefully, intent that her listener understand. "A Hilton hotel is a transit camp compared to that hospital." Nonetheless, she says, "When I saw the sea from the window of the hospital, I wanted to swim to Israel." Every Holocaust Remembrance Day, in her comfortable home near the sea where she lives with husband Ephraim, who is transcribing her memoirs, Leah Paz, alias Helena Lachovich, nŽe Weitzner, lights six candles. Six million dead. And the miracle of one survivor. Previous Next Holocaust
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