On March 3, Cyd Gottlieb spoke to the ENHS sophomore class as a third-generation Holocaust survivor (3G) during third hour. Principal Dan Radicia opened the presentation by noting ENHS’s imperfection. Direct and indirect bigotry is still present in our school, but through speakers like Gottlieb, we can strive for tolerance, love, and hope: the goals of the Week of Understanding (March 24–28).
Gottlieb attended Elie Wiesel’s class at Boston University during his last year as a professor. He taught her something that impacts every time she speaks about the survivors in her family:
“You cannot speak for the dead,” Gottlieb said. “Those are their stories . . . You can speak for your experiences.”
Both sides of Gottlieb’s family are Holocaust survivors with her father Steven, the son of a survivor, in the audience. Through her experiences, she learned that trauma can persist across generations. As a child, she was often the only Jewish kid and felt a responsibility to represent her heritage. This resulted in a people-pleasing child with big feelings she couldn’t process.
“I knew that I only existed because other people died,” Gottlieb said.
As an adult, she could harness these feelings towards her artwork. Her abstract pieces had tight shapes and lines that displayed the tenseness she had felt her whole life. Only when Gottlieb met other 3Gs, did she find the sense of community she’d been yearning for.
Since then, Gottlieb has pieced together the story of her grandfather through documents, his first-hand writings, interviews, and stories from her mother.
As the Holocaust creeps farther into the past, the experiences of survivors grow foggier and more important than ever to tell:
Her grandfather, Majer was a smart man with a wife and daughter. During World War II, Poland was divided into western Nazi Germany territories and eastern Soviet Union territories. With Nazis growing more violent against Jewish men, Meir left his wife and daughter to flee eastward. In the Soviet territories, he refused to take Russian citizenship, denouncing communism. Deemed a criminal, he was sent to a gulag, a Russian prisoner labor camp. The 4-week trip there was cramped and hungry, with the deceased tossed off moving trains.
While the gulag wasn’t a Nazi concentration camp, Majer was still targeted for being Jewish. He often begged soldiers to kill him, but they refused.
“Russians kill you with cold. Nazis kill you with heat,” Majer said in an interview.
Gottlieb believes that a photo of Majer’s 6-year-old daughter Sarah was hidden in his shoe. She thinks that the thought of her alive was the only thing that kept him going, but unbeknownst to him, she had died along with most of his family in Nazi concentration camps.
After liberation from British forces, Majer returned home to Warsaw, Poland, and met Judith, a Jewish woman with forged papers as a Russian Catholic who was recently freed from a Nazi concentration camp. With both of them grieving most of their family and sharing similar traumatic experiences, they joined together.
Antisemitism remained common, and without any forms of identification or many belongings, it was difficult to settle anywhere, so they wandered across Europe between displacement camps. Majer’s fluency in 7-8 languages got him a job with the U.S. Army, and he and Judith traveled to Ohio in 1951.
In America, they were happy and grateful despite having little. After a miscarriage, they had Gottlieb’s mother, but they were decided as unfit parents. Judith was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and the both of them couldn’t escape the trauma of their pasts. Judith likely had a history of self-harming and committed suicide through fire.
Their daughter was put into foster care and adopted by Eva and Ed Rosenberg, a wealthy, older couple who had never had kids. On Tuesdays, she would have dinner with Meir, but she grew to dislike him. She didn’t understand why he was strict and tense.
Only in her adult life did she learn about her mother’s passing and bonded with her father. He told her his story, and she passed it on to her daughter Gottlieb.
Gottlieb never met Majer, but through scouring his documents and journalings, she feels like she knows him, and thus understands herself better. Since his and Judith’s stories are based on writings that continue to be discovered and reconstrued, their stories prove active and develop as their legacy-holders change and grow.
At the start of the presentation, Gottlieb said that if we take anything from her story, it should be this: people have an innate need to help each other, especially through hardship.
