April 15, 2005/Nisan 6 5765, Volume 57, No. 33
Courageous speaking career draws to a close
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
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 Holocaust survivor Ella Adler speaks to a capacity crowd at Gateway Community College. Photo by Jim Carr |
A retired social worker and survivor of the Nazi death camps, Adler has long spoken to schools and other audiences about her Holocaust experience. "The feelings are so painful, tearing you apart," she once said of speaking publicly. "But I have developed the strength to realize I need to leave something."
On the evening of Thursday, April 7, at Gateway Community College, Adler spoke in public for what was billed as the last time. She also received a proclamation from the office of Gov. Janet Napolitano commending her for "her 50 years of devotion to public education with the guiding philosophy that 'history denied is doomed to repeat itself.'"
"I have no answer to why I survived," Adler told the crowd of about 350 students, some in the lecture hall, others watching on monitors around campus. "The warm memories of my family, and above all hope, were my salvation."
Adler arrived in the United States in the spring of 1946, with the assistance of the Hebrew Immigration Society. Twenty-one years old and alone in the world, she found work in a factory. She also set out to complete her interrupted education: it took her 11 years, during which time she married Harry Adler, a German Jew who'd fled Europe before the war and returned to fight as an American soldier. Together they raised two children. Harry, Ella said, typed most of her school papers.
The family moved to Phoenix in 1963. In 1974, Ella graduated from Arizona State University with a master's degree in social work. "I was a late bloomer," she joked.
Explaining her decision to become a social worker, Adler said that her courses in social work helped her to realize "I didn't have a corner on suffering - I felt the need to help others. Living under the most degrading conditions taught me compassion."
After the talk, Harry and Ella fielded questions as a team. Their mutual respect and affection was clear in the way they traded off and joked gently with each other; just two days later, they would celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary.
During her talk, Adler alluded to the possibility that she might speak again, some time, somewhere. But Harry, asked after the lecture if this was really his wife's last public speaking engagement, nodded.
"The time has come for her to quit," he said. "It's very difficult for her to do this."