Who will carry on their story?

The writer in me was almost put to sleep after the Holocaust," Magda Herzberger says. "I didn't wake up until 1963."

Herzberger, who was born in what was then Transylvania and survived Auschwitz, Bremen and Bergen- Belsen, didn't write directly about her experiences at first. "It was years before I could even talk about the Holocaust," she says. "I started writing in 1963 poetry, lyric poetry. I stayed away from the Holocaust."

In 1973, a friend asked her to speak to a women's club about her life. Herzberger, who had grown up Orthodox and who credits her faith for keeping her alive, prayed to God to help her write a prayer to deliver at the speaking engagement. Not only did the prayer come, but shortly thereafter came the music to go with it.

"I was cooking a Hungarian paprikash," Herzberger recalls, "and out of the blue I started humming a melody."

The resulting composition is one of two that will be performed at the Holocaust Remembrance Day Service in Sun City on May 5.

Herzberger passed her love of music on to her children, particularly her daughter Monica Wolfson, who sings with the Arizona Opera Company and will sing her mother's music at the Remembrance Day Service. Herzberger passed the painful memories of her experience on to her children, too.

"We always knew about it when we were little," Wolfson says of herself and her older brother Henry. "She's been writing things about the camps ever since I can remember. As far as graphic detail, I found those things out later."

Wolfson believes that she and other children of survivors have a responsibility to make sure that their family stories do not die out.

"There should be a whole bunch of us gathering together to do this," says Wolfson, who, along with her mother, belongs to the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association. The association was founded by David Kader, himself the child of survivors. "I myself have thought about writing something about being a child of a survivor," Wolfson says, "because we still end up suffering vicariously in a sense, because all these horrible images are something we can't get rid of."

Judy Searle, vice president second generation of the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association, notes that several members of the association's speakers bureau, most of whom are in their 70s and 80s, have announced that they are done speaking publicly.

"Then what?" Searle asks. "Who's going to carry on the message? Who's going to go into the schools? These are questions that somehow we as a community, not just the association, might want to think about."

Searle emphasizes the importance of Holocaust education, and cites good teachers as essential in that process. Every year, she notes, the association presents The Shofar Zakhor Award to acknowledge people who have contributed to Holocaust education, and "most of the time it's teachers." This year the recipient is Kim Klett, of Dobson High School in Mesa.

Jonathan Gruber, director of education with the Jewish Foundation of the Righteous, acknowledges the role of the second generation in sharing the stories of their parents. But, like Searle, he too stresses the importance of historical education.

A few years ago, the JFR launched a Speakers Bureau that includes leading Holocaust scholars, survivors, rescuers and others. The bureau, which aims to honor the righteous by educating others about their actions and the history of the Holocaust, provides speakers to community organizations, interfaith groups, synagogues, churches and schools sponsoring programs on the Holocaust.

The focus of the JFR, Gruber says, is "on the history of the Holocaust itself."

"That's not to say that the stories of the survivors are less important. But as (the survivors) continue to age and pass on, then it becomes more and more important also for us to preserve the history itself in addition to the memory of that history."

For information on the Speakers Bureau of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, visit www.jfr.org. For information on the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors' Association, call 602-788-7003.

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Who will carry on their story?

DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER Associate Editor

DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor