» Eta Chait Wrobel: An appreciation
By Jeanette Friedman | Published Today | Obituaries | www.jstandard.com

On a cold winter night last year, 91-year-old Eta Chait Wrobel walked to the parking lot after the Yad Vashem annual dinner in New York. A 20-something tipsy Latina, spoiling for a fight, pulled her SUV out of the narrow alleyway. She stopped suddenly, looked at Eta and began mouthing off at her and her companion. Eta told her to be quiet and the driver became more aggressive, got out of the car, and threatened to punch Eta’s “lights out.” Eta’s companion told the young “lady” precisely where she could go, whipped out her cellphone, and called 911. In a nanosecond, the woman got back in her car, gunned the motor, and took off. Eta then turned to her companion and said, “Why did you scare her off? My cane and I were ready — I would have knocked her right on her tuchis.”

Eta, who lived in Fort Lee for more than a decade toward the end of her life, was the commander of a partisan group in Lukow, Poland, wife to Henry, mother of four (Hal, Shain, Anna, and Liza), and grandmother of 11. She died on Memorial Day, soon after her twin great-grandchildren were born. Her life was filled with the love of giving and of fighting for truth, justice, and the Jewish people. “We fought to survive,” she would say. “We fought so that some of us would get out of there and make new families, to spit in the Nazi’s eyes. Our babies are our revenge.”

Eta grew up with nine siblings — and she was the sole survivor of her family. She escaped from a Nazi prison in Lublin and from two deportations. She smuggled guns she’d stolen from Germans in Lodz to her hometown, and fled to the woods, where the Jewish partisans made her their commander.

Determined to make a difference, she became the mayor of Lukow right after the war, and then fled the Communists. Settled in Brooklyn, she was a grocery lady extraordinaire in East New York, where she would canvass her neighbors for money for the American Cancer Society while still wearing her store apron.

When her husband became a successful real estate developer on Staten Island, the family moved to the Bronx, to a new grocery store and neighborhood, where Eta began to develop the Holocaust survivors’ division of Hadassah. In time, the family moved to Kew Gardens, where Eta used her home to rally survivors to support Yad Vashem, Hadassah, the Rivkah Laufer Bikur Cholim Society, and Israel Bonds. One of her favorite charities was Akim, an Israeli organization that cares for developmentally disabled children. Eta was also an active and vocal member of the National Council of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

In the last year of her life, she was honored by YIVO and the National Yiddish Theatre/Folksbiene for her efforts to keep the Yiddish language alive. Her legacy is clearly stated in her memoirs, written when she was 90. The book is called “My Life, My Way,” and Eta did it her way until the very end.

see also http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/108821.html

http://www.northjersey.com/news/aroundnj/Polish_Holocaust_legend_dies.html

I am a photographer in New York City. I am doing a book on former miss
subways. A selection from the project appeared in the New York Times
City Section Dec 31 2007.
You can see some photos from the project on my website www.fionagardner.com

One of the former miss subways that I am looking for Elizabeth Stern
is a holocaust survivor. I am contacting your organization in the
hopes that you might be able to help me find her.

I have attached a jpeg of her Miss Subways poster. On the poster it
says that she was born in Warsaw Poland in 1939 and arrived at
Idlewild airport in new york on Nov 15, 1959.

I contacted the Office of homeland security and they had an INS-
foreign address and occupation index card for a woman named Janina E.
Stern that was born in Poland in 1939 and arrived on Nov 15 1959.
The archivist there thought that it is a very good chance that the
person I am looking for is Janina Elizabeth
Stern. Stern would have been her family name and she very likely got
married and changed her last name.

I appreciate any help you can give me in tracking down Elizabeth Stern.

I can be reached at 917-664-9036 or fionagardner@gmail.com

sincerely,

Fiona Gardner

Newton’s Rosian Zerner lives a legacy of courage
By Susie Davidson – Wednesday May 28 2008

“I stand before you as proof that miracles happen,” Rosian Zerner said last year at the annual Yom HaShoah ceremony at Faneuil Hall.

Zerner’s place at the podium was inspirational, and apropos. Her advocacy on behalf of Holocaust survivors and work in German-Jewish relations is well-known. She is the former vice president, and current governing board member of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. The contact person for Greater Boston Child Survivors, she is the JCRC representative from, and executive committee member of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston. She is also on the Holocaust Survivor Advisory Board at the Jewish Family and Children’s Service, the Yom HaShoah planning committee, has represented Boston survivors at restitution issue meetings, and helped bring about a U.S. stamp honoring rescuer/diplomat Hiram Bingham.

Although her native Lithuania holds the dread distinction of being the country that lost the highest percentage of its Jews, Zerner survived World War II in the Kovno Ghetto, and in hiding. Her parents dug a hole under the ghetto’s barbed wire fence and pushed her to safety. “I was 6,” she said. “They timed and avoided the changing of the guards, the searchlights, the dogs.

Zerner, who had grown up in a privileged environment, remembers every detail of her escape. “I was hidden in homes, attics, barns and woods, an orphanage. I was baptized,” she said. “Sometimes I was ready to stop running, but my will to live was greater.” Miraculously reunited with her parents after the war, they remained in Italy for six years, en route to Palestine and before moving to the U.S. in 1951.

Immersed into Newton High School at age 16, she sang the St. Louis Blues without knowing English with the a-capella sextet the Newtonettes. She found it refreshing to be with people not touched by the Holocaust.
“It certainly did not fit into my senior prom as the date of the class president or into the values that I was absorbing within the ‘melting pot’ of the 50s,” she said.

Zerner later matriculated at Barnard College. “In Italy I had listened to Radio Free Europe and thought I would come to the land of spirituals and jazz,” she rememberd. Instead, it was all rock and roll. Her mother, who is still alive today at 100 in a Waltham nursing home, had been the Konzertmeister of the Lithuanian Opera, and Zerner had been a student at Milan’s La Scala Ballet School. She had read all the works of Shakespeare, Zane Gray, and Jack London in Italian. Despite class structures and educational strictures, she said that “the world, the time, was my very own oyster.”

Zerner was a runner-up for Miss Barnard, president of the fine arts club (her major was art history and her thesis, the female nude), and a class officer. Her future husband, John Zerner, was in her music class. In 1961, she began graduate school at Columbia, but embarked for India, arriving before even the Beatles’ George Harrison. She spent four months in Japan, Thailand and Persia.

“I bicycled in Nepal among Tibetan refugees, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, bathed in the Ganges and went to its source.” She has since traveled to 64 countries. In Israel, Zerner visited her mother’s surviving relatives on a kibbutz and in Tel Aviv. She married Zerner in 1962; they had two sons but divorced in 1970 following his medical school graduation. “I was unprepared for either motherhood or independence, and yet, in those feminist days, I declined to take alimony,” she says.

In the freewheeling 60s, Zerner’s car had a flower instead of an antenna, she was teargassed in Washington antiwar marches, and started to sculpt again, painting, writing and publishing Beat poetry, making candles, pottery, enameling. Her father later convinced her to buy a home in Chestnut Hill. “Newton schools were the best at that time,” she said. A salon she had begun in Brookline became the Sunday Brunch Club at the Newton Highlands Women’s Club. She organized trips, tennis parties, support groups, and media, joined boards of arts organizations and chaired art-related events.

“In 1987, she joined her pro-baseball player son Jay, who is now a physician, in Australia. Although caring for her father curtailed graduate school hopes, she studied Spanish and pre-Columbian civilizations at San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca in Mexico, climbed pyramids and became a Mayan Solar Initiate. “I spent a month in New Mexico and Arizona with the Zuni and Hopi, explored Eastern philosophies and religions that took me to Brazil, Japan and Thailand, and followed the Celtic and other paths that led from Stonehenge throughout Portugal and Spain,” she said.

In 1996, her father died at age 90, and she learned that her father’s sister, Lyda, committed suicide weeks after the Nazis murdered her composer husband Edwin. In 2000, Zerner joined a child survivors’ and a German-Jewish Dialogue group. She accepted an award bestowed posthumously by then President Adamkus of Lithuania upon one of her rescuers. “I re-connected with my childhood friend who hid with me, and retraced my steps from the house of my grandfather to the Kovno Ghetto, to the homes where I was hidden,” she recalled.

At Faneuil last year, where son Lang lit a candle, Zerner quoted presidential candidate Dennis Kuchinich: “If we can change ourselves, we can change the world. We are not the victims of the world we see, we are the victims of the way we see the world.”

Susie Davidson, a frequent Advocate correspondent, is the author of “I Refused to Die,” a book documenting the lives of 20 survivors and 10 concentration camp liberators in Boston, and “Jewish Life in Postwar Germany: Our Ten-Day Seminar.”

The funeral was held at King David Chapel and Cemetery, Las Vegas,
Nevada on Thursday, 22 May 2008 at 1:00 PM . Rabbi Craig Rosenstein
officiated.

Born May 3, 1923 in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, he became an Eagle Scout
and then graduated as a ceramic engineer from the Czechoslovakian
Institute of Ceramics. During World War II, he was moved from ghetto
to concentration camps, including Lodz Ghetto, Litzmanstadt Ghetto,
Czestochown, Munition Factory Hasag # 2 in Tschenstochova, Poland,
Buchenwald, S.A. Dora Mittlebau—V/1 and V/2 assembly plant, and
Bergen-Belsen. After the war, he worked in the underground for an
organization that facilitated the acquisition of passports for Jews to
escape occupied territories and find passage to Palestine. He became
the model and subject of a series of art pieces by his friend David
Friedman, titled the Muselman (skeleton) series.
He arrived in the United States with his wife and two year old
daughter—and 60 cents in his pocket. He worked as a pin setter in a
bowling alley while he learned English (he spoke five languages). His
career included: Director of Design Research and General Manager at
Stetson China Company, General Manager of Blue Mountain Pottery,
Managing Director of Bevex Ceramic Tile Company, President of Canadiana
Pottery Ltd., the National Sales Manager of Studiceram Inc. and the
technical director of Holland Brick and Tile Company. He served as a
consultant to the Jamaican government. He received letters of
commendation from every president of the United States since 1949.
Michael Pratt, in his book, Mid Century Modern Dinnerware, called him
the “father of modern dinnerware design.” He also authored a book
entitled “Where Was God?” and was visited by Steven Spielberg
personally during a four hour interview by the Shoah Foundation. He
was a member of many organizations, including: Boys Town U.S.A.,
American Ceramic Society (President), Collingwood Chamber of Commerce
(President), Toastmasters, Huronia Tourist Association (President),
Rotary International (President) and the Canadian Ceramic Society
(Chairman). He held several patents, including a time analyzer for
ceramics.
Condolences may be directed to: Ellia Dube, 4622 Grand Drive, Las
Vegas, NV or Jana Hletko, 175 Sanderling Ave., Georgetown, SC 29440
or Otto Dube, 27923 Copper Creek Lane, Farmington Hills, MI 48331 or
Michael Dube, 2889 24th Street #8, San Francisco, CA 94110.

Family members include:

Beloved husband of Ellia Dube. Dear father of Jana (Paul) Hletko, Otto
(Shelley) Dube, Michael (fiancée Dawn Arredondo) Dube, Nicole Mathis
and the late Clarence Dunbar Floyd. Dearest father-in-law of the late
Patty Lynn Kaufman Dube. Cherished grandfather of Paul (Liz), Valerie
(Katie), and Sarah (Marc), Annie, Danniell, Yoni, Ami, Danielle and
Dominic. Proud great-grandfather of Joshua, Savannah, Jonathan, Sofia,
Paul Quinn, Sydney, Andrew, and Ellie. He was the only survivior out
of 37 members of his family who were murdered during World War II,
including his parents Ernst and Melanie (Guttwillig) Dub and siblings
Edith, Otto, Herbert and Katherine.
It is suggested that those who wish to further honor the memory of
Alfred Dube may do so by making a contribution to:

Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada
P.O. 371434
Las Vegas, NV 89137
or

Paradise Church
Benevolence Fund
2525 Emerson Avenue
Las Vegas, NV 89121
or

Patricia Dube Family Fund
C/O Hillel Day School
32200 Middlebelt Road
Farmington Hills, MI 48334

I am currently writing a biography of a French Capuchin priest named Pere Marie Benoit, also known as Padre Maria Benedetto in Italy, who saved thousands of Jews in France and Italy during the Holocaust. I have much material about him from archives, but I would like very much to interview people whom he helped. I have done a few interviews, but I would like to do more. I wondered if your organization could help me locate people willing to be interviewed.
I speak French and Italian as well as English, and could travel quite a distance to do interviews. I live in New York City.

Susan Zucotti
contact:
Szuccotti@cs.com