Tag Archives: survivor

March 31, 2025 · 7:30 am

Henoch: An Inventory

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

After Lauren Russell

A butcher’s apron pockmarked with dried blood that banging it against the river’s rocks cannot erase. An abacus to calculate the change he owes his patrons. The skill to sever an animal’s carotid arteries, jugular veins, and windpipes in one swift move. A sharp butcher’s knife to cleanly sever a chicken’s head and to break a cow down to its finest parts to sell at a premium to anyone who can afford it. His cleaver whacks away his disappointments until his own fingers bleed with hope for his children. Evening candlelight to read the sacred texts and pray. Meetings of the Baron Hirsch School trustees. His children, even the girls, will get an education, damn the naysayers. An American stamp on his passport from when he arrived in New York with younger brother Benzion. An Austro-Hungarian Empire stamp on his passport from when he returned because Pesia was pregnant. She needed him. No photographs to fold into Chava’s hands when she leaves for America. Plans for his widowed mother’s aliyah to Palestine. The burden of this place and time. No prescience that all but two of his children–the eldest and the youngest–will be murdered. Of the four grandsons named for him, only Herman Krasner is born under the flag of the American Dream.

while the others lie

in the sky in the ashen

shadow of the moon.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

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February 19, 2024 · 7:30 am

Cover Photo

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

My mother brought back from France,

Sometime in the 1960’s,

An oversized book, these often-termed

Coffee table books, meant to be

Casually perused while comfortably seated.

She kept the tome prominently displayed, 

Moving the book from living room to family room

On occasion as if to insure that

Friends and family would encounter it.

In French, we could not read it. 

And she and I would spat, mildly, 

About it, for the cover photo of this

Photo book was gruesome, and was meant

To be: entitled La Deportation, a hollowed-

Eyed survivor stared dully out.

When I would come home from school,

I’d turn it face down, the photo 

Too difficult to see while sitting 

With a morning cup of coffee. 

I’d leave the house and, upon

Returning, be greeted by the grieving

Face front portrait. My mother never 

Chastised me for flipping the  book, and,

When I’d complain how disturbed the image

Left me, she’d simply say: we must remember. 

I miss my parents, who died natural deaths

In the natural course of days, and now

With pained reluctance, I must say I’m relieved

That they are exempt from witnessing again

Images as, perhaps, more gruesome.

This is a book which I cannot 

Flip over to avoid the image and

Alas

Will need to be left face up

To instruct us again

That we must remember. 

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page:https://dennisgura.substack.com

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May 18, 2020 · 10:08 am

Uncle Leon

by Marden Paru (Sarasota, FL)

Uncle Leon (Label) came to Phoenix in 1947 and lived with us. 

He was the youngest and now the only survivor of the Parubansky family, barely a teen when he was sent to a concentration camp, and one of the very few out of several thousand prisoners to survive a Nazi death march to the Czechoslovakian border. 

HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) took care of Uncle Leon in a displaced person’s camp after the defeat of the Nazis until he was able to connect with American relatives.

At the time that Uncle Leon arrived, we were a growing family of seven living together under a single roof. My parents built an addition to the house since, with only one bathroom and a shortage of bedrooms, we were bursting at the seams. So, a large dorm-like room with clothes closets and a bathroom was added, along with an evaporative cooler, which was installed on the new roof. Suddenly, our Culver Street house seemed huge and spacious to a child of seven.

With no knowledge of English, Uncle Leon was aided by my father in finding a job and subsequently learned a new marketable skill. At the poultry market where Dad worked as a shokhet (a butcher trained in kosher slaughtering), Leon learned to candle eggs. The skill was in how to locate blood spots in the yoke within the shells of the eggs, then discard those eggs and pack the remainder by the dozen. This led to learning Spanish, the primary language among the Mexican employees of the poultry establishment, and driving a truck to deliver eggs by the gross to local supermarkets and bodega grocery stores.

In the mid-50s Uncle Leon went east to find a Jewish wife and married Aunt Sally in 1959. The chuppah (literally canopy/the wedding ceremony) ironically took place in the Vilna Shul in Boston, a landsmanshaft synagogue founded by recent Lithuanian post-war immigrants who’d  settled in Massachusetts. 

Uncle Leon became an expert candler and did this for the remainder of his working career, which lasted sixty years, most of which were spent later in the Boston area, where he was reunited with family cousins and was also in the company of Uncle Joe and Aunt Esther, though they lived several towns apart. 

Marden Paru is currently the Dean, Rosh Yeshiva and co-founder of the Sarasota Liberal Yeshiva, an adult Jewish studies institute, and a  former instructor at the Sarasota-Manatee Jewish Federation’s Melton Adult Mini-School. He attended Yeshiva University, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Chicago, and was a doctoral fellow and faculty member at Brandeis University. Marden and his wife Joan are members of Temple Beth Sholom and Congregation Kol HaNeshama. To read more about Marden and Joan, visit: https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/news/newsletter/Hornstein-alumni-articles/My-1966-Computer-Arranged-Jewish-Marriage-by-Marden-Paru.html

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