Even during the worst of times, small miracles happen. Three Milwaukeeans share their stories of miraculous survival in the new book, “Small Miracles of the Holocaust: Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope and Survival,” by bestselling series authors Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal.
Longtime Milwaukeeans and Holocaust survivors Jack Dygola, Louis Koplin and Otto Solomon make up three of the more than 50 voices that, as Halberstam and Leventhal write, demonstrate the full strength and power of the human spirit.
“The horrors, the atrocities, the heinous and brutal things that many perpetrated on man … the accounts of these have been told and retold many times,” they write in the book’s introduction. “But the sparks of human greatness that flared up during this nightmarish time … these have not been told enough.”
Find out more about the book at www.globepequot.com.
Following are excerpts from Dygola’s, Koplin’s and Solomon’s stories.
Andrea Waxman
A Boy Named Yitzchak, Waclaw, and Jack
Written by Liza M. Wiemer for Jack Dygola
In the fall of 1941, terrifying rumors of liquidation, murder, and mass graves buzzed throughout the Strzegowo Ghetto in northern Poland.
“We must make arrangements to escape immediately,” 10-year-old Yitzchak (Jack) Dygola’s mother said.
A partially nailed-down wooden slat in the ghetto wall moved easily and concealed his family’s escape route. Under the blanket of a moonless night, Yitzchak, his mother, his younger brother Shmuel, two aunts, and three male cousins slipped through the narrow gap at various intervals, each running in separate directions to test their fate.
“We will meet up again soon, after the war, in Dobrzyn,” were Mrs. Dygola’s parting words to her sons.
With newly bleached hair, Yitzchak had a survival plan, which he revealed to no one.
“May I have a cross and a Bible, please?” he asked the gentile farmer’s wife who periodically supplied cow’s milk for Yitzchak’s baby cousin back in the ghetto. She gave him the icon and the Bible without any questions. Yitzchak silently declared, “I am now Waclaw Dulczewski!”
During sleepless nights and endless days, the new Waclaw memorized the prayers from his small Polish Bible.
Two brutal winters passed and it was now early spring, 1943. Starvation, bitter cold, loneliness, inadequate clothes, and constant fear had nearly broken Waclaw’s spirit.
“I’m not going to make it,” he moaned out of utter despair. Sitting in a cornfield near a river, Waclaw stared at his infected black and blue hands. “My fingers are going to fall off.… I’m going to die!”
In the late afternoon, he somehow managed to get to his feet and walk along the river. Off in the distance Waclaw saw a Polish woman washing clothes against a rock. “You can trust her,” he heard a voice say out of nowhere. “She will help you. You can tell her who you are.”
For nearly six weeks, she nurtured him — body and soul — feeding him, soaking his hands and wrapping them after applying salve, which she procured from a local doctor by bartering with some of her hand-churned butter.
It’s time for you to go,” the kind Polish woman told him one afternoon. “But I know of a widow living across the river who could use some help on her farm. Her two sons are doing forced labor for the Germans. You will need to get proper documents if you are going to stay with her.”
In the town nearby, Waclaw bravely walked into the Nazi headquarters. “I’d like to get identification papers,” he said.
Why don’t you have papers already?” the stern German behind the desk asked.
Waclaw quickly made up a story. “My father died before the war and my mother went to look for work. She died, and now I am an orphan.”
Staring into Waclaw’s face, the Nazi thought he would trick the boy. “Recite the morning prayer,” he demanded. Waclaw flawlessly recited the Christian prayer. With dubious glances the officer gathered the documents and filled in the name and residence of Waclaw Dulczewski. He could now legally live with and work for the Polish widow.
One night, Waclaw was awakened by a shout. “Come down from there!” A flashlight blinded his terrified, bleary eyes. Scrambling down the ladder, Waclaw saw men carrying guns. “Come outside now! they said. To Waclaw’s surprise these men were not Nazis. They were freedom fighters, partisans!
Within eight months of joining the partisans, the war ended.
Yitzchak immediately began to search for any surviving family members. Several months passed. He put his name on lists of survivors, and eventually he learned that his brother, Shmuel, was murdered by firing squad. He later heard that his father died from a heart attack in 1937 and his mother had been murdered by the Nazis.
Eventually, Yitzchak joined a Zionist kibbutz for orphans in Lodz. The group planned to illegally immigrate to Palestine, as soon as arrangements could be made. He learned to speak modern Hebrew, sing Zionist songs, and develop the skills needed to help build Palestine. In 1946, the kibbutz leaders moved the group to Landsberg, Germany, a town near Munich, which was under American leadership.
One afternoon in 1947, Yitzchak waited in the Munich train station after picking up theater tickets for his kibbutz. Suddenly he heard two American soldiers speaking Yiddish.
“Excuse me,” Yitzchak said in Yiddish. “Where are you from?”
“Well, then, you must know my tante (aunt) Sara Newman. She lives in Brooklyn!” Yitzchak declared.
The men laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding! Do you know how big Brooklyn is?”
“Listen,” one of the soldiers said, “we can write to our parents and ask them if they know a Sara Newman. Give us your address and we’ll see what we can do for you.”
A few months later a letter arrived for Yitzchak from his Aunt Sara. “Come to Brooklyn,” she urged. Subsequent letters followed. “Don’t go to Palestine. You’ve survived so much. Do you want to get yourself killed there? You’re the only living Dygola.”
Unfortunately, his aunt was poor and could not afford to become his sponsor. Her words did have a powerful effect on Yitzchak, however, so he contacted the American, and later Canadian, embassies.
“Great news,” said the secretary from the Canadian embassy upon seeing Yitzchak for the second time that month. “The Jewish Congress of Canada is sponsoring 500 orphans. I’m putting your name at the top of the list.”
Yitzchak was taken in by the Fogelbaum family of Montreal, along with another boy named Yitzchak. That’s when his name was changed to Jack.
Time passed and Jack continued to believe that he was the only survivor in his family. He learned the furrier trade and to speak and write English. During the summer of his 19th year, Jack received an urgent call from an acquaintance he had met on the boat to Canada.
“Yitzchak, you’re not going to believe it! Today I saw an ad in the Jewish Daily Forward saying, ‘Eva Chava Dygola from Milwaukee, Wis., is looking for any survivors from her family.’ You’re the only Dygola I know; are you related to her?”
“It’s got to be my mother! She’s alive!” Jack shouted with joy.
Eight months later, philanthropist Harry Bragarnick sponsored Jack’s emigration to the United States. On Sept. 24, 1950, Jack and Eva Dygola reunited in Milwaukee, with copious tears and hugs.
Five out of the eight relatives who had run from the ghetto survived. Sadly, however, Jack lost nearly 70 other family members in the Holocaust.
The Miracle of the Muddy Seat
as told by Louis Koplin
Louis Kopolovics didn’t consider himself fortunate when he was drafted into the Hungarian army in 1943, but ultimately it was his involuntary conscription that saved his life.
While the rest of his family stayed behind in their snug, supposedly safe home in the Carpathian Mountains, Louis was sent to Komarno, a military installation situated on the banks of the Danube River.
It was the Jewish soldiers, not the Christians, who were deliberately selected for the most physically taxing work — labor that required them to be exposed to the brutal East European winters.
Of the original group of Jews with whom Louis was first interned, only 5 percent survived.
Louis got his first break one day when an army captain lined up the 1,000 Jews who were left and barked, “All shoemakers … step forward.”
Five hundred men answered the call and pretended to be shoemakers in order to avoid working outside in the cold. They knew that if they were chosen, they could sleep indoors on blankets and have three meals a day. The captain chose five men, and Louis was one of them.
Later, Louis ended up in Budapest, where he was arrested by the Germans and shipped to the Austrian-Hungarian border to dig ditches they hoped would waylay enemy tanks. From there, he was forced to participate in a death march across the entire length of Austria, to Mauthausen concentration camp.
When Mauthausen was liberated by Pattons’s army on May 6, 1945, Louis was among the skeletal figures who first welcomed the American troops.
Like many survivors, he hopped on trains to search for relatives. They didn’t need identification papers, and the tickets were free. He constantly went back and forth between Prague and Budapest, where the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had set up safe havens for refugees.
One day, while Louis stood in line at one of these soup kitchens, a man came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Your father’s dead,” he told him, without prelude.
“How do you know?” Louis asked, starting to shake. He knew this man from his village, so he believed the information to be true.
“I was with him in Buchenwald until the end. He died two weeks after Liberation.”
The man had no news about the fate of his mother and five siblings.
Another day, Louis boarded a crowded train bound for Budapest. His shoulders sagged as he sought an empty seat. All the compartments were filled. Louis kept opening and closing doors until he found one with a vacant bench.
Louis was about to lower himself onto the seat when he suddenly realized that it was covered with mud. Louis had no more energy to try to find another seat. “I’ll just clean it up myself,” he thought.
He spotted a discarded piece of paper on the floor. Louis bent down to pick up the stray paper and saw that it was a torn page from some kind of official document.
He gave it a cursory glance, and then stood still in his tracks. A name leapt off the page, a name he knew well: Lenka Kopolovics, his sister. His sister’s name on a random page. What did it mean? There were dozens of other names listed on this page, but his eyes were fixed only on her name.
The document bore the official seal of the Swedish Red Cross and was a record of patients sheltered in their facilities. His sister was among them.
Louis jumped off the train at the next station. He made a U-turn back to Prague, where he sent a telegram addressed to “The Swedish Red Cross.” Somehow, Lenka received the message and telegraphed him back 24 hours later.
Postscript: Lenka told Louis that their family had been rounded up from their home and sent to Auschwitz. Their mother and three of their siblings died in the gas chambers.
A few months later, Louis discovered that his brother Bernie had also survived and had either returned to their hometown of Szolyva or their birthplace Nelipeno, a few miles away.
Although he was loath to go back, Louis traveled to Szolyva and began to look for Bernie. He didn’t have far to go. As Louis walked on a small bridge from Szolva, headed north, he collided with his brother, who was walking south from Nelipeno. They fell into each other’s arms and wept.
The three siblings eventually emigrated to the United States and annually winter together in South Florida.
Written by Dov Haller for Otto Solomon
The walls of the impressive stone house on the banks of Germany’s Rhine River were saturated with the history of the Solomon family. They had seen four generations of Solomon men marry and raise children — had watched four generations of this German-Jewish elite family succeed at the family’s bakery.
They had seen the parties and rejoicing, the good and happy times. They had observed young Arthur Solomon, an athletic and vigorous young man, emerge as one of the greatest swimmers in the country.
Though Arthur had set his sights beyond the bakery: He would become an Olympic swimmer, a champion who would bring honor to his family and his country.
In time, Arthur achieved national renown, winning swimming meets across the country. He competed with the celebrated champion, Johnny Weissmuller, who played the famous title role in the Tarzan films. The future looked bright.
It was a late summer’s evening, a mere two months before the night that would forever change the landscape of the country: Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass.
Arthur was walking along the banks of the river, lost in thought, when he heard a weak cry. He looked out into the expanse of water and made out the shape of an overturned boat and its lone passenger, struggling against the powerful current. He didn’t hesitate.
With confident, powerful strokes, Arthur swam out toward the helpless man, placing a strong arm around his weary body.
“Don’t worry,” he assured him, “I will get you to shore, into a warm comfortable bed.” Minutes later, the man was sipping hot tea by the fire, unable to believe that he had been plucked from the jaws of death by this stranger.
Months passed and the situation worsened for Germany’s Jews. Those who had considered themselves privileged soon learned that no privilege was sufficient to make up for the curse of Jewish blood. All of them, professors and doctors, industrialists and athletes, were equally tainted in the eyes of the Germans, and thus, equally unwanted.
Arthur Solomon, fourth generation German, one of Germany’s most promising young athletes, was taken to Dachau that winter. Dachau was the first concentration camp. Close to 200,000 people would perish within its blood-stained fences.
But Arthur Solomon’s wife refused to accept the inevitable. The family had papers to travel to the United States, and she was determined to get her husband out of the camp so that they could escape Germany.
She was mocked for her innocence, derided for her naivete. The camps were the dark hole from which none would return. How would she get him out?
Undaunted, she traveled to the office of the head of the Nazi division in Cologne, Germany, a feared man. He was, however, the same man that Arthur Solomon had rescued from drowning that night.
The officer had not forgotten Arthur’s selfless, heroic act. He arranged for Arthur to be taken out of the concentration camp and over the border into Holland. From there, he, his wife and his young son Otto traveled to America.
As he took his last step on the blood-soaked German soil, Arthur paused, remembering the shouts for help on a summer’s evening — cries that would herald his salvation.
Loading ...