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Published 11/27/03 in The Post-Star newspaper Holocaust survivors have much to be thankful for COMMENTARY By STACEY MORRIS Abe and Clara Rudnick are celebrating a little more than Thanksgiving today. It's also their 58th wedding anniversary. But that's only the beginning of their gratitude. The Glens Falls couple met in Lodz, Poland, inside a bombed out house that Clara called home at the time. It was the end of World War II and both were reeling from the trauma of just having spent four years in Nazi labor camps, where they worked hungry and barefoot in the snow -- Abe in Dachau near Munich and Clara in East Prussia (now Poland). They were alone in the world that day in August of 1945 when their paths crossed. Both lost all members of their immediate family to the Nazi's. "He was so skinny when I met him," Clara remembered. "After four years of Hitler ..." When Abe was liberated by American soldiers in April 1945 at Dachau, he was lying on the floor of his barracks, 69 pounds and covered in lice. Clara was liberated by Russian soldiers in March of that year at a concentration camp in East Prussia on the Baltic sea. The last three months of her imprisonment were spent in a barn with 1,000 other women -- an attempt by the Nazis to keep prisoners hidden from the approaching Russian troops. As hundreds of the women around her died, Clara managed to survive on a diet of bread and potato peel soup. "At the end I couldn't walk ... If one more day, I wouldn't be here," she said. After the war, Abe said it was common for dazed survivors to wander the streets of European cities, scrawling their names on the exterior of buildings in hopes that friends and family would get word they were alive. "I had a father and a brother," remembered Abe. "Later I found out Nazi soldiers poured gasoline on them and burned them alive. How do you like that?" Abe heard from other survivors that his mother was drowned deliberately in a boat full of other prisoners off the coast of the Baltic Sea. Before Clara was sent to the labor camp, her mother, two sisters and two brothers, including her twin, were taken from their home in Lithuania, rounded up and shot by Nazi soldiers. After Abe and Clara were liberated at the war's end, both returned to their native Poland to search for any evidence of their family. When they learned they were the only survivors, the couple decided to make the 1,000-mile journey to a displaced persons camp in Munich, where they awaited entry to the United States. They married soon after their arrival at the camp. The ceremony, conducted by a red-bearded Hungarian rabbi, was one of the few good memories they have of 1945. "We had nothing," said Abe. "I borrowed pants for the ceremony; she borrowed a dress." Their marriage certificate was documented on a hand-printed piece of newspaper. Two years later, in October of 1947, their twin sons Marvin and Joe were born. A third son, Howard, was born in the United States in 1954. The Rudnicks' original plan was to settle in Israel, but when Abe connected with an uncle in Troy, the family moved to the states, where Abe eventually established a successful plumbing supply business in Glens Falls. Abe received an unexpected gift from his uncle -- old family photos. All of his had been destroyed during the war. "When I saw those pictures of my family," he remembered. "I cried for a week." Over the years, Clara has given dozens of lectures in the area about her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. The circumstances may be behind them, but memories are as fresh as yesterday. When she remembers her family, it's only a matter of seconds before she's shaking her head and weeping. She'll typically reach into her pocket for a tissue to wipe away the stream of tears that flows down both wrinkled cheeks. Clara brushes left, right, then left again, until the tissue is soaked -- it's far too inadequate a net to capture so much pain. "We remember our loved ones every day," said Abe. "The more we talk about them, the more it breaks our heart. ... But the older we get, we think about it more and more. After we're gone, who's going to remember our parents, brothers and sisters?" This year, Abe and Clara will celebrate Thanksgiving and their wedding anniversary alone, foregoing the usual visit to their son's home in California. They don't think of themselves as particularly heroic for having rebuilt their lives and survived terrible memories for the past 58 years. "We are just normal, ordinary people," said Abe. "We know that no one is going to feed us, we have to feed ourselves, it's as simple as that. If you think about the other stuff, you dig a hole and commit suicide. "You either live or you die, and we decided to live." |