New York – Community Of Holocaust Survivors Dwindles In New York

New York – One thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own.

For Sophia Goldberg, change has meant the end of a way of life.

On a recent morning Goldberg sat in her tidy seventh-floor living room, surrounded by needlepoint portraits stitched by her own hands, and sighed over the changes immediately around her.

Goldberg, 98, lives in a 19-story apartment house in Flushing, Queens, one of two neighboring buildings that were erected for survivors of the Holocaust. When she moved there in 1978, she said, her neighbors formed a tight community of predominantly Jewish refugees like her who had fled to the United States from Austria or Germany.

“We had parties,” Goldberg said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We had card games. It was our people. We had Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in our apartment.”

Now, she said, “It’s completely changed – I have no neighbors here.”

For Goldberg, the transformation has been steady and overwhelming. Of the 326 residents in her building, now only 31 are Holocaust survivors, and only seven of them are German or Austrian.

The new neighbors are friendly enough. But she said: “We do not talk. We say hello, goodbye. But that’s it. They don’t speak German. They don’t speak English. They speak Russian and Chinese. Sometimes they just shake their heads.”

The Martin Lande House in Flushing, where Goldberg lives, was the second of six apartment houses built by Selfhelp Community Services, a nonprofit group started in 1936 to help refugees from Nazi Germany resettle in the United States. When it built its first residence for elderly Holocaust survivors in 1965, Flushing was a logical location, said Elihu Kover, vice president for Nazi victim services, because the neighborhood was largely Jewish and Italian.

The residents came mainly from Germany and Austria at first, then later from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Many had ties to Flushing. They knew the merchants and synagogues. At the organization’s first senior center, which opened in 1975, they played cards and celebrated birthdays and Jewish holidays along with other older adults from the neighborhood. It was their place.

On a recent visit to the Benjamin Rosenthal-Prince Street Senior Center, which is attached to the original residential building, it was plain that this mix had been replaced by a group that reflects the neighborhood now, which is overwhelmingly Chinese and Korean. Though no one complained openly about the change, for some it had not been easy.

“It’s hard for them,” said Stuart Kaplan, Selfhelp’s chief executive, speaking of the Holocaust survivors. “You’ll hear, ‘Look at what has happened to our senior center.’ On a practical level they understand, but I don’t think they accept it readily or are happy about it. Their thinking is, ‘We used to be the people who are throughout this building.”’

Goldberg lost her whole family in Germany, and more than a half-century later she agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that she not be asked about the Holocaust. Her friends – she has a regular group of eight women – declined to talk even under that condition.

Part of their bond, Goldberg said, arose from not having to discuss what they all knew. Speaking of their get-togethers, she said: “I try not to talk about it. I talk about what it was like before that time. We still talk about that.”

As Goldberg spoke, in clipped phrases often repeated by her aide, what she described was a community built on a relationship to memory: how to manage it collectively and individually, how to preserve the past without being overwhelmed by it. As that community has faded, Holocaust survivors face not just a single loss but many, said Carmen L. Morano, an associate professor at Hunter College who has studied survivors.

“There are parallel processes going on,” Morano said. ‘`There are the losses that all aging adults experience as they watch their social networks dwindling. And there’s the loss of community created by the trauma they experienced.

“And there’s the sense that as they near the end of their lifetime, what happens to the memory? We all experience loss, but this is quite a constellation of losses.”

Dr. Gary J. Kennedy, the director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said survivors’ experiences made it particularly difficult to form intimate relations with the new neighbors, and made the loss of others like themselves more acute.

“That goes back to the occupation experience,” he said. “Who could you trust? People like you. That’s a strength, but it’s also a vulnerability.”

Many were further stigmatized in the United States, he added, by people who told them “to suppress the past, to roll up your sleeves and build a new life.”

“We’ve moved away from that in the mental health community and as a society,” Kennedy said. “But these individuals don’t forget the threat, even with dementia. The old memories remain.”

To a great extent, the changes in the buildings are simply part of the aging process. Friends die or go to nursing homes, and strangers take their places; any new bonds can never be as strong as the old bonds.

“It’s because the buildings are for elder people,” said Vladimir Pozdnyakov, who escaped from Byelorussia when the Nazis occupied it, and has lived in a Selfhelp building in Flushing since 1997. “There’s one way to go only.”

Though he gets along with his new neighbors, he said, speaking through an interpreter because he does not speak much English, he cannot feel close to them – in part because of the language barrier, but also because of the nature of his experience.

“It’s very difficult to express how we feel,” he said. “Who didn’t live through it doesn’t understand. Like the 25 million people who don’t have food in Africa now, but who understands? Only someone who had this experience. It’s like that.”

But there are also more bureaucratic reasons for the shift in population. With the growth of fair-housing legislation in the mid-1970s and the rise of public financing for housing for the elderly, Selfhelp stopped giving preference to Holocaust survivors, instead making apartments available to all low-income people over age 60. When a resident left, the next resident was chosen by lottery. And as the population of Flushing changed, so did the applicants in the lottery system.

“The residents have a saying that when an original resident passes away, it’s a Korean or Chinese couple who moves in,” said Mohini Mishra, program director for the buildings.

The differences echo throughout the buildings. There is still a synagogue on the ground floor of Goldberg’s building, but attendance fell to about 70 or 75 for this year’s Yom Kippur services, from highs of around 200 in the past.

“They an’t get a minyan together,” Goldberg said, referring to the quorum of 10 men required for traditional Jewish services. “If they didn’t have the Russians, they wouldn’t have a synagogue.”

On another afternoon, Fira Schwarzman, who lives downstairs from Goldberg, took stock of the changes in their building. “There’s been a lot of renovation, new cabinets, new windows,” she said, brightly.

Of the transformation among her neighbors, she said she saw different ethnic groups living together without fighting – a vast difference from the experience of her youth.

“I say, the Chinese people are people too,” Schwarzman said. “If the American government approved them to come to this country, it’s OK. You have to respect everyone. People say, ‘Why did the Chinese people come here?’ I say, ‘Why did you come here?’ It’s amazing how people can say, ‘I’m a refugee.’ Maybe they are refugees, too.”

Schwarzman, 84, was a teenager in Moldova when the Nazis came in 1941. Her mother took her and her sister to the Caucasus, and then to Central Asia when the Nazis invaded there as well. Her father refused to leave their home. He was killed, along with 13 family members.

Unlike Goldberg, Schwarzman said she regularly discussed her experiences during the war, however painful.

“Ten years from now, no more survivors will be,” she said. “But we have to teach young people what it was. The Holocaust cannot be again. It should not be again.”

She added that she was still trying to make sense of her memories. “I talk every time with survivors about the harsh time that it was,” she said. “My brain cannot accept how it was, how I survived to be 84.”

The difference between the two women points to a division among Holocaust survivors, one of many, said Kover of Selfhelp.

Survivors often draw a “hierarchy of suffering,” he said, distinguishing their hardships from others’. Even in a diminishing community, there is a tendency to divide into subgroups: Russians from Germans, adult survivors from child survivors, people who survived concentration camps from those who fled ahead of the soldiers.

For the survivors in Flushing, this has meant a change within their community in addition to the one without. Russian-speaking survivors, mostly Soviet emigres from the 1980s and 1990s, are now a majority. Compared with the buildings’ original German and Austrian residents, the Russian-speaking survivors are younger, poorer, newer to the United States and less likely to speak English. Of 71 total survivors in six Selfhelp buildings, only nine are from Germany and three from Austria.

For Goldberg, this churn has added to her sense of loss. “We used to have card games,” she said. “Now the Russians have card games, but not with the Germans. It’s not that they’re unfriendly. They’re friendly. But they’re their own people. They have their own experiences.”

In spring, Kover said, the Russian survivors tend to celebrate V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe, and the Germans commemorate Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance and mourning for Holocaust victims.

About half of America’s remaining Nazi victims – defined as people who lived in a country under Nazi rule and who directly suffered persecution – or 38,000 people, live in the New York area, down from 55,000 in 2002, according to projections made by Selfhelp from a 2002 survey conducted for the United Jewish Appeal.

Selfhelp projects that the number will drop to 30,000 by 2015 and 19,000 by 2025. In 2002, half of these lived in Russian-speaking homes, a share that is most likely increasing.

For all of these, Kover said, old age presents unique difficulties, both for survivors and for people around them. “Behaviors that helped you to survive are now detrimental,” he said. “It’s like a seepage of a toxin. It eats into all their relationships. Screaming and being strong was how you survived. Try screaming in a Medicaid office.”

Survivors often resist care, he said, because during the Holocaust to admit weakness was to invite death.

As the buildings’ demographics change, the survivors risk becoming isolated, a major danger in any elderly population, said Betsy Smith, managing director of senior communities. “And we encourage assimilation in everyone,” she said.

Whenever groups mix, sensitivities are high. The staff learned not to use yellow tablecloths or decorations because the color reminded some survivors of the yellow star they had to wear decades before. “Same with the Chinese,” Mishra said. “Using white is the color of death, so our snowflakes are all blue or silver.”

Robin Hu, 78, who lives above Goldberg, is a regular at the senior center, where he enjoys ballroom dancing twice a week, largely with fellow Chinese speakers.

“The Russian people don’t go there – I don’t know why,” he said. “My impression is that they’re not very joyful or active. I think maybe they experienced a very sad past. I don’t know the details, because it’s not a pleasure to be asked about the sad past.”

Hu speaks a few Russian words, and he knows the history of the Holocaust. But having a substantive conversation with his neighbors – about who is Jewish; about painful past experiences – lies outside a language barrier. He said he had invited neighbors to his apartment to sing Russian-language songs with his karaoke machine, but so far none had come.

“We don’t know why the Russian people came here,” he said. “And they don’t know why the Chinese people came here. Because they can’t ask us questions. We say hello. What next? There’s no next step. So you don’t get close.”

Kennedy said the barriers were exaggerated because the residents were all seniors, rather than a mix of generations. To a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a 5-year-old Chinese child in an elevator would be a surrogate grandchild, not a cultural stranger, he said. “You provide security but rob them of the role of grandparenting,” he said. “Children are icebreakers. Natural impulse is if there’s a kid in the elevator, you’re drawn to the child, whether he looks like you or not.”

Some residents said they wished there were more opportunities to get to know one another. At this year’s communal Passover Seder, the building staff distributed explanations of the ceremony in Chinese and Korean, and encouraged everyone to attend; at the recent party for Chinese New Year, the staff provided explanations in Russian and German.

But everyday encounters, the sort of interdependency that creates healthy communities, remain a challenge, made harder by history as well as language.

Sofya Brayer, 82, said she participated in many of the building activities but did not feel close to any of her Chinese neighbors. What their experiences were, how they came to Flushing – she had no idea.

“Probably we need an organized discussion with other people who can tell us about their life,” she said.

Though materials distributed by the building discuss the experiences of Holocaust survivors, other residents’ backgrounds remain largely unnoted. “It’d be good for us because we don’t know about their life,” Brayer said.

For others, though, getting to know strangers might only codify their sense of loss. The old neighbors were gone or going. The new neighbors would never be the same. As Goldberg said, “I miss the crowd.”