ST. LOUIS COUNTY • At this point in his 87 years, Mendel Rosenberg has told his story of Holocaust survival more times than he can count. And he knows that after each telling, one question is more likely than any other:
“Did you meet Hitler?â€
He is able to laugh at the question, shake his head and say: “No. No, I did not meet Hitler.â€
Rosenberg often tells his story at the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in west ºüÀêÊÓƵ County, off Lindbergh Boulevard. He shares stories about life in concentration camps, where food was far from a certainty, and he weighed only 60 pounds when he was 16.
“They didn’t care what happened to us,†Rosenberg said of the Nazis. His father was shot, among the 15 family members who did not make it out alive. In all, 6 million Jews died during World War II.
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Of the 72,000 survivors who came to the U.S., about 300 settled in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region, including Rosenberg. But over 70 years, many of them have died, leaving fewer and fewer to give firsthand accounts of one of the world’s worst atrocities.
“It’s important for people to understand people survived, had lives, coped in different ways. The continuation of life takes on additional experiences,†said Vera Emmons, whose mother survived six different camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Jean Cavender, director of the local Holocaust museum, said the center realizes how fortunate it is to have survivors share their stories. But as the museum celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, it also is looking at ways to enhance the experience once those firsthand accounts are no longer available. Of that 300 first calculated living in the region, fewer than 100 remain today.
“Clearly, it’s not ever going to be the same,†Cavender said. Visitors often want to hug Holocaust survivors, bringing an intimacy to history, she said.
“We’re starting to think how we are going to cope; we’re kind of grappling with it,†Cavender said. “It’s going to be a challenge thinking what that will be like.â€
In 2012, the museum installed an interactive exhibition highlighting other genocides throughout the world, including in Bosnia, which led to thousands of refugees ending up in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. Also featured are conflicts in Rwanda and Nigeria, showing “the lessons of the Holocaust are not yet learned,†Cavender said in explaining an exhibit called “Change Begins With Me: Confronting Hate, Discrimination and Ethnic Conflict.â€
“Every 19 seconds, someone is the victim of an act of genocide or politicide,†Cavender said. To drive home that point, the exhibit includes a large digital board listing the number of such people killed since the Holocaust. On a recent visit, it read “111,796,858.â€
Emmons says that ongoing conflicts make it easy to talk about the Holocaust in the present.
“I talk about how my grandparents, living in Berlin, thought they could wait it out, but it became apparent they couldn’t,†Emmons said. “But for you to have a way out you have to have a place to take you in. We’re seeing that with Syria today.â€
Her mother, Gerda Nothmann Luner, graduated from what is now Virginia Tech and got a job in Chicago, where she met the man who would become her husband. They had two children and three grandchildren.
“Once she survived, she lived,†Emmons said of her mother. “To learn the individual story makes it real.â€
Luner died in 1999. But her story lives on, thanks to a three-hour interview she did four years earlier as part of a comprehensive oral history project created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, inspired by his experience making “Schindler’s List.†The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, created in 1994 to gather video testimonies, is the largest archive of its kind in the world, with more than 51,000 stories from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.
In her presentations at the museum, Emmons includes nine video clips of her mother, including her talking about when Hitler came to power, anti-Semitic remarks from teachers and her time at Auschwitz.
“It becomes much more personal than I could ever do alone,†Emmons said. “You can hear her accent and her saying, ‘This happened to me.’â€
A decade before Spielberg began his oral history project, a volunteer with the Jewish Federation of ºüÀêÊÓƵ and its Holocaust Commission began putting together oral histories on cassette tapes, which the museum has digitized and hopes to incorporate into its education programs.
By the end of the year, the museum expects to have hit the 500,000-visitor mark. Part of the planning for the next 20 years is how to keep visitors, a large number of them middle school children, studying World War II, engaged and thinking about the Holocaust as more than a tragedy that happened long ago.
“We’re never going to leave out the foundation of what this is about, learning from the history and lessons of the Holocaust,†Cavender said. One consideration is talking with schoolchildren after they have walked through the exhibits, to see what resonates with them.
Meanwhile, the survivor talks will continue, like the ones from Rachel Miller, who, at 82, is an engrossing storyteller.
She shares on a large projection screen photos of her family in Paris in the late 1930s.
“As you can see, I’m smiling. I’m happy,†Miller says.
But as her story unfolds, her voice breaks. In August 1941, her father was taken away as part of a roundup of Jews. Shortly thereafter, when Miller was 9, her mother sent her to a farm outside Paris and told her to begin going by the name Christine. And to tell no one she was Jewish.
Three days later, Miller’s mother, sister and other family members were among 12,000 French Jews forced out of their homes and into concentration camps. Miller never saw any of her family again.
“There was no more singing, dancing, getting together. No more anything,†Miller said. “You couldn’t be friends with anyone because you didn’t know what was going to happen. There was fear. Constant, constant fear.â€
As she finishes up her story, including her arrival in the U.S. at the age of 13, living in foster homes, marrying young and having two children, she shuts off the projector.
“And that is my story,†Miller says.
It’s a story the museum hopes she is able to continue telling for many years to come.