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Holocaust survivors spend lives searching for sibling

News Channel 8 photo by MICHAEL EGGER

Janusz Suralinski and Rachel Nurman were separated from their siblings during the Holocaust. Decades later, they looked to science to confirm what their hearts felt was true.

By Donna Koehn

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 30, 2009

Rachel's story

Rachel liked to wear her hair in braids as she and her friends picnicked and read books by the waterfall in a forest in her hometown near Warsaw. In the late 1930s, she lived with her beloved grandmother, a good-natured father who talked business with her book-smart mother, her three older brothers and the baby, Mendele. Because her mother was 45 when he was born, Rachel cared for Mendele, 5, as if he were her own son. Rachel, 16, was smart, with college plans.

At first, the Polish people threw flowers at the feet of the German soldiers as they came into Warsaw. But soon the soldiers were taunting the Jews, pulling on their beards and striking them.

One hot day, all the Jews were ordered into the market — to be counted, the Germans said. Seventy years later, the day plays like a movie in her mind.

Waiting a whole day, with the children and the old people, the children screaming and no water and nothing to eat.

Women and children were given bread. She clutched her brother's hand as the scene grew more chaotic.

Take a piece to your father, Mother said. Rachel let go of Mendele and made her way to her father, who was waiting with the men.

As soon as he took the bread, a German guard hit him. Why do you do this to him, she asked. He didn't do nothing to you. The guard told the girl to go away or she would get the same.

Trucks arrived, and the people knew they had been lied to. The Germans brought dogs to scare the frightened women and children onto the trucks, destined for the Warsaw Ghetto. As Rachel prepared to board with her mother, she panicked. Mendele was gone.

He's safe, her mother said. I sent him to your brother's house. He'll be happy playing with his cousin. Rachel was easy with that.

Only later, in the ghetto, would she learn her mother had lied.

Surviving and searching

I lost him that day, she admitted. You must forget about him, Rachel, her mother said. You, of all us, are going to survive.

So Rachel fought to live, sometimes outwitting the Germans, oftentimes simply doing as she was told. But she never forgot the blond little boy.

Chosen to work, she was moved from camp to camp, always searching for family. She knew her mother went directly from the ghetto to Treblinka, an extermination camp. She assumed her father perished as well.

But her brothers were strong, big boys. Mendele, nie. He was small, frail.

When she worked in Auschwitz, gathering the clothes of those who had died in the gas chambers, she watched for them.

Sometimes a transport would arrive, full of children orphaned or separated from their parents. The bigger children held the smaller ones. Knowing she would be killed if caught, Rachel nevertheless hovered nearby, listening to the weeping children, trying to recognize the cries of her Mendele.

She knew children went straight into the gas chambers. Years later, she felt physical agony at the thought of her little brother dying there alone.

Sometimes, as she worked in the fields, the Jews arriving at the camps shouted to her.

Hey, Jewish girl! Tell us! What are they going to do with us here? Are they baking bread?

They saw the chimneys, and they were hungry. Rachel couldn't answer because the Germans would kill her on the spot.

The soldiers promised the Jews coffee as soon as they took a shower.

She was there, right there, when they shoved them in, and they started praying. The ones who prayed so much, they hit them so badly that people started going faster and faster because they were afraid of the hitting over the head.

Rachel couldn't sleep at night, and worked all day. Listening to the crying of the people and the children was too traumatic. No sleep, nie.

She and the young girls tried to let the world know. When they bundled the discarded clothing for transport to Germany, they left the yellow stars attached so people would know they came from the Jews.

There was everything, wedding dresses that people brought with them, diamonds, gold laying on the floor. Who wanted to take that? They knew their own time would come. To stay alive, the girls ate the food the doomed people left behind.

Living with death

Every Sunday, the girls of 15 and 16, already skeletons, had veins tapped for blood for the wounded German soldiers. Rachel, on a top bunk, learned to open a window and shimmy out to the roof, slipping back in when the girls returned. To give blood would have drained her of life, as it did the others.

Later, she thanked God she was not beautiful or tall, as the prettiest Jewish girls were chosen for German parties. Starving, the girls accepted the food and wine, but then were raped. When the party ended, they were shot to eliminate the proof of the Germans' dalliance with "racial impurity."

Finally came April 15, 1945 — she always remembers the day — when the English arrived at Bergen-Belsen. But first, the German soldiers tried to kill the remaining Jews, starting with the men. Rachel and two friends hid in a well, sitting on each others' shoulders, until a Jewish boy came to tell them to come out.

The English made the German big shots — even Dr. Josef Mengele, a ruthless camp doctor — carry the bodies to the graves.

She recognized him, and threw a big rock at him. In German, he told her she would come again to Auschwitz. Not on your life, she yelled back.

Rachel was 19.

She met Israel Nurman, also a survivor, at the camp when he came looking for his sister. They were married quickly and moved to the northeastern United States, trying without success to outrun their memories. They had three children, three grandchildren, three great-grandchildren.

She remembered her mother telling her to live so she could tell the world of the atrocities.

So Nurman journeyed to Dusseldorf, Germany, in the 1970s to testify against Hildegard Laechert, known as "Bloody Briggita," accused of killing thousands of Jews in the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps.

In court, Nurman lost control as she watched Laechert calmly writing in a notebook.

What are you writing there — how many children you killed? she shouted. The judge threatened a mistrial until Nurman explained that she thought for a moment she was back in Auschwitz.

She is proud she helped get Laechert sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Horrors haunt her

Even now, as old age and years of deprivation slow her walk to a shuffle, Nurman visits schools to talk to children about the Holocaust. It helps her handle the fear and the pain she can't shake. She can't remember what she ate for lunch yesterday, but the horrors play out, over and over.

She spent her life battling depression and irrational fears. She refused to let her children ride the school bus for fear someone would take them. She worried that Germans with dogs would come after her. She believes her children suffered, too, and it's all her fault.

She tells the schoolchildren never to let something like this happen again. And always, always to value their families.

Through the years, she thought of her brothers and how deeply she loved them. Because she never learned their fate, she tried to tell herself they must have perished. And yet, she never stopped searching.

It's him!

Nurman continued pouring over the graceta, the newsletter that still hoped to connect the ever-dwindling families torn apart in the Holocaust. In December, when she saw the photo of Suralinski, she knew it was him.

He looked so much like her own children, with their light-colored hair.

It had to be.

She called his home in Warsaw, and the stories poured out in the Polish Nurman never forgot. They compared tales. So much matched.

Soon, Suralinski boarded a plane and arrived at Nurman's small apartment in a Jewish retirement home in Tampa. She couldn't share the joy with her husband, Israel, who had died 12 years before. But Suralinski stayed there for weeks, talking, talking, talking. Nurman told Suralinski all about the family he had never known.

Both submitted to DNA testing to prove what they knew in their hearts was true.

After more than three months of waiting, the results.

No match.

Suralinski refused to accept the results. It was surely a mistake. He flew back to Poland, convinced he had found his sister. Although 440,000 Jews passed through the Warsaw Ghetto, surely no two had stories so similar.

Nurman, too, yearned to believe it was an error. But hard-won pragmatism is part of her nature. So is her belief that life is not fair, that bracing for the worst is a strength and a necessity. In her memoirs, she wrote that civilization failed her. If DNA did, too, well, that is what life brings.

But she will look for blue eyes until the day she dies.

Tribune researcher Melanie Coon contributed to this report. Reporter Donna Koehn can be reached at (813) 259-8264.