Lola Rein Kaufman says that at the age of 7 the Germans arrived in her Polish town and killed her mother and father.
Kaufman's grandmother arranged with a 'Gentile' woman for Lola to hide with three other Jews in a 6-by-4-foot hole dug in the floor of a root cellar.
When the Holocaust was over and she was liberated, she only had the embroidered dress her mother had made. She cleaned it up and kept it.
Then when the Holocaust™ Museum opened in New York, Lola gave the museum the dress as an artifact.
Lola had never told her Holocaust™ story to anyone, not even to her three children. But after speaking to a museum representative, suddenly she decided to start telling her tale.
Lola shares her story to fight against "the supremacist haters."
Holocaust survivor stunned by attack on memorial to millions of slaughtered innocents
Michael Daly
Thursday, June 11th 2009
NY Daily News
In the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautifully embroidered dress donated by a New York woman who wore it as a child as she hid for nine months in a hole from the Nazis.
Her name is Lola Rein Kaufman, and she was baby-sitting her 3-year-old grandson when news reached her that murderous hate had announced itself anew in the form of gunfire at the Washington memorial to millions of slaughtered innocents, among them her father and the mother who embroidered the dress.
"You must be kidding," the 74-year-old Kaufman said. "Oh, my God."
She was shocked, even though she knew that such evil has persisted long after the fall of the Third Reich.
"I know it's out there," she said.
She had come to a conclusion about haters, be they the ones who murdered her parents or 88-year-old James von Brunn, who went into the Holocaust museum on Wednesday with a rifle and began shooting, killing a security guard before he was shot.
She had her own encounter with murderous haters at age 7, when the Germans arrived in her Polish town. Her father, Yidl Rein, was beaten to death. Her mother, Dwojra, was shot on Purim.
Her maternal grandmother survived long enough to give Kaufman a cup with a false bottom containing money and arrange for her to meet a Gentile woman under a bridge. The woman arranged for Kaufman to hide with three other Jews in a 6-by-4-foot hole dug in the floor of a root cellar.
"It was like being buried alive," she recalled Wednesday.
When she was liberated, she still wore her only clothing, the embroidered dress her mother had made, thick with dirt and lice, but the beautiful design and stitching still a sole memento of lost love and tenderness.
"I had no pictures, I had no nothing," she said.
She cleaned the dress and kept it on the long journey that ended in New York. She became a member of the Holocaust museum when it opened and got a letter seeking artifacts.
"I said to myself, 'You know, this dress is hanging in the closet,'" she recalled.
A museum representative traveled to New York to interview her. She began to explain the origins of the dress and told a story she had never told even to her three children.
"I never talked," she said.
Any stitching that had come loose during the months in the hole and the years since was carefully restored by the museum's conservators.
"A silent witness," the museum called it.
The dress and hundreds of other artifacts were bearing silent witness at the museum when the gunshots rang out Wednesday. The medics who rushed the wounded supremacist killer to the hospital were African-American.
News of the shooting reached Kaufman just after her daughter dropped off the grandson. He was making happy sounds in the background as Kaufman spoke to a reporter of what she had learned of murderous losers. She had found that the best response for those who survive is to embrace what makes you a true winner.
"I am not a complainer to begin with," she said. "I have nothing to complain about. I'm not hungry, I'm not cold. I have three children. I have four grandchildren."
She added, "I am not a person that needs bigger and better. I have what I never had in my life. I'm so satisfied."
Then, as the TV news reported all the details of the hate-driven shooting at the museum, she went back to her grandson.
mdaly@nydailynews.com
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/06/11/2009-06-11_beauty_in_face_of_evil.html
Article: "Holocaust survivor stunned by attack on memorial to millions of slaughtered innocents"
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Read more about Lola's story via the USHMM.
Hear Lola speak...
