A Survior Shares her Story

By Danielle Gillespie, palisadespost.com

In its effort to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors for the next generation, Chabad of Pacific Palisades, California, recently invited several of them to speak as part of a class called ‘Beyond Never Again.’

‘We have a moral obligation to hear the stories,’ Adult Education Director at Chabad, Rabbi Shlomo Zacks said, noting that the survivors provide a personal and spiritual perspective of the mass genocide that occurred.

Beba Leventhal, a Pacific Palisades resident who has lived on Enchanted Way for 45 years, was among those to share her story.

In June 1941, the Nazis captured Beba’s hometown of Vilna in Poland (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Beba recalls that many Jewish people fled across the border to Russia. Her family of six, however, decided to stay because her father, Simeon Epstein, had a secure position as a bank manager.

‘We did not think it was going to be so bad; we did not expect the extent of the tragedy,’ said Beba, who was 18 at the time.

At first, the Nazis required Beba and the other Jews to wear an armband with the Jewish star and abide by a curfew. Jews could not be seen outside between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Beba explained that the Nazis took the curfew seriously and would kill Jews out past curfew and leave their dead bodies in the street with a note that listed the time of death as a warning to others.

After a few months, the Nazis forced Beba and her family to move into a ghetto, comprising seven narrow streets enclosed by a fence.

‘They took the poorest part of the city and assigned it to us,’ Beba said. ‘The most we could carry with us was a suitcase. When we arrived at the apartments, it looked as if they had been recently abandoned. There were unfinished meals on the tables.’

Beba’s family lived in a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment with 20 other people. ‘We had to sleep on the floor, and there was one toilet,’ she said, pausing. ‘You can imagine.’

She lived in the ghetto for two years, working many jobs: distributing ration cards, working in gardens around the city, and cleaning and stocking shelves at a supply house.

‘We never had a lot to eat,’ Beba said, noting that when she worked in the gardens, she would hide food under her clothing. ‘It was extremely dangerous. If they caught you, they beat you.’

Beba recalls that every day, the Nazis would take away the elderly and the children, and they would never be heard from again. She lost her entire family: her father, mother, Malka; younger sister, Esia; and two younger brothers, Motia and Chaim.

During those two years in the ghetto, Beba escaped for about a month to live with family friends on their farm. The family hid her on the second floor of their house, but with the harvest workers coming daily, Beba became concerned for the family.

‘I decided that it was too dangerous for them, so I returned to the ghetto,’ she said.

When the ghetto was disbanded, Beba was forced onto a crowded freight train and taken to a concentration camp. ‘We didn’t know what was going to happen to us,’ Beba said. ‘We thought it was the end.’

Beba spent the next two years of her life in three concentration camps: Kaiserwald, Stutthof and Torun, a subcamp of Stutthof.

‘Most of the time I dug ditches,’ Beba said. ‘We used to joke that we were digging graves for ourselves.’

She also had to carry rocks in wheelbarrows from point A to point B. ‘It was busy work to keep us very tired,’ she said, noting that she received a bowl of soup and a piece of bread for dinner and bread and coffee for breakfast. ‘We were skinny like a pencil.’

In spring 1945, the British liberated Beba, and she was hospitalized in a German military hospital for several months. She then traveled by ship with other survivors to Swedish hospitals in Helsingborg and Stockholm. She was diagnosed with typhus and suffered from the consequences of malnutrition.

She reconnected with her father’s older brother, who lived in Brooklyn, and he was instrumental in bringing her to the United States. When she arrived in Brooklyn, she took classes to learn English and worked for YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Beba met her husband, Lee, through her uncle, and they married on August 5, 1948 in San Antonio, Texas. They then moved to Los Angeles, so that Lee could earn his master’s degree in chemical engineering at USC. Lee, who was born in Poland and immigrated with his family to Mexico City as a child, worked for North American Aviation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Leventhals moved to Pacific Palisades in 1965 and raised their two children, Mary Ellen, a psychiatrist who lives in Santa Monica, and Michael, now an attorney who lives in West Los Angeles. They have two grandchildren, Noah, 16, and Ariel, 14.

Beba earned her degree in social work from Antioch University, and she worked for the Jewish Family Service for 17 years as a translator and social worker.

Since the war, Beba has returned to Vilnius, but she discovered that her hometown was a completely different place. The thriving Jewish culture that once existed had disappeared.

‘Every day, I think of that particular time period,’ Beba said. ‘When you are incarcerated for four years, all the memories are bad.’