One of the most horrific wars throughout history, and the Holocaust with it, ended a little over 70 years ago, and those who lived through it are fewer and fewer in numbers today.
Friday, the anniversary of “The Night of Broken Glass,” UW had the honor and privilege to be visited by one such survivor, Estelle Nadel, who spoke of the struggles she faced in Nazi-occupied Poland to a large audience in the Union.
Nadel’s visit to UW was arranged by Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, making this her third year in a row visiting UW, and she plans to return again next year.
“I would urge students who are Jewish or want to learn more about Judaism to join Hillel,” president of Hillel, Jenna Yoches said.
After a long life in America with a family of her own, Nadel has chosen to share her experience with audiences around the US, despite the pain of each retelling, so the lessons of the past will not be forgotten.
“There are less and less survivors,” Nadel said. “I want everybody here, the young people especially, to be able to tell their children that they saw a survivor, that she told her story.”
She began to tell her story after a moment of silence in memory of the veterans who fought and died to end the evils committed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in its nearly-achieved attempt to establish supreme government control and rid society of “undesirables”—including nearly six million Jews along with millions more civilians and prisoners across Europe who were slaughtered by the Nazis, whether in camps or as part of their policy of total and indiscriminate warfare.
Nadel was the youngest of five children in a Jewish family when the Nazis invaded Poland and Hitler sent the Gestapo, or “Secret State Police,” throughout the country to identify those “undesirables”—a process that unfolded, and worsened, over several years.
“My parents would hear that there were people disappearing, that the men were being taken away,” Nadel said. “My dad would have meetings at our home. I would hear them talking. ‘What can we do?’”
Nadel’s father chose to remain with the family, who were too poor to risk traveling away, despite these rumors and the departures of other men for Russia. To this day, she believes that her father’s faith and devotion is what saved three of his children in the end.
“It was just before we went into hiding, my father fasted three days in a row,” Nadel said. “And I always think that he fasted for my two brothers and myself.”
The lives of her father, mother, sister and oldest brother were taken by the Nazis, it was only this past April, while visiting Poland for the March of the Living, that Nadel found the names of the rest of her family among those who were murdered at Auschwitz. Her mother was caught and killed while still in Poland as she attempted to bring food back to their hiding place.
After months of hiding with a Polish neighbor, during which one of her brothers departed to blend in as a farm worker with his blond hair, Nadel and her last brother were also found and imprisoned.
“I always thought ‘yes, I’m going to survive,’” Nadel said. “But when we were in the jail, I thought that was it.”
Because of their small size, they managed to escape through a window, and continued to hide for two more years until the Russian army pushed the Germans out of Poland. But even after the Gestapo was gone, Polish collaborators continued to kill Jewish survivors.
One night a group of armed men came to the house where Nadel and her brother were staying, but they fled when a man of that house turned out to be armed as well, and able to protect them.
After an exodus from Poland, the children found their way to a camp in Hungary where Jewish refugees had gathered to leave for Israel, but it was there that Nadel and her two surviving brothers, all reunited, had the chance to come to America.
“The freedom that we had was just wonderful,” Nadel said.
Now, as a survivor of state-sponsored genocide, Nadel laments the division and hatred that she sees among people still today.
“I’m Jewish, you may be Protestant, you may be Catholic—we have to love each other,” Nadel said. “We are all feeling human beings.”
