Miracles Through Hell

On the night of January 31, 1943, a group of young people escaped from the ghetto in Pruzhany, Poland. Two people in this group were my father, Shmeryl Elman, age twenty-two, and my uncle, Yossel Elman, nineteen. Temperatures were below zero. Dressed in white linen to camouflage their appearance against the snow on the ground, they made a run for the ghetto fence in complete darkness. They quickly slid under the cut wires and ran for freedom to nearby forests.

There were fifteen men and three women in this group. They had made plans, dug bunkers within the ghetto, and stored a cache of supplies and weapons. A partially completed tunnel was not ready for the escape. Time had not allowed for the tunnel’s completion or finishing other preparations.

The liquidation of the Pruzhany ghetto was underway. It would take four days to liquidate the ghetto of ten thousand Jews. It was now or never to escape for this group approaching the fence. German guards shot at them as they breached the ghetto fence. They had already decided they would get through or die trying.

None of these people had a clue of what miracles and hell they would face after this attempt to escape. All they knew was that if they were to die, it would be on their terms, not Hitler’s.

They sought revenge, not survival. They had no idea of the collective impact of their efforts. They changed the course of a war, the course of history. One by one, they showed the world that the human spirit is a powerful force, no matter the odds.

I have captured the true stories of my parents’ Holocaust survival as accurately as possible.

Without hearing each individual account, one cannot understand the miracles and hell of hiding or being a partisan (a member of an armed resistance group fighting the Germans in World War II).

Every survivor’s story has two key themes: the absolute hell they faced and the countless miracles that kept them alive.

The children of Holocaust survivors are known as “second-generation survivors.” Most survivors lived by a “code of silence.” This silence was meant to shield their children from the horrors of their survival, but it did the opposite.

Their silence kept us always wondering about their past. The family members lost—our roots. We could see their emotional pain as much as they tried to hide it. We could not understand it. We suffered from our own scars, even nightmares. We did not understand why. We would always hear the slogan “Never forget” when the Holocaust was mentioned in the synagogue or public remembrance. But we always asked ourselves, “Never forget what?”

In the 1970s, the emotional and psychological struggles of children of Holocaust survivors had been formally discovered. While not born during the Holocaust, the second generation inherited a legacy of trauma through the behavioral patterns of their parents and their parents’ silence about their trauma.

My father passed away in 1989, my mother in 2004. All my survivor grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins have passed away—all with their stories untold. If I did not tell their stories, they would be lost forever. And I would never free myself from always wondering. And even worse, my children and their children would never know our family history and their
connection to the Holocaust.

Most survivors are no longer alive today. Holocaust denial is becoming mainstream. Fascism, even in America, is on the rise. For these reasons, these stories of survival must be understood and preserved.

Writing this book has been a personal journey for me, in ways I never imagined. Because the silent survivors of the Holocaust unknowingly passed on emotional scars to their children, those of us in the next generation have scars and demons in our heads that we have never understood, nightmares when we sleep that we cannot explain.

This personal journey has helped me understand my trauma and my battle with depression. Through the telling of my family history, my story is also told.