Chabad to Honor Holocaust Survivors

Anna Sorotzkin remembers meeting Raoul Wallenberg, the legendary Swede who saved approximately 100,000 Hungarian Jews, including herself, from extinction at the hands of the Nazis. Rachel Schwartz recalls living in the Warsaw Ghetto and being forced, at 14, on a death march that caused her to hallucinate from food and clothing deprivation. Sorotzkin and Schwartz will be among the dozen Holocaust survivors residing in the community to be honored at Chabad of Pacific Palisades’ ‘Survivors’ Honorary Evening’ on Tuesday, September 9 at the Riviera Country Club. The public event will feature guest speaker Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Oskar Schindler’s list. The subject of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book ‘Schindler’s Ark’ and a 1993 Steven Spielberg movie, Schindler, an industrialist and a Nazi party member, became the unlikely savior of 1,100 Jews by having them work at his factory. Today, Sorotzkin, a retired agriculturist, and Schwartz, a sales associate at Coldwell Banker’s Westwood office, are both Highlands residents. But during World War II, they were mere children when the Nazis invaded various European nations and rounded up Jewish citizens for a mass extermination of some six million Jews by war’s end. Born in Budapest in 1932, Sorotzkin remembered an idyllic existence with her large extended family, living in an apartment overlooking the Danube, and enjoying summers at a rented villa at Lake Balaton. Her first awareness of the impending Nazi danger came when she overheard a German-Jewish woman question her mother as to how she could live in such comfort: ‘Don’t you know what is happening to the Jews in Germany?’ By 1941, two of Sorotzkin’s uncles, and her 20-year-old cousin, were taken as slave laborers. The only survivor, an uncle, was killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. In 1942, Sorotzkin became ostracized at school for her ethnicity, and in April 1944, Jews were singled out in Hungarian society, their clothes and houses branded with yellow stars. Sorotzkin was fortunate enough to be reunited with her immediate family after the war. Sorotzkin’s father and brother had also ended up in Mauthausen, but they were among those in the camp liberated by the Americans. As for Sorotzkin and her mother, they were on the list to be transported to Auschwitz when they were personally saved from certain doom by one of the most legendary of ‘righteous gentiles,’ Wallenberg, who essentially blackmailed German Army commander Gen. Gerhard Schmidhuber into relinquishing them. ‘He was very, very brave,’ Sorotzkin said. ‘A no-nonsense man who, in my opinion, is the greatest hero of the time.’ Originally intending to become a physician, Sorotzkin suffered a series of political complications that led her to study agriculture instead. In November 1956, following the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, Sorotzkin emigrated to America, where she worked at menial labor in Miami and Detroit before attending Penn State on a scholarship and landing a job with the Burpee Seed Company in Santa Paula. ‘I always wanted to come to California,’ Sorotzkin told the Palisadian-Post. It was here that she met her Israeli-born husband Joshua, who worked for Ventura-based Shell Oil as a chemical engineer. In Ventura, the Sorotzkins raised their daughters, Ruth, and twins Aliza and Dalia. The former, a Palisades physician, led Sorotzkin to become a ‘professional grandma’ to Rachel, Jordan and Ava in the Palisades. Schwartz told the Post a similar story of upheaval. Born Rachel Gastfreind in 1931, she lived in Warsaw with her parents, two brothers and a sister. Before the war, Schwartz’s father made a comfortable living as owner of a spring mattress factory and the Gastfreind family vacationed at a summer cottage. Things changed dramatically with the September 1939 invasion of Poland by the Germans. The Nazis rounded up, segregated and relocated Jews. The Gastfreinds wound up living in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. On the first night of Passover 1943, the Germans separated the female Gastfreinds from the males, and that was the last time 12-year-old Rachel saw her father and brothers alive. Schwartz and her sister were sent to Majdanek, where they were separated from their mother, never to see her again. After the war, the siblings learned she had perished in the gas chamber. By chance, the Gastfreind sisters escaped death at Majdanek, as Germans began liquidating Jews in anticipation of the approaching Russian army. A few relocations later, the Gastfreind girls were forced on a death march during which nearly all the participants died. The girls gained their freedom on the Elbe River when the Russians arrived. After the war, the Gastfreind sisters were united with a pair of American aunts in Detroit, where Schwartz married Ed Schwartz. ‘We came to California in 1960,’ said Schwartz, a longtime West L.A. resident. ‘We wanted to get away from the winter.’ Today, Schwartz’s two sons, Bruce and Jeffrey, live in L.A. and Murphys respectively. After her first husband passed away in 1968, Schwartz remarried and moved to the Palisades in 1997. Her second husband passed away in 2000, but Schwartz remains a proud Palisadian. To be sure, there is a fine line to respect when centering a festive occasion such as Chabad’s around Holocaust survivors without the event seeming too solemn or, worst, exploitative. But education and, most significantly, the awareness that comes from communicating the horrors and genocide of World War II to young generations less connected to history, is this Chabad event’s raison d”tre, said ‘Survivors” organizer Rabbi Shloimie Zacks. According to Zacks, 26, the evening is not a Chabad fundraiser but an awareness event for the general Palisades community and Chabad is charging admission only to recoup the cost of renting the facility. The subtext of such an event is to impart this facet of history as the number of Holocaust survivors alive to recount their stories steadily dwindles. Both Sorotzkin and Schwartz, incidentally, have participated in filmed interviews with the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization launched in 1994 by Spielberg, following his filming of ‘Schindler’s List,’ to archive Holocaust history via videotaped interviews with survivors. Tickets are $36, regular admission; $126, preferred seating with the opportunity to meet Leyson and other honorees. Reservations (by September 3): (310) 454-7783 or visit www.chabadpalisades.org.