Historical Fiction at Open High

“It is only the physically strong who survive, and they only survive as long as they are of any use.”

Holocaust survivor Alex Lebenstein weighed only 87 pounds when he was liberated by Russian troops near the end of World War II.  "I was very, very sick when I was liberated," he told a group of Open High School students April 20.  "I had maybe a day or two left to live."

Lebenstein had been working as part of the Nazi slave labor force in Gdansk, Poland, painting U-boats with lead paint.  "Anybody know any stories about lead paint, how bad it is?  If you inhale it, it doesn't make you high, believe me--it makes you sick.  On my belly in those U-boats, I'd have to crawl in where electric wires were running with a fine brush to paint--and God forbid if I missed a spot!  Not only was there nothing to eat, but I was bleeding.  I thank God I was strong!  God gave me the strength to survive and to be here today."

 Lebenstein"s visit to Open High was a culmination for study and writing on the Holocaust by several classes.  Karl Zweerink's "Turning Points" focused on the Holocaust as one of the pivotal events in recent world history.  Pete Glessman's "Holocausts" studied Nazi crimes against the Jews as well as African-American slavery and the Rwandan genocide.  I worked with both classes, using writing exercises in historical fiction. 

Writing historical fiction leads to an intimate and imaginative involvement with the past. Some of the most powerful prose from both Glessman's and Zweerink's classes followed a reading from Jan Karski's History of a Secret State.  Karski, who fought with the Polish Resistance during World War II, had himself smuggled into and out of a death camp, then traveled secretly to Britain to tell the world of the horrors he had seen.  The chapter titled "To Die in Agony" is a narrative of this experience.

For a writing exercise, I asked the students to imagine that they, like Karski, were smuggled into a camp.  What did they witness?  How did they feel?  What telling events occurred?  In their writing, students combined scenes and details from their own imagination with what they had read and studied.      
 

Karen Albert's "Death Camp" opened with a description of the combined stench of filthy inmates and cremated prisoners:  "Everyone knows what the smell is, and that just makes it so much worse."  Michelle Harris invoked the cold, and the sounds of suffering in the barracks.  "I spent the night in a girl's bunk.  It was frigidly cold.  I didn't have a blanket.  All I had was my coat to keep me warm.  I did not sleep that night.  It was impossible.  Girls were coughing all night long."

Many mentioned ash from cremated bodies falling from the sky like snow, among the most poignant images from the movie "Schindler's List":  "What seems to be falling from the sky is not falling from the sky," wrote Marshall Stone.  "It's ashes from the chimney, from the gas chamber." 

Carlton Bullock imagined himself witnessing the arrival of the inmates: "Those who didn't move fast enough were prodded by bayonets; those who collapse are dragged away and not seen again."  The detached, descriptive tone--almost that of an official report--heightens the horror of the scenes he's reporting.  "Some of the mothers are, of course, unwilling to give up their children.  One pregnant woman was even able to give birth to her baby and to hide it for some time, but it died since the mother was too malnourished to nurse it.  Mothers who cling to their children are beaten and often taken with the children to the crematorium.  It is only the physically strong who survive, and they survive only as long as they are of any use."

Other students focused on the suffering and execution of the children, surely among the hardest facts to confront about the Holocaust.  Jeannette Robertson saw herself actually having to slap a child to avoid suspicion in her assumed role of guard.  "My hand came down across her face.  She dropped to her knees, weeping.  Oh God, what have I done?  I've become one of those hideous guards who don't care about anyone but themselves."

For others, the internal conflict was too much.  Karen Albert imagined herself attacking a guard after watching him kill a child. She did this knowing that it would lead to discovery and death.  "I fell back and I died by the boy I tried to save."  And, disguised as a guard, Susan Nelson killed the Camp Director.  She also knew the consequences, but her anger was too intense: "Everything seems like slow motion now.  I raise my gun and point it right at his cold, heartless body.  I pull the trigger and see the force of the bullet push him backward.  A smile comes over my face as I feel the bullets rip through me."

Lebenstein himself was full of anger after his liberation.  He knew that his father had been killed by the Nazis, but he still had hopes that his mother might be alive.  Hoping to find her, he returned to his hometown, Haltern, in the Westfalia region of Germany.

"By this time I was eighteen and very wild.  I was fully armed.  It would not have mattered for me to take someone out--the anger was too deep.  One particular incident that happened to me:  I saw one of the fellas I went to school with.  He came back from the army--and he was walking around in his Nazi uniform!  This was, I think, in June of 1945.

 "I saw him in the marketplace and I said, 'How dare you?'  He started stuttering.  He said, 'I don't have no other coat.'  I said, 'What do you mean?  When did you come back?'  He said, 'A month ago, two weeks ago, I don't remember exactly.'  I said, 'You mean to tell me you couldn't find any other clothes?'  He said, 'I like these clothes.'  That showed how much of a Nazi he still was.

I said, 'You do but I don't!'  And right there in the marketplace I took him over and I ripped off the clothes.  And that was not the only incident."

He never found his mother.  "I found out later they 'walked her into the forest.'  I don't want to go into detail--that's too heavy for me, OK?"

Lebenstein eventually emigrated to the United States.  Today he is one of the handful of Holocaust survivors living in the Richmond area.  "I'm always afraid of continued intolerance," he told the Open High students.  "Not just for myself but for other races and peoples.  Even here in the United States I don't think that anyone is really safe unless the young people like you take the bull by the horns and fight for your freedom and fight for tolerance."

Alex Lebenstein's visit to Open High School was arranged through the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond.  Lebenstein died in 2010. According to his obituary, he "left his mark as educator, humanitarian and author.  He will be missed by people he touched throughout the world." 

This article was first published in the Spring 1999 edition of the Arts and Humanities Center Newsletter of the Richmond Public Schools.  The names of the Open High School students have been changed to protect their privacy.