COMMENTARY: An incredible journey, an incredible life

By Alan Gershel

As a docent, I recently led a tour at the Holocaust Museum and Cohen Education Center in Naples, Fla. It was an experience I will remember for the remainder of my life.

A survivor, Suzanne Cohn, a hidden child of the Holocaust, had requested a tour. It also was to include her husband, friends, and other members of her family. To say I was nervous in the days leading up to the tour would be a huge understatement. What could I possibly tell her about the Holocaust?

Her story is a remarkable one which I will briefly share before describing the actual tour experience. She was born in 1938 in a shtetl in Poland. She was relocated by the Nazis with her family to a ghetto in 1942 where they lived for a year. As a child, Suzanne witnessed her grandmother being seized by the Nazis. Her grandmother was forced to dig her own grave and then murdered. With tears welling in her eyes, Suzanne described how her grandmother looked at her as she was being led away. She clearly had a profound love for her grandmother who predicted a long and fruitful life for Suzanne.

During another selection by the Nazis, Suzanne, her family, and others ran to a school and hid under a stage in the auditorium. She was 5 years old. She recalls her uncle saying to her parents that her crying would give them away. Her mother tightly held her close to her chest as the soldiers passed over them. They were not discovered. After three nights with no food or water, they fled. Her father dug under a barbed wire fence and pushed her through.

They made it to a factory and spent three weeks in a utility closet where food was smuggled in by a former factory worker. They thereafter moved in with a Christian family where they spent three years moving to different homes owned by other members of this family. Her sister, who Suzanne described as a gift and her best friend, was born in that home.

Suzanne often hid under the floorboards and on one occasion, which I found to be an interesting metaphor, she hid behind a Christmas tree when soldiers came into the home believing the family was hiding a Jewish family. She adopted some of the religious practices of this family including crossing herself going to church and saying Christian prayers and seeing, but not understanding at the time, her mother’s tears. She believed she was Christian. She did not know she was Jewish. Her father became a member of the Polish underground. This family is included in the Righteous Among Nations.

At the end of the war, Suzanne and her family went to a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. She described this experience as “joyous.” They were together again. They no longer had to whisper and for the first time in years they could live openly and without fear.

With respect to the tour, I had decided that whenever Suzanne wanted to speak, I would immediately stop and step away into the background. Also, I tried to make the tour as interactive as possible since not only Suzanne, but other members of her family, especially her husband, Norman Cohn, were very familiar with the history of the Holocaust. Throughout the tour, which lasted more than two hours, Suzanne would often comment on her life, especially when the exhibit was relevant to her experience. For example, she spoke at length about life in a DP camp.

She also spoke eloquently and passionately about the importance of not remaining silent in the face of injustice as we ended the tour at the genocide exhibit.

I may have been the docent who ostensibly led the tour, but I was the visitor who was given an extraordinary view into Suzanne’s life. I listened and learned so much from her. She is a proud, strong, resilient woman whose journey and life have been nothing short of miraculous. I have shared her story with my children, and I will do so with my grandchildren when they are older. I will never forget her.
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Alan Gershel is a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills as well as Holocaust Museum and Cohen Education Center in Naples. He is a former federal prosecutor, law school professor, and served as grievance administrator of the Attorney Grievance Commission in Michigan for five years before retiring in 2019.