Holocaust survivor Betty Grebenschikoff speaks with students at the VECC about her experiences living in Germany and China during World War II.
By NANETTE LoBIONDO GALLOWAY
VENTNOR The crunch of glass beneath her feet still sends shivers up her spine, Holocaust survivor I. Betty Grebenschikoff told fifth and sixth graders at the Ventnor Educational Community Complex Wednesday, June 12. It was the 16th time Grebenschikoff, 89, who now lives in Florida and summers in Ventnor, shared her experiences living in Germany during the Nazi regime.
Fifth grade teacher Charlene Twiggs arranged the visit, which included sixth grade students this year because Grebenschikoff was unable to share her story last year. When asked, nearly every hand shot up to indicate they had read Grebenschikoff's autobiography, Once My Name Was Sara.
After her talk, several students lined up to get her autograph.
The book, which recalls her experiences growing up in Berlin during the time of Hitler and her family's escape to China, was so named because Hitler said all Jewish girls should be called Sara and all the boys Israel, so they could easily be identified as Jews, she said.
We had a happy childhood in Berlin with my parents and sister, who was two years older, she said. We went to a nice Jewish school and we had friends of all persuasions. We were all together then, she said.
Following a summer-long vacation in Czechoslovakia to visit relatives, things changed, she said. While in the neighboring country, she met her cousin Peter, with whom she developed a very close relationship.
When we returned to Germany, things had changed, she said. My non-Jewish friends picked on me and called me a dirty Jew.' Hitler's government had turned against the Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, gypsies they now call Romas and all people who were different.
I. Betty Grebenschikoff shares her Holocaust story with children at the VECC.
Grebenschikoff said she is one of the few survivors of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
They smashed all our synagogues and glass windows in Jewish shops and threw our prayer books into the street and set them on fire, she said. I remember the feeling of walking over that broken glass the next day and get that sense of fear whenever I step on a piece of broken glass.
Loved ones started disappearing and the Jews tried to get out of the country. Families sent their children away and 10,000 children carrying little suitcases boarded trains to England, called Kindertransport, and some never saw their parents again, she said.
What do you think was the most important thing they carried in those little suitcases? she asked the students.
Family photographs, several students shouted out.
Ventnor Schools Superintendent Eileen Johnson thanks Holocaust survivor Betty Grebenschikoff for speaking with students.
Grebenschikoff said because they lived a good life, her father was able to raise the funds needed to bribe officials at the transport company to get the family moved to China. First, they went to Italy before taking a month-long cruise to China.
We did whatever we had to do to save our lives. We left two days before my father had an interview scheduled to meet with the gestapo secret police. If we hadn't done that, we would all be dead, she said.
She recalled her neighbors peeking through the curtains in their windows as they left.
They wouldn't come out to say goodbye, because they would have been identified as being Jewish sympathizers, she said.
Living in the China was difficult, but the Chinese people were very kind, she said.
We went to a school where they taught us how to speak English by singing songs, she said. You know that song, Old Susanna? That's how I learned to speak English. I didn't even know what a banjo was.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they marched into China and told the Chinese people to kill the Jews using canisters of gas.
But they didn't do that. Instead, they put us in the ghetto where the living was very hard and whole families had to live in one small room, she said. But we had a community, and we tried to make the best of it.
When the Americans came to bomb the Chinese installations the Japanese had taken over, they prayed the Americans would win the war, she said.
She was 18 when the war ended, and she took a job as a secretary for the U.S. Navy. Her sister married a G.I. and moved to America.
One day, I went to the pool where there was a handsome Russian lifeguard, named Olaf, who taught me how to dive so I would not drown. Two weeks later, we were engaged and two months later, we were married, she said. They said it would never last, but we were married 53 years.
His mother made her wedding gown not the poufy one she preferred but still beautifully made, she said.
She said she wanted me to look like a Russian queen, and I did, Grebenschikoff said. I wore it and two of my daughters wore it and it now hangs in a glass case in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum."
Eleven years after finding refuge in China, the government had turned communist and deemed only the Chinese could live in China.
So, the Grebenschikoffs were off again, this time landing in Sydney, Australia, where their two daughters were born. Eventually, the family immigrated to America, where three more children were born, including a boy she named after her beloved cousin, Peter, who, along with the rest of her cousins and grandparents, was killed by the Nazis. All five of her children attended the Ventnor schools.
I'll never forget landing at the airport in New York where a stranger approached us and welcomed us to America and gave us a Coca-Cola. Today, I get shivers thinking about receiving so much kindness from a stranger, she said.
The family lived in Ventnor for about 50 years while Olaf was employed as a gym teacher in the Absecon schools. He has since passed, and Betty has moved to Florida to be near her children. She comes to her Ventnor home every summer, and one of the first things on her agenda is to visit the Ventnor students who are the same age she was when she was trying to survive the genocide.She wrote the book so her own children would understand what happened to her during the Holocaust, but she is willing to speak to other young people about it from a historical perspective and to give them the opportunity to change their own world.
When you see bullying, you can tell someone. We didn't have that freedom in Germany or China, she said. Be kind to one another and don't worry about anything else.
Grebenschikoff also appears in two documentaries, Shanghai Ghetto, released in 2002, and Survival in Shanghai, which was released in 2015.
I often tell my kids I'm not only an author, I'm a movie star, she joked.
Fifth grader Luke Brown said he was sorry she had to experience hardship at such a young age.
It's really different than today, he said. We are not restricted. It's sad people our age had to go through all that.
Lily Hocker, a fifth grader, said Grebenschikoff was able to share the reality of war.
She was lucky she had her parents with her, she said.
Sixth grader Brendan Cahill said it was very unique how she escaped and survived.
I learned to push through everything and try your hardest. Never give up and always know there is a light at the end of the tunnel, he said.
"Once My Name Was Sara" is available at Amazon.com.
