Isl and Ne w s
Eric LaForest, the Kelly Family Director of the Norton Family Center for the Common Good; Heidi Fishman ’80; and her mother, Ruth "Tutti" Lichtenstern Fishman Photo: Jessica Hutchinson.
“It was always, ‘Schnell! Schnell!’” which meant “Hurry up!” in German, Tutti explained, and there were continual threats of being “sent east,” which was code for being sent to an extermination camp.
Tutti Shares Her Story
For a standing-room-only audience of freshmen and other community members in September, K. Heidi Fishman ’80 and her mother, Holocaust survivor Ruth “Tutti” Lichtenstern Fishman, shared the harrowing story of Tutti’s childhood escape from Nazi extermination during World War II. The story is central to Heidi’s recently published novel, Tutti’s Promise, which is based on her family’s story of endurance, and Tutti and Heidi were invited to campus to share the account for a special session of the Freshman Seminar in the Common Good. Heidi accompanied her mother on the Hubbard Performance Hall stage to help explain images and statistics projected on the screen behind them and to give historical context to her mother’s personal narrative. Much of the projected information was from extensive research that Heidi conducted into her family’s past when she was writing Tutti’s Promise. The Nazis killed six million Jewish people during the Holocaust. “To give you some perspective, six million people is roughly twice the population of the state of Connecticut,” Tutti told the crowd gathered for her talk. “But my story has a happy ending.” Tutti was one of only 100 child survivors among the 15,000 children sent through the Theresien-
stadt ghetto-camp located in what is now the Czech Republic. Born in Germany in 1935, Tutti moved with her family to the Netherlands in 1936 before the war broke out. Life for herself, her family, and other Jewish people in Holland became severely restricted, she recounted, showing a photo of the identification card that Jews were forced to carry and a 1942 picture of herself and her classmates at a Jewish-only school. Young Tutti could travel only on designated Jewish public transport, and she and her family, like all Jewish families, eventually were forced to leave their home and valuables and sent to live in a Jewish-only ghetto.
She shared details she remembers about daily life and work in the camps. Showing a picture of a well-worn doll that her father had given her early in their odyssey, she explained that her father had filled the doll’s hollow head with money and instructed her never to let the doll out of her sight because the family might need the money one day. As promised, Tutti kept the doll with her at all times. Her father’s work as an international metal trader and his forethought to obtain a Paraguayan passport proved to be instrumental in the family’s survival, Tutti said. He was moments away from being forced aboard a train at Theresienstadt destined for a death camp when his passport stayed his departure. The camp was liberated by the Russians, and the captives were further aided by the U.S. Army in the spring of 1945. Shortly afterwards, Tutti and her family moved back to Amsterdam. Tutti eventually moved to the United States and made her home in West Hartford in 1958. Her children, Peter L. Fishman ’78 and Heidi, attended Loomis Chaffee. Sponsored by the Norton Family Center for the Common Good, Tutti and Heidi’s visit to Loomis was made possible by the Carolyn Belfer ’86 Fund for Jewish Life.
Tutti said she and her brother “did as we were told” in the interminable registration and transferring processes imposed upon them by the Nazi regime, en route first to a transit camp in Westerbork and then to Theresienstadt.
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