“THE HOLOCAUST IS SOMETHING YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN. TALKING BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OF MISERY YOU WANT TO FORGET.” — ABE TEITMAN
home to. In time she made her way to an uncle in Los Angeles, where she finished her education, worked as a medical lab technician and started a family. She now speaks about the Holocaust to politicians, veterans and students. “When you listen to a survivor, you become a survivor and you can teach the next generation,” she says. Abe Teitman believes in the same principle. The Tarzana resident was 6 when the Nazis arrived in his hometown of Lodz, Poland. As a child, he remembers wearing the mandatory gold star on his arm and seeing sacred torah parchment dyed and fashioned into clothing. Abe’s parents fled the ghetto and took him on the run. They hid in the forest, eating leaves and grass. They sheltered in spare rooms and cellars. One day his father disappeared. He and his pregnant mother were forced to keep moving alone. “We had no idea where we would be from one day to the next,” he recalls. The pair eventually arrived at the Russian border, where hundreds of Jewish refugees were camped out, hoping to evade the advancing Nazis. After a week the border was opened, and refugees streamed into Russia. But there was no relief for Abe and his mother. The duo wandered from village to village, traveling as far as Uzbekistan before they settled. There, Abe’s mother gave birth to a baby girl and died of typhus two months later. Sent to a dangerous orphanage, Abe ran away and hitchhiked to Samarkand. He was 8 years old, starving and entirely alone. A Jewish stranger took him in and ushered him into a network of foster homes that sustained him through the end of the war. In 1948, Abe was sent to Israel with other orphaned children. Miraculously, he reunited with
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his little sister. After marrying and moving to the U.S., Abe became a history teacher. Last year, at age 83, he finally had his bar mitzvah at Encino’s Nachshon Minyan congregation—finishing a chapter interrupted by the war seven decades earlier. “The Holocaust is something you cannot explain,” says Abe. “Talking brings back memories of misery you want to forget.” But when he told his story to an audience of teenagers at Nachshon Minyan, he found the words pouring out. “It helped them. It opens up their vision to learn what went on. It’s not easy to talk about, but they won’t know if I don’t tell them.” Dorothy speaks for that very same reason. “There are too many Holocaust deniers; kids need to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” she says. She has donated her time to the Museum of Tolerance and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust—in addition to her 31-year career teaching grade school students at Emek Hebrew Academy in Sherman Oaks. Education holds special importance for Dorothy. When the German army swept into her hometown of Otwock, Poland, they decreed that Jewish children could no longer attend school. But Dorothy was a quick study and attributes her survival to her language skills and plucky bravery—she spoke perfect Polish (along with the Yiddish spoken at home) and snuck out of the ghetto to buy her family food right under the Nazis’ noses. When she speaks to children now, “Kids are amazed that I was so smart when I was their age,” she says. “I tell them they can also use