8 • THURSDAY,JULY 14, 2011
LIFE
OVER THE MOUNTAIN
JOU RNAL
‘People Need to Remember’
Holocaust Survivor Shares Her Story of Horror – and Hope BY LAURA MCALISTER JOURNAL EDITOR
F
or the longest time, Ilse Scheuer Nathan covered up the small numbers tattooed on the inside of her left arm. Though time has now faded those numbers, she’s much more apt to talk about them now. Ilse is one of about a dozen surviving Holocaust victims in the Birmingham area. Her story was one she didn’t always want to discuss. But at age 87 and as one of a dwindling number of survivors in the area, she feels compelled to share her story of Nazi Germany. “I can forgive,” she said. “But I can never forget. It happened, and people need to Ilse Nathan’s sisalways rememter, Ruth Scheuer ber that.” Siegler, wrote a Ilse’s story book detailing their started the year experience during Adolf Hitler took power. the Holocaust. She At the time will have a signing she was 9, livand reception for ing in a small it from 3-5 p.m. farming town July 24 at the at near Cologne, Germany. the Birmingham Her sister, Holocaust Ruth Scheuer Education Center, Siegler, was 2222 Arlington three years Avenue. The younger, and she also had an book, “My Father’s older brother, Blessing,” is $15. Ernst. Ilse was attending public school, which she had loved up until then. “The town was very Catholic and very nice – until Hitler came to power,” she recalled. “After that, I hated going to school. “They would call me names, and I’d come home crying.” Eventually she was taken out of school, and her father taught her. She was able to enter another nearby school but was kicked out once they learned she was Jewish. Although life was hard on Ilse and her family, it wasn’t until Kristallnacht that they realized life would never be the same for them. Her father was arrested but later released since he was a World War I veteran. After that, he fled to Holland. The plan was for the rest of the family to meet him there and leave for America, but it was 1940 and Hitler had invaded Holland. Ilse’s father was sent to Westerbork, a refugee camp. Two years later, the rest of the family voluntarily joined him. There they had jobs, so for the time being they were safe. Then in 1944, Ilse’s brother didn’t take his cap off in the presence of a German officer, so he was arrested and slated for transport to
Get the Whole Story
Ilse Nathan of Mountain Brook wants people to always remember the tragedy of the Holocaust. The faded tattoo on her left arm will never let her forget that period in history. The German native spent three years in concentration camps and lost most of her family.
Journal photo by Laura McAlister
Theresienstadt, a camp in Czechoslovakia. “My father said if one of us go, we all go,” Ilse said. The family was there for a month before they were taken to Auschwitz, where they were tattooed with identification numbers. Again, the girls and their mother were chosen for work. “We were always carrying bricks, and we never knew why,” Ilse said. “That’s when we saw the crematories, and this huge mound of shoes.” Not long after that, the two sisters, Ilse and Ruth, saw their mother for the last time. During an SS selection, the women – Ilse was almost 20 at the time – were stripped. The SS was the organization in Hitler’s Third Reich that was charged with implementing the Final Solution and carry out the killings at the concentration camps. “My mother was 44. She had had a hysterectomy, so she had a scar,” Ilse said. “They put her to one side, and we were on the other. My sister and I always just kept quiet and held hands.” The two would finally make it to America and freedom, but it wasn’t easy. They saw their father one last time in a camp in Birkeau. Their brother, they later learned, died in a camp in Germany just days before the liberation. Ilse and Ruth continued working in camps. In 1944, they were sent to a camp in Stutthof, Poland. There they helped clear gravel landing strips for planes in Praust, Poland. It was there Ilse was punished for claiming to pick up a piece of paper to protect another in the camp. “I was punished with a horsewhip,” she said. “I had to stand in front of a barbwire fence at gunpoint. I credit God and my sister for my surviving. My sister would help me work and share her food.” In February 1945, the sisters, along with 800 other girls, were taken on a four-week
death march toward the Baltic Sea. Sick with dysentery and typhus and weighing about 80 pounds, Ilse knew she couldn’t make it to wherever they were being taken. Not many did. Only 50 survived. Ilse and Ruth managed to escape, but not for long. They were found by Russian soldiers and were to be sent to Russia, but they escaped to Prague, where they finally found a safe haven. “The Red Cross was in Prague, and they took care of us,” Ilse said. “They gave us clothing and cleaned us. “We always had faith. We always hoped.” The sisters also had each other. During their three and half years at concentration camps, they always stuck together, so much so that people there referred to them as “Ilse-Ruth.” Today, more than 60 years later, they are still close. Ruth lives about a mile from Ilse in Mountain Brook, and they talk to each other almost daily. After the sisters were rescued, they found some of their mother’s relatives. In 1946, they fulfilled one of their father’s last wishes and boarded a ship headed for America. They landed in Mobile but quickly located relatives in the North and moved there. Then they met their husbands, both German-born Jews, and later moved to Birmingham. Ilse and her husband, the late Walter Nathan, had two daughters, one who recently passed away, and five grandchildren. Despite three and half years in concentration camps, Ilse said she’s had a blessed life, as her father always hoped she would. “When they separated us, my father blessed us, and said, ‘You’re young. Maybe God will let you live,’” she said. He did, and Ilse counts her blessings and the many friends and family members who have entered her life since then each day. “I always had hope,” she said. ❖
PEOPLE
AMA Elects Officers, Directors
The Birmingham Chapter of the American Marketing Association recently elected new officers and members of its board of directors. Serving for the 2011-2012 term will be Ginger Gardner Aarons of the Birmingham Business Journal, president; Ginger Gardner Brian Aarons Lawrence of blr | further, president-elect; and Tom Nelson, treasurer and historian. Board members include Keith Smith of Lift 361, past president; Mickey Gee of UAB School of Business, collegiate relations chairman; Zach Meadows of McQuiddy Classic Printing, volunteers chairman; Michelle King of Latitudes Marketing & PR, membership chairman; Anne Senft of the Birmingham Business Journal, program chairman; Bill Stoeffhaas of STYLE Advertising, communications chairman; Zackery Moore of Zeekee Interactive, social media chairman; and Andrea Walker of W Social Marketing and James Spier of Apartment Locators, sponsorship co-chairmen.
Business Leaders Named to BSC Advisory Board
Four Birmingham business leaders have been named to the first Stump Advisory Board at Birmingham-Southern College. The board provides oversight, advice and expertise to the Kevin R. and Jane Templeton Stump Programs in Entrepreneurship at the college. Members of the Stump Advisory Board are: James Childs, partner, chairman of the Venture Capital and Private Equity Team and chairman of the Emerging Growth Companies Team of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP; Colin Coyne, managing principal of the Coyne Group and recent winner of the $50,000 top prize in the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham’s Prize2theFuture contest to transform a parking lot next to Railroad Park; Steve Dauphin, partner at Murphree Ventures, Bonaventure Capital and Fidelis Capital and advisor to Kirchner Food Security