“There was no rhyme or reason why we should have survived, except to tell the story,” recounted Holocaust survivor Paula Burger as she stood in front of a focused audience in Lindsay Auditorium last week.
Burger spoke during “Genocide Awareness Week: Hate Kills” about her experiences escaping Europe during the Holocaust.
Burger was born in a small town in Poland in 1934. At the age of 8, she and her younger brother, father and mother were relocated to a nearby Jewish ghetto, or shtetl, in Novogrudek, Belarus. The once Soviet-controlled Novogrudek had become a ghetto after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Before selection processes, when various members of the ghetto would be chosen and taken away to extermination camps, Burger’s mother and father would hoist her and her brother over the barbed-wire fence enclosing the ghetto where non-Jewish friends would be waiting to “hide [them] for a few days” before returning to the ghetto and having to climb the fence yet again.
Shortly after the move to the ghetto, Burger’s father escaped to join the Bielski partisans in an effort to organize an escape route for his family. The Bielski brothers Tuvia, Alexander Zisel, Asael and Aharon, who Burger said were all “uncharacteristically tall for Jews” at over 6 feet 4 inches, organized the partisan band after they managed to escape Novogrudek in 1941. The group became the largest group of Jewish partisans during World War II.
However, someone reporter the elder Burger’s escape to the Gestapo.
“They came to [to Novogrudek] looking for him, but he was gone,” Burger said. “When they couldn’t find him, they questioned my mother, who was immediately taken away to a German prison for a few months.”
She died in the prison in 1942.
Following their mother’s death, Paula’s father arranged for her and her brother to escape Novogrudek by means of the truck that supplied water to the area. The two children were smuggled out by hiding inside empty water barrels.
Once outside the ghetto, Paula and her brother met up with their father, and they spent two and a half years with the Bielski partisans, whose band had grown to 1,200 members. They were armed, traveled by night and slept in dugouts in the forest. Paula remembers having only an elbow-length “[lightweight] blue coat, with the Jewish star.” She used to make “boots out of rags” that she received in an effort to stay warm. She remembers a string of nights when the entire partisan band had to stand in swampy waters where the water was “up to [her neck],” and the only food they had were “small kernels of wheat.”
Burger recalled one night when her father, who was keeping night watch over the camp, had a dream that Paul’s mother commanded him to “move the children to another dugout.” He relocated his children shortly before the German army invaded the camp and demolished the very place where Burger and her brother had slept earlier that night.
Even though she was young, Burger emphasized that “fear is something you don’t have to be smart for.” In April 1944, Burger, who was not expecting to live much longer, was shocked and relieved when Russian soldiers came and freed her family.
“I remember the soldiers putting my brother and me on top of their tanks, and how warm [the tanks] felt,” Burger said. “The soldiers actually cried when they saw us. We were just ragged.”
When Berger, her brother and her father came to the United States she was 14 years old. She spent her childhood in Chicago and eventually married a Holocaust survivor, with whom she had three children. Today, she lives in Denver where she is an accomplished artist and travels around the country to share her experiences with the extreme hatred that was the Holocaust.
