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As numbers dwindle, Holocaust survivors look to preserve their memories

Alexander White’s voice cracked and his hands trembled as he described the atrocities he witnessed and the murder of his family during World War II.

The 94-year-old retired physician and Polish refugee who eventually settled in Olympia Fields spoke of how after the Nazi invasion of Poland, his family contemplated suicide to avoid the inevitable separation, torture and death sentence that awaited them in the concentration camps.

“I was the only one that objected to it,” White told the captivated audience last week at Harold Washington College. “I said, ‘Look, if we all die, is there going to be anyone after the war to tell people what went on here?’ Nobody will believe it. Even if there’s a tiny chance that someone will survive, we should not kill ourselves.'”

White, as the audience well knew, survived. And he spoke about the Holocaust with a certain urgency because time is running out.

In 2010, there were about 10,000 Holocaust survivors in the Chicago area, according to the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. Today, that estimate, which includes Jews from the former Soviet Union, is closer to 6,000 and is in rapid decline. Most survivors, who where children when the war broke out 70 years ago, are now in their 80s and 90s.

This decline has led historians and educators — including curators of a new exhibit using holograms at the the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie — to find ways to pass along and preserve their testimonials for future generations.

So it was that over two days last week, students sat motionless as they listened, absorbing White’s disturbing recollections of the Shoah.

At the back of the room stood the person who spearheaded the talk — the speaker’s son, Les White, a 62-year-old psychology professor at Harold Washington College.

For nearly two decades, White has invited his father to share his memories of the Nazi occupation of Poland with city college students. Some students are required to attend, others go because they want to meet an eyewitness and many go in search of hope.

“He was a refugee,” White said. “The beauty of Harold Washington is all the diversity. I have so many undocumented students, so many DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients) and refugees. They understand his story.”

As a result, White feels a deep obligation to preserving the memories of his father — to never let the world forget about the deaths of 6 million Jews.

“I feel very guilty, that I should become more involved in what’s going on in the U.S. because (in) these stories there’s a similarity,” White said. “I owe something to the protest to get involved and that this story really should continue to be told.”

To that end, the Illinois Holocaust Museum will open in late October a permanent installation that uses technology and innovation to preserve the memories of survivors. Called the Interactive Survivor Experience, the display will feature three-dimensional holograms of 13 survivors speaking about their experience.

The display will be equipped with interactive voice recognition technology to replicate what it’s like to have a survivor answer questions about losing loved ones and narrowly escaping death.

For the students at Harold Washington College, though, they only had to listen to the voice of Alexander White himself.

Born Alexander Bialywlos in 1923, Alexander White grew up in the town of Krosno, Poland. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he lost his mother and older sister first, and later two younger brothers. His father was shipped to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

After the liquidation of the Krosno ghetto in 1942, White spent more than a year in several camps before moving to one of the camps where the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved thousands of Jews by employing them in his factories. Schindler’s heroism would eventually be dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”

White then went to college and medical school in Munich before immigrating to the U.S. He met and married Inez Libby, whose father insisted he change his name from Bialywlos to White.

But even though Alexander White persuaded his parents and siblings to live so they could tell about the atrocities, the lone survivor of his immediate family did not talk about his own experiences right away. Many Holocaust survivors feared being viewed as if they were miscreants, White recalled.

He even dodged his own children’s questions until Les White was 26 and pursuing a career in film. In the early 1980s, the father and son got stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam. Les White began to ask questions, and the conversation lasted three more days. The revelation was not only eye-opening, but it also was a turning point in their relationship.

“Whatever I imagined he went through was not the reality,” Les White said. “That’s why it’s important to tell these stories. It puts a human face on everything.

“From that day on, my father and I became very close,” he added. “It was in telling his story that we became father and son.”

In 1999, shortly after Alexander and Inez White retired to Scottsdale, Ariz., his son invited him to speak at Harold Washington where he had become a psychology professor. He has invited him there ever since.

“People don’t remember me. They don’t remember my name,” Les White said. “But I’ll be on the street and I see an ex-student of mine and they ask me how my father is.”

Shoshana Buchholz-Miller, vice president of education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, said hearing from a survivor is the most moving and powerful way to learn about the Holocaust.

“It allows these stories and big numbers to become very real and personalized,” she said. “It’s creating historical empathy. Understanding the human story behind the history and being able to really relate to it.”

The new exhibit will feature holograms showing seven local survivors. Fritzie Fritzshall, 88, president of the museum, was one of the seven to travel to Los Angeles for five days of filming. She sought her son and grandsons’ blessing before participating in the project, and her grandsons stayed by her side during the filming.

“I asked them how they felt about this. I’m leaving their name behind when I’m no longer here,” she said. “They said go for it. They were there with me every single moment. They were my rock.”

She, too, didn’t tell her story right away, until after her son insisted she participate in an oral history project. He heard the details of his mother’s time in Auschwitz for the first time in an audio recording.

Alexander White recorded his stories in a self-published memoir titled “Be a Mensch,” his father’s parting words before boarding a train to Auschwitz. He knows time is running out.

“Nowadays they’re very few still alive, and if we are all gone I can guarantee you there will be books that say this is all a hoax and there were no eyewitnesses,” he said. “You don’t need eyewitnesses.”

Les White also feels pressure to tell the story and tell it accurately. He fears that he will never live up to his father’s legacy.

“My nightmare is I’m up onstage telling a story and my father calls out, ‘That’s not how it happened.'”

mbrachear@chicagotribune.com

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