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Dedicated to a special person ... my aunt.
My email to friends on the 3rd of December: Dear All,
This has been a busy day … I figured that I should send an email to all about today’s events. There are just too many people to contact and so much to say. It’s also been tough to recount all the details … writing will allow me to remember and relay them without my emotions overtaking the thought. Today, the 3rd of December, 2007 , my aunt, Shulamit Lack, passed away.
Several months ago, her doctor found a blockage to her heart. She had emergency bypass surgery about a decade before and did not want it again. Even after almost ten years, she was still sore from the original surgery. Shula, my oldest brother - Marnin, and I went to meet with the surgeon and after being presented with the facts, Shula made the decision that she not get the surgery. She emphatically stated that she lived a full life and didn’t want to fight anymore. Her only hope/prayer was that she did not have a prolonged illness and have to be dependent on people. She literally prayed for the Lord to take her during the night with a quick heart attack.
She still carried on her schedule, although the chronic heart illness did take its toll. Her kidneys started shrinking and her brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, she was getting ready for the holiday. She had her hair done, did the usual things to prepare, and also had a dentist appointment. When she went to the dentist, she fell outside. We (her family) found out after the fact, as Shula didn’t want to burden us with her problems. A few days after the fall, after finding that there was just bruising, not any broken bones, Marnin convinced Shula to stay at his house thru Thanksgiving to recuperate. My other brother (Danny) and I were to have dinner there for the holiday and Dan would be able to drop her off back at her house when he drives home.
The day before Thanksgiving, Shula was experiencing shortness of breath and was dizzy. Shula was taken to the hospital to find that her lungs were filled with fluid. The doctor ascertained that her fall was the first symptom of congestive heart failure. The brain was losing coordination due to lack of oxygen. Her health deteriorated fast, and by last month’s end, we had Shula transferred to a hospice in Huntington .
Shula was admitted to The Hospice Inn on the 30th of November. Her health steadily declined. We were there around the clock, with the help of a nurse/caretaker named Majorette. Shula and Majorette developed a very strong bond … it brought back strong memories of the nurse/caretaker we had for my uncle in his last days … also an angel who made his final moments as happy and comfortable as possible.
Yesterday, although Shula’s health was in a steady decline, she was able to respond to questions and was totally aware of the people around her and what was being said. It was wonderful to have her there even though she was unable to open her eyes. Most important, she was able to respond to questions about her condition. We were able to make sure she received pain medication when needed, shift her in bed when she wanted, and give her water when she was thirsty.
Today, she was much worse. Early this morning, she was still knew I was there was able to relay that she needed pain medication. The doctor saw the decline and ordered the medication dispensed regularly, as we feared she was getting past the point of being able to relay her needs. Shortly after 1pm , I was alone with her and noticed her breathing started becoming distressed. I sat next to her and saw she was near the end. I took her hand, started stroking her head, and assured her I was there. I told her to let go … stop fighting it and just relax. With her last breaths, I told her again how much her family loves her, and asked her to say hello to my uncle. At 1:25pm , she opened her eyes and looked right at me. She had a look of surprise/fear, took her last breath, and I closed her eyes.
Below are some stories about her from the internet. I always teased her that although she didn’t own a computer, she was on a lot more websites than I’ll ever hope to be on. With being involved in a documentary, and being interviewed for hours by the Shoah foundation, she comes up in page after page from the search engines.
Above all, what’s not written online about her life is how devoted she was to her family. The love she and my uncle had was from the heart. To me, she was a loving aunt who wanted nothing more than to be there when you needed, and to enjoy one’s company. I will miss her with all my heart.
The funeral was at Sinai Chapels on Wednesday, the 5th of December at 1:15pm
Flushing, New York Kenny
From www.PBS.org:
"I was taught by my father to be very proud and not let anyone insult me. The other kids respected me for standing up for myself, regardless of what they thought of my being Jewish." - Shulamit Gara Lack
Born: Budapest , Hungary , 1924
Family Background
Shula’s parents were highly educated and assimilated Jews in Hungary — "very proud Jews who considered Judaism their tradition, and Hungarian their nationality." Shula’s father had been a decorated cavalry officer in World War I; later, he fought against a Communist uprising in Hungary and became a well-known lawyer. Their family status made Shula’s early years privileged and relatively carefree.
Shula’s first encounter with anti-Semitism occurred at age six, when a classmate called her a "dirty Jew." Even at this young age, Shula defended herself and began thinking about this distinction between being "Jewish" and being "Hungarian."
Shula discovered anti- Semitism at an early age
"I have a brain and I know my people are in trouble and I would like to live and do something for my people. It was an opportunity to live in historic times — to prove yourself."
Shula joined a Zionist youth group at the age of 13, despite her parents’ strong disapproval. The idea that educated people would go work the land in Palestine struck them as ludicrous and they saw Zionism as akin to the Communism they hated. But Shula persisted.
The War Years
By the time the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944, Shula’s father was hospitalized in a sanitarium. Her mother was among the first Jews taken to the camps. This left Shula, at age 19, alone in the family apartment. With no family to protect, Shula threw herself into the underground network of young Hungarian Zionists who were trying to save Jewish lives.
"I felt sure that anyone I saved might go to Palestine and build a homeland. It wasn’t important that I survive — but to help others survive so they can build Palestine ."
Shula’s apartment became a Jewish "safe house." Shula and other young Zionists developed a complex system for procuring identity papers from city offices.
"You never knew if you were getting back from that mission alive."
At Shula's apartment, Zionists would falsify these identity papers so that Jews could pose as Christians and flee Hungary . The resisters would also prepare escapees for the dangerous trip to Romania and from there to Palestine .
When an escapee was caught and betrayed Shula, she had to abandon her apartment and fled. Shula was caught while trying to escape to Romania and, after a series of prisons and transit camps, was sent to Auschwitz . She barely eluded the gas chambers — only to be sent to a work camp where women were forced to dig anti-tank trenches in the Polish forest. Even in a concentration camp, Shula continued to "resist" the Nazis, tricking them into assigning her group of prisoners a smaller workload.
After "liberation" by the Russian army in 1945, Shula endured two more horrifying months of starvation, hostility and combat, trying to get home to Budapest . At every step along the way, Shula used her intelligence, creativity, command of several languages, and fearlessness to help keep others alive.
After the War
Shula married her wartime boyfriend, Dov, and they immigrated to Palestine . There, she fought in the War for Independence and in later wars was decorated for heroism. After divorcing Dov, Shula married Sigo Lack and in 1960 moved to New York , where she lives today.
Shula’s Message for Teenagers Today
"Be proud of your origins and have the knowledge of your culture and your history — whatever it is. You have to stand up for it because nobody will respect you if you don’t respect yourself. Whatever it costs you, you have to keep your dignity and behave like a human being and not an animal — they can kill me but they cannot take away my humanity."
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Lack Shulamit (Gara Mária)
Country of birth Hungary
City of birth Budapest
Date of birth 22/02/1924
Nickname Not Available
BEFORE AND DURING THE HOLOCAUST
Movement/Organization Hanoar Hatzioni
Framework of combat Partisans Unit ---
Area of combat --- Rank ---
Country of combat Hungary Assignment Not Available
Date & Place of death (if known) Not Available
BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Shulamit distributed forged documents in the Hungarian country towns. She turned her apartment in Budapest into a shelter for the refugees on their way to Romania within the framework of the tiyul. Shulamit herself tried to cross the border into Romania but was caught, incarcerated in the Nagyvárad prison and later deported to Auschwitz and other camps.
Shulamit made aliya in 1945 and participated in the War of Independence. She was awarded with a medal of "Fighter aginst the Nazis". She was married to Dov Broshi. After her second marriage to Sigo Lack, she moved to the United States where she now lives.
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Film Reviews
Daring to Resist:
Three Women Face the Holocaust
Directors: Martha Lubell and Barbara Attie
Producers: Martha Lubell and Barbara Attie
Martha Lubell Productions, 426 Bolsover Road , Wynnewood , PA 19096 , (610)642-9112
Narrator: Janeane Garofalo.
Running Time: One Hour
Reviewed by Carla Rose Shapiro, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex , England
Copyright Carla Rose Shapiro, 2000.
According to professor Yosef Yerushalmi, in his classic text on collective Jewish memory, Zakhor, the Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history.[i] However, the voluminous research engendered' by the 1980s, the time when Zakhor was published, did not represent a fully inclusive account of Shoah and was wanting in at least one area of study - gender. A recent corrective to this lacuna in the field of Holocaust studies is the investigation of gender as a category of inquiry.
In response to this new embrace of gender's inclusion there have been both remarks and attacks - notably Gabriel Schoenfeld's acerbic Commentary article, " Auschwitz and the Professors."[ii] Schoenfeld rails against a whole series of academic approaches to the study of the Holocaust which he claims trivialize the calamity that befell the Jewish communities of Europe ; he reserves his harshest criticism for gender -based analysis. He accuses feminist scholars of having an agenda while characterizing their work as frivolous and self-serving. Others charge that the focus of the Holocaust as an enormous overarching tragedy may get splintered and fragmented in the quest by individual groups to claim their niche of persecution and victimhood.
Professor Myrna Goldenberg, whose research and publications examine experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust, presents an opposing opinion.[iii] She insists that gender is a significant factor for analysis and needs to be included in order to give a more complete historical picture of the Holocaust.
Gender analysis should be viewed as a complementary, rather than rivalrous arena of inquiry in the field of Holocaust studies; it adds more nuance to a subject dense with information about predominantly male-centred political institutions and initiatives, reflective of evidence from male perpetrators and, until recently, analyzed most commonly by male academics.
In examining the subject of Jewish persecution during the Shoah, gender is certainly an important factor to consider.[iv] Jewish women were victims of the Nazis because they were Jewish; because they were Jewish women they were victimized as Jews and as women. The differing experiences of suffering between men and women were often a function of the fact that women were vulnerable to the Nazis in ways specific and exclusive to women. The threat of sexual victimization and the dangers posed by pregnancy and childbirth were unique to women.
Gender should also be a significant consideration in relation to the topic of Jewish resistance and non-resistance during the Holocaust. The oft-used, but offensive expression, that Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter, is a reference to a perceived overwhelming passivity on the part of the Jews during the Shoah. The state of being passive in a more general sense has an associative link with the feminine, if one defined this adjective in terms of gender. It is this perceived Jewish passivity and seeming lack of agency associated with women in particular that Martha Lubell and Barbara Attie address in their estimable documentary entitled Daring To Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust.
Lubell and Attie skillfully introduce the viewer to each of the three women resistors featured in her film. Lubell and Attie's accomplishment begins with her choice of subjects who each have a different medium of resistance peculiar to her location, temperament, and circumstance.
Barbara Rodbell and her family emigrated from Germany to Holland in 1933, seeking safety from the Nazis. Barbara's talent for ballet and fierce determination to live helped her survive while passing as a Christian. The rest of her family perished in Auschwitz . Using the privilege of her position as a ballerina, Barbara participated in numerous resistance activities. Possessing special papers which allowed her to stay out after curfew, she helped distribute underground newspapers, and, under the cover of darkness, assisted in the transportation of people who had to be moved from one hiding place to another.
Shulamit Lack experienced anti-Semitism as a young schoolgirl in Budapest . She responded by joining a Zionist youth group. By the age of 19, Shulamit was leading groups of Jews in underground border crossings to Romania . Caught and imprisoned, she persuaded the SS to keep her fellow prisoners alive.
Perhaps the most striking of the three stories is that of Faye Schulman. Schulman learned professional photography as a young teen in Poland . Her camera made her useful to the Nazis and kept her alive when her entire ghetto was slaughtered. Faye joined a forest partisan unit and photographed their resistance activities while she waged war and cared for the wounded. Faye's own words succinctly reveal the essence of her ordeal: When it was time to be hugging a boy, I was hugging a rifle.
These three varied and remarkable portraits broaden our understanding of resistance during the Holocaust. In Daring To Resist, resistance is practiced with forgeries, smuggling, dance, photography and wit. An act of resistance might involve the use of guns and explosives, but is not reducible to it. In depicting a range of activities which broadens the scope of how an act of resistance is characterized, Lubell and Attie's film necessarily raises one of this topics most pertinent questions - how does one define an act of resistance? This issue is particularly relevant for those interested in the study of women in the Holocaust; defining resistance more narrowly, as exclusively an act waged with arms, would exclude many of the feats accomplished by women.
While more sophomoric productions might not spare the viewer from usually tedious didacticism, Daring to Resist illustrates examples of resistance, but does not claim to define the topic. Instead, the film poses many other necessary questions about resistance. What motivated those who chose defiance rather than submission? What obstacles were faced while attempting to resist? What is the nature of courage? Viewers learn both the intricacies involved in planning an act of resistance and the great risks involved in carrying them out. We see the details of how heroes, or should one say, heroines, emerge.
In choosing women from three different areas of Europe ( Poland , Hungary and Holland ) all of which experienced the unfolding of the Final Solution at different times and in differing ways, Lubell and Attie's film gives fuller geographical and political scope in which to comprehend the evolution of the Shoah. The three women also come from varied cultural and religious backgrounds. From Rodbell's acculturated, assimilated Berlin environment, to Lack's participation in Zionist youth groups in Budapest to Faye's more traditional religious Jewish life in an Eastern European shtetl, the manner in which each woman resisted was inextricably linked to her culture, the resistance methods available to her, and, of course, circumstance and chance. For instance, fighting as a forest partisan was not a resistance option readily available in urban Amsterdam . Conversely, transporting children to safe houses while passing as a German didn't lend itself well to the situations faced by most Jewish women whose pre-war universes were informed by the shtetl.
Building on the notion that women and men experienced the Holocaust in similar yet differing ways, the telling of three women's stories of survival by resistance highlights the commonality of men's and women's experiences while giving some detail of where their ability to fight genocide diverged. There certainly were significant gender differences in both survival and resistance activities during the war, sometimes to the advantage of one or the other. For example, women could often pass' more easily on the Aryan side since they were not marked as Jewish. As a result, women in the resistance were often chosen to act as couriers or saboteurs. In Lubell and Attie's film, Barbara Rodbell was able to pass as a Christian, even renting a room in the home of a pro-Nazi German woman and performing ballet on Dutch stages in front of audiences packed with German soldiers. Some experiences were also clearly gender-specific for example, Shulamit Lack's incarceration in a Hungarian prison with a group of Roma (Gypsy) prostitutes lead to moments of mutual support.
The defiant acts of Shulamit, Faye and Barbara typify three genres of resistance; in fact, these three portraits are quite representative of resistance activities in their respective countries: forest partisans in Eastern Europe, the Zionist movement's activities of smuggling and forgeries in Hungary, and passing and underground activities which involved finding safe havens for Jews in Holland. However, Lubell and Attie's film, in its choice of its three particular types of resistance activities and by emphasizing overt acts of heroism, somehow almost inadvertently de-genders' the theme of the film itself by linking women's resistance activities to men's resistance work, rather than focusing on those aspects of resistance that were unique to women. And while their tales are certainly heroic, they are not in fact, wholly representative of Jewish women's resistance experiences during the war.
No one video can address all the issues of resistance in one hour - Lubell and Attie certainly had to make some difficult content choices, hence the subtitle Three Women Face the Holocaust. Lubell and Attie's decision to present just three individual stories is both the strength and the weakness of the documentary, depending on the expectations one brings to the film. While each viewer is privileged with a richly-detailed account of each woman's life, the narrow narrative focus on just three individual stories does not give a panorama of Jewish women's resistance experiences during World War II. Perhaps a more inclusive account of women's resistance during the Holocaust would have included at least one woman's story of spiritual resistance, of small yet nonetheless important acts of defiance such as the keeping of diaries in ghettos and concentration camps, or the emergence of camp sistering and surrogate families which women formed in camp barracks. While some scholars might question the validity of labelling these measures as resistance, their very existence should, at the very least, be acknowledged within the film. Working in underground movements, assisting with clandestine border crossings, passing as a gentile, and taking up arms were not activities that could have even entered into the realm of the possible for the elderly, the very young or the infirmed.
All three women are especially articulate and weave compelling and gripping chronicles of their lives before, during, and after the war. Each woman's life story is greatly complemented by excellent photographs, and, in the case of Shulamit Lack, by rare home movies. With such a wealth of precious archival material, the documentary moves beyond the basic format of visual history interviews which mostly rely on static close-up shots of survivors recalling the events of their lives during the war. Lubell and Attie's film has an animated, vibrant quality throughout, with each woman's photographs lending a rich visual texture to the stories being told. Faye Schulman's photographs of her life in the Molotava Brigade are treasures; they still resonate with intense feeling and character. In one picture, Faye is holding a large rifle next to her leopard pattern coat in a snowy forest; one gets a real taste of life on the edge in the depth of a Polish winter. Additionally, both Lack and Rodbell are filmed returning to the sites where the events they describe in the film took place. Scenes of contemporary Amsterdam and Budapest are contrasted with the narratives being recalled; the effect is almost surreal.
There is clearly a paucity of documentaries on the general subject of resistance, with the topic of women's resistance rarely, if ever, touched. Lubell and Attie's film stands as a much-needed visual corrective to this fascinating, yet neglected chapter of Holocaust history. In line with Goldenberg's more general comments on gender analysis, a gendered study of resistance adds an additional layer of knowledge in which to understand the Holocaust. With Daring To Resist, Lubell and Attie adeptly and movingly fill this void. Perhaps the film's greatest achievement is its success in returning the women's survivor's voice. The testimony of each of these three witnesses is the point of departure for Lubell and Attie's film and its primary focus throughout. Recalling the facts and events of their own lives, these unique, deeply personal stories, replete with detail and character, paint richly woven, sensitive and respectful portraits of three young Jewish women who resisted a fate prescribed to them during World War II.
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