Families tell tales of Holocaust survival

Morris Fer had never heard of aunts, uncles or cousins before he was 6 years old. His best friend, Fred, a Roman Catholic, had plenty of them in the working-class Boston neighborhood where the boys lived.

Fer understood why Fred’s family had a Christmas tree and his didn’t, and why his family had Menorah and Fred’s didn’t. What he didn’t know was why his friend had such a big extended family and he lived alone with just his mother, father and sister.

That was when Fer learned that his Polish parents had survived the Holocaust and that all of his aunts, uncles, cousins and an older brother had died in concentration or work camps during World War II. That also was the day Fer learned that he was the child of survivors.

In a voice filled with emotion, the 66-year-old Bangor real estate developer told his parents’ story Monday night at Beth Israel Synagogue in Bangor. Fer was one of three men who told their family sagas to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A Yom Ha-Shoa event is sponsored each year by the Jewish Community Council. Members of Bangor’s three synagogues and many of the city’s Protestant leaders attended this year’s service. In addition to talks by Fer and others, the program included readings by two teenagers and the performance of a Canzona from Paul Ben-Haim’s Cello Concerto by pianist Phillip Silver and his wife, Noreen Silver, of Bangor.

Silver, a music professor at the University of Maine, has dedicated himself to performing music written by composers who perished during the Holocaust or went into exile during World War II.

That music Monday night underscored the stories of devastation and hope told by Fer, Jerome Kirstein and Alexander Wilde.

When Kirstein’s father was liberated from the concentration camp by Allied soldiers, he weighed 65 pounds. Years later, he told his son, now 50 and a resident of Bangor, that he would not have survived another day.

“I was married on June 24, 1974, 24 years to the day after my parents received visas to enter the United States,” Kirstein said Monday. “All of our children are named after relatives who perished in the Holocaust. … Our parents made sure we never forgot where we came from.”

Wilde was the 15-year-old son of a doctor and a banker-lawyer when the Nazis destroyed 102 of the 103 synagogues in Vienna on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, on what came to be known as the Crystal Night. Wilde, a 78-year-old resident of Brewer, was one of 10,000 children allowed to leave Austria for England before war was declared.

He and his parents also were very, very lucky. With the help of English Jews and his Danish foster father, Wilde was reunited with his parents the next year. His mother persuaded the Gestapo to release his father from the Dachau concentration camp, and eventually the family made its way from England to America.

“We arrived on October 12, 1940, in New York from Montreal,” he said. “I thought, this is providence that we arrive in the United States on Columbus Day.”

Monday night, Rabbi David Cantor of Beth Israel lit a candle as others turned out the lights in the synagogue. He reminded the Jews and gentiles in attendance that “we are all made in the image of God.”

“We all have a divine spark,” he said, “which is why at times like this we create that spark and light a candle.

“Tonight, we remember all the sparks that were snuffed out in the Holocaust, take a moment to think about those who died in that dark time and remember our duty to be sure that the world never imposes another darkness like that.”