EAST END, NY — A Holocaust survivor who has dedicated her life to spreading a message of hope and kindness joined the world in mourning and disbelief Saturday after the horrific synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 dead.
This week, Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan, 83, author of “Four Perfect Pebbles,” who has spoken to inmates at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility about her harrowing childhood spent in a Nazi concentration camp, spoke to Patch about her thoughts on the shootings.
“People just can’t get over this. What happened, it’s incomprehensible — a senseless criminal act and tragedy that has happened. We’re constantly reminded, over and over again. We can’t get away. It’s too sad,” she said.
But as always, Blumenthal Lazan’s invincible spirit shines through. “If there’s some beauty, some light, in this tragic happening, it’s that people came together,” she said. “People of all beliefs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, all came together. That was beautiful, but it is way too sad, that it takes a tragedy for people to understand, to be compassionate and respectful to one another.”
Of accused shooter Robert Bowers — he was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday; the 44-count indictment includes hate crimes and prosecutors have indicated they plan to seek the death penalty — Blumenthal Lazan said, “He was sick, but there was some evil in him, as well.”
The Holocaust survivor said she wishes the media would put more of a focus on all the good in the world; she faults the constant barrage of headlines about killings and stabbings as a way for “warped minds” to pick up on that message and use it for “their own agendas.”
“It goes on and on and on,” she said. “But there is so much good out there. If we would only try to concentrate on good. There’s so little we can do against the negativity, but how we treat each other, how we reach out to one another — it’s entirely up to us. We need to be out there, working together to make this a more peaceful world for today’s children and succeeding generations.”
Just days after the synagogue shooting, Blumenthal Lazan was speaking to close to 1,000 people at a convention in Spokane, WA, a presentation she dedicated to the victims and their families. And she will continue spreading her message of hope and unity, heading to Nashville, TN Sunday. She’s booked six round-trip flights in eight weeks — on a fervent mission to share her story so that it never happens again.
“We’re running as fast as we can, for as long as we’re able, to reach as many audiences as we can. We’re running out of time. This is the last generation that will be able to answer the questions,” she told Patch in a 2013 interview.
Blumenthal Lazan’s young life changed irrevocably when the Nazis came into power in Germany. She and her parents, Ruth and Walter, and her brother, Albert, were ultimately incarcerated from the time she was 4 years old until she was 10.
When the political tides began to turn dark in December of 1934, Blumenthal Lazan said her family had begun to make preparations to leave Germany, but, ultimately, couldn’t part with elderly grandparents. Her family stayed until 1938, and when both grandparents died, they once again made plans to emigrate to the United States
“We were caught up in red tape,” she said. “Everything was ready. We had our tickets, our visas.”
Trying to escape the escalating tensions, the family moved to Holland, where they were living when the Germans invaded. “We were trapped,” Blumenthal Lazan said.
First, her family was sent to the Westerbork detention and transit camp; they were not separated until Blumenthal Lazan and her mother were torn from her father and brother at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne Frank died only days before liberation.
Blumenthal Lazan said although she never knew Anne Frank, “My story picks up where hers left off.”
Anne Frank’s diary ends abruptly when she and her family are discovered in hiding; Blumenthal Lazan’s story sheds painful light on life in a concentration camp through the eyes of a child.
Blumenthal Lazan, who travels across the world to raise awareness of what horrors hate and intolerance can wreak, said she finds hope and redemption in sharing her story — and works tirelessly to keep the messages learned in the Holocaust alive.
Her brother, however, suffered greatly. With no children by choice, he was faced with difficulty in finding a voice to discuss the atrocities he witnessed at the men’s camp, she said.
“We lost 1.5 million Jewish little ones — babies and children,” she said. “Six million of our people were murdered. The population of Suffolk and Nassau Counties is three million. Can you imagine losing twice the entire population of Long Island?”
Describing her life as a child at Bergen-Belsen, Blumenthal Lazan said: “It was such a horror, the filthiest of all the camps. We had nothing to clean anything. Toilets were benches with holes. We had no toilet paper, no water to wash. In a year and a half, we were not once able to brush our teeth. We had nothing.”
Living in squalor, she said: “We were covered with lice. Squashing them became my primary pastime. There are no words, no pictures, that can describe those horrors.”
As unspeakable as it was for a child, Blumenthal Lazan said, “Can you imagine what it does to a mother, to see her children in a state like that?”
Still, she said, her mother remained strong, a constant presence as they huddled in their cot. “Somehow she had faith, inner strength to know that things could get better.”
A little girl trapped, Blumenthal Lazan said she began to rely on games she created with a vivid imagination. “There was one based on superstition,” she said. “I decided if I were able to find four perfect pebbles, it would mean all four members of my family would survive. I made it my business to always find those pebbles.”
The games, she said, were a physical manifestation of her inner survival skills. “We all have survival techniques within us,” Blumenthal Lazan said. “The key is to find them and be sure we put them to work. No one is spared adversity. No one is spared hardship. We all have to overcome obstacles and with determination, faith, and hope, you can overcome just about anything — and everything.”
Even at the worst of times at Bergen-Belsen, Blumenthal Lazan said she was blessed by the fact that she was so young — and because she always had her mother beside her.
As a small child, Blumenthal Lazan was not aware at first what atrocities were occurring at the camp. “It was not until later that I realized people were being killed,” she said. “When I was 9, people were dying around me all the time. I tripped over the dead.”
Of living in barracks crammed with 600 women and children — facilities only built to house 100 — Lazan-Blumenthal said, “It was a horror.”
Many, she added, did not survive because they succumbed to disease, such as typhus, which killed her own father days after liberation and Anne Frank just days before.
Others, including her mother, had a fierce inner drive to survive. “Some people have inner strength and others do not. She did — and she gave it to me.”
Still, Blumenthal Lazan said, she is a woman without a childhood. “There really was none,” she said. “When I was 13 we came to the United States and my brother gave me nylons. I was so upset. I didn’t want to grow up. I wasn’t ready to grow up.”
As an adult, Blumenthal Lazan has made it her mission to share her story, so that others may learn.
While it wasn’t her idea to write a children’s book, after hearing Blumenthal Lazan speak to students, her co-author Lila Perl urged her to write “Four Perfect Pebbles,” for a young audience. The book is widely published in many languages.
“I’m so happy to have it in book form so the story can be passed on,” she said.
Today, Blumenthal Lazan remains friends with many of those she met in the camps as a child. The survivors, she said, meet and talk about the pain of their shared past. “It’s very healing,” she said.
Despite the horror she endured, Blumenthal Lazan said she has messages for inmates and students — for the world — that she learned from one of the darkest periods in human history.
“Be kind, good, respectful and tolerant. That is the basis for peace,” she said. “Do not follow a leader blindly without checking your hearts and minds as to what the consequences might be. A guy with a mustache wouldn’t have succeeded without the followers.”
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She added, “We must never make generalizations about a whole group.” Many non-Jews, she said, risked everything to hide Jewish families during the Nazi invasion — and ultimately lost their lives.
“There is very little that we can do against the negativity in our world but reach out and touch one another.”
Most of all, Blumenthal Lazan reminded, “Don’t ever give up hope.”
Patch file of Marion Blumenthal Lazan in 2013 speaking to inmates at Suffolk County Correctional Facility, courtesy Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office.