"My childhood ended when those soldiers kicked in the door."
That was one of many stinging memories relayed by holocaust survivor Zehava Sweet during a presentation to veterans and community members at VFW Post 2070 on Tuesday night. Speaking largely in the prose of poetry she wrote after the war, Sweet relayed an account that was less based on facts and chronology than in emotional and spiritual traumas she endured as a teenager torn from her family and sent to a labor camp.
Sweet was a child of approximately 10 years old in 1939 when the Nazis invaded her native Poland. Her first poem described excitedly sitting by her mother's sewing machine as she sewed Zehava's costume as the "Snow Queen" for the Jewish holiday of Purim. Her blissful ignorance was shattered, along with her childhood, just before the holiday when armed Nazi soldiers kicked in the door to her house and took all of the cloth, including her beloved costume, as her father stood by helpless and humiliated.
It was but the first and mildest taste of what was to come.
She was hospitalized with a minor illness in the Warsaw Ghetto and narrowly escaped being shipped to a concentration camp when Nazis raided the hospital looking to clear out Jews in failing health. She was secreted away by an aunt, but looked on in horror as the patients were stacked like cord wood in the back of a truck, those on the bottom suffocating under the weight of the others.
Later, she was separated from her family and send to the Ravensbruck labor camp in Germany. There she was put to work building Luftwaffe bombers.
She honored her supervisor from the camp in a poem titled "Meister," recounting his gentle nature and special treats he secretly provided her, allowing her to wash her sole under garment, and warning her away when "the boots" came. One day, though, "Meister" did not come to work, and was never seen again. Sweet suspects his kindness to her was discovered and he was fired -- or worse.
Sweet touched only basically on the experience of the labor camp, which, she emphasized, was no where near as bad as the extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. She described having only a straw mattress to sleep on a straw mattress with no pillow and no blankets, despite snow on the ground. Food was minimal and the best she ate was the day the Germans suddenly evacuated the camp as the Russian Army approached. Sweet spent three days in a bunker during a fire fight that liberated the camp, and only narrowly avoided being assaulted by one of her liberators, a Russian Jew whom she shamed into letting her go unharmed.
Sweet reconnected with her father and 5-year-old sister in a train station after the liberation, but her mother was never found. Records conflict as to whether she died in a camp or was killed by a soldier on a street in the ghetto.
She later served in the nascent Israeli Army and then came to America where she studied at Cal State LA and wrote poetry for an outlet for the emotions of her holocaust experience.
