Holocaust Survivor Helps 'World Remember Why Kindness And Empathy Are So Important'

SEMINOLE, FL — A Holocaust survivor and Seminole resident celebrated her 100th birthday on May 5 by throwing out the first pitch at Tropicana Field when the Tampa Bay Rays took on the New York Yankees.

“It was just something special for me,” Hellen Kahan, a longtime volunteer with the Florida Holocaust Museum, told Patch. “It was really wonderful.”

The Rays Baseball Foundation presented the museum with a $10,000 partnership grant in her honor.

Kahan, who survived three concentration camps and a death march during World War II, worked with the museum for decades, sharing her story with local students and organizations.

“I never could have imagined celebrating a birthday like this, let alone my 100th,” she said. “I’m so grateful that I am here to tell my story and help the world remember why kindness and empathy are so important for us all.”

She was born in 1923 as Hani Sabo in Rozavlea, Romania, according to the museum.

She recalls a happy childhood and showed an early aptitude for both tailoring and clothing design, as well as math as a child. As a young adult, Kahan moved to Budapest “to learn how to become a very highly skilled seamstress,” her daughter, Livia Wein, told Patch.

This was after World War I when Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, her daughter said.

When Nazis occupied the region in 1944, during World War II, Kahan returned to her family in Romania. They were forced into a ghetto before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Later, they were moved to two other concentration camps, Bergen-Belsen and Lippstadt in Germany, the museum said.

Near the end of the war, Kahan escaped from a death march before being liberated by the Soviet army in May 1945. By then, her parents and sisters were dead.

She returned to Romania after the war, but the communist country didn’t allow people to discuss the Holocaust, and Kahan was forced to keep her story and everything she’d been through to herself.

“We grew up in communist Romania, and there you were not allowed to talk about it,” said Wein, who was born there. “So, the first few years of my life, it was like nobody talked about it and there was no support. There was no emotional support having lost your family. There was no emotional support when you’ve lost everything you came from. … Everything was an internal suffering for her.”

In 1967, Kahan fulfilled her lifelong dream of immigrating to the United States, moving to Brooklyn with her daughter and son, then 14 and 20, respectively.

Needing to find work right away, she turned down jobs at dress shops and department stores worried they wouldn’t be lucrative for her and instead found work in payroll for small offices. Eventually, she was hired by Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and worked her way up to payroll manager.

“She was very good with figures,” Wein said.

Kahan retired by the mid-1980s and moved to Florida, where her daughter, who taught Spanish and French at Seminole High School, lived.

Wanting to give back to the community, Kahan joined the St. Petersburg-area chapter of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and became involved with the Florida Holocaust Museum.

For Kahan, sharing her story was the most important thing to prevent atrocities like the Nazi concentration camps from happening again. She especially loved talking to young students at schools in the region. And she always showed them her prisoner number tattooed on her arm during her time at Auschwitz, knowing it would make an impact.

Wein recalls one time they were visiting a loved one at a hospital when a man in an elevator recognizd her, stopped them and said, “You have a number, you came to my high school (decades earlier), and you spoke to us. I’ll never forget it.”

Today, her family, including her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, remain involved with the museum, carrying on Kahan's legacy there. This includes sponsoring a teaching trunk that travels to schools throughout Florida.

“They all want to learn,” she said. “They ask me, ‘Bubbi, tell us about your story.’”

As a centenarian, Kahan sometimes gets lost in her stories of concentration camps, her daughter said. “But who can blame her.”

Kahan, looking back at her life, told Patch, “It’s not the 100 you feel. You feel what you went through. Because if you go through (Adolph) Hitler’s camps, everything you did was painful.”

Even after surviving the concentration camps, life hasn’t been easy, she added. “I really feel that I have to work more than everybody else because I know what was happening there. I know it. I lived it and it was very hard.”

Finding the Florida Holocaust Museum when she moved to the Sunshine State was a saving grace for her.

“We need to stop this killing of humanity,” Kahan said. “It was a hard thing to believe happened (the concentration camps) but I had to tell it to people. It was really very hard and very sad, so really, the museum was important.”

She’s long been plugged into national and world affairs, but in recent years, since the news has been so distressing, her family has limited her intake of it — especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last spring.

“We stopped watching the news after the invasion. It was very upsetting for her. She said, ‘Why is the world doing this again?’” Wein said. “She gets upset that the world isn’t stopping. And when you look around, how are we still doing these things?”