Ms. Nakada's Blog with our Guest Speaker: Gabriella Karin

Agenda
Guest speaker Gabriella Karin

HW: RJ 7.1-7.4 due pages 371-384

We started class by welcoming Gabriella Karin, a Holocaust survivor. She got started right away sharing her World War II experience with us. She was only eight when World War II started and she lived in Slovakia which was a democratic nation, like ours, before the war.

Her mother worked for an underground organization which helped Jews who were about to be taken. Her mother would get a list of people who were about to be taken and inform them.

One time, she had cousins who showed up on the list and she went to tell them they had no where to go. They decided to go to the work camps and hope for the best, but they never saw them again.

At first, Gabriella stayed with nuns. She had fake papers that said she was a Christian girl. She made no friends there so she wouldn't betray herself. Her mother came and saw how miserable she was and
took her back.

Her mother knew what was coming so she prepared a hiding place. A young lawyer, Karol Blanar, was willing to help hide 8 people in his apartment. They were right in the city, and they hid there for nine months. She had to just sit there silently. The lawyer brought books and these saved her. Because of this reading she ended up jumping a grade.

She talked about how everything can taken from you except what is in your head. "Put good things in there."

She tried to find him as an adult and found his brother, Vincent Blanar, who was a professor. She reached out to contact him and she found out about his life, and that he died in 1980. She tried to find where he was buried, but couldn't find him. One day after telling her story, a man said he could find him and he did! Karol Blanar, the man who saved her life, had been buried in an unmarked grave.

She paid for a marker to show that this man was righteous, and saved the lives of eight people. We can find this story here. 

Gabriella then showed us photographs from her growing up. From the photo of her ten-year-old birthday, she is the only one to survive.

She took her grandchildren to Slovakia to see where they hid. Where they hid was just across the street from the Gestapo. From there she saw girls from the convent being captured and taken by the Gestapo.

She is a sculptor now and she showed us images of her sculptures.

One honors the nuns who saved her.

She also has a photograph of her, an an adult, sitting where she used to sit in the convent and cry, and the desk where she used to sit. 

She has another photo of the street where she was hidden with the house where she was hidden on one side and the Gestapo on the other. It was built in 1931, and it was written that no Jew would live in the house, so maybe that is why they never came to that house.

First they took away their possession, their jobs, then apartments, and put people in the camps where they took their material goods.

She talked about Nov. 9 1938, Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when they destroyed synagogues, broke into Jewish stores, destroying everything, leaving only shattered glass. They took the Jewish men that night.

Only England opened their doors to the Jewish refugee children.

We can all do something good. She told us about another man, Sir Nicholas Winton whose kindness helped save so many lives, through the kindertransport. They celebrate his birthday each year.

She showed photographs of her sculptures depicting aspects of the holocaust: the bunk beds, the death march, the silent screams, the forced labor, hands reaching, March of the Living in Poland, from Auschwitz to Berkinow in silence, railroad tracks, a mountain of Jewish stars, the state of Isreal, a cactus.

Another one her sculptures depicts the liberation, and people at the station. She was a young girl, 14, after the liberation, and she was looking for survivors she knew, but couldn't recognize. She wondered if she could go on with life, alone. She decided she would smile and be happy. Because Hitler did not get her, she would live.

In another work, she used the fallen leaves to record the names of the 75 members of her family lost in the Holocaust. Then she has a sculpture with falling leaves, it rotates and represents the 6 million fallen leaves.

Other works of hers include a tribute to Kindertransport, with the faces of the children looking out from the train.

Gabriella answered some of our questions, about life during the war and her life even since.

Thank you so much, Gabriella, for sharing your remarkable story of survival with us.