Holocaust survivor shares experience with students Kaufman survived the Krakow Ghetto and three concentration camps BY TOM CAIAZZA Staff Writer Above: Holocaust survivor, Luna Kaufman, holds up the dress she wore while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. At right: Kaufman gives a presentation to students at the Wardlaw-Hartridge School, Edison, on Jan. 30 about her experiences during the Holocaust. For Luna Kaufman, living well was the best revenge. The 80-year-old Holocaust survivor told students at the Wardlaw-Hartridge school in Edison about her experiences, and the atrocities she witnessed at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Kaufman, a Watchung resident, said that learning about the Holocaust goes far beyond knowledge of the acts of the Nazis; it goes to learning about the people who were affected, their unique stories and the lessons they can teach. "If we just learn about it," Kaufman said, "it will be like a diamond with many facets. Each one has something to learn about it." Kaufman, then known as Luna Fuss, was just 12 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. At that time, she said, anti-Semitism was a way of life in Poland and she could not believe that the stories she was hearing from Jewish people in Germany could be true. PHOTOS COURTESY OF WARDLAW-HARTRIDGE SCHOOL She could not believe the beatings, the horrific stories of death and degradation. She had heard rumors of the concentration camps, but she thought they were used exclusively for political prisoners, not for her or her family. Slowly, the occupation began to show her what was really possible. Kaufman said that in Krakow, Poland, where she was born, university students were organizing into groups and beating up Jewish people on the streets. There was little or no resistance from the authorities to stop them. "If somebody beat up a Jew," Kaufman said, "there was no justice. We depended on the kindness of people, not on the law, because the law did not protect us." When the Nazis came, they froze all Jewish assets held in banks. Kaufman and her family were forced to sell their belongings in order to have money for food. All the changes happened very quickly, albeit in increments. After each one, Kaufman said, the people would say to themselves that "this was the last thing they will make us do." Eventually, Kaufman found herself and her family held prisoner in the Krakow ghetto. Every member of her family was forced to get meager-paying jobs in order to have enough to survive. But those jobs offered more than just income. When the Nazis came to liquidate the ghettos, those with work assignments were sent to work camps, Kaufman said - those without jobs were killed. This was one of the many "miracles" Kaufman said had conspired to see her through the Holocaust alive. While in the ghetto, Kaufman remembers a trolley line that cut through the center of the ghetto for people outside to travel across the city. One woman, a Christian, would travel the trolley, and when the guards were not looking, she would toss money out the window to Kaufman and her sister. The good Samaritan would be caught, beaten and warned, but would continue to ride the trolley, tossing money to the Jews of the ghetto. Eventually, Kaufman found herself in the first of three concentration camps she would be held in. She was forced to work in a factory, where any sign of protest or displeasure would be met with death. One time, she watched passively as the wife of a man scheduled to be beaten began to cry. The Nazi officer who responded shot the man instead. Later, that same officer was standing behind Kaufman, watching her work. Kaufman heard a click behind her head and thought it was nothing more than the man closing his cigarette case. Later, she learned that the hammer on his pistol had landed on an empty round. She said that the silence from the other workers, including her own mother, showed him that if her life was not worth speaking up for, it was not worth reloading his gun. Kaufman said that there was no way of knowing what would spare you and what would get you killed. "You never knew which action to take to be on the right side," Kaufman said. As the Russians progressed on the eastern front, Kaufman and the other prisoners were deported to camps deep inside Germany. At this time, her mother had been selected to go to another camp. Kaufman protested and was allowed to go with her mother, a move she thought would surely be a death sentence. "This act, which I though would be condemning me to death, it was the act that saved my life," Kaufman said. There would be other choices, however insignificant at the time, that Kaufman said had saved her life, including the admonishing of the head of a Nazi camp who would eventually alert her when the Nazis were coming to liquidate the hospital she was in. Through all of the hardship, Kaufman, ever a spitfire, refused to despair or consider suicide. "I really never had thoughts of suicide, because I wanted to show that we will survive and live productive lives," Kaufman said. "If I were to kill myself, it would be doing a little of their job, and I wasn't going to do that." After the war, Kaufman and her mother made their way back to Krakow, to the broken family they had known when they left. While much of her extended family had survived, her father and older sister did not. Her father was gassed at Auschwitz and her sister was drowned when the boat she and other prisoners were being held on was deliberately scuttled just before the war's end. Through all this, Kaufman holds no ill will to the people who perpetrated the Holocaust. "I never did," Kaufman said. "It will poison my life and they would not care, they wouldn't even know about it. My vengeance on them was to live a good life. I feel that I won the war."