Wednesday, March 31, 1999
Holocaust survivor writes of freedom
Passover inspires North Avondale woman to share horrors
BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Anna Ornstein
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Anna Ornstein knew, from watching the tattoo girl's work on the other Auschwitz inmates, that she wanted this one to etch the numbers in her arm. The others scrawled large, sloppy numbers on the outside of women's forearms; this dark-haired girl was neat, placing small, well-formed numbers on the inside of the arm.
When I got to my girl, I told her that I had observed that she did the best job of tattooing. This obviously pleased her and for my compliment she rewarded me with a small, neat-looking tattoo. I spoke German poorly at the time but I tried to keep up a conversation with her. I very much wanted to be affirmed in my optimism, to be told that the tattoo really meant that we would be kept alive.
For more than a quarter-century the audience for such extraordinary glimpses of the Holocaust were the family and friends who gathered around the Ornsteins' Seder table every year. Her daughter Sharone prompted the series of annual essays one Passover by suggesting that each family member write about the meaning of freedom.
For Dr. Ornstein, a child psychiatrist who lives in North Avondale, Passover's themes of slavery and deliverance are buried deep within the early years of her life. The essays begin in the midst of a contented Hungarian childhood, proceed to Auschwitz and the death of her beloved father and brothers and then to her marriage to another survivor. They end with a recent pilgrimage to the camp where one brother died.
“Because of our personal experiences, Passover became a very important holiday for us because of that story of slavery. My children and my husband and I celebrated it with a vengeance,” she says. “So when we were sitting around the table reading the story of the Exodus, it was the perfect setting for my stories.”
Show in Germany
This summer, the essays, along with etchings by Clifton artist Stewart Goldman, will be exhibited in Munich. Collected under the title Tales of Slavery and Deliverance, they were shown at an Over-the-Rhine gallery in late 1997, and the pair hopes to publish the work as a book.
The memories are recalled with the clinical precision of her profession. Her family's two boys, leaving home for forced labor camp and unsure what to take or leave. The expulsion from their homes after the Germans invaded Hungary. The train platform at Auschwitz, where she last saw her father and grandmother.
I can still see him, holding onto his mother, putting his arms around her small, frail body. He was trying desperately to protect her from the crowd. But the people were pushing and shoving in fear and bewilderment. I tried not to lose them by fixing my gaze on my father's back. But the crowd kept separating us as the wagons disgorged the thousands and thousands of people onto the platform.
The first essay recalled May 8, 1945, the day Dr. Ornstein and her mother were liberated from Auschwitz, when the goal turned from surviving the Germans to surviving their freedom. Those seated at the table responded to the tale with tears and stunned silence, and a tradition was born.
“As if this was permission that I got from my children, around this time of year I'd start cooking, and I would write a story,” Dr. Ornstein, 72, professor emeritus of child psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, says. “I needed permission to talk. There are times still, maybe because of the need to share this horror, that I worry about burdening my listeners. ... I'm a teacher and a fairly good one, and I want people to learn. The stories became very much a vehicle through which I could tell the story without hurting anybody.”
Essays move artist
Eventually others heard about the essays, and Dr. Ornstein received hundreds of requests for copies. She decided that she would need to illustrate the essays if she wanted to publish them, and she approached Stewart Goldman.
Mr. Goldman, a professor of painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, had exhibited a series of Holocaust paintings at Temple Sholom in 1985 that had impressed Dr. Ornstein. She gave him a copy of her essays, and he promptly put them in a drawer for a year or so.
“You're confronted with this vast horror, and how to make images about it,” Mr. Goldman says. “Did I have a responsibility? Yeah, I had a responsibility to get it right, whatever that right was. That's why I put them away for a year.”
The understated etchings draw elements from the stories but arrive at a meaning all their own. A spinning wheel mentioned in one of the essays spins out barbed wire in an illustration, with the electrified fences of Auschwitz as a backdrop. A locomotive storms over suitcases, and shower heads spurt forth gas or tears.
And in “World,” an apple, a symbol of all they were denied, is wrapped in barbed wire. But from deep within the apple sprout three seeds — the number of children Paul and Anna Ornstein have — and their shoots push out from the wire to reach for the sky.
Decade spent homeless
After liberation, the teen-age Anna was reunited with Paul Ornstein, who had escaped from a forced labor camp. The two married — she in a borrowed suit and beret, he in a suit of her brother's — and spent more than a decade essentially homeless. First they went to refugee camps in Austria and Germany, then to medical school in Heidelberg, then to New York and Massachusetts before finally settling in Cincinnati in 1955.
“Sometimes I wonder, how did I get here? We really have had a very, very good life here,” she says. “Appreciating life, all the little joys, we're very good at that and not getting hung up on the little things. I think when you've experienced the total loss of everything, you realize how little everything else matters.”
The Ornsteins have also made several trips to the Nazi concentration camps, trying to better understand what happened to their families. The later essays recount some of those trips, including a visit to the grave of Paul Ornstein's sister, Judith, killed in a German bombing in the fall of 1944.
We very much wanted to see her grave, to spend time thinking of her, remembering her exuberant, lively personality. But we could not find the grave . . . I looked at Paul. His face was contorted, he was crestfallen. We wanted to see the stone but more than that, we wanted to see her name written on the stone. We now realized that this is what we really came for. We did not want to think that she too was in an unnamed grave in an unknown site like the rest of our siblings.
Dr. Ornstein is spending Passover out of town this year, and she doesn't know if she will write something. But she has been thinking of her four grandchildren and the grandchildren of her close friends and neighbors, also Holocaust survivors. If she writes something, it likely will be about the future.
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