The Museum’s Behind Every Name a Story project gives voice to the experiences of survivors during the Holocaust.
Lulu’s Story
When on a family vacation in Washington DC, I urged my family to visit the Holocaust Museum as I had recently completed a Holocaust curriculum at school and was eager to learn more about this historical event. After we toured the main Museum exhibits, we decided to visit the research room, where we could explore our family history. I knew that my maternal great grandparents had survived the Holocaust and started a new life in America after the war, and that my great great grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz. However, I knew little more than that. After we submitted my great great grandparents’ names, a number of documents appeared on the computer screen. My attention was immediately drawn to the name Lulu Klein, a family member who, at the time of his death, was a teenager, as was I. Upon entering Lulu’s name in the database, a copy of a letter to the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany, dated 1984, appeared on the screen. The letter, handwritten in an elegant script, began with the following: “I am writing to you in desperation to find a trace of my brother, Israel (Lulu) Klein, born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1927, and deported from Malines, Belgium, to Auschwitz, with the 25th transport in May, 1944.”
The letter was signed by my grandmother’s mother, Paula, nearly forty years after the war had ended. What I came to understand as a result of this letter and other primary documents related to my family that we retrieved that day, is that far from being an abstract series of events studied at school, history is the story of what happens to us, a living legacy of the collective stories of the past that will continue to shape us as we carry these events and their impact into the future.
From the documentation that we discovered at the museum, the story of Lulu and his parents slowly emerged. My great great grandparents, Zyshe and Elka Klein, were living in Belgium with their son Lulu when the Nazis raided their home and arrested them. Their older daughter Paula was not at home, as she was living and working as a teacher in an orphanage. When she heard what had happened to her parents and her beloved younger brother, she rushed to Gestapo headquarters to try to save them. Instead, she was thrown into a prison cell and brutally beaten, losing two teeth and having her eardrum broken. From that cell, she saw her parents and brother, his face bloodied, being dragged down the hallway. She shouted from her cell that she wanted to go with them. Her father responded, “No, my child, or we will all be lost.” That would be the last she would ever see any of them.
Paula was eventually released, but Zyshe, Elka and Lulu were not. They were taken to the Malines transit camp and then sent to Auschwitz on May 19, 1944. Immediately upon their arrival, Zyshe and Elka were murdered in the gas chambers. They were both around fifty years old. Lulu miraculously survived Auschwitz, but near the end of the war was sent on the infamous death march towards Germany. That was the last time anyone had recorded seeing him. My great grandmother Paula’s letter continued, “I met witnesses who were with him, marching together in the death march from camps at the end of the war – I think near Mauthausen – many of them returned expecting him to follow. Unfortunately no news of him since. He was a tall thin dark hair and skinny young man of seventeen and a half years old. I will be very grateful if you can give me any information about his whereabouts."
After returning home from the Holocaust Museum, I shared these documents with my grandmother, who I call Bubbe. She never knew that her mother was still desperately searching for Lulu four decades after he was last seen on the death march. My Bubbe then showed me a cap that had belonged to Lulu, a cherished keepsake, the only tangible object of Lulu’s that Paula had managed to save. To hold Lulu’s cap in my hands made him real to me in an intense and personal way.
As an avid student of history, I am deeply interested in events, dates and statistical facts, but learning the details of the loss of my seventeen year old great great uncle - as a now seventeen year old myself - has had a searing effect on me. As I read about the Holocaust, I no longer imagine nameless, faceless, anonymous hordes of people driven to their deaths. I see instead seventeen year old Lulu, tall, gangly, and alone in this world. Lulu’s life was snuffed out, leaving behind no offspring to memorialize him, or even remember the very fact that he once existed. I realized that this convergence of world history with my personal family story has called out to me to bear witness to Lulu’s story. By viewing history through the dual lens of objective facts and first hand accounts, the factual and emotional truths of events emerges.
This year, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I resolved to speak to the student body at my school about Lulu. I stood at the front of the auditorium and told his story. As I shared the details of Lulu’s brief life and tragic death, a respectful silence fell over the room. Lulu’s story was brought to public consciousness. As I spoke, an enlarged photo of Lulu, wearing his cap, was projected on the screen behind me, giving a face to his story.I then lit a candle in his memory.
History can be a breathing, living entity, but it is only we, the students of history, who can infuse it with life. We are shaped by our appreciation of the significance of the past, for that will inform the hard choices we will have to make for the future. Lulu, age seventeen with his life stolen from him, has returned as my guide. His legacy will inform my decisions and deliberate contributions to the forward march of history, with a greater awareness of my role in how my generation shapes the future. History can be an unfailing mentor, but only if we reflect on the millions of Lulus whose lives were impacted by events, both tragic and noble, that preceded us.
Story submitted by Eitan Miller, Paula Cappell's great-grandson.