Aging Holocaust survivors face new challenges

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 25th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: reliving the nightmare.

This winter, Auschwitz and other concentration camps are holding memorial events, commemorating those who died in the Holocaust, and celebrating those who survived. Every year, survivors return to the camps to tell their stories. But their numbers are dwindling.

REICHARD: As of January, there remain fewer than a quarter of a million Holocaust survivors, and most over the age of 90.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy discovered that as these survivors age, their care becomes a bit more complicated.

NATE LEIPCIGER: The thoughts come back uninvited, and they come back at difficult times.

MARY MUNCY: Nate Leipciger is a Holocaust survivor. He was taken to Auschwitz when he was 11 and liberated when he was 15. Now, he’s 97.

LEIPCIGER: When you get older, when the ability to move and your ability to do things is reduced. You have more time to think. Your mind is not as sharp as it was before. You're bothered with dreams. You’re bothered with images.

The images come flooding in when he picks up his great-grandchildren.

LEIPCIGER: You imagine how my grandparents must have felt when they picked up their children-grandchildren, and they knew that they're going to die for no reason other than the fact that they were born Jewish.

Leipciger has been telling his family’s story since his father died in 1972 and he’s still telling it at schools and events but every week, it gets harder.

LEIPCIGER: It's more difficult to express yourself. It's more difficult to relive it. You're more frail. Your mind wonders, your ability to talk diminishes, your physical strength diminishes.

And he’s not alone. Thousands of Holocaust survivors all over the world are dealing with the same problems as they age and until relatively recently, resources were few and far between.

Geriatric care specialist Paula David is trying to change that.

PAULA DAVID: With survivors, there were some really unique problems.

Her first job in geriatric care was at a facility in Toronto with a large population of survivors. She says they were often labeled problem patients because they would hoard food, panic when they felt like they couldn’t leave, or wouldn’t wear something like an institutional wristband—among other things.

DAVID: There was no history of care and how to support people properly, effectively and apply best care practices to a group with really unique needs.

So, out of necessity, David and her team took it upon themselves to come up with systems for caring for older adults with trauma.

It started with a lot of trial and error.

DAVID: Usually error, and we would have some kind of catastrophic reaction based on best intentions of good practice, and when, in hindsight, some of them were extremely obvious, some of them we had to be hit on the head with.

For example, on one Jewish holiday, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra volunteered to do a concert for David’s patients.

So they gathered people together, but as the musicians began, a few people started having negative reactions.

DAVID: That was the music that the Jewish prisoner survivor musicians would be told to play as they were marching Auschwitz survivors into the gas chambers.

Other triggers were more subtle, but made sense when David and her team put themselves in their patient’s shoes. Things like a lack of privacy, crowded spaces, and hearing other patients crying or in pain.

As they learned more, they created lists of triggers and started distributing them to other care facilities around the world.

About this time, David started noticing another group of people who could use their resources—survivors’ children.

MARALYN TURGEL: My name is Marilyn Turgel.

Turgel’s father Sam Gardener was taken to a Nazi glass making factory when he was 13 and worked in labor camps for almost four years.

But as a child, all Turgel knew was that her father was a survivor and that her family was different.

TURGEL: It was always a very big problem for me, because I was always told not to upset my dad. He was very highly strung and got upset very easily.

She didn’t hear his story in detail until she was in her 40s and the Speilburg Institute interviewed her father.

TURGEL: I said to him, why did you never tell me your story? And he said, ‘I didn't want you to feel sorry for me,’ but it was because he couldn't face it.

But it allowed her to face it.

TURGEL: When I heard his story, I grieved terribly, and he was very sorry he told me, and I said, ‘But didn't you know, Dad, I needed to grieve for my grandparents.’

That first conversation opened a door. Her father started sharing his story with other interviewers, historians, and schoolchildren. Turgel says it helped bring him peace, even if neither of them truly got over their losses.

In his last few years, the memories started bubbling up when he didn’t want them to. And dementia set in.

TURGEL: He used to say to me, ‘the Nazis didn't come tonight to kill me. I don't think they're going to shoot me, but I think they'll poison me.’

Turgel and her family did their best to care for him as he declined, but eventually, he needed more care than what they could give.

About a year before he died, they had to persuade him to go into a care facility. It was hard on all of them.

TURGEL: In those days, they didn't have psychiatric help. They didn't know how to help people's trauma and that affected his whole life.

After he died, Turgel joined a group for children of Holocaust survivors in the UK and now she spends her free time telling her father’s story.

Back in Toronto, Paula David started a similar group for the second generation there. She says that community and sharing stories is one of the most helpful things for survivors and their children.

DAVID: It's been a very, very challenging and exciting and rewarding journey I've been on, and find myself still on, because so much of what we started exploring, very simplistically at the beginning continues to evolve.

When David started, she just wanted to help the people in her care, but it’s turned into a life of trying to understand trauma.

A few years in, she started a group for survivors in the facility.

They would sit in the circle for an hour. David would ask questions about their past—usually with a theme, things like starvation and abuse.

DAVID: Nobody really said anything to me for the first year.

She offered to stop it a few times, but the survivors always insisted that she had to keep it going.

DAVID: And then when they opened up, it was like a dam broke. And that's when my real education began.

She learned each of their stories and asked if she could write them down. She says as they aged, they started leaning on each other more and more too, not just her.

It took time, patience, and a lot of listening, but she feels like she’s helped in a small way—even though she knows the work is never done.

DAVID: I'm in awe of how much has been learned in the last four decades—how much, heartbreakingly, we still have to learn and understand, because war and trauma and genocide hasn't stopped.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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