Searching for the Lieber Gott

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 27th. This is WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you’ve joined us today.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the Holocaust.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Seventy-seven years ago today, liberation came to the concentration and extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, January 27th, 1945.

BROWN: WORLD Radio correspondent Lillian Hamman is a recent college graduate. She admits that most of what she knows about the Holocaust comes from uninspired history textbooks. So when she recently discovered a Holocaust survivor living just a few miles from her apartment—she arranged to spend an afternoon with him and his wife for a first-hand history lesson.

RADIO NEWSCAST: The news of Europe as it occurs…

ZIFFER: My legs don’t operate very well. They get tired very quickly.

LILLIAN HAMMAN, CORRESPONDENT: Walter Ziffer lives in a one-story house—tucked away in the Blue Ridge mountains of Weaverville, North Carolina. He’s a survivor.

ZIFFER: But 94 is a pretty high number, you know?! So I'm not blaming anybody…

We’re sitting in the living room. The smell of soup drifts in from the kitchen, where his wife Gail is making lunch. Walter’s scarred hands rest peacefully in his lap. Wiry white eyebrows poke over the top of his thin-rimmed glasses.

He reaches for a nearby family photo and taps the black and white smiles of each face.

ZIFFER: That's me. That's my mom…

Walter was born in 1927 Czechoslovakia to Anny Ziffer, an avid stamp collector and magnificent cook, and Leo Ziffer, a lawyer and layman photographer. Anny was the family’s leader of Jewish religion and faith, always remembering to light the Sabbath candles, help neighbors in need, and speak prayer into Walter’s heart.

ZIFFER: It's Lieber Gott mach mich fromm dass ich in den Himmel komm. “Dear God, make me,” I don't know, “observant or pious so that I may enter heaven.” But that came to an end the first of September.

WAR RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT FROM 9/1/39: Number 1, At 6:15pm…

A lot comes to an end for many European families on the first of September, 1939. That’s when World War II began.

WAR RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT FROM 9/1/39: German airforce and regular army unexpectedly invaded Polish territory…

ZIFFER: First there was a retreat of the Polish army, which is totally chaotic. Then came the Germans in perfect order, not a shot was fired. And they settled in, and we were occupied, and that was the beginning of the misery for us.

By the next morning, the Nazis had turned two of the three synagogues in Teschen into piles of ash.

ZIFFER: Hitler really became a religious person whom the people worshiped. And I mean, you've seen probably on television, gatherings of tens of thousands of people standing there and shouting these various slogans: “Ein Blut, Ein Volk, Ein Fuehrer.” One blood. One people. One leader and, you know, way back then our minds, thought was, wouldn't it be nice to be on that side? You know, they were very impressive people.

But any admiration quickly faded.

In an attempt to “maintain law and order” in the Jewish ghettos, the Nazis created a self-governing Jewish body, known as the Judenrat.

ZIFFER: It’s a devilish thing. Rather than taking care of this relationship themselves, they put in a Jewish organism in between, as a go between. So whatever happened, you know, it's very often the Jewish people who were at the short end of the rope, blamed their leaders, the Jewish people, the Jewish council leaders, rather than the Nazis.

Although Leo Ziffer’s position as chair of the Teschen Judenrat protected his family for awhile, the Nazi’s eventually separated the Ziffers in June 1942. At 15 years old, Walter was sent to his first of seven Schmelts—or labor camps.

The smell of Gail’s warm soup provides a sobering contrast as Walter recalls the starvation he suffered in captivity.

ZIFFER: But what do you talk about in a situation like this? You know, we didn't talk about camp life, because we experienced it every day. Food is something we dreamt about. And that was the only really, you know, pleasant moment in our lives.

Walter learned Yiddish to earn the respect of his fellow prisoners. Occasionally when guards knew he was the son of lawyer Leo Ziffer, they would give him extra food or a safer job. As he shifted camps about every 6 months, Walter could only hope his family was still alive.

RADIO NEWSCAST: Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard. It will not be pleasant listening…

Four months after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, freedom finally arrived at the Waldenburg camp on May 8th, 1945.

ZIFFER: We just stood there like every morning to be counted. And the SS officer came in and he turned around, he walked out. And he threw the keys to the gates of the Camp across the fence. And we just stood there, we didn’t know what to do. Then a single Russian tank came and smashed one side of the fence of the camp. And kept on going.

Walter was reunited first with Anny and his sister Edith, and then his father Leo. They started over in Czechoslovakia.

ZIFFER: So my mother used to say “volti volti” they called me Volti. “You're nothing but bones and skin. Yeah, we have to put some fat on you” And she built us up the whole family. My father was a skeleton, just like I was.

As communism spread after the war, Walter fled to France, before emigrating to the United States. He smiles now, remembering the taste of his first Coca Cola at Ellis Island.

His life after the Holocaust has been one of searching for the Lieber Gott—the dear God—his mother Anny prayed to. For a time he was a Christian minister before converting back to Judaism. Today he calls himself a secular humanist.

Perhaps one of the reasons to commemorate this day is to do more than just remember the Holocaust, but to lament, repent, and pray—not just that it won’t happen again, but that people like Walter Ziffer might find what he’s searching for.

ZIFFER: When you think that the DNA of the German Nazis is the same we have, we are human beings pretty much built the same way—all of us. So to say that can never happen. Uh uh. It can. I think it's not so hard to understand that what really counts is one's relationship with other people. That's what enriches you. That's what makes you a fully humane human being. Really. And that's my philosophy of life.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lillian Hamman in Weaverville, North Carolina.

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