Courtesy of Ruth Diskin Films – www.ruthfilms.com

ESRA Cinema Club recently presented the documentary film, Here I Learned to Love

to a packed auditorium in Yad Lebanim in Rananna.

This heartbreaking story of two Polish toddlers sent to the Cracow Ghetto with their family after the Nazis invaded Poland is one of such pathos and angst at the injustice of the Eichmann Final Solution, that the audience was stunned into silence by the end of the film.

There was very little that Itzik, then aged 4, could do against the systematic rounding up of Polish Jews, but to firmly hold his younger brother Avner's hand and be his protector. His aunt Malka and her husband took the toddlers on what they called an adventure into the bunkers facing the ghetto when they made a run for it, clasping each other’s hands. When they emerged everyone was gone - total annihilation. Aunt Malka was prepared and hung crosses on the boys, telling them they were going to be Christians, and they escaped into the country, crisscrossing the fields when they heard the dreaded Nazi motorcycles with dogs in the sidecar, scouring the land for fleeing Jews. The toddlers knew the sound of these bikes and always ran into the center of the field and lay down as flat as they could.

After many fields and many farmhouses, Aunt Malka, who was pregnant, gave birth to her child in a barn.The midwife quickly strangled the baby as it would have been too dangerous for this family on the run to keep it. Ironically, this wonderful woman caught some infection from her hazardous birthing and was unable to have children after the war ended. She and her husband, luckily, survived the war and began a new life in the USA.

Meanwhile, after leaving Slovenia, they ended up in Hungary just as the Nazis invaded. Aunt Malka heard about the Kastner train on which Hungarian Jews were promised freedom by Rudolph Kastner who had seemingly made a deal with Eichmann for his family and friends to be allowed to leave Hungary. However, the train into which Aunt Malka threw the boys one by one, as she thought she was saving them, ended up in Bergen Belsen. It is hard to imagine the fear of these two toddlers, not knowing Hungarian or German, being in the midst of this chaos, screaming Nazis with machine guns and ferocious barking dogs. At Bergen Belsen there was a 20-year-old girl called Naomi who looked after them with such love and affection that they called her their 3rd mother. She said she would adopt them, and she was the one person who inspired Itzik to write, in his book, Here I Learned to Love, because she showered them with such love and tenderness.

Having been on this Kastner train was a godsend as all those who had been on it were sent to Switzerland in 1944 from the camp. The saddest thing was that Naomi died in Switzerland and the boys were on their own again going through the aliyah channels to Israel with Bnei Akiva. They spent their youth in Israel, and Itzik told us they had had a very good education and were sent, like many parentless children, to kibbutzim and farms. They grew up, both got married although Avner later divorced, have children and grandchildren, and at the 'family screening' of the film Itzik stood up and stated, "The Nazis didn't win - we survived to tell our story" which took Itzik 20 years to write, and the film is based on his book. His aunt Malka filled him in with many details when she came to Israel to see the brothers.

Avner, on the other hand, didn't want to remember anything from his past, denied his harsh beginnings, and became estranged from his brother because he wasn't sure if Itzik was really his brother. Being the younger brother, his memories weren't as clear although he said in the film that his one recollection of the horrors they endured was the constant sound of the 'clack,clack' of the railway train that had never left his head.

The film not only told of the endurance of these two little boys, but of their reunion. In their 70s, they returned to Cracow and traced their journey across Slovenia, Hungary and Belsen to Switzerland where their beloved Naomi had died. The saddest thing about it was that Avner cried throughout almost the entire film as his denials were unearthed, he was shown proof that Itzik was his brother and that these terrible experiences really had happened and his memories of them came back to him. The director of the film, Avi Angel, translated Itzik's answers to our questions after the movie.

The evening ended with Itzik playing a haunting melody on his harmonica, which both brothers knew how to play, and which had brought them some comfort in their remaining years.

We left with a feeling of admiration for all Holocaust survivors who have endured such torment and survived.