Glantz. “When you make testimony, you are making everyone a witness that this really happened,” she began. She then spoke a horrific tale, which Prime Minister of Sweden, Oren Persons, related in his opening of a Stockholm meeting on May 7, 1998. Five children were hanged from hooks in the cellar of a school near Hamburg, Germany. According to Persons, it takes approximately 15 seconds to read the names of the young victims, but to read the names of ALL the victims of the Holocaust—8 hours a day, 7 days a week—would takes three years and seven months, the same amount of time that elapsed from the building of the first gas chamber to the eventual release of the last survivor. “The time it would take just to read their names.” Glantz pointed, if one were to read the names, 70 members of her own family would be among them; grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, including her mother and father and two brothers. Miraculously, her name is not on the list. Glantz earliest memories are of her mother’s “beautiful voice” singing lullabys to her in a shtetl in Poland. Esther, Glantz’s mother, who gave Glantz her Soprano voice and love of music, never reached her 40th birthday. September 1, 1939, German soldiers invade and occupy the country in three weeks. Jews were forced to wear arm bands identifying them as such, synagogues were closed on Yom Kippur, and the Chief Rabbi was dragged to the open marketplace and killed him with his bayonet. Glantz noted that in 1940, 55% of the population in her town were Jewish, a vibrant part of the community since the 1600s. By 1944, the Jewish population was zero. She’d lived with her family above a tannery, owned and operated by her father and several uncles. Her mother was a teacher. Unfortunately, her home was only about 12 and a half miles from the Death Camp Treblinka. Today, Treblinka is a cemetery, covered in 17 thousand huge stone of varying sizes, each representing a Jewish community decimated by the Nazis. In 1942, Glantz took a walk with her mother, to the home of Maria Kowalczyk, or “Matka (Polish for “Mother.”)” as Glantz would come to her know her, where she was left for safekeeping. “That was the last time I saw my mother,” she said. Matka loved and cared for Glantz as her own, and Glantz was never for want of food, clothing or shelter. Still, and understandably, the young survivor spent many days in bereavement, though the sadness would diminish over time. “The memory of my own natural family began to fade… My mother’s singing, however, has been imprinted on my heart, in my own voice and has remained a blessing for me all my life.” The anecdotes and details of her years, hiding in plain sight, brought Glantz’s horrific tale vividly to life, like the time she requested milk to drink with kielbasa, only to be denied by Matka who told the child her heritage forbade such practice and cautioned her to keep the truth a secret. Or the terrifying instances of being abruptly roused in the middle of the night with a flashlight in the face by Nazi soldiers, looking for Jews hoping a jolt of fear coupled with sleepiness would cause a hidden Jew to betray their true identities and thus foment their own demise. As such times, Matka urged the young Glantz “to show the soldiers how you say your prayers.” Kneeling with her palms pressed together before her, Glantz recited her prayers in perfect Polish before the picture of the Holy Mother Mary, which hung over her bed, and in so doing, lived to see another day. May 1945, Glantz’s “vaguely familiar” Aunt Norma— her father’s youngest sister—arrives with a new carriage and doll for Glantz. Glantz would later learn Aunt Norma escaped the horrors of Treblinka by jumping off a stalled train on its way to the Death Camp, but her uncle had not. Aunt Norma was going to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp and took her niece and Matka with her. There, Glantz, her Matka and aunt stood amid similar uprooted people and American soldiers. The former could only speak Polish and the latter Yiddish, but Aunt Norma did know the name and location of her older sister—who’d moved to America before the war—and husband. “Esther Max Bernstein Bronx New York,” she cried again and again, hoping to catch the attention of a soldier from the same area of the Big Apple. Not only was there, but also soldier Phil Kaplan turned out to be the nextdoor neighbor of Esther and Max Bernstein, and word gets back to Uncle Max and Aunt Esther. Glantz is later torn away from her beloved Matka by two representatives of the American/Jewish Committee on a mission from her uncle and aunt to retrieve her. On the way, she was taken to an orphanage run by Lutheran nuns in Sweden, where she learned her first foreign language—Swedish—had her tonsils removed and gained an utter distaste for herring, which seemed to be served at every meal. But Glantz’s travails were not over; a long boat trip to Canada for what was supposed to be a three-anda half-week stay, while officials processed the paperwork for her relocation to the United States, turned into more than three years. In Montreal, Glantz stayed with Fannie and Abe Morantz, a couple Uncle Max and Aunt Esther met at a wedding, and as will happen after living with people for so long a time, Glantz grew to love the Morantz’s. Forced once again from those she loved, Glantz finally made it to her uncle and aunt’s in New York. But unlike previous traumatic experiences, Glantz would be able to visit the Morantz’s many times in the years thereafter. Glantz became the legal adopted daughter of Uncle Max and Aunt Esther and grew to raise a family of her own: wife to husband Myles, mother to children, Craig and Jordana, and grandmother to Maxwell, Emerson, Kenzie, Lexie and Judah. She never saw her Matka again, but strove diligently for three years to get the woman who risked her life to save so many honored with the recognition of “Righteous Among the Nations” in 2013. Speaker Gloria Glantz as a child with her "Matka" Committee Members (l. to r.) Roz Chumsky, Zona Schreiber, Edna Greene, Gloria Glantz, Marcia Jacobson, Eva Kessner, Gloria Beck and Bob Ricken June 2017 ¢ NORTH SHORE TOWERS COURIER 17
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