Though old age is catching up to many of Rhode Island's dwindling number of holocaust survivors, they are still determined that their stories not be forgotten.

09:01 AM EDT on Wednesday, May 18, 2005

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- David Newman sipped his decaf, just another white-haired customer in a booth at Gregg's restaurant yesterday.

Digital extra

Journal staff reporter Jennifer Levitz narrates a multimedia telling of the gathering of Holocaust survivors in Providence, with photos by Journal staff photographer Connie Grosch

Then he rolled up his sleeve.

There was a blue tattoo on his left forearm, 160558.

The Nazis gave him that number when he was in Birkenau. Sixty years after the end of World War II, the ink is still clear. So are his nightmares.

"Do you know how many times my wife wakes up because I yell in my sleep?" said Newman, a retired home builder who lives in Narragansett.

But Newman is fading, and says he's not the only one. The generation that escaped the hell of the Holocaust can't beat time. Holocaust remembrance services draw fewer survivors. Gatherings are hard to organize because few can drive.

Newman says he's not so well. He coughs a lot, and must spend winters in Florida. As founder of the dwindling Holocaust Survivors of Rhode Island, he notes all the people who have died, and who has which ailment. One member told Newman not to call anymore; the man has Alzheimer's disease and couldn't remember anything. Others can't get to meetings.

The incongruity hit him.

"Can you imagine being a Holocaust survivor and you can't drive?" he said.

THE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS of Rhode Island had almost 100 members when it formed in 1982. About that many Jewish families resettled in Rhode Island after World War II, after Hasbro and a few jewelry companies agreed to hire Jewish refugees.

Barely two dozen members remain in the group, Newman says.

About five are active.

Their pet project is to raise money and hold a groundbreaking for a Holocaust memorial along the Providence River. With everyone getting older, and with the country at war, Newman feels a sense of urgency about it. The purpose is "to never forget," he says.

There are other signs that the keepers of the stories of the Holocaust are getting old and frail.

For its Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month, Temple Emanu-El on Providence's East Side invited the more than 50 Rhode Island residents known to have escaped or survived the atrocities of Hitler.

Again and again, the survivors said they could not come for health reasons, said Diana Grimes, the administrative assistant at the temple.

Marty Weissman, for one, had to cancel the day of Yom HaShoah because his bladder problem flared up. He just couldn't sit through a service.

"And I was strong until this year," says Weissman, 80, a retired butcher.

Just 15 or 20 survivors attended the service; fewer still were willing or able to walk in the procession.

Journal photo / Connie Grosch

Morris Gastfreund, 89, takes part in holocaust remembrance services at Temple Emanu-El, in Providence, this month. He survived the Buchenwald death camp, but many in his family died.

Lea Eliash, 86, worked in a fur factory in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania and smuggled her baby to a Christian family for safekeeping during the war. Her husband survived Dachau and their child was returned to them.

She had accepted a ride from the rabbi's secretary so she would not have to walk the half block from her home to Temple Emanu-El.

Inside the synagogue, she clutched her cane. Morris Gastfreund, 89, steadied himself by bending his knees slightly.

He had hearing aids in both ears; when Edward Adler, the temple's ritual director, asked if he would be going to the Rhode Island Holocaust Museum for a ceremony after the remembrance service, he responded:

"Please?"

"You dressed up like you go to museum," Adler said.

"That's right," Gastfreund said.

"Have it your way," Adler said.

"Please?"

Gastfreund hung his cane on a pew, and removed his fedora to reveal thinning white hair.

Through thick glasses with heavy black frames, he looked at the program, 24 pages of Holocaust survivors in Rhode Island and their relatives who died. There were nearly 700 names in all.

Among the murdered were his mother, his sister, another sister, another sister, another sister, his brother-in-law, another brother-in-law, his nephew, another nephew, his niece, his aunt, his uncle, another uncle.

"You should know. You should know what happened to us. I was in Buchenwald death camp. Sally was in Auschwitz."

Sally was his late wife, who was tortured but survived.

"They chased her outside. She stood in the snow for three hours."

Harold Reissner, 82, walked in the short line of survivors.

"We're dying off," he said.

Reissner, retired from the commercial-cleaning business and lives in Barrington.

At age 19, he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. His father and brother died there. He feels terrible guilt that he survived and his brother did not; until 20 years ago, he refused to talk about the Holocaust.

Now, he forces himself to go to public events, to speak to schools, saying, "there are so many deniers, and fewer of us survivors."

Rabbi Wayne Franklin, of Temple Emanu-El, says he's relieved that many of the Rhode Island survivors have put their stories on tape. Some have participated in producer Steven Spielberg's Holocaust oral history project.

"But it's not the same," Rabbi Franklin says, "as hearing it from them."

WHEN DAVID NEWMAN tells his story at Gregg's restaurant, he seems to travel back 60 years to the smells and sounds of his five years in concentration camps.

"It was real hell," he said, his eyes tearing. "In hell, there is fire. We had fire there. We were burned."

Newman, whose story is among those documented by Spielberg, recalled Auschwitz in a Polish accent.

"They'd wake us at 5 a.m., like dusk. It was raining, especially in the winter," he said. "Then our clothes would get wet and they froze on us, crinkling."

He grimaced, remembering the icy rustle of the prisoners' garb of blue and white stripes.

"Five, ten of us would huddle together for body heat to stay warm. At 7 a.m., we'd get a piece of bread. Coffee."

He formed his hands in a square, like a piece of sandwich bread. "It was full grain, to last all day."

"At 6 p.m., we'd get soup."

He rose his hand to show a pile.

"There was this mound, three, four stories high, with skeletons."

"If you saw 16 movies, read 116 books . . . you can't imagine how horrible it was," he said.

Talking face to face with a survivor, one can begin to.

Digital Extra: Listen to Journal staff writer Jennifer Levitz narrate a multimedia telling of the gathering of Holocaust survivors in Providence, at:

http://projo.com/extra/2005/holocaust/