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A Survivor’s Last Wish

Sylvia Badner turned 80 years old in 2007, and her son Victor threw a small party in his home, inviting a few friends, cousins and neighbors to mark the milestone.
[additional-authors]
September 24, 2014

Sylvia Badner turned 80 years old in 2007, and her son Victor threw a small party in his home, inviting a few friends, cousins and neighbors to mark the milestone.

Everyone showed up except Sylvia, who adamantly refused to attend.

The Queens, N.Y. housewife had been lying about her real age for more than sixty years, and was certain that if anyone discovered her true birthdate, the U.S. government would deport her.

The utterly irrational fear was rooted in a grim reality: Sylvia was a Holocaust survivor who falsified her application to come to the United States after World War II. She had been told it would be easier to be approved for admittance if she were a sixteen-year-old orphan, rather than nineteen. So Sylvia, who was born in 1927, wrote 1930 on the documents, and stuck with that untruth for the rest of her life.

Only once did she reveal her actual age to a stranger, and that was when I interviewed her in 1996 for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, the director’s post-“Schindler’s List” project that eventually videotaped the testimonies of 52,000 survivors worldwide.

As is the case with many survivors, Sylvia’s early trauma traveled with her across the ocean, a piece of hidden baggage that periodically surfaced during her new life in America. After hearing her story, I understood why she was forever haunted by it.

Born Sala Schonhaut in Tarnopol, Poland, Sylvia was the youngest of three sisters in an observant Jewish family. Sometime after the German invasion in 1939, the Schonhauts were forced into a ghetto, and at the age of 12, Sylvia was recruited to work in a nearby labor camp.

In July, 1943, after countless deportations, the Germans began to “liquidate” the remnants of the Jewish population. Sylvia’s family hid in a cellar with some friends, until the Nazis discovered them and began shooting while screaming “Juden, raus! Jews, get out!”

Sylvia’s sister Clara, wounded in the leg, impulsively threw a coat over the petrified teenager and whispered, “Stay here; don’t follow us!” as she crawled up the stairs.

Sylvia (then Sala) in the middle,  her sister Esther on the left and Clara on the right, and their parents, Moshe and Henshe Schonhaut.

Sylvia, quivering with fright, heeded her sister’s advice, remaining in the cellar for more than a day, until the arrival of a contingent of Jews who’d been ordered to retrieve all valuables from the ghetto. One of them, a relative, helped Sylvia escape the area and led her to the home of a Polish maid who’d been employed by Sylvia’s parents. On the way, he confirmed her worst fears: Clara had been shot and killed immediately upon exiting the cellar; her parents and other sister had been marched to a ravine at the edge of town and murdered, along with hundreds of other Jews.

After one day with the Polish family, the maid informed Sylvia she would have to leave. It was simply too dangerous to harbor a Jew. “So I started walking back towards the ghetto,” Sylvia remembered. Why would she head toward the enemy’s location? “Because I was 15, I suddenly had no family, I had nowhere to go, and I wanted someone to find me and shoot me.”

Instead, Sylvia happened upon a Jew who convinced her to turn back toward the forest; he’d heard rumors that a dozen Jews were hiding there. “I found them, and lived with them for a year.” Lived with them how?, I asked. Did they build some kind of house?

Sylvia smiled at my naivete. “Not exactly. For the first few months we lived outside, under the trees. When we weren’t hiding in the bushes, I was looking for berries, for anything we could eat, for a bit of water. A few times they tried to clean me up and send me into town on market day, because they thought I didn’t look ‘too Jewish’. We all knew I would be killed if I was discovered, but I sometimes managed to buy a few things and run back to the group.”

Then came the cruel winter. The hapless hideaways dug a trench, covered it with branches, and literally went underground. Every passing footstep signaled a German or Pole who might betray them; each sound could mean death. The omnipresent danger from man or beast – a distinction often lost in those dark days – was oppressive and unrelenting.

The debilitated group became desperately ill with all manner of disease. “Once”, Sylvia recalled, “I was so sick I heard them take out the shovels. They were getting ready to bury me.”

For months, through snow and rain, bitter cold and bottomless hunger, they somehow clung to life and to hope, until Russian troops captured the area. Sylvia made her way to a village where she miraculously came across a surviving uncle, who didn’t recognize her. “How could he? I was covered with lice and boils. I was filthy and sick. I was not the child he had known a year before.” The uncle nursed her back to health. Sylvia ended up in a displaced persons camp, where she met her husband, who was also a survivor. After arriving in the U.S., they had two children and five grandchildren.

When my conversation with Sylvia ended, her daughter Helen – named after her martyred grandmother – took me aside. “Did Mom tell you about the roof?”, she asked. What roof? “When I was growing up, we used to move from apartment to apartment pretty often. My mother always insisted that we live on the top floor of the building, and I could never figure out why. One summer, it was a hot day. Some neighbors went up on the roof and were walking around. My mother became hysterical. I mean, we couldn’t calm her down.

Finally, she told us what was wrong. Hearing the footsteps above her brought her back to the hiding place, to that muddy trench in the forest, when any sound above them meant they were about to die. That’s why she always wanted to live on the top floor.”

I spoke with Sylvia one more time after our 1996 meeting. Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, I interviewed several Holocaust survivors to get their reaction to the event, and to elicit some advice for the grieving families of victims whose remains, like those of Sylvia’s relatives, would never be found.

“Well,” said Sylvia, “this is what I have told my children: when I die, and you put up a gravestone, I don’t only want my name on it. I want the names of my parents and my sisters, so when anyone sees it, they’ll know those people had lives too”. I wrote about Sylvia’s final wish in an article that was published on October 11th, 2001.

Sylvia passed away in July of this year. Some weeks later, her son Victor got in touch with a monument company and put down a deposit for her gravestone. The very next day, while going through Sylvia’s papers, he found that 2001 article. “To be honest,” Victor later told me, “I had forgotten about those instructions.”

He immediately called the monument company again. When Sylvia Badner’s gravestone is unveiled next year, anyone passing by will also see the names Moshe, Henshe, Clara and Esther Schonhaut. And they will know that those people had lives, too.

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