BANGOR, Maine — Helen Lyon of Brooklin was born on a Sunday in August 1944 to a Polish freedom fighter.
It is not when but where she was born that makes her birth and survival to adulthood unusual.
Lyon was born in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, to Marie Horowitz Edelsbourgh, who was a prisoner there.
The long-time Hancock County resident recounted her mother’s story Wednesday night at Beth Israel in Bangor as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, began at sunset. The holiday ends at sunset Thursday.
Barbara Schwartz of Bangor joined Lyon at the event, attended by about 60 people, to talk about her father, Peter Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, who also survived the Holocaust. Both used video recordings of their parents talking about their experiences to highlight their presentation given as the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe approaches in May.
Edelsbourgh was interviewed on June 6, 1995, when she was 75, by the Institute for Visual History and Education within the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. The foundation’s honorary chairman is filmmaker Steven Spielberg who won the Best Picture Oscar for his 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.”
Peter Schwartz was interviewed on Oct. 31, 1991, by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Edelsbourgh was born in 1920 in Poland to a well-to-do family, her daughter said Wednesday. She had a classical education that included 12 years of Latin. Edelsbourgh spoke Polish and “perfect German.” After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, she joined the resistance. She had falsified papers using the identity of a Christian who died in childhood.
In the filmed interview, she tells of traveling from one town to another with a suitcase full of dynamite on a train in which Nazi officers were riding. They struck up a conversation with her but because she spoke perfect German, they did not suspect what she really was doing.
When railroad officials came to check the luggage, the officers told them not to bother. Once the train reached its destination, “one of those German officers [said] ‘Aw, madam, I will help you carry your suitcase,’” Edelsbourgh said.
The dynamite was used to blow up trains transporting German troops and supplies but also to disrupt and destroy the Nazi regime, according to Lyon. She said it was possible her mother did not know specifically when and how the dynamite would be used.
She and her husband George were captured in early 1944 with other members of the resistance in the Carpathian Mountains. They were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau where both were to be shot. Her husband was executed but Edelsbourgh was spared because she was pregnant with Lyon.
“My baby was more than gorgeous,” she told the interviewer about her daughter when she was born.
The child was to have been given up for adoption but Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed horrific experiments on prisoners, examined the infant when she was a few months old. The girl, who was fascinated by a ring he wore, apparently charmed the doctor and was spared.
The camp was liberated by the Russians in January 1945 but it was winter and a very chaotic time, Edelsbourgh said in the archived video. She decided to stay at the camp with her daughter in the winter because there were clothes, food and water — provisions for the Germans who ran the camp that had been stockpiled in the facility.
In April 1945, Edelsbourgh made her way back to her hometown but found few relatives still alive, Lyon said. Edelsbourgh remarried a few years after the war and the family came to the U.S. in 1954. For a time, she worked for Helene Rubinstein as a cosmetologist in Chicago.
Edelsbourgh died on July 30, 2008, her daughter said.
Lyon said Thursday that she does not remember a time when she was not aware of the circumstances of her birth.
Peter Schwartz’s experience was very different. He was a Hungarian Jew who attended a Zionist Hebrew school as a boy. He was arrested as a teenager for speaking to an Aryan girl but released.
In 1940, at the age of 17 or 18, he was sent to an unarmed forced labor camp where he and other young Jewish men repaired railroads, cleared minefields and built airports, his daughter, Barbara Schwartz, said Wednesday. One reason he and other Jews survived much of the war was the Hungarian regime refused to deport Jews to Auschwitz until March 1944 when the German troops invaded.
Eventually, he escaped from the labor camp. He sought refuge at a building under the protection of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, where Ambassador Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Peter Schwartz stayed there until Dec. 4, 1944, when the building was raided. He was imprisoned again.
On Christmas Eve 1944 Schwartz escaped and returned to Wallenberg, his daughter said. He asked for safety and was told the only safe place in the building was on the sixth floor.
“My father was worried it was too high in the building,” she said. “So, that night he stayed in the basement. The sixth floor was bombed and he was saved miraculously once again.
He was liberated in January 1945 by the Russians.
Peter Schwartz wanted to go to Palestine, which became part of Israel, his daughter said. Instead, he was one of a group of 100 students sent to study forestry at the University of Maine. He met Barbara Schwartz’s mother, Lillian Silver, there and the couple settled in Bangor.
He owned apartment buildings in Bangor and operated Peter’s Fashion Centre, located on Main Street next to Freese’s Department Store in the 1960s, his daughter said after her presentation. At the time of his death on Dec. 5, 1994, at the age of 71, he owned Maple Crest Nursing Home in Sullivan.
Yom HaShoah began in 1953 as a holiday to mark the uprising in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, on April 19, 1943, according to Rabbi Bill Siemers of Beth Israel. In the Jewish calendar, that date always fell after Passover. It was moved so that it falls eight days before Yom Ha’atzma’ut, or Israeli Independence Day.
Siemers said it was important that non-Jews learn about the Holocaust “because it can happen again and it has happened again.”
“We had the terrible genocide in Rwanda,” he said. “There’s terrible killing all over the world and the way to stop it is to acknowledge that it happened and to think about how it can be prevented and to never believe that a country can be too civilized for something awful like this to happen.
“Germany was the crown of civilization in Europe when this happened,” the rabbi said. “It’s terrible wherever it happens but never believe it only happens in uncivilized countries.”
Video of Marie Horowitz Edelsbourgh may be viewed on the website of the Institute for Visual History and Education within the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. Online visitors must first register to view survivors’ stories.