For the Holocaust survivors who came to build a new life in the Midwestern Jewish enclave of Skokie, nothing comes without a fight.
First, in the 1970s, they found themselves face to face with neo-Nazis bent on parading in their own backyards. Now, their memorial foundation and museum are being squeezed out of their headquarters for lack of space. After an unsuccessful battle with the Village of Skokie to build an expanded center, the foundation feels the urgency to find a new home.
With the number of living survivors dwindling, the foundation is running out of time.
“Almost every week it seems we lose another survivor,” said Lillian Gerstner, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois.
One survivor particularly involved in the foundation’s plight, Lisa Derman, passed away immediately after telling her survival story to a crowd at the Illinois Storytelling Festival in Spring Grove on July 28.
“We are hopeful that we will find another location, but it better be soon,” Derman, former president and founding member of the organization, said in an interview conducted in June. “We, the survivors, want to be the ones to set it up and to live to see it.”
TINY SPACE
Take a brisk walk down Main Street in Skokie and you will pass many drab brick buildings. Without paying too much attention, you’ll casually observe travel agencies, florists and the occasional deli. You won’t notice the museum unless you’re searching for it. The unobtrusive, colorless building is set off from the street, and the only marking is a small sign above the main door that can’t be read from the sidewalk.
After ringing the buzzer at the door, you will be allowed to open it into a tall staircase. The air smells of paper — 50-year-old paper. And when you reach the top of the staircase, your eyes confirm your nose’s assumptions with the sight of stacks of books and documents. “As you can see,” says Gerstner, “we’re just bursting in here.”
The foundation, created in 1981 by a group of Holocaust survivors who settled in Skokie after World War II, is home to a museum, library, auditorium and speakers’ bureau, all of which serve as a conduit to the entire state for Holocaust education. But the building, 4255 Main St., is no longer big enough to adequately display the foundation’s historical holdings. The ceilings are low, the white-washed walls are crumbling and the whole museum is crammed into a space smaller than a single family apartment.
“Our walls are insufficient, but we have been entrusted with artifacts to fit on to those walls,” Gerstner said. “And I can’t tell these survivors that I have no room to preserve their memories.”
BIG RESPONSIBILITY
For Skokie’s survivors, the lack of a suitable museum site is just the latest in a long history of struggles. The village drew national attention in 1977 when a band of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collins intended to march down its midwestern streets. A large population of Holocaust survivors lived in Skokie at the time, and many of them were vocal in trying to stop the march from taking place. As they tried to recruit support in blocking the march, the survivors found much of the Skokie community apathetic, Gerstner said.
“People said things to them like, ‘Oh, it’s just a small bunch of crazy guys. Ignore them and they’ll go away,'” Gerstner said. “But you can’t say that to a Holocaust survivor. They know that Hitler’s rise to power started with a small bunch of crazy guys.”
Their efforts were successful: The march never happened, though Collins and his cohorts did come to Skokie to speak. The survivors and many other members of the community, including the mayor and clergy, decided the community needed an awakening in the form of a Holocaust educational committee that would serve Skokie year-round.
“When these survivors first came to America, they were told by society, ‘That was then and this is now. Don’t talk about your old life. You must build a new life,'” Gerstner said. “And they did, but this event less than 30 years ago showed that it was time to start talking about the war.”
Officially created in 1981 by five Holocaust survivors, with a mission to record, teach and preserve memories of the Holocaust, the foundation began holding meetings in members’ homes. It then graduated to a storefront on Dempster Street. After outgrowing the first location, the foundation acquired the Main Street location, once an apartment building, one piece at a time in 1984.
Lisa Derman and her husband, Aron, came to Chicago’s South Shore in 1947 from Europe. They had survived the Holocaust by escaping from Poland to join the Nazi resistance in Italy. By 1968, the couple had three children and went school-shopping in the Chicago area.
“We moved to Skokie because it had good schools,” Lisa Derman said. “And it already had a strong Jewish population. We found it to be a wonderful town.”
Less than 10 years later, when Collins threatened to march, the Dermans were grappling with Nazi resistance yet again — this time in America.
“We were not going to close the windows and the shades like others were,” Derman said. “We mobilized the community through synagogues, because we felt we had to do something. But it was a sad revelation to us that even many Jews in Skokie knew so little about the Holocaust. It was criminal. History could always be repeated — even in America.”
The Dermans’ first step was to find a building where they and other survivors could meet to plan further action.
“We had our meetings in the Dempster building at night so we didn’t have to pay rent,” Derman said. “We recruited and told people we were inspired to make a foundation to teach about the Holocaust to children. There were no educational tools about the Holocaust at that time. We found curators who put together a supplement to our testimonies — a pictorial museum about the Warsaw Ghetto — and they did it for tzedakah — for charity, in Hebrew. Soon, the buses of children started coming.”
FOR THE CHILDREN
One Monday afternoon in May, Gerstner had just finished directing a choreographed routine involving several busloads full of school children.
“It’s getting to be that time of year when the classes finally get around to World War II,” she said. “We’re at our busiest.”
The teacher had called a few weeks ago to notify Gerstner that she would be bringing 220 eighth graders. “OK,” Gerstner said, “Our auditorium only seats 110, but we’ll manage.”
The group divided into three. While one group watched a documentary, another toured the museum exhibits and the third heard a first-person account of the Holocaust from a survivor involved with the foundation’s 36-person speakers’ bureau of survivors and camp liberators. Then they switched — thus, the choreography. To enter each wing of the building, the students had to go outside and enter from a separate door. “It gets pretty awful when it’s raining or snowing,” Gerstner said.
The foundation’s doors are open every day — except Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. The five-person staff, composed of Jews and non-Jews, works to find places in the overflowing library for the constant flow of donated artifacts. In addition to more than 200 videotaped testimonies from Illinois-resident Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators, the library holds slides, posters, novels, children’s books and historical documents.
Last year, the foundation received a complete copy of the Nuremberg tribunal documents. In an act of desperation, the staff put the 50-pound crate of records in the single-stall bathroom, less than a foot from the toilet.
“This isn’t even a storage bathroom,” Gerstner said. “People actually use this bathroom.”
The museum receives donations of Holocaust art created by survivors, but wall space has become prime real estate. A haunting yet hopeful oil painting of skeletons wreathed in flowers is propped precariously in a closet.
The museum itself takes a much different approach to its presentation than larger Holocaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Muse
um in Washington, D.C., which devotes four spacious floors to the subject. In its small space, the foundation has tried to give an overview of the lives of survivors who ended up in the Chicago area, Gerstner said.
Exhibits on the museum’s walls follow a chronological order, profiling members of the speakers’ bureau.
“For the young people who are still wrestling with the idea of the Holocaust as a very remote subject, we try to personalize it and give it a face and voice by reinforcing a speaker’s story with a picture of that person’s family during the war,” Gerstner said.
The exhibits contain artifacts like concentration camp uniforms that belonged to adults and children, as well as quotes from camp liberators, such as U.S. Army Sgt. Leon Bass, a black man who helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
“I was angry at America for treating backs with racism, but then I saw these Jews, and I saw that human suffering is universal,” reads a plaque on the wall bearing Bass’s words.
The museum also contains an exhibit of Holocaust art by children and adults, as well as a Room of Remembrance which houses the “Book of Chicago,” a huge volume with the names of Holocaust victims whose surviving relatives have passed through Chicago.
When the field trip departed, Gerstner sat down to prepare for her next task. Two eighth-grade girls were coming to interview a survivor for a class project.
“They’re expecting a survivor, but none of our 36 speakers could come in today, ” she said. “Well, they’ll have to settle for me instead.”
She pulled a file out of her desk containing the yellow star patch her mother was forced to wear as a young woman in Berlin and documents that helped save her parents’ lives. Gerstner began volunteering at the foundation in 1985, shortly after the death of both of her parents. “I wanted to work here as an outgrowth of missing them and missing their friends with whom I had grown up,” she said. “I already felt like I fit in here.” When her daughter started kindergarten in 1995, she became the foundation’s executive director.
LIMITED TIME
On most days, a coffee klatch, a group of elderly men and women, meets at the museum to socialize and reminisce about their shared experiences.
“We have friends here,” Derman said in June. “We have entertainment programs, we serve cake and coffee, and we remain. But the number of survivors every day is less and less.” Derman said that a growing number of younger American Jews and Christians have begun to frequent the foundation’s social events.
Most of the participants in the coffee klatch are survivors, members of the foundation’s speakers’ bureau. Gerstner said she worries about the toll the rigorous speaking schedule takes on the aging survivor population.
Sometimes, a survivor tells his or her story three times in one day to accommodate large groups. In total, the 36 speakers address more than 30,000 audience members a year.
“It’s hard for them to unburden themselves of the memory,” Gerstner said. “Each time they speak, it is an emotional, gut-wrenching thing. To do it back-to-back? I just don’t know how they do it. They want the information to be passed onto the next generation.”
“We have found that the interaction with the eye-witness, the survivor, has the greatest impact on the students who visit us, and there is nothing that can replace it, not even an Academy-Award-winning documentary. We know, and the survivors know, that they have an expiration date. They are available for a limited time only. That is why we want to bring their message to as many students as possible. We need a bigger auditorium”
This, and the fact that the building has no school bus or handicapped-accessible parking, motivated the foundation to find a plot of land on which to build a larger, more appropriate facility. “Every day we have here is a strain,” Gerstner said.
MOVING ON
In June 2001 the foundation discovered what appeared to be a perfect plot in the southwest corner of Skokie. The Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School on Howard Street was trying to sell a 3-acre plot just west of their facility. The Holocaust Foundation hired an architect and drew up plans for a 45,000-square-foot expanded center. The Main Street location is approximately 5,000 square feet.
On Dec. 17 they brought their plans to the Skokie Village Board of Trustees for a hearing. When she entered Village Hall, Gerstner said she felt that she was in volatile atmosphere. “It was standing room only in there,” she said.
“They were packed in. No other issue in my recent memory has ever produced so much interest in Skokie.”
Many Skokie residents, especially neighbors of the school on Howard Street, showed up at the hearing to speak against allowing the museum to be built near their homes.
They said the new Holocaust center would be a tourist attraction and bring traffic and pollution to their quiet, residential neighborhood.
They were also afraid that the museum would threaten their security as a target of terrorism.
The board decided to remand the vote for further consideration and told the foundation to redraw some of their plans, taking into account some of the neighbors’ traffic concerns.
“Some Skokie residents had some concerns that were credible,” Gerstner said. “They were worried about the driveways not being able to handle multiple buses. But some were incredible. This museum wouldn’t irrevocably alter the nature of their neighborhood, and we have never before been a target of a hate crime.”
Gerstner said some residents showed support for the foundation.
“Though there was this vocal opposition to our building this center, it also brought out people who never visited our museum before, who stopped by to tell us, ‘Please don’t leave Skokie just because some people don’t want you to build on that one plot,'” Gerstner said.
In January the board reconvened — this time, in the Skokie Public Library auditorium, to accommodate the expected crowd. The 211-seat auditorium filled up, and so did a room adjacent to the auditorium, where attendees watched a live video feed.
The Village Board rejected the revamped plan by a 4-3 vote, citing inappropriate land use.
“It pulled the rug out from under us,” Gerstner said in June. “We invested a great deal of time and money on that piece of land, and now we are back at square one.
“Some city officials have expressed privately that they are really sorry things turned out this way and they hope to find some way to keep us in the village,” she said. We still hope we end up in Skokie. Our history is here.”
Gerstner says the foundation is close to securing a new property. “Some wonderful things have fallen into place since January, and since August, but we can’t make a public announcement just yet because there are too many factors.” She says the foundation should know by the end of the year.
“These good things falling into place really happened on the heels of losing Lisa Derman,” Gerstner said. “It spurred people into action to make this happen.”
“She was a remarkable woman who affected a great many people. However, the absence of one does not undermine the progress of all. We move forward,” she said.
Derman would have agreed.”It’s more important to just find some land and start to be there,” Derman said in June.
“We started from the very bottom, and now, we hope, the roots will be deep, and we will be ready to leave this place to the next generation.” nyou
