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Guest column

Son's journey to Terezin brings special meaning to Father's Day

By STEVE UHLFELDER
Published June 18, 2005

I never knew my paternal grandparents. My father's parents both died in Theresienstadt, a terrible place where Jews from Europe were herded before being sent on to concentration camps and death. In Theresienstadt itself, Jewish prisoners were killed or died of hunger, disease and despair. A shocking total of 6-million Jews were murdered by Hitler and the Nazi regime. This place of genocide, also known as Terezin, is located in a beautiful region of the Czech Republic, surrounded by green hills and quiet rivers.

My grandparents were among first group of Jews to be transported from Western Germany to Terezin. The Nazis meticulously recorded how and when they killed my grandparents and other victims. My grandmother survived about a month after arriving at Terezin. She died on Oct. 16, 1942, which also happens to be my daughter's birthday. My grandfather, after whom I was proudly named, lived a year and half longer in unimaginable conditions.

I visited Terezin while I was on a recent a trip to Eastern Europe in my capacity as chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. I was the first in my family to make this difficult journey to see where and how my grandparents died. My father, at age 16, was the only one in his family to escape Germany before the Holocaust. The loss of his parents and most of his family was too much to bear, and he never revisited his home country, nor was he able to visit the site of his parent's deaths.

A Fulbright scholar from Minnesota, whose work and study in Terezin embodies the importance of foreign educational exchange, was my guide and companion. The day we visited was cold, windy and gray. The gloomy weather stood in stark contrast with the green foliage and peaceful countryside in this area 35 miles north of Prague. It is difficult to reconcile the horrific murders committed here with the pastoral surroundings.

Passing row after row of headstones near the memorials and monuments, we entered the large crematorium where my grandparents' bodies were incinerated. Against one wall was a series of ovens. Near one oven, I lit two candles in their memory. After they were cremated, their ashes were placed in paper urns and were stored in a dark brick building nearby. As the war neared its end, the Nazis attempted to discard the ashes in the river near the camp in an effort to conceal 35,000 or more murders at Terezin.

In Prague, I had met, by chance, an 84-year-old survivor of Theresienstadt. She wept as she recounted to me how, when she was a young prisoner, she was forced by the Nazis to dispose of the Jewish ashes from the urns into the Ohre River.

Near the site where that young girl and other prisoners deposited the victims' remains is a modest memorial. From there, the Ohre River flows into a larger body, and then appropriately back into Germany. As I stood at the riverbank, it struck me that the Ohre River is much like the rivers near my home thousands of miles away. The smell of the mud, the smoothness of the rocks at the shore, the graceful ripple of the slowly moving water - these things can all be found in North Florida rivers. It is a comfort to know that my grandparents found their repose in such serenity, and that a fellow prisoner, rather than a Nazi, may have seen to that.

My grandparents' ashes have long since become one with that river, so I could not bring their ashes home. Instead, I descended the set of granite steps that end at the riverbank and crouched down. I selected several small pebbles, stained dark with water and time, and slipped them in my pocket. As I turned my back on the river and climbed the granite steps, the pebbles tumbled together in my pocket. I thought of my grandparents' other two grandchildren, my two first cousins. Peter and Sam are among the youngest survivors of the Holocaust. I decided that I would share a pebble with each of them and the rest of the grandchildren. They might find a small measure of closure in our grandparents' final resting place in the Ohre River, and how their ashes may have washed over these same pebbles only 60 years ago.

This Father's Day will have a special meaning for me because I finally met my father's parents at the Ohre River. This Father's Day, I will give two pebbles, pulled from that river near Terezin, to my grandsons. My father would be comforted to know that the memory of his parents - and the lessons of the Holocaust - will never be forgotten.

Steve Uhlfelder, a Tallahassee attorney, is the chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and former chairman of the Board of Regents. He can be contacted at steve@sulaw.net

[Last modified June 18, 2005, 00:45:19]