By Victor Greto
When Holocaust survivors Michael and Susan Ronay spoke to children at Attucks Middle School in Hollywood about their experiences, they were met alternately with awed reaction and searching questions.
The Ronays spoke at the school this month at the request of their daughter, Judy Ronay, who teaches photography and art there. The occasion was the week of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Day, a time set aside to remember the 6 million Jews massacred by Nazi Germany during World War II.
One of the students at the predominately African-American school, named for a black American patriot killed at the 1770 Boston Massacre, asked the Ronays: “But you’re white. Why would Hitler want to kill white people?”
After Michael, born in Czechoslovakia, and Susan, born in Hungary, spoke, eighth-grader Dorlyn Alphonse remarked that their Holocaust experiences sounded like the days of African-American slavery.
“Yes,” Susan replied, “that is why we can consider ourselves sisters.”
Their subsequent embrace seemed to justify the Ronays’ 20-year-old decision to begin talking about the Holocaust, a topic both had avoided through much of their lives together in Hungary, and then the United States, where they emigrated in 1957.
“We keep alive the history in the schools, churches and synagogues,” said Susan. “I still dream about it. I have a mission to teach future generations. They have to know what happened and learn from the past.”
The students had a lot to ponder.
Michael and Susan did not meet and marry until after the war. Their Holocaust stories are thus radically different but equally sorrowful.
In March 1944, Susan Ronay, then 13, was taken with her mother from their home in Hungary by the Nazis to the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women in northern Germany.
Packed in a train car with about 75 other people, it took them about two weeks to get to the camp. When they left the car to enter the camp, “an SS soldier pointed either left or right,” Susan said. Left meant death in the gas chamber. Right meant you were permitted to live to work. Susan and her mother got to go right.
“When I first got there,” Susan said, “waiting to go either right or left, I saw the chimney of the crematorium while we stood in line, and smelled the burning flesh.”
They lived in a large tent and slept in the mud, Susan said, because the barracks were too full.
Once, Susan said, her mother had a fever. Susan grabbed some snow from a distance to bring back to her mother and place on her forehead, when a female guard stopped her.
“I thought because she was a female guard she’d have some heart,” Susan said.
Instead, the guard beat her mother and gave Susan 25 lashes across her back.
“But I survived,” Susan said, “because of my youth and will power. I wanted to survive because we knew the war was going to be soon over.”
Both mother and daughter were soon moved to a factory in Chemnitz near Dresden, in Germany. There, they got up every morning at 3 a.m. to stand in line, and the guards counted off each prisoner.
“Every fifth person got a bullet,” she said. “This is how they played; this is how they had had fun every morning. I was one of the lucky ones.”
One fellow worker had hidden her pregnancy successfully and gave birth in their barracks in secret. However, “the woman didn’t have milk,” and the baby cried, giving its presence away.
“An SS woman came in, got the child, grabbed it by its legs, and hit it against the wall, killing it,” Susan said. “They shot the mother just after the baby was killed.”
Toward the end of the war, in April 1945, “the Russians and Americans were coming,” Susan said, so the camp guards, during one rainy day, marched about 200 workers out to a nearby forest, forced them to dig a mass grave and shot them.
Before they reached the site, however, Susan and her mother jumped into a ditch filled with 4 feet of water. They silently watched the soldiers walk by.
After they were gone, Susan and her mother hid in an overturned automobile. They later walked from muddy ditch to muddy ditch for days, until, Susan remembered, she saw her first American soldier sitting in a jeep. He gave her chocolate and “I smiled my first smile in years.”
Back in Budapest after the war, Susan discovered her grandparents had been killed at Auschwitz, but that her father had survived. She was an only child.
Michael Ronay was born in Czechoslovakia, and had just become a tailor before the war changed his life. In Nazi labor camps by 1941, he was forced to travel to Hungary, Poland and Romania, cleaning roadways of mud and debris, unloading trains and building roads for the Nazis.
Many of the workers were shot arbitrarily, Michael said. They often slept outside in the freezing cold. Michael said he got lucky several times because of his tailoring talents.
“A guard watching us liked me because I was a tailor and I fixed some of his clothes,” he said.
On one morning, guards shot every 10th person in line as punishment. His number came up 10th, but the guard vouched for him, and he survived.
When Michael was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, he was reunited with his younger brother, Charlie.
He and his brother survived several near-death episodes, including the time he and Charlie were carrying a pot of soup and Michael slipped, dropping the pot. The guard was going to shoot him, Michael said in tears, but his brother saved his life by pleading with the soldier.
After the war, Michael discovered his parents and many of his other siblings did not survive. Only he, his brother, Charlie, and a sister made it.
Susan said it was partially her daughter, Judy, who gave them inspiration to tell their stories to anyone who would listen.
Judy, 42, said that her mission is similar to that of her parents: “To keep [the Holocaust] in people’s minds,” she said, “to educate people in general about prejudice, how things can escalate from simple things like name-calling.”
The idea, Judy said, “is for people to be aware of it, try to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.”
Even though Michael has been telling his story for 20 years now, he said he has almost reached the point where he can no longer speak of it.
“I used to do it more easily,” he said. “Now, I just can’t. When I start to, I have to stop. The words” — he chokes-up in mid-sentence — “won’t come out of my mouth.”