Reclaiming a childhood based on the Holocaust

For Felicia Graber, it was hard to understand why she would have fears of train stations, large crowds and the dark until she started to reconstruct her memories as a child living through the Holocaust.

Aided by her mother's accounts and eight 90-minute tapes from her father, the 64-year-old retired school teacher from St. Louis has been able to recapture her Jewish heritage and retrace her parents' lives through her native Poland.

Graber spoke to about 140 people Sunday during a lecture and question-and-answer session following the final production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" at Southeast Missouri State University's Rose Theatre.

"My story is not a horror story," she said. "Compared to some others, I sailed through the Holocaust like a bird."

Born in 1940 at Tarnow, Poland, Graber was the only child of an Orthodox Jewish family. Her parents survived by adopting new names and Christian identities, raising Graber to be a fervent Catholic. Also, Graber was "brainwashed" to believe that her father was a Polish soldier missing in action, she said, while her father lived with them as an "uncle" who later married her mother.

At 7 years old, she discovered the truth about her Jewish identity and her "uncle."

"I think it was harder for me to accept the fact that this man was my father than it was for me to accept that I was Jewish," Graber said, in response to a question about the difficulty of switching religions.

Early in her life, Graber lost three of her grandparents as they were deported to Belzec death camp. However, during a trip to her hometown, Graber discovered three memorials, one of which remembered the 18,000 Jews who were shot on the site on June 11, 1942 -- the same date that her grandparents were deported.

"Chances are very high that I was standing at the place where my grandparents were shot," she said.

While in Poland in 1994, She reconnected with the farming family whom Graber's family lived with through most of the Holocaust.

"When I identified myself for the first time, I was treated like a long-lost relative, hugged and kissed, drooled over," Graber said.

"I wanted to tell them that they saved a Jewish family," Graber said. But when conversations turned to Polish politics and comments by the family were anti-Semitic, she backed out, and has never told them her true ethnic identity to this day.

Even 60 years after the Holocaust, Graber said, children of the Holocaust are just learning about their heritage.

jmetelski@semissourian.com

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