Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 1, 1994 TAG: 9402010186
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRED KIRSCH LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long
By day, she would wash the piles and piles of bloody sheets that were dumped through the doors.
By night, she slept on a thin mattress in the barracks, her arms wrapped around her sister, Erna, wondering in the darkness if tomorrow would be the day they killed her.
Then one day, in the spring of 1943, a small Jewish man in a suit came to the laundry.
"We need 10 women to work in the factory," he said, looking around, stopping at the young woman with the bright eyes that somehow still flickered with life.
"What is your name?"
"Anna Duklauer."
He wrote it down next to the others:
Rosner. Dresner. Horowitz. Stagel. Scharf. Pefferberg. Hirsch.
Anna Duklauer was on Schindler's list.
Today, Anna Duklauer Perl sits in the living room of the small Virginia Beach house she shares with her daughter's family, including three of her 10 grandchildren.
Perl is 71. Her face is creased. The letters "KL," a German abbreviation for "concentration camp," burned into her left forearm a half century ago, have faded to a dull blue-gray.
"I don't know why I was chosen that day," she says. "It's a question I've asked myself hundreds and hundreds of times. Why me? Why was I chosen to live?"
Perl was one of the 1,100 Jews who, by working in German industrialist Oskar Schindler's enamelware factory during the Holocaust, were spared from certain death.
For almost five decades, she never said much about the horrors of Plaszow or the salvation of becoming, as she puts it, "one of Schindler's Jews." She rarely mentioned it to her friends. To her husband. To her family.
"I kept it inside," she says. "I didn't want my family to go through it, too. I just told them that, without a man named Oskar Schindler, I wouldn't be here. But I never told them the whole story."
But with Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" being hailed as the movie of the year and perhaps the finest Holocaust film of all time, Perl, a shy woman who quietly raised three children and worked as a seamstress, finds that everyone wants to hear her story.
She has been Hillary Rodham Clinton's guest at the White House. She has been interviewed by newspapers from as far away as Florida. She has been on local TV. She has been quoted in Newsweek. And at a special screening of "Schindler's List" at a mall in Virginia Beach, she was the guest speaker.
"When I first heard of the film, I didn't know if I wanted to see it," says Perl, who saw the movie in November during a viewing in Washington attended by President Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Spielberg.
"But I knew I had to. It was so powerful, so moving. People ask me, `Did it really happen that way? Was it really like that?'
"That's the way it was. Only, the concentration camp was worse."
Perl was living in the ski resort town of Zakopane, Poland, in 1939 when the Nazis loaded the townspeople into trucks and resettled them in a four-block by four-block ghetto in Krakow.
In Krakow, the Duklauer family - father, mother, Anna, brother Morris and sister Erna - were herded into a one-room apartment.
"Morris was about 14, and he was blond and blue-eyed," she says. "He looked like a Christian. We told him to escape out of the ghetto to the German side and get his freedom. Somehow he could survive."
He did, but one day he came back.
"He said he missed us too much," Perl says. "When the Nazis found him, they beat and dragged him off to a truck."
Perl's mother ran after her only son and climbed onto the truck.
"We didn't say anything. We knew. We were never going to see them again."
In 1942, the truck came for the Jews still in the Krakow ghetto and took Anna, her father and her sister to Plaszow.
She was at Plaszow for several months when her name was added to Schindler's list.
"Yes, we had heard of this Schindler," she says. "That things were better. But I had never seen him. I didn't know what I was going to, but I knew it couldn't be worse."
At first, Perl did not want to leave her sister.
"But she begged me. She said, `Go. With Schindler, there is life. You must go.' "
At Schindler's factory, she alternated her time between making pots and pans and working in the kitchen preparing meals.
"It was humane," she says. "It wasn't easy. There was never enough to eat, and there were guards everywhere. But no one of us was ever harmed."
When the war ended, Perl went back to the village in the mountains. Every day for months, she would go to the community center in town and ask anyone she had not seen the day before about her family.
One day, she heard about her father.
"He had a bad infection, and he couldn't work, so they poisoned him," she says. "It was only days before the Russians came."
And then she heard about her sister.
"Someone told me they put her on a boat with about 300 other young girls and took it out and sank it. It was near the end, and they were trying to kill as many Jews as they could."
Soon after, she met John Perl, an attorney from Czechoslovakia who had escaped the Germans with forged papers. In 1965, they moved to Israel and then immigrated to the United States. They were married for 44 years before he died nearly five years ago.
She doesn't remember the exact day, but it was sometime in 1974 when she heard that Oskar Schindler had died.
"I think a little bit of all of us died, too," she says. "But you go on, because that is what we are. Survivors."
by CNB