THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504230041
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 142 lines
The photograph holds its secrets. A dozen unsmiling girls dressed in white, from lacy hats to gloves, stare into the camera with faces that hold only hints of womanhood.
1944. Brussels, Belgium. The communion class of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul.
Kitty Saks marches her finger slowly across the faces. ``That's me. Rosette Nizolle.'' A slight laugh. Her finger moves on. ``She's Jewish. And she is. And she.'' She pauses, points again. ``Maybe her.''
Four of the group, possibly five, she believes were Jewish girls, like her, in hiding at the convent. They lived under false names, not daring to share their loneliness or stories of lost family, except in whispers or secret glances.
``Who could you trust in those days?'' Saks said.
But there were people to trust even then, when Nazi Germany carried out an extermination plan that would eventually take the lives of an estimated 6 million Jews.
Saks placed her trust in Fernande Henrard, an elementary school gym teacher who persuaded - and sometimes fell to her knees to beg - nuns at convents across Belgium to hide Jewish girls. ``I'm here because I owe my life to people who cared,'' Saks said.
Those people who cared, despite society's message of hatred, are a particular focus of this year's ``Yom Hashoa,'' Holocaust remembrance events in the region.
Saks will speak about her experiences at 2 p.m. today at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Virginia Beach.
On Thursday at the Harrison Opera House, there will be a free performance of ``Letters from Leokadia,'' a play about a Polish woman who raises a Jewish baby as her own child. Irene Gut Opdyke, who has received Israel's highest honor for her rescue of a dozen Jews, will speak Sunday at the War Memorial Museum in Newport News.
Betsy Karotkin, director of human resource development for the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, says the rescuers' work was a spark of hope in a time when the world seemed overwhelmed by darkness.
For her, the rescuers' heroism began with the strength to follow an inner voice instead of society's drumbeat. ``It is very important for people to follow their own conscience and not always look to society for approval,'' she said. ``Individuals can make a difference.''
In the Talmud, the collection of writings constituting Jewish civil and religious law, it is written: ``Whoever destroys one life is as if he destroyed a whole world, and whoever preserves one life is as if he preserved a whole world.''
In 1939, Kitty Saks, then 6-year-old Kitty Friedenbach, lost her placid world when Nazi officers interrupted the family's Sabbath dinner to seize their apartment in Vienna.
She fled with her parents to Brussels. Her grandparents, who had helped raise her, stayed behind, believing that her grandfather's service in the Austrian army during World War I would be enough to save them. They were among the first to die, in experiments to gas people in locked trucks.
In Brussels, Kitty wore the yellow star, which designated her as a Jew. She enrolled in school, where she swiftly learned French and met Mademoiselle Fernande Henrard, a stocky gym teacher in her mid-30s.
Henrard, unlike the Friedenbach family, understood the full extent of the danger for Jews. By the early 1940s, when laws were passed to prevent Jews from attending schools, Henrard approached the family with a plan: She would place their young daughter in a convent.
For weeks, Henrard and 9-year-old Kitty rode the train to convents. The child, with her small suitcase and baby doll tucked under her arm, heard Henrard ask the Mother Superior at each convent, ``I would like you to save a Jewish child.''
She saw the disbelief in the nuns' faces, and watched her teacher fall on her knees to plead. To the young girl, ``it became a comedy,'' as the refusals piled up, day after day, and the pair traveled home to the Friedenbach apartment.
The refusals stopped with Mother Superior Marie Bernadette, at Institut Paridaens in Louvain. Kitty enrolled under the assumed name of Rosette Nizolle, deceased niece of a priest. She wouldn't see her parents again for nearly three years.
The nuns, many of whom were not told of her Jewish background, gave her rigorous Catholic training. She was baptized and taught the catechism. She went to Mass every day. Around her neck, she wore small medallions stamped with the image of the Virgin Mary.
But before bed, in the darkness, Rosette Nizolle would disappear. Then, Kitty Friedenbach would whisper the ``Shema,'' a prayer that is at the heart of Jewish faith: ``Here Oh Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.''
She learned the principles of Catholicism with more thoroughness than she had studied her own faith. Even now, she has an emotional connection to the Catholic tradition, though she practices Judaism. ``There is a kinship, because of what it represents for me,'' she said.
During holidays and vacations, when the other girls went home, Henrard returned to transfer Kitty to orphanages or other convent schools. At the orphanages, she suffered from hunger, cold and diseases from the dirty living conditions.
Her final stop was the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, where she met Edith, a Jewish girl she had known before the war. They did not acknowledge each other in public, but in the washroom, Edith whispered to her, ``There are others here like us.'' She came to know, or strongly suspect, the background of the other Jewish children who shared her lessons and communion ceremony.
Edith's parents had been taken to a concentration camp in Auschwitz. One night, Saks remembers, the two girls made a whispered pact: ``She said, `If my parents don't return from where they are, will you adopt me?' And I promised her.''
On Sept. 4, 1944, after days and nights of bombardment, the door of dormitory bedroom swung open. ``I can still hear the words of the nun, `Mes enfants, nous sommes liberes!' - My children, we are liberated! We all jumped out of bed in our underwear.''
The two girls reunited with their families. The Friedenbachs, who had hidden throughout the war and sold cigarettes on the black market to survive, came to Norfolk. Kitty married Abbott Saks, a member of the faculty at Old Dominion University, and raised two children, who heard her stories of World War II at the dinner table.
She exchanged letters with Henrard, who was tortured by the Germans but refused to name any of her accomplices or the Jews she had hidden. After the war, Henrard returned to her work as a teacher in Brussels.
Saks also wrote to the nuns in Louvain, one of whom addressed her correspondence to ``Rosette-Kitty.'' The false name, Saks said, ``is part of me.''
She has spoken for years about the Holocaust, and has the simplest of replies to the courage of the rescuers. ``What makes one do it and not another?'' she said. ``I am my brother's keeper. They take it seriously.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
1995
Kitty Friedenbach Saks fled with her parents from Vienna to Belgium
in 1939. She remembers wearing a yellow star on her clothes,
designating her as a Jew.
1944
Kitty Saks received her first communion in 1944 while hiding under
the name of Rosette Nizolle at the Sisters of Charity of St.
Vincent de Paul convent in Belgium.
KEYWORDS: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
by CNB