Beth Sholom marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

Patricia Weil Coates flipped through slides at Beth Sholom Congregation Sunday afternoon with pictures of her mother, art from women who survived concentration camps, and photos of the concentration camp her own mother survived.

Weil Coates was the keynote speaker for the Holocaust Remembrance Day program at the synagogue, an obligation she knew was coming as the number of Holocaust survivors have dwindled.

The ceremony was presented by both the Beth Sholom Congregation and the Congregation Kol Ami.

Her mother, Helga Wehrheim, grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, during the Nazis’ rise to power, and was held in Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in Germany.

According to the Ravensbrück Memorial, approximately 120,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,200 adolescent girls and young women were registered there from 1938 to 1945. Tens of thousands died in the gas chambers or of hunger, disease or as a result of medical experiments conducted by the Nazis.

Wehrheim survived.

“I’m here because it is extremely important not to forget what happened. And the theme here is, you know, it starts with antisemitism, but hate of any kind can be spread. So we’ve got to be aware of the hate in the world,” Weil Coates said.

Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The date lines up with the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. This year, the anniversary is on Monday.

Weil Coates said that the process of finding out more about her mother’s experience during World War II was an emotional and moving journey. Her mother didn’t tell her much about it, so a lot of what she shared on Sunday was what she found out on her own.

Wehrheim was half-Jewish, Weil Coates said, with a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father. Wehrheim considered herself German, not Jewish.

Weil Coates shared pictures of her mother before the height of the war, smiling with other girls or dressed fancily with a group of girls and boys, all dressed equally as nice.

“But that’s actually a smile on her face that I can’t really say that I ever saw. She just looks different to me than the mother that I knew,” she said.

Wehrheim wasn’t spared as Jews were banned from various places. She was kicked out of school, and was forced to wear a yellow Star of David in public.

Wehrheim kept that patch, and Weil Coates held it up for attendees to see. On the back of the patch, she said, was also her mother’s prisoner number, written in her mother’s own handwriting, from when she was in the concentration camps.

In March 1943, Wehrheim’s mother went into hiding with a Catholic family. Despite pressures from the Gestapo, Wehrheim and her father never revealed her location.

A little over a year later, in April 1944, the Gestapo arrested Wehrheim and took her to a jail in Frankfurt. She was 19.

Weil Coates said she doesn’t know exactly how long her mother was held there before she was sent to Ravensbrück. Ultimately, Wehrheim was forced into a cattle car and transported with other women to the camp.

It was there where they were stripped and forced into the striped uniforms, their heads shaved. For some unknown reason, Weil Coates said, her mother’s head was not shaved.

Weil Coates showed drawings scrawled on pieces of paper from women who were in the camp and drew what they saw. One prisoner, a French resistance member, drew the women in their striped uniforms, their faces gaunt and haunted.

She drew the overcrowded barracks where women were crammed four to five people on one bed to sleep. To fit, they slept sitting up, Weil Coates said.

Wehrheim ended up working in the kitchens at the camp, which allowed her to smuggle food and trade for other items in the camp.

Weil Coates said she visited Ravensbrück in 2019 and found her mother’s name on a list of people who were held there.

While Wehrheim didn’t speak much about her experiences, Weil Coates said, there was one story she told multiple times that brought her mother to tears.

“She mentioned that some female French resistance fighters who are with her in Ravensbrück were taken on a truck to the gas chambers. And their bravery must have just really stayed with my mother because they sang ‘The Marseillaise,’ which is the French national anthem, as they were being taken to the gas chambers,” she said.

As the Russian army approached the camp in April 1945, the Germans took the women who were able to march to another camp. Ultimately, Wehrheim and her friend escaped into the forest and trekked over 400 miles over the course of three months to return to Frankfurt.

The city and her neighborhood were destroyed, Weil Coates said. Wehrheim was reunited with her mother, but her father had died weeks before of pneumonia.

He had been staying with Wehrheim’s aunt. The aunt’s daughter had told Weil Coates that she thought he died of a broken heart, not knowing where his daughter and wife were, or if they were even alive.

After the war was over, Wehrheim and her mother tried to rebuild their lives, never speaking about the horrors Wehrheim endured.

In 1945, Wehrheim met Weil Coates’ father at a party. He was a Jewish American soldier stationed in Frankfurt. Three days after meeting, he proposed. They moved to Iowa and married.

While life was better, it wasn’t a “bed of roses,” Weil Coates said. Her mother suffered from PTSD, and would be debilitated for days with migraines.

But it was important to share her mother’s story, she said, especially to consider what people today would do if they were faced with a similar situation as those in Nazi Germany.

“If you saw Jews being rounded up in front of you or put on trains or shot in the streets, what would you have done?” she asked the audience.

The ceremony also honored children who died in Auschwitz, with 10 people lighting 10 candles in their honor.

Speakers also spoke about rising antisemitism in the United States. It’s important to remember the past, as to make sure it doesn’t happen again, speakers said.

”We will not allow our history to be erased and we will not be cowered. We will be strong, we will have hope, we will act, we will overcome. We will once again defeat hate,” Stanley Binder, the son and grandson of refugees from Nazi German, said.

The story has been updated to reflect the ceremony was a jointly presented by two congregations.