For many years, Helen Kaltman did not tell her story. She said, “I just wanted to forget my childhood.” Later in life, Helen decided it was important to share her experiences during the Holocaust, not only for herself and her family, but she said, for all the people like her who were forced to run from their homes and communities to try and survive. Helen and her parents endured incredible hardship and separation from each other, and after the war ended, their efforts to find any of their family members alive came up empty.
“There was a big list of the survivors. Every survivor told their name and it went in every place the Jews were. My parents used to go every day, and they didn’t find anything.” — Helen Kaltman
Not only did Helen and her parents lose all their family, but Helen later met and married her husband Simon, who had survived multiple concentration camps and carried grief and trauma of his own. Helen and Simon worked hard to put the past behind them and raise their own family. Helen’s daughter, Elana, and Elana’s daughter, Ariel joined Helen in this moving conversation. Of growing up the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Elana said, “I remember my cousin Sandy said to me, ‘You know that the grandmother we have in Israel is not our real grandmother. She’s a step-grandmother.’ And I said, ‘Well, what happened to our grandmother?’ And she said, ‘She was killed.’ And that was all she said about it. But I knew there were a lot of secrets that I wasn’t allowed to know.”
Ariel Grubbs-Guttman is named after her grandmother’s cousin, Ari, one of the estimated 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust. Her existence is a testament to the resilience of her grandparents and of the Jewish people. For much of her life, Ariel says her grandmother only told her husband, Simon’s, story. He survived multiple concentration camps, and was liberated while on a death march. Helen says she felt his story needed to be told more than hers. Ariel told us, “To finally hear her story has been really just important for me.”
This important conversation sharing reflections from three generations of survivors is one we hope you find meaningful.
This episode is part of the Cynthia & Harold Guttman Family Center for Storytelling. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode https://www.youtube.com/@holocaustandhumanity
Our gratitude to Margaret & Michael Valentine for their ongoing support of this series.
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Episode Resources
Learn more about the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center
Find out more about the Lodz ghetto, where Helen’s husband, Simon and his family were sent
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lodz
Information about Cyprus, where thousands of Jews were sent while trying to settle in Palestine https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/cyprus-detention-camps
Helen sharing her story on PBS https://cet.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/survivor-story-helen-and-simon-kaltman-video/yom-hashoah-remembering-for-tomorrow-carrying-our-stories-forward/
More about life in displaced persons camps in the aftermath of WWII
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/displaced-persons
