Meeting Felice Newman

Rory, Cherie and myself met up an hour before our interview to go over some preliminary questions and to discuss what topics to emphasize and what to stay away from. I was nervous because I had spoken to and met quite a few survivors, but I had never done a formal sit-down interview. When we arrived, Felice greeted us at the door and was an incredibly warm and inviting woman. We had a seat in her living room and she asked us what we wanted to know. I told her that she didn't have to answer any questions that made her uncomfortable and we tried to be respectful of her traumatic experiences. I began asking some basic questions about her childhood that would eventually segway into her experiences in Auschwitz and Habstadt, but she answered a few questions about her family and immediately went into talking about being in the Lodz Ghetto for four years before being deported to Auschwitz. Born into a small Jewish family in 1921, Felice Newman and her mother, father, and younger brother enjoyed a quiet life in Lodz, Poland. She described herself as a sickly child and claimed that she found herself immersed in books from a young age. Her close knit family began disintegrating in 1939 when her father, a well known writer and Zionist, was sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Felice and her family received a letter in 1940 saying her father had been killed by some sort of blood poisoning, when in reality, they knew he had been killed at the hand of the Nazis. In 1940, her family was placed in the Lodz Ghetto, a few walled off blocks of the city where hundreds of thousands of families were rounded up and kept for years. Since her father was a well-established writer, much of the community knew Felice and she was able to maintain a job in the ghetto until 1944, when she and her mother and brother were put on a cattle car and sent to Auschwitz. She described the Hellish 3 day journey without food, water, or even a place to sit and said that she had no idea where they were going. When they arrived at Auschwitz, her brother was immediately sent to the left while she and her mother were sent to the right. Her mother was sent to the gas chambers a few weeks later and Felice remained in Auschwitz for several weeks with a cousin she found after arriving there. In September of 1944, Felice was sent to Halbstadt, a work camp where she and a group of other women were forced to make armaments for the German military. She described how she and the women used their charm to convince the guards to look the other way while they sabotaged the products, thousands pieces used to make bombs, daily. She helped to delay the German war effort for 8 months, and I found myself speechless at the courage of the barely 5’0” soft-spoken woman sitting in front of me. She describes her liberation by the Soviets in May of 1945 and the touching story of how she met her husband in a displaced persons camp that same year. They married 3 months later and stayed married until his death in 2004. Upon returning to Poland after the war, she was met with hostility, anti-Semitism, and even witnessed a pogrom. She described her experiences after the war as being more painful than the camps. She said, “I suffered more after the war than during it because at least during the war I didn’t know how bad it was or how bad it was going to get.” She moved to Lansberg, Germany with her husband for several years where her only child, a daughter, was born in 1947. She came to the U.S. a few years later, where her husband eventually became an incredible lamp maker and she worked as a bookkeeper. She faced many trials in America, including her husband’s fight with TB after suffering in Dachau and financial hardships, but she overcame each and every obstacle in her way with great determination and grace. The most heartbreaking moment in the interview came when she said, “I know I won’t sleep for two or three days after telling this story, but my mother is dead, my brother is dead, and my father is dead. Who will speak for them?” This reminded me of a piece of Shoah drama by Charlotte Delbo entitled, “Who Will Carry the Word?” Felice Newman and so many other remarkable people that have seen the face of Hell and continue to share their stories will not be with us much longer, so who will speak for them? It is our responsibility to lend our voices when the voices of the witnesses can no longer be heard, and she really drove that point home for me. After the interview, we sat down for coffee with her and ate the cake and cookies she had prepared. She was so incredibly gracious and willing to share her life story with us. She let us photograph the lamps around her house that her husband had made (which were gorgeous) as well as the impressive needlepoint work she had done in her life. She showed us pictures of her daughter and grandson and the books her daughter had published as a well known poet and editor. We shared stories about our lives as students and she was very receptive and had a wonderful sense of humor. This was one of the most amazing and rewarding experiences of my entire life and I can't express the admiration I have for this incredible woman who admittedly never lost hope, even in the face of Hell itself.