A survivor’s voice: Irene Skolnick on the trauma of the Holocaust and the ongoing fight against antisemitism

With the approach of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 — and amid a rising tide of antisemitism — survivors are called upon to share their stories.

Irene Skolnick, 87, and one of a dwindling number of survivors living in Pittsburgh, was 2 years old when the Nazis marched into Poland and began their campaign of terror.

For more than three years, Skolnick and her family hid “in plain sight” within their own country, enduring the brutality and humiliations of Nazi occupation and resorting to extreme measures as they struggled to stay alive.

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Skolnick is today a mother of three, grandmother of seven, retired entrepreneur and an autobiographer.

Drawing upon vivid childhood recollections and memoirs her father produced after the war, she works through the Claims Conference and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh to speak about the horrors that she and her parents, brother and extended family experienced under Hitler’s regime — as well as the hope they maintained in the presence of extraordinary evil.

“We didn’t have a choice but to persevere,” Skolnick said. “The first great challenge was to accept that these cultured Germans were capable of the atrocities they were perpetrating. Notwithstanding Hitler, Poland was just as antisemitic. They piggybacked on Nazi fever.”

Skolnick’s father, Maurice Rinde, came from an Orthodox family of factory owners and businessmen, and her mother, Stella, was an assimilated Jew. They were one of just three families in Przemysl to own a car, and they employed a chauffeur, who would prove to be pivotal to their survival.

“There were four ways a Jew could hope to survive,” said Skolnick. “Being sent to the camps, escaping the ghetto to hide in the forest, being hidden by a Christian — although we know how that went for Anne Frank — or getting false papers and passing yourself off as Catholic. That is the option we chose.”

Skolnick’s family was living in Lvov under Soviet Communist persecution when the Nazis invaded and circumstances became far more ominous.

Her mother purchased birth certificates from their former chauffeur and his wife and gave them to a counterfeiter to modify. Although Skolnick’s father at first refused to disguise his Judaism, a series of events would force him to change his mind.

“In Poland, Jews 12 and older were made to wear not a yellow star, but a white armband with a blue Star of David,” Skolnick recalled. “My aunt didn’t feel she needed to wear the armband. One day a Ukrainian stopped her and asked to see her documents. He wanted a bribe, which she could have afforded, but she refused and he turned her over to the Germans.”

“She thought she could talk her way out it, and then my father tried to buy her freedom, but it did not pan out,” Skolnick said. “She was put into a truck and taken to the forest and executed. That was a message to my family that the Germans meant business.”

Soon after, two Nazis raided the Rinde’s home — “the one room we were living in,” Skolnick said — demanding money, which civilians were not allowed to possess.

“My mother had dollars hidden, of course — in the lining of her purse, and in a box of facial powder under a big puff. When they began rummaging through her cosmetics, she quickly opened and closed the powder box as if to say ‘Look, there’s nothing there.’”

This infuriated the Nazis, who forced her to take off her nightgown and sit still until they left, Skolnick said.

“To her dying day, when she would occasionally talk about this episode, she would shiver, and wonder how she’d ever had the courage to do what she did.”

“But if she hadn’t, she said, she knew we would all perish. It strengthened her determination to never give up.”

When deportations to concentration camps began in Przemysl, “Rumors started flying and were so unbelievable everyone dismissed them except my mother,” Skolnick recalled. “She knew this was different from past antisemitism: ‘They are out to exterminate us, and we need to do something to save ourselves.’”

An uncle in Przemysl, a physician, warned about what was happening. He was turned over to the Nazis by a gentile patient, and he would eventually perish with his wife and daughter in Belzec extermination camp. Facing a similar fate, Skolnick’s paternal grandparents killed themselves with cyanide they obtained on the black market.

“It shook my father up,” Skolnick said, “and he was willing to try to pass as Aryan.”

“That was the beginning of us becoming Christians. We had new names, and were instructed not to tell anybody who we really were or anything about our past. My brother was instructed never to undress in public because only Jews were circumcised.”

The family found someone to clandestinely shepherd them to another city, Lublin. Although it was in the shadow of the Majdanek concentration camp, Skolnick’s father, with his new identity, was able to secure work as an accountant in a German-controlled factory.

It was owned by Polish brothers, Victor and Albert Pacalowski, who hired him because they needed someone who spoke German, and who, even after learning that he and his family were Jewish, went to great lengths to keep them safe, Skolnick said.

“These brothers and their wives who didn’t owe us a thing risked their lives, because anyone helping Jews suffered the same fate as Jews. There was no benefit to them except being decent human beings.”
Their names are inscribed as righteous non-Jews at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.

There were smaller acts of kindness, too, said Skolnick, who remembers an Italian soldier on his way to the front handing her oranges and chocolate as she and her brother loitered near the train station. “These goodies were unheard of in the ghetto,” she said, further noting that he carried her to her home and handed her to her mother along with a cigarette — another rarity — and a photograph of his own wife and children.

Skolnick’s family was liberated in 1944, and Skolnick moved to New York in 1952, enrolling in Brooklyn College and eventually marrying a physician.

Although they have made a good life, Skolnick said she is still “haunted” by her childhood experiences.

“Does a 4- or 5-year-old know what death is? Not the way a teenager does, but I saw the brutality of the Nazis, I saw people jumping out of windows and crashing at my feet and I could smell and see the smoke from the Majdanek camp.”

“I knew it was dangerous to be a Jew and that if I said the wrong thing a lot of lives would be at stake.”

She often ponders how she would have behaved if she had been in her parents’ position, she said. “Would I have risen to the challenge that my mother did? I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t know how you will respond until you are fully confronted with a situation.”

The massacre in the Tree of Life building in 2018 “absolutely” brought back traumatic memories, she said, as well as the sad realization “that nothing has changed.”

“I am just so disheartened that antisemitism has not died. I keep asking, in vain, why does the world hate Jews? I like to think we are good citizens. In whatever country we live in we contribute. We are pacific. Even Jews who assert their individuality do it in a peaceful, respectful way.”

Skolnick was raised without much Judaism after the war because her father had lost his faith, observing only the High Holidays and Passover out of respect for his parents, she said.

“Whatever religion I have is largely self-taught. I’m far from observant, but when my grandchildren visit I make Shabbat dinners because I want them to have the traditions.”

Skolnick recalls that even after her mother immigrated to New York, she allowed others to assume she was Christian. “She had worked not to be Jewish so much of her life that, when I got engaged, my future in-laws questioned whether their precious son, who was about to be a doctor, was going to marry a shiksa,” Skolnick said. “My mother, to her horror, realized that she had no way to prove that we were Jewish.”

And when her mother was in her 90s and Skolnick found a cross on a chain amid clutter on her desk, her mother stopped her from tossing it into the trash.

“It saved my life once,” she told me, “and I might need it again.” PJC

Deborah Weisberg is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.