00:00:00:00 – 00:00:28:13

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Hello, my name is Daniel Hutchinson. I’m a professor and chair of the history department here at Belmont Abbey College. And this is Conversatio, the podcast of Belmont Abbey College. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple or Google Play and keep up with what’s happening here at the Abbey and in our community. Today, it is my great pleasure and honor to welcome to our campus Suly Chenkin.

 

00:00:28:15 – 00:00:52:06

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

As a resident here of Charlotte, North Carolina, and she’s here to share with us today her remarkable journey and her remarkable experience during World War two and the Holocaust. And it’s our great pleasure here at Belmont Abbey to help her in sharing the legacy of an experience. Although 80 years ago, which is profoundly important and reverberates in our world today, and we’re honored to share in her mission of sharing the story into the future.

 

00:00:52:08 – 00:01:26:17

Suly Chenkin

Thank you very much for having me. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Please tell me a little bit about your life, your experiences there in Lithuania, and how life changed when the Nazis arrived in 1941.

 

Suly Chenkin

I was born in Lithuania, in the city of Conneaut or Kaunas, which was at that point the provisional capital of Lithuania. I was six months old when the Nazis came into Lithuania.

 

00:01:26:19 – 00:02:00:04

Suly Chenkin

And, everything changed for us Jewish people there right away. There were all kinds of rules and regulations. And, the yellow star, David, which had to be worn at all times. Some eight weeks later, we were all commanded to go into a designated place. Anybody called outside of that designated place after August 19th, 1941 would be shot to death.

 

00:02:00:06 – 00:02:36:12

Suly Chenkin

This designated place was then called the Covenant Ghetto. It was surrounded by bog wires. They put 38,000 of us in a place where, up until that time, maybe only 10,000 people lived, and it was the poorest part of town. The overcrowding, the lack of food, the terror disease, took a lot of people. By the time October came, we were like 27,000 at that point.

 

00:02:36:14 – 00:03:04:20

Suly Chenkin

We were all called to appear at a certain early hour into an open plaza in the ghetto. Stand by family units. Nobody could stay in their houses. The houses could not be locked. Anybody who stayed in their house would be shot immediately to death. We stood there from 6:00 in the morning. My parents took turns in holding me.

 

00:03:04:22 – 00:03:34:10

Suly Chenkin

I was eight months old. Ten months old, and it wasn’t until, like, 9:00, when the commandant had had his breakfast that the selection started. You go to the right, you go to the left. And it was, in this manner, he selected some 10,000 people, mostly the infirm, the handicapped, the elderly and the small young children.

 

00:03:34:12 – 00:04:06:23

Suly Chenkin

They were all taken away, never to be seen again. The rest of us were sent back home. It started a period in our lives where everything was terrible. They burned down the hospital. They burned down the orphanage with people in it. It was a terrible, terrible time, but we somehow lived. My father got the job of being in charge of the bread distribution machine in the ghetto.

 

00:04:07:01 – 00:04:42:07

Suly Chenkin

And it was a very difficult job because you had to keep books. Like if it was a regular business, you had to basically keep tabs on how many pounds of flour were sent, how many were baked into bread, how many slices were given out to the people, and people would come and try to bribe my father and tell him, please give me more, and I’ll give you whatever I was able to hide from the Nazis.

 

00:04:42:09 – 00:05:06:19

Suly Chenkin

And my father would not take a bribe from anybody, not even for himself or for me. The baby. And without aiming to, he kind of gained the trust and respect of his boss. Of course, it was not only a Nazi, but he was also part of the SS elite killing machine. And he would come to our house after business hours.

 

00:05:07:00 – 00:05:32:17

Suly Chenkin

The Nazis came in in the morning, did all the transactions, all the business that they had to do in the ghetto. They would leave back to their barracks at six, but he would stay and come to our house. And I remember him, and he would give my father real news, not propaganda. I mean, not that we really know anything other than what he told us.

 

00:05:32:19 – 00:06:07:03

Suly Chenkin

And he would tell us, you know, we were right at the doors of Moscow and we couldn’t take it. And we lost Stalingrad. And so that gave us some hope. But then there was other news that started infiltrating and rumors. And then the woman who had been my nanny the first few months of my life, when my mother was still working and we were free, came to the barbed wire gates and asked to speak to my father.

 

00:06:07:05 – 00:06:31:12

Suly Chenkin

And when he approached her, she told him, you know, I have relatives that came to visit me, and they are from a town that is about a hundred miles away from here. And they told me that in their town they also have a ghetto, and that the Nazis came in and rounded up all children under the age of 12 to save the baby.

 

00:06:31:14 – 00:06:54:13

Suly Chenkin

And he said, take her. And she ran away. Because harboring a Jew was not only punishable by death to you, but your entire family would be put to death. So at this point, my father went to his boss and he said, so is this true? And the boss said, yes, and if you want to save your child, you have to get her out of here.

 

00:06:54:15 – 00:07:24:08

Suly Chenkin

So he gave him a safe conduct that he could leave the ghetto under some, you know, pretenses of doing, transacting business, looking for flour or whatever. And he interviewed people who, by word of mouth he had heard were willing to take the risk and money to save 1 or 3 hours, and it was touch and go, this one?

 

00:07:24:08 – 00:07:54:02

Suly Chenkin

Yes, this one. No. And time was running out when on the 27th of March, 1944, the Nazis just came in. And I remember that day because my father woke me up and I still really was very, very sleepy. And I was ready to protest. And his face was like he was so frightened. It was terror that was reflected in it.

 

00:07:54:04 – 00:08:27:07

Suly Chenkin

And he picked me up and my mother, he and I went to the staircase and my mother had been down, picked up a slab of wood, and there was this round hole, and she jumped into it. And then my father handed me to her, and I remember it because I hit my head against that round rib. And I just remember my mother’s hand over my mouth and her mouth in my ear, begging me not to cry.

 

00:08:27:09 – 00:08:53:14

Suly Chenkin

I know it hurts, she said. But I beg you, don’t cry. Because if they hear us, they’ll come and kill us. And soon enough, the first day they didn’t come, but the second day when they realized that there were more than 900 children in the ghetto under the age of 12, that there were more. They came back. And that’s when they came to our house.

 

00:08:53:16 – 00:09:14:23

Suly Chenkin

And I remember their footsteps and they’re screaming. And one of them had an ax, and he held it over my father’s head and said, take me to your bunker. We know you Jews have bunkers all over the place. Luckily, the house we were in had something called an ice cellar. In the old time, some people didn’t have refrigeration.

 

00:09:15:01 – 00:09:47:16

Suly Chenkin

They would put their perishables in the cellar deep under the house. It’s so cold and with chunks of ice. So my father took them there and they broke down with their things. They broke down walls and floors and destroyed half of the cellar. And not finding anything, they left. But from that day on, I was not allowed to go out of the street, and my orders were that the front door opened and the person didn’t identify themselves immediately.

 

00:09:47:16 – 00:10:12:19

Suly Chenkin

I was to run and hide under the bed. My parents were getting really desperate because, you know, they knew they had to send me out. When they hear about this woman who is willing to place me with a Lithuanian Christian who’s willing to risk their lives, the only trouble is he’s going to be the mastermind of the plan.

 

00:10:12:21 – 00:10:38:10

Suly Chenkin

Not only is she Jewish herself, she comes from a very religious Jewish sect, people who are a little bit like the Amish. You know, they stick to their own. They have their ways. She has never heard anything but liturgical music. But somehow, you know, I don’t know where she got the nerve from and how she did it. But the plan was made.

 

00:10:38:12 – 00:11:00:13

Suly Chenkin

I was being brainwashed, even at the age of three and a half, that my parents had to give me away, that they loved me. But the bad guys were out to kill us. And I could never ask about them, ever. Or they would come and kill me and kill them. And at a prearranged time, I was given a sleeping potion.

 

00:11:00:15 – 00:11:52:23

Suly Chenkin

I was put into a potato sack, my sack paining me. Sleeping there was loaded right in front of the Nazi officers onto a cart that had sacks of potatoes, real potatoes, and the driver had an order that was signed by my father’s boss, who did not know about this operation, and he signed it, and giving my father the and the okay to take it to the to the, grinding mill in the outskirts of the ghetto to to write it into flour, to make potato bread for the ghetto at a prearranged time along the barbed wire in the outskirts.

 

00:11:53:01 – 00:12:18:00

Suly Chenkin

The cart made it on schedule. Stop. There were two women standing on the other side of the barbed wire. Miriam Shulman, the mastermind of the plan, the Jewish lady and a young girl by the name of Albina, who was about 18 years old. A Christian girl who was going to hide me and my sack was gently thrown over the barbed wire.

 

00:12:18:00 – 00:12:43:18

Suly Chenkin

The two women ran to it, tore the sack open, and placed me in a carriage and wheeled me away to where everybody prayed would be a chance to live. I don’t have to tell you that. When I woke up, I cried a lot, not really knowing where I was, what was going on. But I never asked for my parents.

 

00:12:43:18 – 00:13:15:02

Suly Chenkin

I just cried a lot. My war was over in no time because I was sent out on May 11th. And on August 1st the Russians came in and the Nazis ran. But the ghetto had been liquidated at the beginning of July. All the inmates had been taken out of the ghetto, and then the ghetto was dynamited and burned to the ground.

 

00:13:15:03 – 00:13:50:15

Suly Chenkin

The inmates had been taken to the train station and separated the men from the women. All the women were sent to a concentration camp in Poland called Stutthof, and all the men went to Germany to the concentration camp. How I stayed in Lithuania. My war. Like I said, my war was over in no time, and we stayed there and Miriam realized at one point that the Russians were not good people either.

 

00:13:50:17 – 00:14:21:02

Suly Chenkin

They were communists and that we would not be able to leave. And her husband had been cut off from her. He had been in New York when the Nazis had come in, and her parents had gone to Israel years before, and our aim was to get to Israel. So at one point in January of 1945, we escaped Lithuania, and it was one of the coldest winters recorded.

 

00:14:21:04 – 00:14:54:23

Suly Chenkin

And we went to Lublin. And then things were very bad in Lublin. So we left and went to Polish stock in Bialystok, Poland. We went back to Lublin anyway, but we ended up in Bucharest. And that’s where Miriam was finally able to get the certificate that allowed us to go to Israel. It took us ten months to get from Colorado to Bucharest, the distances from New York to Miami.

 

00:14:55:01 – 00:15:25:21

Suly Chenkin

And, it was a horrendous trip because, of course, we had no documents and no real documents and very little money. And we finally did get to Bucharest. And on the month of my fifth birthday, we boarded the ship that took us to Israel. Now, I had never, never asked for my parents because even though war was over, there were tanks on the street.

 

00:15:25:23 – 00:15:59:23

Suly Chenkin

There were people. There were a lot of soldiers with machine guns. And so even when Miriam asked me one time, do you remember your parents? I just turned my head. I wouldn’t lie to her, but I didn’t want to speak about it either. But since we were told that we were going to the land of milk and honey where we would not have to be afraid anymore, and where, you know, we would have enough food and we would even have toys and eat chocolate, whatever that was.

 

00:16:00:01 – 00:16:22:02

Suly Chenkin

I once we got there and I put one foot on the port of Haifa, I turned around and I asked the man, who was standing next to me, “where’s my mother,” because I looked and looked and I didn’t see anybody familiar, and he didn’t want to tell me the truth, which would have been, I don’t know. And nobody else in this world does.

 

00:16:22:04 – 00:16:44:08

Suly Chenkin

So he said, she’s in the next town and the next town and the next village. And finally, with that night, we finally got to Jerusalem. I turned around and I said, stop lying to me. I know I’m an orphan. And that very same night I started calling Miriam Ima, which is Hebrew for mother. And that was that.

 

00:16:44:10 – 00:17:14:05

Suly Chenkin

In the meantime, my mother had been liberated by the Russians in January 1945, and they had taken all these women that they had liberated from Stutthof to a place that was a camp. It was a hard labor camp. It wasn’t like they were beating them up, but they were still not free. There were now under the Russian regime, a young man came looking for his girlfriend.

 

00:17:14:07 – 00:17:36:06

Suly Chenkin

The Nazis were so methodical that you could all see the history of the place where people would. All the women from Calvino were sent to this, other than what was said to that place so you could follow. And he came looking for his girlfriend. Did the women milled around him, asking who else was left? You were in hiding and you came out.

 

00:17:36:07 – 00:18:04:04

Suly Chenkin

Wilson’s left and he started overwriting people, and then he said, you remember the guy, the redhead who used to be in charge of the bread distribution in the ghetto? Yeah, well, she’s got his kid and she’s taking her children, and that kid, they’re trying to get to Israel. And they’re right now on the way to the city of Loach in Poland, my mother fainted.

 

00:18:04:06 – 00:18:26:06

Suly Chenkin

It was the first news that she got that I was alive. And she repeatedly made plans. And she escaped that. Right in front of the machine guns. She made a run for it. Hidden in somebody got knocked on their door, begged them. She managed to get to the village. A few days later. They were looking for her and get them broken trains, busses, whatever method she could, she had.

 

00:18:26:08 – 00:18:47:20

Suly Chenkin

Whichever way she came to the city of Loach, she went to the Jewish Agency that kept tabs on people. I was told we were already on the way to Israel at the High sea. She came out as she stood in the middle of the street crying because all she had was her dress.

 

00:18:47:22 – 00:19:13:03

Suly Chenkin

No underwear, half torn shoes. She had been under this bridge that the Nazis had taken her. At the end of her stay at the concentration camp, she had no money, no nothing. She was never going to see me again. When these two young men stopped on the tracks past. As they passed up, I said, aren’t you on the riverbank of it?

 

00:19:13:03 – 00:19:48:07

Suly Chenkin

Your husband is alive. He knows you’re alive and he’s waiting for you to come to him. Then the Americans left Germany. He is in Munich. So two guys said my mother made the trek. I don’t know how, but with broken down buses or they stole bicycles. My mother said they rolled down hills. They finally got to the border that separated the Russian zone of Munich from the Americans.

 

00:19:48:07 – 00:20:17:10

Suly Chenkin

Old. And of course, my father had been liberated from the show by the Americans. So he was in America. So if you didn’t have the proper documents showing that you lived in Munich before the war, of course they had no such documents. They were put on the train that was going back to the Russians. So my mother and these two guys climbed to the roof of the train that they had been put back on.

 

00:20:17:12 – 00:20:39:07

Suly Chenkin

And when the train they had been taken off from passed by the jail, they jumped from one moving train to the other. And that’s how my mom got to my father. My father’s family had lived in Cuba for many years. He was the youngest, so he had stayed with his mother. And my father had written many, many letters through the Red cross.

 

00:20:39:09 – 00:21:29:14

Suly Chenkin

Finally, one such letter got to my family in Cuba, and they learned that my parents were alive and that I existed. And my uncle started proceedings for papers to bring my parents to Cuba. But it took a long time. My parents, in the meantime, stayed in Munich. My father was working for the Americans in the displaced persons camp, and I was in Israel, on the on the month of May, I was a month away from my sixth birthday, and Miriam had called me over at the dining room table and she said, I got this picture in the mail, and I want you to tell me if you know any of these people.

 

00:21:29:16 – 00:21:54:06

Suly Chenkin

And she showed me the picture and my heart skipped a beat, and I said, this was my mother, I left the bed and I had red hair. This was my father. And she embraced me. And she said, they still are your parents. They’re alive and they’re coming to get you. And I didn’t believe it because I had been lied to before.

 

00:21:54:08 – 00:22:29:10

Suly Chenkin

But it was true. And, my mother and father went to Cuba. My uncle picked them up and brought them to Cuba in July of 1946. Then the family took my mother to New York, and all they could find was a freighter that went to Israel. And she boarded that freighter and came to Israel. And, I was at a playdate, and my eldest and siblings came to get me foster siblings.

 

00:22:29:12 – 00:22:54:05

Suly Chenkin

And they said, Imma, which is Hebrew for mother, wants to see you. And I was very worried because she only served you if you had done something, you should. And I came running around the bend of the house screaming Imma, imma, I’m here and I haven’t done anything bad when this lady came out of the house onto the porch and she stopped and I stopped.

 

00:22:54:05 – 00:23:17:19

Suly Chenkin

And then she opened up her arms and I ran into them in full recognition of my mother, who had come to get me. And then I froze her. She was a stranger and then started that period of, you know, having two others. First I had, but now I had to and it was a little difficult for both ladies and for me.

 

00:23:17:21 – 00:23:42:10

Suly Chenkin

And my mother and I moved to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem so I could start, you know, bonding more with my mom. And we had to wait for documents because all of a sudden, Cuba didn’t want to let me in. So it was that my mother had arrived in September, and it wasn’t until February that we, we’re able to travel to Cuba.

 

00:23:42:12 – 00:24:17:01

Suly Chenkin

And I arrived there on February 6th, 1947. And, I was reunited with my father. Out of the 40,000 Jewish people that lived in Colorado before the Nazis invaded, only 2000 remained alive. And it was a miracle that my mother, my father and I remained intact out of children under the age of 12. Only 3% survived.

 

00:24:17:03 – 00:24:46:14

Suly Chenkin

So I was very, very lucky with the people who saved me. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

When your family reunited, what sort of future did you make for yourself? And how did the legacies of those past shape that future?

 

Suly Chenkin

Well, we came to Cuba and we were very lucky. My father had a wonderful family in Cuba. Brothers, his sister, cousins.

 

00:24:46:16 – 00:25:10:21

Suly Chenkin

I grew up with a lot of love, surrounded by a lot of love. And I was very spoiled in many ways with gifts and everything. I mean, when I graduated high school, before my last exam, there was a knock at my door, at lunchtime. And, it was my uncle’s chauffeur with a key in his hand.

 

00:25:10:23 – 00:25:36:00

Suly Chenkin

And he said, your uncle has sent you your graduation present. The car is downstairs. So it was wonderful. And then Castro came. And this country was wonderful and let it go. Said, I came on first as a tourist. And then when, you know, Castro declared himself a communist and I came on my own, my parents sent me out again.

 

00:25:36:02 – 00:26:05:15

Suly Chenkin

I had relatives, but they sent me out again. And, then I came to what they called the dock. And it’s that asylum, and we then my parents came after Castro confiscated most of the businesses in October of 1960. And, we were in textile in Cuba. So there were a lot of the suppliers here in Charlotte.

 

00:26:05:15 – 00:26:32:21

Suly Chenkin

And suppliers, machinery, supplies. So my father and his brothers came here and started a small textile factory. And then I came and I stayed here for about six months. And then I went up to New York. I got a job in an export company. I use my Spanish. I worked on the 75th floor of the Empire State Building.

 

00:26:32:21 – 00:26:54:20

Suly Chenkin

I called my father and I said to him, I got a very high position. And he said, how much are they paying you? I said, $70 a week. He says, what’s so good about that? You were making that in Miami. I said that I’m on the 75th floor, how much higher can I go? So I stayed with that job and I ended up being a partner.

 

00:26:54:22 – 00:27:21:09

Suly Chenkin

For 22 years I lived in New York and stayed with that job. I got married in New York, and then at the end of 1989 I came back with my husband here to Charlotte, and I’ve been here since. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

That’s wonderful. I know for people who have experienced such challenging experiences, sharing that with others is very difficult.

 

00:27:21:11 – 00:27:43:09

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

What inspired you? What caused you to share your experiences as a child with the world and with these communities? 

 

Suly Chenkin

Well, I never did. I grew up in Cuba. My friends, they know I had come from the other side, that I had been born in Cuba, but we never talked. I never talked about it, never talked about being a Holocaust survivor.

 

00:27:43:10 – 00:28:15:07

Suly Chenkin

As a child, I wanted to be just like everybody else as a teenager and everything else. All I was interested in was music and dancing, and that was it. Then I came here and I didn’t talk about it either. So I was 50 or so when my father had a massive heart attack and passed away. And a few weeks later the bankers came, you know, to pay dollars to see what was going on in the factory.

 

00:28:15:08 – 00:28:34:06

Suly Chenkin

And one of them said to me, you know, your father had promised my son to come to his school and tell his story. Will you do it for him? And I said, of course I will. And I went, and when I saw the reaction of the kids and the letters they wrote to me, I knew I had to keep on doing it.

 

00:28:34:06 – 00:29:04:01

Suly Chenkin

And that’s when I started. I haven’t stopped. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Well, thank you for continuing to share your story. What do you think is important for the children of today and of tomorrow to understand about this moment in history and why we need to never forget the things that occurred. 

 

Suly Chenkin

Well, I tell the children, I’m very active at the Levine JCC.

 

00:29:04:03 – 00:29:36:05

Suly Chenkin

We have a program that is called the Butterfly. And children come from different schools. And then we have a survivor answer their questions. They see a film with a story and that we answer the questions. And what I’m trying to tell this, children, is, first of all, I always tell them that when I came to Cuba, my world was divided very clearly into parts.

 

00:29:36:07 – 00:30:12:22

Suly Chenkin

One was Jewish people and the enemy, because even after the war, everybody stopped us with documents that were not good centers. But we had to, you know, do all kinds of tricks to get where we were going. So that was the way it was. And because I played outside on the street and all the neighbors adored me and had little treats for me and presents and hugs and kisses, and my parents got along with all the neighbors.

 

00:30:13:00 – 00:30:38:17

Suly Chenkin

I was totally convinced that all of Cuba was Jewish, and it took until Christmas to realize, no, you can’t have a Christmas tree. That ain’t no difference. So I say, oh, it doesn’t matter what is the name of the God you pray to? It’s what you have in your heart and that we’re all the same. So that’s one of the messages.

 

00:30:38:19 – 00:31:08:23

Suly Chenkin

And I also tell them, look, it took one man to kill 1.5 million children. Look how many people it took to save one little girl. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

But it’s the courage of those individuals in the face of the unimaginable that made your life possible. And, it’s a credit and a wonder that you’re doing the same for helping us today and for those of tomorrow to understand your story.

 

00:31:09:01 – 00:31:20:01

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

So thank you for sharing your experience with us and with our community. 

 

Suly Chenkin

Thank you so much for doing it. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Absolutely.

 

00:31:20:03 – 00:31:42:06

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

One day there, it will be more challenging for educators and historians to communicate this moment in time, because we don’t have those who lived this experience to share. Do you have any advice or what? What do you think is important for us in trying to continue to tell your story and the story of others who lived through this experience for the future?

 

00:31:42:08 – 00:32:14:08

Suly Chenkin

Well, it’s, you know, there’s already been deniers and there will always be deniers. But it just so happens that the Nazis have been very methodical about really having everything in black and white. There’s 22km of filing archives, filing cabinets in a town in Germany, which tells the story, and they have documented everything like my town kovno.

 

00:32:14:10 – 00:32:53:12

Suly Chenkin

They have the documentation assigned by the commandant of how many children, how many women, how many men they killed, or what date. So it’s there. It’s only by remembering the past that we don’t make the same mistakes in the future. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Absolutely. 

 

Suly Chenkin

So we just have to keep on trying, documenting everything, having today, we have all these wonderful new methods of filming, of being able to do podcasts, being able to take stories and showing them.

 

00:32:53:14 – 00:33:17:23

Suly Chenkin

And what we’re doing at the JCC is tremendous, because those children are able to ask how many questions they want and get their answers straight. And, we keep on trying. That’s all we can do. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

In your years, as an adult, did life ever bring you back to Israel or to Lithuania?

 

00:33:18:01 – 00:33:44:11

Suly Chenkin

I will never go back to Lithuania. My father asked me not to. He said it was covered without blood. But it happened many times to Israel. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Yes, I see, for those who wish to learn more about this experience, do you recommend any museums or institutes? Or maybe tell us a little bit more about the JCC community?

 

00:33:44:12 – 00:34:12:07

Suly Chenkin

Well, I would like somebody who is here to talk to us to tell us about it because she is the one who runs it, and she can give you a very good idea of what it is as far as museums. Yes, there is, of course, the Holocaust Museum in Washington. There also happens to be a museum in Richmond, Virginia that is about the colonial ghetto.

 

00:34:12:09 – 00:34:43:06

Suly Chenkin

If I may add one little story…

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Please.

 

Suly Chenkin

…that I heard from my father, when, maybe shortly before he died. He had never told me about this. My father was really, you know, dying 80 pounds. It’s not something you can live on. But without knowing it, the. The Nazis were losing the war.

 

00:34:43:08 – 00:35:08:19

Suly Chenkin

They didn’t have any manpower to work those fields and that was really an agricultural area. So one day they just took the inmates out and my father got the job in the form of tending the vegetable garden. And it was right behind the farm, his house. And there was this farmer’s daughter who found out it was the daughter.

 

00:35:08:19 – 00:35:34:22

Suly Chenkin

Later on, on a window poised on a window staring at him, he said to me that he must have looked like a scarecrow. He was, you know, that striped uniform, unshaven on base. And the girl threw him a piece of bread, and he looked around. No guards nearby put the piece of bread in his uniform. The next day she threw him another piece of bread.

 

00:35:35:02 – 00:36:06:09

Suly Chenkin

The third day she said, she found, said Deutsche. Do you speak German? He wouldn’t like that, she said, don’t die. What you hear is not thunder. Those are the American planes bombing our cities. And, soon you will be free. And that gave him more strength than the pieces of bread. And he did hang on. And then time passed by and he was, you know, they had food.

 

00:36:06:11 – 00:36:34:11

Suly Chenkin

Eisenhower was liberated that down. My mother came to him. They were waiting for papers from Cuba that would allow them to leave Germany forever. They knew that I was safe and sound, and they knew the papers were coming. Any day now. The Germans had nothing. Their cities had been bombed to the ground. Most places didn’t even have drinking water.

 

00:36:34:13 – 00:37:05:22

Suly Chenkin

And my father, working for the Americans, had everything. So knowing that soon they would be leaving, he and my mother took two baskets and filled them up with coffee and and and and sugar and soap and whatever. And they went out to the farmland and found the house, and we prayed for that one act of kindness that was done to him throughout those years.

 

00:37:06:00 – 00:37:30:10

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

It’s a remarkable story, remarkable in moments that are so dark. The kindness of a stranger could be the light that can keep people going

 

Suly Chenkin

Right.

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

In times of today and in the future, we’ll face future darkness. How do you think we can maintain hope and find those connections? They keep that spark alive. 

 

Suly Chenkin

You know something I don’t?

 

00:37:30:10 – 00:38:02:00

Suly Chenkin

I think there was a dual reason for that jester. Yes, sure. It was not only to show the girl the gratitude, but to convince himself that despite everything that had happened to him, he was still capable of having that feeling. 

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

Remarkable. I want to thank you for sharing your experience, your life, the story of your parents, and your story of becoming an American.

 

00:38:02:05 – 00:38:21:20

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

And thank you for your work and sharing this with communities here in the Charlotte area, and with us here at Belmont Abbey College. I wish you continued opportunities to share this with the children of the community and with other communities. And thank you for your work in keeping this part of our history. It’s such an important part of our history alive.

 

00:38:21:22 – 00:38:44:01

Suly Chenkin

Thank you for doing this absolutely very much. Thank you.

 

Dr. Daniel Hutchinson

I want to thank you again for joining us for conversation and encourage you to continue to keep up with our activities here at the College by keeping in touch with our podcast. Thank you.

• To learn more about the Levine Jewish Community Center of Charlotte and the Butterfly Project, click here to see a brief conversation with Lori Semel: https://youtu.be/i2vsVkJ9o0o
• Levine JCC Butterfly Project Workshop