Roberta Lynn Wechsler often watched her father, Murray Lynn, tell Georgia schoolchildren his harrowing story of narrowly surviving the Holocaust. She was struck by how the young students reacted. After he finished speaking, some asked if they could shake his hand, even hug him.
“They just wanted to touch him,” she remembered.
Her father did not mind, she said, but he did not linger. Retraumatized and drenched in sweat, he left as soon as possible. Four years ago, he died at age 90.
“I hated knowing Dad had so much pain,” said Wechsler, a retired broadcast communications executive who lives in the Atlanta area. “He never forgot.”
Today, Wechsler is repeating her father’s story so that others do not forget.
Monday marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a large complex of Nazi concentration camps in Poland where her father was held. Nazis murdered more than 1.1 million people there, mostly Jews.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland is preparing to commemorate the anniversary and televise the events live. Holocaust survivors have been invited to attend.
Meanwhile, Wechsler is encouraging younger descendants of survivors to share their families’ stories as a way to prevent more atrocities. She spoke about her father with high school students this month at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta.
Her mission is becoming increasingly critical as the number of Holocaust survivors in America dwindles.
As of 2023, there were 245,000 Jewish survivors worldwide with a median age of 86, according to a report published last year by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Of those, 38,400 resided in the United States.
In Georgia, there are at least 300 still alive today, estimated Amy Neuman, who directs Holocaust survivor services for Jewish Family & Career Services of Atlanta.
Repeating their stories helps illuminate how the Holocaust was “incremental and that at various stages there were opportunities to do things that could have made a difference,” said Sally Levine, executive director of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust.
“Each individual story is a story about a person whose potential was cut short, about a family that was destroyed,” said Levine, also a museum teacher fellow with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “There are always opportunities to do what is right and to make a difference. And that is the message we are trying to get out.”
Credit: AJC staff
Credit: AJC staff
‘I am the ghost’
Before he died, Murray Lynn repeated his survival story in video interviews and a documentary for the Breman.
The oldest son of a clothing store owner and a homemaker, he was raised in a small Jewish community east of Budapest in what was then Hungary but is now in the Ukraine. Antisemitism was already rampant in Europe. Lynn and fellow Jews were treated with hostility.
One night in 1942, when Lynn was 12, armed fascists from Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party showed up at his family’s home near the Carpathian Mountains. Accompanied by snarling German shepherds, they seized Lynn’s father.
Weeks later, Lynn learned they had executed his dad and about a dozen other Jewish community leaders. As they were still grieving, Lynn said, a gun-wielding Arrow Cross fascist burst into their home and raped his mother.
In 1944, he and his mother and three younger brothers were deported to a ghetto. After about 10 days, they were herded along with about 100 others into boxcars and taken to Auschwitz. The three-day journey, he remembered, was “nightmarish.” They had no food or water. Sick and elderly passengers died on the way.
Credit: Photo courtesy of the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta.
Credit: Photo courtesy of the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta.
When they arrived at Auschwitz, they observed a crematorium ominously belching dark smoke. One of the prisoners urged Lynn to lie about his age and say he was 16 — old enough to do slave labor. Then 14, Lynn heeded that advice and was separated from his family. He remembered his mother’s final words to him before she and his three siblings were murdered: “I love you, son. I hope to see you again.”
The prisoners’ daily rations consisted of a single slice of bread and a cup of coffee in the mornings and a cup of foul-tasking potato or turnip soup for dinner. This, Lynn said, was part of an “orchestrated program to starve us to death.” Often without blankets, they slept belly to back on wooden bunk beds in the brutal cold. Their filthy barracks were infested with lice and rodents.
Lynn was forced to work 12 hours a day at a construction site, carrying heavy bags of concrete mix. To shield himself from the frigid temperatures, he fashioned one of the empty bags into a vest. The prisoners scavenged surrounding woods for mushrooms to eat. Lynn remembered a guard once slapped him so hard that he suffered for weeks from partial blindness and deafness.
Emaciated and weakened, Lynn was often picked to get in the line for the gas chamber. Each time, he slipped back into the workforce. Lynn credits his willpower for keeping him alive during the year he was held at Auschwitz.
As Soviet forces drew closer near the end of the war, the Nazis forced Lynn and the other prisoners on a death march to a concentration camp in Germany. Hundreds died or were killed during the grueling journey. One of the guards shot Lynn through his collarbone.
Skeletal, suffering from dysentery and on the edge of death, Lynn weighed less than 70 pounds when U.S. troops liberated him in 1945. He was hospitalized and fed intravenously until he was nursed back to health.
Lynn returned by freight train to his home in Eastern Europe, begging for food along the way. When he arrived, he discovered his house was occupied by hostile strangers. One told Lynn, “I thought you were all dead.” Lynn replied, “I am the ghost.”
Eventually, Lynn traveled to Ireland and studied there for nearly a year with the help of a generous rabbi from Great Britain. When he was 18, Lynn received permission to continue his studies in the United States, where he attended graduate school at New York University and supported himself working in liquor and clothing stores.
In 1956, Lynn moved to Atlanta for a sales job. He met his wife there and became a senior business executive and consultant. Raising three children, he said, was among his “crowning achievements.”
“They will be heirs to my legacy,” he said, “bear witness when I am gone, retell my narrative and keep our experience alive about man’s capacity for cruelty and monstrous evil.”
Credit: Photo courtesy of the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta.
Credit: Photo courtesy of the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta.
‘He is my hero’
The horrors Lynn experienced echoed in his life. Suffering from nightmares, he avoided trains and was afraid of large dogs. He was hypervigilant around his children. Lynn called the psychological impact of the Holocaust “oppressive.”
Initially, Lynn was reluctant to speak publicly about his experiences, worrying he would reopen wounds. As he got older and considered his mortality, he became more introspective and realized he had a responsibility.
“I came to the realization that my life is not entirely my own. It belongs to a tragic history. And from that we need to draw some meaning,” Lynn said in a documentary for the Breman that was narrated by Andrew Young, a civil rights leader and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “But most of all, we want to send a message to the world — for them to remember the consequences of silence, the consequences of hatred.”
Starting at around the age of 70, Wechsler recalled, her father began bravely sharing his story. In all, he spoke dozens of times at various places, including at schools, houses of worship and the Breman.
“It retraumatized him every time,” Wechsler said. “Mom always said he would have nightmares every time he spoke.”
Just months after her father died in 2021, Wechsler began repeating her father’s story.
In a theater at the Breman this month, she spoke about him with more than a dozen students from the Westminster Schools. Wearing her father’s wristwatch, she told the students she was standing in the very spot he once stood when he spoke about the Holocaust. Moments later, the students watched with rapt attention as Wechsler screened her father’s documentary.
“He is my hero,” she told the students. “We promised him that we would share his story so that the past does not become our future.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The next generation
Wechsler said she had just finished repeating her father’s story at North Springs High School in December when one of the students approached her with a question that made her reflect on her mortality: “Who will tell your dad’s story when you are gone?”
“He was right. I don’t have any children,” Wechsler said. “It just becomes so important about who will tell these stories. It is reminding people what happens when hate and lies run amok.”
Wechsler pointed to a pair of kindred spirits, Emily Yehezkel and Brendan Murphy.
Yehezkel speaks to classrooms, synagogues and universities about her late grandfather, Martin Brown, who survived Auschwitz. Yehezkel grew up in New York, where she was involved with 3GNY, an educational nonprofit that got its name from the fact that this is the third generation of people telling the stories of Holocaust survivors.
Yehezkel has started a local chapter called 3GATL.
“I try to pass on this message that we all have a voice — we all have the power to do good in this world and the responsibility to do that,” said Yehezkel, an educator who serves with Wechsler on the board of the Daffodil Project, an Atlanta organization that plants daffodils in memory of children who died in the Holocaust. “It’s important to keep these stories alive and make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Credit: Emily Yehezkel
Credit: Emily Yehezkel
At the Marist School in metro Atlanta, Murphy teaches about the Holocaust and takes his students on field trips to Auschwitz. Before he died, Murray Lynn befriended Murphy and frequently spoke with his students, even their parents.
“He was an extraordinary man,” said Murphy, who directs the Bearing Witness Institute for Interreligious and Ecumenical Dialogue at Marist. “It was always really hard for him to recount these stories. But in the end, he felt that it was regrettably necessary.”
Credit: Courtesy of Marist School
Credit: Courtesy of Marist School
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