At a wedding festival in Philadelphia last weekend, a kiddush cup was raised in celebration and thanksgiving. Later that same evening, it was flown to Des Moines where its custodian had a speaking engagement on Monday.
While four-year-olds across the district were attending preschool this morning, Michael Bornstein was at Roosevelt High School recounting what he experienced at that age.
Bornstein is a Holocaust survivor, one of the youngest liberated from the infamous Auschwitz death camp and his book, Survivor’s Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, was a New York Times bestseller. His appearance at Roosevelt was sponsored by donors to the Iowa Jewish Historical Society, an award-winning institution that celebrates Iowa’s Jewish heritage through education and preservation.
The book was a collaboration between Bornstein and his daughter, Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, who did the research that documents her father’s remarkable story and accompanies him on his speaking tour. They are on a joint mission to bear witness to one of history’s darkest eras while those who personally experienced it are still alive.
“Surveys indicate that 20% of your generation are not aware of the Holocaust,” Holinstat told the students. “My father is determined to share his story with as many young people as possible while he still can because within a handful of years no one will be left.”
“I’m here to roll up my sleeve and go to work,” said Bornstein. Then he did just that to reveal the B1148 tattoo that was branded on his left forearm when he was processed at Auschwitz, where his father and older brother died in the gas chamber. Bornstein survived seven months at a place where children lasted an average of just two weeks.
“People always ask me how much I can actually remember since I was so young,” Bornstein said. “I tell them I can remember the smell of burning flesh and the sound of voices shouting in German.”
The Bornstein family lived in the Polish village of Zarki when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Michael’s mother Sophie, who, like him, survived Auschwitz (and the Austrian work camp where she was later transferred without Michael), witnessed a Jewish family being forced to dig its own grave in the village cemetery before a German soldier shot them all and dumped them into it.
What the Bornstein family buried in Zarki were as many of its valuables and cash as possible in a vault in their backyard. When Sophie went back after the war to retrieve it, the contents were missing, with one exception.
“All that was left was the kiddush cup,” Bornstein said. Kiddush is a Hebrew blessing recited to sanctify Jewish holidays and special occasions. There have been many of those since Bornstein was liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians in 1945. He and his mother came to America six years later and in1957, when he was 17, Bornstein became an American citizen. Eventually, he found his way to graduate school at the University of Iowa where he earned a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry AND met his wife of 51 years, Judy. Bornstein’s roommate, a foreign exchange student from Germany, introduced them.
Holinstat tried to put the Holocaust in context for the audience of high school students.
“The tragedy at Parkland (FL) High School would have to happen every second for the next 40 years to equal the extermination of six million innocent people,” she said. “Chances are, by the time your children are as old as you are now, no one will be alive who lived through it.”
She and her father also called attention to the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews and other groups.
“Three students at my son’s middle school were suspended for a text chain that included the message ‘Kill the Jews,’” she said. “And their parents got angry at the school for suspending them. They said it was only a joke. Well, the Holocaust didn’t start with death camps and gas chambers. It started with mean-spirited jokes.”
Michael and Judy Bornstein have four children and 12 grandchildren.
The ceremonial cup that was all that remained of a family’s buried treasure? It overflows.
