ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

ASSEMBLY MEMBER JUAN ARAMBULAAD 31

Is HONORED TO PRESENT

THE STORY OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR

ANNA MAXELL LEVIN-WARE

ROBERT WARE

PATIENCE MILROD

PAUL PIERCE

MADELINE PEVSNER

JONATHAN PEVSNER

CAROL REBA

JEWISH FEDERATION OF FRESNO

__Anna Maxell Levin-Wareby Darrow Pierce and Rachel Pevsner

There are many uses for the average bowl. A bowl could be used for eating or drinking,perhaps decoration. However, a simple bowl usually doesn't mean the difference betweenlife and death, as it did for Anna Levin-Ware.

Anna Maxell was born in 1922 in Grodno, Poland, of Jewish Russian parents. Fiveyears later they moved to Krakow. Anna lived with her parents and younger brother Simonin an upper middle class district. Her father owned a tannery; her mother was a concertpianist. Their friends were mostly Catholics and Anna was the only Jew in her all-girlschool.

Anna had a German governess who taught her sewing and German. Anna spokeRussian to her parents and Polish to everyone else. She took dancing, ballet, and piano.

As a teenager, Anna went to her share of high school dances. At one point, she dancedwith Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II. Anna was a serious student who hoped to goto medical school. She followed what was happening inGermany, but her family paid littleattention to politics. When Anna was fifteen, her mother had a baby girl named Felicia.Then in September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. Everything changed.

The Nazis did everything systematically and slowly. First, Jews were made to wearwhite armbands with blue six-pointed stars. Food became scarce. Slowly, civil rightswere taken away from the Jews. They couldn't ride streetcars. They couldn't shop incertain stores, and the Nazis confiscated Jewish businesses and properties. A ghetto wasestablished in a less desirable part of town. The Nazis took all the property of the peoplethey moved to the ghetto. Jews could only carry what fit in one suitcase.

One day in 1940, Nazi soldiers knocked on Anna's door and forced them to move tothe Krakow Ghetto. Her father lost his business, without compensation. Anna said that shewould rather die than move to the Ghetto. So she married her Hungarian boyfriend, JanosFenyo. This enabled her to live with his family outside the ghetto.

All of Anna's family was sent to the ghetto excepther brother, who was sent to thePlashow work camp outside Krakow, Anna could visit her family in the ghetto, but theycould not go out to visit her. In March of 1942, Anna's father and hundreds of others fromthe ghetto were put on a cattle train. Anna arranged to take her baby sister from the ghetto,but the Nazis sealed the ghetto just before Anna reached the gate. Within days, transportsremoved everyone from the ghetto. Not until 1989 did Anna find out that most of thosetransports including her father's had gone directly to the Belzecextermination camp.

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In March of 1943, Germany invaded Hungary. Anna, her husband, and his family werearrested as political prisoners and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It wasn'tso bad there; three basic meals a day and no forced hard labor.

Months later, the Fenyo family, another Hungarian Betsy Gordon, and four Hungarianmen were "transported" by cattle train to Auschwitz. During a forced three-mile walk toBirkenau, Anna's grandmother-in-law collapsed. The family convinced the guard not tokill her so the Nazis sent a truck to bring them all to Birkenau.

Unfortunately, because they all arrived at Birkenau by truck, it was presumed that theywere not fit to work. They were sent directly to the gas chambers. Men and women waitedin the chamber. Two strange women were forced in; then a baby was thrown in and thedoor close for a final time. After a while it opened again. A Nazi soldier came in askingfor the Hungarian group that had just arrived. Leaving the two women and baby behind,Anna's family and the other Hungarians were moved to an adjacent room exactly like theone they had been in. The door banged shut. After an indefinite period, they heard muffledscreaming-then silence.

The door opened. A Nazi said, "Ihr habt nichts gesehen und nichts gehert" +wordsshe will never forget: "You have not seen or heard anything."

They each were issued a set of clothes: a dress, shoes, and bloomers for the women;a shirt, pants, and shoes for the men. Anna's grandmother-in-law, in her weakened state,was given a lethal injection by the infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele. The men and women wereseparated and taken to some kind of check-in building. Anna never saw her husband again.They were made to undress, were tattooed, and their head and pubic hair shaved. TheNazis even shaved and tattooed the deceased grandmother. The Nazis saved their hair inbags for some later use.

Living conditions at Birkenau were inhumane and horrific. People slept six to a slab inthree-tiered wooden bunk beds with straw mattresses and thin blankets. One slept in one'sown garments. The latrines allowed no privacy. One was awakened at 3:30 in the morningfor roll call, which lasted until 7:00. Then there was 'breakfast:' a scrap of bread and somebrown liquid dubbed 'coffee.' Each had a bowl-with which to get "food;" really just a thinsoup. Without that bowl, one would starve.

To stay alive, one had to work. Many know of the infamous sign on Auschwitz's gatesthat reads: "Arbeit macht frei," "work makes you free." The work wasn't easy, though.They dug ditches, built barracks, cleaned, made ropes, sewed, and many other laborioustasks. One was always told how lucky one was that they were able to work. Everyone hadlice. "If you didn't kill them, they would eat you alive."

By December of 1944, the Russian Armies were getting close to Auschwitz. Some

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prisoners including Anna were wakened for roll call early and loaded onto cattle trains.They were transported to Bergen-Belsen; the camp Anna had been in two years before.Many, many more people were moved to that camp than it was originally meant for. Therewas no room. Hygiene was nonexistent, and disease broke out. Anna caught typhus,which, ironically, saved her life. When word came of the British advances, the Nazis fledthe camp. When the British finally arrived three days later, they told the ghost-like peoplenot to eat anything the Nazis left, because they had probably poisoned it.

The British cooked up barrels of thick, hot soup, but most people who were able to eatdied because it was too rich for starved people. When the British doctors realized this, theystopped the rich food, substituting mild broth till people regained some strength. Anna'styphus made her too weak to eat at all. That saved her life.

The British set up hospitals and delousing stations. Some former prisoners now gotjobs. Anna spoke several languages, so she became an interpreter for people who came tothe camp looking for friends and relatives. How Anna found her family and came to theU.S. is another story. When she did, it was a very emotional reunion.

Years passed. Anna married Dr. Manuel Levin. With four children, all at the top intheir fields of work, and five grandchildren, she has much to be proud of. Following thedeath of Dr. Levin, Anna became the costume shop supervisor for the University Theatrewhere she met her present husband Dr. Robert Ware.

In the meantime, Anna had returned to school for a degree in fine arts. She developed anelectroforming process for bonding silver and copper to porcelain. This technology hadn'tbeen achieved before, and hasn't been duplicated since. She used this new technology tomake bowls-bowls without any function but to be beautiful.

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