Saved by the hollow of a tree: A survivor's tale

Yaakov Zilberstein did not know the name of the woman in whose attic he hid for nearly six months until World War II ended. She had saved his life. Neither did he know the name of the northern Czech village where he hid. "She didn't ask me and I didn't ask her and that was the best thing. No one wanted to know, everyone was afraid," Zilberstein said yesterday at a ceremony at Yad Vashem.

But a decade after the war, Zilberstein, a Polish Jew who had become a jeweler in Stuttgart, West Germany, decided to return to seek out and thank the woman who had saved his life. Before he had arrived at the Czech village he managed to stay alive almost three years in Auschwitz as a builder and chimney cleaner.

"I was afraid the communists would arrest me for being around there looking for information, but I had to find her and thank her," he said. But he was unable to find the village and the house despite a number of attempts over the years.

Three years ago, he sought the help of a local historian, Zdenek Vesely, who wrote to the local paper Oko and to journalist Frantisek Krajicek. Krajicek published an article about it, and a few days later a reader approached him, saying that Zilberstein had hidden in a house near him in the village of Sunichl, which since the war had become a neighborhood of the town of Bohumin. Through a neighbor, Krajicek found Anna Garlova, who was the daughter of Jana Sodova, the woman who had saved Zilberstein.

"We told her we were partisans and she agreed to hide us," Zilberstein said of Sodova, who died a few years before he found her daughter. He and three other Jews hid in her attic after escaping the death march from Auschwitz at the beginning of 1945. The three other fugitives came out of hiding despite Jana's warnings to make a break for the Red Army's lines, but they were caught and executed.

Two and a half years ago, Zilberstein and Sodova's daughter went together to Sunichl. The house had been destroyed to construct a new building, but in the field behind it, he noticed something familiar: Two pieces of a large, hollow birch trunk. The tree was hollow 60 years ago, too, and became Zilberstein's hiding place in the face of ever-increasing searches of the house by German soldiers.

The moment Zilberstein saw the tree, he resolved to ensure that Sodova was properly remembered and the tree sent to the Yad Vashem Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. Zilberstein's testimony was enough to gain recognition for Sodova as a Righteous Gentile in January 2006.

Transferring the tree trunk was more complicated. "They told me I was meshuga to do a thing like this," Zilberstein said yesterday at the dedication ceremony for the tree. It also took a long while until Yad Vashem agreed to have the trunk placed in the middle of its garden commemorating the Righteous Gentiles.

At yesterday's ceremony, Zilberstein, Garlova and the Czech journalist Krajicek stood together next to the tree, and a chapter was closed.

Yad Vashem's willingness to have a tree placed on its grounds that tells the story of a single individual is part of a trend of changing the old emphasis on the collective. The emphasis now is on the individual. "This is a concept that has proven itself as more correct for our time," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev says. Since Shalev took up his post 14 years ago, he has been leading the new concept. "We realized that today's society is more individualist. We believe a person is first of all an individual."

Shalev says that to create empathy the connection must be made with individual subjects. The annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony has also been changed to include survivors telling their stories, and Yad Vashem seeks out personal items that belonged to Jews during the Holocaust. "Even the smallest thing like a cup has a special story. A cup meant a drink that could save Jewish lives," Shalev says.

Yad Vashem now has 25,000 personal items in its collection, of which Ya'akov Zilberstein's hiding tree is the latest addition.