Writing Memoirs Opens New Chapter for Holocaust Survivor

Teri Keish

Sun Newspapers

March 11, 2004

The soft lines worn into Sabina Zimering's face outwardly tell of a life lived. She speaks tenderly, her words colored by her Polish heritage, and she speaks poignantly. She has nothing to hide, not anymore.

Zimering has spent enough years hiding, first from her persecutors then from her own memories surviving as a Jewish teenager in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

She was 16 when the war broke out. She spent three years in the Piotrkow Ghetto, escaping hours before the mass deportation of Jews to the concentration camps began. In 1942, with the help of family friends, she and her younger sister were given false identities to pose as Catholic Poles. Living with the Catholic family friends and working as maids at a hotel favored by German Gestapo, the sisters, unbelievably, but successfully hid their identities, averting Nazi capture.

Zimering was once reluctant to talk about how she survived the Holocaust, hiding from memories that were too painful to talk about. Not even a happy marriage, the joy of raising three children, nor a successful medical career could erase the memories of a time spent living in constant fear of persecution.

Recalling the last 60 years of her life after the Holocaust, Zimering says she's led a "normal" life, but flashbacks to her adolescence will never let her forget.

"The strange thing is it doesn't heal - just observing myself," says Zimering. "But I just keep going. I have something to wipe the tears and I keep going. When I see men my age, war heroes, breakdown and cry when they talk about their experience I think, I can keep going."

When Zimering married, her husband Rueben knew about her past, but their three children growing up knew little about what their mother had gone through. They pleaded with her to document her story. She promised some day she would, but not wanting to relive the memories, she kept finding excuses not to.

When she retired in 1996 after practicing medicine for 42 years, she ran out of excuses.

"What is pretty common among parent survivors is to decide whether to tell the children at all about the experience, at what age, what to tell…" her words cut short as her voice trembles. Reaching for a Kleenex she apologizes for the tears rolling down her cheeks. "I do quite a bit of speaking about it now and sometimes I go through it and I'm fine and sometimes it's like this. I never know."

From inside the warmth of her St. Louis Park kitchen, she gazes out the picture window at the sparkling winter landscape lit by the morning sun. She doesn't like the snow. She especially dislikes the cold.

"I would tell them short little events," she continues. "They had a vague idea. As they got older they got very interested and that's when the pressure really came."

Zimering began taking creative writing classes in 1997 with the intention of documenting her experience. Two years later she emerged with her memoir, aptly titled, "Hiding in the Open: A Holocaust Memoir." She also emerged emotionally stronger and more confident about sharing her memories.

"Once I got started and got over the fear of it being too painful, I couldn't let go," she says. "My creative writing teacher told me that as we face painful events in our lives it’s normal to cry. That's all I needed to hear. Then I could sit here by myself with my Kleenex and write."

North Star Press of St. Cloud published her book in 2001. It's now in the second edition. It's also been adapted into a play set to premier March 27 at the Great American History Theatre in St. Paul.

'Hitler kaput'

During the process of writing her book, Zimering spoke to two groups of students about her Holocaust experience. She'd never done anything like it before, and was surprised at her ability to speak in front of an audience. Before that she could really only talk personally to other Holocaust survivors.

Since the publication of "Hiding in the Open," Zimering has been a guest speaker at several schools, churches, synagogues and bookstores. She enjoys talking to young students about her experiences, hoping to make a new generation aware of the power behind hatred and intolerance.

"It's a tragic thing that still goes on. People are still so inhumane to one another. I tell the younger kids, 'Human beings can be so terrible to one another and then again the other way around so caring and nourishing.' But we have be aware of it and pay attention to it."

A few months ago, Zimering spoke to 500 World War II veterans, those she considers her liberators. She glows when speaking of them, having enormous gratitude and respect for those who set her free. She finds comfort in talking to veterans or people her own age that survived the war. "They understand what I'm talking about. When I say 'Hitler kaput' they know what I'm talking about - the day the happy GIs rode through the streets shouting 'Hitler kaput.' I told that story and a gentleman stood up and said he was one of those GIs."

No matter whom Zimering is speaking, to she gives a candid account of her life under Nazi rule. She tells of the Gestapo using dogs to attack Jews in the ghetto, vividly recounting the day a dog was nipping at her heels; making a sharp turn around a building she escaped the dog only to hear the painful outcry of a little boy a moment later.

She tells of the night her sister woke to tell her she was talking in her sleep, and from then on being terrified the young Aryan girl also living with the Catholic family would overhear something that would lead to the discovery of their true identities.

"You had to watch yourself constantly, what you would say in conversations. It was very frightening."

But not everything that happened to Zimering during the Holocaust was terrible, a point she tries to express in her book. "I read several Holocaust stories. They were very gripping but the style was as such that it was constant trial. But that's not how life works. So when I was writing I tried to avoid that because it wasn't one bad thing constantly after the other. I had my first kiss in ghetto."

She also recalls the excitement of taking illegal private school lessons and then teaching younger students what she had learned. Also the pride she felt when the father of two of her students, who was a baker by trade, paid her with bread and rolls. "This was such a hit with the family because everything was rationed."