Young Bruno Bienenfeld reached under his tattered pillow and discovered the one thing he wanted most in the world — a second piece of bread.
Shocked, he turned to his mother for an explanation. After all, hunks of food didn’t just magically appear underneath pillows in the Jasenovic concentration camp in the bitter year of 1943.
“She told me that an angel brought it, answering my prayer,” Bienenfeld wrote in his short memoir “Angel.”
“I was puzzled and asked her, ‘Are there Jewish angels?’ She smiled and said, ‘There are angels for all people on Earth.'”
Bruno’s “angel” continued to place an extra piece of bread under his pillow until, after three excruciating months at the camp, his mother died. Suddenly, the deliveries ceased.
“I told my dad, ‘Angel didn’t put the bread under the pillow tonight,'” wrote Bienenfeld, a resident of Sunnyvale for 31 years. “To that, Dad, embracing me, said, ‘Yes, I know, he was too busy taking Mom to Heaven.'”
Bienenfeld’s simultaneously crushing and uplifting recollection is just one of the hundreds of reminiscences Foothill Junior College instructor Sheila Dunec has collected over the years.
Dunec teaches a class on how to write one’s life story. To her amazement, her students, many of whom are elderly, had dramatic and varied accounts of World War II. Several were sharing their experiences for the first time ever.
“In one of the class sections, we looked back at the toughest times of our lives and how we got through them. I asked all of my older students what they did in World War II, and by the end of that exercise, my mouth was almost hanging open,” recalled Dunec. “The younger members of my class had the same reaction. For the first time, it was real.”
Out of that classroom exercise, the War Stories Project was born. The project has led to “Remembering World War II: First Person Accounts,” a short series of live readings by Bienenfeld and 31 others at Palo Alto’s Cubberley Theatre.
The last of three readings, held Nov. 18, was videotaped in hopes of creating an educational film for junior high- and high school students. Plans are underway to craft the readings into a book as well. Approximately $25,200 has been collected for the effort, and another $47,000 is needed.
“I tell you, I had very, very difficult dreams for the first two or three weeks,” recalled Alfred Jacobs, a professor emeritus at Menlo College who culled the vast number of lengthy memoirs into a handful of short, two-minute readings for the performances. “I was reading their material, and it was very affecting for me.”
“Angel” is not the only piece dealing with the Holocaust. Ellen Fletcher wrote about being ferried from Germany to England via Kindertransport, calming the other frantic children by playing her recorder. Nurse Johanna Willemsen recalled harboring Jews in the “highly contagious” ward of a Dutch hospital where no SS man dared poke his nose. Walter Meyerhof, a retired Stanford physics professor and the son of a prominent German scientist, told of his abuse in school at the hands of the Hitler Youth, and even the teachers. And Saul Golan remembered escaping from a Polish armory plant and the stranger who saved his life.
“We slipped into the pocket [in the ceiling] and observed the SS guards and dogs running wild, searching for the missing escapees. At night we climbed down and looked in the direction of the camp which was empty and abandoned,” wrote Golan. “The next morning my partner and I stopped near a Jewish cemetery to look for food…We were soon surrounded by six Polish youngsters who wanted to take us to the German police for a reward for catching Jews. Fortunately a Pole in his early 30s passed by and intervened. He said, ‘Hey guys, let them go! They have the same blood as you, they are human beings.’ The youngsters obliged and let us go.”
Bienenfeld’s piece served as something of the show’s crux: Dunec and Jacobs said that audiences were so emotionally affected by “Angel” that they rescheduled Bienenfeld to speak immediately before the intermission. But the project also encompassed views of World War II other than those of Holocaust survivors.
Citizens of and soldiers hailing from Europe, China, America and even Japan read their memoirs, as do Pearl Harbor survivors and a former German soldier. Some of the speakers have waited over half a century to tell their stories to anyone.
“After the war, I moved to Israel during ’48, during the War of Independence,” said Bienenfeld, who, at age “70-plus” still works full time at Agilent Technologies. “Most of these things [memories], they’ve just been shut off, and I didn’t want to talk about them, didn’t want to think about them
“In the due course of time, you get married and have children, and sometimes here and there you start talking and they say, ‘I’m sick and tired of your stories about the war.’ Well, children grow up and have their own children, and they say ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Who are you?’ From these little things issues start developing, you have to put it down, you have to write it.”
Bienenfeld has found that not just his grandchildren want to know about his past and World War II.
“It turns out that youth in junior high and high school are hungry to understand what World War II was about,” he said. “There are only a couple of people that are still alive, and pretty soon they’re going to die, including myself. So we are inspired, and maybe we owe them something to explain this and put it forward.”