Daughter & grandson of survivor give artifacts to U.S. Holocaust Museum

Evan Sherbet (L) presents U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Curator Steven Luckert with artifacts of his late grandfather, Michael Kurzer

By Renate Frydman, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

A plastic box, perhaps a foot and a half long, not much bigger than a shoe box, held a father’s life story that remained mostly unknown until recently.

Dr. Ann Sherbet knew very little about her father’s history. Michael Kurzer passed away during Ann’s freshman year in college. She knew he was a survivor of the Holocaust.

Beyond that, very little passed from his lips about that time in his life.

However, there was a box that her younger brother Joe received after their father died. Joe Kurzer kept it with him wherever he moved over the past 30 years.

“Joe got all his belongings and took it all with him everywhere he went, even to Hong Kong where he lived for 10 years,” Ann said.

Joe worked in advertising and lived in a lot of places. Years went by and Ann forgot about the box.

“I didn’t see Joe that often and I never thought about the box, “ she said. “Finally he moved to Columbus the last few years.”

There was even a flood at Joe’s house in Columbus, flooding nearly everything. But the box was on a shelf. It was preserved.

Ann’s son Evan, now 14, provided the link as to how the box would reenter his mother’s life.

“I was in religious school at Temple Israel and studied about the Holocaust,” Evan said. “I knew my grandfather was a survivor and asked my mother if she had anything of his.”

A 1946 document confirming Michael Kurzer’s imprisonment at Dachau

That got Ann thinking. She knew so little of her father’s history. And she had hesitated before to talk to her sons about it. She thought to herself, “Now you are old enough, you can handle this.”

”I called Joe and he said he had been meaning to do something with the contents of the box,” Ann said. She told her brother, “If you don’t mind, I will take care of this. I will get it to wherever it needs to go.”

It turned out that Evan and his eighth-grade class at Tower Heights Middle School in Centerville were going to Washington, D.C. over Memorial Day weekend this year.

Ann decided that if there were any items in the box that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum wanted, Evan could take them there.

When Ann opened the box, she found several books, some pictures and a belt that belonged to her father. It also contained original documents of his time in the Kovno Ghetto in 1941.

He was there with his family and his mother and brother before they were shipped out.

One document has his picture and dates of imprisonment in Dachau Concentration Camp showing Michael Kurzer was there from July 1944 to April 1945. The fragments Ann found in the box pieced together many of her questions about her father.

“I know him better now than when he was alive,” Ann said. “In his mind, it (not telling us about his life) was the best thing to do.”

Like many survivors, Michael Kurzer didn’t want to burden his children with his difficult, sad past.

“He kept all his papers, prisoner records, family photographs, pictures after the war,” Ann said. One picture showed Michael in his striped prison uniform, which he did not keep.

A rare book from Michael Kurzer’s collection

A series of books in the box was from the displaced persons’ camp that Michael was in after the war. The quarterly series was titled The Last Extermination.

“We don’t have all the books, just four,” Ann said. “Only the cover was in English, the rest was in Yiddish.”

One book was called The Ruins of Lithuania 1941-1945. It documented what happened to every town and village.

After several tries at reaching the right person at the Holocaust Museum in D.C., Ann found someone who said the museum was very much interested in the items.

When Evan went to the Holocaust Museum with his class, he presented Curator Steven Luckert with the items they wanted. His classmates looked on as he gave the precious artifacts to Luckert.

“I presented them on behalf of our family: my grandfather and great-grandfather,” Evan said. Charlie Kurzer, his great-grandfather, also survived the war and lived in Dayton until his death.

A mature young man, Evan said he found the Holocaust Museum to be “a very special museum and memorial. It was hard, as I wanted to take my time there. It was hard to consider my grandfather going through all that.”

“The museum was a lifetime experience. I got to look up my grandparents and great-grandparents in the archives.”

Ann said she found it difficult to learn the details of her father’s life now, when she and her brother are in their 40s.

Michael Kurzer was born in Utena, Lithuania in August 1928. He attended eighth grade before World War II started. Michael’s father was one of five sons. Ann was named after her grandmother, Chana, who was killed in the Holocaust. Evan’s brother, Michael (17), is named after their grandfather.

Ann does know one story of her father’s survival from her mother, Fern.

When the Germans knew they were losing the war, Mike — along with many other inmates of Dachau — was taken on a death march. Finally he sat down and said to himself,  “I’ve had enough.” A German soldier came and pointed a gun at his head and fired. The gun jammed. The soldier grabbed him, threw him forward and said, “Start walking.”

After the war, when he was in Germany, Michael drove in a motor pool for U.S. soldiers. He came to the United States in October 1949 on the ship USS Gen. Harry Taylor.

Ann believes that if her father could have spoken of his experiences after the war, perhaps he might have lived longer. Growing up in a survivor’s home, Ann said, “you had to do your best. There were very hard standards. In the household we were in, going to college was not even up for discussion. It wasn’t if you were going, but where.”

An Ohio State University graduate, Ann is an optometrist. Her brother, Joe, graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in art and architecture and became a graphic designer. He is now in higher management with Victoria’s Secret as an event coordinator.

“I didn’t really know him,” Ann said of her father. “He never talked (about his past). He was very much an introvert, shy, kept to himself, very quiet. Especially after he lost his father in 1964, he realized everybody was gone. This greatly affected him and he enclosed in a shell.”

Ann believes he refused to open himself up to hurt. She plans to make a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington with her brother and present the last of his things, which includes a small metal dog-tag type badge. It is red and blue and has a Jewish star and the word ‘Dachau’ and a number.

“I knew it should be in a much better place,” Ann said of the box’s contents. “His legacy can now be shared with the world.”