David Halpern was born in France, but raised mostly in the United States. While he didn’t know much about his parents’ background, he knew that their native language was Polish and not French. He knew that World War II was a terrible time for them and their loved ones.
And over the years, little things helped him realize the fact that what his parents had seen in their home country in the 1930s and ’40s was still with them today.
“There were TV shows that showed footage from World War II, and when they showed a picture of Adolf Hitler, my mother would literally go ballistic. She would start screaming at the TV and then she would run into her bedroom, close the door, and I could hear her cry,” Halpern said. “I started to piece together that, obviously, there was some dynamic here that was very hurtful to her, to even drum up any sort of memory of what had happened.”
Halpern’s father never discussed what had happened to their family, and his mother only did so slowly over the course of many years. It wasn’t until Halpern’s father passed away that he convinced his mother to translate her old diaries from Polish to English, at which point Halpern truly understood the gravity of the horrors that his parents experienced. All of his grandparents were killed. His mother was whipped by the Gestapo. Of the 6,500 Jews in their Polish town, 34 survived the Holocaust.
Halpern’s parents were never able to fully tell their own story. Maybe that’s why their son is so committed to doing it for them.
Today, David Halpern is a part of a program that sees descendants of Holocaust survivors who have been coached in storytelling recite their ancestors’ stories from a first person point of view. As those who actually witnessed and survived the Holocaust pass away, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have taken up the mantle.
The Howard County Holocaust Remembrance Committee is one of the organizations that hosts these events, with the annual Holocaust Remembrance Memorial Service scheduled for April 13. The event will be held in collaboration with the Jewish Federation of Howard County and Teach the Shoah.
It’s not easy for the storytellers to do this, but it’s important.
“To be honest, I also find that I have to control anger [like my mother did],” Halpern said. “I have to control anger because I thoroughly understand the anger you feel from having been deprived of a family history. I have one picture of my father’s mother, I have no pictures of his father. I have no pictures of any of his other family. There’s a huge void, an absence of information, of connection.”
While Halpern experienced these dynamics firsthand while growing up with his parents, other speakers are much younger. Dylan Rauseo is a high school student at The Park School of Baltimore, and he has been working with the Howard County Holocaust Remembrance Committee and Teach the Shoah since last spring.
His great-grandmother passed away in 2021 after surviving part of her teenage years in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Rauseo created a 20-minute documentary about her story for his bar mitzvah project when he was 13, and knows her story well. The Teach the Shoah program helped him package it into something that could be presented to audiences in person.
“By taking the class, I just kind of learned how to almost rethink her story. I learned how to tell it in the first person point of view, and paint a picture of everything going on and how my great-grandmother was feeling instead of just saying what happened,” Rauseo said.
For Rauseo, the chance to work with other storytellers and practice in front of each other was supremely helpful in getting to the point where he can effectively do what he does.
For Halpern, telling these stories is not just something that he enjoys, but something he feels he has a duty to do.
“When you hear each of these miracles, it gives you a responsibility to say, ‘this is not just a story of the Jews being persecuted, it’s a story of perseverance, of an amazing will to live,’” he said. “And to prove, as is commonly said, that Hitler did not win.”
Rauseo has only presented the story for Jewish audiences thus far, but he is confident that his great-grandmother’s life will resonate with people of all backgrounds. As he gets older, he wants to continue to honor her in the best way he can.
“I would just like to continue telling her story in the best way I know how and making my entire family proud, knowing that her story is being shared for generations and generations past me,” Rauseo said.
No matter the age or background of the people who tell these stories, it’s all about the same thing, said Randy Gartner, a member of the Howard County Holocaust Remembrance Foundation’s board.
“We’re all focused on the same goal — getting the stories out there, teaching the stories so that people won’t forget,” he said. “When I listen to David, I feel like I’m listening to the person that they’re talking about. That’s not David telling the story, that’s his mother’s story.”
