To Live

The University hosted the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center's annual Sala Kryszek event in May -- honoring survivors of the Holocaust, the schoolchildren who annually contribute essays and artwork to the Center, and the late Sala herself, who survived Auschwitz and saved her three sisters. We asked the remarkable László Bencze to photograph the faces of the men and women there who survived what the world's Jews call simply Shoah -- Catastrophe.

Pictured here are Eva and Les Agnier (top), Jacob and Chella Kryszek (middle), Al Lewin (bottom left), and Miriam Greenstein (bottom right). Eva Agnier was separated from her family when she was seven, and she and her sister survived in the Budapest ghetto. Les Agnier was 15 when he and his family were sent to Auschwitz in 1944; he was liberated by the Allies from Dachau. Jacob Kryszek spent the war in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Birkenau; when he was freed from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945, he learned that he had lost three brothers and three sisters to the Nazis. His wife Chella Kryszek hid in Holland for 18 months with her sister before being betrayed; the sisters spent the war in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and weighed 70 pounds each when freed by the Russians in 1945. Miriam Greenstein was sent as a slave laborer to the Lodz ghetto at age nine, and then survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. When she was freed, at age 15, she had one unmurdered relative in the world: her uncle in Oregon, to whom she found her way across one ocean and two continents. Al Lewin, born in Poland, survived five years in camps (among them Auschwitz), and has been instrumental in advancing the Oregon Holocaust Memorial, which will be dedicated in the spring of 2004.

-- Marc Covert '93