When Andrea Bolender first entered the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, her first thoughts were of her father, Benek Bolender, a survivor of Auschwitz who had died several years before.
“He had passed before I came here in 1999, and my mother passed a few months later in 2000,” Bolender said in a recent interview. “At the time, I had three kids under the age of 7, and I owned a chain of supermarkets. But I was missing that connection, that link.”
“I couldn’t conjure up his voice anymore,” she added.
In 2005, she came across a newspaper advertisement for the Glen Head center, asking for volunteers. In her words, “it opened up a whole new door for me.”
“I realized if I came here that I would find a whole new set of survivors, and I did, I met dozens of new ones,” she said. “And they embraced me right away, and that’s how it’s been ever since.”
Fifteen years later, Bolender would be named the center’s chairperson, succeeding Steve Markowitz, who had held the position for eight years. With the announcement of her appointment in September, Bolender became the first child of a Holocaust survivor to lead the center.
A Glen Head resident who grew up in Roslyn, Bolender said her father almost never discussed his experiences with his children.
“I know that I was not the repository of a lot of the memory,” Bolender said. “We as his children tended not to ask the questions that we knew would be a very emotional thing to ask. Watching your parents cry is something you tend to want to avoid … A lot of what I learned I actually learned after he passed away. I learned from his friends, I learned from his cousins. And I actually found his testimony, it was found written in Hebrew and Yiddish, and I actually paid to have it translated.”
Bolender said that “around 1960,” her father gave written testimony about his experiences. A native of the Czyzewo area in Poland, Benek Bolender was 13 when the Nazis bombed the town in 1939, and for the next several years witnessed horrors, death and destruction before being liberated by the Russians.
With his father, mother, brothers, sister, uncles, aunt and cousins killed in the camps or on death marches, Benek was the only member of his family to survive.
After emigrating to the United States in 1948, Benek worked to provide for his wife and four children. Bolender rarely heard stories as she grew up, but the ones that she did hear were striking.
“My father told me stories that during Christmas and Easter, they couldn’t leave the house, because that was the time the town’s people would throw rocks at them and accuse them of being a Christ killer,” Bolender said. “And that was back in the early 30s, so this didn’t start with the Holocaust. There was fertile ground, obviously, for anti-Semitism.”
Quoting Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps, Bolender adds that anti-Semitism did not die with the Holocaust.
“It took a little break, with the embarrassments perhaps of countries, but individuals are the ones who breed anti-Semitism, and we didn’t eliminate those individuals or those feelings of individuals,” Bolender said. “Many in Poland will still say, you know, Hitler didn’t get enough of them, or we still exist, so he was a failure. So we know that anti-Semitism still exists … I think in general, the world has fertile ground for it. The fact that we see it in New York, which has more Jews than any other city except for Israel, is a very disturbing fact.”
In a world where the anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy abounds in the underground and community institutions like Port Washington’s Police Athletic League clubhouse and the center itself are defaced with swastika graffiti, Bolender said that education is the strongest defense.
“A long time ago, one of our founding survivors said to me, they had weapons of mass destruction, we have weapons of mass instruction, and that always resonated with me,” Bolender said. “Education is always the very strongest point. But it can’t just be with the children. I feel it should be intergenerational, because all kids are born innocent. Nazi children were not born wearing brown shirts … I think the biggest problem is that we have to get to the individuals and find out why these tropes exist.”
Those who spray-paint swastikas most likely aren’t aware of the meaning behind the symbol, she says.
“They know that it’s a symbol of hate, they know that it’s a symbol of attention,” Bolender said “[But] do they necessarily know its history, and why? Probably not. New York is one of only 15 states in this country, 80 years later, that mandates teaching of the Holocaust. What they don’t mandate is the curriculum. So there are teachers who will spend one day on it and if that child is absent, they don’t learn it. Some teachers will spend two weeks on it. So really depends on the commitment of the teacher. There’s no standard in schools.”
It was this spirit that prompted the center to support the Never Again Education Act, which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in January, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove). Bolender also said that thousands of schools send their students to the center for field trips, where representatives will discuss both the horrors faced by the victims and the heroes who helped to save their neighbors. The students are then encouraged to be “upstanders” instead of bystanders.
“These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” Bolender said. “So those were really extraordinary people and we’d like to think that we can raise some extraordinary people. It’s not going to be every child, but all you need is a few extraordinary people to lead the way.”
In addition to students, the center works with institutions like the Nassau County Police Department and the Northwell Health system to educate employees on acceptance.
“People are dealing with people who are sick, who are don’t speak the language, who are marginalized, who are minorities, who maybe have been emotionally beaten down, and they have to understand that dealing with those people is something they need to learn from a tolerance point of view as well,” she said.
Twelve years ago, Bolender founded and continues to run a 2G group, holding discussions for second-generation survivors like herself, with over 400 members on its email roster, and members appearing over Zoom to talk in recent months.
“We act as a support group and event group,” Bolender said. “Sometimes it’s social action. Sometimes it’s just to talk about growing up as a child of a survivor, and to share things with parents at that point, who were passing their issues with memory and sharing agencies that might create a support system for them. So the 2G group has evolved over the years because of the age of the children of survivors. Most of the parents have passed, and now it’s a lot more about memories, support and how to get our children involved.”
She is also working to coordinate a 3G group for third-generation survivors in the area, and said that most survivors who did not share their stories with their children instead brought them to their grandchildren.
“The grandchildren got the best of it because their grandparents were then retired, and they got a lot of the stories from asking, ‘Grandpa, what were you doing when you were 10 years old?'” Bolender said. “And facing their mortality, they were much more open. I think the grandchildren really have so many stories to tell even more than I do.”
Additionally, Bolender annually takes part and leads groups in the International March of the Living, in which thousands of Jewish teens, adults and survivors march three kilometers from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, in a tribute to all victims. The two-week trip then concludes by traveling to Israel for Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Israeli Independence Day. While the experience is emotional, Bolander said, there’s also a victorious feeling.
“The victory is that 15,000 Jewish children and adults are walking on grounds that Hitler swore a Jew would never survive on,” Bolander said. “So, as we walk, we kind of pound his memory deeper into the ground. And we bring back generation after generation. So it’s very victorious. It’s emotional, but it’s uplifting.”
Bolander has also brought uplifting cultural activities into the center, including Yiddish language productions and a forthcoming screening of “Deli Man,” a documentary following the careers of Ben’s Delicatessen owner Ronnie Dragoon and third-generation deli owner Ziggy Bruber, both of whom are Long Island natives.
“Judaism has always been that portable suitcase that we took from place to place to place until we had a state and it had a tradition, it had culture, language,” Bolander said. “I can go to any synagogue anywhere in the world today. And they’re praying on the same page. It’s a sense of belonging to that bigger community. Even if you don’t observe, you’re still part of that community.”
A graduate of New York University’s Stern School of Business, Bolender held management positions at JP Morgan Chase, Price Waterhouse and Skadden Arps before founding the Gourmet Glatt Emporium, a Kosher market chain, and leading the company until it was sold in 2007. Currently, she serves as CEO of the real estate investment and management firm Grove 34 Management LLC.
All told, she said, her priority in leading the center is to inspire the next generation to lead.
“I’m looking for that next person to say, ‘OK, my grandmother, my grandfather survived. So I have this beautiful life now. And now it’s my turn to give back,'” Bolender said. “That’s really my goal, to make sure that there’s a perpetuity, that my grandchildren who obviously will never meet a survivor will come here and be able to acquaint themselves because this is a family.”
In the final words of her father’s own written testimony, Bolender intends to ensure that more and more people “will remember forever.”
