Nessa Ben-Asher survived as a teenager in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II struggling against a constant feeling of fear.
Those emotions returned when Ben-Asher spoke to upper class students at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Williston Park last Friday of her war time experiences.
But, she said, she was happy she had the opportunity to share her experiences with the students.
“It was for me wonderful talking to children who were my age when I was in Warsaw,” she said. “You lived with fear all the time. No one in America knows what this fear was.”
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Ben-Asher – then Sylvia Tylbor – was 15 years old.
Within months of the Nazis arrival in Warsaw, she witnessed he uncle, Staniswov Kon, hung by a group of Nazi mercenaries with other members of his chess club, according to an account written in 2002 by her grandson, Michael Ben-Asher, based on what she told him.
By 1940, her family had abandoned their opulent home in Warsaw and were crowded into the Warsaw Ghetto with 400,000 other Jews. Most of her family didn’t survive the war, but Sylvia and her father, David, did.
The occasion of her visit to Solomon Schechter was the anniversary of Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass on Nov. 9, 1938 – when windows of Jewish shop fronts throughout Germany were shattered and Jews were killed and taken to concentration camps.
Stephen Schwartz, principal of SWS Architects in Livingston, N.J. oversaw the construction of a model of the Warsaw Ghetto from Lego pieces by Schechter middle school students in the school gym. Schwartz had enlisted Ben-Asher, who lives near Schwartz in Short Hills, N.J., for the presentation at Solomon Schechter.
He led Ben-Asher on a guided tour of the miniaturized ghetto during the presentation, evoking memories for her as he told the students the history of the ghetto. The virtual tour supplemented lessons the students received in their classes during the preceding week.
“It makes it very real for them. People understand things when they see a three-dimensional model,” said Schwartz, who has been bringing his Warsaw Ghetto model to Jewish schools for the past several years.
The students surprised Ben-Asher, who recently turned 90, with a bouquet of flowers and a birthday cake. They sang a spirited rendition of “Happy Birthday” and many of them thanked her for her visit.
Ofrah Hiltzik, principal of the Schechter upper school, said all the school’s students will write essays this week reflecting on the experience of hearing Ben-Asher’s story and learning about the Warsaw Ghetto.
While they were in the ghetto Ben-Asher and her sister Lilli were shocked by the sight of bodies piling up in streets. Her family refused to believe the stories circulating about concentration camps, according to her grandson’s account.
One day the Nazis summoned people living on their block into the street, lined them up, and shot every third or fourth person in the line. A Nazi officer grabbed an infant by the legs from the arms of its mother and swung its head into a street corner, killing it instantly.
Sylvia stumbled back into her family’s apartment, remembering what her mother, Felisia, had always told her about behaving because God is watching. She screamed, “You will not tell me about God anymore!” And her mother said she would not.
After returning from a walk after dinner one night in 1942, Ben-Asher and her father returned to learn the Nazis had removed everyone on their block, including her mother and sister. She never saw them again, and it was presumed they were taken to the Treblinka death camp.
In despair at age 17, she decided to get herself shot, her grandson recounts, by trying to leave the ghetto.
As she walked through the ghetto exit, the Nazi guards were either distracted or assumed her to be part of a Jewish work party that had left a few minutes earlier.
She found one her father’s old business partners, a gentile man who gave her money and false papers identifying her as his Polish Catholic niece.
Eventually she snuck back into the ghetto and managed to smuggle her father out with another work party. Over the next two years, she said she helped rescue more than 100 people.
She said worked with the Home Army, the Polish resistance, and convinced priests to give her birth certificates of deceased Catholics for Jews to use. The Home Guard found them homes of those called “righteous gentiles” to conceal them.
“I wasn’t brave. I was young and an idiot,” she said. “Everything is luck. Nothing more.”
She said she also set up a false wall in an apartment to conceal her father and 11 other men.
“They had to stand like sardines,” she said.
She said she would buy small quantities of food at a number of different stores every day to avoid suspicion.
Sylvia and her father left the ghetto when the Home Army staged the Polish Revolt in 1943. They were separated and Ben-Asher was on a line with other Jews lined up for transport to a death camp. But she said she managed to escape again, eventually finding a farmhouse where she was sheltered in a barn with cows, pigs and horses.
When Russian tanks arrived, driving the Germans from the area, she said she ran out to greet them and asked for a ride to Warsaw, despite the obvious danger. Laughing at her, they took her to Warsaw, where she eventually found her father.
“I thought they might rape me,” she said.
Ben-Asher left Poland for Romania, where she met her first husband, Shimon Zakrewski, a former resistance fighter. They returned to Warsaw and, an aspiring actress in her younger years, she pursued a 25-year career on the European stage.
“I was fortunate with my life,” she said.
After her husband died, she and her son, Olek, moved to the U.S. in 1967. She met and married her second husband, Jerry Ben-Asher, in 1972 and they lived in Short Hills, N.J.
Ben-Asher gave her nickname, Nessa, the Hebrew word for “miracle.”
Today, Ben-Asher said she spends time with her eight grandchildren, plays bridge with friends and goes to the theater in New York.
