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A Vow Fulfilled
The Fran Laufer Story: Memories and MiraclesFran Laufer
A Vow Fulfilled
Read this remarkable book and wonder at the bravery, the tenacity, and God's ever-present guiding hand that have carried Fran Laufer through the darkest periods of history - and of her life. From Bergen-Belsen, to forging a new life in a strange land, to spearheading a successful business as an international art collector and becoming a major philanthropist, Fran Laufer's story is a story of a young woman's dreams - and a vow fulfilled.
Book Excerpt from A Vow Fulfilled
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A Vow Fulfilled:
The
remarkable story of Fran Laufer celebrating her bravery, tenacity,
& G-d's guiding hand that carried her through the Jewish
Holocaust and enabled her to build an outstanding legacy of Jewish
philanthropy & continuity.
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For two years, Shimon managed to survive the horrors of Auschwitz, and then, in March 1945, he was sent back to Buchenwald — on a death march. Luckily, Shimon had a pair of shoes and had somehow fashioned a backpack for himself.
They walked all day under German guard, and heard people speaking other languages, including English. There were rumors that the Americans were coming, but that didn’t mean much to Shimon, because he knew nothing about America at that time. He just kept marching until one day he’d had enough and ran from the line to a nearby house, where he hid in a cellar. There, he found a jacket and some slippers and put them on.
He sat in that place for a few hours as the march continued without him. But then the lady of the house came down to the cellar for some coal and found him. She demanded to know what he was doing there. He didn’t know what to do, so he ran out of the house and back to the road, but everyone was gone. A few minutes later he saw a Polish man who wore prisoner clothing working nearby. Shimon told him that he’d just escaped from the march and didn’t know what to do. The man advised Shimon to hide in a nearby bunkhouse and wait there and he would bring him some food. He also told Shimon to be patient — the Americans would be arriving in a day or two.
Shimon spent the night in the bunkhouse, and when he woke up that morning he discovered that indeed the Americans were already there. When he saw German soldiers running for their lives, he went into a German apartment and told the woman there that he had escaped from a concentration camp. When she asked him what he wanted to eat, he asked for french fries. They spent hours talking and then it was time to get some sleep. She gave him a bed, but he woke up hungry in the middle of the night and ate two jars of fruit that he found in the kitchen. In the morning, he began vomiting. The woman took him to a hospital, where they discovered that he weighed just 60 kilos (132 pounds).
Shimon did not remember much about those first days in the hospital, because he had typhus and was unconscious most of the time. He was kept clean and fed regularly, and when he finally awoke the nurses and doctors, told him that he had a friend there who was also a patient, another survivor. Shimon went to find him, and though he didn’t know the man he introduced himself. The man was incapable of feeding himself, and so Shimon helped the man by feeding him.
Once Shimon knew the war was really over, he began looking for family members who might have survived. He knew one sister was living in Israel and then he heard that his uncle, Berl Laufer, was in Bergen-Belsen, a former concentration camp that had now been turned into a Displaced Person’s camp. Uncle Berl worked there with the Central Committee of the survivors that was headed by a certain Yosele Rosensaft. And so, still dressed in his concentration camp uniform, Shimon arrived in Celle and found his uncle in the nearby camp.
It wasn’t long before Shimon took notice of me. I told him I was from Chrzanow and that I was the only survivor from my family. Though I hadn’t known him at the time, Berl Laufer had lived next door to us on Rynek 7 Street. He told Shimon not to let me go because I came from a prestigious family he knew well. He then vouched for me and said it would be an appropriate match.
When Shimon asked me to marry him, I said no. I told him, “Go get yourself a pretty girl. I’m sick and I don’t know how to cook. I have a spot on my lung. I’m really not ready to get married.”
He said, “You’re going to say yes.” He told me that his uncle had said not to let me go. Shimon told me, “In honor of that you’re going to say yes, you’re going to get well. And you will be my wife; you will be my queen.”
My cousin Aciek was in favor of the match, though I was still reluctant. I didn’t feel I was ready for marriage.
Moreover, I didn’t think I should impose myself on Shimon. I was still recuperating from typhus, and I also feared that I had contracted tuberculosis and had a spot on my lungs. With all of these tsuris (troubles), I didn’t want to be a drain on such a good man. Naively, I also still had my dreams of marrying into a higher class of social circumstance. It had been my lifelong goal to marry a rabbi or a doctor, a professional man.
After Shimon proposed, Aciek said that my fantasies of landing a medical doctor or a learned rabbi were just that, fantasies, and that I should wake up and see that this man who was asking me to be his wife was a wonderful man who would take good care of me.
In the meantime, people who knew Shimon were shocked to find that after Montelupich, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald he was still alive. Many girls wanted to marry him, but Shimon only paid attention to me. Noticing how frail I was, he decided that if he wasn’t a doctor at least he was going to doctor me.
Since I was constantly coughing and running a temperature, Shimon started bringing me food. Soon I had on my menu butter, sugar, eggs, and other foods he got from his uncle from the Central Committee of the Bergen-Belsen Survivors. And every few days he would put me on a scale. We were both convinced I had tuberculosis, but I was determined to get better. He would constantly tell me that if I married him he would be my mother, father, sister, and brother all rolled into one, that he would always care for me and make sure I would get well.
In addition to being my doctor, Shimon also decided to become my couturier. Since the Central Committee had a supply of used men’s suits, Simon one day asked his uncle if he could get two suits for me and one for himself. Because of the urgent need for suits for all the DP’s, his uncle could only let us have one suit apiece. Nevertheless, Shimon gave my suit to a tailor and had it turned into a smartly-tailored women’s suit.
Shimon kept showering me with gifts and attention. Was love growing for him? Since he was the first boy I had ever dated, I didn’t know if I loved him or not. I thought he was unusually good-natured, and a man that was smart and who knew how to handle himself in any situation…financially and otherwise. I remembered wishing that I had known him during the war, because it was clear he was extremely resourceful and I never would have gone hungry if he had been with me.
Over the next few weeks we went for walks and found out more about each other. We talked about our lives, the war, our parents, our siblings. Shimon grew to love me more and more. One time, when he came to visit, I wasn’t home because I had gone to see someone from Chrzanow who had just arrived in Celle. I found out later that Shimon was so sick with worry, jealousy, and anxiety that he actually ran a fever that day.
When I heard about his condition, I went to see him and discovered he was indeed running a fever. He asked me where I had gone and I told him I had gone to see some old friends from my hometown. He was very relieved and, amazingly, the fever quickly abated.
I think it’s important to understand how religiously observant we were during the war. Under the Nazis, we ate whatever we were given and worked whenever we were told to work. There was no such thing as Shabbos and yom tov, and sometimes those days were marked by the Germans with new tortures, pogroms, extra killings, and extra work. Once we were liberated, however, those of us who came from Orthodox homes tried again to be observant.
As soon as we were liberated, we began keeping Shabbos and tried to make sure that everything we ate was kosher. In those days there were no kosher supervision services or kosher supermarkets. You trusted your local Jewish butcher or you didn’t eat meat. If you wanted kosher chicken, you bought a live one and then brought it to someone you could trust to kill it correctly, a shochet with a good reputation. Then you had to clean it, soak it and salt it yourself.
It took Shimon about a month to convince me to marry him. Initially, I was reticent; I was a young girl still in shock from the effects of the war. What did I know from men? Was I truly ready to marry? But the more Shimon and I spent time together, the more I realized that I would never find anyone who cared more about me than he did. He was truly a wonderful man. And so, in the middle of July 1945, we began making plans for a wedding.
We went looking for a place to live and found a small apartment in Celle, Zellnerstrasse 29, on the main street. Aciek and Goldzia promised to do all the cooking for the wedding. Simon, by then, had started earning money on the black market and went to Hamburg, where they had a real shochet, to order meat for the wedding. I borrowed a gown and veil from a local German woman by giving her cigarettes. More than 300 Bais Yaakov girls who were in Celle came to our wedding, and one of the girls lent me a pair of white gloves. The girls also gave us a wedding gift of a little silver fork. On October 15, the first wedding since the liberation of Bergen- Belsen took place. The rabbi from the Celle synagogue, Rabbi Israel Moshe Olewski, was our mesader kiddushin. Uncle Berl Laufer also attended.
As we stood under the chupah, Shimon asked me, “Should we go on and be religious? Can we go on and be religious after this? After all, look at what has happened to us.” I told Shimon that we had to be Torah observant, religious Jews. I believed that my mother and my father, had they lived, would have wished that we follow in the same footsteps as our parents and grandparents. Though during the war we’d had to do many things to survive, our ultimate survival would have to be in the embrace of observant Judaism. And thus our sacred covenant to each other — and to G-d — was made.