Holocaust survivor’s story is living history

• Reprints

Updated: December 7, 2011 8:26AM

Beatrice “Trixie” Muchman tells her life story whenever she can, wherever she is invited.

As a Holocaust survivor, she sees it as her responsibility to those left behind.

It is a responsibility she feels more urgently with each passing year, knowing at age 78 that time is running out for the last generation of eyewitnesses to one of history’s darkest hours.

“Anyone who calls me, I’m there,” she said. “I don’t turn anyone down.”

Muchman knows there’s something about having a Holocaust survivor right there in front of you sharing their story that makes it real in a flesh-and-blood way no textbook or museum display can match.

Not all survivors can tell their stories.

“Some people simply cannot talk about this part of their lives,” said Muchman, a Gold Coast resident who once felt that way, too.

It wasn’t until later in life when an adult son died in an auto accident with a drunken driver that Muchman went down a path of self-rediscovery about her own experiences.

That resulted in a 1997 book, Never to Be Forgotten: A Young Girl’s Holocaust Memoir, based in large part on her childhood journal and wartime correspondence between her family members.

Ever since, the retired language teacher has been visiting Chicago area classrooms to talk to students, finding that many of them know little if anything about Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews during World War II.

Muchman is one of the so-called “hidden children” whose parents made the gut-wrenching choice to trust her to the custody of strangers to protect her identity — thus saving her from the Nazi death camps.

Born in Berlin in 1933, Muchman was 5 years old when the violent anti-Jewish pogroms of Kristallnacht sent her family fleeing to Belgium.

When Hitler invaded Belgium, her parents took the next step, entrusting her to the care of two Catholic sisters in the Belgian countryside while telling Muchman she was going to summer camp.

Muchman’s name was changed to Duchet, and she devoted herself so thoroughly to Catholicism that by war’s end her goal was to become a Carmelite nun — “of a non-speaking order,” she always adds with a laugh. The parish priest had to talk her out of it, though a photo from her first communion remains one of her prized possessions.

In many ways, Muchman’s story is most remarkable for the goodness of those who protected her — an entire village that helped keep her secret at great risk to themselves.

But Muchman never saw her parents again after being sent to the countryside. She can’t even remember telling her mother goodbye. A young girl’s confusion about the circumstances that led to their decision left her feeling abandoned for years.

She would learn her father had been killed trying to escape while being transported to Auschwitz, where her mother also was murdered. The discovery decades later of the family letters helped her understand for the first time the full measure of their sacrifice for her.

Muchman is expected to be among 100 Holocaust survivors on hand Monday for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum annual fund-raising luncheon at the Sheraton Chicago.

Jill Weinberg, the museum’s Midwest Regional director, is only too aware of the dwindling resource of the eyewitnesses.

“What happens next? There’s a lot of concern about that,” Weinberg said.

Still, by telling their stories, Weinberg believes Muchman and her fellow survivors have empowered others to share these accounts with future generations.

Next Generation is actually the name of a museum program enlisting younger people — not necessarily family members of survivors or even Jewish — to carry on with the work, Weinberg said.

As someone who has had the honor of writing about several Holocaust survivors over the years, I can attest that meeting these individuals has brought home to me this period in history in a way I had never fully appreciated.

For any Holocaust survivors out there who have never told their own story, keep in mind I’m always looking for more.