Piece of the Warsaw Ghetto comes to LV

Stephen Curran

Friday, Aug. 23, 2002 | 1:49 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: August 24, 2002

More than 50 years after immigrating to the United States, Holocaust survivor Lillian Kronberg will have a chance to see the same street she walked on as a girl in Poland.

The only difference is that Kronberg and her husband, Henry, also a Holocaust survivor, will not have to travel half a world away to see the stones that used to line Chlonda Street in Warsaw. Instead, she will need only to travel from her Las Vegas home to her Summerlin synagogue.

The paving stones will be part of a permanent exhibit at Temple Beth Sholom, where 250 of the stones will be built into a wall surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden, which is scheduled to be completed by year's end, said volunteer project manager and Las Vegas gaming consultant Mark Scheiner.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is the only other place in the country to have the stones.

"If the stones could talk, they would tell you what we went through," Lillian said.

That's exactly what organizers of the all-volunteer effort are hoping the stones will help do.

The effort was started about two years ago, when Scheiner approached the Holocaust Museum after hearing about the exhibit from Irwin Goldberg, president of Temple Beth Sholom men's club.

The original agreement was for the synagogue to get the stones that wouldn't be used in the museum's display, so Scheiner was surprised when the museum agreed to give them 250 of the stones.

"When Irwin mentioned this, I thought 'Why not ask for more?' " Scheiner said.

For Lillian, the stones bring back painful memories of the year she lived in Warsaw working as a dressmaker after moving from her hometown in nearby Lublin.

Dressmaking is a skill shewould continue to use -- only not to sew clothes for the local women, but also to make uniforms for the German army.

"They needed (dressmakers) at the time," Lillian said. "That saved me some time."

The ghetto was surrounded by 10- to 12-foot walls with guarded gates on both sides. The prisoners were permitted to leave only to work.

"You couldn't get in, you couldn't get out," Henry Kronberg said.

Lillian was able to escape once by offering a guard her ring, a treasured heirloom, and some money.

"I was sitting with a friend and figured, 'If they're going to kill me anyway,' " she said.

However, her escape was short-lived. She was turned in to the Gestapo shortly thereafter and returned to her work in the ghetto.

It was while working in the ghetto that she met her future husband, who had been assigned to paint the Gestapo headquarters where she was working.

When they liquidated the Krakow Ghetto, Henry Kronberg was one of 100 chosen to work at Gestapo headquarters.

Being one of such a small number of remaining Jews was eerie, he remembers.

"All the families they sent to concentration camps or to the gas chambers," he said. "There were no Jews. They took over the whole town."

But the couple would not become close until after the war and unspeakable tragedy -- Lillian was sent to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen and Henry to Bergen-Belsen.

She spent almost two years in the camps, she said.

When the camps were liberated in 1945, the couple found each other after failed attempts to locate family members.

Both Henry and Lillian Kronberg's families were killed in concentration camps.

"I found out that there was a camp and I went to look for acquaintances," Lillian said. "We had something in common."

The couple were married a year later and came to the United States in 1947, originally moving to New Jersey to join Lillian's relatives.

They moved to Las Vegas in 1962.

The arrival of the paving stones at Temple Beth Sholom brings a reminder of Lillian's former home, which the couple last visited in 1979.

But the visit would not be a happy one. Twenty-three years after the visit, the memories still bring back emotions.

"It was terrible," she said. "What can I tell you? It was bad. I couldn't wait to leave."

Lillian also remembers the happy times during the year she spent working as a dressmaker in Warsaw, but those memories are overshadowed by the negative, she said.

But the return was something she felt she had to do.

"Before I die I wanted to see what it looked like," she said. "I had to go back to satisfy myself."

Yet, despite the negative memories, the couple are glad that future generations will have the opportunity to view a tangible piece of what they went through.

"People should know it's not just a story to tell. It was real," Henry Kronberg said. "There are people who say the Holocaust never existed, but we are living proof."

The garden is the only such memorial in the Western United States, Rabbi Felipe Goodman said.

Along with the garden an endowment has also been established to fund lectures on diversity and guest speakers -- all funded by donations, he said.

"They have given of their own time and resources," Goodman said. "It has taken on a life of its own."

Goodman came to Las Vegas from Mexico City four years ago and has watched the synagogue grow from 180 families to more than 700, he said.

Goodman also saw the congregation move into its new home on Ravenwood Drive two years ago.

For Scheiner, getting involved with the project was not something he even stopped to think about.

"It was an opportunity that presented itself," Scheiner said. "Once you make the decision to move forward, the rest is easy. You don't let things stand in your way."

Having such a memorial will help Las Vegas establish credibility as a city concerned with maintaining history, Scheiner said.

Museums have been a large part of Scheiner's life, he said, having grown up in Washington, D.C.

"I grew up where if we didn't have anything to do we would go to the Smithsonian," Scheiner said. "So it was a natural progression."

For the Kronberg's daughter Jean Freeman, the Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Garden is an acknowledgement of her family history in her hometown.

Placing the stones in an outside garden is an appropriate tribute, she said, giving visitors an opportunity to focus on the future while learning about the past.

"I think it's fitting it should be in a contemplative setting so people can sit and reflect," Freeman said.

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