I knew Irma

I was a young kid when I met Irma Sonnenberg-Menkel; I was just eight. She was ninety years my senior. Irma had white hair and a hunch, she walked with a cane, and had liver spots on her face and arms. When she spoke, her voice rattled from age and pain.

My mom was with me and she was playing chaperone that afternoon, no easy task. My mother was a teacher, so they trusted her to decipher what was and what was not acceptable for us children. It was a school field trip, a “fun” summer school class that I took that was supposed to help us learn about the world. When it brought us to the Holocaust Museum, boy, did I ever.

By every measure, Irma was old. She was old when she arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1939, over forty. It’s what kept her alive, because she looked after the younger girls and kept order. A Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) guard who knew her uncle would sneak her food and placed her in charge of the barracks, knowing it would help her survive the extermination of Jewish. That’s what it was – an extermination. She’d been alive long enough to make such contacts in the country. Those contacts kept her alive. In the closing days of the war, as the allied forces moved in, that guard shot himself in the head.

The younger women weren’t as fortunate. They were often dragged off, beaten and raped by other guards, before many died from starvation or Typhus, or were sent off to the gas chambers at other locations (there were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen). Their scratch marks were permanently embedded into the metal walls, their fingers, skinned to the bone as they died. There were pictures of it. We didn’t see those pictures or that hallway at mom’s discretion. Yet there I stood, speaking to Irma, who could have told me of it all. She had survived it upon the Allied Force’s liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She weighed just 78 lbs. at the time of liberation.

She knew exactly what to say to someone my age. She danced around the truth, letting just enough of it through so as to be age-appropriate while still hammering home the point she needed to make: We cannot forget. She was a sweet woman, with a calm demeanor, and when she sat on a nearby bench to have a cookie snack, she shared them with me.

I knew Irma for two years and we were pen pals. She died from natural causes and the letters stopped around 1998. I was then just short of ten. Irma knew that I was an intelligent kid, and she knew I would remain the last of the final generation to know a Holocaust survivor. She trusted me with relevant, age-appropriate information. My job was important – important, and simple. My job was to remember her.

As I aged, every time the subject would come up in a history class, I’d blurt out proudly that I knew Irma. I’m still proud to have known her, over a quarter century later. She was an incredible woman, and an incredible teacher. Still, in those history classes, I didn’t know enough.

When I was old enough, and when the internet became formidable in providing information, I searched for her. She was drug by her hair from her home in Holland during the first night of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) on November 9th, 1938. She was separated from her husband and brother at Bergen-Belsen in 1941. They both, unfortunately, wouldn’t make it. She became an American refugee after the war, learned English, and taught the world her story.

She never had a tattoo removed from her forearm. She signed her letters “Not #######” and she lived a full life full of love.

Hell yeah I knew Irma. You should too. So today I write of a bad ass woman, a survivor, and the past. I hope it stays with you the way it stays with me, forever.

Playlist: “Sword from the Stone” by Passenger