Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Monday, April 28, 2014. I have been following Michele Lefler Scercy on Facebook. She has been sharing a lot of posts about being Jewish, a widow, a woman, and a student.

I met Michele first as an Alpha Phi alumnae. She helped with some “Wear Red for Women and Heart Health” campaigns sponsored by the local Alpha Phi Alumnae and the local YWCA. Sadly Michele became a widow at a very young age. Over the years Michele has kept me informed about the local Alpha Phi Alumnae chapter, but only by way of emails.

Since I retired I have reconnected with Michele on Facebook. I have learned so much more about her life. I feel like I am getting to know her better now because of Facebook than I ever did with our face to face encounters.

In person Michele seemed reserved, quiet, and shy. If asked a direct question, Michele would always be forth coming, but you had to ask the question first. On Facebook I get a sense that she has found her “voice.” Her Facebook persona comes across now as an extrovert, not an introvert.

On Facebook Michele even has a cartoon representation of herself that gives off a sense of power and being in control. I don't know if she created this character or if she found this depiction in a Facebook “cloud.” Her “avatar” like creation is forceful, in the know, and very expressive.

These “avatar” like cartoons present Michele in social and emotional quandaries which sometimes are humorous, self-deprecating, or questioning. Whatever it is or however she has accomplished it, it is definitely attention getting. I want to keep knowing and seeing more and more about her life.

Earlier I followed Michele through Passover. Recently her posts have been about the Holocaust and the upcoming Day of Remembrance. She has given me pause to think about my own knowledge of the Holocaust.

Since I was born in 1945, I am too young to remember WWII firsthand. I do, however, have some recollections related to WWII. My father, Otto Arthur Exner, Jr. grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He came from what was referred to as the “East End” which was populated by folks of German and Polish descent who were basically farmers.

My dad never had a lot to say about growing up in Fort Wayne. However, one day I was with my dad in our backyard when I was about 10-12 years old and heard some ladies standing near our back fence yelling “Junie!, Junie! I had no idea what they wanted, but they did seem to be waving at my dad. I remember poking my dad and saying “I think they are talking to you!?!” As it turns out he had been their paper boy and he was called June or Junie which was short for Junior. Strangely though the real revelation was that he was delivering their German newspaper, the “stadts abendzeitung,” not the local Journal Gazette or News Sentinel.” My dad would get his newspapers at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station because they came to town by rail. This daily German newspaper was delivered around the “East End” until 1939.

Once a year we would attend the Exner Family Reunion on the second Sunday in August which originated in 1925. Elsie Exner Linker came up with the idea of a reunion and held it at her farm. Attached is a picture from that first reunion which only my dad and grandfather attended because my grandmother and two aunts were under quarantine because of scarlet fever. (1) It is because of these reunions that I have connections to the Holocaust. Like many Germans living in the “East End” of Fort Wayne, our family had come from parts of Germany that at times came under Polish rule.

It was at these family reunions where I encountered a relative of a relative who had a number tattooed on his forearm. I was too young to be part of the discussion, but I was old enough to have noticed his arm and ask why he had it. He was from Poland and had been put in a concentration camp.

In 2007, after my father died, my sister joined my husband and myself on a trip to Germany. Our trip did include a visit to the concentration camp at Dachau. If I understood the German sign correctly, it was a memorial site preserved to remember the people who died there. When I walked around the grounds and read the inscriptions, I was reminded of that relative of a relative who had survived incarceration in a concentration camp in Poland during WWII.

(1) SOME UNUSUAL POEMS by Albert Exner, (Alex—the first two letters of my first and last names) Lutheran Home, Fort Wayne, Indiana