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From 'Ghetto Shanghai' to L.I.

Holocaust survivor recalls war experiences for Calhoun students

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The train trip still haunts Evelyn Pike Rubin more than 75 years later. It was the winter of 1939. Pike Rubin, an only child who was 8½ at the time, was steaming from Breslau, in Nazi Germany, to Naples, Italy, where she was to board a cruise ship, the Hakusaki Maru, bound for Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

First, however, Pike Rubin, an Orthodox Jew, had to get past the Gestapo, which had positioned guards at border crossings along the train route. She said she would never forget the terrifying moment when a guard approached her mother and father as they waited pensively aboard the stopped train to cross from Austria into Italy.

“My mother told me you have to be very, very quiet, do not look up and don’t move,” recalled Pike Rubin, who is now 84.

She kept her eyes trained on the floor, and saw only the guard’s shiny black boots as he shuffled back and forth. He let the family go, the train continued on its way, and the dozens of Jewish refugees crowded aboard it erupted in applause as they passed into Italy.

The memory was among the numerous wartime experiences that Pike Rubin recounted for students in Calhoun High School’s Voices of the Past class during an hour-and-a-half-long talk on Nov. 19. She was among the roughly 18,000 European Jews who survived World War II by hiding out in Shanghai, which, despite occupation by Japanese forces, was open to war refugees from around the globe.

Bringing history to life
Taught by social studies teacher David Goldberg and English teacher Julie Rosslee, Voices of the Past is a yearlong elective that looks at history through primary-source documents and literature. Rosslee said that a visit by a Holocaust survivor such as Pike Rubin brings history to life for students. “It takes it off the page,” she said. “It makes it very real for them.”

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