A survivor's tale

First of two parts.

April 27 marked Holocaust Remembrance Day in the U.S., as synagogues across the country held services honoring the six million Jews who were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime during World War II.

The East Meadow Jewish Center hosted its own Yom HaShoah service last Sunday. The synagogue has a number of Holocaust survivors, including Alex Konstantyn, who spent years as a refugee in his own country with his family, roaming the Polish countryside while evading Nazi persecution, and Ruth Mermelstein, a native Romanian who spent time in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

The Herald recently sat down with Konstantyn and Mermelstein, who told their stories of survival.

Leaving home

It was 1941 when the evil of the Nazi regime touched Konstantyn’s family. Now 76 years old, he was 3 when he fled his home in Varenz, Poland. The East Meadow resident of more than 30 years said he recalls much of his journey, some moments better than others, and the rest was passed down to him years later by his mother, who went by the Jewish name Hannah and was in her mid-20s when her family left home.
   
German troops were en route to the Soviet Union, moving northeast into Poland. Though Konstantyn’s small, predominantly Jewish village remained untouched, Jewish refugees wandered through, “scared and hungry,” he recalled, sharing horrifying stories. They said that the German police, known as the SS — short for Schutzstaffel — were rounding up Jews and loading them on trucks. “And they disappeared,” Konstantyn said.