Someone, something to be thankful for
By Richard Robbins
In his recent book “Long Journey Home,” a largely loving tribute to his hometown, Jim Burger mentions an incident that took place during his youth at his family’s place of worship – The Tree of Life Synagogue in Uniontown.
It seems the tent erected at the synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holiday Sukkot had been ripped down and torn to shreds by vandals.
“It was a horrible scene,” Jim writes.
By the time he and his mother arrived at the synagogue, however, the nuns of nearby St. John’s Roman Catholic church were busy with needle and thread attempting to repair the damage.
“I saw the best and worst that Uniontown had to offer in that moment” Jim Burger notes.
Elsewhere in “Long Journey Home,” Jim recounts his family’s experience in the Holocaust, the mass exterminations undertaken by Nazi Germany during World War II. Six million Jews were executed by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler.
Jim’s paternal grandparents, Adolph and Karoline Pollak, and their daughter, Jim’s great aunt Elsa, died at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. A handful of other relatives were also slaughtered by the Nazis.
Another of Jim’s great aunts, Hilda, hid from the Nazi for 18 months before her capture. Hilda was sent to the slave labor concentration camps Sered and Theresienstadt. Liberated by the Russians toward the end of the war, she eventually came to the United States.
Jim’s book contains a black and white photograph of Hilda sitting alongside her sister Elsie (Jim’s grandmother) and his mother Lisa Burger in 1990. All three, flashing broad smiles, gave no hint of the troubles they saw and experienced.
According to Jim, Hilda, a robust, athletic youth, never fully regained her health following the ordeals of the camps.
Lisa Burger and her mother shared a unique Holocaust-era story.
It was Thanksgiving Day 87 years ago that Lisa arrived in the United States from Austria. She was 14 years old, a pretty girl with braided pigtails, hopeful but frightened, too, of this fresh start in a new land. She recalled her ship approaching New York City and all on board rushing to gaze at the Statue of Liberty, the very symbol of liberty for generations of refugees to this country.
Elsie arrived on New Year’s Eve. In the tumult of Times Square, Lisa and Elsie, along with Elsie’s brother Oscar and his family from Hartford, Conn., made their way to a restaurant where they ate American flapjacks
Elsie and Lisa moved to Uniontown, where another of Elsie’s brothers lived.
Mother and daughter escaped from Vienna in the nick of time. Already darkened by the Nazi stain in 1938, things would become infinitely grimmer in Austria and throughout Europe in short order. The Nazis eventually set their diabolical sights on wiping out all Jews on the continent.
As a senior at Uniontown High School in the early 1940s, as World War II raged on, Lisa wrote an essay in which she declared, “Today we are trying to keep the flame of liberty burning, trying to preserve the spirit our ancestors, the ideals of our pioneers … to keep the torch held high in the hand of the Lady in the Harbor….”
The Americanization of Lisa was swift, a mere four years from the time she left her fraught homeland for this country.
Decades later, Lenny Burger, speaking to a reporter, said of his wife, “She doesn’t take freedom for granted.”
In “Long Journey Home,” Jim Burger writes that “I think [my mother] lived a fairly happy life punctuated by episodes of remarkable heartache.”
Lisa Burger was a wondrous woman. I spoke with her and her mother many years ago. Their recollections of Austria under the Nazis and their safe arrival in the United States in 1938 were vivid; the act of retelling seemed to transport them both back in time.
One chillingly sad recollection involved a rosy-cheeked, chubby-faced cherub named Otto Kaltenhuber, Lisa’s young playmate in Vienna. He would be killed in the war, a German soldier sacrificed on the altar of hate.
Lisa Burger’s love of the United States and her courage are illustrative of some larger truth about this country and its standing, then and now; her example is a thing to be recalled and to be thankful for on Thanksgiving Day 2025.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.