Holocaust survivor haunted by final memory of mother
SARASOTA (AP) – Among Sara/Hannah Rigler’s final memories of her mother is one that still brings shame.
Rigler, then 16, had acquired a loaf of bread from a discreet German guard as hundreds of emaciated, dying Jewish women straggled at gunpoint through his frozen home village in December 1944. The guard said he had family who could hide her away, but her alone. Rigler refused: She could not leave her mother and sister behind.
That night, as the death marchers were ordered by the Nazis to camp in a barn, the Matuson family – what was left of them – ate small portions of bread. Sara’s mother, frostbitten and cadaverous, situated the remainder beneath her body and settled in for the night. At dawn, they discovered the bread had been stolen.
“I flew into a rage,” Rigler recalls. “I hit my mother.” The Lithuanian native pauses to compose herself. “You become an animal. That’s what happens.”
Rigler has told this story countless times, even written a book about surviving the Holocaust, and this never gets easier. That Rigler survived to tell her story is a combination of fate, chance and remarkable luck.
After the theft of their bread, Rigler’s mother – Gita Matuson – gave her daughter a diamond ring. How she managed to conceal it from the Germans, Rigler never learned. Her mother told her to exchange it for more bread at the next chance. That happened shortly thereafter, at a little town in Poland called Gross Golemkau. Rigler made a break for it. It was the last time she saw her mother and sister Hannah, whose name she appropriated as her own after the war ended.
Now living near Sarasota, Sara/Hannah Rigler, 80, removes her glasses and uses a tissue, smudging her streaked eyeliner during a recent interview.
“I got made up for this,” she says in accented English, her sixth language. She takes a sip of coffee from a red mug with white lettering: “You Are Special Today.”
Her husband, Bill, who hit the beaches at Normandy while his future wife was registered as prisoner No. 58,384 at Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, lingers in another room. Of the 110,000 Jews deported to Stutthof, 85,000 never came out.
Rigler grew up in the industrial Baltic town of Shavel, a tomboy, with scabby knees and elbows from sports and bike riding with the boys.
Rigler was away when the Soviets – who rolled through Shavel in 1940 – took her “bourgeois” father away and booked him on trumped-up charges of theft. He spent six months in a windowless cell and was acquitted in his second trial after retaining a Communist attorney.
The Matusons were forced to share their quarters with a Soviet pilot, who eventually moved his wife and their infant in as well. When the pilot fled on June 21, 1941, during Hitler’s blitzkrieg to the east, Samuel Matuson refused to follow. Recalls Rigler, “He said, ‘At least the Germans are an educated lot, but the Russians are barbarians.'”
Within a week of occupying Shavel, the Germans turned life upside down. With Lithuanians directing them to the Jews, the invaders began issuing Stars of David for identification, ordered them off the sidewalks and into the gutters, and rounded up the men. Rigler would never see her father again.
Rigler, her mother and her sister were ordered into Kavkaz, a crowded ghetto for Jews.
By the summer of 1944, the German retreat forced the relocation of its captives to Stutthof to the west. Rigler spent five days inside a boxcar, flooding her with images of filth and whips and the snapping jaws of guard dogs. It was her first encounter with the dark uniforms of SS agents. Outside the showers “we saw tons of shoes, men’s shoes and babies’ shoes.”
Rigler’s work-camp chores, sustained by thin rations of bread and watery cabbage soup, included digging trenches for the German army. But by December, the prisoners – all girls and women – were on the move again. She estimates between 900 to 1,200 prisoners began the winter march to Danzig, Poland, but when the new year began, only 300 survived.
As they trudged through Gross Golemkau in January 1945, armed with her father’s ring, Rigler slipped out of the lines and approached a Polish child. She offered the ring for a loaf of bread. The child alerted authorities, who chased her through the village. She tumbled into a trough inside a barn, where she hid until her unlikely discovery by a man named Stan Wells.
Rigler’s autobiography, “10 British Prisoners-Of-War Saved My Life,” describes how Wells and his colleagues – working the farm as POWs – went to remarkable lengths to feed and shelter her. One of them, Willy Fisher, kept a wartime diary, which Rigler reproduces in the book.
“Her eyes are large as is usual with starvation, sunken cheeks, no breasts,” Fisher wrote. “Hair has not been cut, body badly marked with sores caused by scratching lice bites. … I got my forefinger and thumb round the upper part of her arm easily.”
Rigler’s book reproduces photos of her rescuers, none of whom are alive today. She still keeps in touch with a sole surviving widow.
In the war’s chaotic aftermath, Rigler made her way to Bialystock, Poland, a gathering point for Jewish refugees. She met a Lithuanian girl who told Rigler her mother had succumbed to starvation and Hannah had died from malnourishment and typhus on the day the Stutthof death march survivors were liberated.
Rigler would emigrate to America in 1948, thanks to an arranged – and brief – marriage. She completed college, remarried in 1952, and pursued a nursing career in New York.
Rigler would immerse herself in state politics, spend six years as the Democratic Party’s leader for the 44th Assembly District, and lobby for the release of Soviet refuseniks such as Natan Sharansky.
In 1999, she and Bill, a retired New York Supreme Court Justice, returned to Lithuania and walked the streets of her native Shavel. The house of her childhood was a “shambles,” the family garden of vegetables and immense sunflowers long gone.
Only 12,000 of an estimated 300,000 Lithuanian Jews survived the war. Rigler learned that her father had been forced to dig his own grave before being shot to death. In a final irony, Samuel Matuson’s ring made it to America. But his daughter hid it away years ago, so thoroughly she has never been able to find it.
Rigler says her life in America has been so rewarding, she would change only one thing. “I would love to be wealthy,” she says. “Not because I need diamonds or clothes, but so I could do good things for people.”