Holocaust survivor's harrowing story of survival still hits home
Rumson resident Claire Boren is a treasure for Chhange, the Brookdale-based center for genocide education. It turns 40 next month.
Claire Boren remembers the two houses. One was a run-down farmhouse. The other looked considerably nicer, its occupants certainly wealthier.
Her mother had to knock on one of the doors. It was a life-and-death decision.
“She decided to take a chance on the poor place,” Boren recalls.
This was in Mizocz, Poland during World War II. Boren was four years old, but the moment is seared into her memory. Her Jewish village had been annihilated by the Nazis — men, women and children executed en masse in a ravine. Claire and her mother Anne were on the run.
A knock on the wrong door could get them turned in. Her mother’s intuition proved correct; the folks in the farmhouse took them in.
“They dug a hole in the barn, just long enough and wide enough for us to lie down next to each other,” Boren recalled. “They covered the hole and we were in there, totally in the dark.”
There they stayed, underneath a pigpen. They would come out only at night. The brutal arrangement lasted “a few months,” Boren said, before they moved to another hiding spot. Decades later, after she took up art, the Rumson resident painted a depiction of her time in the hole.
“I never displayed it at my house,” she said. “I never wanted to look at it.”
Today it hangs in an exhibit at Chhange, the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights & Genocide Education located at Brookdale Community College. Chhange is marking its 40th anniversary in May, and its mission never has been more important.
Claire Boren, now 80, would know.
“What made it possible for me to survive was I was always with my mother — I never let go of her,” she said. “Now you read about the U.S. government separating mothers and children (at the Mexican border). Oh, how that hits home for me. I can’t imagine a child ripped away from their mother.”
It’s a point she’ll make to students who see her artwork.
“I don’t want to just tell a terrible story,” she said. “I want them to take this and learn something from it. Something about justice.”
Escaping the Nazis
Boren and her mother fled the infamous Mizocz Ghetto just in time. Her father, who had arranged for them to go into hiding, stayed behind. They never saw him again.
Throughout 18 months evading the Nazis, Claire and Anne bounced from place to place. At one point they hid in the woods with other refugees and narrowly escaped another group execution there. Tired of wandering, Anne made a daring decision to sneak back into their former home to retrieve a stash of money and jewels. It was the only time she left Claire’s side.
The panic of that brief separation, punctuated by the sound of artillery detonating in the area, remains fresh in Claire’s mind.
“I remember being terrified,” she said. “What would I do if she didn’t come back?”
Anne did come back, and the cache she retrieved bankrolled their best and final refuge — in the attic of a family who hid them for the duration of the war. Eventually they migrated to a displaced persons camp in Germany.
“It had wire fencing around it and I loved it,” Boren said. “We were totally safe and I had bicycle. I was eight years old and I had never had a toy for years.”
Eventually Claire and her mom relocated to New York. In a symbolic break from her traumatic past, Claire cut off her braids because American kids didn’t have them.
“I think of all the different people that were really kind to me; one of them was this teacher in Queens,” she said. “I didn’t speak English, but during my lunch period she would sit with me and teach me.”
Boren attended college, got married and became a mother of two. The Holocaust remained buried in her mind's recesses.
“Just like I cut off the braids, I didn’t want to talk about my past,” she said. “I just wanted to put it behind me.”
Opening the floodgates
Two things ended Boren’s silence. The first was art. One day, several years ago, she created an image with some paint and a couple of household items. She didn’t know what it was at first.
Then it hit her.
“I realized it was the public hanging,” she said.
The hanging was an execution of Jewish men she had witnessed in Mizocz.
“It opened up the floodgates for me,” she said. “This is how I sort of found my memory. Once I found it, I dealt with the horror by working with it.”
Ten years ago she connected with Chhange and began speaking at schools on the center’s behalf. Now she serves as a member of its board and a docent at the genocide exhibit.
“It’s all about the human story,” Chhange executive director Dale Daniels said. “To give facts and statistics alone is meaningless. When you connect with a survivor, then you really understand. That’s the whole premise behind the educational work we do here.”
The exhibit, “Journeys Beyond Genocide: The Human Experience," examines how survivors rebuilt their lives.
Consolee Nishimwe is one of them. She was 14 when ethnic cleansing in her native Rwanda wiped out 800,000 people. After coming to the U.S., she met Boren through Chhange. It was an important step in her recovery.
“One thing she told me that I’ll always remember: appreciate the small things in life to really feel joy every day,” Nishimwe said. “It was an important reminder on how to live. I look at her as one of my aunts that I don’t have anymore.”
Boren is at her best with students, either during her visits to schools or their visits to Chhange.
“Meeting Claire is such a big deal for students,” said Jennifer Brown, a teacher at Forrestdale School in Rumson. “It’s a way to cap the lesson (on the Holocaust) with a real person standing there in front of them. It really connects with them.”
It’s not just a lecture. When Brown took her seventh-grade students to Chhange, she was struck by their interactions with Boren. As one of the students viewed her painting of the hole in the barn, he made an observation.
“He saw light,” Brown said.
Boren herself never even noticed, but sure enough, there are streaks of light colors amid the darkness.
Exchanges like that keep this Holocaust survivor motivated to tell her story.
“We have to speak,” she said. “There aren’t too many of us left.”