Renee Siegel told the story of her mother, Helen Zelikovich and her family’s experience during the Holocaust
Very rarely can a single word bring a room of middle school students to silence and full attention. At Bunker Hill Middle School on June 6, that one word was “Holocaust.”
The students at Bunker Hill were tasked with reading “The Diary of Anne Frank,” giving them some background on World War II and the Holocaust. To accompany that, they received a unique lesson from someone whom the Holocaust affected directly. Renee Siegel presented the story of her mother, Helen Zelikovich, a Holocaust survivor. Even though Zelikovich passed away about two years ago, her story lives on through Siegel, who has a PowerPoint presentation that includes clips from an interview where she discusses her experience with the Holocaust and living as a Jew in the early 1940s.
Zelikovich grew up in the Carpathian Mountain region of Czechoslovakia, and her family lived in that area for five generations, roughly 120 years. She was the oldest of nine children with four sisters and four brothers. Siegel claimed her mother described her life as “simple and joyful.”
“Life changed dramatically when my mother was 11 years old,” Siegel said. “In her words, ‘my childhood ended.’”
This was when the Sudetenland, western Czechoslovakia, was given back to Germany. Because of that, Zelikovich’s father was called in to the Czechoslovakian army. This was the beginning of the downfall for their family.
Siegel described the downward spiral that happened, starting with outlawing Jews congregating in public places, Jews having to walk in the gutter as opposed to the sidewalk, and having to wear a golden Star of David on their chest. This led to the Zelikovich family being evicted from their house and sent to a ghetto on one day’s notice.
“By April 1944, my family, and every other Jewish family in their town, were given orders from the Nazis that they had to leave their towns and move into the local ghetto,” Siegel said. “They could only take the possessions they could carry. The family carried bedding, cooking utensils, valuables and money.”
The ghetto was a cornered off section of town comprised of private homes, community schools and other buildings. Her family lived in a classroom in an elementary school with three other families.
Zelikovich’s family lived in that ghetto for about six weeks before they inevitably boarded cattle cars headed for Auschwitz.
Siegel read a quote from her mother in reference to the trip to Aushwitz.
“Everything was chaos. There was shouting and pushing, the [Nazi’s] dogs were barking, I was terrified. The family tried to stay together as we were shoved into cattle cars, packed in like sardines with standing room only. There were about 100 people in one cattle car. We traveled in the trains for about three days, the doors were locked shut and we weren’t given any food or water.”
Once off the train, Zelikovich was separated from her family and it was the last time she saw her mother. She was left with her younger sister, Zelda. She was the only member of her family to make it out of Auschwitz. Zelikovich was sent to five camps before being liberated in April 1945. Siegel said her mother credited her survival with the hope that she would see her family again, coupled with the kindness of others who had the ability to help her.
After the war, Zelikovich moved to Israel where she met her husband, Abraham Rieder. The couple got married and moved to America where they had their first daughter, Renee. In Jewish culture it is customary to name a child after a family member who had passed away. Zelikovich had many options to choose from but ultimately chose “Renee” the French word for “Renaissance” which means “rebirth.” Renee is the epitome of Zelikovich’s rebirth.
