Retired CCSD teacher captures stories of Las Vegas Holocaust survivors for documentary

from Grace Da Rocha (contact)

Thursday, July 6, 2023 | 2 in the morning

Anne Ruskin sits under bright lights at the Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center in Summerlin, wiping away tears as Alexander “Alex” Kuchel recites a poem. October 19, 2022

In it he laments the lives lost, the burning of synagogues and the destruction of Tories in the streets.

But he also sings about how he will never – and should never – forget.

“My God, my soul is tormented,” Kuchel says in his poem. “It hurts so much to remember… so much pain… but it’s so hard to forget.”

It’s something he wrote decades ago, and although he immortalized it on paper in 1972, the 99-year-old Holocaust survivor now has it and his own life story captured on film.

Keuchel and his wife, fellow Holocaust survivor Lilo, are part of a larger documentary to preserve the stories and spread the inspirational messages of Ben Lesser, another Holocaust survivor based in southern Nevada.

The documentary is called “Commit to a Life That Matters – A Life That Matters Inspired by Holocaust Survivor Ben Lesser” and is directed by Raskin, 70.

Raskin, a retired Clark County school teacher who lives in Utah, first discovered Ben Lesser and the local community of Holocaust survivors while still teaching. CCSD’s superintendent at the time, Walt Ruffles, sent a list to all teachers of Holocaust survivors who might be available to speak in their classes.

Several of the survivors, including Lesser, spoke to Raskin’s classes, and she maintained friendships with many of them over the years. She and Lesser have known each other for 20 years, and Raskin said she even helped him write the curriculum for his foundation.

After hearing his “inspiring” story, Raskin decided to make it her mission to help spread Lesser’s message of hope and remembrance.

“This is my dream,” Raskin said. “If I had to do this, it would be for the rest of my life.”

With the help of Utah’s House Bill 60, which allows Utah residents 62 and older to register for college credit classes for the nominal fee of $25 per semester, Raskin recently returned to college to study digital film and film editing.

Raskin said it was all in an effort to create a documentary about Lesser and other Holocaust survivors who call Las Vegas home.

The project started as an eight-minute video for a class project, with some of her current team helping out.

After hearing Lesser’s story, Raskin said the team — many of whom are in their 20s — stepped in to help make a full documentary about him, and has since gone on to include other survivors, such as the Kuechels .

Their budget? Absolutely nothing, according to film producer Lane Palmer.

The crew “all have commitments in their lives and have taken the time because they feel as strongly as I do that Ben’s message needs to be heard,” Raskin said.

A harrowing journey

Driven from his home country by anti-Semitic attacks, the Polish-born Lesser fled to Hungary and was captured by German soldiers six months later in 1944.

He was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He survived a seven-week death march and captivity in four different concentration camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Durnchau, Buchenwald and Dachau.

Speaking to the Sun earlier this year, Lesser said he spent three weeks in a cattle car attached to a train traveling to Buchenwald from Dachau. He had survived only on bread crumbs that he smuggled on board.

Of the 5,000 prisoners on the train with Lesser, he was one of only 18 survivors and is the last one alive today, according to his daughter, Gail Lesser Gerber.

Since immigrating to the United States in 1947, Lesser has raised a family, built a successful career in real estate, written a book, and now spends all his time making sure the world doesn’t “go amnesiac” about the Holocaust through his organization, the Zahor Foundation for Holocaust Remembrance.

He was presented with the Cross of the Order of Merit — Germany’s highest civilian award — for his work educating people around the world about the Holocaust through a free curriculum.

“There are a lot of Nazis (in Germany) and there are a lot of Nazis right here in the United States, and it’s so important that we emphasize that the memory should be alive,” Lesser said in a conversation earlier this year. “People would like to forget the atrocities that happened during the Holocaust, but as long as I live, I will not let them.”

The Kuechels share some of the same experiences. Alexander talks about how he survived seven different concentration camps – including Blechhammer, the second largest sub-camp of Auschwitz.

Lilo Keuchel didn’t spend time in any camps; she hides “underground” with her mother and the only older brother she has left in Germany. Her other two brothers immigrated to Palestine, now the state of Israel, long before the Nazis’ reign of terror.

Both her mother and brother were branded on various occasions while in hiding and eventually died in Auschwitz, she said. Lilo Keuchel was cared for by a man named Heinz for most of her remaining childhood.

During his time in the camp, Alexander Küchel recalls certain moments, such as the time he watched a man have three of his fingers cut off by an SS soldier of Adolf Hitler. Other things Alexander Kuchel has already forgotten, he said.

With the help of people like Raskin and her team of filmmakers, Lesser, the Keuchels and other Las Vegas Holocaust survivors immortalize their stories.

Raskin’s Lesser documentary is not the first project to document Holocaust survivors in southern Nevada.

From 2014 to 2016, the UNLV University Libraries also collected historical documents, photographs and biographies of various individuals from the Southern Nevada Jewish community for the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project.

The project’s collections are available on a website, special.library.unlv.edu/jewishheritage, created through a one-year grant from the Library Services and Technology Act, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and administered by the Nevada State Library and Archives.

“The goals of the project are to conduct oral histories that capture first-hand accounts of Jewish life in Las Vegas; to seek personal and organizational archives for the community and ensure their preservation; to provide online access to selected historical resources that support research, teaching and learning; and to engage the Jewish and Las Vegas communities to appreciate this rich history,” the UNLV University Libraries website said.

Within the first year, UNLV University Libraries said they were able to collect “58 oral history interviews, recorded four roundtable discussions with members of the Jewish community, and digitized 43 historical oral histories.”

An additional 19 new archival collections and 1,500 digital files were donated to UNLV for long-term storage, making nearly 2,000 items posted online by July 2015, they noted.

Short stories by Lesser and Alec Keuchel are included in the collection.

The Sperling Kronberg Mack Holocaust Resource Center in Summerlin — where the Kuechels were photographed by Raskin and her team — contains shelves of Holocaust information.

Susan Dubin, a library consultant and education specialist, spends her days there. As someone surrounded by portraits of survivors and books full of history, Dubin knows all too well what happened during that time.

Like Raskin, she believes it is important for people to continue to hear from survivors and learn about the Holocaust.

“Sadly, many of our survivors are no longer with us, and as time goes on, they won’t be here,” Dubin said. “The more we can document what their experience was like, the more we can share.”

Anti-Semitism and a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust are becoming more prominent as the world continues to lose its last survivors, Dubin said.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, there was a 36 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States last year, from 2,717 in 2021 to 3,697 in 2022. Nevada saw 30 of the reported anti-Semitic incidents.

One person was killed in an anti-Semitic attack in 2022, according to the ADL.

The reason for the increase in anti-Semitic incidents cannot be attributed to a single cause, according to the ADL. Organized white supremacist propaganda, however, may be one of the biggest perpetrators. The spread of anti-Semitic propaganda from white supremacist networks doubled in 2022 from the previous year, the ADL said.

The world also saw a slew of high-profile figures spout anti-Semitic messages, such as Ye – the rapper formerly known as Kanye West – and former President Donald Trump, who hosted Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last 22 nov.

In 2020, what was described as “the first-ever 50-state survey of American millennials and Gen Z’s Holocaust knowledge” recorded that 63% of all survey participants did not know that 6 million Jews were were killed during the Holocaust.

The US Holocaust Millennium Survey also found that 48 percent of national survey respondents could not name a single concentration camp of the more than 40,000 that existed during Hitler’s reign.

Dubin said there has to be some way to correct all the misinformation, which is part of the reason she’s running now.

“Everybody has wonderful amazing stories, and they’re all different,” Dubin said, gazing at a wall of portraits of Holocaust survivors — Lesser included. “People ask me, ‘Don’t you get depressed doing this?’ and my answer is, ‘Not even a little bit, because I have them all around me.'”

With last week’s interviews now on film, Raskin and her team will now turn their attention to editing and finishing the documentary. She said she will finish the film by the end of the year and enter it into several film festivals in 20224 and hopes to make it available for public screenings.

Those interested in supporting the costs of completing Raskin’s documentary can donate to GoFundMe.