By CHRISTINA RITCHIE ROGERS
CorneliusNews.net

Daniel Gittleman creates characters. He creates worlds. He even creates languages. A 13-year-old seventh-grader at Lake Norman Christian, Daniel spends most of his free time writing stories on his small – and top secret – laptop computer.

“I always have 50,000 things crammed in my head, and writing is a way to get half of them out,” Daniel said.

Lying on his bed listening to the soundtracks from epic movies, he draws inspiration from even the smallest cues, like a few bars of music, a strong sentence in a book or an action sequence in a video game.

Two years ago, Daniel took on the challenge of telling a different kind of story – that of a real character, living in the real world. She is 96-year-old Frieda Roos Van Hessen, a Holocaust survivor living in Charlotte.
And instead of adding her story to his laptop collection, he wrote it as a book to be published for children.

The idea came from his father, Stuart Gittleman, who told him about A Book by Me, an organization created by Illinois native Deb Bowen in an effort to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors.

“I just wanted their stories to live on,” Ms. Bowen said. “The most creative way I could think of was to introduce them to young people and get them to write and illustrate the stories.”

Daniel types his latest story. Ms. Bowen helps pair interested young writers with survivors, and gives them tips for interviewing and writing. She then takes their illustrated pages and prepares them for publication.

WRITING ABOUT REALITY
Daniel embraced the writing process. He first read Ms. Roos’ autobiography, “Life in the Shadow of Swastika,” and then interviewed her over the phone before starting the book.

As a character for a story, Ms. Roos had more than enough personality. “She’s a firecracker,” Daniel said. She could inspire any number of stories.
But it wasn’t up to him to create a story – the characters, relationships and action sequences in her life were already written in history.

Born in Amsterdam in 1915, Ms. Roos spent years performing as a singer. During the Holocaust, she escaped Nazi soldiers eight times, and remembers watching her parents get taken away by armed soldiers when she was in her 20s. They were then killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Daniel’s challenge was two-fold: He had to break down Ms. Roos’ story into scenes that an elementary school student could understand, and to do so in a way that wouldn’t be too graphic for a young child.

MEETING MS. ROOS
Re-telling the story wasn’t hard for Daniel, he said. He grew up reading comics like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, and he said he is able to think like a comic strip writer – to tell a story with just a few sentences and a well-thought-out picture.

When choosing words and images, he was able to remain sensitive to the fact that his target readers are young. He drew from his own experience as a child learning about World War II.
“I remember what would scare me and what wouldn’t when I was that age,” Daniel said.

But while Daniel had no problem drawing information for the book from Ms. Roos’ autobiography and phone interviews, his perspective on the project changed dramatically when he visited Ms. Roos at her home.
“She brought him to the place of really connecting to it emotionally,” Daniel’s mother, Sandra, said.

Ms. Roos showed him items she saved from her twenties, including a patch she once had to wear which read, “JOOD.”

“It was a mark of persecution, but she holds onto it,” Daniel said. “It all kind of came at me like a tidal wave,” he said.

He made a point to include the patch in the illustrations in his book, which he drew with his mother, a local artist.

TEACHING MORE THAN HISTORY

“It’s a history lesson, but it’s so much more than that,” Ms. Bowen said. “There are all kinds of social injustices that we need to help kids understand,” she said.

“It’s tragic that such a young mind needs to be troubled,” Ms. Roos said. She is conflicted about the children’s book project.
“I hate the children to no longer be children,” she said. “On the other hand, it can’t be early enough that they can be warned about the dangers of antisemitism.”

Ms. Roos travels around the country telling her story to adults, and has appeared several times on the “700 Club,” a television program on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“I keep my heart out of the story,” Ms. Roos said, “because if I had my heart in it I wouldn’t be able to speak.” The opportunity to speak and share her message is “a great responsibility,” she said.

And through Daniel’s book, her story will be shared with even more people. All Book by Me stories are reviewed by Ms. Bowen together with the Holocaust Board of Education to check them for historical accuracy, and she hopes to one day soon get them into schools nationwide.

Ms. Bowen has 50 completed books from young authors around the country, including Daniel’s, waiting for publication. But she needs to raise funding in order to finish the process. It costs about $250 to prepare each book, not counting printing costs, she said. Recently, the son of one of the featured survivors sponsored four books, she said, and she hopes more people will come forward to do the same.

“IQ is important, but it isn’t everything,” she said. The holocaust survivor books develop students’ EQ, their emotional intelligence, she said. “We’ve got to get kids feeling about what they’re reading.”

Source: http://corneliusnews.net/blog/2011/03/31/young-writer-tells-a-holocaust-survivors-story/

I was born and raised in Amsterdam, Holland, of Jewish parents. They never talked about God, and I had never been in a synagogue except for my brother’s wedding. For me, Yom Kippur meant a day off from school, and today I know and believe that my father and mother themselves never knew what it meant... that they, like so many of us, were “seeing blind and hearing deaf” as the Prophet Isaiah foretold. The only Jewish events that took place in our home were the Bar-Mitzvahs of my two brothers! However, we considered ourselves very Jewish.

Entering into my teenage years I had a Gentile boyfriend who was Catholic, though not a practicing one, and we often went to Catholic church together. I was always impressed by the paintings of the seven stations of the crucifixion and moved by the sadness expressed in the face of Christ, as the artist perceived the magnitude of that event. Those were the teenage years of my existence, which were soon to become very eventful and tragic when I became a fugitive, running for my very life.

The Lord had blessed me with a soprano singing voice, and after studying at the Amsterdam Conservatory and being still very young, I embarked on a career that led me to sing the Dutch version of Disney’s Snow White. I proceeded to the Grand Diploma in the Geneva, Switzerland World Contest, to the role of the Forestbird in Wagner’s Siegfried with the Bayreuth Festspiel Haus, a Command performance of Verdi’s Requiem for the Queen of Holland, many live broadcasts and concert performances, not to forget oratorios like Handel’s “Messiah,” and the many beautiful Christian cantatas by Bach in church performances.

Then came the Second World War, ending my singing career abruptly, and forcing me to flee for my life. During the next five years I lost all I ever had, my entire family, home and belongings, and had to run from death and destruction never knowing what the next day would bring, whether I would live or not.

I was immediately disqualified from all regular concert performances. The reason given was that I was Jewish, and it was therefore not worth reviewing “this soloist, after all the suffering brought upon us by the Jews.” The Germans allowed a temporary Jewish Theatre, so I became involved in performing with famous German Jewish refugee artists for the Jewish population.

Meanwhile, the Nazis brought Jews that they had rounded up in “razziahs” for deportations to the infamous concentration camps to another theatre in the next block. Because of my involvement with the Jewish Council, we were allowed to minister to the thousands of deportees, and were guaranteed we would be the last ones to go.

The deportation theatre had become a madhouse of anguish and filth, housing up to 9,000 people a night in a place built to seat 1,000. Sick people, old and young, were huddled together in fear of death, sleeping on lice-infested mattresses all over the floor, and children were screaming. There were only two toilet facilities. I finally contracted scabies all over my body and lice, so much so, that when an opportunity did present itself for me to go into hiding, I could not because of my condition.

In the theatre I had met a dancer whose sister, Henny, became my friend. Her husband had been arrested by the Gestapo, and we decided that I would stay in her house and help with her two small children. My former boyfriend, unbeknown to me, had become a Gestapo agent out of anger against my parents, who had forbidden our courtship because he was a Gentile. Not only did he try to destroy the Jewish people, but he sent the stormtroopers after me at Henny’s place. They came at night, shot through the house, but failed to find us. We hid in a heavy steel dumbwaiter. The stormtroopers left, planning to return in the morning. This afforded us a couple of hours to escape over the roofs of our four-story house and the neighboring buildings in the dark of night.

Thus we entered an unknown world of escape, fear, hiding, and agony. For the next four years we were hiding out in many places, towns and cities, and like a “dance macabre” God put a hedge of angels around us each time our arrest seemed inevitable. The longest time in one hideout was 212 days in one room, never going out except by crawling over the ground in the dark to be with my parents.

They were hiding in the next house until they were betrayed for 25 guilders each by the woman who was hiding us. That was the price paid by the Nazis to anyone for information about Jews in hiding or Anti-Germans listening to English radio broadcasts about the progress of the Allied forces.

I saw my dear parents rounded up and taken away with bayonets in their backs. They and my lovely younger brother, who was betrayed some time later, were all murdered in concentration camps.

The only thing my brother Eddie had taken with him was his violin, which he had played professionally. He was forced to play it while our people were being tormented and gassed. After the war I met a doctor who had survived, and who told me about how the Germans kept Eddie without any medication as he suffered from typhoid and starvation. May God help them!

It takes the love of Jesus to enable us to overcome and to want to forgive; to say “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We forgive, He heals the wounds, but the scars remain.

Space does not afford to account here for all that happened. I can only say that our God was in complete control and saw me through even when I was held prisoner after having been arrested with a bayonet in my own back. God was there, He set me free right out of the “lion’s den,” forcing them to let me go in a most miraculous way.

When it seemed to us that our trials would never finish, finally the war came to an end. Suddenly, from all different directions people started to talk to me about Jesus. Then, at last I contacted a pastor who sent, believe it or not, a German lady to me. God does have a way with things! She had married an Orthodox Jewish man, and lived a Jewish life for some 33 years. Her husband died suddenly leaving her brokenhearted and grieving much. Then, to make a long story short, the Lord spoke to her and she was born again.

For the next six weeks I argued with her until she asked me to read Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Reading Isaiah 53, I did not understand a single word. Then, as promised, I started reading Psalm 22, and coming to the 16th verse where it says “they pierced my hands and my feet,” I let out one big yell, “Oh my God, that is Jesus, because He was crucified!”

I remembered all the Christian paintings I had seen years earlier in that church in Amsterdam. Suddenly all of it made sense. I went back to the 53rd Chapter of Isaiah and now I understood each and every word. Hallelujah!

The ‘scales fell off my eyes’ instantly, and the first thing I said was “it’s like coming out of a dark hole into the light,” at that point not knowing that Jesus is called “The Light of the World.” I was born again all alone in a room, by reading the Old Testament, Jesus revealing Himself to me there. Then reading the Gospels I understood even more.

Since those earlier days, God has not only furthered my concert career in the “New World,” but enabled me to become a living testimony for Yeshua ha Mashiach (Jesus). Now, many years later, having been recently in Israel visiting the places where Yeshua walked and preached, the Word has become even more dear to me. Now it is no longer a dream, but my eyes have seen where He was, even as my spirit perceives how near He is. Amen.

God has called Frieda into different ministries, such as volunteering in a maximum security prison for twenty years as a counselor, and music director during church services in the prisons. She has conducted her own chapel services for years in one of the major nursing homes in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Frieda was asked by Director Steven Spielberg to add her testimony of survival to the Shoah (Holocaust) Project, as well as the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and Jerusalem, and was able to add into the permanent record her faith in Yeshua as Messiah.


As published on Jewish Voice website.


http://www.jewishvoice.org/who-is-yeshua/jews-who-believed/frieda-roos.html

Charlotte woman, 98, shares story of escaping the Nazis 8 times November 9, 2013.



It will mark 75 years since Nazi soldiers began their tack on Jewish families in Germany. “Kristallnacht” or the “Night of Broken Glass” was the beginning for what would become almost a decade of Nazi persecution. Just a few short years later, a Charlotte woman would find herself escaping the Nazis 8 times.

Some say all we have are our memories. Some happy, sad, and some are so vivid that they feel like just yesterday. 

“I remember the clothes I was wearing when I was five years old,” said Charlotte resident Frieda Van Hessen.

Today, Frieda Van Hessen is 98 years old. She was born in Amsterdam in 1915.

She has almost a century of memories. Happy ones like touring her home country as a famous opera singer in 1938.  She sang the part of Snow White in the Dutch version, still seen by children today, but when the Nazis invaded, her singing career quickly ended.

“I’m one of the few people from the Holocaust that is still alive,” she said.

Her younger brother and parents were killed behind the brutal gates of Auschwitz. Though Van Hessen escaped from Nazis a total of eight times, she says the first time was the especially nerve-wracking.

“That was the 11th of September. I had my own 11th of September,” she said.

Van Hessen and a friend sat quietly inside their home, both frantic to stay still as Nazi soldiers shined flashlights through the black shutters.

“The whole house was lit up,” she said.

She left through a tiny window, and would go on to escape the Nazis seven more times, but she lost many family and friends.

Van Hessen says the pain of losing so many family members led her down a different spiritual path. Though she calls herself culturally Jewish, she became a Christian in 1945 after the war.

 Van Hessen has traveled the world sharing her experiences. At age 96, her memories started leaving a mark.

These last two years it’s for the first time that I cried. I went to the I Internet and I saw a lot about how my father and mother died,” she said.

Today, Van Hessen still drives, talks with friends, and goes to church.

“I’m still so very grateful that God has given me an opportunity to live this life, have a beautiful daughter and granddaughters,” she said smiling.

She says what happened to 6 million of her people though horrifying, is a memory worth keeping.

 “Never again I should forget. I have been able maybe in a small way to help against Anti-Semitism. It’s poison,” she said.

Van Hessen wrote a book about her survival. It’s called “Life in the Shadow of a Swastika.” It’s printed in English, Dutch, Russian, and Spanish. Van Hessen will turn 99 in April.

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