Pauline & Chaim Alter
Chaim Alter was born in Warsaw, Poland in March of 1914. He had two brothers, Avraham and Getzel. One was considered an illui, a Hebrew term for a Talmudic prodigy, and the other a sought-after chazzan. Their mother died when they were very young and their father was unable to care for the children on his own. The responsibility to support the family fell mostly on Chaim.
Around 1939, in anticipation of the German invasion, Chaim was conscripted into the Polish army. When the Germans invaded Poland in September of that year, he was taken prisoner and forced to fight on behalf of the Nazis. He escaped from the German army but was caught and sent to the Warsaw ghetto, which was established in November 1940. Chaim initially managed to sneak in and out on a regular basis to find food or work. As this became more difficult, he fled the ghetto and was hidden by a Polish farmer who was not very fond of Jews but hated the Germans more. Unfortunately, on Easter Sunday, when the farmer went to church and found that the Nazis closed the church to Poles, he cursed the Germans and was shot. Thankfully, word got to Chaim in time for him to escape before he might be discovered in the Pole's home.
At that point, he made his way to Hungary where he hid again but was soon found and, as a foreign national, he was arrested and placed in a jail. In prison, Chaim recalled being extremely depressed until, one day, his meager meal was served on a recent newspaper. Chaim inferred from it that the allies were approaching and the end of the war was near. He took it as a sign from God that he should persevere.
When he was released after the war, he started traveling West. On this journey, while in Slovakia, he met a fellow survivor who invited him over for a hot meal. This man was the father of Pauline Lipschutz whom he ended up marrying in 1947. None of Chaim’s relatives survived the war, but thankfully all of Pauline’s did.
Pauline was born on August 2, 1919 in Vienna, Austria, to Ignatz and Rosa. She had two brothers, Karli and Freddy, and a sister, Erna. They enjoyed a pleasant life until the Anschluss on March 12, 1938, when Austria was incorporated into Germany. Pauline’s father owned his own business making headstones. He had come from a large and very religious family and his own father studied all the time but he felt it was important to work. He became less religious and supported his family.
Pauline qualified to try out for the Austrian Olympic swim team when she was in high school but was dismissed because she was Jewish. Her father moved the family to a small town nearby called Sankt Pölten, in what is now Bratislava, to escape the Nazis but by 1939, the situation became precarious for Jews there as well. When her two brothers were arrested, Pauline strode into the police station pretending to be German; with her red hair, green eyes and perfect mastery of the language, she was able to deceive the officers and get her brothers released. They subsequently went into hiding in the basement of the same home. After the war, these brothers married the daughter and cousin of the family who hid them.
Shortly after that, around 1942, “The Paula,” as she was called by friends, along with her sister and all the other Jewish girls in town, were rounded up and put into trains heading towards the concentration camps in the East. Paula and her best friend managed to unscrew floor boards with their hairpins and, grabbing each of their younger sisters, jumped from the train. These were the only four Jewish girls from the town believed to have survived.
They reconnected with their father, who found them a hiding place with a non-Jewish farmer. Paula ended up moving to the forest where she joined a group of partisans. She was useful to the group because she was able to pass for a non-Jewish girl. All four siblings survived and reunited after the war. The brothers stayed in Europe, one in Bratislava and one in Germany. Both sisters moved to the United States with their husbands. Pauline to New York and Erna to Los Angeles.
Pauline and Chaim emigrated in 1948. After arriving in Ellis Island, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee temporarily put them up at the Esplanade Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Soon after, they moved to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and, a few months later, they settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, where they raised two children: a daughter named Fran and a son named Sandy.
In Bayonne, Chaim worked as the longtime shamash (beadle) and baal koreh (the person who reads the Torah) at Temple Emmanuel, where Pauline famously catered the kiddushes (and was especially known for her “Oma Kugel).
Chaim passed away young, in 1978. Pauline passed away many years later in 2006. They had six grandchildren, among them Abigail Besdin, mother of Heschel students Zeke and Elijah Gutman.