'I Was On The Lucky Side': UWSer Teaches Kids Lesson Of Holocaust

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Victoria Rosenthal Kristy has lived in her Upper West Side apartment on West 100th Street for 47 years. The 81-year-old's story, though, does not start in Manhattan, or in the United States at all.

It's a story she speaks about from time to time when she meets with local students through a program that connects older and younger generations. Thursday marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Kristy's story is deeply entwined with that dark chapter in history.

Kristy was born in a small mining town in Russia in 1941, two years after her parents fled Poland at the beginning of World War II.

In Russia, her parents kept their Jewish faith a secret, doing their best to work and take care of each other. The family of three did not have running water, or electricity, and Kristy didn't go to school. But they were the lucky ones. Much of Kristy's family remained behind in Poland.

Kristy's mother was from the Polish city of Lodz. During the war, her mother's entire family — parents, five sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives — were marched to a nearby forest and forced to dig their own graves before being shot by Nazis.

Before leaving Poland, there had been relatives in every house on the street where her mother grew up. By the time it was safe to return, there were no Jews left.

Her mother had "survivor's guilt" and was "very depressed," Kristy said.

The war ended in 1945, but it took another year for the family to leave Russia and make their way to the United States. Kristy was 5.

Kristy described the move for DOROT, a social services provider with a program that connects older adults to local children and teens. DOROT is the Hebrew word for “generations," according to the group's website.

"My father woke me up very early on the morning where we were going to dock," Kristy wrote. "He carried me onto the deck and stood at the railing because he was waiting to get close enough to see the Statue of Liberty. And he pointed at the Statue of Liberty and said, 'We’re going to a country where everybody has liberty. And this is the statue that tells us so.'”

Kristy arrived in New York City in 1947, where a few family members already lived. She was immediately introduced to more food than she had ever seen.

“In Russia during wartime, my mother said I had never seen a banana," Kristy wrote for the DOROT project. "They got me an orange one year. And I cried because I didn’t know what it was.”

The family's initial visit to NYC was quick, though. They soon had to relocate to Cuba over confusion about which family members could sponsor them in the United States.

Kristy and her parents spent close to five years in Cuba, where she experienced warm weather for the first time, learned how to swim and dance ballet. They eventually moved back to New York City in 1951.

Kristy attended a local high school and college and went on to become, in every way, a quintessential New Yorker. Over her career, she worked jobs in the performing arts, at the United Nations, and in fashion and crafts.

Kristy, who is now a widow, had three husbands.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

When Kristy has her bi-weekly conversations with kids and teenagers — most of which are virtual these days — she makes sure not to force difficult subjects.

"If they're concerned about something, I don't probe much, but I sort of go and pay a little more attention to that subject," Kristy told Patch. “That’s really what intergenerational is about to me, that I can share from my experience in my own life without lecturing."

But the discussions aren't a one-way street. The kids have just as much effect on her as she has on them.

"Partly it is energy, and I’m just very grateful that I’m in a position where I can share some of my own experience in a very light way, not in a lecturing way," Kristy said.

"It gives me a very nice outlet," she continued, chuckling at the power of virtual connection. "I’m a widow, and during the pandemic, we’re all alone you know, kind of alone in our own space, so it’s very nice to have the kids come in over the computer and be able to connect."

While the topics generally rotate around academics or romantic interests at school, sometimes attention turns to their shared history and culture — most of the young people Kristy speaks to attend Jewish schools.

It is a topic that has come up more often as Holocaust Remembrance Day has approached.

“Holocaust Remembrance Day is a very valuable step to keep us informed, especially when — my family was this way — we really did not talk about what they went through," Kristy told Patch. "It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that my father actually had a conversation with me about his years in Russia, because he was always afraid that if I knew stuff, if he gave me real information, and I was picked up by the police, that they would torture me and I would tell everything."

“The girls that I see now, it is really their great grandparents, and possibly their grandparents, who lived through this, and I don’t know how much the subject is covered in their schools, Kristy added.

She believes it is important to connect with the history of previous generations.

"Most of these youngsters have parents who were part of a generation that didn't live through any of these things, so it needs to be in context, but I do feel it is very important and very valuable to connect the history of previous generations because we need to know that all the things that go on are cyclical."

In terms of how the passing of Remembrance Day will make Kristy feel, she said it will bring to mind memories of her upbringing.

"I'm very aware of this as a factor in my life," Kristy told Patch. "I was 10 years old when we came to America. I was the child who interpreted for her mother, because it took her a while to learn English. My father knew English, but he didn't understand America."

The thought brought her back to a funny moment she had with her father decades before.

"'I don’t understand what dating means," he told her. "Do you go on dates?"

"Yes, I do go on dates," Kristy responded. She was already married at the time.

"So, what do you do on dates?" her father asked. "I don't understand."

"Well, sometimes when you're meeting a person for the first time, or even the second time, and you haven't made a plan yet on the activity, you might meet and have a drink," she responded.

"I thought he was going to have a heart attack," Kristy said, beginning to laugh over the phone.

"'You have a drink!?' he responded. 'You go to a tavern or a saloon?'"

Kristy said she had to quickly explain that nicer restaurants and hotels also had bars where you could get a glass of wine.

The thought of a hotel quickly worked him up again.

"Fortunately, at that point, I was old enough to realize he wasn't going after me, he was really just trying to understand America," she said.

Kristy is also quick to highlight that she was on the lucky side of the Holocaust.

"I didn't really live in the Holocaust," she wrote in her project for DOROT. "However, I was the youngest of the group of people and the older generation is gone. There are really very few people who understand what it was, that time. Anybody who survives has a story. I was on the luckier side."

Today, you can still find Kristy taking walks on the same Upper West Side streets she has traversed for nearly 50 years.