By Devan Sipher
At a time of war and polarization, a group of 160 Santa Monica students and family members gathered at Lincoln Middle School last month for an after-school event focused on bringing people together. Braiding them together, one could say, since the students made challah, an egg bread made of three strands of dough woven together, while they listened to the life stories of Holocaust survivors.
The event was called L’Dough V’Dough, which is a playful turn on the biblical Hebrew phrase: “l’dor v’dor,” meaning “from generation to generation,” and the program literally brings generations together to pass down stories from the past and inspire students to share family stories they might want to pass down in the future. It’s an annual event at Lincoln, presented in partnership with the Holocaust Museum LA.
The speakers this year were Gitta Morris and Monika White, twin sisters who were born in 1939 in the Shanghai ghetto. Shanghai isn’t the first place people think of when they think about the Holocaust, and Morris and White’s parents were living in Berlin when their father was arrested in 1937, at a time when the police were arresting and detaining anyone they suspected of being Jewish.
Their father was sent to Buchenwald, which was a labor camp at the time and not yet the death camp, for which it would become infamous. But he was able to be released if he could prove he was leaving the country, or self-deporting, to use current vernacular.
This is where Shanghai comes into the story. At a time when most countries, including the United States, were not accepting Jewish refugees, Shanghai, which was under Japanese rule, was one of the few places Jews were able to escape from Europe.
When the war started, 20,000 Jewish immigrants were living within the confinement of the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees,” where each family was allotted two cots in a communal space and very little food.
“We weren’t killed and we weren’t tortured, but we weren’t free,” said White, who is now a Santa Monica resident. “There was a pervasive smell of sewage, rancid oil, and people dying.”
But even more traumatizing than the wartime privation was the disappearance of their mother shortly afterward. One day she was gone. Their father wouldn’t tell them what happened and refused to discuss it for the remainder of his life.
He remarried, and his new wife, who also suffered great loss during the war, relentlessly insulted her stepdaughters’ intelligence and attractiveness, and she physically beat them. The abuse continued long after the family arrived in the United States in 1948, on a freight ship laden with bananas and refugees.
The American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) assisted in settling them in Duluth, MN, and the twins still remember their amazement encountering their first elevator, refrigerator, and particularly their first console radio.
“We ran around the box to see if we could see the people inside,” Morris said. They were also shocked and delighted to discover indoor plumbing.
But their homelife remained fraught, with their stepmother only allowing them out of the house for school, and, from the age of 11, for work, which was mostly cleaning houses and babysitting until they became licensed hairdressers at 16.
They both married for the first time when they were 17. “That’s how you got away from home in the 1950s,” White said.
White put herself through college, eventually earning a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Southern California. Morris is the proud progenitor of 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, which gives both sisters particular joy because they grew up without any extended family. Along the way, the twins performed together for a decade in an all-female string band.
“You can survive,” White said, emphasizing the message the sisters most want to convey to young people facing challenges of their own. “You can not just survive, but you can thrive.”
Their message registered with Rachel Podber-Kennison, the senior manager of education programs at the Holocaust Museum LA, who organized the event at Lincoln. “My hope is that young people hear the stories of the survivors, not just the atrocities, but the themes of resilience and empathy,” she said, adding that her goal was also to encourage students about “speaking out against hate and speaking up for those who can’t speak up for themselves.”
Morris and White finally found their mother in 1969. She was living in Israel, and unfortunately had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Morris sighed as she said, “We still don't know what happened.”
If you’re interested in participating in a L'Dough V'Dough event or organizing one at your school, you can contact Podber-Kennison at education@hmla.org.