Decades of support for many local Holocaust survivors
IN Canada, most Jewish communities recognize two official days, one in January and one in April, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and honour those who against all odds managed to survive it. For Adeena Lungen, however, the act of commemorating and honouring has never needed a designated day.
As an about-to-retire social worker in Winnipeg’s Jewish Child and Family Service’s (JCFS) Holocaust Support Program, Lungen has spent 27 years working with local survivors, providing them with emotional and psychological supports, assisting them with practical matters, helping them age with dignity, and holding space for them to grieve and remember those they lost. She also has created special social and cultural programming for them, including Café Europa, a bimonthly event that brings survivors together to lunch, learn, enjoy eclectic entertainment, and celebrate Jewish holidays.
Lungen was already familiar with many of the city’s survivor community when she assumed her new role at JCFS.
While her mother Clara had escaped Poland on the last ship to sail from Europe before the outbreak of the Second World War, her father Ben, who lost his mother and two siblings to the Nazis, spent the war years hiding in the Belarus woods with a partisan unit. Years after the war, the couple met, married and made their home in Winnipeg.
“While I always felt a heavy sadness in our home, my childhood was filled with larger-than-life friends of my parents who were Holocaust survivors,” Lungen says. “They often came to our house for card games or holiday celebrations. They were animated, dramatic, and the most alive group of people I had ever met. Many of them had numbers tattooed on their arms.”
“I felt privileged to be in the presence of people who suffered so terribly and still found a way to move forward,” she continues. “The opportunity to work with survivors at JCFS seemed a natural progression of those earlier years — a chance to be part of a history that shaped me as a Jew.”
Much of Lungen’s work at JCFS, especially in the first few years, was devoted to helping her clients access reparations and restitution from the German government for the persecution, pain and suffering they endured under the Nazi regime. That effort involved completing extensive applications and detailing every aspect of every individual act of oppression, as well as researching and identifying critical corroborative evidence such as photographs and archival documents to support each narrative.
“I was determined and honoured to assume the role of advocate on behalf of survivors,” Lungen says. “The responsibility ultimately taken by the German government, and other complicit countries, in providing pensions and payments to survivors was indeed therapeutic and redemptive. Though obviously incapable of redressing the monumental loss and suffering wrought by the Holocaust, for many survivors it was a measure of accountability and justice.”
Being able to secure that compensation, Lungen says, was perhaps her greatest achievement during her tenure at JCFS. It was, though, only one of the many ways in which her deep empathy and diligence positively impacted her clients.
In spite of the trappings of what may seem from the outside to be comfortable, content and ordinary lives, many survivors continue to suffer from PTSD more than 80 years after the Holocaust.
“For many survivors post-war,” Lungen explains, “ the act of rebuilding one’s life, having families, establishing careers and businesses, and involvement in community or religious or cultural institutions often buffered or sublimated the pain and grief of the Holocaust.”
But as her clients aged, Lungen elaborates, those buffers diminished or disappeared, leaving them with fewer defences and distractions to counter the intrusive thoughts, painful memories, flashbacks, unresolved grief, and survivor guilt that characterize their PTSD.
That PTSD, in turn, is easily exacerbated by the health challenges, decline in mental acuity, limited mobility, and loneliness, that often affect the elderly, no matter their past experiences.
The brazen rise of antisemitism in the last few years is also a concern for many of Lungen’s clientele. They are more saddened than shocked by it, she says, and worry what the future holds for their children and grandchildren. Still, they are determined to stand proud as Jews.
That determination hardly comes as a surprise to Lungen. As she prepares to say goodbye to her clients after almost three decades working with many of them, she acknowledges that they have been a great source of inspiration and that she will never forget their strength, courage, fortitude and resilience to carry on and try to live life to the fullest.