Lusia Milch was just 10 when the Nazis invaded her home of Skalat, Ukraine, on July 4, 1941.
Her neighbors lined the streets in traditional Ukrainian outfits as German troops marched through the town. They would call on the Nazis for an immediate pogrom of local Jews, many of whom they once called friends, Milch said at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event hosted by the Lappin Foundation over Zoom Thursday night.
By the end of that day in 1941, hundreds of Jews would be brutalized, molested and shot down on Skalat’s streets, including a head rabbi who was dragged from his home, beaten until both of his legs were broken and drowned under the spout of a well by Nazis and locals alike.
Milch, now 92, remembered hearing the rabbi plead for death as she watched the atrocity from her attic.
“The brutality of a child witnessing something like this, it ingrains itself into the very core of my person,” Milch said Thursday. “How could it not?”
But it is horrific memories like these that the world must remember, Marblehead High School senior Arielle Mogolesko said at the event.
“There’s pain and remembering but even greater danger in not doing so,” Mogolesko said. “We are obligated to remember the Holocaust as an eternal reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked.”
More than 250 people tuned in to listen to Milch and watch clips of “A Survivor’s Journey: The Lusia Milch Story,” a documentary she released in 2020 to share her harrowing experience during the Holocaust.
The genocide would take the lives of over 6 million Jews, including Milch’s parents and only sister.
Milch saw her first glimpse of what horrors the Holocaust would bring a year before the Nazis took control of Skalat. She recalled how in 1940, her mother and other women in their neighborhood tried to help a bedraggled woman who stumbled into town with her young son.
Both were wearing torn clothes. The woman’s hair was infested with lice. Her son, just a baby, was starving. She told Milch’s mother that she had fled Nazi-occupied Poland after they killed her husband, and she was running as far away as she could.
Milch still remembers the warning the woman gave her mother: To “run wherever your eyes will carry you and your feet will take you.”
“This was our catastrophe, and I sensed that already as a child,” Milch said. “There was no place to run. Nobody wanted us. Nobody opened up borders. Nobody came with a word of pity, if not actually to help.”
After the Nazis came for Skalat, Milch was separated from her family and survived by pretending to be a peasant girl. She made her way across the Ukraine with bare feet and an urgent need to run, just as her stepfather instructed her to do when she stumbled upon a quarry where he was being forced to work by the Nazis.
That day, he stepped up to the highest part of the quarry after learning that she was nearby. In Yiddish, he sang as he worked that everything there was lost — that she would be killed if she got closer. and that she must run as far away as she could.
It was the last contact she had with her family or the Jewish community of Skalat.
“I would do everything and anything, I would give up my fingers to be able to resuscitate them and bring that life again to existence,” Milch said.
The Holocaust didn’t start with mass murders and death camps. More so, with casual yet frightening antisemitism, like what Milch experienced as a child when fellow schoolchildren blamed her for “killing Jesus Christ” and taunted her with “dangerous words,” she said.
That is why continued education about the Holocaust is so important, her son David Milch said.
“The Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population,” he said Thursday. “99.8% of the world is not Jewish, but we can take great pride in the impact that the Jewish people have had throughout history and certainly in the world today. But we do have to remember: Never again — be prepared and always vigilant.”
Milch, then just a young girl, crossed a war-torn Europe before she was able to sail to New York City, where she still lives. She would go on to marry another Holocaust survivor, Bernard Milch, and have two sons: David, who would graduate from Harvard Medical School, and Neil, who earned a degree from Columbia Law School.
Forever a survivor, she debated long and hard whether to have children.
“In the ghetto, we had no more hope. That is what I didn’t want for my children,” she said. “I want them to be able to have hope. I want them to strive. I want them to live. I want them to be able to read a good book and understand that I want to give them the gift of life.
“What I did today is to maintain humanity,” Milch said. “It’s difficult and if I do it, it is because I want it to be productive. I want it to be able to have an impact. I want it to be able to serve as a warning.”
Antisemitism is still present on the North Shore. Swastikas were found in Danvers High School and middle school last winter. A masked group of neo-Nazis held antisemitic banners from overpasses in Danvers and Saugus in September, and in the spring, antisemitic pamphlets were distributed to homes in several local communities.
“When we see (antisemitism), we must call it out,” Deborah Coltin, executive director of the Lappin Foundation, said in an interview. “When swastikas show up at our schools, it’s not enough to say ‘Children, this is bad.’ We have to tell them and teach them what it represents; what a society under the banner of a swastika accomplished.”
To watch “A Survivor’s Journey: The Lusia Milch Story,” go to https://tinyurl.com/lusiamilch.
Contact Caroline Enos at CEnos@northofboston.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolineEnos .