Sevek leaving for Windermere, England from Prague, Czechoslovakia, August 1945

Chapter 15: Not Made of Glass

  By Ruth Wade, daughter of Sidney “Sevek” Finkel

My father, Sidney “Sevek” Finkel, was eight years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. For four years, Sevek, his father Laib, and his twenty-five-year-old brother Izzy managed to stay together, enduring first the ghetto, and then slave labor and concentration camps. But when he boarded the cattle car to Buchenwald, Sevek was on his own. He had already seen bombers set the people and animals of his town on fire, watched his mother and sister board the cattle train to the Treblinka killing center, grieved for his other murdered sister and infant nephew, suffered several near-death experiences, and witnessed unspeakable acts of brutality inflicted by Nazis on a countless number of Jews. In order to survive he numbed himself, stopped caring, and gave up on love. 

In 2006, at age seventy-five, my dad published a memoir, Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die. In the following excerpt, Sevek sees his father again, in Buchenwald, days before Laib is transferred to another concentration camp, Dora-Mittelbau, which functioned as an underground ammunition plant. Laib would die there, of exhaustion, overwork, and starvation.

"I have an indelible memory of my last meeting with my father. He came across me as I was standing with my friends in the compound. My father cried with joy when he saw me. He hugged me as tears ran down his cheeks. He had lost a lot of weight and he looked very weak and emaciated. He took a piece of bread from the knapsack from his shoulder and he handed it to me. The gesture of the bread showed his great love for me, since these were the only provisions he had for his transport out of Buchenwald. I took the bread, but I felt agitated and uncomfortable. Here standing before me was the one person in the world that I loved more than any other, and yet I was incapable of feeling affection. I bore no resemblance to the son that he knew. Sevek, the fun-loving, affectionate, boyish kid was dead. I now was more like an animal, with instincts only for survival. Likely, he was being sent to his death—I am unsure under what conditions we met—and yet I was silent. I turned my back on my own father without giving him the slightest bit of encouragement or acknowledgment.

Who was I? What kind of an animal had I become in the camps? This encounter was so powerful that it stayed with me for the rest of my life. Guilt plagued me and caused me to believe that I had betrayed my father. I left my father standing alone and walked back to my block to be with the young people. “Old people had no right to live; they were taking resources from the young,” I thought to myself. My God, I was beginning to think just like the Nazis."

I didn’t know this story growing up, but the way my dad chose to survive even after the war ended affected our relationship in a profound way. I longed for his love and approval. His trauma-induced inability to provide tenderness and caring left me feeling frustrated and angry.

ADDITIONAL FAMILY RESOURCES
[by Ruth’s father] Finkel, Sidney. Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die. Self-published, 2006.
 [by Ruth’s niece] Finkel, Bari.  "Visiting Buchenwald With My Grandfather."
Tablet Magazine, April 15, 2015.

Sidney speaking at school in Tucson, Arizona – February, 2018

Sidney and grandson Ike – May, 2013

Sidney at St. Xavier commencement – December, 2012

Ruth and father Sidney, Tucson, Arizona – May, 2021