A Birthday With a Purpose

by Laura Breen Galante

The ongoing pandemic made Helen Greenspun’s recent 95th birthday an intimate, family affair, but Helen was still emotional as she opened the many cards and messages she received from the community.

“I’m very happy for all the good wishes,” she said through tears. “The crying is for happiness because I have so many good friends.”

Helen’s birthday also featured another cause for joy. A Holocaust survivor, Helen has been telling her story to local schoolchildren since Helen and her family moved to Central Florida in the early 1980s, and she was a dedicated volunteer and board member at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida for decades. Helen remains an emeritus member of the board, and her family set up the Helen Greenspun Birthday Foundation so well-wishers could donate toward programming that fights anti-Semitism including Teacher’s Institutes and the anti-bullying UpStanders program. More than $10,000 has been raised to date.

The happy outcome is in stark contrast to the tragedies of Helen’s childhood nearly a century ago. 

A young Helen Garfinkel was only 15 in 1942 when Nazi troops began deporting Jews 16 and older from her hometown of Chmielnik, in Central Poland. Two of Helen’s older siblings, Nathan and Sonia, had already been captured and were about to be taken away. While attempting to deliver a package of bread and socks to them before their departure, Helen was also forced onto the truck that took the three siblings to a labor camp.

Two weeks later, Helen’s brother Fishel (then 7) and sister Rachel (9) were sent to the gas chambers at the Treblinka Concentration Camp, along with their parents.

Two of Helen’s other sisters, Bela (13) and Regina (12), hid with friends but eventually gave themselves up under the threat of death.

Miraculously, Helen and four of her siblings – Nathan, Sonia, Bela, and Regina – all survived but not before enduring three years of starvation, torture, and beatings across two labor camps and five concentration camps.

“It is important to tell her story,” says Helen’s granddaughter-in-law, Toni Turocy, a current Holocaust Memorial Center board member. “She was there, she suffered.”

Helen never slept on a bed and never saw her parents again after being forced onto that truck and shipped off to the labor camp.

“Grandma always tells people that the worst thing she suffered during the Holocaust was starvation,” says Toni. “She said the lice, the no bathing, the treatment, and slave labor were nothing compared to starvation.”

At one of the camps, Helen recalls finding a potato on the ground, which she tried to hide from the Nazis.

“Unfortunately, she was seen and received more than 20 lashes to her back,” says Toni.

Near the end of the war, Helen and her sisters were loaded into boxcars and transported to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. They traveled three days and three nights, and many of the passengers did not survive. Brother Nathan was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In the spring of 1945, the girls were sent through four more death camps. In the final camp, Helen, Regina, and Bela contracted typhus. Sonia cared for them all until freedom came on April 29, 1945. Nathan, meanwhile, endured a monthlong death march from Buchenwald that ended on May 7, 1945, when Allied soldiers found Nathan and other prisoners in a barn.

According to Tess Wise, founder and former executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Center, the Garfinkel siblings are thought to be the largest family unit to emerge from a Polish death camp.

The family spent four years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, where Helen met her husband, Joe Greenspun. One by one, the siblings immigrated to the United States. Helen and Joe married in Detroit in 1951. They later moved to Central Florida with daughters Rita and Pauline.

“She has been a resident of Central Florida since the early ‘80s, and her grandchildren grew up here,” says Toni. “She wants to ensure that her message continues to be heard.”

The Greenspun family is also excited about Orlando’s new Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity, which is set to break ground in 2022. The 40,000-square-foot facility promises to be one of the most extraordinary Holocaust museums in the world. State-of-the-art technology coupled with 55,000 video interviews will allow visitors to have face-to-face interactions with survivors. Thanks to artificial intelligence, guests will have the ability to ask questions directly to survivors – even those no longer living – and see their faces as they answer.

It all means Helen will continue to tell her story for generations to come.